(From 23 minutes) President Trump on the defeat of America by primitive fanatical Muslims in Afghanistan because of “President” Biden’s ineptitude: “Our country has never been so humiliated.”

(But don’t worry – Hannity is praying to “God” to save the thousands of Americans stranded there, and as “God” is omnipotent and good he will do as he is asked, just as he always does.)

https://youtu.be/yNRbQNzz4xs

No place left for the Civilized?

Are we in the midst of a socialist revolution?

We quote (in full) Victor Davis Hanson, who writes at American Greatness:

Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them.

The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable.

“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic.

If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical.

In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state?

Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux.

Liberals try to yank capitalism to the left; but true revolutionaries seek to dismantle the very tenets upon which it is based. No wonder that a recent poll showed most Democrats had a more favorable view (59 percent) of socialism than of capitalism (49 percent).

So, the Right shouts “They are socialists!” And the Left fires back “Smears and lies!” while quietly the Biden Administration has already begun systematically to warp the rules of free-market capitalism. In other words, we are apparently all to be socialists now.

By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep?

Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back? Biden is talking about vastly expanding any prior idea of student loan debt cancellations by massive new amnesties. As capitalism transitions into socialism, what about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition, the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working-class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead at 18 to go straight to work?

Are they hapless Kulaks? And what do we name the indebted students and the loan-sharking universities who finagled a collective$1.7 trillion in student debt? Revolutionaries? Who pays for what others have incurred?

Supply and demand under capitalism adjudicate wages and thus the rate of unemployment. But have we ever seen an expanding economy seeking to meet pent-up consumer demands for goods and services without the labor to meet that need? The workers are everywhere and nowhere, but the government has deliberately persuaded millions not to return officially to work, given rising unemployment compensation is more remunerative than the wages of working. Have we now finally embraced the old Marxist canard, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”?

Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it.

Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt. Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an “infrastructure” bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash. Ronald Reagan talked of “starving the beast”—cutting taxes to deprive the voracious bureaucratic state of its fiscal food.

Now instead we are “gorging the beast”: exponentially expanding government with so much debt that higher taxes are inevitable. And with the red ink comes redistribution in the socialist sense of borrowing more to give to the deserving, and taking more from the undeserving—to borrow even more for the more deserving still.

Socialism does not believe in the construct of merit given it is predicated on free will that trends supposedly towards selfishness, and results in an absence of “equity”: that is why colleges have dropped standardized tests for applicants, and are jettisoning traditional ideas of “exclusionary” honors programs.

Remember, under socialism, in T-ball style, we all win—or lose. Our shared purposes are not to help meet and surpass purportedly artificially constructed standards of excellence to ensure greater prosperity, security, and comfort, but to demolish such ossified constructs, and rebrand the formerly failed as the now successful.

The revolution has already redefined crime as a construct in the eye of the bourgeois beholder. Our woke elite told us to cool it for 120 days of last summer’s riots, looting and arson, since in the words of the “1619 Project” architect and former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Torch a federal courthouse, a church, or police precinct and why worry over mere “brick and mortar”? Take over a few city blocks and, presto, we have a “summer of love”.

“Defund the police” became a socialist slogan supposedly to remind us that “crime” is what the rich call going into Walgreens to grab something they never fret about needing. COVID-19 is not the real reason why prisoners are freed from jails and prison to commit new crimes at an alarming rate. Indeed, those people didn’t really commit crimes so much as reflect society’s bad karma of arbitrarily labeling what they did as “crimes” in the first place, which in truth were often simply cries from the heart.

Two years ago, it would have been considered absurd that youth would ride bikes into drug stores and steal with impunity as security guards watched, or thieves could enter into Neiman-Marcus department stores and skip out with thousands of dollars of rich people’s favorites. Over $2 billion in “stuff” was destroyed in 2020. And almost none of the violence was ever properly investigated, the perpetrators arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, or incarcerated.

In such revolutionary times, no one knows any more what is and is not a crime. Illegally storming the border when positive for COVID-19? Destroying a public statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Looting a corporate chain store? Knocking out an Asian-American septuagenarian? Or turning over the tables of Jewish-Americans as they eat? Taking over municipal blocks and declaring the confiscation an autonomous zone? Not crimes. “Illegal parading” inside the U.S. Capitol building? Crime.

Twenty years ago, on the eve of 9/11, there were earlier heated debates over cash reparations. The acrimony has now again resurfaced after the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd.

Yet the Left this time around did not envision reparations as just monetary gifting for the distant descendants of the enslaved and the generations who grew up under Jim Crow. Rather, it is already recalibrating the Great Society doctrine of “proportional representation” quotas, achieved through “disparate impact” into new reparatory and disproportionate quotas and allotments.

