Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.
Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?
From thisTo this
Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.
What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?
Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.
On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.
Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.
And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.
It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.
No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.
All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)
It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.
The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.
But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.
So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.
We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.
Biden and his announced cabinet, January 2021.“Ship of Fools”, A. N. Mironov
It’s August 31, September 1 in Afghanistan, and we’re gone, lock, stock and barrel. Biden, Trump, and the primetime lineup of Fox News got what they wanted.
The “Ship of Fools” allegory is from Plato’s “The Republic” in which a ship is run by a dysfunctional crew. Democracy can magnify the “fools” presence among the personnel. But so do the other forms of governance: the “fools” can be a subservient peasant class and their overseers born into privilege, or a group of belligerent oafs, fired up by half-witted utopian visions, and gaining power through the barrel of a gun. Such has been the lot of mankind. We should know this oft-repeated story well.
Look at what democracy gave us in November 2020. A majority rejected the man-of-many-mean-tweets and narcissistic demagogue (a tautology?), and chose a doddering old fool, obsequious to the ruling radical left of his party. The result is the ruination that the radical left has always given the people who sadly have to live under their edicts. Prime example: the Afgan bugout.
I turn to H.L. Mencken for sarcastic aphorisms on democracy. Here’s some for your edification (courtesy of Mark J. Perry of AEI). Enjoy.
H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.), a writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1905 to 1948. (Baltimore Sun Staff File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche). (Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT ORG XMIT: BAL0909101149453148)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (my personal favorite)
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
That about sums it up. Elections are just as able to hand command of the rudder to fools as any other method.
Zalmay Khalilzad (l), US negotiator at the Doha conference, with the Taliban representative signing the Doha Agreement, Feb. 29, 2020.
A suicide bomber killed 13 American soldiers, wounding 18, while defending the perimeter around HKI airport in Kabul on Thursday 8/26. The bloodbath included 95 Afghans killed and more than 100 wounded among the teeming thousands feverishly trying to get out of a now Taliban-ruled country. It’s heart-wrenching but the bloodbath both illuminates and obscures the key reason for our presence in Afghanistan. We were in Afghanistan to kill and obstruct people who have a nasty habit of mass-murdering moms, dads, and children as they go shopping, and to work and school. Somehow, we forgot it.
The terror bombing at HKI Airport in Kabul, August 26, 2021.
It’s easy to become wearisome of something when you’ve forgotten its original purpose, or have been raised on fantasies over the course of three administrations of it being a Denmark in the Hindu-Kush. The mission has been muddied and politicians, the people we elected D to R, have been the most ardent purveyors of the slinging. Conversely, and more prominent over the most recent few years, a steady drumbeat of “forever wars”, left to right, continually pummeled the nation and so overwhelmed it that the 2020 November election became a contest between two withdrawal-enthusiasts.
In the end, Biden gave us a deadly debacle, a forever-stain on the country, and coincidentally, if you think about it, a stain on the politically opportunistic cliché of “forever wars” popularized by Trump. Would Trump have led us into a similar drubbing had he won in 2020? It’s hard to say, but his after-the-fact big talk that “we wouldn’t have done that” isn’t reassuring in light of the public record.
I can’t speak for the left, but we on the right shouldn’t lie, least of all to ourselves. History will not be kind.
The February 2020 Doha Agreement that Trump and his people describe as “conditions-based” was only ink on paper to the Taliban (taqiyya: lying and deception are justified in dealing with infidels). The “conditions” – break from al-Qaeda, cease attacks, and bargain with the Afghan government – were in the Agreement’s hidden annexes. The Taliban didn’t think enough of the promises to publicly admit to them. The Taliban didn’t get around to starting negotiations with the Afghan government till September 2020, and then only half-heartedly. As for the break with al-Qaeda, a Defense IG report in August 2020 confirmed that the break hadn’t taken place. So much for the much-vaunted calibration of US actions to conditions on the ground. The withdrawal of US troops continued apace in 2020.
ISIS-K fighters in Afghanistan.Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.
The most damaging aspects of the agreement to American interests were openly declared, such as the withdrawal date of May 1, 2021 for all US forces. I repeat “all”. Foreshadowing what Biden did – albeit horribly – the Trump/Taliban agreement reads,
“The United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel within fourteen (14) months following announcement of this agreement [i.e., by May 1, 2021].”
This may come as a surprise to the Trump brigade but Trump didn’t possess a crystal ball from throughout 2020 to before Biden’s deadly fiasco this August. Trump was singing a different tune before the current hot potato. Going back to the period of his ardent efforts in 2020 to reach agreement with the Taliban, the group and its terrorist allies continued their attacks before the ink was dry – in fact, before they even found the pens and long after. A Defense Department IG report covering January to March 2020 stated, “Taliban violence continued at high levels, even during a negotiated weeklong reduction in violence that led to the agreement’s signing . . . . The Taliban escalated violence further after signing the agreement.”
The boast that we hadn’t lost a single soldier since the ceremony rings hollow since the thugs didn’t want to upset the skedaddle then underway and instead turned their guns on the Afghans. And they continued to do so throughout 2020. In spite of the violence, Trump persisted in reducing troop levels from 13,000 to 2,500 by the end of his term in January 2021. Trump is now a tough talker but “conditions” in real time didn’t dissuade him from negotiating with the officially-designated terror group and fulfilling their desire of getting us out. On that, the terror group and Trump agreed.
