How will the
Biden administration deal with the massive hostage crisis we are about
to witness?
Article by John Dietrich in The American Thinker
President Biden's feckless handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will have a significant impact on the future of the U.S.
President Biden claimed he had a choice "either to follow through on that (Trump's withdrawal) agreement, or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban."
He chose to follow through on the agreement, albeit without its tough conditionalities, which among other things included a requirement from the Taliban to share power.
The chaos that has resulted was not a result of the withdrawal itself but the inept way it was carried out. Pulling out troops first, abandoning the strategic Bagram airbase without telling the Afghani military, leaving civilians to fend for themselves without troops to protect their departure, and leaving billions' worth of military hardware for the Taliban to get its hands on, has led to this chaos. The president weakly claimed he wanted to avoid further bloodshed, as did the swiftly fleeing president of Afghanistan.
The way the withdrawal was implemented will only guarantee further bloodshed on a massive scale. The fall of Afghanistan is a historical disaster of epoch proportions. It may rival the fall of Constantinople. Afghanistan is not called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing. The Soviets left Afghanistan in 1988-1989 and the Soviet Union was officially dissolved in December 1991.
British MP Lord Forsyth of Drumlean claimed “It is very hard to overestimate the scale of the catastrophe following the Biden administration’s disastrous implementation of the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan." British MP Lord Blencathra believes "Biden may have condemned the world to Chinese domination in future and the end of western liberal democracy.” He continued, "This is not like Saigon; it is far worse. The Viet Cong had no agenda outside Vietnam but Afghanistan is now under the control of Islamist fanatics who want to wage war on every western democracy." Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated "America's retreat is imbecilic – and tells our enemies we don't have any interests or values worth defending. Friends and foes ask: is this a moment when the West is in epoch-changing retreat?"
How will the Biden administration deal with the massive hostage crisis we are about to witness? When not on vacation, its first response is to deny that there is a problem.
In her August 23 press briefing, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki indignantly stated, "I think it’s irresponsible to say that Americans are stranded. They are not." However, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told “Meet the Press” on August 22 that there are “several thousand” Americans still stranded in Afghanistan. On August 17, the Daily Mail reported 40,000 Americans were stranded in Afghanistan. No one knows the actual number. How do you plan an evacuation when you don't know how many people need to be evacuated? Press secretary for the Defense department, John Kirby, told reporters the U.S. military does not know how many Americans remain in Afghanistan.
The Iran crisis involved only 52 American hostages They were able to humiliate the Carter administration for 444 days. How will the Biden administration deal with hundreds and possibly thousands of hostages? The media will have a field day with heart-wrenching stories. As an example, there are more than 20 students and 16 parents from El Cajon, California who visited Afghanistan on summer vacation. They were unable to get to the airport. One reason Americans cannot get to the airport is Taliban roadblocks. John Kirby has acknowledged that some Americans have been beaten by the Taliban in Kabul. He reassured us that the Biden administration has “communicated to the Taliban” that the attacks are unacceptable. Even Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff believes getting all Americans out of the country by 8/31 is unlikely.
If it is necessary to reenter Afghanistan, the American military will be facing a well-equipped adversary. Between 2002 and 2017, the United States gave the Afghan military an estimated $28 billion in weaponry. One U.S. official claimed, "Everything that hasn't been destroyed is the Taliban's now." This would include 40 aircraft UH-60 Black Hawks, scout attack helicopters, and ScanEagle military drones, 600,000 infantry weapons including M16 assault rifles, 2,000 armored vehicles, and 16,000 night-vision goggle devices. What kind of assistance can we expect from anti-Taliban Afghans?
In addition to the problems arising in Afghanistan, the withdrawal will inspire forces throughout the world to challenge the U.S. President Biden claimed that we got rid of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Almost immediately after he made this claim Defense department press secretary John Kirby stated “We know that al-Qaida is a presence as well as ISIS in Afghanistan." These terrorists may be headed to the U.S. The Defense department’s Automated Biometric Identification System has flagged up to 100 of the 7,000 Afghans evacuated as prospective recipients of Special Immigration Visas as potential matches to intelligence agency ties-to-terrorism watchlists. Vladimir Putin has rejected the idea of airlifting people from Afghanistan to countries near Russia, or even in Russia. He claims he did not want "militants showing up here under cover of refugees."
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/bidens_afghanistan_pullout_is_going_to_cost_us.html
For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital, and time in an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect.
Yet neither America’s resilience nor its resources are infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans.
