The long fall down. At 16, glued to the television with the rest of world, I watched in horror as the Twin Towers burned and buckled, and finally collapsed. On every station there was screaming, and also on the radio, where eventually clips of people crying and narrating the unimaginable catastrophe would be cut into a hit Jewel song and played on a loop for months. Thousands of people were crushed or burned alive that day before a stunned audience of billions. The next morning, I sat with my mom, a New Yorker by birth and the most formidable woman I have ever known, as she quietly cried with her face in her hands. There are adults today too young to remember September 11th, and last week must have been especially confusing for them, because Afghanistan is impossible to understand without some recollection of that collective trauma, of the world before and after America realized it was not invincible, and of the promise we could fight our way back to rosy blissful optimism. Back to youth, in a sense. But you can never go back, even when you find yourself exactly where you started. Today, America is finally out of Afghanistan, and so concludes the War on Terror. But over the last two decades, who have we become? I anticipated a return to isolationism. I anticipated a return to nationalism. What I did not see coming was a defense of the Taliban.

With the fall of Kabul, much of our discourse came as expected. Most Americans, across ideological lines, expressed surprise at our botched exit, and especially with the fact that our military was withdrawn before American civilians and allies were safely removed from the country. That surprise and horror was framed in bad faith as pro-war sentiment by talking heads in support of Biden’s decision, pushback followed, and there the media has more or less waged war with itself. On the fringes, I guess predictably in the age of attention grift, the absolute dumbest opinion, “America is like the Taliban, actually,” came from every political direction.

Moore’s take is relevant because it’s grafted to the left’s obsession with domestic terrorism, which Biden has echoed throughout his presidency. The rhetorical strategy here is two-fold. First, our enemies abroad are not really our enemies. It’s time to bring the troops home. Second, we need to eradicate political extremism. The problem, of course, is in the nutrient-famished minds of people like Moore — extremists themselves — everyone to the political right of Joseph Stalin is a dangerous subversive who needs to be controlled.

At first glance, Hanania’s take seems essentially similar, if speaking to fear on the other end of the ideological spectrum. Wokeness is out of control. Freedom of speech has effectively ended in a world where it can’t be exercised, so who are we to talk about liberty? Here, were we not comparing a mob of Twitter idiots yelling at Carrie Underwood to terrorists raping the children of their political enemies, I might be more amenable to conversation. But we are, unfortunately, comparing a mob of Twitter idiots yelling at Carrie Underwood to terrorists raping the children of their political enemies. The take is dumb. It also wouldn’t be worth mentioning were it simply fodder for our local culture war, rather than what seems in context something more akin to a defense of militant Islamic fundamentalism.

Hanania isn’t really saying the woke left is as bad as the Taliban. He’s saying the Taliban isn’t that bad.

Years ago, a great friend and mentor introduced me to something called mimetic theory. He and I bonded on the side of growth, and war was the great enemy. Disastrous, he said, extricating ourselves from military conflict was the most important political position of our time, worth sacrificing almost any other, because war was destructive in every dimension. This included a psychological dimension I had never considered. The problem is, we become what we fight. Sure, war was bad, I got that and agreed. But why would anyone take cues from their enemy on what to become? Surely, enemies didn’t want to be anything like each other, which is why they sought destruction of the other: their differences. Right? The big takeaways are just, first, war occurs between people when they want the same things, not when they want different things. Then, mimesis isn’t picked up, it’s a part of the human condition. Mimicry is how we learn and become, and isn’t really something we control. But somehow, as much as I believed I grasped the stuff, I never thought the idea was literally we’d become the Taliban.

Welcome to Caliphate Chad, population ‘you subscribed to my newsletter so deal with it.’ There’s a difficulty in writing about this topic, as no one wants to be seen as taking dumb things said on the internet too seriously. Who cares about a random meme? But we’re now about a decade into clown reality, and I’ve learned to believe people when they tell me what they want — no matter how insane. Online, I’ve stumbled on the joke-y Taliban stuff before. It sits adjacent to the more straightforward trad life “lift weights, have kids” content, which sort of inadvertently provides cover in something largely healthy for a pretty disturbing trend. Last week, I waded into its meme-rich ecosystem.

Inevitably, all of this stuff is picked up and parroted by much more influential figures:

Now, I know we’re all just joking here, but it probably is worth quickly mentioning the Taliban has been carrying out the rape, mutilation, and extrajudicial execution of civilians for its entire existence. Adherents of Sharia law aren’t interested in banning gay marriage, they’re interested in killing gay people, and abortion isn’t really a hot button issue for the Taliban because women under Taliban rule are effectively slaves. Trusting the Taliban to sack a country and not immediately mass murder everyone they don’t agree with is also a game we’ve already played.

A great thread worth clicking into here on what happened when the Taliban sacked Kabul in 1996:

More recently:

This stuff is Dark Age status, antithetical not only to America political values, but also to our conception of masculine heroics embodied in our archetypical soldier, strong and silent on the beaches of Europe. The American warrior is a liberator, but that archetype has long been debased by our culture, with largely an assault from the left. Now, to the charge that men — all men — do not have heroics in them so much as an innate tendency toward rape and murder, the reaction from some corners of the trad right is simply to ask “ok, but what is wrong with that exactly?”

