The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Special Edition: Debate Reactions

In a special, up-to-the-minute episode of The Roundtable, Mike, Spencer, and Ryan give their first impressions of what was, by all accounts, a dog’s breakfast of a debate. Topics include Trump’s missed opportunities, Kamala’s boldfaced lies, and the hellaciously biased moderation by ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis. Plus: will Trump’s closing mic drop be enough to win voters over?

The post Special Edition: Debate Reactions appeared first on The American Mind.

Since language determines how issues are framed, rhetoric is an essential dimension of political warfare. Historically, the American Left has held the advantage when it comes to controlling the words we use to talk about our problems. “Political correctness” means nothing other than that liberal progressivism has the sovereign right to dictate the standards for public speech. That this phrase has been part of our vocabulary for almost half a century shows that progressives have been remarkably successful in policing our language, even in the face of public criticism. Nevertheless, the Right has notched some major successes relating to the norms of public discourse in recent years. Two victories jump immediately to mind.

Until Trump ran for president, “fake news” was a phrase used almost solely by mainstream media outlets to discredit alternative sources of information in the widening ecosphere of digital journalism. Ironically, though, the very outlets warning the public about the proliferation of “fake news” were the most responsible for spreading it. Trump and those in his orbit co-opted this piece of linguistic weaponry and used it to attack the slew of disinformation the legacy media uses to manipulate the public. Unexpectedly, this effort was so successful that people called on leftist media outlets to stop using the phrase entirely. When mainstream media attacked “fake news,” most Americans saw them calling attention to their own hypocrisy. Ultimately, this rhetorical appropriation—expertly executed from the Right—stole an arrow from the opposition’s quiver.

A similar gambit with the word “woke” has been even more successful. For decades, the adjective had been used by the countercultural Left as a compliment. To be woke was to have savvy political awareness—a unique attunement to the structure of American oppression and a grasp of the revolutionary techniques required to “dismantle” it. As late as 2017, the word still functioned in this way in academic circles—to be called “woke” was to have some scholarly cache. But since the unmasking of Leftist authoritarianism in 2020 (which conservatives successfully branded as “The Great Awokening”) that cache is gone. While wokeness still pervades the universities, its acolytes dare not call it such—the term itself is now passé. This transformation is nothing short of remarkable: to be called “woke” in 2024 is considered a slur. It connotes a facile, reflexive mode of thinking, a self-important sort of posturing, a kookiness masquerading as political sincerity.

There are other instances where conservative resistance has significantly modified the connotation of words taken from the never-never land of leftist thought. Most adult thinkers mentally recoil at hearing someone use the term “non-binary” in a serious tone. The public is well on its way to catching the sleight of hand inherent in the term “equity.” And even the word “progress” is now largely exposed as the cypher it always was—a kind of shorthand for Marxist kulturkampf.

Still, the Left maintains a monopoly on one term of special political significance: “social justice.” Since the George Floyd riots, talk of social justice has formed the superstructure of American and global political deliberation. It’s a very powerful idea, and conservatives’ avoidance of the term—or worse, our mockery of it—has worked to our opponents’ great advantage.

As a professor at a public university, nary a faculty meeting since 2020 has passed without some reference to social justice. For a while, I asked my colleagues to define the term. I wanted to have a discussion. I wanted to show them that their definition was debatable—that there is legitimate and substantial disagreement about the characteristics of a just society. But not a single member of the faculty indulged me. It took some time for me to understand why.

The reason is that they intentionally use the phrase as a political cudgel: in the mouth of the Left, social justice means nothing more or less than the full implementation of the Democrats’ radical, ever-evolving agenda. They’ve replaced the ancient philosophical question of defining the just society with a moral absolutism that implicitly and falsely posits a broad agreement on the answer. This is a technique to forestall any meaningful debate. By appealing to a consensus that doesn’t exist, they dare their interlocutors to take issue with their presumption. When someone does, they get to smear their opponents as enemies of justice itself.

