Opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine claim the country persecutes Christians. “When American leaders frame this as a war for democracy and human rights, it would be good if the recipient of the aid was a little bit more careful of human rights, including religious liberties,” Sen. J.D. Vance said in an interview in mid-March. Ukraine “is doing some pretty bad stuff,” he adds, citing “news reports of priests being investigated, church assets being seized and priests being arrested.” Ukrainians have “invaded churches, they’ve arrested priests,” according to Sen. Rand Paul. Rep. Paul Gosar says Kyiv has “banned Ukraine’s oldest and largest denomination, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.”

Two years of full-scale war in Ukraine have reshaped the military alliance called NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization): Finland and Sweden have now joined, an unintended consequence, as afar as Vladimir Putin was concerned, of his brutal aggression against Ukraine. It is probably correct to argue that NATO is now more united than it has been since the fall of the USSR in the 1990s. NATO announced this month that two-thirds of the alliance’s members have met the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. That is a marked increase from a decade ago. But, at the same time, former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican candidate, said this month that he was willing to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” against NATO allies that do not fulfill their commitments on military spending.

A regular columnist in The Economist magazine writes under the label “Lexington” and recently published an article summarizing a 1988 six month visit by a Chinese political scientist, Wang Huning, to America and his subsequent book, America Against America. [Wang is now Chief of Ideology and Propaganda in China.] Wang was mesmerized by the voluntary pursuit of financial wherewithal, rather than any ideology or political system of coercion in America. For him, this was a source of stability. He was astonished at public libraries, where people could access the knowledge of generations past.

There is one incontrovertible fact about America: We are a nation of immigrants. It is important to remember this even about former president Trump: His mother came from Tong, a remote Scottish settlement that was once Viking territory. His grandfather came from Kallstadt, a Bavarian village. In America, everyone is from somewhere else; even Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait millennia ago.

The Alabama Supreme Court clearly opened a new phase in the legal battle over when life begins. Embryos created and stored in a medical facility must be considered children under the state’s law governing harmful death, the Court ruled. The ruling involved three couples who had sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic in Mobile, for inadvertently destroying their embryos. The plaintiffs argued that they were entitled to punitive damages under Alabama’s 1972 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The Court argued that the embryos fell under Alabama’s definition of minors and that the negligence lawsuits could proceed. The case now goes back to the State District Court for further litigation.

The Russian state blandly announced the death of Alexei Navalny. Navalny was Russia’s foremost dissident and opposition leader. Despite being poisoned and repeatedly punished with long bouts of isolation in remote prisons, Navalny stood unbroken. He continued to mock Putin and denounce the invasion of Ukraine. As Nicholas Kristof argues, “His wit and refusal to bow to authority made him a Kremlin nightmare.”

In 2023, Jean M Twenge, Psychology professor at San Diego University, published an important book entitled Generation: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silent—And What They Mean For America’s Future. She offers profiles of the living generations in the midst of a century of social change

As I am writing this piece, continued American aid for Ukraine is in grave doubt. Tucker Carlson recently conducted a friendly interview with Vladimir Putin. There are reports from the front lines that Russia is advancing, in part because of Ukrainian ammunition shortages. In short, the war is reaching a critical stage, and Ukraine may lose because, among other factors, there is increasing evidence that many Republicans are simply turning against Ukraine. In fact, in some GOP circles, there is now outright contempt for the Ukrainian cause.

In 1978, the historian Christopher Lasch published a profoundly important book, entitled The Culture of Narcissism, in which he argued that this culture “assumes that psychic health and personal liberation are synonymous with an absence of inner restraints, inhibitions, and ‘hangups.’” And what could offer more liberation than throwing off the constraints of one of humanity’s oldest institutions, monogamous marriage? Polyamory is the most recent manifestation of this narcissistic penchant.

Sunday, 21 January 2024, was centenary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Soviet communism and the leader of the bloody Bolshevik Revolution that brought communism to Russia. There were no parades or stirring speeches in Red Square. The obvious reason is that one of Lenin’s most strident critics is Vladimir Putin, “who appears far more enamored with the empire that Lenin’s revolutionaries overthrew.” “In my opinion, the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death creates an opportunity to try to move away from the endless passionate and meaningless bickering around the dilemma: is he an angel from heaven or a monstrous antichrist, the embodiment of absolute world evil?” said Vladimir Lukin, a Russian senator who formerly served as a human rights commissioner.