A Twilight for Freedom in Kyiv
What’s happening in Ukraine reminds us that we live in troubled times, but we are not to be troubled.
Underground, it’s an alternate universe. Children play ball in the subway hallways or sit on blankets watching their tablets. For the crowd of Ukrainians packed into the cities’ makeshift bomb shelters, flashes of normal life are surprisingly calming. Families cluster by piles of belongings, petting their dogs and cats while jets roar overhead. For the third night in a row, they wonder what’s left of their cities.
Above them, life tells a very different story. While explosions take out key buildings and access points, national guardsmen lie across Kyiv bridges on their stomachs, rifles trained on unseen soldiers. In the south, the Russian infantry has already unloaded from the sea, putting “potentially thousands” of troops ashore. As the capital’s mayor and former president join the rows of Ukrainian soldiers on the city streets, someone asks them how long they think they can hold out. “Forever,” Petro Poroshenko replied.
Russian missile launches are well over 200 now, detonating on even civilian targets. Through it all, President Volodymyr Zelensky has been a persistent voice in the chaos, updating his anxious citizens at all hours. In a particularly grim message during the night, he announced the arrival of Russian sabotage groups in the capital. They have come, he explained, to hunt him down. “According to our information,” he said evenly, “the enemy marked me as target No. 1, my family as target No. 2. They want to destroy Ukraine by destroying the head of state… I am staying.”
As darkness fell Friday, the mayor warned of “a difficult night ahead.” Russian troops, he cautioned, are “very close to the capital.” While rockets pound away at government offices and Ukrainian neighborhoods, mixtures of heartbreak and patriotism were everywhere. One couple, who became an international story when they rushed to get married as the first bombs started falling, spent their first day together collecting rifles. “We are going to fight for our land,” Yaryna Arieva insisted. “We maybe [will] die,” she said, “but have to protect it… we have to protect the people we love.”
International leaders, for the third day, hosted late-night meetings and emergency calls, desperately trying to find the right pressure points to stop Putin before he unleashes “targeted killings, kidnapping, detentions, and torture” on thousands of the country’s innocents. “All evidence,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned, “suggests… Moscow has developed plans to inflict widespread human rights abuses — and potentially worse — on the Ukrainian people.”
And yet the United States’ response in the face of this massive invasion of Europe, Blinken’s predecessor warned, is more weakness. “This thug understands one thing: brute force,” Mike Pompeo said of Putin. “We should give him the brute force he deserves.” If we don’t, the world doesn’t need to guess about his intentions. Pompeo, like so many conservatives, understands that the best deterrent is strength. That’s why his boss, Donald Trump, spent four years rebuilding the military. They know that the stronger America’s troops are, the less likely we are to need them.
But if Joe Biden doesn’t grasp that — if he doesn’t meet Putin with resistance — the reunification of the old Soviet Union isn’t our only threat. “I fear that we’ll see a cascading series of crises,” Pompeo warned on “Washington Watch.” “Even as we speak, the United States is in Vienna with the Russians on [our] side of the table… negotiating a deal to create a pathway for a nuclear weapon for the Iranians. You’ve got Russians negotiating as partners of the United States while Russia is invading Ukraine… This is incomprehensible to me. It sends exactly the signal that Vladimir Putin hears, which is I can move about the cabin. I can go destroy the lives of Ukrainian children and women, and the United States and the West will do nearly nothing to push back against me.”
America’s hand was weakened even more thanks to Biden’s absolute joke of a “climate envoy,” John Kerry. The former secretary of State is being eviscerated for comments he made Wednesday, prioritizing the environment over Ukrainian lives. “I hope diplomacy will win. But it could have a profound negative impact on the climate, obviously. You have a war, and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war,” he said, as mouths dropped.
Kerry, who’s no stranger to stupid comments (genocide, remember, isn’t in his “lane”), managed to bring down the wrath of the international community with this one. And rightly so. Innocent men, women, and children are being killed, and his concern is the war’s carbon footprint. A member of the British parliament, Marcus Fysh, could barely contain his rage, posting the interview and ranting, “These idiots are the problem.” Condemnation poured in on social media, even spilling into editorial pages, where the Wall Street Journal declared, “What’s overheated here is Mr. Kerry’s brain.” One radio host joked, “Bad news for the Babylon Bee: American leadership is now beyond parody.”
