The right-wingers who admire the Taliban

As the Taliban swept by Afghanistan this month, a Gen Z alt-right group ran a Twitter account dedicated to celebrating their progress. Tweets in Pashto juxtaposed two laughing Taliban fighters with photos meant to signify American effeminacy. Another mentioned, the phrases 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 only one instance of the open admiration for the Taliban that’s developed inside elements of the American proper. The influential younger white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar’s and anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin’s — 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 best way the Taliban “took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.”
“The far right, the alt-right, are all sort of galvanized by the Taliban essentially running roughshod through Afghanistan, and us leaving underneath a Democratic president,” mentioned Moustafa Ayad, govt director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia on the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a assume tank dedicated to countering violent extremism. They’re Afghanistan, he mentioned, “from a standpoint of us getting ‘owned,’ in the parlance of the internet.”
This will not be the primary time that right-wing American extremists have been impressed by Muslim militants; a number of white supremacists lauded al-Qaida’s assaults on Sept. 11. The distinction now’s that the far proper has grown, and the space between the kind of right-wingers who cheer for the Taliban and conservative energy facilities has shrunk.
Florida Republican Matt Gaetz could also be a clown, however he’s additionally a congressman who was near the earlier president. On Twitter this month, Gaetz described the Taliban, like Trump, as “more legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here.”
Twenty years in the past, within the aftermath of Sept. 11, the United States launched into a battle that might, in time, promote itself as a battle for democracy. Back then, liberal democracy was virtually universally honored in America, which is one purpose we had the hubris to assume we may export it by drive. Many, particularly on the fitting, nervous concerning the risk that jihadism posed to a contemporary, open society. The tragic journey of the previous 20 years started with the loudest voices on the fitting braying for battle with Islamism and ended with a right-wing vanguard envying it.
At least earlier than Thursday’s devastating terrorist assaults, there was a subtler type of satisfaction with the Taliban’s takeover amongst extra respectable nationalist conservatives. They don’t sympathize with barbarism however had been happy to see liberal internationalism lose. “The humiliation of Afghanistan will have been worth it if it pries the old paradigm loose and lets new thoughts in,” Yoram Hazony, an influential nationalist mental whose conferences function figures similar to Josh Hawley and Peter Thiel, tweeted this month.
What outdated paradigm? Well, a number of days later, he tweeted, “What went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan was, first and foremost, the ideas in the heads of the people running the show. Say its name: Liberalism.”
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, a very powerful nationalist voice in America, appeared to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he mentioned shortly after the autumn 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.” (By “neoliberalism,” he appears to imply social liberalism, not austerity economics.)
It seems that when the federal government deceptively invokes liberal democracy to justify a battle, liberal democracy may be discredited by a grueling defeat. In his new ebook, “Reign of Terror,” nationwide safety journalist Spencer Ackerman attracts a direct line between our stalemated post-9/11 wars and the rise of Donald Trump. “Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation,” he wrote.
Humiliation is a risky emotion. Many have written about its position in motivating al-Qaida. Perhaps it’s not stunning that elements of the fitting would reply to humiliation by figuring out with photographs of brutal masculinity.
Some of this identification would possibly simply be for shock worth; the alt-right is adept at utilizing irony to occlude its intentions. But a few of it’s lethal earnest.

“We’ve come across a lot of content that’s US-based extreme far-right websites saying how good the Taliban victory is, and why it’s good for their cause,” mentioned Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, a U.N.-supported venture that screens extremists on-line. One neo-Nazi web site has a tract hailing the Taliban victory partly for displaying {that a} small band of armed fundamentalists can defeat the American empire.
As for the remainder of the pro-Taliban proper, the Proud Boys and incels and MAGA splinter factions, a few of them are in all probability simply trolling. But as teams similar to QAnon and the civil war-hungry Boogaloo Bois present, a motion can appear absurd and nonetheless be a supply of actual radicalization. “The classic response to any of this is, ‘Ah, they’re just a fringe group,’ and then when that metastasizes, a lot of people eat their words,” mentioned Ayad.
If there’s one lesson of latest American historical past, it’s that there’s no such factor as one thing too ridiculous to be harmful.