Snowflakes: Afghanistan is Your Future

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The plight of Americans left behind in Afghanistan is described as “dire”. U.S. Senator Tom Cotton has set up a hotline for crisis counseling; Biden, still hiding at Camp David, said through his vacationing press secretary that he hopes the Taliban will be nice and let Americans go peacefully.

THIS is what the military and federal government of the United States of America have come to. The military founded by George Washington that defeated the British, later liberated the world from Nazism and Communism, and crushed ISIS only a couple of years ago is now THIS. Why? Because the fish rots from the head down, and Joe Biden, along with all who actively support him, are rotten, through and through.

It’s truly a metaphor for what’s to come. The 30-year-old snowflakes who draw government checks and live in their childhood bedrooms claiming fear of COVID; or the more sophisticated snowflakes who trade on government perks and favors in pursuit of the unearned … They will yawn or sneer at the collapse of American credibility in Kabul and around the world. But the moral credibility that once made “America” mean something, and the fiscal credibility that those government payments or perks made possible, should matter to these snowflakes.

Reality will hit them at some point. The Joe Biden regime is just like any other regime that will follow it in our rigged, utterly corrupt system that once made up a republic. The very Joe Biden who literally hides at Camp David and refuses to talk to anyone is the same one who will abandon the millions who count on ever-expanding benefits — benefits that will do them no good when inflation grows into the double digits, or beyond, and all the freebies in the world will do them no good in a collapsing economy. Yet they will vote for their own destruction again and again — screaming, as they go down, that nothing was ever their fault.

Take a look at those poor, physically mangled, abandoned souls clinging to US military planes fleeing Afghanistan, you snowflakes. Before long, that will be YOU.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Don’t Trust the Brain Trust

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The ghost of FDR is everywhere, haunting both Washington and New York. The terrible trouble is that the minds in power have confused an economic wrecker with an angel of mercy. They are following his confusions and prescriptions day to day in an attempted repeat of the longest economic calamity in modern American history.

They have looked at the history of the New Deal and completely misunderstood it, believing the civics-book claptrap about how FDR saved us from the Depression, whereas the fact is that FDR’s theories and policies lengthened and deepened it to the point that the only way out that the Roosevelt administration saw was war.

The great theoretical error of the New Dealers was to confuse the symptom of low prices with the causes of the economic downturn. The real problem was that prices were massively inflated before the stock-market crash of 1929. The correction had to occur and would have occurred peacefully, if not wholly painlessly, had the government not intervened.

No government in all of human history that has waged war on prices has won.

The Great Depression is exhibit A.

First there was Hoover with his attack on the “bitter-end liquidationists,” whose advice he summarily rejected. Instead he increased taxes, regulated against short selling, attempted to expand liquidity and the money supply, attempted to maintain existing wage rates, extended loans via government, and bailed out debtors with bankruptcy laws. For more on Hoover’s antimarket program, see Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression.

Roosevelt took office and extended this program, while rhetorically claiming that it was the free-market policy of the Hoover administration that failed. Today we see Bush’s attack on speculators and the mediawide attempt to claim that the meltdown is caused by unregulated markets run amok. No doubt the next president, whoever he may be, will continue this crusade against markets, pretending as if the Fed and the Bush administration haven’t been trying antimarket means of rescue for fully two years, with each attempt backfiring.

But now let’s look forward to the next step in the war on falling prices in the 1930s. FDR took office under the promise that he would curb the big spending of the Hoover administration. The tune changed once he took office. Like Hoover before him, he denounced the rich and powerful speculators, bankers, and corporations he blamed for bad economic times. Even as he was saying these things, he called together the people he regarded as the most powerful and important corporate, banking, and labor interests — together with a gaggle of professors from Columbia — and essentially asked them what they wanted to get the economy going again.

This was the Brain Trust that set the pattern for all of Washington’s activities from then to the present day. John T. Flynn, in his masterful book The Roosevelt Myth, described the first round of the New Deal as

that vast hippodrome, that hectic, whirling, dizzy three-ring circus with the NRA in one ring, the AAA in another, the Relief Act in another, with General Johnson, Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins popping the whips, while all around under the vast tent a whole drove of clowns and dervishes — the Henry Morgenthaus and Huey Longs and Dr. Townsends and Upton Sinclairs and a host of crackpots of every variety — leaped and danced and tumbled about and shouted in a great harlequinade of government, until the tent came tumbling down upon the heads of the cheering audience and the prancing buffoons.