Conservatives’ fear of these smears benefits the Left in two ways. First, it ensures that leftists’ (unstated) definition of social justice remains the political default and stays insulated from critique. This, in turn, discourages their opponents from using the phrase at all. It’s rare to encounter someone on the Right who makes explicit appeals to social justice. In part, that’s because progressives talk of social justice so frequently that conservatives are afraid that by using the phrase themselves, they might be mistaken for leftists. Further, since they are conscious of the highly-contestable nature of “social justice,” some on the Right avoid that term because they may be challenged to explain what would necessarily be a philosophically-complex vision of the good.

The final effect of this discursive surrender is that the Left sustains the illusion that Americans who care about justice should agree with (and vote for) Democrats. And that is an illusion. The hard truth—the heretical truth that progressives cannot admit to themselves—is that everyone wants social justice. Yes: everyone. “But what about the Ku Klux Klan? Surely, they don’t want social justice!” Yes. Them too.

When I say that everyone wants social justice, what I mean is that if asked, no one would state that they would prefer an unjust society. In other words, any Klansman (do any still exist?) would say that he does want a just society—and he would be sincere in saying so. The problem is that this Klansman would make that claim based on a screwed-up idea of the meaning of social justice.

But if it’s possible for people to arrive at flawed notions of justice, how do we know that the leftists who give it lip service have an accurate image in mind? The answer, of course, is that we don’t. If nothing else, their demonstrated reluctance to give any details should make us even more reticent to accept their view of social justice as benevolent, achievable, or even desirable.

The proper response to this problem is for the Right to make explicit, frequent, and favorable appeals to social justice. Of course, our concept of the just society differs greatly from our opponents. But we do want social justice, don’t we? Conservatives rightly believe that our society is perhaps closer than any other nation has ever come to the ideal of justice, but we, too, see areas for improvement. We must speak openly and honestly about it. The average apathetic American voter needs to hear conservative ideas explicitly defended on the basis of social justice commitments.

We don’t even need to give our own definitions of social justice at first. Our opponents’ shock at hearing the phrase in our mouths—a piece of their rhetorical property—will ensure that they challenge our usage. In that moment, we will have achieved the necessary conditions for a meaningful debate over what exactly we mean by social justice. And when that debate occurs, we should be prepared to demonstrate the contradictions and utopianism inherent in the Left’s (heretofore unstated) idea of social justice. Those flaws will be readily apparent to any neutral audience. There is a reason why progressives are so desperate to avoid any explanation of what they mean.

So as the election approaches, conservatives would be wise to make consistent, forceful appeals to social justice, assuming (as the Left does) that audiences already understand and agree with our conception of it. At the very least, we can provoke a dialogue that is long overdue. With some success, we can reorient our political discourse when it comes to justice. And in the best-case scenario, we can do what we did with “fake news” and “woke”—laying claim to the terms with authority in a way that forces the Left to abandon their disingenuous use of the phrase altogether.

The post “Social Justice” and the Right appeared first on The American Mind.

The National Park Service has started rewriting the history of American westward expansion as a grinding tale of “indigenous resilience in the face of, and resistance to, the impositions of settler colonialism.” Under a three-year program to create a “national context narrative” on the Southern Plains Conflicts of 1864-1869, the agency will contract a group of writers to follow a pre-written script that will result in a politically-charged view of our past. This project should be stopped not just because it will distort Southern Plains history but also because it is an insult to a free society.

Leftists assailed the Trump Administration’s 20-member 1776 Commission, which produced a report on American history in 2021. But the Biden Administration’s institutionalization of official history within a state agency is far more nefarious. The 1776 Report was a one-off written by outsiders and having no official standing in government or education. The Southern Plains Conflicts report, on the other hand, is being managed by bureaucrats who work for the taxpayer, and it will be used as the official handbook for government operations, including tour guides, historical preservation, and, of course, grants to tribes. “The narrative will provide a framework of the US government’s policy towards Indigenous populations, and its support of American economic development and settlement west of the Mississippi River,” the program notes.

Most people associate officially-approved histories with the Soviet Union or Mao’s China. The state, we assume, should not be in the business of foisting its current political attitudes onto our understanding of the past. But our Scandinavian Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is never seen without native American jewelry to emphasize her indigenous bona fides, has made a point of doing just that.

