Guest Blog -Afghanistan Update, August 31, 2021

This guest blog comes after the last US plane left Kabul yesterday, 24 hours ahead of the self-imposed deadline Biden had announced.  Biden’s failed exit from Afghanistan leaves hundreds to thousands of Americans stranded there, along with up to 250,000 Afghans [according the the WSJ] who cooperated with western forces who were preventing the takeover by the Taliban.  This is only a small part of the 4,000,000 (four million) internally displaced Afghans who have tried to flee the country during the Taliban’s resurgence.

Biden’s lie that the Afghan army did not fight denies the reality that 70,000 Afghan army members died since 2015 with tens of thousands more wounded.  Further, 20 years of American, British and NATO forces unofficially “occupying” the country means an entire generation grew up from infancy to young adulthood with anticipation of participation in their own governance.  Now we have deserted them.  A much longer blog than my usual, but well worth reading.

Please continue to pray for my friends in Bamyan, Mazir-e-sharif and Kabul.  A few were able to leave on Sunday, several are still there.

A C-17 Globemaster takes off from Kabul International Airport

GUEST BLOG:
After the way the Biden administration handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the nation’s adversaries “will now be pushing the envelope a little bit more … to see just what they can get away with,” says Luke Coffey, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy.

After 20 years in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said the U.S. military completed its evacuation from Kabul by midnight local time, leaving behind a country under Taliban control.  “It’s a sad geopolitical irony that the Taliban will control more of Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2021, than it did on Sept. 11, 2001,” Luke Coffey, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy, says. 

The Biden administration’s poor handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will cause adversaries to push “the envelope a little bit more,” Coffey says, adding that even “America’s friends are questioning U.S. resolve” on the international stage. 

Panjshir is the only one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces under the control of a resistance movement led by Ahmad Shah Massoud Jr.. Coffey says Shah Massoud Jr. “is probably, right now, the best hope in terms of slowly turning the tide against the Taliban.”

Coffey joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to address concerns over Americans who remain trapped in Afghanistan after the Aug. 31 deadline and to explain the potential ramifications of the withdrawal.  The following is a lightly edited transcript.

Virginia Allen: Today is the deadline for all American troops to be out of Afghanistan. And here with us to break down the latest news and what we know about the progress of the pullout is The Heritage Foundation’s director of the Center for Foreign Policy, Luke Coffey. Today is the pullout deadline. Are all Americans out of Afghanistan?

Luke Coffey: Well, they’re not out right now, but they will be. We probably won’t know when exactly they will be, because that will be kept a secret, of course, for operational security reasons, by the Pentagon. But it’s a very precarious time right now for, not only the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, as we wind up this mission there, but … also [for] our allies and also for the Afghans who have been essentially left behind.

We know that there are probably a couple of hundred U.S. citizens that are left in Kabul, perhaps there are more, and other places around the country. And who knows how many Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants there are, these are the Afghans who helped us over the past two decades during our time in Afghanistan. Who knows how many are still remaining in the country. And for those Afghans who are left inside the airport, after that last U.S. C-17 leaves, it will be a very frightful time for them, I suspect.

Allen: In relation to the American citizens that are on the ground there, that we’re still working to get out, after the deadline, will those be covert operations trying to get them out? Do you think we’ll have some freedom to still send some planes in and pull them out relatively, obviously, to others or will those operations take place in secret?

Coffey: That remains to be seen. And it’s a very good question. There are some private initiatives taking place—the so-called Pineapple Express, which has been doing, by all accounts, a good job at getting U.S. citizens and Afghan interpreters out of the country. But they’re also doing this with the U.S. military presence there in the background.

The Taliban have said that foreigners will be able to leave freely, but they don’t want Afghans to leave, but there’s nothing in the past two decades that has shown us that we can trust the Taliban at their word. In terms of any effort to get U.S. citizens out, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, at least in the short term.

Allen: And what about our Afghan partners? Are there still going to be operations to get some of them out after this deadline? Or are we just kind of saying, “Good luck”?

Coffey: The Biden administration hasn’t been very clear on how they’re going to deal with this. They keep telling the public that the Taliban have told them that none of this will be a problem, but clearly it is going to be a problem. The Taliban will say one thing one day and they’ll say a completely different thing another. So I suspect, however unbelievable it might sound to the listener, after the deadline for American withdrawal, there will be American citizens stranded in Afghanistan, and there will be Afghan [Special Immigrant Visa] applicants who are also stranded.

Allen: Do we know how many of those applicants we successfully got out and how many are still in the country, as far as our Afghan partners?

Coffey: Again, the numbers coming out from the Pentagon are sort of all over the place. In addition to Afghan [Special Immigrant Visas], other Afghans have been taken out of the country. They’ve been brought to a third country — for example, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates—for further security screening before they will eventually move on to the United States or to other places. The exact numbers are unknown publicly, at least right now.

Allen: How are the Afghan people viewing America’s pullout? Is there a sense among them of, you know, “Good riddance. America’s been here for 20 years, it’s time for them to leave”? Is it mixed? Do we know how they view this?

Coffey: I think it depends on where you go and who you speak to in Afghanistan. I think, generally speaking, many are probably disappointed or saddened or shocked or feel betrayed by the U.S. withdrawal, and the way it has taken place.

For example, if you’re an Afghan soldier, you must have been shocked to discover that your No. 1 partner for several years has just left, in some cases, in the middle of the night. President [Joe] Biden had been criticizing the Afghan military for not fighting, but this is false. Since the Afghans have taken over security and combat operations in 2015, they’ve suffered more than 70,000 killed, tens of thousands more, wounded.

We built this Afghan military around a system that relies on civilian contractors providing maintenance and support to helicopters and planes and logistics and our close air support that we would provide the Afghans.