If I were President Biden, Pompeo argued, “I’d call [Kerry] back immediately. I’d tell him to stop diminishing the United States in the eyes of the world.” But in some ways, it’s too late. It was this administration’s misplaced priorities that helped lead to this conflict in the first place. By shutting down America’s pipelines, Biden delivered the rest of the world into Putin’s hands. By forcing the West to turn to Russia for oil and gas, we helped finance this war. And we could just as easily help stop it.
“Perhaps the quickest thing that President Biden could do to put pressure on Vladimir Putin would be to immediately… lift all the new regulations he’s put in place [that deny] America the capacity to produce its own energy and ship that energy around the world… We have the capacity to drill. We were up to almost 13 million barrels per day in the Trump administration… We ought to drill baby drill and ship it to Germany, ship it to Estonia, ship it to Ukraine, ship it to Latvia, Lithuania. We can change the lives of these people. And when you drive the price down to 50 bucks a barrel where it sat for much of the Trump administration, you will be denying the very monetary fuel that is allowing Vladimir Putin to roll tanks in and kill women and children in Ukraine today.”
That’s one of the many things Christians can be praying about as the situation deteriorates in Ukraine. You can find others in our special prayer guide. What’s happening in Ukraine reminds us that we live in troubled times, but we are not to be troubled. We need to pray with hope and understanding and then act with confidence. “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled… The end is not yet” (Matthew 24:6).
Originally published here.
Texas Holds ‘Em: GOP Moves to Stop Trans 'Abuse’
While the world implodes, the White House once again managed to find time to attack states that are trying to protect kids from the transgender agenda. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and Governor Greg Abbott (R), like a lot of leaders, see the Left’s grip on our children and have taken concrete steps to address it. Not surprisingly, that hasn’t sat well with the most radical transgender activist in America: Joe Biden.
Fresh off of his radioactive “gender-fluid” pick for the Department of Energy, the president continued his historic attack on biological gender by condemning Texas’s decision to investigate anyone steering minors toward transgender hormones or treatment. “Because the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is responsible for protecting children from abuse,” Abbott wrote, “I hereby direct your agency to conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas. To protect Texas children from abuse, DFPS and all other state agencies must follow the law as explained in OAG Opinion No. KP-0401.”
The governor goes on to explain that it’s already against the law to subject children in Texas to a wide variety of elective gender transition surgeries, including those that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, or the removal of “otherwise healthy body parts.” It’s time to enforce those rules, he insisted.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki blasted Texas’s directive, insisting that it’s “designed to target and attack the kids who need support the most.” “LGBTQI+ students are already vulnerable to bullying and violence just for being themselves,” Psaki said. “This isn’t an isolated action, as evidenced by multiple states pursuing this. We’re seeing Republican leaders take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn and, most troubling, who they can or cannot be.”
Paxton rejected Psaki’s spin, explaining that he and his team did their due diligence on this — and designating the treatments as “child abuse” is entirely keeping with the opinion of several medical experts, including the American College of Pediatricians. Look, he explained on “Washington Watch,” “Our job is very simple. We’re not making law. We were basically just exposing what the law is. We spent literally hundreds of hours doing the research on this. And it’s pretty clear in our laws at least that if you sterilize a child — whether it’s through physical means or whether it’s through some type of chemical means — that’s child abuse in Texas. And it’s wrong.”
Like other states, Texas has come to the conclusion that if minor children aren’t allowed to get tattoos or a driver’s license until they’re of a certain age, why allow them to move forward with treatments that are even more dangerous? “It’s pretty insane” what the far-Left is pushing, Paxton agreed. “In most other medical procedures that have a significant impact, you have to be at least 21. And so for something like this, it’s irreparable. It causes harm that cannot be undone. It seems to me that Texas has gotten it right that these children need to be protected until they can make their own decision. And as you know, [as many as 89 percent of these young people] do change [their minds]. And a lot of others regret it down the road.” But by then, he laments, “the genie’s out of the bottle. You can’t fix what’s been done.”
Fortunately for Paxton and Abbott, the state’s voters have their backs. “Most Texans are pretty reasonable,” he said. And besides, “This is the law. If you want to change [that], change the legislature and lobby the state. My job is to tell people what the law is when I’m asked. And I think the Texas legislature got it right. I think most Texans think the legislature got it right.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