What of those released prisoners at Bagram when Biden abandoned the base? It was an abomination . . . like Trump’s agreement strong-armed the Afghan government to turn loose 5,000 in 2020. How many of those returned to the fight to maim and kill more Afghans, and maybe later to show up as suicide bombers of American soldiers and Afghans ringing the lonely and isolated outpost of an airport in the middle of Kabul in August 2021?
ISIS prisoners at the Bagram prison.
No wonder Afghan president Ghani split with bags of cash. Cowardly? Yes, but I understand his logic. Why should he stick his neck out if two successive administrations were set on abandoning his country? American resolve had evaporated under the barrage of two presidents bent on getting out. The Doha Agreement was strictly a pact between the US and the officially-designated terror group. The Afghans were left on their own to bargain with the wolves. The aforementioned Trump-approved jailbreak of 5,000 and the cutout of the Afghan government from the negotiations was heartily opposed by Ghani in 2020. He could see where this was heading back when the orange man was loudly lambasting “forever wars” and American policy began to reflect the smear.
Do you think that Trump let up on the rhetorical heat after leaving office? Not a chance. In April, Biden set a deadline of September 11 for the pull out. Three days later, Trump berated Biden for not doing it sooner by saying, “. . . we can and should get out earlier . . . .” Further writing, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”
The big question posing as the elephant in the room is the one about the wisdom of a pullout to begin with. Right now, and excusably so, our eyes are glued to the unfolding debacle at Kabul airport. It’s contemptible and sufficient grounds for a presidential resignation. Dramatic as that is, we should not let it cause us to ignore what we are leaving behind. Do we really want another terrorism-compatible vacuum as existed on 9/10?
An easy out for Trump and Biden is to blame the Afghan leaders and soldiers. Both have smeared the Afghans. Neither mentions Biden’s withdrawal of the support that kept the Afghan air and ground forces in the field of battle. The subsequent collapse of the Afghan military is too easy a plum for Trump not to use to excuse his own skedaddle infatuations. It’s a convenient alibi for Biden for obvious reasons. Anyway, tarring the victim country makes it easy to not have to think about what we’re leaving behind, a Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISIS playground.
Children trained in the use of AK-47’s at an al-Qaeda at a camp in Afghanistan.
Which brings me back to remembering our original reason for invading the country: remove the Taliban, keep them out of power, and kill terrorists. The nature of the danger of terrorism means that it’ll be a threat into the foreseeable future. It’s like crime. You reduce it, not eliminate it, which means that you maintain precinct stations in high crime areas. If you tire of the war on terror, then you should be in favor of defund the police.
Trump and Biden, in the end, are unknowingly pushing for the international equivalent of Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, LA, and any Democrat-run big city in America. All I can say is this: keep a wary eye on the skies, water supply, and any place with a large gathering of people. Thank you, Biden and Trump.
While thinking about the return of Trump – he’s already conducting campaign rallies – I ran into Peter Robinson’s essay of vignettes on the political, social, and economic morass that is California. Robinson was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is currently the Murdoch Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. No RHINO this guy.
His story of the predicament of Mike Garcia (R) in California’s 25th Congressional District is illuminating.
Rep. Mike Garcia (R) of California’s 25th congressional district.
Garcia is the son of Mexican immigrants, an Annapolis grad, flew two dozen missions in the Iraq War, and is overflowing in charisma and oratory skills. The 25th is tailored for Republicans to be legitimately competitive (D 38%, R 32%, NPP 25%). It like much of the state has been trending increasingly Democrat but is an easier get than most of the other districts on the coastal plain. The district centers on Simi Valley, the home of the Reagan Library for good reason. Yet, a Democrat, Katie Hill, took the seat in 2018 but had to resign in scandal in 2019. In a special election, Garcia took the seat back for Republicans, and barely won reelection in 2020 by 333 votes out of 339,000 cast. Why so tough, after all, in a competitive district with a great candidate?
As I’ve said repeatedly, I voted for Trump twice and would do it a third time if he is the 2024 nominee. The Democrats are too wretched. But campaigns like economics are decided in the margin, that space where voters or consumers could go either way, or simply leave a line on the ballot unmarked. Looking at the 2020 result, I can only conclude that Garcia was running with the Trump anchor chained to his ankle in a Republican-competitive district that Biden won by 10%. Trump is wildly popular among the rabid 24% of the electorate, but he’s highly toxic to a good chunk of the rest, especially in California. For any candidate like Hillary, Biden, or Trump, how many of the getables are willing to engage in hold-the-nose? For Garcia, thank the Almighty that enough were willing to ticket-split.
Holding the nose is an epidemic when the choices were Hillary, Biden, or Trump. Just looking at Trump, his ribald, brutal verbal ticks appeal to crowds not offended in bars and locker rooms. His approach is as Gutfeld would say, “direct”. But depth of understanding is shallow to such as extent that he ran the executive branch in a naively “direct” manner in, for instance, personal overtures to the world’s pariahs like Kim Jong-un. If you agree with Trump that foreigners are screwing us, Trump scraps the Trans-Pacific Partnership whose purpose was to create the commercial foundation for an alignment of Asian and Pacific countries against a resurgent and hegemonic Red China. Don’t like the “forever wars”? He’ll negotiate a pull out. Direct and understandable, yes. Effective in the long run . . . ?
He began his most recent rally in Alabama with Patton’s speech at the beginning of the movie “Patton”. How ironic. Scott’s Patton regales the crowd with Americans “staying out of the war as a bunch of horse dung”; “Americans love the sting of battle”; and “. . . making the other poor bastard die for his country”. It was lost on the rally-goers that Patton’s call to arms and martial virtue doesn’t comport with Trump’s pull-out fixation – essentially a negotiated runaway – and his drumbeat against “forever wars”.