What did the elites gathered around FDR demand? Higher prices (of course), uniform industrial codes on labor and prices, production controls, an end to competition from below, security for labor unions, guaranteed credits, import tariffs — and also the police power they needed to enforce all this. The model here was Mussolini’s Italy, which was regarded at the time as an ideal system of industrial management. Of course, antitrust laws were shelved as the government itself set out to create as many trusts as possible.

What came out of these meetings was the all-around industrial planning fiasco called the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the National Recovery Administration. The head was former draft administrator General Hugh Johnson, who brought to the effort every propaganda trick he had learned from his kidnapping years. He began with a central plan of wages, working hours, prices, and production quotas. He went on the air, to the papers, to billboards, movies, and everything else to whip up a frenzy.

There was a symbol of compliance: The Blue Eagle. FDR said on the radio that “soldiers wear a bright badge to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades. Those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance. That bright badge is the Blue Eagle.” And, added Johnson, may “God have mercy on anyone who attempts to trifle with that bird.”

And you know what? It is a complete disgrace that business supported it all — for a while.

Flynn tells of police raids of factories, as workers were lined up and interrogated to make sure that they weren’t working overtime and weren’t accepting less than the government-approved minimum. Consumers were arrested for paying less than the approved minimum prices. A tailor named Jack Magid in New Jersey was arrested and jailed for charging 35 cents instead of 40 cents to press a pair of pants. In time, the NRA became unenforceable, as black markets sprung up in every industry. The crackdown became worse, with nighttime raids on factories, and bureaucrats chopping down doors with axes to make sure that no one was sewing clothes. The NRA staff ballooned from 60 employees to 6,000 at the national level.

The entire thing became a war on production to benefit a handful of elites, all in the name of keeping prices up, all on the profound misunderstanding that boosting prices would boost production, whereas the opposite was true. Finally the Supreme Court came to the rescue and declared the whole Soviet-like scheme unconstitutional, but, by that time, it was clear that it was unworkable and doomed to failure.

At the very same time, other sectors such as banking and agriculture were being administered by other destructive schemes, all based on economic error. The result was fantastic waste, disastrous attacks on freedom and productivity, a regimentation of the entire country under a dictator, and a prolongation of the Depression, which went on and on.

No matter how many disasters FDR created — and it was nonstop — and no matter how much his ridiculous “rabbits from the hat” were exposed as economically harebrained, with every new bureau, every new law, every new initiative, the economy continued to sink.

The New Deal is a paradigmatic case of how to turn a downturn into a depression. That US leaders regard this as a model to follow does not speak very well of their economic literacy, and it doesn’t bode well for our future.

On the other hand, if you want to see how to handle a crisis, consider the Panic of 1819. Never heard of it? That’s because it came and went, and that’s because the government did nothing about it.

[Originally published October 7, 2008.]

Llewellyn Rockwell

Is Life Worth Chains and Slavery ?

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“It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

– Patrick Henry, Speech at the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia (23 March 1775)

Frank Chodorov, Part II

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Chodorov’s rejection of war was motivated largely by the growth of the state that accompanied it and that savaged individual freedom. Chapter 11 of his autobiography, entitled “Isolationism,” summarized his position:

When the enemy is at the city gates, or the illusion that he is coming… the tendency is to turn over to the captain all the powers he deems necessary to keep the enemy away. Liberty is downgraded in favor of protection. But, when the enemy is driven away, the state finds reason enough to hold onto its acquired powers.… It is inherent in the character of the state.

Chodorov stressed war’s devastation of economic liberty as well:

Taxes imposed ostensibly “for the duration” have become permanent, the bureaucracy built up during the war has not been dismantled, and interventions in the economy necessary for the prosecution of war are now held to be necessary for the welfare of the people. Whichever side [of the war] won, the American people were the losers.

The American people were burdened with permanent bureaucracy, more restrictive laws, higher taxation, militarism, and inflation because interventionism’s main goal was to expand the state’s sphere of control. Why did people accept such violations of freedom during peacetime? In large part because the state instilled constant fear of an “enemy” into them.