The call for proposals went out in early August, giving scholars only two weeks to submit applications. NPS staff contacted those they wanted on the project, giving little time for others to respond. No doubt they knew in advance the sort of history their political boss was demanding.

The reports must use “multi-cultural perspectives on American colonialism,” especially “Native American perspectives,” in order to generate “a more holistic and balanced understanding of Indigenous resilience and resistance to settler colonialism.” Writers must also document “the destruction of traditional culture” by white settlers, as well as the “refusals to concede to specific treaty terms” by natives. All reports must accept as settled truth that white pioneers “demanded that the US government acquire tribal lands and secure ‘peace’ for ongoing extraction.” To ensure that only tribe-approved history makes it onto the docket, writers must pre-commit to “respectfully and appropriately collaborate with Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and American Indians.”

In the Soviet Union, the members of “the proletariat” in Marxist dogma were deemed the immutable and eternal victims of capital-H History. They therefore gained a privileged status in the writing of official small-h history. Most historians had to have what the party identified as a sufficiently working-class background. The NPS’s version features Native Americans in the starring role of the perpetually aggrieved and is now reconfiguring history accordingly. The result is to pander to the worst prejudices of Native American activists and allow them to seize political power in the name of justice.

One independent historian who has documented the conflicts between Indians and settlers, Dr. Jeff Broome, refused a last-minute invitation to participate because of the pre-written script. “Nearly everything you have narrated in the proposal reflects historical distortions of epic proportions,” Broome replied in an email to the NPS that he shared with me. “I could not be paid enough to put together such a false narrative.”

Broome, author most recently of Indian Raids and Massacres: Essays on the Central Plains Indian War, called out dozens of falsehoods in the NPS contract. These include its description of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle—whose raids and killings on settler camps were notorious—as a “peace advocate.” They also include the claim that the Sand Creek battle in Colorado of 1864 that left 67 Indians dead (not the 230 claimed by the NPS) was unprovoked. In fact, a similar alliance of tribes had massacred over 700 settlers near New Ulm in Minnesota in 1862.

As two scholars wrote in a 2010 article, experts in any field taken over by the party in Soviet times either had to conform rigidly to avoid retribution or, better yet, trample opportunistically over colleagues and produce works even more ideological than what the party demanded. A few deviants might engage in “passive resistance” such as “discreetly questioning the dogmas with documented facts.” But those unwilling to sacrifice their integrity had just one choice: “withdrawal.”

Broome has admirably chosen withdrawal, but the NPS will surely not lack for conformists and opportunists. The chosen writers will mostly be those claiming native ancestry or else whites who have proven their worth by publishing ultra-radical books. The Soviet Union had an Institute of Red Professors doing much of its history writing. The NPS is now creating an equivalent for Southern Plains history.

“Day by day and almost minute by minute, the past was brought up to date,” Orwell wrote in 1984. The NPS is now bringing the past “up to date” in a manner far more alarming and damaging than has ever been thought possible in the United States.

The post Rewriters of the Plains appeared first on The American Mind.

Recently leading my family of seven (soon to be eight) through the airport for an international flight, it dawned on me how much of a circus we must appear to bystanders. Though my older children are more-or-less trained to follow instructions and minimize complaining, the toddlers wander out of line, sometimes bypassing security, screaming whenever my wife and I attempt to corral them. People stare, whisper, and shake their heads at our “little basketball team.” We are, in a word that is having its political moment, “weird.”

The Democrats are having a field day accusing the Trump-Vance ticket of being “weird,” primarily because of J.D. Vance’s vocal natalist impulses. He has bemoaned the nation’s declining birth rate and criticized unhappy “childless cat ladies.” When asked in a 2021 interview whether abortion should be permitted in cases of incest and rape, Vance replied, “At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby…. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

Yet as much as Democrats are hammering Vance over his natalist “weirdness,” the truth is there is a general political consensus that America is undergoing a tremendous crisis when it comes to the family. Kamala Harris’s proposal for an expanded child tax credit up to $6,000 for families with newborns was little more than a ham-handed response to Vance’s earlier call for a $5,000 child tax credit. Her idea to help first-time home buyers by encouraging the construction of three million homes—a plan that even her liberal supporters recognize is entirely unfeasible—seems aimed at young, lower-income families currently priced out by a national housing shortage.