Bar-room bouncers having to deal with roadhouse fights aren’t likely to deal with nuance, and the bouncer Trump wouldn’t practice it anyway. As president and politician on the stomp, he plays checkers as the CCP is immersed in chess.
Playing checkers gave us the Doha Agreement. Biden doesn’t play checkers since he doesn’t understand the colors of the pieces. Translating, Trump was getting to the king line on the checkerboard with his Doha pact; Biden is in the sand box; and the CCP is in the chess room with the rest of the geeks.
Pompeo and Taliban leaders in Doha, early 2020.
Trump got his withdrawal agreement which would have produced the loss of an operating base on China’s western flank and key on-the-ground assets in a strategic location to counter Islamofascism, protect our allies (read Israel and the Gulf Arabs), and kill those who have killed so many of us. To borrow from Patton, long distance, over-the-horizon diligence is “horse dung”. Once you’re out, you’re out, and you’re not going back in . . . unless we lose another 3,000 in the American heartland.
Biden achieved Trump’s endgame with a whole lot of chaos while destroying US credibility for a generation or more. Trump would have done a better withdrawal but still manufacture a vacuum in Afghanistan. All the rhetoric about “forever wars”, lack of fighting willingness of the Afghan forces, and Afghan government corruption is beside the point if the Islamo-crazies flock to the feudal Hindu-Kush, as they did before under the watchful eyes of the Taliban, to have the tranquility to coordinate mass-casualty events among the Kaffir (an insulting term used by some Muslims for non-Muslims).
That’s what is so amazing about Trump’s use of the Patton speech. Patton was calling men to arms. Trump was calling the nation to get out. Biden couldn’t get either right and gave us a cluster-f@#*. Get prepared for a perpetually heightened terror threat level to go with the non-stop COVID hysteria. Can a civilization withstand such a water-boarding? I guess that we’ll see.
Lara Logan interviews Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh in “Sacrificing Afghanistan” on Fox News.
Below is guest Lara Logan on Fox Business from Friday, 8/19/21.
This is my review of the current scene in light of her insights:
Yes, we are horribly, horribly governed, and have been for quite some time. 2016 brought in the orange man and his wretched rhetoric of “forever wars”, while getting some things right. I’ll give him that. But the guy wanted out, trying to peremptorily get out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan as if by doing so, we’ll cure the opioid epidemic in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. 2020 brought us a mentally incontinent and doddering fool, beholden to the powerful and growing neo-Marxist wing of the Democratic Party. The only real difference on Afghanistan between the two administrations is the difference between a smoother and impulsive bugout. The big, big question, heartily avoided, is the one over the wisdom of a pull out in the first place, no matter how conducted.
To be clear, I don’t get my cues on issues from celebrities on Fox News or talk radio. Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham chanting a common line matter not a twit to me when it sounds like so much nonsense.
And nonsense is everywhere in today’s political cauldron. The reason is obvious: our political discussion is dominated by cultists. Chirping hackneyed lines like “forever wars” or “respect of the world community”, they bring catastrophes in tow. We are experiencing it now, and will in the future in grotesque episodes when scenes from Kabul fade from the news cycle.
Cultists are famous for denying reality in the service of an imaginary one. For instance, the Democratic Party’s neo-Marxist cult has embarked on a great smear job of the country: it’s systemically racist. It’s easy to bug out of Afghanistan if you believe the country is evil, love and reciprocity lie in the heart of fanatical jihadists, and the revolution at home is far more important. At root, that’s how we get to the abandonment of Bagram Air Base and our Afghan allies in the middle of the night and the chaos begins to pour down on Kabul and the rest of the country.
The Trump cult has its own dispiriting lunacies. Cultists wanted a personality, not policies, and got one in the bravado and bombast of the man from Mara Lago. As long as he remained in your face, he was loved by a zealous following to the ends of the earth. So, the loaded jargon of “forever wars” filtered from his microphone to the broadcast studio and became a mysteriously accepted doctrine.
His appointees, having to translate his rhetorical burps into policy, engineered the Doha Agreement (Feb. 2020). Now, they’re trying to clean the fingerprints from the established policy in paper by hitting the airwaves to say, “We were tough”. Tough about what? Agreeing to get out, which was the great prize for the jihadists while fully disheartening to our Afghan allies? The scenes of Pompeo hobnobbing with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, speak volumes. It, like Biden’s horrendously precipitous skedaddle, shouldn’t ever be forgotten.
Combine Logan’s program with Levin’s on Sunday night and we get a fuller picture of the debacle. Levin interviewed Colonel Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan. He insists that there’s enough blame to lap on everyone involved, including the Europeans. Kemp justly reserves special contempt for Biden: Biden’s behavior is deserving of a court martial. But he also rebuts the rubbish coming out of the mouths of telegenic anchors and hosts from one end of the spectrum to the next. He has great respect for the Afghans, for many fought bravely until air and logistical support vanished in the abrupt surrender of Bagram upon, amazingly, the insistence of the Taliban according to Logan
Discussion between Mark Levin (l) and Colonel Richard Kemp on Levin’s show.
Kemp’s dire warnings about the future clearly draw into question the more fundamental insistence of pulling out to begin with. The damage to America’s reputation will reverberate on America’s global allies as they seek cover under less hospitable umbrellas. Now, chew on that for awhile.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s de facto political leader, in Doha, Qatar, in September 2020. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Now that Afghanistan is collapsing into what it was before – a terrorist Disneyland – the administration responsible for the bugout is in hiding like the thousands of Americans stuck in Kabul, and the people from the previous one are all over the airwaves in a butt-protection exercise. The question before the house isn’t only the wisdom of Biden’s wholesale surrender and run for the hills. It’s also about all that led to the bugout, including the sanity of any kind of pullout, smooth or otherwise. Everyone from Trump’s hawking of the rhetoric of “never-ending wars” in 2015-20 to Biden and his abrupt skedaddle should be in the dock for cross-examination. Admittedly, Biden and his people should be under the most scrutiny, but save some for Trump.
Look, I voted for Trump twice because the Democrats are too despicable, and in the hope that his worst bombast could be mitigated to get the big things right. He did right on borders, taxes, judges, energy, and ending the careers of al-Baghdadi and Soleimani. But troubling signs were in the air. The infantile abuse heaped on John McCain in 2015 (“I like people that weren’t captured.”), who was tortured in the Hanoi Hilton as Trump was busy filling out deferments, was absolutely repugnant, and a sign of things to come.
John McCain spent 5 and a half years in Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton”. Here he is with a broken arm being examined by a prison medic.
As it turned out, the “never-ending wars” lingo wasn’t empty political rhetoric for the man from Mara Lago. He wanted to bug out of Syria and turn over the north to Erdoğan’s Turkey so they could rebuild the Ottoman Empire, only to be dissuaded by people with a better grasp on reality. He was chomping at the bit to jump ship on Afghanistan, only to be held back by the adults in the room once again. The guy seemed to be hell-bent on rebuilding an 18th-century fortress America, a time when it took a month after the Battle of New Orleans (fought Jan. 8, 1815) to deliver notice of the signing of the Peace of Ghent ending the war (signed Dec. 24, 1814). Pan-Am and underwater cables ended the era of defense starting at the edge of the continental shelf. Not so in Trump’s stunted mind.
Au contraire, Tucker Carlson, “oceans matter” . . . only in the 18th century. In an age of satellites, fiber-optics, vibrant international trade and travel, and when a missile only requires a booster, oceans only carry a warning not to swim alone across one. Heck, oceans haven’t even inhibited the flood of migrants from the rest of the continents at a time when our southern border is an open sieve.
Butt-protection is the order of the day when a Biblical calamity is taking shape in the land that time forgot. Biden and his people only further soil themselves every time they come out of hiding. Trump and his people show up in friendly venues to hawk the line, “It wasn’t us. We would have conducted a better bugout”.
For instance, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Friday, 8/20. I listened to the whole thing. It was pure butt-protection.
He made assurances that Trump threatened the Taliban if they broke the Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 2020), which might have worked since no American soldier had been killed since early 2020. That just means that the hooligans were biding their time waiting for the American skedaddle. It’s what all scheming thugs do when the good guys agree to abandon the field on date certain. They wait for the date certain, plan and stockpile arms in the meantime, and then pounce. Doha wasn’t about leaving behind a country absent the terrorist Disneyland. It was about getting us out, period. It was the announcement that we were reverting back to 9/10.
The throw away line of leaving behind a residual force upon leaving office wasn’t particularly reassuring. Remember, the deadline concerned getting everyone out – granted, with our equipment and civilians in tow. The Taliban should be good with that. They’ll be free to hobnob around in parts of the country under their control, maybe the whole country, with their Al-Qaeda friends after date certain to terrorize girls, boys, women who wear makeup, and eventually get around to killing the bountiful infidels beyond their borders.
Pompeo in the interview made many utterances on the untrustworthiness of the Taliban so much so that threats of slaughtering the villages of Taliban leaders if they broke the agreement were thought necessary. Question: If they were that dishonest, why were you negotiating with them in the first place? Answer: Trump wanted us out. Doha was recklessness on paper.
In that, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, and H.R. McMaster agree. It was recklessness on paper. In an age before the mean tweets and the hawking of isolationism, these people were considered wise on the right. Then came the pop jargon of “neo-con” as a pejorative by Mick Jagger, Donald J. Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. If you’re wondering, here’s a sample from Jagger’s “Sweet Neo-Con”:
“You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/ You call yourself a patriot. Well, I think your [sic] are full of sh*t!… How come you’re so wrong, my sweet neo-con.”
I wonder if Carlson and Ingraham downloaded the tune with excitable, trembling fingers.
All the stipulations in the Doha Agreement are meaningless if the gangsters can’t be trusted and are simply waiting to pounce. Conditions like the Taliban reaching agreement with the Afghan government and promises to prevent ISIS and Al-Qaeda from taking root in the country would be worthless. Remember, today’s catastrophe hadn’t happened yet and Trump clearly wanted out at the time. Today’s after-the-fact assurances by Trump, Pompeo, et al, of toughness ring hollow. It sounds like so much of a butt-protection exercise.
Others warned Trump at the time of Doha. UN ambassador Nikki Haley resigned during the negotiations saying, “Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil.” Lisa Curtis, former national Security adviser who sat alongside our envoy Zalmay Khalilzad during the negotiations said, “The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the U.S. should have gained more concessions from the Taliban.” During negotiations, Trump frequently called for troop pullouts. That’s right, get your deadly foe to agree by disarming yourself. That won’t end well.