There are concrete consequences when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings.
Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest?
Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden Administration had no fear of audit. It took for granted that its disasters from the southern border to the chaos in Afghanistan would be excused by toady reporters.
Government-engineered “equity” has replaced the goal of equal opportunity. But such utopianism birthed popular anger when personal initiative, excellence, and performance do not count as much as virtue-signaling groupthink.
The United States just suffered a terrible and shameful defeat in Afghanistan. The catastrophe reminds us that the Biden Administration weaponized its politicized military and bureaucracy mostly to fixate on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to root out supposed internal American enemies.
So, our top brass and functionaries talked of redirecting the military to every possible woke agenda—except ensuring military superiority and the safety of the United States.
The result is the horrific mess of a premodern Taliban army routing the most sophisticated military in the history of civilization. We shudder when America begs premodern tribes please not to murder our citizens whom we abandoned in full retreat.
Our airline CEOs vie to virtue signal their wokeness by damning voter ID laws—though such identification is required to board their own airplanes. As corporations preen to the media, their jet airliners lately don’t have enough fuel to reach their destinations. The new American airline normal is woke delays, woke cancellations, and woke anarchy in the skies.
Universities now subject their admissions, their hiring, and their very research to race and gender directives. There is less concern for the collective student debt of $1.7 trillion. College students may graduate woke, but they do so with far less impressive reading and writing skills than their less politically correct predecessors a half-century ago.
Are college administrators really so virtuous when they boast of improving diversity, equity, and inclusion? Why then do they ignore indebted and poorly educated graduates—veritable serfs who cannot afford homes, put off raising families, and prolong their adolescence rather than becoming autonomous citizens?
We know from centuries past what policies ensure public safety and which guarantee crime. All laws must be enforced equally. Yet now suicidal critical race and legal theories govern which laws are enforced and which are ignored.
If a state attorney prosecutes crimes—or chooses not to prosecute them—on the basis of ideology and race rather than on questions of impartial law, then who would obey, much less honor any of them?
The police must not just be monitored, but respected and supported. Today they are defamed and defunded. If those who commit crimes do not expect to be arrested, tried, convicted, and punished, then crime pays. And so we get more of it.
Cries to empty the jails and prisons and pull back on police might sound neat on Twitter. But lots of innocent Americans will suffer the deadly consequences of someone else’s virtue signaling.
Before a country can conduct cancer research, explore outer space, or defeat its enemies thousands of miles away, its citizens must have access to affordable fuel, food, and shelter.
But ideologues now restrict irrigation water, gasoline supplies, power generation, and timber production. They may seem woke and enlightened to each other. But otherwise, they are indifferent to the exorbitant cost of living, the growing shortages of necessities, and the hundreds of thousands of homeless living amid filth, excrement, and disease on the nation’s urban sidewalks and streets.
Social media fights, the cancel culture wars between celebrities and elites, the virtue signaling of academics, actors, and activists—all of it means nothing if Americans do not have safe roads, viable travel, affordable gas, food, and housing, and safety in their homes.
Increasingly, they do not have these things. Woke leaders are losing the ability to do the hard and essential work of civilization, largely because they are obsessed with the dispensable.
We live in a world of cell phones, Skype, and Zoom. But high tech has become a mere veneer pasted over medieval urban streets, Depression-era highways, and Third-World airways. It is more dangerous to walk the nighttime streets of Chicago than it is those of war-torn Kabul or Baghdad.
Until our officials can ensure a humane and sustainable standard of living, we have no business lecturing others abroad, much less conducting endless witch hunts of our own at home.
Can America Survive the Biden Administration?
The question that many Americans are now asking themselves is whether the United States can survive another three and a half years of a Democrat administration. Under its stewardship, a short period of merely a few months has seen the country sink into a morass of increasing social dissension, mounting debt, growing unemployment, the dismantling of central industries, gross mismanagement across the board, military embarrassment, policy failure, and international humiliation.
The nation is ruled by a president who seems to be in the terminal stages of galloping dementia. His potential replacement resembles a cackling witch with the intelligence of a feral child. The Senate majority leader is by all reasonable accounts a candidate for intensive psychotherapy. What unites these three presumptive authorities is a triple condition consisting of (a) contempt for the country they were elected or appointed to serve; (b) an intelligence quotient at the low end of the bell curve; and (c) an insatiable lust for the spoils of financial jobbery and unmitigated power.
