Ukrainian President Zelensky responds to critics who say his country is persecuting Christians

 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to critics who accuse his government of persecuting Christians, saying religious groups in Ukraine are free and that American commentator Tucker Carlson has probably never been to the country.

Zelensky made the remarks in an interview with host Tony Perkins on "This Week on Capitol Hill" on Saturday. Zelensky asked how Carlson could talk about religious life in Ukraine without having visited.

“We are very free,” Zelensky claimed, adding that Ukraine has the largest council of religious institutions in Europe and that its members meet every month at the presidential office.

The council talks through problems and the delivery of humanitarian aid, he said, and takes up cases of destroyed buildings and of church leaders tortured or jailed by Russia. Zelensky said Christians, Jews, Catholics and Muslims all sit in the same room.

He said Carlson, a former Fox News host, “doesn’t know what’s going on in Ukraine” and could come to see what Russia had destroyed and how Ukrainians treat different faiths and nationalities. Ukraine is home to many nationalities, Zelensky said, and can defend itself only if they stand together.

In 2023, the Orthodox Public Affairs Committee, a U.S.-based organization advocating for the global Orthodox church, condemned Carlson’s comments at the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, about Christian persecution in Ukraine. Carlson asked former Vice President Mike Pence if he had asked Zelensky about the treatment of Christians in Ukraine during his meeting with the leader in June that year. Pence had voiced support for the U.S. giving Ukraine resources to thwart the Russian invasion.

The group accused Carlson of spreading “Russian propaganda.”

During Saturday’s interview, Perkins said he met the council and Zelensky during an August visit, prayed for the president on Independence Day and saw religious freedom there. Zelensky replied that thousands of people take part in that work and that they respect one another.

Earlier in the interview, Perkins raised accusations that Russian troops had detained and tortured Christian pastors and taken over churches in occupied parts of Ukraine. Zelensky said Russians had killed about 120 representatives of religious institutions and called the killings deliberate attacks on people and churches.

Zelensky responds to claims Ukraine is persecuting Christians | U.S.

The Midterms Offer a Choice Between Two Brands of Socialism

In the country with arguably the most successful market economy on Earth, it's not unreasonable to ask for just one major political party to favor a system of relatively unfettered voluntary exchange. 

And yet, the midterm elections offer Americans a "choice" between a party openly embracing socialism by name, and one that increasingly embraces state-directed economic activity in the cause of nationalism.

 Not every candidate running as a Democrat or Republican is on board with their parties' statist transformations, and there are certainly other issues separating the two dominant political tribes. But if you want reliable advocacy of economic freedom, you won't find it in the two major parties.

The midterms offer a choice between two brands of socialism

France’s multiculturalism experiment goes up in flames

 “French culture doesn’t exist in and of itself; there is no such thing as a single French culture. There is culture in France and it is diverse.”

That was French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, putting his own spin on the insipid “diversity is our strength” mantra that’s been the thoughtless creed of Western elites for more than two decades.

Now France, like so many other Western countries, is reaping the whirlwind of that shallow, misguided ideal. Riots are breaking out all over the country.

But it isn’t a case of France being French.

In fact, just the opposite.

This instead feels like the beginning of the end of a foolish and civilizationally suicidal globalist, “multicultural” project facilitated by EU elites that can no longer accommodate its contradictions.

I’m going to back up a bit here for those who haven’t been paying close attention to what’s been happening across the pond. Last week, protests in France — absurdly billed by much of the media as student frustration with large class sizes and fiscal “austerity” — exploded into a torrent of violence that authorities have been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to contain.

Left-leaning media continue to spin a narrative about what’s happening, downplaying the violence in a way that will be quite familiar to those who remember the Black Lives Matter and defund the police “mostly peaceful” riots in 2020.

One now-deleted X post by CBS described what was happening in France as “scuffles” between “small groups of protesters” and police.

Does this look like a scuffle to you?

The situation got bad enough that Macron addressed the nation, but he hardly rose to the occasion. Instead, the French president seemed to minimize the violence, highlighted the importance of “listening and dialogue,” and blamed America.

France’s multiculturalism experiment goes up in flames

France Is a Warning to California's Tax-the-Rich Crowd

French economist Gabriel Zucman has come to California bearing a familiar French solution to a fiscal problem: another tax. Once based at the University of California, Berkeley, Zucman is back and campaigning for Proposition 40, which would impose an allegedly one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of Californians worth more than $1 billion. 

Zucman, who coauthored the proposition, estimates that the tax could raise about $100 billion and claims that 90 percent of the proceeds would go to health care. The California Legislative Analyst's office is far more cautious, saying it would raise only "tens of billions" and could cause a long-term loss of income-tax revenue as wealthy people leave the state with the companies they created.