Bolton and McMaster are scathing in their indictment of Trump, and rightly so. McMaster: “Our secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban. This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” Bolton: “Had Trump been re-elected, he’d be doing the same thing. On this question of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”
Bolton (l) and McMaster
Drop the lefty jargon of neo-con-as-pejorative. It gets us nowhere because political rhetoric is no substitute for sound policy. A real America First strategy realizes that some of our enemies don’t wear uniforms and are hell-bent on killing us, all of us. The killers don’t reside here, but can, plan and coordinate mass-casualty operations in safe redoubts in countries that we abandoned, are well-stocked with weapons that we abandoned to them, and now no one is safe. We’re back to 9/10. Thank you, Biden . . . and Trump.
CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)MSNBC anchorsFox News anchors
Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.
First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.
Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.
Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.
Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.
If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.
After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.
Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.
All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.
Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.
In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.
Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.
The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.
Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.
If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.
Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.
How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) and major Taliban leaders in Doha.
Larry Elder said it best: “We have forever wars because we have forever enemies.” The aphorism is lost on many talking heads and politicians across the political spectrum, including Biden and . . . Trump.
Last night, I couldn’t take it anymore. The Fox News primetime lineup were all in for a bugout. The only difference them and Biden on the abandonment of Afghanistan is the pace. They wanted a scheduled bugout and Biden carried out a precipitous one. Lost in all the barking was something Elder quickly understood. Our forever enemies hate us, want to extinguish us, and are in it for the long haul to construct a worldwide caliphate. The belief is central to their identity. Taliban/Al-Qaeda leaders have repeatedly said, even during the negotiations,
“One day mujahedeen will have victory and Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.”
They won’t be satisfied till we are like them in burqas, beards, prayer rugs, sandals, and the 8th century. I was so disgusted that I flipped to the Smithsonian Channel.
Let’s clear away some deadwood to logic. One is the chimera of the Taliban and A-Qaeda as distinct entities. They aren’t for practical and operational purposes. One 2020 UN report put it succinctly:
“Relations between the Taliban, especially the Haqqani Network, and Al-Qaida remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage. The Taliban regularly consulted with Al-Qaida during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honour their historical ties.”
I’m not a fan of much that comes out of Turtle Bay, but this got it right, probably because it’s too well known in intelligence circles to refute. Think of Al-Qaeda as the Taliban’s Quds Force (of Islamic Republic of Iran fame, and once headed by Soleimani, now dead, thank God).
That’s who the Trump people were negotiating with. Many of the people sitting across the table from Trump’s negotiators in 2018 to 2020 were Al-Qaeda under the Taliban flag, which was well known throughout. Many of our adversaries wear two hats than can be switched with a flick of the wrist.
Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, August 13, 2021.
Good faith gestures in negotiations with people who want to kill, convert, and replace you is the height of folly. Leading up to the Trump/Taliban/Al-Qaeda “peace” agreement in Doha on February 29, 2020, was an officially-sanctioned jailbreak of 5,000 Taliban/Al-Qaeda prisoners. All returned to the fight to kill Americans and friendly Afghans. Two examples among many should suffice. The Taliban commander of Helmand province, Mawlavi Talib, was one of those set free. Even worse, the Taliban head, Abdul Ghani Baradar, was in custody for years in Pakistan till Trump asked for his “good faith” release in a bribe to the Taliban to let us bugout. Today, word is that Baradar is residing in Kabul’s presidential palace.
Mawlavi Talib (center) in Kabul, August 15, 2021? I can’t tell.
Trump consummated the diplomatic abortion, and Biden carried it out precipitously and with gusto. Despicable, absolutely despicable.
Most despicable was the collective amnesia over the real reasons for the 2001 invasion. It wasn’t only as our incontinent president put it yesterday when he limited the justification to removing the Taliban from power and the killing of Osama bin-Laden. Preemption was on the lips of officialdom in DC in the heady days after 9/11. Preemption means to forestall this from happening again: take over the rats’ nest, clear it out, and continually hunt down those foolish enough to be later recruited to kill Americans. Like them, we have to be in it for the long haul, something not well understood by our last two presidents, if not the last three if the myopic Obama is included.
So, we’ve come to this pass. The Taliban/Al-Qaeda are back in the seat of power, ready to continue their bloody evangelism. India, Taiwan, our allies, the signers of the Abraham accords, and Israel must be wondering if they’re going to be the next victim of an American bugout. The goatherders-with-a-cause will be emboldened, and get fresh video for recruitment of the next generation of suicidal killers.
Thank you, Biden . . . with Trump as your enabler.
RogerG
*Thanks to the reporting of Jim Geraghty and Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review.
Politico-speak on the stump is a crock. Not always, but it happens often enough for many to avoid politician interviews like an evasive maneuver to escape an encounter with one of the many homeless madmen wondering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Trump prattles on about the Chinese paying “paying billions and billions of dollars” in US tariffs, apparently not knowing, or not caring, that businesses don’t pay business taxes – of which tariffs are. We do! Biden and his Democratic Party coterie babble on about the “rich paying their fair share”. It’s all just stupendous nonsense. But, apparently, a block of the public eats it up.
No more accurate indictment of the current state of journalism, the schools, and media can be found than the popular currency of pure tripe. Since Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer currently possess the lion’s share of power, their balderdash takes center stage, because they now have the reins to foist it on us. Conversely, the job of the Republicans is to stand athwart history and say “Stop!”
So, what of this “fair share” blabbering? Simply put, it ain’t true. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) numbers don’t support the popular fiction of the rich escaping the taxman while the little guy and gal gets punched in the gut by the tax code. It’s class pandering reminiscent of the kind perpetrated by Marxists – or in its newest incarnation in the race-pandering of Kendi’s or Deangelo’s Systemic Racism.