One thinks of the three-headed (or rather, triple-faced) Satan immured in the fourth ring of the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno. Only, Dante’s Satan is portrayed as devouring three of history’s grievous traitors (Judas, Brutus, Cassius), while the Beltway triumvirate is engaged in coddling and caressing the nation’s exploiters and betrayers, “those who are treacherous to their benefactors,” that is, to the people who trusted them. Dante describes an upside-down world that must be turned right-side-up even in the midst of turmoil and confusion:
Now let all those whose dull minds are vexed
By failure to understand what point it was
I had passed through, judge if I was perplexed.
I am convinced if events continue as they do at present, the nation that prepares for the 2024 election will be unrecognizable. The fiasco that is Afghanistan will have been the least of its problems—merely a symptom of what was to come. Taiwan, a dependable ally, will be lost to the monstrous appetites of a rogue regime, aka Communist China. Russia will have exerted pipeline domination over Germany and middle Europe. The Baltic states will be threatened by re-incorporation into the new incarnation of the “Evil Empire” they managed briefly to escape. Radical Islam will have been gifted with a new lease on life. The Western alliance will have disintegrated. The world’s economy will be tottering. And America itself will have been catastrophically weakened by a Woke military, rampant inflation, massive corruption, a millennial surge in illegal immigration, energy dependence, artificially fomented racial tensions, electoral malfeasance, oligarchic censorship, and runaway flashpoints of internal conflict. On any rational estimate, this is what the future may plausibly look like. The present is an alarmingly close facsimile.
The inflexion point was the last “irregular” election, although the debacle has a long prehistory. There is such a thing as historical momentum. When a nation decides to die, there is precious little that can prevent it. Arnold Toynbee wisely said that civilizations die by suicide, not murder. The same prescription applies to nations. If a cataclysm is somehow to be averted, the time is approximately now.
As Richard Fernandez warns in the aptly titled article “Chaos on the Ground, Collapse at the Top,” the catastrophe will not end until “the U.S. has found a constitutional way to clean house.” We recall, however, that the American constitutional tradition relies to a great extent on Biblical precedents. “The founders valued the Bible,” writes Daniel Dreisbach in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “for its insights into human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority, the rights and duties of citizens, and other concepts essential to framing a new political society.”
It is no accident that the American Constitution, one of the greatest political documents ever penned by man, on a par with the Magna Carta, owes its force and uniqueness to Scripture. Writing in Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald points out that “historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.” Indeed, one cannot do better than to consult the American Patriot’s Bible, a volume that should be read and studied by concerned citizens who wish to understand the nature of their act of establishment and its debt to the Abrahamic Covenant.
A reawakening to the majesty of the Constitution and its scriptural warrant is the single route to “cleaning house,” to “Making America Great Again,” to rescuing the nation from the malign agenda of its domestic enemies who seek only profit and power rather than pride in accomplishment and commitment to what once was called its “manifest destiny.” In the current climate of apathy, nihilism, and deep perplexity, this may seem like an insurmountable task. Yet, a return to the source and its evident belief in providence remains the indispensable factor in the quest for national recovery. I am not a communicant, and yet I sense that only a miracle, perhaps Divine intervention via a cadre of chosen warriors loyal to the spiritual and doctrinal origins of the nation, can save America now.
Watching the dumpster fire Joe Biden and his team lit with U.S. dollars and materiel in Afghanistan is demoralizing. Realizing we’re facing at least three more years of such catastrophic ineptitude, even if Biden is nominally replaced, is almost too much to absorb.
Just eight months to the regime of “normalcy,” we’ve seen millions of unknowns crossing our southern border unchecked and child-raping third-world terrorists chasing off U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan. These are not accidents; these are man-made catastrophes. They are the direct result of our elites’ corruption and of American voters’ failure to rein in those elites, even though it is within our power to do so.
The left rewards sycophants, even incompetent ones, because to them ideology is more important than competence. That means these kinds of political disasters are going to keep happening.
That’s really depressing, and so are a host of other things going on. Fantasy spending packages amid shocking inflation and shortages, unresolved election insecurity, rising crime, state-sponsored racism throughout government institutions — all while exactly the wrong kinds of people are at all the helms.
Yet chaos presents many opportunities. The moment all hell breaks loose is the precise time to press in. So here are some ways that’s happening. Think of your own, and join in.
A longtime local Tea Party leader recently noted to me that while the Republican Party largely squandered the political opportunities the Tea Party handed them on a silver platter in the last decade, and some of the people they elected turned out to be duds, the movement still had significant success in getting a new wave of better lawmakers elected at various levels of government. Think Mike Lee and Rand Paul.