The Cold War and McCarthyism

Chodorov saw the Cold War for what it was: a continuation of interventionism in a different guise. The Cold War is generally dated from the 1947 Truman Doctrine through to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine was a foreign policy measure that sought to contain the Soviet Union and communism, which were viewed as quintessential threats to America. Direct military involvement was not its primary strategy. Instead, it provided financial and other assistance to regimes that appeared vulnerable to communism; this led America to support oppressive regimes that were perceived to be anti-communist.

The analysis (Chodorov’s journal) immediately began to attack the Truman Doctrine as “dangerously imperialist” and futile because “communism is already the religion of Europe.” Why? The April 1947 issue explained. American involvement in Europe had nourished communism through war and post-war policies that caused hopelessness and poverty. People were prevented “from producing by destroying the tools of production, by condoning wholesale robbery and the rooting up of populations.” The solution: embrace a laissez-faire attitude toward Europe; that is, leave Europeans alone to reconstruct their markets and their lives.

Chodorov’s main reason for a laissez-faire approach was not benevolence toward Europe, although he certainly felt genuine compassion. His purpose was to spare Americans the domestic impact of interventionism.

There is … an even more vital argument in favor of minding our home affairs. If we go along with this poking into the business of Europe, what will happen to the liberty we have left in America? Already there is a “Red” witchhunt afoot, and experience tells us that … the definition of Red will include every person who raises his voice against the going order. Mass hysteria will conveniently support such a definition.

The “Red Scare” — also known as “McCarthyism,” named after Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin — was a tool of interventionism; it stirred up politically useful fear of “the enemy” and rage toward him. The fear became hysteria in 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device, eliminating America’s nuclear monopoly.

McCarthy’s ostensible goal in his Senate investigations in the early 1950s was to expose communist infiltration of the American government and society by which radicals sought to overthrow the system. Suspected communists were generally subpoenaed and asked to turn over the names of other so-called subversives.

A favored tactic of persuasion was to blacklist an uncooperative person, which often led to this person being fired and rendered unemployable. Since most hearings were based on unsubstantiated charges and flaunted due process, the term “McCarthyism” has become a synonym for character assassination and unjust proceedings that damage or destroy its target. The hearings were akin to the show trials for which the Soviet Union was rightfully condemned.

Chodorov viewed the hearings as heresy trials and hypocritical. They were heresy trials because people were being persecuted for their beliefs, not for any harm they had inflicted on the person or property of another. Moreover, the act of punishing beliefs was extraordinarily dangerous on a domestic level. “If men are punished for espousing communism,” he warned, “shall we stop there? Once we deny the right to be wrong we put a vise on the human mind” and turn to “ruthlessness.” On a foreign level, using force against an idea was futile because ideas cannot be killed no matter how many people die or accept bribes.

The trials were hypocritical because the “judge” believed in an all-powerful state; they simply wanted the power to be in the right hands — theirs. The men who sat in judgment never asked those in the hot seat if they advocated state power, Chodorov observed. This was because they too “worship power.” He interpreted the question, “Are you or were you a member of the Communist Party?” to mean “Have you aligned yourself with the Moscow branch of the church?” To the extent federal agencies had a communist problem, Chodorov offered an easy solution. “The only thing to do, if you want to rid the bureaucracy of Communists, is to abolish the bureaucracy.”

After a few years, McCarthyism abruptly halted. A turning point came in 1954 with a nationally televised 36-day hearing on accusations against U.S. Army officers and civilian officials. The American public watched McCarthy’s savage tactics with disgust. When Joseph Nye Welch, special counsel for the army, proclaimed to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency,
sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy lost public support. Unfortunately, at this point, interventionism and bureaucracy were so embedded into the American fabric that McCarthy’s fall from grace did not diminish them.

The Old Right was fading. Under the leadership of William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review, the New Right was ascending; it embraced a strong foreign policy of intervention. In The Freeman of August 1954, Buckley summed up the schism in conservative ranks through one question, “What are we going to do about the Soviet Union?” On one side were “containment conservatives” and isolationists who detested communism but believed the domestic consequences of a militant foreign policy were prohibitive. Chodorov fit into the later category, although he would have demanded to be labeled “an individualist”; in a 1956 letter to National Review, Chodorov wrote, “I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose.”

