AFGHANISTAN IS BIDEN’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE: Who knew His Fraudulency would become the procurement chief for the Taliban. If you doubt that, consider this Issues & Insights:

“The country is now a modern arms bazaar, overflowing with designed-to-kill equipment for the Taliban to use on Americans and anyone else they choose to murder, or sell to unsavory characters who want to massacre Westerners. Remaining in Afghanistan after the U.S. quits will be nearly 76,000 military vehicles, 208 American airplanes and helicopters, and almost 600,000 arms.”

ADD BIDEN’S BAGRAM BLUNDER TO: Little Big Horn and Pickett’s Charge as among the biggest military mistakes in American history.

HR4 IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN YOU KNEW: Attorney Cleta Mitchell has been in the front lines of election reform battles for decades, so she knows a thing or thirty-three about how the Left has corrupted the ballot box over the years. And she warns today that HR4, just passed by the House of Representatives, is not about protecting voting rights.

“Instead, the bill cynically adopts into federal law every losing argument advanced by the vast leftwing elections industry to courts across the country for years. Every theory rejected by the courts has been enshrined in HR 4. The bill also hands control of our elections over to the radical leftwing attorneys in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Most importantly, the bill codifies congressional districts as ‘protected’ under federal law even if those districts do not have a majority of minority residents. Courts have recognized the importance of majority-minority congressional districts, but have rejected partisan efforts by Democrat lawyers to extend that recognition to congressional districts that do not have a majority of minorities in the district. HR 4 would put into the federal statute protection for districts with more white voters than minorities, thus expanding legal protections to — you guessed it — Democrat House seats.”

This piece is essential reading for anybody who cares about what happened in the 2020 presidential election and could happen again and again and again in future elections.

CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION HIT WITH FOIA SUIT: Writing at Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader reports the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) resorted to a ridiculous justification for refusing to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Bader Family Foundation.

The FOIA sought email records for a six-month period for two CCR members, Chairman Catherine Lhamon and Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, the director of its Office of Civil Rights Evaluation. The CCR denied the request, claiming it “fails to describe the information sought.” Typical bureaucratic hair-splitting to avoid accountability and transparency.

Bader explains that “the commission claimed that ‘the request failed to ‘contain a sufficiently specific description of the record requested with respect to names, dates, and subject matter … as required by’ its FOIA regulation.’ But that regulation only requires a FOIA request to ‘contain a sufficiently specific description of the record requested with respect to names, dates, and subject matter to permit such record to be identified and located.'” [Italics added]

The emails could be extremely useful in determining whether Lhamon should be confirmed by the Senate after being nominated by President Joe Biden to be the next Director of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

That is one of those jobs in the federal bureaucracy that is obscure but tremendously powerful because if confirmed Lhamon would have tremendous power over the daily activities in America’s public school system classrooms. Bader quotes Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) saying “Ms. Lhamon has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric, violating students’ constitutionally based right to due process, and abusing regulatory power.”

THE MOST OFTEN HEARD FALLACY OF FAITH SKEPTICS: Leave it to a 19th Century divine to anticipate 21st century arguments.

MEMO TO SKEPTICS: My view and that of a great many Instapundit readers is that politics is downstream from culture, which is downstream from philosophy and theology, so talking about one necessarily encompasses assumptions and principles, often unstated, about one or both of the others. Being a great admirer of James Madison, the First Amendment’s author, I welcome the expression of opinion contrary to my own and hope you will afford me the same.

SEVEN REASONS FOR HOPE DESPITE IT ALL: Yes, admits Joy Pullman, Critical Race Theory (CRT) poison is seeping throughout the public education system, and the Afghanistan debacle tells foreign friends and foes that the U.S. decline is all but irreversible.

But Pullman, writing for The Federalist, offers seven reasons to preserve hope that even amid these multiple dark clouds there may yet be silver linings. To cite but one illustration, Pullman reminds us all that:

“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.”

Realistic or Panglossian?

TODAY IS WILLIAM WILBERFORCE’S BIRTHDAY: It’s unfortunate that Wilberforce is so little known these days, especially among high school and college students. His 20- year struggle to persuade Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire stands among the most notable moments in human history. I am indebted to Houston’s Bill King for allowing me today to republish on HillFaith his fine tribute to Wilberforce.

I THINK INSTAPUNDITEERS WILL LOVE THIS GUY: Not just because Doug Wilson is a philosopher of a reformed/evangelical bent who did a widely lauded televised debate series on the existence of God with Christopher Hitchens. But because he recaptures something of the rebellious spirit of the Reformation and the American Revolution.

As a result, Wilson ably makes the case for defying Covid authoritarianism by using fake vaccine passports, in the event our betters make them mandatory for interstate travel across these once-free United States. There were, after all, solid grounds for King George III’s description of the American Revolution as a “Presbyterian war.”

I’m not entirely on board with Wilson, not on principle but on tactical considerations. And I am not an anti-vaxxer. As it happens, I will get my second Moderna shot in three days. But Wilson makes an articulate, historically and spiritually well-grounded case that is worth pondering by anybody who values their liberty.

FOR THOSE WHO MAY BE INTERESTED: It’s Tuesday and that means the seventh installment of HillFaith’s series on Jesus’ seven great “I AM” claims is live.

THEY ACTUALLY SAID THIS WITH STRAIGHT FACES: Speaking of reminders, Issues & Insights highlights the 2020 campaign assessment of His Fraudulency by 70 national security veterans of GOP administrations:

“We believe Joe Biden has the character, experience, and temperament to lead this nation. We believe he will restore the dignity of the presidency, bring Americans together, reassert America’s role as a global leader, and inspire our nation to live up to its ideals.”

Did somebody mention “The Stupid Party?”

FORGOTTEN FACTS ABOUT U.S. AND CHINA: Do you remember which U.S. president condemned his predecessor for being too soft on China, then opened the candy store of U.S. military and digital technology to Beijing?

Writing in The Federalist, Chuck DeVore remembers:

“It was during the Clinton administration, in the heady days of the American hegemony in the post-Cold War world, that the process of accelerating technology transfer to China began in earnest.

“In 2000, at the urging of Silicon Valley, the Clinton administration relaxed regulations to allow the People’s Liberation Army to purchase high-speed U.S. computers capable of simulating nuclear explosions — without an export license or security review.

“But in many ways, strengthening the PRC had already begun a few years earlier when Western corporations, under the thrall of the emergent Chinese market, began to transfer technology to China as a Chinese precondition for access to their markets. One illustrative example of this was the rise and fall of Lucent Technologies, a spin-off from AT&T, and the subsequent rise of China’s Huawei.”

Devore extends the same kind of rigorous analysis to Clinton’s successor, too, in a bracing assessment of how the U.S. policy “clerisy” has profoundly bungled foreign policy for more than two decades.

CUOMO COMEBACK BEGINS: Looks like the Democratic National Committee’s fund-raising arm is helping the soon-to-be-former New York chief executive pay off debts and start a stash for future opportunities.

‘THE CHOSEN’ CROWD-FUNDED HIT CONTINUES: It’s already the most successful-ever crowd-funded streaming TV series and now “The Chosen” is preparing its third season. This clip on HillFaith is from the series’ first season and is about the healing of the leper.

Interesting Note: “Game of Thrones” had a budget of about $1 billion for its eight season run. Dallas Jenkins, the creator of “The Chosen” project, estimates the series can tell the entire story of Jesus in seven seasons at one-tenth the cost of “Thrones.” This series is top-notch acting, scripting, dialogue, the works.

AS CENTRAL ASIA GOES: So goes the future, according to Claire Berlinski, who notes about the vast region stretching across the middle of Asia that:

“Only 20 percent of the population in Central Asia is old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Empire. The young have no memory of the Soviets; their sense of identity is drawn from legends of earlier kingdoms and the fabled history of such places as Samarkand and Bukhara. The region’s governments have deliberately cultivated this sensibility in an effort to reclaim their history from Russia and the Soviet Union.

“The US and Europe have neglected the region. Some French and German companies have invested in Uzbekistan’s mining resources, but their investments pale compared to the massive scope of China’s in recent years. The US and Europe have simply not built an enhanced military presence, nor have they created economic incentives sufficient to build a lasting relationship with the region. In his recent summit with Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin made it clear that he would not tolerate new US bases in Central Asia.”

One need not agree with a neo-con/globalist agenda in order to recognize that the West, including the U.S., cannot afford to ignore developments in Central Asia, in particular those that point to the region’s potential contributions to the gathering strength of Russia, China and Iran.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST BRITISH LABOR: Just the News reports that former Prime Minister Tony Blair is calling His Fraudulency’s bungled Afghan withdrawal “imbecilic.” Said the former leader of Britain’s Labor Party: “The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours.”

EARTH AND THE GOLDILOCKS PRINCIPLE: Dr. Jeff Miller looks at five examples that illustrate one thing notables on both sides of the Existence of God issue agree about – the Earth appears to be designed specifically for human habitation and development. Not too this, not too that, but just right. Otherwise, none of us would be here to debate about it.

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.