That, she said, underscores an opportunity arising with the critical race theory storm. Because CRT is so clarifying, so obvious in its evil, it is waking up people who would not as easily grasp more complex issues like Common Core and Obamacare to the fact that American institutions are corrupt at every level. Many of these people are and will be running for offices. Most of them have never held office before.
That’s excellent. Our nation very obviously needs new and better leadership, and higher-level leaders get their start in bootstrap positions like state representative and school board.
So run, citizens, run. Refine your message, get busy figuring out how to do what your people are electing you to do, then build your competence towards higher posts. If we’re going to kick the bums out — and we must — we need bushels of competent leaders to replace them. This crisis is an opportunity for better people to earn leadership posts — and we need that, badly.
Homeschool Legal Defense Association’s research director, Steven Duvall, recently disclosed a shocking set of statistics about how pandemic panic has exploded U.S. homeschooling.
Between April 2020 and the present, data collected via the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS) indicated that an estimated 22–23 million US households included school-age children.[iv] The percent of these households that had at least one homeschooled child (i.e., a child who was taught at home but not enrolled in a public or private school) was 5.4% in spring 2020, 11.1% during fall 2020, and 19.5% by May of 2021.
As I noted this spring, there is a tipping point for Americans’ trust in government schools that all the COVID chaos could push us towards. I don’t know where that tipping point is, but I don’t think it’s as high as half of Americans educating privately. It could be one-third or so.
“Once this exodus starts, it will be hard to stop,” I noted last summer before yet another year of school COVID chaos. “Parents have for years told pollsters that private education is their top choice, not public education. They haven’t left yet because it hasn’t gotten bad enough. Long-term coronavirus schooling is easily a tipping point towards ‘bad enough to finally leave.’It will likely create a cascade effect of long-term parental divestment from public schooling.”
If you combine current private school and homeschooling enrollment, we’re nearing a level of detachment from government schools the United States hasn’t seen since the secular nationalization of K-12 education began. We’re talking a watershed moment that could dramatically upend leftists’ strong strategic advantages from controlling American education, because, as I’ve repeatedly detailed, “public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers.”
Breaking leftist control of child formation is a non-negotiable precondition for an American renaissance. That process could be underway. It can’t go fast enough.
Vaclav Havel wrote a famous dissident essay about what the “powerless” could do in a political system he characterized “as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling” and that employs an “extremely flexible ideology that … is almost a secularized religion.”
In our time, the failures of our ruling class to effectively govern are sorting people into harmonized communities that solve their own problems. People are now moving states and cities to get away from the incapacity of elites in both parties to address basic human needs like sanitation, evenly applied rule of law, good employment, education, reasonable living costs, and keeping the roads maintained.
People who are paying attention are starting new publishing houses, experimenting with new artistic outlets, finding doctors who align with their values, and developing parallel networks of educating and caring for the sick outside of the utterly broken systems that elites directly control. People are questioning conventional, Big Pharma “health” prescriptions, and taking charge of their own health.
Continued repression will catalyze more of this. The more bright quants who are fired and sidelined for being too male and white, the more will be turning their genius to developing and funding pro-American hedge funds and financial instruments. The more parents disillusioned by government-sponsored racism in schools, the more they will demand to directly control taxpayer education dollars themselves rather than be endlessly looted by corrupt institutions.
Their acts of citizenship will also have the effect of creating lifeboats for the increasing numbers of cultural and political refugees our regime will continue to generate so long as it ostensibly maintains power. This will develop a vibrant private ecosystem inside the corrupted one to rescue even more people when the corrupted facade finally falls.
While it is unclear whether the Afghanistan catastrophe will mean the Biden administration returns to keeping our troops there indefinitely, the debacle will certainly curb presidents’ habit — with the recent exception of Donald Trump — of starting new foreign wars.
New Yorker foreign policy columnist Robin Wright observed after the Taliban takeover of Kabul: “Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together ‘coalition of the willing’ for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives.”
We might have to give up the Afghanistan withdrawal thanks to our military leadership’s incompetence. But at least this could make other presidential wars and “UN-led coalitions” to do heaven knows what less likely. Fewer military-industrial Hydra heads is a good thing.
Afghanistan proves our elites cannot control a resistant populace from afar. And the elites’ incompetence increases the likelihood and strength of the resistance.
Havel notes of a regime that runs on ideology, “Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
Afghanistan is a revelation that the system is a lie. It is a glitch in the Matrix that can help more people see through the ideology into reality.