We are jettisoning the old idea under our Lebanese-like system of racial spoils that each group deserved representation in hiring and admission commensurate to its percentages of the population—trumping many traditional meritocratic criteria of examination scores, grades, or prior work experience.

No more. If one examines current fall 2021 entering classes at many of our elite universities, many minority groups will enroll with numbers disproportionate to their current demographic percentages but proportionate to the idea of reparatory “overrepresentation”.

The same holds true of the racial make-up of new television shows and commercials, pilot training programs, and corporate board room representation. Again, the idea is that blacks, for example, should be represented in percentages exceeding 12 percent in any coveted honors or awards—to make up for past underrepresentation, given prior mere proportionality offers no reparatory justice.

In a strange way, for all the furor over reparation payments, the issue already is beginning to be settled quietly by our major institutions. Note class consideration will have no role in such disproportionate and compensatory action.

Another revolutionary crackpot idea was ending nuclear power and fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar generation that would power our homes and our new envisioned national fleet of electric cars. No one quite believed the revolutionary Left would be so suicidal as to spike the energy costs of the middle class, make the United States dependent again on imported oil from the autocratic Middle East and Russia, and strangle the oil and gas industry that had enriched America.

But without much debate, Joe Biden has cancelled the huge ANWR oil and gas project in Alaska. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline and destroyed Alberta’s export of oil to the United States. He nixed all new fossil fuel leases on federal lands. He discouraged frackers from using their full inventory of rigs. As gasoline heads to $5 a gallon, Joe Biden, in the months before the next midterm elections,asks OPEC to send us its hated carbon fuel to help our addicted, but suddenly furious, commuter-voters.

Here is a final reminder of why the revolution has already turned society upside down. The canniest elements of the aristocracy always cut deals with the revolution and indeed often remain the nomenklatura. What unites Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the Silicon Valley billionaire crowd are the exemptions they purchased from revolutionary justice.

In the old days they would have gotten dachas on the Black Sea coast and three dial phones on their desks. These days they keep their billions if they give a hundred million dollars in “civility” bounties here to Van Jones (ex-truther and expert on why white people are supposedly responsible for mass shootings) or there seed $500 million to key voting precincts to help ensure the good people defeat the bad.

In 1961, Cubans were not quite aware that they were experiencing a Marxist takeover. Nor were Russians fully cognizant in 1917 of the plans that the Bolsheviks had for them over the next few decades. It is hard to see during anarchy, chaos, and collapsing institutions that leftists still have an agenda for what will emerge on the other side.

In other words, we are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.

Socialism is a system proven over and over again to bring shortage, insecurity, fear, compulsion, poverty, desperation, sorrow and worse for all but the dictators who control the lives of the rest.

Is it too late to prevent it being established in America?

If so, can it be disestablished? Can freedom be restored?

Afghans fleeing from the Taliban packed tight in a US military cargo plane.

“President” Biden said July 8 2021: 

The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you are going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.

As always, he was wrong . 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday [August 8, 2021] on ABC’s “This Week” that while video shows military helicopters facilitating the rapid evacuation of U.S. personnel from the U.S. embassy in Kabul, it was “manifestly not Saigon”.

As always, he was wrong.

Yet again, America is humiliated by incompetent government and feeble military commanders.

The pictures:

Above, Saigon April 1975

Below, Kabul, August 2021

Idea for the government: How about appointing military commanders who know how to win wars rather than concern themselves with critical race theory?

The Taliban is approaching Kabul. Once there they can stop planes leaving from the airport.  Is there time to airlift US troops out of the country before that happens?  Possibly not.

The Western Journal reports:

As President Joe Biden moved toward his goal of withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of this month, he repeatedly promised to keep Americans safe. The latest development from Kabul now throws that promise in serious doubt.

Taliban  forces are pushing ever closer to the capital city of Afghanistan. The situation has deteriorated so rapidly that the Kabul International Airport is now the only viable way out of the city.

For many Afghan citizens, flying is preferable to staying put ahead of the impending Taliban takeover. The AP reported that every flight on Afghan airlines Ariana and Kam Air is booked solid for at least a week.

Previously, there were plenty of road routes out of Kabul. But the Taliban is now within miles of the city.

It’s not just Afghan citizens who must rely on the airport as their only lifeline, but also American troops sent to evacuate staff from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

The Bagram Air Base once served as a hub for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But that base was abandoned as Biden pushed for a full withdrawal from the country by Aug. 31.

Despite repeated warnings about the potential consequences of pulling troops out of Afghanistan, Biden insisted the Afghan government would be able to hold off the Taliban.

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden said on July 8.  

