Nike Swooshes in to Join Corporate Response in Ukraine
It’s a powerful gesture but a confusing one.
They work quietly, each man bending and turning in rhythm. Together, they form a long human chain — sons and fathers moving in unison to fill sandbags for the attack they all know is coming. One hundred twenty-five miles to the west, Russian soldiers own the streets, giving these exhausted men all the motivation they need to keep working. For days, Odessa’s families have braced for an invasion from the sea, a modern version of the horror their grandparents endured in 1941. Nearby, the city’s crown jewel — the opera house — “looks like a scene from a World War 2 movie,” fortified like it was when Nazi Germany was the wolf at the gate. One man, seeing a picture of the beautiful baroque building, bursts into tears. “It’s impossible to imagine that this picture [is] reality,” he says.
Around the world, images of a Ukrainian nuclear plant going up in flames set everyone on edge. “The situation is extremely tense,” local leaders urge. Heat has been completely cut off in the city, and men at the plant are working at gunpoint, the head of the site said. After fierce fighting put the ticking time bomb in Russian hands, President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a grave warning to international leaders. “There are 15 nuclear reactors in Ukraine. If one of them blows, that’s the end for everyone. That’s the end of Europe,” he added.
In Lviv, close to the Polish border, residents are climbing onto cherry pickers and up stepladders desperately trying to protect important pieces of Ukrainian heritage. In Market Square, Neptune’s trident is the only thing that’s visible above the duct tape and plastic that locals hope will withstand a siege. Centuries-old statues and sculptures are being frantically wrapped in layers of protective sheets, while historic churches are busy boarding up old stained glass windows. They’re heeding the painful lesson learned in Iraq, where the world’s most priceless ancient treasures were destroyed in ISIS’s bloody march. If Vladimir Putin takes Ukraine, the people are determined: he will not kill our culture.
Five thousand miles away in D.C., Ukrainian flags wave down a two-mile stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. At night, city hall, nearby embassies, the D.C. Basilica, Memorial Bridge, and the National Harbor Ferris Wheel glow blue and yellow in a growing symbol of solidarity. “The Russians have greatly underestimated and miscalculated the strong international resolve against their aggression in Ukraine,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) insisted. “It’s being heard loud and clear. There will be a very strong punitive response diplomatically, economically, and otherwise. So I won’t say I’m surprised — I’ll say I’m impressed. For Vladimir Putin, this has become a politically incorrect war, and he’s losing.”
In corporate America, the backlash against Russia is full-throttle now. In a flurry of media advisories, the U.S.‘s biggest brands are pulling out of Putin’s country in droves. Microsoft said Friday morning that it will suspend “all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia,” following in the footsteps of U.S. titans like Apple, Ford, Shell, and Exxon. Hollywood executives are turning up the heat too, as Disney pulls major studio releases like Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Pixar’s Lightyear and DirecTV cuts ties with its local partner. Even Big Tech got in on the game, announcing that Twitter and Google would stop advertising in the region. To most people’s amazement, Putin’s Twitter account is still active — an ironic decision for a company who can’t seem to censor conservatives fast enough.
Airbnb, one of the five major sponsors of the Beijing Olympics, is stopping all operations in Russia, while Nike — who fought to keep Uyghur slaves toiling in their shoe factories — is temporarily closing 116 stores. It’s a powerful gesture by these big businesses — but a confusing one. How is it that Nike, Apple, Airbnb, and Disney find their voices on Ukraine but shrug their shoulders at genocide in China? While these CEOs all seem to be deeply troubled by the Russian invasion, they manage to feel no such sympathy for the two million victims of China’s war, wasting away in concentration camps behind miles of barbed-wire walls. For them, there are no underground bunkers — no safe spaces to shelter and wait. Their hope is not in picking up arms and fighting back but in the moral courage of the West.
What would these CEOs say to them — that atrocities only count when the world’s televisions can see them? That money matters more than the brotherhood of humanity? Because that’s the message America’s titans are sending by deciding that persecution and barbarity are only sometimes wrong. As grand as their pronouncements about Ukraine have been, they’re no substitute for the truth, which is that these punishments might not have been carried out against a country with deeper pockets; pockets in which they have their hands.
As Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) pointed out on “Washington Watch,” “Russia’s GDP is the same as some of our states. I mean, it’s a two trillion dollar economy. It’s the size of Italy. So it’s not a big economy. China’s is a much bigger economy. Our corporate class, our businesses [are] a much more ingrained there than they are in Russia. And I think they feel like that economic power insulates them from some of the things that’s happening to Russia right now.”