Moreover, just about every corporate media outlet has acknowledged the nation’s birth rate crisis, from CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, and The Economist to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. The White House says “low fertility” will translate to fewer workers per capita, creating “significant headwinds to economic growth, the fiscal sustainability of public benefit programs, and the trend of continuous improvements in living standards.” Fewer babies, the data quite persuasively shows, is an economic catastrophe coming our way.

But so is deficit spending. And debt equaling 100% of U.S. GDP. And so are entitlement programs that make up about two-thirds of federal spending. Is there any groundswell of American popular opinion demanding our elected officials address these fiscal disasters which loom over the horizon? Are the mandarins of our expert class in the media, academia, or federal bureaucracy exhausting their vocal chords shouting at the electorate about the impending disaster brought about by American fiscal policy? Hardly. We are a people lulled into complacency, propelled by an unfounded belief that things will indefinitely continue as they have previously.

If Americans cannot be persuaded that their nation’s spending habits will eventually impoverish them and make their economy—and national security—more vulnerable to our greatest adversaries, it seems unlikely they’ll be persuaded to have more children for the sake of those national priorities. If I wasn’t a non-contracepting Catholic who has come (much to his surprise) to celebrate and cherish babies, I doubt I’d be heeding the latest warnings of egghead statisticians or economists, let alone clerics or conservative social media influencers trying to make me feel guilty about my childlessness. Consider the immature glee of the DINKs basking in the freedom of voluntary infertility (all you can eat Costco pizza!).

Nevertheless, conservatives must grapple with another uncomfortable truth: the anti-natalist cultural phenomenon is not unique to the Left or the unchurched. When in the company of conservatives (and even Christians), admitting the number of children I have elicits raised eyebrows. “You have how many children?” It’s true, conservatives have more children than liberals, but not by much: as of 2018, conservative women on average have 2.5 children, while liberal women on average have 1.9. Given our nation’s historically low birth rate, it’s safe to speculate that those numbers have dropped on both sides of the aisle.

None of this is to say that political attempts to curb declining fertility shouldn’t be thoughtfully considered and pursued. Some countries (e.g., Hungary, Czechia, and Israel) have had modest success at marginally increasing (or at least stabilizing) their birth rates. Tim Carney’s recent book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, offers many practical suggestions for policymakers and businesses, from family-friendly urban planning to tax code reform to more generous paid parental leave policies. All of these ideas and more should be implemented to make life easier for American families and encourage the fence-sitters to give having kids a chance. I’m even optimistic enough to think such measures could result in an appreciable, if tempered, “baby bump.”

Yet a “baby boom” seems unlikely given the blatant, if bizarre fact, that Western culture is anti-child in a way that is unprecedented in human history. American Millennials are having fewer children than their parents, and Gen Zers are projected to have even fewer than Millennials. Yes, financial hardship is the most commonly cited explanation for cratering birth rates, but one must square that complaint with the fact that of the countries with the top 30 birth rates, 29 are impoverished African nations, and the other one is Afghanistan. Does anyone really think it’s harder to have children in Appalachia than Angola?

To explain this phenomenon, one must consider two trends beginning in the 1960s that dramatically reshaped American society: women entering the workforce and affordable access to contraception. In 1960, less than 40% of women were in the workforce; today, that number is almost 60%, and more women than men have college degrees. In 1960, the federal government approved a birth control pill; by the end of the decade, more than 80% of married women of childbearing age were using contraception. Careerism and contraception dramatically changed the options and calculus for American women, who felt no longer constrained by their biology or “patriarchal” social mores that dictated an exclusively maternal role in society. Sex became untethered from children, and women became free to pursue careers and romance absent the threat of pregnancy. This is the script of Sex and the City, one of the most influential, descriptive, and prescriptive programs in television history.

It’s also why my soon-to-be family of eight is seen as a spectacle. In a culture that has catechized women to cherish their personal and professional empowerment above all else, the big family seems like drudgery, if not a freak-show, that likely bespeaks some underlying pathological disorder. One or two kids? Sure, every woman has a right to define and express herself through her fertility and participate in creating and nurturing new life—but as long as this doesn’t interfere with her career. But five, six, or ten? That, in the words of Betty Friedan in the best-selling 1963 work The Feminine Mystique, is the way women “forfeited their own existence” and lose “a personal purpose stretching into the future.”

Big families are not for the faint of heart. I know (and have witnessed) that some people conscientiously choose to have offspring for less than noble motives. My hope is that acquiring responsibility for a new life can shake such persons from their deep-seated narcissism and inculcate responsibility and virtue. Sadly, that’s not always the case, including me on my worst days, when I’m tempted to perceive my children more as annoyances to be suffered than gifts to be patiently loved and appreciated.  

On better parenting days, I pray that amidst the crumbs of food strewn across carpeted floors or shouting matches over contested toys, observers witness a family that seems at least as happy as them, and perhaps more interesting and fulfilling than whatever program they’ve got streaming on their mobile device.

One promising data point, raised aloft by Carney, is that Americans are having fewer children (below 1.7 per couple) than we actually believe to be the ideal (2.7). Perhaps the more such people witness the smile and laugh of a baby—even the type who cries loudly during an airplane’s descent—the more likely they’ll consider children as a positive good rather than an annoyance. Or perhaps I’m just weird.

The post Our Demographic Disaster Is Here appeared first on The American Mind.

Not too long ago, I was regularly bombarded with advertisements from egg banks promising upwards of $30,000 for successful egg retrievals. Now that I’m officially over the age of 25, the ads I’m seeing have shifted toward fertility cultivation and hormone tracking rather than egg harvesting to pay off college debt. Clearly, online algorithms now see me as a seeker of fertility solutions rather than a supplier.

I’m no longer a chicken: I’m the customer ordering an omelet.

This shift in my position on the fertility market was reaffirmed during my recent visit to the gynecologist. I asked a few questions about fertility and hormone health, which seemed to puzzle the doctor since I wasn’t currently trying to get pregnant and had no known complications or medical red flags.

She quickly picked up on my interest in having children and confidently recommended, “You should consider freezing at least 20 eggs to give yourself more time.” Then I could just forget about it! How convenient!

Her suggestion wasn’t totally unfounded given my desire for children. But it was a jarring reminder of the strange, almost clinical approach Westerners now reflexively take toward family planning and women’s fertility. “There are no ethical concerns because it’s not an embryo,” she assured me in her egg freezing pitch. I wondered, if the point of egg freezing isn’t to create an embryo, then why do it at all?

After she repeated the “no ethical concerns” line for the third time, I felt moved to politely clarify. “Thank you for explaining, but I’m Catholic, so that’s not really an option for me.”

She was surprised that the Catholic Church doesn’t permit IVF and suggested, with a polite smile, “Well, sometimes the Pope changes his mind.” I hadn’t gone into this appointment looking to parse ecclesiology with my MD while sitting in a pink, open-front robe. I just wanted to know more about how my body works.

I also found it strange that a doctor who specializes in fertility and childbirth had no clue that fertility interventions are a cause of moral concern for many Americans. In vitro fertilization (IVF), egg freezing, surrogacy, and similar interventions are all off the table for many religious people, not just Catholics. Even if these procedures aren’t completely prohibited, all sorts of restrictions might apply depending on the tradition. For example, some branches of Orthodox Judaism do allow for types of fertility intervention, but those interventions must be in line with guiding principles of the faith. The same is true for Muslims.

Catholics are not reproductively oppressed. We follow a particular theology of the body. We are required to be open to the possibility of children in marriage, but we aren’t a breeding cult. Plenty of devout Catholics—nuns, monks, priests, and consecrated single people—take vows of celibacy and remain childless for life.