 I've written plenty about why wealth taxes are economically destructive, administratively nightmarish, and unlikely to achieve anything close to what their advocates promise. But Zucman's prescription is wrong for a more fundamental reason, as his (and my) native country shows: Raising taxes to fuel ever-larger demands for government spending is a recipe for disaster.

France is a warning to California's tax-the-rich crowd

93% of Protestant pastors don’t plan to endorse candidates from the pulpit: survey

 Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, more than 90% of Protestant pastors do not plan to endorse political candidates, even if their churches would face no legal consequences, according to a new Lifeway Research study.

A Lifeway Research survey of over 1,000 Protestant pastors in the United States released Tuesday finds that 93% of respondents won't endorse any political candidates during worship services even after being told the Internal Revenue Service said last year that it wouldn't strip tax-exempt status of churches if their pastors or leaders make political endorsements.

By contrast, 5% of pastors surveyed said they do plan to endorse candidates during worship, while the rest said they were unsure whether they would do so.

“Since historically very few Protestant pastors had endorsed candidates from the pulpit, we were interested in whether the IRS ruling last year would change that,” Lifeway Research Executive Director Scott McConnell said a statement. “Were pastors simply obeying the tax law or was their neutrality in a worship setting their conviction?”

The survey of 1,003 Protestant pastors was conducted Sept. 2 to 24, 2025. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

African American pastors (11%) and pastors of other ethnicities (9%) were twice as likely than white pastors (4%) to say they plan to endorse candidates. Pentecostal (13%), Baptist (9%) and non-denominational (7%) pastors were also more likely than Lutheran (1%) and Methodist (1%) pastors to say they plan to endorse a candidate.

The survey was conducted about two months after the IRS submitted a joint motion for entry of consent judgment last July to settle a lawsuit, saying the agency doesn't enforce Johnson Amendment restrictions "against houses of worship for speech concerning electoral politics in the context of worship services."

93% of pastors don’t plan to endorse candidates from pulpit | Church & Ministries

‘French Intifada’: Mayor Calls For Terror Investigation Into ‘Islamo-Leftist’ Riots, Ban on Antifa Groups

A leading French mayor has called for the government to open up terror investigations into the urban youth riots over the weekend, and to ban far-left militant groups like Antifa. Éric Ciotti, the Mayor of Nice, France’s fifth largest city, said that the unrest seen throughout the country over the weekend, which included widespread attacks on police, mass looting, and arson attacks on government buildings, should be treated by prosecutors as terrorism, while warning that “Islamo-Leftism” is seeking “to overthrow” the Republic. 

 “The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office needs to step in and track down these far-left groups—these coordinated, organized structures that seek to attack the institutions of the Republic. It’s clear that institutions were targeted—not just in other cities, but here in our own city as well. They attempted to attack the town hall, for instance, and they also targeted police stations,” the Nice Mayor told broadcaster BFMTV. 

 The leader of the Union of the Right for the Republic (UDR) party and ally of National Rally presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said that France is facing a “hybrid phenomenon” in which the far-left is coordinating and fuelling riots from a “mix of Islamists and drug traffickers, or ‘narco-Islamists’,” and lower level “armed robbers”. “We are facing a red fascism, a French Intifada, a form of insurrection where Islamists, Antifa members, rioters, and looters—remotely controlled by the far left with terrorist aims—converge,” he said referencing the Palestinian terror campaigns against Israel, adding that there are “more Palestinian flags than French flags” at the demonstrations.

French Mayor Calls For Terrorism Investigation Into 'Islamo-Leftist' Riots

Televangelist George Bloomer wins $62.2M in racial discrimination lawsuit against Word Network

 Televangelist George Bloomer was awarded $62.2 million by a federal jury, four years after suing Kevin Adell, the white owner of The Word Network, billed as the “largest African American religious network in the world,” for race discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.

A federal jury in Detroit made the award Wednesday following a five-day trial before U.S. District Judge Susan DeClercq, The Detroit News reported.

Bloomer, 63, who founded the Bethel Family Worship Center, a multicultural ministry in Durham, North Carolina, hosted the television programs “Rejoice in the Word” and “The First Word” on the network from approximately 2011 to September 2019. He left the network in 2019 following an uproar over a controversial meme showing the pimping of black pastors. Black pastors protested and called for a boycott of the network.

In the petition calling for the boycott, Bloomer alleged that in September 2019, Adell texted a photoshopped image of himself dressed as a pimp surrounded by well-known black clergy he called “hoes” to various staff members, many of whom are black. Bloomer was included in the text.

“When Bishop Bloomer stated: ‘This is not funny. This is not good. That pimp talk and hoe talk has racist connotations for Black people.’ Adell texted Bishop Bloomer a second time and said that ‘it’s funny and he should get over it,’” the petition said.

Televangelist George Bloomer wins $62.2M in discrimination suit | U.S.