“President Joe Biden continues to humiliate the United States,” Joseph Klein whines at neoconservative rag FrontPageMag, “by letting the Taliban terrorists dictate the terms of his surrender.”

Furthermore, writes Klein, “the president is clearly willfully blind to ISIS in Afghanistan being a long-term threat to the American homeland. … Biden has shown zero concern for any al Qaeda threat emerging from Afghanistan.”

Oddly missing: Any mea culpas for the neoconservative policy pillars that created,  and fueled the rise of, al Qaeda. And of the Taliban. And of ISIS.

In the 1970s, former Trotskyites like David Horowitz (founder of FrontPageMag), Jean Kirkpatrick (Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations), and Paul Wolfowitz (deputy Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush) wormed their  way from “the New Left”  into  the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and on into the GOP, transforming themselves from prophets of Trotsky’s “global socialist revolution” into  advocates for “global democratic revolution.”

Their support — as expressed from positions in the American foreign policy bureaucracy — for giving the Soviet Union “its own Vietnam” in Afghanistan resulted in the birth of al Qaeda and the rise of the Taliban. Their support for a continued US presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War led directly to the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan. Their support for the US invasion of Iraq led directly to the birth of ISIS.

With predictable regularity, every jar of pickles neoconservatives touch at the foreign policy grocery store falls off the shelf and bursts on the floor.

It takes a lot of nerve to scream at the janitor tasked with the unsavory job of cleaning up their gory messes that he’s missing a spot. And more nerve yet to insist that if the janitor will just help them spill more blood — American, Afghan, and Arab — on the floor, surely all their wildest dreams will eventually magically come true.

American politicians have spent the last 40 years chasing the fantasies of the younger crop of Republican Trotskyites. And before that, they followed a previous generation, led by James Burnham (former leader of America’s Trotskyite sect, later co-founder of “conservative” journal National Review) down the primrose path in Vietnam.

In every instance and without exception, the results of American politicians listening to neoconservatives have been disastrous for Americans and for the world.

They’ll never sit down and shut up, but we can and should tune them out.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

We’re still hearing a lot about “mask mandates” in COVID-19 era America, but my experiences (and those of acquaintances) over the last few days suggest that the supposed mandates have functionally become mere advisories.

In my opinion, that’s a good thing. Generally speaking, we’re all better off when personal health decisions are left to individuals than when government presumes to make those decisions for everyone.

Many Americans began voluntarily donning masks when “public health authorities” were still yelling at us not to, and drastically reducing our outings and interactions before governments started trying to put us all (well, all of us toffs who could stay home and watch Netflix while “essential” peons delivered our groceries) under house arrest. Policy is a trailing, not leading, indicator.

Grain of salt warning: “The plural of the word anecdote,”  Kenneth Kernaghan and P. K. Kuruvilla wisely noted in 1982, “is not data.” I’m not equipped to conduct a nationwide, well-controlled, peer-reviewed study on the subject. I can only tell you what I’ve noticed and what others I know have seen.

New Mexico blogger Kent McManigal notes at  “Hooligan Libertarian” that, although that state’s government has re-imposed its previous mask mandate, about 25% of shoppers seem to be ignoring it, and that stores aren’t hassling those shoppers about it.

I follow the news closely by profession, but I didn’t even notice when my county’ s government (Alachua County, Florida) re-imposed its mask mandate. My wife mentioned it to me just as we were about to walk into our neighborhood grocery store.

I didn’t have a mask with me, and was about to return to the car, when I noticed two things: First, the store hadn’t put up signs at the door advising shoppers of the re-imposed mandate. Those signs had been there throughout the first mandate. Second, looking through the door, I could see unmasked shoppers inside, and nobody appeared to be giving them any trouble. So I just went in. My experience matched Kent’s. More than half the shoppers were masked, but nobody gave the unmasked so much as a cross look.

On our next outing, I brought a mask with me, just in case.

At one store, the proprietor had been clear through the pandemic that it was not his job to enforce county mask mandates. The county government sign wasn’t back up, and the “masks optional” sign still was. I shopped unmasked without incident.

At another, the county government sign WAS up, but I saw not a single employee, and only a few customers, wearing masks. When in Rome …

A third store had its own — not government-printed or referencing any law — “masks required” sign. I masked up, went inside, and noticed that most (not all) customers were complying, and that nobody was beating anyone up over it.

I don’t much care whether people choose to wear masks or not. If it makes you feel better, knock yourself out.

But it’s good to see Americans deciding for themselves instead of just doing as they’re told.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

George Orwell’s classic dystopia 1984 describes a future (as of 1949, the year of its publication) in which a totalitarian state attempts to control both present and future by modifying the past. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, “rectifying” past news accounts:

“[T]he Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise … that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.”

Disturbing, yes, but a prediction fail on Orwell’s part. The political class’s openly stated desire for a Ministry of Truth to suppress “misinformation” on social media notwithstanding, there’s little evidence that it needs any such brute mechanism to let it have its way with the facts.

Circa 2021, mainstream media spend most of their ink and bandwidth uncritically regurgitating, and affirming their faith in, the political establishment’s preferred narrative of the moment.

The collapse of Afghanistan is a perfect example.

How many cable news talking heads have we watched nodding at each other like chickens pecking corn as they discuss how, well, of COURSE the US had to invade in Afghanistan in 2001, because the Taliban wouldn’t turn over Osama bin Laden? Quite a few.

How many of those same talking heads even mention that the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden upon presentation of evidence that he was behind the 9/11 attacks? Or that then-President George W. Bush declined the offer and chose to invade anyway? Any?

It’s not just Afghanistan or foreign policy.

From the delta variant panic-pandering of “public health authorities” and mainstream media, one wouldn’t know that COVID-19 deaths in the US are at a quarter of their pandemic high. Or, given the constant emphasis on “the chillllllllllldren,” that COVID-19 has killed fewer than 400 Americans (out of a total of nearly 625,000) in the under-18 age bracket since the pandemic began.

Those “public health authorities,” with the aid of compliant media, have given themselves whiplash over the last 18 months from constantly reversing themselves on policy and science, entreating us all to trust them and hide under our beds.

No Ministry of Truth had to “rectify” the public record to put these whoppers over on us.

The information is freely available and easily accessible.

But the mainstream media either don’t want us to know it,or can’t be bothered to know it themselves. And, for the most part, the same is true of the rest of us.

As Orwell’s language framers would put it, “doubleplusungood.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY