A roundup of news and interviews from around the interwebs.
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At Chronicles Magazine, Pedro Gonzalez has a chilling essay on the extent to which American occupying forces enabled the rape of Afghan boys. This paragraph stands out:
The U.S. government’s role in enabling Afghan pedophilia quickly lost it even the pretense of moral legitimacy in its delusional nation-building project. It should disabuse Americans of any idea to the contrary, though their government continues to claim it was on the side of good. Good and evil, it turns out, are hard to see clearly in the endless moral midnight that is the Graveyard of Empires.
It is worth reading the whole thing if you’d like to understand the complexities of what was unfolding in Afghanistan. These practices, mentioned only occasionally in the press over the past decade or so, were also discussed in Netflix’s new documentary series Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror. From the sense of national unity and purpose just after September 11 to the ongoing disintegration of the world’s greatest superpower in only twenty years.
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Over at Right Now, my friend Scott Hayward has a detailed, number-crunching analysis of the Canadian election. In short: Erin O’Toole was an abysmal failure, and this was largely due to this flip-flopping and his team’s decision to shank the base. Do take the time to read the entire thing if you’re even marginally interested in Canadian politics.
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Social media is making young people—especially teen girls—depressed, suicidal, and struggling to survive in the 21st century. Albert Mohler has an important essay on this subject, “The Clear and Present Danger of Social Media.” If you have kids—or social media, for that matter—you need to read it.
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At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher has a devastating piece titled “Compassion leads to the surgeon’s knife,” on the transgender medical industry. Included in the article is a clip of the transgender reality star Jazz Jennings having a conversation with her parents and surgeons—and finding out that it is likely that she will never experience sexual pleasure. It is staggering to consider how many of these children going under the knife have no idea what they are sacrificing. Give this a watch—it’s only a few minutes long:
Imagine giving up the prospect of having children or experiencing the fulness of sexual intimacy before adulthood—with adults facilitating this mutilation. Horrifying.
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The twists and turns of the legal travails of the Texas Heartbeat Act continue. After a judge blocked the Texas law and abortionists announced that they were going back to work, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the temporary block.
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Canada’s Justin Trudeau got mocked online again—this time, for dramatically expanding the rainbow alphabet acronym to “2SLGBTQQIA+ people.” Whatever that means.
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Two “transgender women”—biological men identifying as women with the help of the press—have won parliamentary seats in Germany. Trans continues to go mainstream.