On the other side were “interventionist conservatives” who wanted to launch aggressive action to destroy Soviet power. Buckley correctly predicted the fissure would “ultimately … separate us.” The interventionist conservatives soon dominated and became the New Right.

The later Chodorov

Chodorov sharply differed from conservatives on several issues. He did not share their embrace of big business, for example, because it rushed to compromise with the state in return for privileges that harmed Americans. This not only betrayed true capitalism, it also opened the door to Marxism. Communism would arrive in the United States not on Main Street, he believed, but through Wall Street.

Nevertheless, Chodorov was held in high esteem by the conservative movement. One reason: In 1953, Chodorov founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), with Buckley serving as president. ISI was the first national organization designed for conservative students and campus outreach. ISI listed its core beliefs as limited
government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and Judeo-Christian values. It became very influential and had 50,000 members by the end of the twentieth century. Now it is known as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Another reason Chodorov garnered the respect of conservatives was because he wrote and edited prolifically, often debating prominent members of the New Right. In 1951, Chodorov became the associate editor of the then-isolationist periodical Human Events with which analysis merged. He held this post until June 1954, after which he resumed the editorship of The Freeman for a brief time. Books became his primary focus, however. They included One is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (1952), The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), The Rise and Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces that Underlie Social Institutions (1959), and Out of Step (1962).

Chodorov died on December 28, 1966, after having a major stroke in 1961 while teaching at Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School. He had lived through America’s watershed period on foreign policy: World War I and II, the Truman Doctrine, and the Red Scare. After this, America abandoned the isolationism that had such deep roots in its history and soul. As Chodorov foresaw, the state swelled in size, and Big Business became its partner in interventionism through the military-industrial complex.

Chodorov’s legacy is best remembered for its many positive effects. Just as he looked to Albert Jay Nock as a role model and for inspiration, generations of libertarians have held Chodorov up as a paragon of intellectual integrity and indefatigable commitment to freedom. In an excerpt from One is a Crowd — entitled Time for Another Revolution — he wrote:

Were the disposition of the current crop of Americans comparable to that of their forbears, a new revolution, to regain the profit of the first one, would be in order. There is far more justification for it now than there was in 1776. But, people do not do what reason dictates; they do what their disposition impels them to do. And the American disposition of the 1950s is flaccidly placid, obsequious and completely without a sense of freedom; it has been molded into that condition by the proceeds of the Sixteenth Amendment [which imposed a Federal income tax]. We are Americans geographically, not in the tradition. In the circumstances, a return to the Constitutional immunities must wait for a miracle.

In a real sense, Chodorov created the miraculous revolution for which he longed. He was the man behind the man who sculpted modern libertarianism in the 1960s. And, true to Chodorov’s gentle nature, his revolution is both peaceful and persistent in its demand for individual liberty.

This article was originally published in the July 2021 edition of Future of Freedom.

Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster Proves: There Are No Accidents

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Biden badly bungled Afghanistan. He took the military out of the country without even first securing our weapons and technology. The Taliban, one of the primary groups responsible for 9/11, is back in power, free to strike again. It’s incomprehensible that the nation who won a Revolution, prevailed in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and over ISIS could reach this point. But here we are.

People are quick to label Biden incompetent. And demented. It’s true; he is both of these things. But Biden didn’t achieve high office through his own skill. He was put there by people and entities — tech giants, fascist billionaires like Soros and Steve Jobs’ widow, the Chinese Communists, and others — with both the will and the skill to do so.

Biden’s incompetence is no accident. His regime, like his party, is out to destroy the United States as we’ve known it. Whatever remnants or fragments of individual rights, private property, and fearless defense of liberty still exist must be eradicated. Biden’s party, Biden’s Congress, Biden’s Supreme Court (including paid off, blackmailed or otherwise terrified conservatives) and, most of all, Biden’s media are all on the same page: They want the United States to lose because they want freedom to end. They want capitalism to lose. But they only detest capitalism because it means economic freedom. They have no problem with “crony capitalism”, which is actually economic fascism, i.e., a way to control others through money; it’s FREEDOM they are after.

They will not stop until there is no freedom left. They’re doing everything conceivably possible at home: outlawing fossil fuels; devastating the currency through inflationary spending; massively raising taxes; imposing crippling regulation; shuttering small business with mask mandates and by making people “show their papers” with vaccine passports; and driving up the cost of fuel to paralyzing levels. None of these policies are accidents; they are all deliberate. These are the actions of a regime and a movement HELLBENT on the utter obliteration of freedom.