The “likelihood is unlikely”. Bidenspeak! Well, the likelihood is now likely to be likely.

The Taliban is well on its way to “overrunning everything” due to the Biden administration’s poor handling of the situation.

Biden himself tacitly admitted his mistake by sending 3,000 American troops back into Afghanistan this week.

Update: 5,000 troops.

It is entirely possible for the Taliban to sabotage movement into and out of the country.

If the insurgents are able to halt travel from the airport, they will have effectively trapped American forces in Afghanistan.

Biden’s handling of the conflict in Afghanistan has been disastrous from the start, and the consequences of his missteps are now becoming clear.

The report says that if American troops are stuck in Afghanistan, unable to be airlifted out, the Taliban “most likely would not kill those troops”.

Why is it “most likely” that they will not kill them?

Afghan army soldiers surrendered to the Taliban on the understanding that they will not be killed, and as soon as they were unarmed, the Taliban shot them dead – as even CNN reports.

The US soldiers would fight, of course.

Even so, this disaster is likely to get worse.

*

Update: The Taliban have reached Kabul.

Debkafile reports:

A few minutes after entering the outskirts of Kabul on Sunday, Aug. 15, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheed said his forces await a “peaceful transfer of the city”.

Afghan president Ashraf Ghani is in emergency talks with US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad as US staff exit the embassy by helicopter.

The Taliban statement said they have “no plans to take the city by force” and no intention of “taking revenge” against those serving in the Afghan government or military.

And the Taliban are famous for keeping their word?

*

What does stupid Joe Biden think his 5,000 soldiers can do other than get stranded in a barbarous land at the mercy of savages? 

The twenty year war waged in Afghanistan by the combined armies of some of the militarily strongest countries in the world, led by America the strongest of all, against fanatical Muslim savages banded together as “the Taliban”, is over. 

The savages have won.  

From the Daily Mail today (August 14, 2021):

The Taliban seized its 17th major city on Friday as they raced to take full control of Afghanistan and inched closer to Kabul, with the main settlement in Logar province – just 40 miles from the capital – falling to the militants.

The blitz through Afghanistan’s southern heartland means the insurgents now hold half of the country’s 34 provincial capitals and control more than two-thirds of the nation – weeks before the U.S. plans to fully withdraw.

As Kabul looks to be on the brink of being taken by the Taliban, fears have also been raised of a refugee crisis and a rollback of gains in human rights. Some 400,000 civilians have been forced from their homes since the beginning of the year, 250,000 of them since May.

The loss of Helmand’s provincial capital of Kandahar in the past 24 hours comes after years of toil and blood spill by American, British and allied NATO forces.

Both Britain and the United States will deploy thousands of troops to evacuate their citizens from the capital city Kabul, which could fall within days as the Taliban continue their march to seize it from the [useless] government.

The defeat of America and its NATO allies by Afghan savages is perilous for the world.

From Debkafile:

The Taliban’s regaining of power in Afghanistan bodes a shift in the balance of power on the Indian subcontinent and the revival the terrorist threat to the Mid-East.

The return of Taliban to Kabul will mean the reinstatement of al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in their old lairs.

Yet the “Biden” administration is still denying that it has capitulated to the Taliban in Afghanistan!

From the Daily Mail:

DoD spokesman Baghdad Bob John Kirby said on Friday that the Pentagon does not believe Kabul is under imminent threat from the rapid Taliban advance.

Could America have won the war?

Who is most to blame for the defeat?

Could a withdrawal have been better managed?

What lessons for the future might be taken from this enormous fiasco, so costly in lives and money?

 Resist not evil (Matthew 5:39 KJV)

In humility count others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3 English Standard Version)

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life.

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity.

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Joe Biden has conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care.

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism.

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages [thanks to Trump – ed.], Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing.

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed.

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive.

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.

No one seems to acknowledge that both students and the universities—which lured them to borrow—knew exactly the risks they were taking. Meanwhile, millions of American youth, the working classes who choose not to attend college, and those who paid their loans off or whose parents saved enough over the years to cover their tuition obligations, will subsidize those who renege of their debts by paying higher taxes.

Inflation is roaring back as the administration is printing trillions of new dollars that do not reflect commensurate gains in productivity or population.

Soaring prices are a direct result of incentivizing the unemployed not to work, while discouraging manufacturers and producers of food, gas, oil, timber, mineral, and metals.

The crime wave likewise is not accidental. It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.

In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.

Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.

The current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear the nation as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole. 

All this multifaceted chaos is not just faculty lounge stuff. We are beginning to see the collective craziness filter down to disruptions in our everyday lives.

