I go to bookstores frequently, but I don’t ever venture into the area of books for children. But a recent video and column by John Stossel has changed that. “Go into Barnes & Noble,” says Bethany Mandel, “and you will be met with a wall of biographies. Probably 27 different books about former Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” She also talks about lots of book about Kamala Harris.

But what about biographies on conservatives like Margaret Thatcher or Amy Coney Barrett? According to Bethany Mandel, there are none. That is why she started a company that told the story of “Heroes of Liberty” like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell.

Her top seller is her biography of Sowell, who overcame adversity to become a famous economist. When Sowell’s family moved to New York, his new teachers put him in a lower grade because they assumed that he couldn’t compete. He didn’t play the victim but asked to see the principal. It is an encouraging story.

John Stossel reminds us that conservatives make up about half the country so you would assume that book publishers would want to appeal to them. But that is not what is happening. Bethany Mandel explains that libraries buy many more books than moms and dads so there is an incentive to churn out books that librarians will buy.

Most of us (including John Stossel) assume that librarians would be apolitical. But he provides one statistic that shows that 90 percent of librarians’ political donations go to Democrats. Our tax dollars are used to buy a thousand copies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and zero copies about Amy Coney Barrett.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Heroes of Faith and the Tuttle Twins are some conservative alternatives. And Christian publishers have been providing inspiring books as well. Unfortunately, you won’t find these books in your local library.

There are many insights to glean from the latest controversy concerning the Disney Corporation. One of most significant is how a woke corporation manages to portray itself as a victim the moment public opinion turns against them.

Ben Shapiro argues in a recent column that “The Left is the Culture War Aggressor.” He reminds us that much of the firestorm surfaced when Disney criticized “Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which protects small children from indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Then, video footage of top Disney employees surfaced. One Disney producer “told an all-hands meeting that her team works to push a not-at-all-secret gay agenda in programming aimed at kids and sought to add ‘queerness’ to such content.” The Disney corporate president “announced that she was the mother of ‘one transgender child and one pansexual child’ and that she would try to achieve a quota system whereby half of all Disney characters would be LGBTQ or people of color.” Also, the Disney diversity and inclusion manager stated that Disney theme parks would be eliminating any mention of “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.”

Obviously, Disney had a PR disaster on their hands. So, it was time for the establishment media to come to the rescue. A writer for the New York Times lamented that Disney executives had be the “object of right-wing fury and disgust.” A Washington Post columnist came on CNN which added the chyron, “LGBT COMMUNITY LATEST TO BE CAUGHT IN CULTURE WAR.”

The goal of these and others in the media was to make Disney the victim. Ben Shapiro calls this “a transparent lie” Americans have seen the transformation of Walt Disney into Woke Disney, and I think they understand that Disney is the culture war aggressor.

A few weeks ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning about the mental health of adolescents. More than 4 in 10 teens reported they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” A significant percentage of teenagers said they had contemplated suicide.

The deputy director of the CDC explained that their survey was a cry for help. “The COVID-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental well-being.” I would add, however, that some of these problems of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts were probably growing even before the pandemic.

The survey was a representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021. They were questioned on a range of topics, including their mental health, alcohol, and drug use. While it is true that young people had fewer medical problems due to the virus compared to older people, they nevertheless faced the isolation and the economic turmoil of the pandemic and lockdowns.

In previous commentaries, I have talked about other warnings from health care officials. For example, last fall the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. A few months ago, the Surgeon General issued a similar warming about the “pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distance from loved ones, friends, and community.”

While I applaud all these organizations for focusing on the problem, I also hope we can find solutions to what is a growing problem of mental health. I believe that churches can provide help and encouragement to teens and their families. Pastors and youth leaders should be alert to this problem of teen mental health and work to support these young people and their parents.

As President Joe Biden was leaving the NATO summit in Europe, he talked about his belief that the US should lead in this “new world order.” No one in the administration felt that this remarkable comment should be “cleaned up” or “clarified” or “corrected.” Fortunately, Colonel Oliver North felt it was worthy of some comments.

The idea of a new world order goes back to the 1940s when H.G. Wells published his nonfiction book on, The New World Order. He is best known as a science fiction writer who penned, The War of the Worlds. But he was also a “collectivist” who believed that a global government was the best way to protect human rights.

Today, the phrase “new world order” is used to promote the idea of removing national boundaries. An international body would be given the task of promoting global policies for the environment (like the Green New Deal) along with other utopian and socialist programs.

Colonel North argues that a Biden new world order would be one where the “federal government will dictate whether Americans must foreswear fossil fuels while our elites fly around in private jets.”

In the Biden new world order, “the People’s Republic of China will remain ascendent in economic and military power.” China is working to control valuable mineral resources and take over Taiwan and it microchip production. He also observes that, “Despite the genocide being perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine, Moscow still intends to use its fossil fuel to control Europe” and is helping Iran become a nuclear power that threatens Israel.

He concludes by arguing that “conservative patriots must retake the House of Representatives and Senate in November 2022 and the White House in 2024.” It’s time to pay attention to who you are electing to Congress and the presidency.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has not only devastated that country but it has also changed the world. Former Assistant Secretary of State John Hillen documents eight ways the war has changed the world. Here are a few of them.