We don’t have to ask if these companies would be willing to sacrifice business for conviction with a better international customer, because they haven’t. Nike, Apple, and Ford rake in about a quarter of their profits from China — and not one of them have been willing to risk a cent of it for the moral high ground. If oppression is wrong in Ukraine, then it’s wrong in Xinjiang. When billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya insisted, “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?” the shocking part wasn’t just that he said it. The shocking part was that in so many of America’s gleaming skyscrapers, it’s true.
Originally published here.
Obsession Is Nine-Tenths of Biden’s Law
They were just 59 words of the president’s State of the Union — a tiny sliver in a 62-minute speech. But the reality of Joe Biden’s transgender agenda is much more vast and all-encompassing than anyone could dream. At a time of war, inflation, and crises from every direction, the White House is spending precious time fighting anyone who dares to believe that children shouldn’t be allowed to mutilate their bodies or permanently sterilize themselves under age.
In Texas, where leaders have called this kind of gender transition “child abuse,” the president has unleashed the full force of the United States government. While he’s wary to take strong action against Vladimir Putin, Biden is more than willing to go to war against parents and communities who’s only request on transgender “therapy” is that minors wait. To this president that represents “a cynical and dangerous campaign.” The idea that Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas) has asked state officials to open up child abuse investigations on cases like these is, Biden declared without irony, “government overreach at its worst.” (This, of course, coming from a man who’s forced Americans to inject foreign substances into their bodies.)
Biden’s pot-kettle statement would have been outrageous enough on its own. But this administration, whose transgender obsession knows no bounds, refused to stop there. Instead, his HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, set in motion a series of guidelines outlining the “rights of transgender youth” and promised to take “immediate action” if those rights become threatened. “HHS is closely monitoring the situation in Texas,” Becerra insisted, “and will use every tool at our disposal to keep Texans safe.”
According to the White House, “These announcements make clear that rather than weaponizing child protective services against loving families, child welfare agencies should instead expand access to gender-affirming care for transgender children,” the statement read. “Children, their parents, and their doctors should have the freedom to make the medical decisions that are best for each young person — without politicians getting the way.” (Naturally, this doesn’t apply to COVID vaccinations.)
Meanwhile, the Texas initiative was already under fire from the Left, where legal challenges have already put Abbott’s order on ice for now. Doing the far-Left’s bidding, District Judge Amy Clark Meachum absurdly decided that children’s access to these dangerous, unproven treatments are “constitutional rights” and demanded Texas’s investigations to come to an immediate halt.
Roger Severino, who served in Donald Trump’s HHS, has a hard time believing that this is where the president is devoting his efforts. “If he truly cares about children, he will support them in sometimes difficult circumstances. You let nature take its course and you do not sterilize children before they have the capacity to make that sort of life-altering decision. Imagine a 12- or 13-year-old child put in a position to say whether or not they ever want to have kids of their own. Think about that… Even the leading transgender advocacy groups are saying you should wait until after 18 for the surgeries. That should also apply to puberty blockers, because we don’t know all the full risks.”
The bottom line, he insists, is protecting our children. “Now this administration is ignoring that, and it has moved to make [gender transition surgeries and drugs] an essential health benefit in insurances on the exchanges under Obamacare. They’re moving in April to issue a rule under an anti-discrimination provision to say that all insurance must cover it, and all doctors must perform these transgender surgeries that remove healthy, perfectly functioning reproductive organs. And there’s no exclusion for children… So people need to be aware that our federal government is moving headlong on a crash course to do this — when the states are now pushing back and the science does not support taking these risks.”
In Europe, Severino points out, they’ve actually pulled back on these permanent surgeries for children because there have been so many devastating consequences. And yet here, our top doctor for HHS — a man who identifies as a woman — is on board with locking kids into a future of despair, poor health, and regret. But then, the Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center says, what do we expect? This is an ideologically-driven administration. Look at Becerra. “He didn’t have a background in public health, yet he was still appointed to the top health position in the country as secretary of Health and Human Services. It made no sense. It is just inexcusable that he has been AWOL during the pandemic, yet laser-focused on LGBT issues, on abortion, on pushing back on the states that are working to protect kids.”
As for Biden, “To think that the president of the United States had to dedicate time to discuss this issue when there are so many things going on in the country, it shows that he is playing to his base… And unfortunately, despite whatever pretensions that Biden put out as being some sort of a moderate, he is not. He is beholding to the far-Left of his party — and especially on the social issues. The culture war continues, and in fact, it’s gotten worse. He has not united us. He has driven wedges, and children should not be pawns in this fight. Yet they’ve become so, and that is tragic. This is not a game. These are real children’s lives that are at stake.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