Let’s take a look at the numbers. Fact: U.S. income taxes in terms of who pays what are the most progressive in the world (Thank you, Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). I don’t see how they can be made more progressive without the targets turning over their entire income receipts to the U.S. Treasury. The top 1 percent of wage earners account for 40.1 percent of all federal income tax receipts in 2018, and this after Trump’s so-called “gift to the rich” in the Republican tax reform bill. The Tax Foundation found that the richest of the rich – the top 1 percent – paid a greater share (40.1) than the bottom 90 percent (25.4). Average paid tax rates tell a similar story. The Dems are engaging in the old gambit of the Big Lie, and it’s that simple.
Why do they lie? Well, they share with Marxists the same hate for the rich – and like Kendi and Deangelo of CRT fame grovel in a hate of “whiteness”. The hate is tied to the Marxist flimflammery of systemic class oppression. Marx called it Scientific Socialism in the same manner of all demagogues who seek to monopolize the word “science” to magically turn their dictums into imperial truths. But if the well-to-do are in the catbird seat according to the hucksters, who are the uber-rich politically supporting? You’d be forgiven for assuming that the greater the wealth, the greater the propensity and power to bend the state to further the material interests of those who own the greatest share of the national wealth. Oh, how shocked you’d be when the reality is uncovered.
Three of the Dems’ big underwriters: Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros
Point of fact, it was disclosed in various reports. In 2020, The eat-the-rich crowd under Biden overwhelmingly got the backing of the billionaire class. According to Forbes, Trump got 133 billionaires to throw some cash his way. Biden benefitted from 230. In raw numbers from the Federal Election Commission, Biden was drowning in $1.074 billion in his basement as Trump garnered $812 million.
What’s with the super-rich? Why invest in your own demise? Many answers are possible. Certainly, Trump is a lightning rod who instills profound love in some and manifest hate in others, in equal measure. Trump-hate played a role. Also, it could be that these people are so well-heeled that they’re insulated from the consequences of their beliefs to such an extent that fantasies can be seriously entertained. But I think that something more profound is afoot.
Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of the Zuckerberg-to-Bloomberg crowd that to be considered well-rounded smart and sophisticated means to be a lefty. Lefty is fashionable. Esteem within the group won’t be acquired if you’re driving into the parking lot of your effete soirée in a pickup truck flying the Gadsden flag. A chauffeur-driven Jaguar and the spouting of lefty drivel will earn the necessary style points.
But in the end, it’s all pure poppycock. The Marxism-without-saying-so is still ruinous. Systematized envy, the very essence socialism, is never a path to prosperity. Similarly, the never-ending hunt for white racism will never be a path to social peace any more than it was when Jim Crow was a popular socio-political menu choice. The real Jim Crow 2.0 isn’t the Georgia election law. It’s what is arising out of the growing CRT industry.
Once again, it comes down to pure poppycock, but this poppycock isn’t some knock-off little innocent thing. This time, it’s got the backing of some very deep pockets. Watch out, America.
Social psychosis: noun, a widely-spread mental disorder characterized by disconnection from reality which results in strange behavior in mass, often accompanied by a mass perception of stimuli (voices, images, sensations) and other hallucinations.
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Progressivism as a political movement is based on one overriding assumption: history is a long march toward a more sophisticated, rational, and all-round better existence. The problem is, it isn’t. There are fits and starts, technological improvements, yes, advances in science, yes, and well-meaning attempts, but not all “improvements” are improvements. Some are a product of hysteria and periods of intense social psychosis that represent a step backwards to our more atavistic side. Our bestial nature never went away, and four years in college classrooms won’t eradicate it. We are probably in another one of those spasms of flight from reality.
Don’t expect our recent crop of elected leaders to appeal to the better angels of our nature. They haven’t been especially good at filtering the nonsense. Indeed, some have stoked it. President Obama was famous for admonishing his opponents for being on the “wrong side of history”. It’s the same stilted form of thinking. What he shows is that he is fully marinated in the same “march of history” stuff that warped the minds of Karl Marx, Marcuse, and today’s Ta-Nehisi Coats, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo of critical race theory fame. The last three took Marcuse, and by extension Marx, to give us another one of those iron laws of history that handcuffed their minds, as it did many of their 20th-century predecessors who constructed some of the worst tyrannies to the unremitting disgrace of humankind.
The current phase of frenzy was 30+ years in coming. From the child sex-abuse witchhunts of the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s through the nexus of the election of Donald Trump and aftermath, the resurgence of a revised Marxism and its manifestation in street violence and indoctrination into nearly every corner of the culture, to our current COVID panic, we seem to have lost our marbles. Events can be a catalyst, but so can personalities. These episodes can be linked because they have so much in common: they are manifestations of a social psychosis.
One factor boosting this mental dysfunction is an unfortunate byproduct of the ubiquity of electronic media in the form of tv in an earlier era and today’s internet. Thoughts and paranoias move at light speed. Today, social media and our instantaneous interconnectedness intensify an already powerful stimulant. Thanks to the ever-present electronic social communion, the unease spreads like wildfire, taking form in loose theories, unquestioning faith in media-grabbing public personalities, radical activism, and government coercion.