First, it is likely China may be discouraged rather than encouraged with its own territorial ambitions. Russia was likely surprised at both the military resistance of Ukraine and the unprecedented level of sanctions placed on it. China is taking note.

Second, we could be witnessing the death-throes of a superpower. Russia has been declining in many areas, invading Ukraine made their problems worse.

Third, aggressor states are once again seeing the advantage of being in the nuclear club. NATO is only willing to “help-from-a-distance” rather than directly confront Russia. Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan were not nuclear powers and thus were attacked by the US and European powers.

Fourth, he says it is “time to go back to deterrence school.” One problem was this administration’s willingness to articulate what it would not do in Ukraine before and during the Russian invasion. A limited deterrence failed to deter aggression.

Finally, it is time to “dust off your Samuel Huntington.” The Harvard professor wrote a book I often quote: The Clash of Civilizations. Free institutions that arose from Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values are shrinking. China, Russia, Islamists and others offer an alternative system for political, economic, and social order. We need to stop being so naïve about what is happening in the world around us.

Not only has the war in Ukraine been devastating to the country and its people, but this conflict is also changing the world around us. We need to pay attention.

Today is Earth Day which is a day set aside to focus on our environmental challenges. Unfortunately, the environmental movement has a problem. Years of telling all of us that we are headed for an environmental apocalypse have affected the public’s perceptions.

Climate activists used to say their biggest challenge was climate denialism. Now, many are talking about climate doomism. It’s a feeling, especially among young people, that there is nothing we can do to save the environment. Why bother if we are all doomed. It has manifested itself with many young adults publicly announcing they will not have any children because of climate change.

A month ago, I talked about the book by “the skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. In his book, False Alarm, he laments that on the one hand we have an abundance of environmental information that will help us deal with future challenges. But on the other hand he says, “the rhetoric that comes from commentators and the media has become increasingly irrational.”

Doomism has become such a problem that even some of the environmental activists who have been making some of these irrational statements are starting to tone down their rhetoric. They are even challenging some of the most extreme statements.

One of the scientists they have been battling is a retired University of Arizona ecologist who has become one of the leaders of the doom movement. He reminds us that all species go extinct and that humans are destined for the same future. He predicts that humanity will go extinct in 2026, though he has also mentioned 2030 as an extinction date.

Today on Earth Day we will hear lots of extreme environmental rhetoric. It is encouraging that some environmental activists are starting to realize they have gone too far and promoted doomism amoung the young.

Students fell behind in their schoolwork during the pandemic because of the limitations of online learning. But instead of working to remediate students, some school districts implemented social-emotional learning. It did not help. Instead, it hurt students and provided another forum for teachers to push radical ideologies in the classroom.

Many parents have embraced the fight against critical race theory and other radical programs. But it isn’t as easy to identify the threats coming from programs that are couched in therapeutic language. A review of social-emotional learning materials by the group Parents Defending Education confirmed the concerns of parents who provided the material.

They argue that mental-health language is being used to advance ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. Even when the material isn’t promoting a radical agenda, parents are asking why teachers are taking valuable class time away from important subjects.

Traci Spiegel, whose son needed educational help, asked: “Where is the algebra? Where is the biology? Where is the English?” Though a life-long Democrat, she became concerned after her son started complaining about the weekly social-justice-heavy lessons involving social-emotional learning. She was also shocked to see what was on the quizzes for her son and daughter.

A teacher in another school district finally pulled one of her kids out of the school system. She concluded that her daughter “basically didn’t have math for a year.” And even when a class did focus on mathematics, the first half of the class was often devoted to a talk about Black Lives Matter “almost every single day.” The class even skipped an important unit of Algebra because they “didn’t have time.”

Parents are going to have to pay attention to what their children are learning, as well as pay attention to the subjects they aren’t learning.

When you say the word “invasion,” you will likely think of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army. But Graham Cunningham talks about another invasion. That would be the “Invasion of the Virtue Signalers.”

The group he talks about goes by various names. They might be called “social justice warriors” or “virtue-signaling liberals” or merely called “the woke.” Whatever name you give to these groups, they have been successful in influencing nearly every institution in America and much of the Western world.

Unlike the Russian invasion, they don’t use guns or bombs. They use rhetoric and what he calls “ex-cathedra incantations of pseudo-values so absurd that only a few years ago it would have seemed like they must be kidding.” That’s a fancy way of saying that you can’t believe people are completely serious when they are saying crazy things about race, gender, and science.

He rightly focuses his attention on what has taking place on university campuses across the nation. Professors are the “academy’s pied-pipers” influencing the “ambitious young minds of the future opinion-forming elite.” But he also focuses on the “feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM (mainstream media).”

This is an important principle. In the past, many people used to argue that the nutty ideas in the heads of college students would fade away as they had to earn a living and deal with the realities of the world of business. Instead, they found previous graduates in some of these corporations who were woke soul mates. And the media continued to reinforce those crazy woke ideas.

That is why we must challenge these ideas being presented on university campuses and being promoted by much of the media. We should be “destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5).