This wasn’t 2009, 2010, 2011, where we had 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan conducting combat operations every single day, taking casualties every day. When President Biden entered office, there were about 2,500 U.S. troops on the ground. And we were also providing our close air support. If the Afghans were getting in trouble, we would provide airstrikes or whatever to help them. And in some cases, all of this was withdrawn without the Afghans knowing and overnight.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Afghan soldier was demoralized by this. I think your average Afghan would not necessarily welcome the Taliban into their village, but what are their choices? The central government has all but dissolved, the U.S. is now gone, and you have an Afghan schoolteacher teaching children and all of a sudden, a couple of pickup trucks filled with fighters with machine gun shows up to your village. What are you supposed to do?

And when President Biden says, “Well, they didn’t fight,” well, how is this person supposed to fight back? I think in the end, this will be a terrible stain on U.S. prestige and honor in history. And it’s probably going to come back to bite us.

Allen: Thinking into the coming days, weeks, months, do you think that there’s hope that we’ll see any resistance from the Afghan people? That some of those soldiers that were trained by the American military will reform and decide to fight against the Taliban?

Coffey: Yes. Well, this is happening, actually, as we speak. There’s one province in Afghanistan called Panjshir that is under the control of the resistance. Panjshir is probably about 60 or 70 miles as the crow flies northeast of Kabul, the capital. This resistance movement is being led by a young man called Ahmad Shah Massoud Jr. Now, Ahmad Shah Massoud Sr., his father, led the resistance against the Soviets and also against the Taliban in the 1990s. He was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001, two days before 9/11, by al-Qaeda.

His 32-year-old son fled Kabul in some helicopters, went to his homeland in Panjshir Valley, and has set up resistance. He claims that forces are pouring into this region every single day. I suspect they’re trying to hold out until winter. If they can hold out until winter, then we might see some movement on their behalf, taking back some of the provinces in the north of Afghanistan, where the Taliban are going to have a difficult time controlling and managing.

This is very early days, but there is a resistance. There are Afghan commando soldiers that are pouring into this region. … They’re called the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, the NRF. I’m not sure if the NRF thinks, knows if they can trust the United States right now. Can they trust the Biden administration after what the Biden administration had done?

But this young man, Ahmad Shah Massoud Jr., he’s acutely aware of his father’s role and his father’s history. He will act accordingly because of this legacy. He is probably, right now, the best hope in terms of slowly turning the tide against the Taliban. But this takes us back full circle to where we were in the 1990s and regrettably, all of this could have been avoided had President Biden kept the 2,500 troops in the country and the close air support.

Allen: And that really brings us to ask the question of, how has President Biden’s actions affected America’s position on the world stage and other international leaders’ views of America? What are your thoughts on that?

Coffey: Yeah. Well, it’s been horrible, to be honest. America’s adversaries will now be pushing the envelope a little bit more, every single time, to see just what they can get away with with the Biden administration. America’s friends are questioning U.S. resolve and commitment. President Biden was all but censured in the House of Commons last week, this is from America’s No. 1 ally.

Many people are scratching their heads wondering, “Well, what does this mean for our relations with the U.S., for American commitment to security alliances and security agreements?” And our adversaries in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran, they’re all looking at this as an opportunity and they will take advantage of this. How they will take advantage of it remains to be seen, but they will. I can guarantee it.

Allen: Luke, let’s chat a little bit more about the day that’s ahead of us, this pullout deadline. We are having this conversation on Monday. It’s impossible to know what’s going to happen in the next 24 hours, but how likely do you think it is that we’re going to continue to see attack attempts like we saw over the weekend and on Monday on the airport as Americans complete this pullout on Tuesday?

Coffey: Well, we’ll for sure be under threat. The withdrawal of this nature creates a very vulnerable environment for the military. They have to gradually hand over chunks of the airport to Taliban control while they continue to secure a smaller and smaller bit until the last airplane takes off with the last soldiers and the last equipment.

What will they do with the remaining equipment? Will they destroy it? Will they just leave it behind? Or will they find a way to take it out? Who knows. Obviously, the priority will be taking out the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that are there. When that last C-17 takes off, will you have a situation where desperate Afghans flood the runway again, trying to stop it? How will the Taliban react?

And of course, you have the so-called Islamic State of Khorasan, or ISIS-K, as it’s known—the ISIS branch in Afghanistan, that’s probably the easiest way to describe them. They were responsible for the terrible bombing that killed 13 U.S. service personnel and more than 170 Afghans last week.

They will be trying to take advantage of the situation, … where the Biden administration is now reliant on the Taliban and specifically this terrorist organization called the Haqqani Network to provide security for Kabul and security for the U.S. forces that are leaving. The leader of the Haqqani Network has a $5 million bounty on his head from the FBI. And this is a guy whose terror group is now responsible for the security in Kabul.

You couldn’t make it up if you tried. The situation is so absurd. It is a very dangerous time. Right now we should be praying for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that are trained to wrap up this very dangerous mission in Kabul. And we should also have in our minds those Americans who will be left behind, and also the Afghans who deserve to get out, but can’t.

Allen: What is the Taliban doing right now? Have they been cooperating with America? And do we know if they have any responsibility for the attacks that we have seen?

Coffey: Well, for the most part, the Taliban has allowed the bare minimum to occur. So, it looks like the U.S. is withdrawing people from Kabul international airport. But they’ve been doing so while not allowing full and free access for Afghans and American citizens to get to the airport.

Basically, they want the Americans out. They don’t want to do anything too provocative that would somehow change President Biden’s mind. At this point, I have no idea what that might be. But they still don’t want to tempt their fate in this.

