Do Conservatives really care about children? No. No, they do not. From fake outrage over drag queens and distracting narratives on immigration, the conservative stance on abortion stumbles to incomprehensible lows and logical failures when confronted with the Ohio case of a pregnant 10 year-old rape victim.

In this episode, I interview my 11 year-old daughter to get her input on conservatives' insistence that a 10 year-old being forced to give birth is totally cool. We also discuss periods and drag queens and determine that conservatives intentionally misrepresent their beliefs and then double down on them to save face. A little light listening for your Sunday. 

Royalty free montage music from Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio: https://whitebataudio.com/ 

We're wrapping up our coverage on the war in Ukraine. The civilian death toll continues to climb, and the international community has completely failed in preventing civilian casualties. Expect periodic updates, but for the sake of our mental health we must move on. 

As Russian troops left Kyiv and its surrounding villages, they left behind evidence of war crimes and brutality. The Bucha massacre and the systematic rape of women and children by Russian soldiers will leave a legacy of trauma for future generations of Ukrainians. For rape victims who have become pregnant and then fled Ukraine, access to abortion can be a crime. Poland has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. 

For this episode, we interviewed a volunteer at Helping to Leave, Yury, a Russian expat who now spends 20 hours a day gathering information to help coordinate evacuation routes for Ukrainian citizens. Yury hasn't lived in Russia for 15 years, but still has friends and family there. His only goal at the moment is to help as many people survive as possible. 

We left off wondering what the hell Russia thinks it doing poking around in Ukraine's business. Was the inner chaos during the Maidan Revolution somehow Russia's concern? No. It was just a handy story that Putin likes to tell people. Putin has also made clear that Ukraine doesn't exist. In the battle of Western/Russian propaganda, the story that never gets told is the real story. Maidan got messy - like, real messy - but nothing within Ukraine's borders has ever amounted to an offense worthy of intervention. The story that's being hidden now, in real time, is the story of Ukrainian sovereignty - not as a nation, but as a people. 

We came across some hot takes on Twitter disparaging Ukraine, its government, and its people. Unsurprising. We took a break from regular reporting to think about how Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine is understood in the West. Do we understand it? Do we provide the Ukrainian people any justice by trying to view this war through a geopolitical lens? Surprisingly, some folks on the Far Left and Far Right of US politics see the war as something of a lost cause - is President Zelinskyy selfishly leading Ukrainians to their deaths? Some think so. This thought completely undermines the sovereignty of Ukrainians as individuals, who have not been led to the slaughter, but have found slaughter descending upon them.

Over two parts, Poking the Bear dissects the hot takes on social media to make up the difference between geopolitics and the sovereignty of the Ukrainian people. Slava Ukraini!

War In Ukraine: Update for March 22, 2022. 27 Days of War. Of the 3.5 million refugees who have left Ukraine, 1.5 million of them are children. UNICEF has issued a warning that these children are at high risk for abduction and trafficking. 

The last reporters in the destroyed city of Mariupol have fled. Mstyslav Chernov and Evginiy Maloletka, who had been covering the war from inside the city, were on Russian soldiers' hit-list, literally. Ukrainian troops helped them escape to tell the story of Mariupol to the world.

Greek Diplomat Manolis Androulakis compares Mariupol to Grozny, Aleppo, Coventry, Guernica, and Leningrad. 

More Russian reporters are leaving their roles in state-run media - is it too little, too late? 

Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelinskyy spoke with public broadcast media today about his WW3 comment on CNN, what he would say to Putin, and has advice for the rest of the world as they watch the war in Ukraine unfold: Be Ukrainians.

March 21, 2022. 26 days of war. Today was a hard day in Ukraine. Protesters in Kherson were shot by Russian troops. A holocaust survivor was killed in Kharkiv. Lviv, once a safe haven, faces a new reality of air raid sirens and bombings. 

Today in Vilnius, Lithuania, activist and politician Sviatlana Tsihanouskaya - the democratically elected president of Belarus in exile - spoke at the second annual Kalinowsky Forum, where she called for recognition of Belarus as a country under temporary occupation by Russia. He opening remarks at the Forum demonstrates solidarity with Ukraine and highlights the reach of Russian oppression. Her powerful address makes up the bulk of today's show. 

March 20, 2022. Last week, we met with Russian activist and public historian Sophia Shirogorova to tell us how Russia came to its final form - an authoritarian state hellbent on wrecking former Soviet republics. We discuss the rise of Putin from Yeltsin's blessing to the brutal crackdowns of the 2011-2013 protests, to the annexation of Crimea, to the present war in Ukraine. 

Behind everything, Putin is afraid of losing power. A riot police force of over 500,000, consolidated state media to control the public narrative, laws against protesting, eliminating public elections in favor of appointed mayors and representatives, and even the annexation of Crimea were all efforts to tighten control and boost his popularity. The moves against Ukraine play to a much deeper Russian sentiment about their Western neighbor. We discuss Pussy Riot, Maidan, and political opposition in Russia. 

March 18, 2022. 23 days of war. 1,300 Ukrainians are still stuck in the Mariupol Drama Theater, an unknown number are stuck in the shelter of Mariupol's Neptune Pool, where mostly pregnant women and women with children were sheltered. Mariupol is basically destroyed. 80% of its residential buildings are now uninhabitable. Russia does not stop shelling the city's corpse. 

Wherever Russia's missiles land, they claim it was exactly where they wanted. They say there were soldiers there. But no soldiers have emerged from the rubble of the Drama Theater. No soldiers were carried away from the maternity hospital that was bombed last week. Everywhere Russia strikes, the enemy is curiously absent. Is it war if you bombard a ghost?