From "The Right-Wingers Who Admire the Taliban" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT).
August 28, 2021
"As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in August, a Gen Z alt-right group ran a Twitter account devoted to celebrating their progress."
"Tweets in Pashto juxtaposed two laughing Taliban fighters with pictures meant to represent American effeminacy. Another said, the words auto-translated into English, 'Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe and the world see it.'
The account, now suspended, was just one example of the open admiration for the Taliban that’s developed within parts of the American right. The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes... wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: 'The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.' An account linked to the Proud Boys expressed respect for the way the Taliban 'took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.'... The tragic journey of the last two decades began with the loudest voices on the right braying for war with Islamism and ended with a right-wing vanguard envying it.... 'They don’t hate their own masculinity,' [Tucker Carlson] said shortly after the fall of Kabul. 'They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.'"
From "The Right-Wingers Who Admire the Taliban" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT).
From "The Right-Wingers Who Admire the Taliban" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT).
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31 comments:
Bovine scatology
Nobody views these outliers as alt—right except themselves and the leftist media. They have meetings with radical Marxists and anarchists, left-wing truthers, and Bob Avakian acolytes with whom they have more in common. They are welcome at Code Pink riots and Occupy events but not conservative events. They’re obsessed with pot and hardcore music and that’s about it. They even smell like the Rainbow Tribe. Riddle me that.
Any "right winder" who supports the Taliban is as crazy as Joe Biden.
The Great Afghanistan American debacle is a failure of neoconservative nation building redistribution of $2T to the MI Complex and corrupt client puppets. Even if we murdered another quarter million people, who had nothing to do with 911, the Taliban would still be fighting.
Three more days
Look squirrel!!!
I guess they are not Russian troll accounts when they want them to be.
Howard's not wrong, but...
To this observer, it seems that Goldberg's goal is to remind her readers to keep their focus on the real enemy while we all watch the liberal/neocon fantasy burn down. In HD. On our phones. In real time. Because that's the way the world works now. Remember that the alt-right and the Taliban are really on the same side and represent the same threat. That's the message I get.
Remember, this was supposed to be a triumphal end of the situation Howard describes on the twentieth anniversary of the death of thousands in the center of our civilization at the hands of the people we are leaving in charge as we try to get our people out alive. That was the plan.
In reality, we'll see what takes place. In HD. On our phones. In real time.
All Biden had to do to avoid what we are seeing on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 was nothing. Don't forget that point.
Biden's the guy who wanted the job in the worst possible way. He's wanted the job so long that he can't imagine his life ending without being President before that happens. He got what he wanted, while so many others have not.
Now, try to tell him he isn't the smartest guy in the room. He's the President of the United States of America. He's the most powerful man in the world. Go ahead.
I've got an idea for an article:
The Left-Wingers Who Cannot Bring Themselves To Hate The Taliban, or Any Enemy of the United States, Unless They Can Equate Them To Republicans.
Why is it that all the people reading and paying attention to these influential white supremacist and alt-rightists -- and who even know who they are -- are on the left?
This is such cherry-picked one-offishness offered up by one of the lowest forms of Journalistic life, Michelle Goldberg, who, if she ever left Manhattan, might find that there are people who do not think like her, but are actually pretty nice, kind people.
She's disgusting and I cannot even believe I'm taking up your comment section to write about her. Sorry for using up this space. I'll try to be more productive with it next time. But Michelle Goldberg...
It's Michelle Goldberg, who can be reliably counted on to miss the point if it's in her interest.
Notice how the American right-winger's account is suspended, but the Taliban's own accounts are not. And Goldberg doesn't question the decision-making process at Big Tech that makes that happen.
"the encrypted app Telegram"
If it's encrypted, how did Michelle see it? Or did she just throw that in to make it sound more sinister?
"An account linked to the Proud Boys"
Linked how? Show your work, Michelle.
Now do Hamas....
"An account linked to the Proud Boys expressed respect for the way the Taliban 'took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.'..." Linked by who and how? Important information left out, probably because it is based more on wishful thinking than any legitimate link.
Everytime I think I've got a "pithy" well thought out comment to post, I see Temujin has beat me to it. Better said as well!
Everything Michelle Golberg says is a lie. Remember when she was Ms. Feminist, who didnt' need no MAN. And having kids was patriachial oppression. Then she got married and had a child, and suddenly that was the greatest thing ever. Like Jen Rubin, who went from "Hard Core Conservative" to celebrating the destruction of white, conservative America in a blink of an eye, Michell Goldberg is a fraud.
Why would she assume that tweets in Pashto (a language of eastern Iran) were made by Americans, much less Americans with a connection to the right?
Whatever the issue or dispute, there is probably a tiny nutjob group out there who believe something crazy. You'll find them if you look for them, and the Times likes to look for them.
I wonder if looking for the wingnuts and moonbats reflects sincere concern or if it's a sign of insecurity about the validity of one's own beliefs or if it's a tactic to support one's point of view by calling attention to the perniciousness of groups who oppose it.