And they want to let the world see how incompetent and weak America looks while it does the withdrawal process. That’s why they’re letting it happen. They’re just not letting it happen very smoothly. And so there is some cooperation and coordination between the U.S. military and the Taliban.

Now, ISIS-K and the Taliban are actually adversaries and enemies. Which just shows how complicated Afghanistan is. In the past, the Taliban have fought ISIS in Afghanistan. In fact, there have been reports of the U.S. providing airstrikes in support of Taliban offensives against ISIS-K in eastern Afghanistan.

This will likely become a major headache for the Taliban as ISIS in Afghanistan tries to exert more control and take advantage of what is a very chaotic security situation. It will probably mean that the Taliban will not be able to control and secure and govern much of the land that it currently has in Afghanistan. It took a lot of land and territory over the past two weeks, but can it govern and control? And that’s the big question for the Taliban now.

Allen: We’re really looking at a situation that’s obviously deteriorating quickly. What do you think as far as strength and numbers? Does ISIS-K pose an immediate threat to, let’s say, overtaking the Taliban in Afghanistan? And then what threat do they pose immediately to America?

Coffey: Well, one of good news stories about America’s presence in Afghanistan for two decades was that during the course of 20 years, there wasn’t once a terrorist attack that was planned, coordinated, and launched from Afghanistan that was successful against the United States.

Now, it’s likely that Afghanistan will revert to the chaos we saw in the 1990s, where you have four or five different warlords or power brokers that control certain parts of the country. In this chaos it’s likely that non-state actors and terrorist groups will be able to set up shop, if they wanted to. Already, we have signs of senior al-Qaeda members coming back from Pakistan into rural places of Afghanistan. This is documented on social media for anyone to see.

And ISIS will continue to pose a threat to the U.S., but they will pose a threat to the Taliban’s legitimacy and the Taliban’s ability to control and govern certain areas. They’re not a major power right now in Afghanistan. They were recruiting a lot from disenchanted Taliban fighters who felt like the movement wasn’t going in the direction it should be going.

ISIS-K is very extreme in its views and how it practices Islam, in a way that even the Taliban find abhorrent in many ways. I mean, the Taliban would release statements criticizing ISIS when they did things in Syria. So these two powers will be fighting against each other. This will make the Taliban focus a lot on trying to defeat and counter ISIS.

One thing the Taliban would have going for it is recruitment is improved when you’re successful, and the Taliban has been successful. So a lot of recruits that might’ve gone to ISIS are likely to go to the Taliban. But the Taliban is going to have a problem governing and controlling the whole country, because most of the country, most of the big cities and provinces switched sides to the Taliban without a shot being fired.

Incidentally, and coincidentally, I should say, this is how the Taliban gained most of its power in the 1990s, was through local deals, bribery, convincing people to switch sides. And this happened again. How the Taliban manages this new complex set of relations that it now has with different power brokers across the country will determine how securely and how well they’ll be able to govern and control the country. And this will not be easy for the Taliban.

Allen: Of course, we can’t change the past, we can’t change what’s already happened in Afghanistan, but how does America go about mitigating the damage and trying to prevent any further loss of life moving forward? What does our foreign policy toward Afghanistan need to look like right now in the immediate future?

Coffey: Well, the Biden administration hasn’t left much room for a maneuver here. I suspect this administration will try to pursue a pragmatic relationship with the Taliban, which, ultimately, will let America down.

In terms of America’s options, I think, in the short term, we need to find ways to get the remaining Afghan [Special Immigrant Visa] applicants and U.S. citizens out of that country. I’m not sure how that might take place, but that should be a top priority.

And then we need to double down on our relationship with key partners in the region, such as India, for example, or some of the Central Asian republics, the so-called Stans: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. These are countries that are right on the front lines, not in a military sense, but in the literal sense. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan border Afghanistan, they have a lot at stake with how Afghanistan goes. There are huge ethnic minority groups in Afghanistan that [are] ethnic Uzbeks, ethnic Tajiks. So these countries will play a role in the future of Afghanistan one way or the other. So the U.S. needs good relations with these countries.

And then finally, I think, we need to have an honest discussion about how we engage with, or maybe even support, the NRF, the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan. Right now they need bandwidth and connectivity. The Taliban are trying to cut off their internet access. Right now, from my contacts that are involved with the NRF, they tell me that they can’t stream anything. They can barely use Twitter and barely send text messages.

And we need to provide them cold weather gear. The winter’s coming in Afghanistan. If they can survive the winter, it gives them more options in the spring time—they can consolidate more, get more supporters into the secure region. And also, you never know, … if they can expand this region, the National Resistance Front, then maybe that becomes a safe area where those who are stranded in Afghanistan can somehow make their way to.

We need to figure out how we support this new group. I’m not sure if they even need weapons right now—I mean, there’s so many weapons floating around Afghanistan—but they do need secure communications, they do need bandwidth, and they do need winter weather equipment for this coming winter.

Allen: That’s a practical need, certainly is.

Coffey: That’s very achievable.

Allen: Well, the anniversary of 9/11 is less than two weeks away. Do you think that America is at legitimate risk of facing another terrorist attack, whether it be from the Taliban, ISIS-K, al-Qaeda?

Coffey: Of course. I always start at the assumption that we are at risk and that we have to take steps to mitigate that risk. But certainly the way the Taliban has been able to sweep across Afghanistan, it will embolden Islamist fundamentalists around the world to be even more daring or to be more aggressive toward the United States.

It’s a sad geopolitical irony that the Taliban will control more of Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2021, than it did on Sept. 11, 2001. And all of this was avoidable had the Biden administration pursued a different policy, but this is where we are.

Hopefully, the U.S., I’m sure the professionals in the Department of Homeland Security and our law enforcement professionals and our military professionals and those in the intelligence community are working tirelessly with our allies and partners to ensure that we remain safe here in the homeland.