What sparks these episodes? The angst can be rooted in a little-noticed alteration in family chemistry. The shift from the social ideal of a single breadwinner to two working parents may have elicited a broad anxiety about the care of children, a lingering discomfort waiting for a trigger. The trigger came in the 1983-4 McMartin Preschool case in Huntington Beach, Ca. Child-talk to public officials, and that common staple of our times, the degreed “expert”, took the banter of children to place seven adults in the dock. It took six years of litigation to exonerate the defendants, at the expense of ruined reputations, the lingering emotional scars of the innocent at the hands of public officials and their lackeys, and millions of dollars of public and private money.
The outcome of the McMartin Preschool case didn’t staunch the jihad. As it was working its way out, the crusade waited for an avatar in the person of Dade County DA Janet Reno (future AG for Bill Clinton) to concoct a formula to turn the child-talk into convictions. The Miami Method, as it was called, relied on university-trained child therapists to extract the stories, physical evidence that was spuriously associated with the tales, and multiple witnesses in the form of children who went through the child-therapist mill. Three people would be railroaded – the Fusters and Grant Snowden – until Reno ran into 16-year-old Bobby Finjnje. He refused to plea-bargain, went to trial, found others who could expose the Method’s gross errors, and was exonerated. The fever broke in Miami.
Bobby Finjnje at age 16Janet Reno and assistant as State’s Attorney for Dade County.
It still raged elsewhere. In such far-flung places as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Washington State, Martinsville in Saskatchewan, Canada, and New Zealand, the illicit holy war persisted. Then, like magic, the hysteria disappeared by the mid-1990’s. Odd thing: fantastic tales of satanic rituals of sodomy and bestiality have a date-certain shelf life. Poof, it’s gone.
But the emotional virus was mutating below the surface.
Sometimes, the frenzy can grow out of other emerging socio-economic circumstances. Many have noticed the current divide in our country between the winners and losers in the new society emanating from the rise of our time’s latest edition of the global free market. Mind you, the global free market isn’t necessarily composed of free market societies. It’s just that all countries, whether free or unfree, are to be treated alike, no matter the impact on any one nation.
The winners in this brave new world are concentrated by geography. Urban centers became the epicenter of a new transnational commercial elite. They are concentrated in certain zip codes for work and residence. Allied to them are the elite prep schools and universities who help create and perpetuate an incestuous petri dish of culturally homogeneous elite social pools in these nodes.
What of the losers? They’re everywhere else. They reside in flyover country. They are found in places that have been caricatured in city-centered media as overrun with uncouth and ignorant oafs. For the beautiful people, they are the flotsam to be ignored on the way to the ascendancy of the “better” people, meaning them.
BigTech’s oligarchs
The bifurcation seldom ends well. If it persists, and resentment simmers, it won’t take much for a media-savvy personage, speaking in the right tone and tenor, to lead a counter-revolution. In 2015, that person arrived in the form of Donald Trump. He was combative, seemingly spoiling for a fight at every turn. He spoke for the forgotten, for the people who bore the brunt of the new prejudices and bigotry of the narrow set of elites coalescing at the commanding heights of the culture.
Remarkably, he won in 2016 and spent 4 years at war. The nouveau culture’s self-anointed vanguard elite spent 4 years at war with him and everyone associated with him, including his supporters, which culminated in the 2020 election and Trump’s single-minded crusade to undermine the results at the expense of everyone else in his party. The January 6 capitol riot erupted as 800-1,000 of his enthusiasts stormed Congress.
Trump at his January 6 rally
What did the party get for all the tumult? It’s a mixed bag. The Republican Party managed to squeak by with some victories down ballot as well as the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia.
What makes people perform unspeakable acts, such as rampage into the capitol, based on the drumbeat of an influential figure? The well-spring is the anxiety from stressed lives that was evident in prior witchhunts. Sometimes the underappreciated rally to an avatar who stylistically gives voice to their resentments. It’s not his ideas so much as it is his demonstrative qualities, the pugnaciousness. He’s deeply admired for these personality traits, not his brain. At this point, the movement reflects rabid fandom more than an exaltation of possible statesmanship.
The zealotry of the fan is evident in Trump’s famous line from the 2016 campaign trail:
“The polls — they say I have the most loyal people … I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Judging by the shenanigans on January 6, maybe not going so far as to turn a blind eye to murder, still, his most rabid followers would become a mob for him.
Though, it’s not as if Trump supporters had nothing to complain about as election day unfolded. The election laws in many places were contorted by partisan activism arising out of the urban/academic petri dish of our progressive jet-set. Standards of accountability were set aside in such a way as to get their bête noire, Trump. Legal, yes, in that no court has overturned the count. Disreputable, yes, in that nobody knows what happened in many locales when ballots were scattered in the mail, mysteriously made their way to a multitude of unsupervised drop boxes, and then on to their unobserved processing in counting rooms. Ballot harvesting was rampant in many places; honest verification was non-existent; and the vote-counting saga continued for weeks. Who wouldn’t at least scratch their heads at this circus?
The pandemic was the crisis too good to waste in order to make a hash of the election. It was used not only to create an election monster but, as it turned out, to introduce all-encompassing state control to a frightened populace. The pandemic proved to the nouveau elite an excellent opportunity to conduct a grand socio-political experiment testing the popular limits to a great expansion of government power.
Our ideological and social sorting by geography showed a distinct difference in submission to this new regime. An entire segment of our population, the urban part, who are routinely dependent on government services, have a preternatural tendency to accept authority, especially if it comes from the much-ballyhooed “expert”, many with the same credentials in tow as the influential residents in uptown high-rises and the outlying well-to-do ‘burbs. In other words, these new potentates have the additional advantage of being respected for having the same social qualifications as a sizeable portion of the governing coalition. Social comradery goes a long way in instilling fealty to “experts”.