In part, I think it really is just hard to be on the side of our government right now. Last week, with the Taliban in total control of Afghanistan, with American civilians still stuck abroad, with probably thousands of our allies likely to be executed, and with overtly the goal of never returning to that god forsaken land — which is crucially to say, with no leverage — our State Department had some very stern words for the terrorists.

Our farewell kiss to the country we shaped for two decades was a demand the Taliban let women, who the Taliban believe a kind of property, vote. Was there any real expectation this demand be met? Of course not. It was a spectacular performance of weakness at a moment most Americans had already lost faith in our government. From the State Department to Gavin Newsom’s taste for French Laundry to my pro-crime District Attorney, presently celebrating the release of his terrorist father from prison, there is no level of American politics in which our leaders are not pathetic. But their absence of strength at a time of ongoing crisis is also obvious, which makes people nervous. From a place of fear, demands for order emerge, and as leadership continues to fail in this regard, broadly — across all ideologies — authoritarianism ascends.

Per a study released last week from the Pew Research Center, Americans have nearly abandoned the commitment to free speech. With acquiescence to the concept of elitist truth arbitration a common part of the discourse, it’s as if we’re begging now for someone to take our power, and to wield it against us. I’m a vaccine guy, but the coercion of people into medical procedures they don’t want isn’t a scientific position, it’s a hideous moral position. Right wing incels dreaming of their fundamentalist harem on one hand, left wing incels publicly masturbating to the works of mass murderers like Lenin and Mao on the other. A few weeks ago, the barista Stalinists of San Francisco set up a cutesy decapitation display in the Mission, with a warning for ‘pro housing capitalists’ who, they explicitly state, should be murdered. Jokes! Keyword search the word “guillotine” on Twitter to get a feel for the discourse. Then, no matter the changing of flavors and themes, one thing that never seems safe at a time of ascendant authoritarianism is sex. Caliphate Chad was on top of it.

Another joke to be sure — really, I’m sure! — but the gruesome nature of the joke is not its most notable aspect. What’s important to keep in mind is this meme is presently on the winning side of culture.

Sex is canceled. Last week, OnlyFans announced it would no longer platform adult content, which is to say one of the largest adult content platforms in the world would probably cease to exist. The New York Times was quick to report on the matter, soberly noting the details of the story before bizarrely concluding with the absolutely idiotic take below:

“As someone who does sex work on OF, I’m very angry,” said an OnlyFans creator known online as Jasmine Rice, 23, who founded a content subscription platform called Fanhouse. OnlyFans, she added, “made all their profits off the back of sex workers and are now discarding them.”

Never coy about their own idiocy, the Verge was more explicit with its editorial position: “SEX WORKERS MADE ONLYFANS VALUABLE, THEN IT SOLD THEM OUT.” What followed was a piece of ‘reporting’ overtly making that opinion clear. But what exactly will the porn company be selling in the absence of porn? Because from where I’m standing it seems like nothing. In which case, to whom is OnlyFans selling out? I guess if I hadn’t thought about this for longer than five or ten seconds it might be confusing. But they’ve obviously been forced to do this.

No one at OnlyFans wanted to destroy their extremely lucrative business, nor did they make their profits off the backs of anyone. The platform, and platforms like OnlyFans, freed sex workers from the exploitative traditional model, shifting the balance of industry power and wealth from a handful of studio heads to performers, which is probably why we’ve seen a spike in actual sex workers working — there’s money in it now. Separate from the question of whether or not this is good for society, certainly this is reality. Or, this was reality until Mastercard and Visa began prohibiting the use of their cards on adult content platforms, starting with Pornhub last December. With new rules from Mastercard governing adult content set to go into effect in October, this issue, as well as banking, now threatens the existence of OnlyFans.

The company explicitly admitted the problem.

In a lengthy thread from Post Culture Review, OnlyFans’ decision, the New York Times’ provocation of the sex work backlash, and the central role of Visa and Mastercard in all of this is thoroughly recounted.

The argument in favor of banks and credit cards deplatforming sites like OnlyFans is they are waging war on sex trafficking and child abuse. Of course, these things are illegal, and there are no adult content platforms unwilling to work with authorities to bring creators of such content to justice. In reality, the push against sex work is moral. Many people just think it’s wrong, and my purpose here is not to make a case to the contrary — though I do believe consenting adults have an absolute right to their own bodies, the end, you will never convince me otherwise. My point is only that platforms like OnlyFans aren’t being targeted for their edge cases, they’re being targeted for what they platform generally… and it is now possible, both socially and technically, to eliminate the bad think.

Free speech is effectively irrelevant when a small handful of people, of the same class, and almost entirely of the same opinion, control our ability to trade. There’s also a version of this at the intersection of political speech and social media, which I’ve written about all year. In a world of consolidated power, it was inevitable the people who wield that power would use it to assert their personal morality over others. As both technology and business have matured to the point at which such control is possible, our rights to liberty from the State increasingly don’t matter. Concurrently, there is hope of subverting such ability in technology and business. There’s the decentralization of everything movement, and maybe that will save us.

I’m told that “Bitcoin fixes this.”

But does it? Does it fix all of this?

September marks twenty years from the day the towers crumbled, and we jumped. Since then, “freedom” has been discarded to the American fringe. We didn’t lose everything, or at least not yet, but here at least — philosophically — we certainly did lose. Not the war on terror, exactly, but ourselves. That seems worse.

-SOLANA