I write this morning with a very heavy heart. The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than has been reported. I can’t tell you how I know this, but I have sources I absolutely trust. Our soldiers on the ground there are behaving with great courage and honor. Our leadership in Washington is not. The persecution of Christians in Afghanistan has begun. The stories I am hearing are absolutely gutting. They cannot yet be revealed so as not to put those still on the ground in greater danger. Of course Christians aren’t the only ones being persecuted. Any religious minority there is in grave danger, and all Afghans who helped the US in any way are marked men. I bring up the situation for Christians because as an American Christian, their plight grieves me like no other.

I am thinking right now of my visit this summer to the Hungarian government office in Budapest, the one for the bureau that helps Christians and other religious minorities. While there, I heard stories, and saw photographs, of the kinds of savagery that Christians in Muslim countries of the Middle East are suffering. Hungary helped them, in real ways. Hungary is a much more secular country than the United States is, but the Hungarian government had the backs of these vulnerable Christian peoples when my own country’s government did not. Indeed, if you talk to people involved in this world of religious liberty advocacy, you will find that Western governments don’t really care about the fate of Christians. The secularist received narrative is that Christians can only ever be persecutors, never the persecuted. This is how the US and Western European governing classes see it. With individual exceptions, so do our media.

A lot of Afghan Christians are going to die — it could be a genocide. Some are dying now. A lot of Afghans (Muslims and others) who helped our country, and who trusted us not to abandon them, are going to die. Some are dying now. I’m not speculating here; I know this. Soon, everyone will know it.

We will not be able to get all of our people out in time. The Taliban today has officially closed off all access to the Kabul airport. The Taliban holds all the cards here. The leading superpower on the planet is reduced to begging these barbarians for mercy — and they’re not giving it. It seems altogether likely that after the August 31 deadline passes — and the Taliban has said no to extending it — we are going to face mass hostage-taking. Are you prepared to relive the Iran hostage drama of 1979-80? I think it is almost certainly coming, in some version.

Joe Biden owns this. The Carterization of his presidency is well underway. No doubt about that. But he is not the only one who owns this. All the generals, the diplomats, and the national security scholars who for twenty years told us all was going well there — they own this. Biden had more political courage than either Obama or Trump, in that he executed the withdrawal. But it did not have to be like this, our pulling out. We could have gotten our people, and our allies, out in an orderly way. All those government officials (military, foreign service, et alia) who screwed up the planning — they own this catastrophe.

And a catastrophe is certainly is. Leaving aside the human wreckage of what we are seeing now in Afghanistan, and what we will see in the days, weeks, and months to come, think about what this does to America’s international credibility. We literally told people who risked their lives to help us occupy that country not to worry, that we would take care of them. Now, we are telling many of them, “Sorry, you’re on your own.” Who is going to believe us going forward? If you are a country who is being courted by Beijing, you are going to take the Chinese more seriously, because America has shown itself to be a weak, incompetent, feckless superpower.

I watched some of Donald Trump’s Alabama rally the other night, before I got disgusted and turned it off. I don’t blame him for laying into Biden, but he gloated about it, which struck me as deeply unpatriotic with American citizens facing a life-or-death struggle to escape Afghanistan. Besides, I have no confidence at all that this wouldn’t have happened on Trump’s watch, given that he would have had to rely on advice from the same military advisers, and most of the same State Department team. Moreover, Trump’s boasting the other night that the Taliban were afraid of him, and wouldn’t have tried all this if he were in the White House, is crass and empty. He praised our generals as “good,” but defined their quality based on loyalty to him. This shows you how utterly unserious he is about understanding the corruption in the Armed Forces that got us to this point. The wokeness in the US Armed Forces did not start under Joe Biden.

The Carterization of the Biden presidency might just lead to a Trump restoration — in which case America’s decline will only accelerate. The most charitable thing one can say about him is that he is not the leader American needs. Our country is desperately in need of steady, courageous, competent leadership, especially given that the Chinese will almost certainly make bold and aggressive moves, seeing how confused and weak we are. This is not a game. This is not Twitter. This is not cable news. This is reality: stone-cold reality.

I return to the plight of the Christians in Afghanistan. We live in an America where the faith is in steep decline. Our Catholic massgoing president believes that

These people, like all in the governing class, do not care about us Christians who dissent from the successor ideology. I wish I were wrong, but so far, it doesn’t seem like we will many Republicans who care about religious liberty enough to make a big issue of it in the face of the LGBT juggernaut. Maybe we will elect next fall more Republicans to Congress who have the faith and the courage to make this stand. We had better.

I don’t think we will. I believe that just as the leadership of our country abandons Christians in Afghanistan, it will not only abandon them, but actively turn on them at home (and if Republicans are in power, I don’t trust them to push back effectively on this evil). The story I told last night about the conservative Christian man who hired a lesbian, who turned around and denounced him to the Title IX office at their university for his “bigoted” Christian beliefs — this is America today. This is going to expand, this kind of persecution. It’s not what Afghan Christians are facing, God knows, but it’s not nothing. This man was making a good mid-career university salary, and is now reduced to trying to get a low-paying job selling suits at a department store — all because a woke woman for whom he did a good turn stung him with the poisonous barb of accusation.

This is the country we live in. A reader of mine who is not a religious believer wrote in response to that story:

I’m not about cancel culture, doxxing, etc. But there’s always an exception and this is one of them. That Woke lesbian (that’s how she identifies, that’s how she shall be referred) deserves all of it in heavy doses.

Forget politics. Who does that to anyone? Especially someone who’s done such a wonderful thing to you? We know the Woke Left is fully capable of such evil, but I always felt that, in real life, people who know each other wouldn’t do that to each other. Turns out I was right to be cynical.

One of the thing that happened to me the last year is that I’ve taken steps to avoid any kind of contact with someone I already don’t know. This includes people I run into on a daily basis, be it at work, the gym, my residence, etc. I live in a place with a large Woke population and some of the bigger industries in my area are those that have been infused with Woke ideology or are staffed with the Woke (for example, healthcare). Simply put, I’m surrounded by people who’d consider me the enemy if they knew what my politics were. The lack of human contact can be tough at times, but it’s something I’m used to and it’s worth not potentially running into a life-destroying, screeching banshee like that Woke lesbian.

We’re getting a taste of what it’s like living in a police state. The secret police, however, is literally all around us. They’re our neighbors. Our co-workers. Our doctors, nurses, and therapists. They work at Starbucks and teach our children. What’s really crazy about it, however, is that they’re not really living in secret. Every day, through expressing their views or via virtue-signalling, they reveal to us who they are. They claim to be afraid, but they’re not. They know they have the power of the state behind them. They’re quite possibly one of the most insidious and malevolent forces in human history, with the only threshold they haven’t crossed being the one where they openly carry out acts of physical violence (though, I’d argue, getting someone fired is physically violent). I have to wonder if we’re not too far from that.

I still hope that there can be a reckoning with as little bloodshed as possible. But my hatred for the Woke and those who enable them grows by the day. I don’t believe in Hell, but, if it exists, I know there’s a special place in hell for the Woke.