But within a marriage, the requirement of openness to children alleviates pressure around childbearing: you are quite literally commanded to just let what happens happen. Nothing could be further from drafting a plan to implant some set number of embryos. The idea of telling the man I fall in love with, “There’s no rush! I have a few dozen eggs on ice already!” feels uncomfortably clinical. It turns what should be a profoundly human experience into something more akin to project management.

Yet my doctor’s appointment reminded me of a dinner I attended with some friends shortly after moving to Washington, D.C. One woman in her early 30s, who worked for the White House, casually asked the table if we had looked into freezing our eggs. We all responded that we hadn’t, although another woman said she was planning to start the process later that year. The woman who worked in the White House said she was in the process of freezing her eggs, and expressed regret that she hasn’t started in her mid-20s.

As a recent Midwest transplant, I had thought IVF and egg freezing were for 50-year-old celebrities in a midlife crisis, or couples experiencing fertility hardship. Clearly, something has shifted in the culture since my early-2000s upbringing. The prevailing default is now to regard pregnancy and family formation as something that can, and should, be meticulously planned and managed.

This intense desire to delay, plan, and manage births and pregnancy contributes to the shrinking size of the average American family. It doesn’t help that the default setting for women is birth-controlled, and fertility is something that not only needs to be turned on, but perfectly planned for. The issue has become one of the hottest points of contention in the upcoming election: one party takes it for granted that abundantly growing families should be encouraged as a basic sign of natural and national health. The other party finds this position deranged, tapping into a deep-seated fear and anxiety that has been instilled into many women about how and when to have children. But this anti-child default will soon be an economic problem for our social welfare programs, which depend on a stable and growing tax base.

Egg freezing and IVF are not easy projects for women to undertake. They both involve months, potentially years, of hormone injections, doctors’ appointments, detailed health monitoring, and then implementation procedures. The miscarriage risk is also elevated. These interventions can be physically and emotionally brutal, which makes the sunny eagerness of my doctor and other women who plug these procedures even stranger.

This attitude shift raises important questions about how we value children and family in society. Why should pregnancy be the last thing on my mind, rather than at the forefront? Of course medicine should be a handmaiden to childbirth, but should it define and govern the entire process? Why is pouring money and attention into meticulously arranging the biological parameters of pregnancy smarter or saner than pouring them into raising whatever kids you have without such interventions?

We should reflect on the market conditions and incentives that our systems and public policies create. A 26-year-old who feels obliged to freeze her eggs for the sake of “backup options,” only to go through the hardship of failed implantations in her 30s or 40s, hasn’t been liberated. She’s been sold a bill of goods.

The post “How Much For a Dozen?” appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Wolves In Skin Suits Ft. Megan Basham | The Roundtable Ep. 235

In a time when the slimmest margins in just a couple of swing states can flip national elections, Democrats are making a play for the pews. Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and Daily Wire Reporter Megan Basham joins the editors to discuss her latest book, Shepherds for Sale, which describes a left-wing effort to wield evangelical voting power and moral prestige for woke causes. Plus: Brazil is encroaching on the free speech rights of Americans through sanctions on X/Twitter, while the FBI is consulting with the Brazilian government to facilitate the encroachment. Are we heading toward jail time for memes?

Mentioned media:

Fleecing the Flock

Stop It by Bob Newhart

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode #235 appeared first on The American Mind.

Three years ago, U.S. forces pulled out of Afghanistan at Joe Biden’s direction in the most disastrous way possible. For much of the world, Biden’s decision was simply another tragic news story. But for those of us who had spent time in that remote country, it was a boot to the face.

I was deployed to Afghanistan from 2011-2012 as the communication director of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division. The Alaska-based brigade’s mission was to secure the provinces of Khost, Paktiya, and Paktika in eastern Afghanistan, which was well known as a dangerous region. Forward Operating Base Salerno, the brigade’s headquarters, was colloquially referred to as rocket city, a designation that was well earned.

