BUT NATION-BUILDING WON’T WIN THE FOREVER WAR, EITHER: Thus contends Sean Davis, who takes us back to an infamous David Frum essay in 2001 that remains to this day a catalogue of globalist mythology.

HOW LONG TILL WE’RE BACK IN AFGHANISTAN? Washington Free Beacon founder Matthew Continetti explains why His Fraudulency’s Kabul debacle does not represent the end of “The Forever War.”

A WAKEUP CALL COMING FOR POLITICO? There are still a few voices of sanity scattered about on the Left, including Jamie Kirchick, whose lengthy Tablet piece today describes the approach taken by a German media executive to a bullying attempt by radicals on his staff:

WINKEN, BLINKEN AND NOD: Mike Pompeo, predecessor to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, established a swift reaction evacuation capability known as the Crisis and Contingency Response (CCR) Bureau. Can you guess who “paused” — that is spelled k-i-l-l-e-d — the program only weeks before going forward with the Afghanistan debacle now playing out?

As for the poetic reference, Blinken is Secretary of State, Nod is in the Oval Office. Nominees for Winken? I’m thinking Hunter, but am open to other possibilities.

HELL ON EARTH FOR AFGHAN WOMEN: Blaze Media reports an Indian TV interview with one of the early victims whose eyes were knifed out includes this chilling warning:

“‘It’s tough for the world to imagine what we built in the past 20 years,’ she told the outlet. ‘We built dreams. Now they are gone. It’s all over for us. Women who work with the government or police were being hunted and threatened even before the Taliban had taken over the country. Now, the concern has gone beyond letting women work. At this point, I am scared if they would leave these women alive. They don’t just kill women — they make animals feed on their bodies. They are a blot on Islam.'”

CRT BY ANY OTHER NAME: Is still Critical Race Theory (CRT) and The Federalist’s Julie Barrett has a useful tutorial on how to identify its use in your school district’s classrooms. Pro Tip: “Social-Emotional Learning” has nothing to do with learning, it’s just another deceptive label for a CRT-based curriculum.

HERE’S THE HUB OF THE MATTER: The matter being why is Gen Z such a confused, wandering, preoccupied mess:

“The fluidity of gender is predicated on the fluidity of truth, which itself demands moral relativism. This is the postmodern muddle. Alongside failed wars, a Great Recession, and ambient tech addiction, it’s the world our experts hath wrought. It’s the only world Gen Z knows.”

It’s The Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky. Don’t delay, click right over.

NO, DIVERSITY IS NOT OUR STRENGTH: Writing for The Federalist, Chris Bedford offers a great deal of common sense wisdom about the Left’s familiar bromide proclaiming “Diversity is our strength.”

If it were, why, among so much else, would nearly two decades of constantly being told that it is produce these depressing results:

“In 2004, 74 percent of white Americans and 68 percent of black Americans told Gallup that race relations in America were good. This year, those numbers are 43 percent and 33 percent, respectively. It turns out that a decade and a half of relentlessly racializing every issue in American politics just made everyone feel less happy, less trusting, less like they are part of a unified American whole.”

Bedford is smart, often deeply perceptive, and a competent writer who is definitely worth following.

UNUSUAL FLURRY OF AMICUS BRIEFS: Fourteen state Attorneys General submitted an amicus brief supporting College of the Ozarks’ challenge of His Fraudulency’s Day One executive order that mandates unisex campus bathrooms and showers.

Four more briefs were also filed in the case, which cheers the school’s attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). It’s a bit unusual to see briefs accumulating at the appeals court level, they say. Keep an eye on this case because it spotlights the egregiously dishonest legal analysis underlying one of Biden’s top priority initiatives.

NOW BEGINS THE RE-FUND THE POLICE CAMPAIGN: Businesses in Harlem, according to The Truth About Guns, are calling on New York City authorities to bring back plain clothes cops to help deal with the surge in shoplifting, assaults on customers and the climate of fear. Watch this one spread.

FOR THOSE WHO MAY BE INTERESTED: It’s Tuesday and that means the sixth of seven installments of HillFaith’s series on Jesus’ great “I AM” claims is posted. And don’t miss the incredibly powerful scene at the end of the post from season one of “The Chosen.” No wonder this crowd-funded series has gone viral in a way unlike any ever before.

SO WHY’D THEY VOTE FOR HIM? Only 39 percent of suburban voters back His Fraudulency’s grandiose spending if doing so requires tax hikes, according to the latest Issues & Insights/TIPP survey. Suburban voters were a key support bloc for Biden in 2020, but now that the bill is coming due, they get cold feet?

LIBERALISM UNMASKED: Capital Research Center’s Michael Watson points to one consequence of the Pandemic that probably won’t be covered by the MSM.

CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT FAILED: Writing in the American Spectator, Scott McKay argues the conservative movement is dead, if it is defined as the Old/New Right Plus Bush Chamber of Commerce Republicanism:

“When you’ve gone from surrendering on gay marriage to failing to summon up convincing arguments for obvious things like ‘boys shouldn’t play on girls’ sports teams’ or that the least racist nation on planet Earth was founded to promote slavery, you aren’t really conserving much of anything anymore, are you?