Allen: Luke Coffey, Heritage Foundation’s director for the Center for Foreign Policy. Luke, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you coming on.
Coffey: My pleasure. Thank you.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature.
Remember to include the url of https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/08/31/afghanistan-pullout-deadline-is-here-what-happens-next/ or the headline of the article, Afghanistan Pullout Deadline Is Here. What Happens Next? plus your name and town and/or state.

 

Intermezzo Guest Blog: Dr. Victor Hanson on Biden’s Amerika

Razor wire and fences still surround the U.S. Capitol at sunrise. (Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)

The World Goes On While America Sleeps
Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson/ February 12, 2021
Dr. Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.  You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

The Democrat-controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a citizen who is no longer president.  The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago — and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors.  The constitutionally mandated presiding judge — the chief justice of the Supreme Court — refused to show up.  Chief Justice John Roberts apparently believes an impeachment trial of a private citizen is either a waste of time or unconstitutional — or both.

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican House members.  For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other.  Yet for each Republican outlier, there is a corresponding Democratic firebrand member who has either called for violence or voiced anti-Semitic slurs — and yet will not be removed from House committees.  So the asymmetrical tit-for-tat continues.

The subtext to this madness is that the Democratic Congress, the new administration, the administrative state, and the political left are obsessed with dismembering the presidential corpse of now citizen Donald Trump.  Apparently they fear that one day he will rise from the infernal regions to wreak his revenge.  Meanwhile, life in America goes on.

Yet few of our leaders are very worried about the existential crises left unaddressed by their obsessions with the ghost of Trump.  Take the debt.  It is now nearly $28 trillion, and it is growing by almost $2 trillion a year.  No one in Washington talks about reducing the annual budget deficit.  Nor do officials find ways to balance the budget.  The idea of paying off the monstrous debt remains a fantasy.  Instead, our elected representatives argue over whether to borrow another $1 trillion, or more likely $2 trillion, without worry of where it comes from or how it will be repaid.

But money is not completely a construct.  We will eventually pay for our profligacy either with steeper taxes, higher inflation, 1970s-like stagflation, or permanent zero interest.  Or eventually America will renounce its debt and destroy the credibility of the U.S. government.  Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars and countless hours of once-productive labor are diverted to unproductive ideological censorship, career canceling, and indoctrination.

Our allies, such as democratic France, warn America that it is cannibalizing itself — and becoming dangerous to others.  Our enemies, such as the totalitarian Chinese, are delighted with our suicidal wokeness.  The cost is not just the expense of cleaning up the billions of dollars of destruction from the summer riots, the thousands of memorials and statues destroyed and defaced, and the hundreds of schools and buildings to be renamed.

Far more consequential is the suppression of creative thinking — from humanistic study to scientific research.  The Islamic world, as the historian Bernard Lewis once observed, stagnated in the 19th and 20th centuries once radical Islamists began squelching all free inquiry.  Humanities and science were perverted from 1932 to 1945 in Germany by the pollution of Nazi racial censors.  What was written or advanced in communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is largely discredited, given that commissar hacks determined the rules of publication and research.  Something similarly frightening is now occurring in the United States.

Scholars, journalists, artists, and educators feel they must mouth politically correct platitudes.  They constantly hedge their public discourse in fear of career cancellation.  They strain to synchronize their research with some approved woke ideology to save their livelihoods.  When professors must write “diversity statements” and hire, promote, and fire on the basis of race, the model is not the U.S. Constitution, but something out of contemporary China.

No one pays much attention that our capital is now weaponized with soldiers in camouflage and barbed wire.  Not since the Civil War has Washington resembled such a vast police state.  Ex-military officers who once warned Trump not to deploy federal troops to ensure the safety of the White House from Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators now are silent about a veritable army deployed in Washington.

President Joe Biden has signaled that all new pipeline construction is over.  Fracking on public lands is taboo.  The border is to become wide open.  Federal immigration law is now effectively nullified.  Americans may soon have to be tested for COVID-19 before flying into or out of the country.  But illegal immigrants will not be COVID-19-certified when — illegally — they cross the border.  Iran is bankrupt, isolated and roundly despised by most of the countries in the Middle East.  Now America is doing its best to resuscitate the most radical and anti-American regime in the world — at the expense of our allies in the Arab world, Israel, and America’s own interests.  While we are busy devouring each other, China is smiling because once-feared American capitalists have become laughable Keystone Cops.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com.

Intermezzo Blog: Prophetic Word for President Biden from Jonathan Cahn

An apology to my email followers: the other day I erroneously reposted the blog of January 21.  My old brain just seems to slip a cog every now and then, and it is too easy to click buttons on the computer.  But once the reposting went to your email there was no way to retract it.  This was the blog I intended to send.

Jonathan Cahn leads Hope of the World, a service to Gentiles and Jews examining issues of prophecy and end-time events.  While somewhat flamboyant (his website is a little ‘busy’ for my tastes), he is impressive as a Bible teacher in that he does not go beyond what the scripture says; no predictions of dates or even seasons; no announcements of “Look here is the Christ in the inner room!” (Matthew 24:23).  And he is very thorough and discreet in his exposition of what the Bible says about the second coming of Jesus.

If you have 35 minutes, you may want to check out his YouTube of the Inaugural Prayer Breakfast for Barack Obama on March 11, 2013.  I suspect someone in the president’s staff thought, “Okay, here’s a Jewish rabbi who is also an evangelical Christian; we can kill two birds with one stone and have him speak, appealing to voters from both camps.”  Boy, did he get an education! 😄

Joking aside, this is Rabbi Cahn’s recent message to our new president, who we must acknowledge is in the position because of God’s will.  I, along with any other Christ-followers, am praying FOR President Biden that he will recognize Father’s voice when He speaks and respond appropriately to the grace of Jesus, winning for himself and our nation a reprieve from the disasters that the current divisions in our county portend.