Do they really think that Nick Fuentes et al pose a real threat to the existing order? And is thinking so an indication of the real problems with that order? Or are the nutjobs just people who resent the awesome righteousness of progressive opinion?
*
But a creeping trust or admiration for the Taliban seems to more pervasive and not confined to the kooks. Two administrations have negotiated with them. Biden relies on them to keep things under control. Psaki and Blinken appeal to their desire for international recognition.
I suspect that a strangely positive attitude towards Islamicists may be the shadow that one can detect in more places than just the alt-right.
Those people were a kind of solution
Proud Boys? Again? Even after we learn they were led and organized by an FBI informant who ran it the way his handlers told him? What a conveniently distracting article they fed to the operative with a byline.
I still am amused by those old Bloggingheads shows where Althouse had her way with Michelle Goldberg on the topic of Sarah Palin’s autobiography vs. Barack Obama’s.
Michelle is a unidimensional hack who takes up space at NYT. No one on the right of any consequence thinks anything good about the Taliban. Dinesh D’Souza talked himself right out of the game trying to say that radical Muslims could find common ground with conservative Christians. I think all the head-cutting is a problem.
I have a friend who told me that when he was working on an engineering advanced degree at Michigan State, he had a crew of four very smart graduate students assisting him, all of whom happened to be from either India or Pakistan and all of whom were practicing Muslims. He was surprised to find that all of them supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He said they were otherwise very smart, charming fellows. It gave him a lot to think about.
Also the mainstream media was “reporting” on Taliban power plays for the last two years. It’s just that no DNC-Media operative like Goldberg ever asked Joe’s admin about Taliban taking over when it would have mattered. Now we read “the signs were everywhere” and still they fail to ask how Joe and Milley and Blinken and Nod missed all that and never had a “what if” moment.
The accepted term in Yiddish for Michelle G. and Jennifer R. is "a shandeh fur die goyim".
Howard seems to have forgotten why the term "neocon" begins with "neo." They were leftists and liberals, when that term still meant something. They joined with Republicans to implement their theory that tribal people, like Iraqis and Afghans, could become good democrats. It didn't work and had little or nothing to do with Republicans. Some of us thought there was a chance with Iraq, which had had a middle class. We were wrong and most of us saw that in a matter of months. With Afghanistan there was never a chance.
Who writes this sort of codswallop? Well--Michelle Goldberg and others of her insular Manhattan ilk.
There's a Pew survey from 2013 that suggests why the Taliban and other fundentalist Islamic movements have been so durable in Afghanistan. Ten years after the start of our occupation, a whopping 99% of Afghans (at least those who could be reached by survey, whom you would expect to be the most Westernised) thought Sharia should be the law. Only 61% thought sharia should be applied to non-Muslims -- this is perhaps the dividing line between our friends and enemies in Afghanistan, but the absolutist stance of the Taliban commands a landslide majority. Oh, and 79% thought the penalty for apostasy from Islam should be death.
If 99% of the US thought we should be governed by Biblical law, and 79% thought apostasy should be punished with death, even today's Alt-Right would be out on the liberal fringe. The political center is just in a completely different place.
That’s right, Michelle. Never mind the millions of conservative (or is it right wing?) posts praising our servicemen and women, decrying the Taliban and condemning the lack of prudence and honor in our withdrawal.
In the silo that is the NYT any scrap of evidence supporting the leftist narrative and the Democrats becomes the mediaswine meme of the day. Imagine seeing this as the topic in the face of the tragedy, carnage, chaos and humiliation during the dereliction of Afghanistan.
It is my, admittedly few, acquaintances on the Left that continually shock me in casual conversation with their admiration of authoritarianism:
1.) Make life as hard as possible for those ingrates who are still unvaccinated? Yes, and why are we not simply going door-to-door with armed agents getting this done and arresting those who resist?
2.) Seek out and sue any business that doesn't wholeheartedly embrace the LGBTQIA+ agenda? Of course, and we need to expose and ruin not just businesses but any individual who opposes the agenda.
3.) Make tax law and mandates to hasten our transition to a low-carbon future? Yes, but we need to go much further: enforced limits on the size, number of cars owned, and diet of each family.
Notice how they don't bother to engage Tucker's argument, but rather simply tries to banish him from society outright.
I am still looking for a concrete example of Trump's 'authoritarianism,' BTW, or any examples of his 'corruption.'
It was shitheads like Michelle Goldberg that kept us from killing the Taliban.
We could have done it at any point. We just needed permission.
She is just on the other side.
By taking Tucker Carlson’s words out of context, Michelle Goldberg made it seem like he was praising the Taliban. In fact, he was criticizing Congress for allocating close to a billion dollars over the past 20 years to export academic feminism to Afghanistan.
As Tucker put it “officials kept pushing radical gender politics” even though “almost nobody in Afghanistan liked any of it.” And arrogantly kept doing it “because they were in charge of these Stone Age people they were going to educate.”
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