So don’t call Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan an example of “incompetence”. In today’s world, there are no accidents. There are no conspiracy theories, either. It’s not a conspiracy to point out that every single action of this regime is the exact kind of action you would expect if a Nazi or Communist party had taken over the government, and was (1) setting the government at war with the people and (2) destroying all cultural and political remains of the previous government. The facts overwhelmingly, and with 100 percent predictability, support this assertion.

So why is the collapse of American military force, not just in Afghanistan, but everywhere, even a tiny bit of a surprise.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Evidence is in: The COVID Vaccine is a Failure

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In my efforts to provide good information in place of Big Pharma-serving propaganda about Covid and the vaccine, I have reported to you from the official databases the large number of deaths and health issues associated with the vaccine. For some age groups the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus.

I have also reported to you from official reports that the largest percentage of new cases are associated with those who are fully vaccinated. The question is: are these actually new cases or are they vaccine-associated illnesses?

Following the conclusions of a Nobel prize-winner in medicine and other top level experts, I have attributed what the medical establishment calls new cases, breakthroughs, delta variant, to adverse responses to the vaccine itself, thus questioning the existence of the delta variant. But after listening to Dr. Robert Malone, it appears that there are variants also, and will be more variants. Thus the new breakout of what are reported as Covid cases consists of both adverse reactions to the vaccine and illnesses from the new variants.

Dr. Malone is the inventor of the mRNA technology that was used to develop the mRNA vaccine. He is a member of the establishment. He is not a kook, conspiracy theorist, or anti-vaxxer. He is so solid a member of the establishment that the Department of Defense has relied on him for years. Where Dr. Malone differs from the establishment is in his unwillingness to keep quiet when he sees that the ruling Covid narrative does not fit the facts.

Dr. Malone explains (at the 50 minute mark) that what the vaccine is doing, in addition to killing and injuring people’s health, which he does not emphasize, is evolving the virus, in a manner of speaking, training it to escape vaccines. In other words, the vaccine itself amplifies variants that cannot be prevented by vaccines.

You can listen to his explanations in the first 57 minutes of this video address to a professional group of educated people in Silicon Valley. Even if you are not well educated, Malone speaks with a clarity that will allow you to understand the gist of the explanation. https://rumble.com/vl0zpf-dr.-robert-malone-the-liberty-forum-8-10-2021.html

The first 25 minutes are taken up with Malone’s explanation of who he is, his background and experience. He explains the origin and reason for the official public health policy that experts, no matter how distinguished, are censored when they depart from the official (and ever-changing) CDC, NIH, WHO, FDA narrative. In other words, the official public health bureaucracies have a monopoly on the explanation. He explains that the mainstream media is interlocked with the public health bureaucracies and acts as censoring agent. He speaks with humor. He describes being “fact checked” and deplatformed by a high school dropout employed to shutdown “misinformation,” which is everything that diverges from the official narrative of the day. We have reached the point in our absurdity where distinguished scientists are censored by total dumbshits.

Beginning at the 35 minute mark, Malone gets into the heart of the dilemma we face. He makes it crystal clear that the authorities were wrong and that there is no hope that vaccines are the answer. He makes it clear that the delta variant is going to run through the population and no amount of vaccination, masks, and lockdowns can do anything about it. The focus must be switched to treatment. There are known effective treatments, and more are under development and testing. Malone himself was cured by Ivermectin.

Fortunately, he reports, the delta variant is less serious than Covid-19, but future variants might not be if we continue to use a vaccine that trains new variants to escape immune systems.

For the first time in history, the world’s population has been used for mass clinical testing of an experimental vaccine. The evidence is piling up. Official reporting databases show extraordinary numbers of deaths and injuries associated with the Covid vaccine. The vast majority of new cases are associated with the fully vaccinated. The fully vaccinated spread the virus as easily as unvaccinated Covid patients according to the CDC and Dr. Fauci himself. The vaccine is associated with spontaneous abortions. These are all facts now quietly acknowledged by the bungling public health bureaucracies, but still mainly kept from the people.