Intermezzo Guest Blog: Petr Svab; Experts’ Warning

This is a rather long piece compared to my usual blogs of ~1000 words, but well worth reading.  C.S. Lewis once wrote: “A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometime be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment without end for they do so with the approval of their conscience[s].”  Read on and pray for the USA.  This article has minor formatting and grammatical edits from the original.

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism

The US Flag at half-mast in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

Concerns about the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government.
By Petr Svab  January 20, 2021; Updated: January 21, 2021

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors.  Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or are not even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous.  Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed — merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.  “Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion,” he told The Epoch Times.  The power of the regime is not yet absolute, but it is becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass.  Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult.  Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years — the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, the Capitol intrusion of January  6 — its roots go back decades.

Is It Really Totalitarian?
Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force.  That is not the case in America, but it is also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes do not initially need to control every aspect of society through government.  Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, or through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially did not control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.  The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.  Dissenting media in America have not been silenced by the government directly as of yet. 

But they are stymied in other ways.  In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google.  Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.  Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.”  Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative.  Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.  Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform.  Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there is as yet no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly.  But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement.  Indicators go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe — both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted.  The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.  While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it is the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.

Totalitarian Ideology
The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society — “the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.  Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in Das Kapital.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary.  People would become “socialized” — that is transformed and perfected — by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized.  The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.  In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously.  Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.

“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.”

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.  “This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.

That is not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.  The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

1. There is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality.
2. There is a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in.
3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it.
4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will.
5. People who will not accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.

“I think that is the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It is a disaster, frankly.”

Points Four and Five Now Appear To Be In Progress.
Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.  The “core issue,” he said, “is that we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.

Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who have tuned into the dissenters.  “How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.
“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.

The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities.  That has not been proven in court and is thus false.  People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen.  Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.

With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNN that all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast.  “That is not to say they do not want an opposition.  They want a token opposition.  They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is okay.”

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.  She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.  Their objections were voted down.

“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”  Under the regime, allegations of election fraud — de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader — have become incitement of terrorism.  YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels.  Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.  This approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”

What Is The Alternative?
If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them?  The question appears to be its own answer.  If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it cannot exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.

The United States were founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable.  The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.

“If you are not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who is above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.

Intermezzo: President-Elect Joe Biden – Chosen By God

“The Electoral College on Monday began voting to make President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election official.” (NBC News) “According to an NBC News tally, Biden was leading Trump by 240 votes to 229 as of 4 p.m. ET. Biden will mark the occasion with an address to the country around 7:30 p.m. ET on Monday.”

Finally, after five weeks of “officially” calling the election, a major news network is finally admitting they made a mistake. Well, not in so many words, like “We’ve been lying to you all month.” But NBC News just announced the Electoral College vote which would “make Joe Biden’s 2020 victory official.”

Since the Associated Press called the “official” results on the night of November 3rd, most of the mainstream media echoed this theme, calling Trump’s contesting “baseless, without evidence, a false narrative” and other pejorative terms to make sure we all “knew” that there was “nothing to see here, folks.” In spite of significant irregularities and multiple legal affidavits affirming suspicions of voter fraud and machine tampering (subject to criminal prosecution if lying), the courts, including some judges appointed by Trump, avoided the conflict to stay out of politics.

Whether the outcome of these complaints by the Trumpers would have changed what Democrats expected to happen, it disturbs me that the media continued to pile on that he was “trying to overturn the election,” when what his legal team was trying to do was assert that the election was not over until the legal challenges had been heard.

Unfortunately, inaction is itself a form of action, and only God can assess whether the judges were just afraid of the leftist mobs that would attack if they validated any of the questions, or if they truly believed that Trump’s team had no legal basis for challenging the election processes in the contested states. I am not a lawyer and have not read any of the briefs presented to the courts. In any case, unless Trump “pulls a rabbit out of the hat” (as I have referenced his winning before), and gets Congress to refute the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, then Biden will have prevailed, however dubiously.

Thucydides, about 400 years Before Christ, said in his History of the Peloponnesian War, “In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.” While this is true in any democratic/republican election, it is particularly concerning that this election was SOOO close in the so-called “battle-ground states” that it is very possible there were illegal activities that delivered the election to Biden.

However, as a Christ-follower I must keep in mind that it is my Father who actually determines our leaders per Daniel and Paul in the Bible: “He removes kings [presidents] and sets up kings [presidents].”  (Daniel 2:21) “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” (Romans 12:21-31:1) Thus, whether illegal actors or incompetent officials were responsible in human terms for the outcome of this election, I must admit that God has chosen the Biden/Harris ticket for our next president and vice-president.

That does not mean Christ-followers should simply lie down now and let the pro-abortionists, the Green New Deal, and the antisemitism of the BDS congress people bowl us over into submission to ungodly activities. But we must tread carefully and make sure the places we take stands are, in fact, places Jesus would stand. We ARE supposed to be “little Christs,” the derisive term that initially got us called Christians. It may be that some of us will have to take stands as Jesus did before Pilate and the Sanhedrin and allow ourselves to be crucified. Isn’t that what being a “little Christ” means?

As a Christ-follower, I am enjoined by the apostle Paul to pray for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. NOTE: we are to pray FOR them, not against them. (See https://capost2k.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/who-are-you-praying-for-during-this-wuhan-virus-crisis/.) This may be difficult if you voted for Trump, but I did not write the rule book. You may want to check out Forgiving What You Can’t Forget by Lysa TerKeurst for some guidance on dealing with what many of us consider “unforgivable sins,” remembering that there is only one thing that goes by that ID. And Ms. TerKeurst addresses how one deals with the frustration of forgiving someone who does not want or ask for it; well worth reading.

