From Twitter to the Taliban, we are witnessing the death of American supremacy.
Mere weeks ago, we did the unthinkable: With thousands of our citizens trapped in Afghanistan, the Biden administration asked the Taliban to extend our deadline for withdrawal.
They said no. We said OK.
The United States of America, capitulating to a medieval death cult.
Our posture on the world stage is exemplified by our increasingly weak president, head in hands and bending before the White House press corps, unable to explain or defend this unmitigated disaster.
No less than the New Yorker, perhaps the most august of left-leaning outlets, asked this week: “Is the U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan the End of the American Empire?”
Their conclusion: Not yet, but probably.
You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to see it. After all, here at home we’re no longer governed by the American DNA — fortitude, confidence, independence of thought — but by Twitter.
And rather than rebel, America lives in fear of it. Get on the wrong side of any issue, utter the wrong word, say or do something offensive and you will be vaporized, canceled, your exile co-signed by cowardly publications, universities, Hollywood studios, multinational corporations.
No longer are we the home of the brave.
The center-left columnist Andrew Sullivan, just last week, told Bill Maher that he did not resign from New York magazine, as announced last year, but was fired with four days’ notice.
Sullivan’s offense? He wouldn’t hew to orthodoxy of thought.
“The real problem with this is not so much the woke and online media — because they are awful and they should be ignored but they aren’t — it’s the point of the people running these institutions,” Sullivan said. “Liberal institutions, universities, magazines, newspapers, they don’t have the b—s to say no! ‘We do believe in the plurality of views, we are going to defend unpopular writers.’ Free speech means nothing!”
He’s dead-on.
New York Times expat Bari Weiss expressed the same outrage last year, writing in an open resignation letter that seasoned professionals no longer edit the paper. Twitter does.
“The paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space,” Weiss wrote. “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.”
The threat is real, and it imperils our survival.
If we cannot abide dissent and debate, who are we? What is our purpose? What is the point of America? We have always been as much an idea as a place.
America is atrophying, and our prognosis isn’t good.