I had the privilege of leading a team that included both American soldiers and Afghan interpreters, the latter helping to keep a pulse on the local news and get truthful information out to what remained of the region’s press. Our comms efforts were done against a backdrop of rhetorical paradox. The official military talking points, which we were expected to parrot at every opportunity, were that coalition forces were there to support the Afghan government, which was leading the charge to victory. This proved to be an ethical tightrope. My men and I were determined not to lie, and we succeeded. But we frequently did not get to tell the whole truth due to the political malleability of those at higher levels, rather than for maintaining operational security. It bothered me every day.

The Afghan men we worked with were not under the same illusion that blinded the senior commanders in Kabul, Tampa, and the Pentagon. Shortly after our brigade arrived in December 2011, the Obama Administration announced force reductions with a targeted withdrawal date. It was clear that U.S. commitment was waning despite the bravado of military creeds about never accepting defeat. The Afghan war could not go on forever—and certainly not under rules of engagement that handcuffed our warriors from breaking the enemy’s will to fight. As a nation, we could not keep pouring lives and economic treasure into a region where the local populace was not willing to equally commit. But none of this meant we had to give the Taliban our mission calendar, which only served to increase their morale and resolve while draining our own.

The Biden Administration pulled out of Afghanistan in order to meet the public relations goal of announcing an end to combat operations during a 9/11 observance. The images from Kabul of the overrun Hamid Karzai International Airport, the news of 13 American troops killed at Abbey Gate, and visions of human beings falling from Air Force C-17 transports in flight were haunting to veterans who poured their lives into that tribal region. We knew that as Kabul fell, the Afghans who had partnered with us over the years were marked men. I had some peace knowing that the man I worked the most closely with had made it to the U.S. a few years before. Most of my colleagues did not share such assurance, and spent months in pained calls, negotiations, and covert international rescue missions in efforts to help those who risked their lives to support us over two decades of combat operations.

At the time of the withdrawal, I worked in the public affairs office for the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. While at lunch on August 17, 2021, I received a surprising email inviting me to go on Fox News for a conversation with Martha MacCallum. Knowing the sensitivity of the topic, I informed my boss. While admitting that he could not stop me, he asked me to turn down the offer. Desiring to be seen as a team player, I acceded to his wish. That was a mistake. There was a brief window in which the American public was suddenly interested in this mission our troops and their families had borne for so long. But the White House and Defense Department wanted it to pass quickly, and it did. Within days, coverage of Hurricane Ida replaced the tragedy occurring halfway around the world.

It dawned on me that if Fox News was interested in my perspective, then others might be as well. I wrote an essay describing the pain of veterans who watched the way the war ended. But the Combined Arms Center’s public affairs officer, who was my supervisor at the time, actively broke Army regulation by suppressing my ability to submit it for publication. My appeals to the chief of staff went nowhere, and Commanding General Lt. Gen. Ted Martin failed to follow through on a commitment to review the nonpartisan essay and offer counsel. The following year, with their boots off my neck, I was finally able to share my reflections publicly.

That attitude was one of indifference to the palpable sense of mourning across the Army. “Your grief be damned” could have been a poster hung across the halls by many senior officials. It seemed that their sole concern was to tamp down any potential embarrassment for the political figures who ordered a reckless and hasty American withdrawal that left the Taliban in a stronger position than it had been at the beginning of the war. That political vindictiveness was displayed again as the Army issued a press release condemning Donald Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery, where he laid a wreath for the 13 troops killed during those tragic final days of U.S. military operations in Kabul. No matter that the Gold Star families personally invited Trump to take part. As their families mark another anniversary of loss, it seems that top Army officials are more interested in partisan games than honoring our war dead.

While the Departments of State and Defense share in the responsibility for spreading 20 years of lies about how Afghanistan was progressing, the order to chaotically pull the plug came from Joe Biden as Commander in Chief. Biden and the careerists throughout the military chain of command callously dismissed the consequences of his reckless orders, which have led to two additional wars in the time since.

An honest assessment of the Biden Administration will note the nation’s tragic and embarrassing exit from Afghanistan at his behest, and the entirely preventable human suffering that has resulted since.

The post Biden’s Catastrophic Exit From Afghanistan appeared first on The American Mind.