Coming Monday from the Heritage Foundation and the National Review Institute: ON-DEMAND: Religion is Essential: COVID Lockdowns and Unjust Religious Discrimination
1. Kevin Clarke: Were Orthodox Christians massacred in Ethiopia?
2. Peggy Noonan:
On “Axios on HBO” Sunday we will hear from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He is playing a hard hand. Russia is breathing down his neck, Republicans don’t want to hear about him because they’re embarrassed by the Trump phone call that triggered the first impeachment, and Democrats are embarrassed by Hunter Biden and Burisma. Mr. Zelensky seems kind of on his own, sitting on top of one of the world’s flashpoints. China has been sweetly reaching out.
Reporter Jonathan Swan asked the president how he felt as he saw the Capitol stormed. “Shocked,” Mr. Zelensky said. “I could not even imagine something like this was possible in the United States of America. . . . We are used to thinking that the U.S. has ideal democratic institutions where power is passed calmly, without war, without revolutions.” Such things happen elsewhere; they’ve happened in Ukraine. “That it could happen in the United States, no one expected that. . . . After something like this, I believe it would be very difficult for the world to see the United States as a symbol of democracy in the world.”
For more than a century we have claimed the mantle of world power, basked in the warm glow of our exceptionalism, and put ourselves forward as an example. When you do that you have responsibilities; you owe something in return. What you owe is the kind of admirable behavior that gives the world something to aim for. On 1/6 they saw the storming and the siege and thought: Ah, no stability in that place. We can’t learn how to do it there and replicate it here.
This is a loss to rising democracies and also to us, to our standing and reputation. Senate conviction is the chance to show the world: No, we won’t have this; those who did it will pay the highest penalty.
It matters that all evidence be presented, that everyone sees we can come down like a hammer, ensuring that 1/6 was a regrettable incident, not a coming tendency.
It matters that the world see this. That we see it.
10. Inés San Martín: Syrian archbishop calls on the West to lift sanctions against his country
11. Keeping China accountable for Xinjiang
12. April Ponnuru: Virginia fails to protect elderly: My parents caught COVID while vaccines languish unused
13. Nicholas Frankovich: We Can’t Let the Old Die, Just Because They’re Old and Expensive
14. The last thing New York needs: Advocates in N.Y. renew fight for ‘death with dignity’ bill
15. Marlo Safi: ‘Untold Harm Has Been Done’: Twitter Sued For Allegedly Profiting From Spread Of Video Showing Sex Trafficked 13-Year-Old Boy
16. In Christianity Today: I Escaped. Now I’m Using My Voice for Victims Trafficked to the U.S.
17. French incest allegations prompt victims to speak out
19. Second police officer died by suicide following Capitol attack
20. Andrea Picciotti-Bayer: Biden Can (And Should) Safeguard the Conscience Rights of Americans Opposed to Abortion
21. U.S. Senators reintroduce Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
22. Richard Doerflinger: The “Equality Act”: Threatening Life and Equality
24. Virginia is on the verge of abolishing the death penalty. Other states should follow suit.
25. Ramesh Ponnuru: Covid Is Making the Case for More School Choice
26. Chris Stirewalt: I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here’s what I learned
27. Tom Hibbs: Is envy at the root of our political anger?
28. Elizabeth Regnerus: Revelations from a Hidden Life
29. Smithsonian: These Are the Highest Resolution Photos Ever Taken of Snowflakes
30. Noah Criticized For Lack Of Social Distancing On Ark