The chief commodities of the “expert” are safety and a shield from risk. The notion of trade-offs – something is given up to get something else – is an alien concept to people who have lived their lives in the protective womb of uniformed and credentialed experts. Insulated from realities, citified people become easy marks for hysteria. The zero-risk myopia of administrative agencies, taken as the voice of God, can be easily transmuted into instances of personal bullying in the public square.
The true-believers’ public threats and denunciations for not wearing a mask in outings to the grocery store are not unusual.
The obsessive penchant for outdoor mask-wearing, even while strenuously exercising, and alone, is common. Being absolutely petrified about sending their children to school in an unthinking response to a threat that is smaller for the kids than the flu pre-COVID is a prevalent reaction. Mask-wearing became a totem of God’s mark of saintliness. All crazy, all unhinged.
Wearing a mask while jogging.
The panic and hysteria show in polls. Rural areas are more hesitant in regards to COVID mitigations and more reluctant to get the vaccine. Urban areas, just the opposite. Yet, the vaccinated, the vast majority in municipalities, show a greater degree of fear about a return to normal and engagement in public activities than the unvaccinated. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the vaccine. Or, more importantly, is it evidence of something more troubling in the urban mind: a deeper, irrational dread of any risk not countenanced by the beloved “expert”? These people are naked on the barricades without their departments of public health, sanitation, public safety, transportation, urban planning, and water and power.
The strong sense of exposure in times of stress leads to anxiety and the anxiety leads to a population always on the brink of hysteria. It’s pure irrationality. COVID provides the latest example of a population pushed to the event horizon of public madness. Early on, prudence dictated strong measures till knowledge and treatments were discovered – not necessarily a vaccine. Within a few months, vulnerable populations were identified and treatments developed. While COVID isn’t the flu, it certainly is for a sizeable chunk of the population: the healthy and the young. Protective measures should have quickly focused on the aged and those suffering from chronic conditions. They should have been quarantined, not the whole of society in massive stay-at-home orders. It was a sledge hammer to fix a watch, and now we are paying the price.
For a people without a sympathy for risk, and in possession of an abject faith in the protective shield of the “expert” in government posts, they are extremely hesitant to leave the bubble of corseted “protections”. Their life will soon become as distorted as the late 19th-century female body after being bounded for hours by a corset. The mental and emotional capacities of self-reliance and confidence of urbanites will atrophy, like ladies’ abdominal muscles in a bygone era, after 18 months of universal mask-wearing, business closures, stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and distance-learning. The horror at the thought of cutting the apron string is palpable.
One of the unintended consequences of the smothering is that the isolation may have primed people on the emotional brink to fall headlong into fanaticism. Confined to Zoom and reluctant to venture outdoors, some were cramped in a prison of their own mind and pre-selected media preferences. In such a rarified and enclosed atmosphere, unacceptable ideas and actions may move into the realm of the acceptable. It’s a fused magazine of powder waiting for a spark. Enter George Floyd and Derek Chauvin.
The miscreants subsequently hitting the streets and passersby, and torching the downtowns, always a demographic speck, weren’t evidence of a popular uprising, but preposterous ideas, still preposterous, were starting to be taken seriously by our influential trend-setters. Big Everything – sports, media, Fortune 500 – began to sing a radical tune. Unable to prove actual racism, faculty-lounge extremists opted for mysticism. Amazingly, it caught on. The scientifically unprovable charges of systemic racism and the unscientific theorizing of critical race theory (CRT) were treated as physical realities on the order of the sun, wind, and earth. With their finger in the air of an artificial gale from a faculty-lounge wind machine, the culture’s hegemons repeated the chants of the new cult.
The normal check for sanity of broader social interactions in a normally functioning society were knee-capped. Normally, an ounce of good old-fashioned scientific skepticism would be enough to put the kibosh to the nonsense. In these times, not so fast.
Diangelo and Kendi, chief propagandists for CRT
CRT isn’t so much a real theory as it is a kind a Nicene Creed for race-hustlers. It starts with the conclusion – we’re a racist nation – and moves to condemnation – “systemic racism” and “white privilege”. It can’t be proven in any meaningful sense. The use of statistical disparities is “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” run amok. Racial statistical differences aren’t proof of much of anything, least of all a society who has it in for blacks. No tie can be made between the evidence – the variance in numbers – and the conclusion – systemic racism. The variances can be explained in many ways without “racism” ever rolling off your lips. It’s jump-to-conclusions time.
The hustler’s gambit of “equity” is simply a cover for vengeance. Those of lighter skin shades are expected to pony up with racially-based benefits till the numbers come up equal, in a statistically artificial state of “equity”. In a more rational time, this was good old-fashioned reverse racial discrimination, and patently and justly illegal. Not for today. Not in today’s climate of dysfunction-induced hyper-aggravation.
2020 riots in NYC
This isn’t progress. It’s a mania that happens so often that a person has to wonder if it is a built-in feature of the modern banality that we happen to call “progress”. Are we really that much better than the past’s socially psychotic behavior in the pogroms, witch trials, India’s anti-Muslim riots, the Ottoman’s second-class status for Christians, Rwanda’s Tutsi genocide, or today’s inner-city street thugs who routinely target Asians and anyone with a lighter complexion? There’s good reason to believe that the beast is always at the gates.
Jefferson’s faith in education as the cure-all is illusory. It can’t be if it is as corrupted as the malady it was meant to heal. Human failings are as persistent as is our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. They are everywhere, even in our “progress”.
