Headline quoted by Mark Steyn:

Former British P.M. Tony Blair Rips Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal: Gives ‘Our Opponents A Belief Our Time Is Over’

On which Mark Steyn comments:

Well, our opponents aren’t wrong about that, are they? In fact … it’s not just “our opponents” who believe “our time is over”, but a significant percentage of the west’s ruling class. For why else would they have gone over to the other side? Our randomly selected Shill of the Day, Joe Biden’s jetsetting climate honcho:

John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks

So many global A-listers are “echoing China’s argument” these days, don’t you find? Fauci and the public health gang, the stars and administrators of those crappy unwatchable corporate sports, Justin Trudeau, Hollywood, the WHO…

It suits China that climate change is the only Big Picture non-subterranean conversation we are permitted to have. Every minute we spend worrying about whether the Maldives will be washed away by rising sea levels in the twenty-second century makes it less likely we’ll notice that America is being washed away by China right now.

This Saturday [9/11] will provide, one would have thought, a rare glimpse of that subterranean reality. But tens of millions of Americans are so content being spectators in their nation’s eclipse that it may well be that the traditional cringe-makingly passive candle-in-the-windiness of 9/11 observances will for a few moments work its usual magic, and on its twentieth anniversary they won’t notice that the war on terror is over and America lost. The guys who toppled the Twin Towers have just been rewarded for their pains with a bazillion Humvees, Black Hawks, and more territory than they ever held back in the Nineties.

If by “us” we mean Western civilization, is our time over?

U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

The difference of degree between the death penalty and five years imprisonment plus a fine of $10,000 is so great, there must have been a very wide range of types of treasonous action in the minds of the lawmakers when those punishments were prescribed.

“President” Biden has obviously given aid, in many forms and huge quantities, to the Taliban enemy of the U.S. in Afghanistan, and – worst of all – unnecessarily given them victory. He has undoubtedly committed treason of an extreme type. 

Nothing short of the death penalty would be fitting for what he has done.

Joe Biden gave all this to a band of savages:

America has been vanquished by a band of savages; pestilence is spreading through the land; millions of aliens from backward countries are flooding in; the currency is losing value; half the citizenry has been disenfranchised by the other half’s tyrannical leaders; liberty is lost.

We cover our faces. We close our schools. We shutter the places of pleasure. We hear the gloating savages mock us.

Optimists still find “blessings” that remain to us.

But we resort to “counting our blessings” only when we feel many of them slipping away. Serious loss has us tightening our grip on what remains. “Be grateful for small mercies” is the counsel of despair.

We may also console ourselves by finding “bright sides” and “silver linings” to being suddenly poorer and afraid for the future. Or even joke about it in a “grin and bear it”, or “whistling past the graveyard” effort to keep up our courage.

Or we resort to concentrating our attention wholly on our private lives, working our personal ground.

As Voltaire advised long ago.

These are the concluding words of his Candide:

Pangloss would sometimes say to Candide:

“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds. Had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.”

“Excellently observed,” answered Candide. “Let us cultivate our garden.”

Or is there something else we could do – something to recover self-esteem, dignity, strength, health, nationhood, wealth, and freedom?

With the “election” of the nasty idiot Joe Biden to the presidency, the era of American domination came to an end. The event that proves this was his insistence that the country he so badly leads – the mightiest military power in the world – capitulate to a band of terrorists in Afghanistan after twenty years of waging war on them.

With that, he rendered the service of American soldiers through all that time pointless, and the deaths of some 2,500 of them and injury of over 20,000 suffered in vain. The huge sacrifice of young lives, and the vast cost of  $2.26 trillion of American taxpayers’ money, was all a total waste.

Communist China is now already the dominant power in the world. Though it is not yet as rich as America, the US trade imbalance with China stands at over $74 billion in China’s favor. Though China is not yet a mightier military power than the US, it is far more likely to win the wars it starts.

It seems that this will be China’s century, as the last century was America’s, and the one before that was Britain’s.

Communism has won. Because a sufficient number of Americans chose to let it win.

Right or wrong?

If you think we are wrong, please tell us how and why.

… turned the West totalitarian.

How China did it is explained very well by Michael P. Senger at Tablet:

“Lockdowns” –  the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people – have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?

Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of press conferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.

The world has been fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that transforms the world into China. But if the national security community has noticed this bizarre development, they haven’t said so. Instead, their preoccupation has remained largely unchanged since February 2020. Insiders have confirmed that by spring 2020 the national security community was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was a supervirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, explaining why many supported lockdowns. Yet the key pieces of information that gave rise to the lab leak theory were the videos of Wuhan residents suddenly falling dead, the contrived tale of heroic whistleblower Li Wenliang, and Xi Jinping’s apparent success locking down Wuhan, the city with the lab in it.