Half of Americans voted for Joe Biden because they believed lies they were sold by highly influential institutions, one being that Biden is even capable of being president. They also voted for him out of susceptibility to mass manipulation campaigns.
As we have seen in totalitarian regimes such as China, Nazi Germany, Iran, Cuba, and the USSR, population compliance with government terrorism can be extremely high. The United States, however, has some things going for it, which include an unusually high proportion of citizens who are increasingly aware of what’s going on and making preparations to resist.
Despite the all-out propaganda campaign by all major institutions on Democrats’ behalf in 2020, more Americans voted for Trump that year than in 2016. Half is a better number than China and the USSR had, and there’s room for growth.
Spectacular failures like Afghanistan before the majority of the population is well under the totalitarians’ thumbs destabilize their eventual success. Such failures reveal to even more people that they’ve been duped and confused. This is a point of hope. It is a reason to keep pursuing the civic art of persuasion, instead of giving up on our fellow citizens. Some people are not persuadable, but others in fact are, and we can learn to talk to them.
As much as Biden and Democrats want to continue blaming Afghanistan and all the other coming catastrophes on Trump, even dumb people can see through that. And for once, rather than Democrats ruining the country for Republicans to deal with (usually badly) once the political pendulum swings back control of Congress, the catastrophes are happening while Democrats clearly control everything. There is nobody to blame but them.
That won’t stop them from trying to blame-shift like the cads they are, but it does put more distance between their claims and what normies can easily swallow. This means Afghanistan will help bang more nails into the coffin of the managerial progressivism that has been possibly the chief foe of Constitution-based governance in the last century.
Any political revitalization must first start with a spiritual revitalization. As the great political scientist Charles Murray has noted, presaging every positive turning point in American history has been a religious revival.
A debauched society simply cannot and will not govern itself. So self-government of the kind America’s constitutional remnant seeks is not possible without broad adherence to Christianity.
Societies don’t tend to lean into faith in the good times. Human nature being what it is, in easy times people are more likely to forget God and indulge themselves rather than develop their moral discipline.
Hard times, however, remind us what is far more important than money or our standing in the world: It’s our family, our community, and our faith. Those are the only things that can get us by when we cannot buy, borrow, or beg our way out of major problems.
The more people who cannot find solace and provision in the deposed god of technocracy, the more they might look for spiritual solace somewhere wiser, like church. Again, repentance and a return to faith are truly our only hope for a national renaissance, and people are more likely to realize that when their other options are closed off. Enlist in your local Cajun Navy, the American refugees are coming.
So, while it appears we’re in for an extended season of disruption, hardship, and confusion, this is not the time to despair and hide. It is time to pray harder, pick up a shovel, and get to work.
To any sane person, it appears our elites and their media sycophants are engaging in an unprecedented preposterous statement tournament. They must get up every day, snicker once or twice, and try to think of the most ridiculous, least verifiable piece of ludicrous prevarication they can attempt to pass off as truth. And why shouldn't they? A significant percentage of Americans seem willing to believe anything at all.
So President Biden says there are no Americans trapped in Kabul. All right, now tell us the one about the three bears. His press secretary, Jen Psaki, says we need to get the military out of Afghanistan first, so we don't risk anyone getting hurt. Yes, forget about the thousands of American civilians trapped in Kabul. Ignore the pictures of mothers throwing their babies over fences. Um, Jen, we send our troops to places specifically to confront danger and instability...and often to fight the bad guys. That's why, unlike civilians, they are armed to the teeth and wear body armor. That's why they have attack helicopters, A-10 Warthogs, missiles, rocket launchers, grenades, and submachine guns. Or used to, before the Biden administration decided to donate them to the Taliban. But we are told we can trust the Taliban, that its members are turning over a new leaf. (Perhaps moving from the 8th century to the 9th century?)
We are told the vaccines work wonderfully and are totally safe. And then told we need to start wearing masks again. And that hospitals are filling up again. And that we need a "booster" shot. We are virtually assured the coronavirus didn't come from a laboratory in Wuhan. Until we were told that it might very well have come from a laboratory in Wuhan. But, Biden says, the Chinese are Hunter's our friends., and Iran, too, poses no serious threat.
Then the Los Angeles Times trots out a headline averring: "Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You've been warned." Gee, Times, thanks for the tip. Does it make sense, though, that a Black man is a spokesperson for white supremacy? Apparently, this is not your grandfather's White supremacy movement. (Were there many Black Imperial Wizards in the Ku Klux Klan?) I mean, did the rank and file not notice that their precious White supremacy organization was filling up with Black folks? If they did and didn't care, and if they like Larry Elder, they really aren't particularly racist, are they? Have they just not been paying attention, or have they gone soft? Or maybe there isn't that big of a problem here, and everyone can just settle down and go home.