The public health bureaucracies do not know how to respond to the vaccine failure as they bet the entire ball game on the mRNA vaccine. All the hopes and claims associated with the vaccine were mistaken. It is a long limb to climb back, especially when they have no other policy to suggest.

Not knowing what to do, the CDC recommends more jabs with the toxic vaccine. https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/cdc-panel-recommends-third-covid-19-vaccine-dose-for-immunocompromised_3948012.html?utm_source=News&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-08-13-3&mktids=092db3c2207e302e76724bb7ec9567e0&est=%2F8lqto%2B7%2BWPg%2BZW0EFu7j%2BNb4wY4dqytO%2FhsQbKFOqNMqq9OCLh7%2Fg%3D%3D

All the “fact check” mechanisms put in place to silence those who understand what is happening are still in place and still censoring the experts who have real solutions.

Clearly, the suppression of experts must now stop. The health dilemma that the ignorance and arrogance of public health officials, dumbshit politicians, and dumbshit media have trapped us in can only be resolved by open debate among the world’s experts. No more controlled explanations, or we may all die if not from the vaccine then from a variant created by the vaccine.

Ivermectin Has Stopped Covid in India and the Media Covers Up the Good News

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/indias-ivermectin-blackout

Covid Financed by NIH Has Brought Totalitarianism to the World

Pressure on Unvaccinated Intensifies

https://www.globalresearch.ca/pressure-unvaccinated-intensifies/5752891

Those Who Protest against the “Official” Covid-19 Narrative are Categorized as “Psychopaths”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/collective-narcissism-and-the-dark-triad-those-who-protest-against-the-official-covid-19-narrative-are-categorized-as-psychopaths-is-it-a-witch-hunt/5722151

CDC Is Murder Incorporated

CDC’s Own Statistics Show 1,270 Fetal Deaths Following COVID Shots but CDC Continues to Recommend Pregnant Women Get COVID Injections

https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-own-stats-show-1270-premature-fetal-deaths-following-covid-shots-recommend-pregnant-women-get-covid-injections/5752897

If you take the vaccine, this could be your fate

https://www.bitchute.com/video/8I4NlpjAsaL3/

Paul Craig Roberts

Who Lost America’s Longest War ?

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In April, President Joe Biden told the nation he would have all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack ever on the continental United States.

Given the turn of events of the past week, that 20th anniversary may be celebrated by a triumphant Taliban, now on the cusp of victory over the Americans and their Afghan allies, with gruesome public executions of their surrendered and captured enemies.

Sept. 11, 2021, could see U.S. Marines and diplomats fleeing Kabul to escape the retribution of the Taliban whom we ousted in 2001.

Consider. From Friday, a week ago, to today, the Taliban have overrun 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals.

Mazar-e-Sharif in the north is now surrounded. Kandahar and Herat, second and third largest cities, are under siege. The Kandahar-Kabul road has been cut. The defense minister escaped assassination in the capital. The government’s media director did not. The Taliban now control half of the 400 regions of Afghanistan and two-thirds of its territory.

Some Afghan soldiers have fought bravely. Others have retreated into their bases, surrendered, or fled into neighboring countries such as Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. An entire Afghan army corps with its U.S. weapons, equipment and vehicles was surrendered in Kunduz city.

U.S. military say the fall of Kabul could come within 90 days, with some saying privately the regime could fall to the Taliban within a month.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has summarized the situation:

“The complete, utter failure of the Afghan national army, absent our hand-holding, to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective democratic central government in a nation that has never had one.”

The reality of that grim assessment raises many questions.

Who is responsible for the colossal U.S. failure in Afghanistan? Who is responsible for America’s impending defeat in her longest war?

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. lost 2,500 troops with 20,000 wounded and invested $1 trillion to create an Afghan army, only to see that army crumble and disintegrate as soon as we departed.

Wednesday, Biden conceded that truth:

“Look, we spent over $1 trillion over 20 years; we trained and equipped … over 300,000 Afghan forces. Afghan leaders have to come together. They’ve got to fight for themselves.”

We are facing in Afghanistan a wipeout of the investment of a generation to convert Afghanistan into a democracy with the ability to hold the allegiance of its people and to defend itself.

Why did we fail?

Did the U.S. generals, statesmen, politicians and journalists who went to Afghanistan during these last two decades, and came back to testify to our steady progress, delude themselves? Or did they deceive us?

