Foreign desk: Re-evaluating the Russia Threat

“Americans largely consider our homeland safe from the threat of foreign attack,” but that confidence is “tragically misguided,” warns Terry Thompson at The Washington Times. Tensions between the United States and Russia are increasing as “both are squaring off yet again over nuclear proliferation.” Vladimir Putin is expanding his country’s “military influence” and pushing “anti-Western, anti-American sentiment” — all while maintaining “the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.” Making matters worse, Russia is busy developing capability “to target and destroy US satellites in space — and it’s unlikely they’ll stop there.” Fact is, “Russia is seeking every opportunity to capitalize on America’s military weaknesses. It stands to reason, then, that the United States should be looking to plug each hole before it can be exploited.”

Libertarian: Everyone’s a Traitor!

“Politicians, pundits and political players have grown comfortable yelling ‘treason’ in each other’s faces,” worries Reason’s J.D. Tuccille, and “that’s a problem.” Why? “Tagging your enemies as traitors lazily bypasses debating their ideas and actions.” Whether it’s “former economist and current stoker of Manhattanite prejudices” Paul Krugman, who called “Big Finance” treasonous for opposing Elizabeth Warren, or President Trump, who on Twitter mused about arresting Rep. Adam Schiff for treason, throwing around the “T”-word is “a way of rallying the troops” and telling them they need to “destroy” their political enemies, which can lead not just to polarization, but real violence. Bottom line: The only time it’s appropriate to use such rhetoric is when criminal treason has been proved, in which case it “warrants punishment with a bullet or noose.”

Feminist: No, Don’t ‘Listen to the Children’

At Spectator USA, Meghan Murphy laments how anyone criticizing 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg is met with “bleats” of “listen to the children!” But it’s exactly because child activists are children that we can’t act “as though they were fully fledged, confident, practical adult humans who can take public criticism.” That’s why propping up Thunberg as “a leader we must listen to” is “unethical and manipulative,” even “dangerous.” Worse still, “progressives’ fetishization of youth and ‘youth activism’ ” is little more than self-serving pap, eliciting an emotional rather than rational reaction and giving adults a chance to virtue-signal. It’s great that kids “feel passionately about things and . . . speak out against said things” — but don’t “listen to the young” simply because they’re “young and speaking.”

2020 watch: Warren’s Sticky Cherokee Problem

The controversy over Elizabeth Warren’s debunked claims of Native American ancestry “has not been put to bed, and it shouldn’t be,” writes National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty. Even Warren’s media defenders, who have tried to play down the story, have had to admit that she only received “crucial leaps in her academic career” after she “began listing herself as a racial minority.” Worse, her contribution to a cookbook titled “Pow Wow Chow” (byline: “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee”) and decision not to seek official Cherokee status suggest she knew “she was perpetrating a racial fraud.” As Warren climbs the polls, she will have to face “the upwardly mobile Left’s hatred of cultural appropriation” — and even if she wins the nomination, in a general election “the same basic problem remains.”

Populist: Ask Biden About Ukraine

Amid the “explosive cacophony of impeachment noise all around Washington,” Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail has a “simple question” about the Ukraine scandal. But it’s not about President Trump: It’s about Joe Biden, specifically whether the ex-veep “intervened to stop an investigation into corruption that might have caused problems for his son.” That’s what Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate, but we still don’t know what, if anything, Biden did. And Democrats don’t want us to know — even though they would be “screaming blue murder about nepotism, conflict, corruption and collusion” if it were about Trump instead of Biden. That’s why it’s time for the media to “put the same heat” into investigating the Bidens and Ukraine as they are currently investing into investigating Trump’s phone call.

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann