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Ever prepared to appropriate the ideas and rhetoric of the left, DeSantis and his friends are arguing that mask and vaccine mandates, even from private businesses, are a form of “discrimination” against anti-vaxxers. Is there any basis for this position?

No. The essence of unlawful discrimination is that it is directed at personal traits over which the victim has little or no control. Refusing the vaccine is a deliberate action, not a trait, over which the anti-vaxxer has complete control. It would make as much sense to say the law discriminates against thieves and murderers.

American social conservatives have made it clear: they’re tired of playing defense. It’s time to impose their religious values on the rest of us, even if they aren’t anything like a majority in this country. But how?

The next logical step is illiberal democracy, of course, but if that doesn’t work, they could always take inspiration from the Taliban. After all, on issues of morality and regulation, they have a lot in common.

On our failure in Afghanistan.

We had no discernible plan.

All the choices were bad

So I’m not really sad

That we no longer play kick the can.

Some commentators are asserting that the Taliban’s need for basic administrative competence and financial aid will force them into a degree of moderation. Is that true?

No. The idea that the state is responsible for the comfort and prosperity of its citizens is relatively new. The older model—that the state is required to maintain a society that is pleasing to God—is the one followed by the Taliban. If the Afghan people are poverty-stricken, miserable, and righteous, that will be fine with them.

The real constraint on the Taliban will be the need to avoid provoking the Chinese and the Pakistanis, not success in providing material goods. Will they try to inspire Islamic revolutions outside their borders, with all of the risks that will entail, or will they settle for medieval squalor in one country? On that point, only time will tell.

In the end, Kabul fell in one night

When the Afghans just chose not to fight.

The images on

Look a bit like Saigon

And the future’s not looking too bright.

Ross felt compelled to make the case for belief in God in Sunday’s NYT. Frankly, I think he was pushing on an open door. In my experience, Americans are not committed, hardened materialists; they are actually humble, undogmatic believers. By that, I mean they acknowledge the existence of a higher power, and occasionally try to negotiate with it, but they doubt their ability to fully understand it, particularly through the use of anachronistic rituals.

Douthat’s real problem with people he considers unbelievers is that, unlike their grandparents, they aren’t willing to accept the authority of supposedly sacred texts and practices without further examination based on logic, experience, and the scientific method. They want orthodox Christianity to justify itself by reference to common sense. What reasonable person would become a conservative Catholic by creating a metaphysical universe from scratch?

And then, of course, there is the Trump factor. The truth of religions should not be evaluated based on the behavior of their adherents, but who, really, can help it?

The Taliban are telling the world that they don’t intend to oppress the Afghan people this time. Should we take them at their word?

Of course not! They want to recreate the 7th century in their country. They will go as far as the world lets them. Period.

The bottom line is that the Taliban are the monster to Pakistan’s Dr. Frankenstein, and Pakistan is now a Chinese client state. Stability in the neighborhood is now their problem, not ours. Good luck with that.

Some commentators are portraying the Afghan War as one between the US and the Taliban, with the Afghan people playing the role of innocent victims caught in the crossfire. Is that accurate?

No! Our war was with Osama and the terrorists, not the Taliban, whom we tolerated for years before 9/11. After Osama’s death, the war became purely an effort to protect what we considered a decent society in Afghanistan. In other words, it was a war for the Afghan women; we were just there to help out.

Remember that when you are told we have obligations to Afghan people other than those who assisted us directly. They ultimately chose not to fight for their own interests. Why should we take responsibility for their failures?

I saw an interview with David Petraeus on NBC last night. Lester Holt pitched him a number of softball questions about Afghanistan, to which he responded by saying that the Afghan military only refused to fight because it knew that help wasn’t coming.

Let’s dig into that response more than Holt did:

1. If Petraeus was saying that America was obligated to come to the rescue, one can only assume he meant the Afghan military was designed by him and his successors to be dependent on American help in perpetuity. At what point did Petraeus tell America that we were committed to stay in Afghanistan forever, and what right did he have to obligate us in that manner? If, on the other hand, he was actually trying to build an Afghan military that would survive on its own, he certainly did a pathetic job of it, didn’t he?
2. If Petraeus meant that the fault lies with the Afghan government in not coming to the rescue, that is on the Afghans, not us, isn’t it?

Virginia was relatively late to the secession party, but it is fair to call it the heart of the Confederacy. After all, it provided a disproportionate number of the South’s leaders, resources, and battlefields, as well as its capital.

Today, Virginia is a blue state—the only one in the Confederacy. The GOP candidate for governor doesn’t even mention his party affiliation in his commercials, even though he is a Trump acolyte.

How would our nation’s history have been different if Virginia had been a blue state in 1861? The mind boggles at the thought of it

Theodore Roosevelt’s reform program was called the “Square Deal.” FDR, of course, had the “New Deal.” If the Biden legislation is approved, what should it be called?

It can only be the “Big F@#@# Deal,” of course.

The United States invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the Afghan government and military over a period of 20 years. In the end, the government couldn’t govern, and the military wouldn’t fight. Who is to blame for this colossal waste?

It isn’t Bush, Obama, Biden, or even Trump. It is the American military and foreign policy establishment that conceived the programs and spent the money. Politicians came and went, but the blob assured us that they had everything under control, and that it would all turn out OK. LOL.

The Republican responses to the collapse In Afghanistan were predictable: the few remaining CDs are horrified, and would support some sort of surge; the PBPs will use the bad news opportunistically to resist tax increases; and the America First CLs and Reactionaries will be indifferent. In the end, their opinions won’t matter much, particularly since Trump was as eager to exit the country as Biden is.

But what about the left? Will AOC and her friends demand military support for the Afghan women? Will foreign policy take a feminist turn here?

I doubt it. The left will flinch a bit, but they have no more use for this war than the America Firsters. Still, the issue bears watching.

As I’ve noted many times before, there are two models for American military involvement in Third World countries. In the Korean model, we decide the country in question has so much strategic importance, we are obligated to stay indefinitely; in the Vietnam model, we prepare the natives to fight for themselves, and then leave.

Once Trump, and then Biden, chose the Vietnam model for Afghanistan, its fate was sealed. So what can we learn from this experience? That attempting to foster a kind of liberal democratic regime on a Third World nation with a completely different culture, and then leaving, will not succeed if the armed opposition has a place of refuge from which they cannot be displaced.

There are two ways to avoid the Vietnam/Afghanistan experience. The first is to accept the burdens of the Korea model up front; the second is to install and arm the most competent warlord you can find, give him guns and money, and let him take responsibility for the country. Call it the Putin Solution.

As a result of their excessive individualism and selfish disregard for the interests of posterity, the Boomers did nothing but make climate change worse. The data were there, and the science was clear, and yet, they did nothing. The planet is now ablaze. It’s their fault.

That is the millennial position, and it is true as far as it goes. The fact of the matter, however, is that America is a much greener country than it was before the Boomers. The real accelerant of climate change was the rise of China, which was done on the back of mountains of fossil fuels. How could that have been stopped? There just wasn’t any way.

Are you persuaded?