Airliners cannot take off due to fuel shortages. Automobiles, houses, gas, and lumber are in short supply.

Consumers can’t get their roofs fixed or their houses painted or the trees trimmed as employers plead to their idle government-subsidized employees to come back to work.

No one knows whether our laws even still exist—or at least exist haphazardly depending on who breaks them.

Thieves steal with brazen impunity.

Scared Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC, and most of the federal bureaucracies that are as politicized as they are increasingly incompetent.

What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis—followed by civilizational collapse.

Accused by the ruling elite, many Americans are doing penance for actions they never took, words they never spoke, ideas they never thought. They plead guilty to being oppressors. In penance they hand power to their destroyers and abase themselves.

Why do millions of Americans accept the accusation that they are guilty of oppressing minorities when they are doing no such thing?

Could it be because a religion, still common to millions of Americans, taught self-abasement to generation after generation? Taught that you were born guilty? That you must always put the wants of others above your own?

That you must not resist evil?

The plan is to empower a new, hyperpolitical, easily manipulated domestic security agency. 

A national police force?

An American Stasi?

When President Trump was in power the Democrats were against it:

When the Left was worried about Trump’s use of Department of Homeland Security officers to protect federal buildings during last summer’s riots, the Atlantic noted, “One common tool for an interior ministry is a national police force. That can be a dangerous tool because an armed national police force at the disposal of the central government has a tendency to be misused. A repressive regime that is in danger, or simply faced with protests it finds troublesome, can use the national police to crack down, turning the force into an agency that protects the rulers, rather than one that defends the rule of law.”

Then the Democrats cheated Trump of his victory in the November 2020 election and fraudulently seized the presidency. So now they are for a national police force. It was surely to be expected.

As a general matter, whatever the Left has warned the Right might do, they do when they have the power.

We quote Christopher Roach writing at American Greatness:

We recently saw the first phase of the January 6 show trial. The congressional hearing, which the House Republican leadership has boycotted, always threatened to be a farce, prolonging and exaggerating a one-time event for partisan political gain. It lived down to expectations.

The assembled U.S. Capitol Police jerked tears and repeated popular lies, including the now-disproven claim that officer Brian Sicknick was killed during the riots. [He died days later of natural causes.] One of the policemen exposed himself as highly ideological after his tweets praising Black Lives Matter violence surfaced soon after his testimony. All of the witnesses used highly charged language, referring to their fellow Americans as “terrorists” and the event as an attempted “coup”.

In other words, the Capitol Police leadership supported the Democrats’ bleak view of the moment: that the country is beset by dangerous, violent, right-wing extremism … namely, those who supported President Trump and have doubts about the 2020 election.

Defining Trump supporters (some 75 thousand voters in 2020) as “extremists” and terrorists” …

… permits extreme measures to defend “Our Democracy”.

The most ominous development is the plan to deploy the Capitol Police in the nation’s interior, with the first field offices located in California and Florida.

The Capital Police is now being purposely remade as a political police force, aimed not at real subversives and dangerous violent criminals, but at critics and opponents of the congressional members of the ruling class.

We perceive the plan to be the brainchild, specifically, of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The Capitol Police are the security guards of Congress, so she apparently regards them as her personal Praetorian Guard, subject to her will. Her will now is that the force must expand over the whole country and spy on us all.

But can it be used for that?

The Capitol Police have very limited jurisdiction by statute. Even in Washington D.C., they’re only allowed to arrest for crimes within the Capitol building and grounds. In other words, they are highly paid security guards.

So what gives Pelosi’s Congress the right to turn them into a secret national police force?

While the Capitol Police have no nationwide arrest authority, they do have a right to work outside the Capitol grounds for “intelligence gathering”.  The scope of this authority is entirely undefined by the statute and related regulations.

Which means that the nationwide force can be secretive, accountable only to Congress.

It is not subject to presidential control. It is not limited by executive orders on intelligence gathering. It is not limited to the investigation of crimes. And it does not have to respond to FOIA [the Freedom of Information Act]. By way of example, the Capitol Police has concealed the identity of the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt.

[Since] oversight of the Capitol Police is exclusively within a single branch, the Congress, in a case of divided government some future Republican president would have no ability to reign them in.

The USA is no longer a free country. 

The Left has consolidated the power of the media, corporate America, the scientific establishment, the military, and now an obscure federal agency to push its agenda and to punish those who refuse to recognize their authority.

The acquisition and use of such power by a government over the people it governs is the making of a tyranny.  

Can it be denied that America is now a tyranny?

Is it not being taken in the direction of totalitarianism?

We are at a moment of truth and a crossroads. Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children?

Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom. pic.twitter.com/XrI2tjdAHW

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 8, 2021