One national security official after another has claimed to know the virus came from the Wuhan lab, even as the underlying intelligence information has changed little. If these officials are as confident as they claim to be, great !It does not change the fact that Covid’s average infection fatality rate (IFR) across all age groups is under 0.24%. It’s long past time to address the more concerning question to which the rest of the public has long since moved on: why governments across the world have copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19.

One by one, governments of the world imported China’s totalitarian lockdown measures. Neil Ferguson [of Imperial College, London] , whose series of alarmist, wildly inaccurate models fueled lockdowns around the world, recalled how China’s example had inspired him:

I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March … It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could … If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.

In the U.K. Government’s official Coronavirus Action Plan from March 3, 2020, discussing social distancing, school closures, and rapid COVID test and vaccine development, nearly every source the U.K. government cited was from China. All the measures outlined in New Zealand’s official COVID-19 Elimination Strategy document—“physical distancing” “widespread testing” “surveillance”—were adopted from China based on the reported success of the CCP’s Wuhan lockdown. The New Zealand Department of Health deleted this document from their website one day after it received widespread attention on Twitter, after having been posted there for over a year.

In Germany, the federal government commissioned a confidential strategy paper “based on the scientific findings of expert teams from the University of Bonn/University of Nottingham Ningbo China” containing a “catalog of measures” to be implemented by Germany’s CDC, later obtained upon FOIA request by Germany’s independent Corona Committee. The strategy paper outlined, in detail, the steps to implement lockdowns, mass testing, and quarantine facilities, among other draconian measures. The paper specifically suggested “appeals to the public spirit” including two words that would soon become a worldwide propaganda slogan during the COVID-19 crisis: “together apart.”

Of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails that led to the publication of the German strategy paper, 118 pages were blacked out entirely. The emails contain frequent discussion of China, but nearly all of these references are redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”

One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed. The Dutch government knowingly took a course of action that would cause health damage—let alone economic damage—six times worse for the Dutch people, out of a concern for optics.

Based on WHO guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, doctors around the world began putting patients on ventilators en masse, killing thousands before a grassroots campaign stopped the practice. Based on the WHO’s guidance on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are false positives, as confirmed by The New York Times.

The WHO’s PCR guidance was paired with new international ICD-10 codes for COVID deaths to make COVID-19 quite possibly the deadliest accounting fraud of all time. According to this coding guidance, if a decedent had either tested positive or been in contact with anyone who had, within several weeks prior to their death, then the death should be classified as a COVID-19 death. The result was a terrifying number of supposed “COVID-19 deaths” that bore little relation to the number of “excess deaths” in a given year, even in states and countries that employed few lockdown measures. This absurd number of “COVID-19 deaths” has been used to rationalize any manner of devastation caused by governments’ response to COVID-19—from bankruptcies and mental health crises to deaths from lockdowns themselves.

What’s transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative. The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments. Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP’s narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP’s policies. Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.

Articles from March 10, 2020, illustrate how media outlets adopted China’s narrative in unison. “How China Slowed Coronavirus: Lockdowns, Surveillance, Enforcers,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “Those containment efforts do appear to have been successful, with the number of new cases slowing to a trickle in recent weeks,” CNN admired. “Xi asserts victory on first trip to Wuhan since outbreak … China’s epidemic statistics suggest that its efforts have been effective,” trumpeted The Washington Post. “The World Health Organization has praised Beijing’s response … ‘This epidemic can be pushed back,’ Dr. Tedros said, ‘but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government,’” The New York Times repeated.

For journalists, indulging the fiction that China controlled the virus appears to have begun as a little white lie—a little something in exchange for all those goodwill seminars and ad placements. It was silly, of course, but what harm could that do?

The snowball effect of this little white lie, that China had controlled the virus, was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. One after another, they fell victim to their own collective propaganda. Global media outlets legitimized a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies. Within months, they’d begun to sound like foaming-at-the-mouth communists, their every word dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate China.

“The U.S. has absolutely no control over the coronavirus. China is on top of the tiniest risks,” The Washington Post gushed. “The verdict is in,” Politico ruled, “China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.” “U.S. Says Virus Can’t Be Controlled. China Aims to Prove It Wrong,” The New York Times admired. “China beat the coronavirus with science and strong public health measures, not just with authoritarianism,” the Conversation lectured. “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,” The New York Times suggested. “China eradicated COVID-19 within months. Why won’t America learn from them?” Salon whined.

It’s hard to think of many things worse than marching the world toward totalitarianism out of embarrassment for failing to prevent the world’s march toward totalitarianism. But sadly, embarrassment and denial appear to be the primary motivations of world leaders today. From the courts to intelligence agencies to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretenses, and whether those policies actually work.

Everything since “15 days to slow the spread”—from the fear propaganda to the masks to the school closures and vaccine passes—has been a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of the insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real.

Read the rest, read it all here.

China has outwitted the West. Wrecked the economies of nations. Made us poorer, afraid, and less free.

A poem by Bruce Bawer:

That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.

–W.B. Yeats, “Long-Legged Fly”

*

Groaning toward his eightieth year, the Free
World’s leader, on this pleasant August day,
Dozes calmly under an apple tree,
Dreaming of that episode with Corn Pop,
Of children’s fragrant hair, banana splits,
White sails skimming over Delaware Bay.
— No, actually, he’s at a photo op
In the White House, opposite the premier
Of Israel, and — ah — he’s fallen asleep,
His head bowed, his shoulders slumped: the shoulders
Upon which our civilization sits.

His aides, seized by a now-familiar fear,
Rustle through their thick, important folders.
But what’s to be done? Look beyond the seas
To every continent, and there you’ll find
Cruisers and aircraft carriers, tanks and jeeps,
Awaiting orders from this man whose eyes
Are shut in slumber; squadrons of GIs
Prepared, at his command, to sacrifice
Their lives for the liberty of mankind;
Bombers poised to fly when he gives the nod.
But him? He’s nodded off; he’s flying blind;
And all the mighty forces must stand down,
For it’s that addled head that wears the crown:
Long as he’s in the Oval Office, odd
Though it sounds, he’s the closest thing to God;
Long as America still rules the waves
(And he, with his rank company of knaves,
Foolishly and brazenly waives the rules),
All civilization rests upon one mind.

So when you vote, think what you’re voting for.
It shouldn’t matter if a candidate
For president’s presentable and kind
(Or seems to be), or comes off as a boor,
Or if that individual’s maligned
By media boobs: dismiss such chatter
From your mind. And no, it shouldn’t matter
Who has more estrogen or melanin
Or who might be a Basque or Bedouin.
You’re not picking a morning talk-show host
Or someone you can call your friends and boast
Of having voted for because he’s gay.
For once, please put such childish thoughts away
And think like an adult, a citizen
Of the Republic that transmogrified
Ideas of what a human life could be,
The land for which your forebears fought and died.
For God’s sake, do the homework. Do the math.
Learn to recognize a sociopath.
Learn what it means to be custodian
Of your hard-won freedom, of your nation,
Of your — your children’s — civilization.

Just this once, instead of relentlessly
Finding fault with all the Founding Founders,
Why don’t you attempt to be worthy of
Them — to show respect, if you can’t show love —
And to be worthy of the wondrous land
They brought into being? You have a hand,
When you cast your vote, in shaping its fate,
In deciding whether or not our great
American experiment founders
Or survives. So choose as your head of state
Someone who loves your country, first of all,
And who understands how to wield power
In its service; who can be a bright ball
Of fire in that country’s darkest hour;
Who knows good from evil, knows foe from friend,
And knows when duty tells him not to bend;
And who, unlike the man who tends to doze
In the middle of the day, and who weeps
Inexplicably at a lectern, knows
To cry in private, and who barely sleeps.

A country without memory is a zombie. Deleting the past destroys the future. With left-wing extremists driving political debate, destroying monuments, attacking free speech, and censoring everything that displeases the Twitter mobs, America is on the path toward Communist-style tyranny.

So Nikola Kedhi writes at the American Mind.

He declares –

The American century appears to be coming to an ignominious end.

He thinks the end of America itself, as it has been from 1776 until now, is in sight, if not already upon it.

Nothing lives forever, and nations are no exception. The reasons for the downfall of great nations and empires are complex, but if you want to see a great country decline and crumble, it is enough to watch it cancel its culture and destroy its economy through an abandonment of values and fiscal irresponsibility.

Unnatural cultural and economic conditions will lead inevitably to social polarization and civil unrest. This leads to an erosion of democracy, less freedom, and less economic opportunity.

Such conditions are now hastening the end of the free American republic:

Due to the [Covid] pandemic, we have seen the global accumulation of power and centralization at the expense of individual liberty. The current Washington and coastal elites are forcibly imposing their cultural views on the American people. The country’s progressives in control of the media, academia, the corporate sector and almost every other institution present a vision of the U.S. as irredeemably racist, evil, and oppressive. Massive reconstitution of the nation is necessary to move forward, in this view.

In the view that is, in the vision, of its Oh-so-highly-virtuous critics.

And so, to their insane satisfaction, the free republic is tottering and will fall.

Their moral condemnation anathematizes, and their active destruction of the institutions completes, the very idea of a nation bound together by a love of liberty and the rule of law. Their insistence that such an America is too evil to be allowed to exist has weakened the formerly mighty republic almost to death.

He explains why America cannot thrive any more.

Massive unproductive government spending with ever growing entitlements and never-ending quantitative easing have become the norm in recent years—largely with bipartisan consensus.

The United States has close to $30 trillion in debt. Interest rates will not remain low forever, especially if inflation continues to increase, which is a virtual certainty given the Biden plan to double or triple government spending. When rates rise, paying for this massive debt will be much costlier. The short sightedness of politicians is steering the American economy toward “Modern Monetary Theory,” a fancy name for socialism.

Governments cannot channel capital efficiently. Instead, they fund zombie companies, unproductive sectors, and political cronies. The data back this up: according to the Congressional Budget Office, the estimate for average real growth in GDP from 2020 to 2030 is 1.7 percent, while the unemployment rate is forecast to average 4.8 percent, despite trillions of dollars in stimulus packages. In the second quarter, after massive government intervention, annualized growth was at 6.5 percent, much lower than the 8.5 percent expected, while annualized real personal disposable income fell at a 30.6 percent rate, and inflation continues to rise.

In contrast, the pro-growth and pro-worker policies of the Trump administration led to median household income growing by 6.8 percent in 2019, which remains the largest annual increase on record. America gained seven million new jobs—more than three times projections and at what was supposed to be the end of an expansionary cycle. Middle-class family income increased nearly $6,000—more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration. Median household incomes rose among Hispanics (7.1 percent), blacks (7.9 percent), Asians (10.6 percent), foreign-born workers (8.5 percent), whites (5.7 percent), and for all native-born Americans (6.2 percent). Poverty rates during the Trump years fell to a 17-year low.

It was thanks to Trump’s policies that the American economy began to recover much quicker than Europe as soon as many states ended lockdowns.

[But] when the Biden administration, with the help of the Fed, started inundating the economy with needless and unaffordable money, the recovery cooled rapidly.

The current administration is intent on following through with unnecessary spending, an assault on the energy sector, increasing the size of government, and higher taxes which will lead to a decline in competitiveness, stagflation, and the immiseration of the American people. Republicans are enabling this fiscal insanity, as their support for the massive, unnecessary infrastructure bill shows.

Kedhi’s conclusion:

The American century appears to be coming to an ignominious end.

But he seems not to have given up all hope of the nation saving itself from the fate its virtuous haters wish upon it.

He softens his jeremiad a little with a warning. (Though by his own account it would seem to be coming too late.)

A total revision of American history, and a forceful implementation of progressive socialist values, will take place in the United States if the current momentum continues unchecked.

Wasn’t defeat in Afghanistan the coup de grâce?

The recent catastrophe in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of the weakened state America finds itself from internal attacks that have produced an ineffective and incompetent government. Soon, the United States will be unable to confront Chinese expansionism or other authoritarian threats.

But not absolutely inevitably?

It is a crucial moment for American society. However …

Conservatives can yet save it?

However, it is up to conservatives and traditionalists to be smart and swift enough to counteract the cultural and economic transformation and provide an alternative, which is not yet happening in any cohesive or convincing way.

Can it happen? Will it happen?

Or is the lesson that the American experiment – people uniting under constitutional law rather than according to ethnicity and place of birth – can only succeed for a relatively short time?

… delivered and not delivered.

We cannot find this message from President Trump to the nation anywhere but on Twitter.

So as a tweet we post it.  (As usual we overlook the “God” parts.)

He says what a president of the United States ought to say to and about the soldiers who fought for their country.

The goof of a “president” in the White House wouldn’t think of saying anything of the sort. His handlers, however, should think of it for him, if only for the “optics” of it, about which they are always most concerned, even now at this time of national abasement and global tragedy caused by their “president”.

President Trump's message for a grieving nation. pic.twitter.com/2o7kgLKdaR

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) August 27, 2021

Here is an unhappy but sober discussion of What Is Happening in the World now that America has been led into defeat in Afghanistan.

Niall Ferguson is excellent. John Cochrane is good. McMaster, in our view, patchy.