What can be said with certainty is that "The Los Angeles Times is the face of media idiocy.
The United States was founded on a healthy — and historically deeply warranted — distrust of government. Today, the only thing many Americans are skeptical about is the truth.
Past this point, no free republic, indeed no viable society, can long continue.
The nation’s attention these past two weeks has focused nearly exclusively on Kabul, and rightly so given that the city has become the scene of the largest hostage situation in American history and a vivid image of the decline of Pax Americana abroad.
But Americans don’t need to travel 7,500 miles to get a first-hand glimpse of the end of American order. In many of our own country’s major cities, gangs of masked thugs and criminals do what they please — and our far-better-armed police aren’t allowed to stop them and protect the rest of us.
Take one August Sunday in Portland, Oregon, where two days ago political gangs roamed freely, beating people, including women, and even opening fire downtown. Meanwhile the police, who have been threatened with government action if they intervene, were nowhere to be seen.
The breakdown of law and order was crafted in the offices of politicians, and its results are as immediate as they are sickening: A beautiful port city is now a frequent host to pitched battles between masked and helmeted left- and right-wing mobs spanning across city blocks; paintballs, pepper spray, fireworks, and beatings in broad daylight; and while innocent civilians flee the violence under a cloudy gray sky, the only sounds audible are of rioting — with nary a police siren in the distance.
It’s long not been safe to be a reporter in Portland: Just Sunday, Antifa targeted independent journalist and photographer Maranie Staab. “You f-cking endangered people by flying to f-cking Colombia and endangering everyone by opening them up to COVID, you little slut,” one masked and armored man screamed at Staab, referring to her June reporting on violence in South America.
Minutes later, Antifa members pepper-sprayed her, knocked her to the ground, and reportedly broke her phone and damaged her camera, yelling, “How many times do we have to f-cking tell you?”
After other reporters moved her away from the mob and helped her wash out her eyes and mouth, an Antifa member sprayed them (and their cameras) with more paint. Once again, police were nowhere to be seen or even heard.
That same day, during riots and demonstrations downtown, a man opened fire on Antifa members, who reportedly fired back. Police were nowhere to be heard or seen, though they arrested the man minutes later.
So where are the police, exactly? Law and order has slowly, and then rapidly, broken down in Portland for years, with images of besieged courthouses, lawless “autonomous zones,” open drugs and violent crime, and roving, organized mobs hitting honest newspapers across the United States nearly every week. Indeed, Sunday’s festivities were organized to celebrate a violent clash that had taken place the year before.
Amid it all, local and national politicians have repeatedly attacked and undermined the men and women who maintain order at great personal risk, cutting the police budget by millions and threatening further cuts along the way.
Then on July 19, the governor signed a new law that opened police officers using non-lethal, anti-mob force to personal prosecution. This, independent journalist Andy Ngo reports, was “the final nail for an effective permanent police stand down.”
Therein lies an interesting connection to the most recent disaster we’ve been watching abroad: In Portland, city leaders demand say their refusal to back their own police or enforce their own laws “is a national problem that demands national resources,” adding that “the idea that Portland, or any city, can single handedly defeat white nationalism is a fallacy.” Across the country in Washington, White House leaders pretend 10-15,000 stranded Americans, a captured military base, hijacked American equipment in enemy hands, and outnumbered soldiers and Marines in a civilian airport surrounded by the Taliban is just what all withdrawals look like.
All of this is completely false, of course — both these crises, in their immediate senses, have been created by the foolish decisions of the people directly in charge of them. We don’t need a time traveler from 2010 to teach us how to maintain peace in our cities, just as we don’t need Alexander the Great to teach us to remove civilians and equipment before the military departs and to hold bases until they aren’t needed anymore.
Our country here and abroad is held captive by radical and lying politicians unwilling to tell the truth or face it. Drive into your closest major city anywhere in the country and there’s a good chance it’s gotten a lot worse than it was just a few years ago. Look at any foreign paper and see that our word is worth a lot less than it was just a few weeks ago.
Neither of these is, or were, inevitable: They are the conscious decisions of a country in decline. We don’t have much time to put things right, but we know what we have to do to fix these things; the answers aren’t arcane. It already might be too late, but it’s worth the fight.