So whether you voted for our President-elect or the current President, let your faith grow into Jesus. God did not make a mistake. Now, how will we react to what God is going to do in our nation? How will we participate in what God wants to do for our neighbor?

Intermezzo: Turn Left for Joe Biden

The previous blog was a “retweet” of a conservative blogger to present a “right view” of Joe Biden.  To balance that, I am offering a guest blog from Joe Biden’s own words and support articles I could find for him. 

Most of the current articles are about who he will choose as vice-president because not even his supporters expect him to live through a full term under the pressure of being president.  Just look at any president at the start of his first term and how he has aged in four years of leading the world’s largest business, economy, and political system.  It is not a pretty progression, and Joe’s biggest problem is that he already looks like he’s been there eight years (at least he was close under Obama).  And this is the assessment from the Chicago SunTimes that gives him a 21% chance of surviving his first term!

As most of my readers are right-leaning conservatives, I strongly advise you to educate yourselves about the man who may succeed Trump (and his vp pick once it is made). Unless there is a strong undercurrent of people who will not admit for whom they will vote in November it is possible we could be looking at a traditional “progressive” politician with significant connections and pressures from left-leaning socialists and marxists leading our nation after December 31, 2020.
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https://www.vote411.org/joe-biden
Candidate responses to our questions: JOE BIDEN
What policies do you support to improve and secure elections and voting in our country?

I’ve fought for voting rights since I first got involved in politics, helping to secure several extensions of the Voting Rights Act. But in 2013, the Supreme Court ripped the heart out of those voter protections. As president, I’ll enact legislation to restore the full force of the Voting Rights Act, and my Justice Department will challenge every one of the new Jim Crow laws that are now curtailing people’s right to vote. I’ll also boost state funding for secure voting with a paper record, and for better information-sharing. I’ll fight for automatic and same-day voter registration. And I’ll make sure that any country or group that seeks to interfere in our elections faces real and serious consequences.

Please explain where you see opportunities for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on the very serious issues facing our country.

The next president will inherit a divided nation and a world in disarray. They’ll need to hit the ground running to fix Trump’s mess, restore our global standing, and bring people together to get things done. Our next president will need to be a president for ALL Americans. I refuse to accept that we can’t work together to solve tough problems. It’s what democracy is all about. We can rebuild the middle class with historic investments in infrastructure, tackle prescription drug companies’ profiteering, build on Obamacare with a public option – and so much more. I know how to find common ground without compromising my values.

What, if any, steps will you take to reform current immigration policies?

We’re a nation that values immigrants – it’s how we’ve constantly been able to renew our democracy. As president, I’ll reverse Trump’s assault on our values on day one, ending his cruel asylum policies, especially his Migrant Protection Protocols, family separation, and public charge rule. I’ll address the root causes pushing people to flee Central America. I’ll act immediately to protect Dreamers and their families. Then, I’ll invest real political capital to finally deliver legislative immigration reform to modernize our system, giving nearly 11 million undocumented people a path to citizenship, updating our visa system to sharpen our economic competitive edge, and preserving family unification and diversity as cornerstones of our system.

Please explain the policies, if any, you support to address gun violence in America.

Gun violence is a public health epidemic. We need courage to stand up to the NRA and fix our broken gun laws. I’ve beaten it before – twice. As president, I’ll do it again. I’ll ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and require background checks for all gun sales. I’ll fight for red-flag laws and close the Charleston and boyfriend loopholes, to get guns out of dangerous hands. I’ll invest in smart gun technology and new strategies to reduce daily gun violence in cities. I’ll work to heal trauma that outlasts shootings, starting by doubling the number of school mental health professionals. And I’ll address the deadly nexus of gun violence and domestic violence, starting by signing into law the Violence Against Women Act of 2019.

What, if any, actions would you work towards in your first 100 days to address the threats facing the US due to climate change?

Climate change is our most urgent threat. Beating Trump won’t end it, but it’s key to all progress. In 1986, I introduced one of the first climate bills; PolitiFact says I’m a “climate change pioneer.” Now, I’ve outlined a bold plan to match today’s crisis – putting us on a path to a 100% clean-energy economy and net-zero emissions by 2050. On day one, I’ll rejoin the Paris Accord, restore American leadership, and push the world to do more. I’ll invest $1.7 trillion in clean energy research and development, and in transforming our infrastructure – from electric vehicle charging stations to high-speed rail – reducing emissions and withstanding the impacts of a changing climate, and creating 10 million good-paying jobs, that can be union jobs.

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The most thorough exposition of a pro-left view of Joe Biden comes from USA Today.

2020 Election: If Republicans care about America, they should vote for Joe Biden.
Another four years of Donald Trump would be a disaster for America and the world. They would also be a disaster, and likely fatal, for the Republican Party.
by Stuart Stevens:

I’ve worked in five Republican presidential campaigns. Four won the nomination and two won the White House. It’s a presidential election summer but I am trying to do everything I can to help elect a Democrat: Joe Biden.

Another four years of Donald Trump would be a disaster for America and the world. They would also be a disaster, and likely fatal, for the Republican Party. The reality is that President Trump is a symptom, not the source, of the disease that is ravaging the Republican Party. Only by confronting that sickness can there be a possibility of a cure.

The Republican Party has lost its way

In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower got 36% of the African American vote. In 1964, that number fell to 6% for Barry Goldwater. One could have argued that once the Civil Rights bill, which Goldwater opposed, became law, many of those former Republican African Americans would return to the party. But it never happened, and Republicans have never come to grips with the reasons.