How many U.S. generals knew what was going on but declined to risk their careers by telling Congress or the country that the Afghan army and regime we had stood up would likely collapse like a house of cards once the Americans departed and they had to face the Taliban alone?

Today, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, is in Qatar threatening the Taliban that if they overrun the country and impose a victor’s peace, they risk being denied diplomatic recognition by the U.S. and its Western allies and a forfeiture of future foreign aid.

But to brand the Taliban terrorists and pariahs is not new to them. What they seek is something for which they have proven they are willing to die.

What is critical for them is to restore the Taliban to their previous dominance; to create an Islamic Emirate; to make themselves the moral, social and political arbiters of a more purely Islamic Afghanistan.

And to be rid of the outsiders and their alien values.

They want to be able to stand up and say to the Muslim world: “We have shown you how to do it. We fought America, the world superpower, for 20 years until we forced the Americans, tails between their legs, to get out of our land, and then put their puppets up against a wall.”

While our strategic defeat will leave Americans reluctant to attempt any such future imperial interventions, there needs to be an accounting.

The questions that need answering:

Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

The Taliban’s God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy. In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

Why Inflation Now ?

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Inflation is back. In a big way. And, horrifying as it is to contemplate, it could lead to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation brought down pre-Nazi Germany and Venezuela, among other places. Hyperinflation, which involves the total devaluing of the currency, means the kiss of death for an economy, and a society.

How did we suddenly get so much inflation? To understand it better, I recommend the writings of the best economists. I have read Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt and George Reisman extensively. Also, read the works of Frederic Bastiat.

With inflation, the government “prints” or creates more money than the economy needs. This is what happened after the so-called pandemic of 2020, although it has continued into 2021 and, if Democrat Communists realize their dreams, indefinitely into the future. Through redistribution of wealth, and programs such as open-ended unemployment benefits at higher rates than the market pays for jobs, forgiveness of student loans, and all the rest, the government has poured funny money — thanks to the Federal Reserve’s virtually unlimited power — into the hands of consumers. Any economist will tell you this has the effect of artificially creating demand. “Artificially” means there is, thanks to this money poured into the citizenry for “free”, more demand for goods and services than there otherwise would have been in a pandemic and its aftermath, or any other context where there’s an economic downturn.

I saw a statistic yesterday that inflation in the United States is going up at 5 percent a year already, and climbing, while in other industrialized countries like Japan it’s way down at under 1 percent, or maybe 1 or 2 percent. There’s a reason: The United States, initially under Trump and the Republican Senate in 2020, and massively under Biden and the Democratic Congress in 2021, has spent like there’s no tomorrow. The debt and the deficits are piling up to incomprehensible levels, levels beyond what even ten years ago most would have considered acceptable for fighting a war to save the country from destruction. It’s clear that neither party intends to stop the spending. So we can expect more and more inflation.

Put simply: When the government creates more money than would otherwise have existed in a free market based on, say, a gold standard rather than a politicized Federal Reserve, then there’s more demand for goods and services than would otherwise have been the case. When the government hands out trillions in “free money”, it drives up demand relative to supply, which in turn raises prices. This explains the supply chain, lumber, housing, food and employment shortages, in part. These things are only going to get worse as the government continues to spend, and spend, and spend, and pour trillions of “free” dollars into the market. It’s like creating a fantasy economy; it’s the socioeconomic equivalent of heroin addiction.

Sure, the government could step in and impose price controls, as the government did back in the 1970s. Price controls lead to shortages. Why? Because the high demand remains, and the supply gets bought up by the artificially cheaper prices created by price controls. Without being able to raise prices, there’s no incentive for businesses to hustle and try to keep up with all the demand. That’s when you get, quite literally, a Soviet Russia, a Venezuela or a North Korea, where people eat their pets because the grocery store shelves are chronically empty, or a bottle of milk costs $75,000.

Read economics. Most Americans are clueless on the subject. They listen to people like Paul Krugman at the New York Times WHO IS ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, yet they still trust him because … well, because he works for the New York Times and has an economics degree. How could he be wrong?

It’s all part of the ignorance that our media and government masters exploit so well. Ignorance and evasion are impoverishing us and, on our current road, are going to kill literally millions of us.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason