www.nytimes.com/...
Remember when the GOP and followers were purple-faced bellowing patriots screaming that you were unpatriotic or even a traitor if you didn’t want to bomb the hell out of various Middle East miscreants? The War on Terror was existential. We had to push out the Taliban to get Bin Laden, then take over and spread democracy too, in Afghanistan. Then on to Iraq, and presumably so on if that had “worked out.”
But now, things are shifting in a weird and ironic way. Michelle Goldberg lays out how many of the far and alt-right admire the masculine, fundamentalist Taliban and their struggle to make Afghanistan medieval again. They revel in the failure of the “liberal” US government there and even in our nation’s defeat thereby. Oh, for Biden to fail is the icing on the cake but not the core ideological motive and cause for intramural (for the US examples) schadenfreude.
The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of the Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar and the anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin — wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: “The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.” An account linked to the Proud Boys expressed respect for the way the Taliban “took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.”
It’s not just the rightwing rabble that are on this disturbing new wave, though. Even some of the GOP big wigs (pun intended) are getting into it:
The Florida Republican Matt Gaetz may be a clown, but he’s also a congressman who was close to the previous president. On Twitter earlier this month, Gaetz described the Taliban, like Trump, as “more legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here.”
This is very very creepy stuff. Maybe surprising, maybe not, considering how nutty and surreal the landscape has gotten lately. Reminds of recent tilt towards Russia. It bears watching.