For decades, Republicans told themselves that African Americans would be drawn back to the party if only Republicans understood how to communicate with Black voters.

This launched a cottage industry of Black Republican consultants hired by the RNC to help white Republican candidates and campaigns deliver their message to non-white voters. “If you talk about ‘good’ jobs not just jobs, African Americans will hear you,” was a standard of these lessons.

It was all nonsense. African Americans heard Republicans clearly; they just didn’t like what they were hearing. The party that revered Ronald Reagan’s line, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” never realized that to many African Americans and lower income whites, the federal government was the last best hope for a better life.

After the 2012 election, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus commissioned a so-called “autopsy” to analyze the reasons the party had only won the popular vote once since 1988. The need to reach out to non-white voters, to appeal to younger voters and women was presented not just as a political necessity but a moral mandate for a governing party.

Joe Biden: We must urgently root out systemic racism, from policing to housing to opportunity

All of that was thrown aside a few years later when the party embraced the white grievance candidacy of Donald Trump. Trump didn’t bend the party to his will, he gave the party an excuse to quit pretending it really cared about anything but power.

Biden is right choice for Republicans

I’ve helped elect Republican governors or senators in over half the country, and I have given up any hope that there is some line Trump can cross to make more than a few Republicans in Congress stand for the principles they all swore to believe. The only way to save the Republican Party is to crush Trump and Trumpism and rebuild. It’s why I say, when I am asked what to do about the party I worked in for so long, “Burn it to the ground and start over.”

That starts with electing Joe Biden. Most importantly, Biden is a decent man with a seriousness of purpose that is totally lacking in the Trump administration. The alternative is four more years of a Republican Party that endorsed Roy Moore and stands silently by as Attorney General Bill Barr shreds the rule of law.

It is possible the party can squeeze out enough white voters and suppress enough non-white voters to eke out a victory for Trump.  But it is impossible for that party to grow and prosper beyond November 3rd.

Today in America over half of those 15 and under are non-white. There is good reason to believe that when they turn 18 they’ll register as Democrats. That is a stage four cancer warning for the Republican Party.  Had George Wallace won the Democratic nomination and been embraced by the Democratic establishment, what would that have meant for the future of the party?  So it is with Republicans and Trump. We have a president and vice president who refuse to say the words “black lives matter” and seem more determined to defend Confederate statues than the Constitution.

A change of course: Six ways to make sure Joe Biden wins and Donald Trump loses in the November election

I spent years working to defeat Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama. In those battles, I passionately believed Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney would make better presidents, but I never feared for the country if a Democrat won. That’s how a civil society must function. But today I do desperately fear for the country if Trump wins, again. History tells us that once hate is unleashed and legitimized by a major political party, it is difficult to stop. History will judge each of us on what we did to defend America in this tenuous moment.

America or Donald Trump? That’s how this Republican sees the November choice. I say to my Republican friends: I know what side I’m on, do you?
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The best endorsement I found for Joe Biden comes from overseas, the American School in London specifically, so I just include the link to this short article for those interested:
https://standard.asl.org/14349/opinions/joe-biden-is-the-best-choice-for-president/

The Right View: Joe Biden Pre-election and Mail-in Ballot Myths

A quick search online will expose Tony Perkins as a controversial figure.  However, my views tend to coincide with Mr. Perkins, his controversies arising from principled stances on what he believes.  So I will use his two blogs of July 21 2020 for this guest blog.  However, keep in mind that as Christ-followers we must find the perspective of Randy Alcorn, writing in Heaven (the book, not the address 😉 ): “Christians should be involved in the political process, and we can do much good, but we should never forget that the only government that will succeed in global reform is Christ’s government.”   And some of the links, like the ones to CNN, Fox News or the Washington Post, are particularly interesting.

A Veep of Faith?
July 21, 2020

By Tony Perkins

Based on his comments, Joe Biden’s never had much use for evangelicals. As far as he’s concerned, they’re “virulent people,” the “dregs of society.” But those “dregs” also vote. And Joe’s hoping they’ll forget what he’s said and the policies he pushes long enough to support him.

It’s an ambitious strategy, trying to win over a group of people you’ve spent the last several years insulting. And yet, Biden’s campaign is leaving no election stone unturned, including, it turns out, the president’s staunchest base. In an interesting announcement from the former vice president’s camp, Biden confirmed he’s hired former Republican Josh Dickson to oversee his “faith engagement.” The liberal media, which, like Biden, usually has nothing but disgust for orthodox Christians, rushed to applaud the move, suddenly finding some use for the religion it usually maligns.

The press’s flattery wasn’t lost on everyday people like Patty McMurray, who couldn’t believe the same CNN that routinely mocks Christians was rushing to “prop up Joe Biden as some sort of deeply religious man.” Then again, they probably don’t see his faith as a threat, since it never seems to translate to policy. Deputy Political Director John McCarthy admitted that evangelicals “might disagree on a particular issue” (or 20), but insisted that “for faith and values voters,” Biden’s “spiritual authenticity is the quality they’re looking for.”

As Scripture points out, who can know a man’s heart? Maybe Joe Biden, a self-identified Catholic, is personally spiritual. But “authentic?” Surely, no one who’s followed his four-decade career could conclude that Biden shares Christians’ values where it matters: in the public arena. And yet even Dickson himself tried to sell the former vice president as the real deal because he “love[s] our neighbor” and “care[s] for the poor and vulnerable.” But what does he consider children in the womb, if not vulnerable? This is man running on a vision, not only of abortion-on-demand, but abortion right up until — and perhaps after — birth. To cap it off, for those Americans who do have a biblical or moral objection to abortion, he says they should still have to pay for them with their tax dollars. How does he square “authentic” faith with those radical positions?