“When you went from failing to reform government programs like Social Security and Medicare, when it was patently obvious they would eventually bankrupt the government, to signing off on a trillion-dollar bacchanal of ‘infrastructure’ spending only a quarter of which can reasonably fit in that definition, you’re not a fiscal conservative.

“When you progressed from creating a security state capable of spying on everyone in the world with marginal accountability to having little to say when that security state gets politicized and nearly effects a coup d’etat on a duly-elected American president, we can’t really say you’re conserving our liberty.”

McKay advocates a new “Revivalist” movement that sounds an awful lot like what I heard one night in October 1964 on television when a guy from “Death Valley Days” came on the screen and delivered what became known as “The Speech” that launched the Reagan Revolution.

He wasn’t perfect, but he won the Cold War and got Congress to pass the biggest tax cut in American history, rebuilt American military might and respect, and showed how presidential leadership can restore a large measure of the shared civic spirit that once was the norm.

I was one of the legions of idealistic young Americans he inspired to enlist in the movement to save America and who in some key respects were the “Wide Awakes” of our day. Reagan was the right man for the time. But that was 1980. This is not. A revival would be great but would it be enough?

WHAT ABOUT BOB DYLAN? Which one, you might ask. If you’ve ever liked any of the various Dylans seen over the years, you will certainly enjoy my appreciation of Barry Lenser’s excellent assessment of the role of faith in the aging singer’s career. You might even like it if you’ve hated Dylan since the answer was blowin’ in the wind.

AND YOU THOUGHT WILLIAM TELL WAS JUST AN OVERTURE: Christopher Bedford, writing in The Federalist, sees interesting parallels between the 700-year-old Swiss legend and our own contemporary showdowns before local school boards on Critical Race Theory, mask mandates and virtual classrooms.

TOOMEY TARGETS EVICTION MORATORIUM: Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) wants a quickie review by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to determine if the CDC’s eviction moratorium extension should be viewed as a regulatory rule rather than a public health regulation.

If GAO says it is viewable as a rule, then Toomey plans to force a Senate vote to repeal the moratorium, which even His Fraudulency admits is unconstitutional. That repeal vote would be under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which means all that is required is a majority vote in the Senate.

DEMS TO MAKE UNION  DUES TAX DEDUCTIBLE: Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation that will both repeal the Right-to-Work laws of 27 states and make compulsory union dues tax deductible. In other words, taxpayers subsidize Big Labor, but those same taxpayers better not even think about having a choice about joining the union.

COURT THUMBS DOWN ON DOCS’ TRANSGENDER MANDATE: My latest PJMedia culture column is on doctors and other healthcare workers who have a religious objection to participating in transgender surgeries and related treatments must be respected by the federal government, according to a federal judge. But don’t be surprised if the Biden administration appeals all the way to the Supreme Court.

HOW MANY MORE CUOMOS SHIELDED BY THE ELITE? Kylee Zempel, writing today for The Federalist, is asking that rather relevant question, which makes sense, given the Clinton, Weiner, Epstein scandals:

“Tuesday’s resignation signals it’s the end of the road for Cuomo — for now. But if the media can sit and twiddle its thumbs — or worse, kiss keister and perform comedy sketches with giant Q-Tips — while thousands of elderly folks die in New York nursing homes and women in the double digits tell of a gropey governor’s disgusting habits, we must ask: How many other Andrew Cuomos is the media covering for?”

NO, DELTA VARIANT IS NOT WORSE: Why is it all but impossible to get from the Mainstream, excuse me, the Government Media solid data like the three charts provided this morning by Issues & Insights that demonstrate rather conclusively that Covid casualties are on a steady decline?

BIDEN EV CONVERSION DEPENDS ON CHINA: Nadia Schadlow was deputy national security adviser during the Trump years and she points to multiple reasons why China has all the cards on EV batteries.

FOR THOSE WHO MAY BE INTERESTED: HillFaith today is on the fifth of the seven great “I AM” claims of Jesus, including the shortest verse in the Gospels.

CLOSED MINDS ON BOTH SIDES: It’s an unfortunate fact that there are closed minds in the Christian ranks and on the other side. Dr. Tim McGrew looks at David Hume as the springboard to a challenging survey.

CLOSED MINDS ON BOTH SIDES: Of the Faith vs Science debates, that is. Dr. Tim McGrew has in mind the influential 18th century philosopher David Hume, a multitude of contemporary folks who refuse to consider the possibility of miracles, and a whole bunch of folks in between. Put another way, just as there are Bible Thumpers, so are there Darwin Thumpers, Materialists Thumpers, and so on.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): If you believe in the theory that our universe is probably a massive computer simulation, as so many of our brightest do, then it seems to me it’s impossible to disbelieve in miracles, since we have no idea what cheat codes are buried in the software.