The reality is, FRC’s David Closson points out, that “while Joe Biden is touting his faith and courting evangelicals, his policies remain odious to anyone whose view of the world has been shaped and formed by Scripture.” Last year, the one-time defender of the Hyde amendment traded his 40 years of integrity for the support of groups like Planned Parenthood. From there, he swore to appoint only rabid abortion activists to the bench and bulldoze every state pro-life law. He told nuns they’d have to fund birth control, churches they’d have to cover abortions, and U.S. taxpayers that overseas abortion would be our newest export. Someone please explain how this is a candidate that can connect with Christians “through a shared worldview?”

And that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of his radical LGBT advocacy. Biden, who brags that he forced Barack Obama’s hand on same-sex marriage, is so outside the mainstream that his first act as president would be to gut religious liberty — destroying Christian schools, Catholic hospitals, and nonprofit charities from food banks to homeless shelters. We’re talking about a piece of legislation, the Equality Act, that hunts down and punishes the same evangelicals whose vote he claims to want! One that also ends women’s sports, girls’ and boys’ bathrooms, Christian counseling, privacy laws, conscience protections, millennia of biology, medical ethics, parents’ rights. If you can imagine a man in every girls’ shower and a drag queen in every library, that’s Joe Biden’s priority. “This is our soul, da** it,” he said. “This is who we have to be…”

Now, there are some who will say that Joe Biden is a more acceptable choice to Christians because he’s less brash and confrontational than Donald Trump. But if a kinder, gentler Biden was what Americans were expecting on the campaign trail, a gentlemanly statesman is not what they got. Biden’s tirades in local town halls have been the stuff of internet legend, as he berates, profanes, and shouts his way through the heartland. If Biden is supposed to be the angel to Trump’s devil, no one told him. As for his personal conduct, there are at least eight women who would question that he’s more suitable choice for the office than the current occupant.

“Obviously,” Michael Brown said on “Washington Watch,” “people have to vote their conscience, and they have to do what they feel is right before God for their own lives. But the big question is, what are we actually voting for?” Evangelicals don’t support Donald Trump because he’ll hold up a Bible — they support Trump because his policies are based on what’s inside. No administration in history has done more for Christians in America and around the world than this president. And I’ll be the first to admit that, four years ago, I didn’t think that was possible. No one is rationalizing or excusing Trump’s failings. But consider what he’s accomplished for the unborn, religious liberty, Israel, persecuted minorities, the military, our economy, the family. He’s had a backbone of steel to push back against LGBT extremism, political correctness, America’s enemies, and the world’s tyrants.

This isn’t blind allegiance on the part of evangelicals. This is reasoned support for a political leader who has made and kept his campaign promises. As for Joe Biden, it’s going to take a lot of outreach for Democrats to prove that he’s even mildly sincere on the evangelical issues that matter. So far, as his record shows, the only way faith has been a “central part of [Biden’s] persona” is his willingness to attack it.

Unsigned, Unsealed, and Undelivered: The Perils of Mail-in Ballots
July 21, 2020

By Tony Perkins

It’s a “myth,” USA Today insists. “Rare,” writes NPR. Either way, the New York Times argues, “it doesn’t affect elections.” That’s interesting, the Heritage Foundation points out. Because they’ve counted more than 1,285 cases of this rare myth of voter fraud that doesn’t affect elections in the last four years — and they’re convinced: that’s not all of them.

Cheaters have prospered — and they’ll continue to prosper — voters worry, if the Left’s campaign for universal mail-in balloting succeeds. According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, a plurality of Americans worry that the Democrats’ idea makes the election “vulnerable to significant levels of fraud.” A majority of them — 60 percent — want to vote in person this November, the latest sign that George Soros’s plan to steal the election isn’t fair or popular.

With more than 70 lawsuits underway in states across the country, Democrats seem intent on forcing their way to a different system. But, as Hans von Spakovsky pointed out with Sarah Perry on “Washington Watch” last month, that won’t score them any political points. This isn’t a partisan issue anywhere except DNC headquarters. By and large, every American wants some form of election integrity, and this system — which we already know from this year’s primaries and local elections — is ripe for abuse.

“If you talk to liberal activists and liberal leaders of the Democratic Party, they’re all against voter I.D. If you actually look at the polling, you find that everyday folks — no matter whether they’re Republican, Democrat, Independent, no matter whether they’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic — a majority of them say voter I.D. [makes sense]. So their constituents don’t agree with the views of their leadership.” The same goes for voter fraud, he said. In the polling he did for his book with John Fund, “we found that African-Americans were more concerned about voter fraud in communities than other voters.”

And why shouldn’t they be? Democrats are talking about a system with no witnesses, no voter ID, no certainty that their vote would even be delivered. If Americans thought 28 million missing votes over the last four elections were bad, imagine no accountability or supervision whatsoever! True the Vote Founder Catherine Engelbrecht prays it doesn’t come to that. “This is engineered chaos,” she warns. “We need to see it for what it is. This is not an effort to make sure that those who’ve been affected by the pandemic are going to be able to cast their ballot in a secure and well-defined process. It’s anything but that.” It doesn’t matter if you’re dead, incarcerated, illegal, or unregistered, Catherine points out. Every active or inactive voter would get a ballot. “Then you throw in all the dysfunction that is the U.S. Postal Service … and it begs the question, why are we doing this if not but for intentional manipulation to a certain end,” Engelbrecht said.

As FRC’s Ken Blackwell has argued, we can’t let anyone exploit this crisis to take away the integrity of our elections. “This pandemic may seem like it’s changed everything, but it has not changed the rules of our constitutional republic. Let’s keep it that way.”