Right-wing cranks blame ‘woke LGBT+ ideology’ for Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. No, seriously
Ben Shapiro has joined the chorus of people blaming the Taliban on US military ‘wokeness’ (Getty)
The American far-right is taking its culture war obsession to new levels in an attempt to blame the Taliban takeover on LGBT-inclusive “woke ideology”.
Generally confused at the best of times, conservative pundits have somehow fixated on the US military’s alleged “wokeness” in their latest tirades about the fall of Kabul.
It takes some impressive mental gymnastics to suggest that lifting the ban on trans troops somehow led to religious extremists taking control of Afghanistan, but that’s just a regular Thursday for Ben Shapiro.
Last week the pint-sized pundit claimed it all went downhill because Biden’s Pentagon is more focused on diversity and “revising restrictions on trans troops” than it is on “winning wars”.
Priorities of our military leadership:
✓ Diversity
✓ Revising restrictions on trans troops
✓ Lecturing Tucker Carlson
✓ Combatting “white rage”
❌ Winning wars
❌ Evacuating Americans
❌ Keeping commitments to allies
❌ Basic competence
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 19, 2021
His tweet followed an op-ed from New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who roped in anti-LGBT+ rhetoric to accuse Biden of leading the country into a defeat that “will echo for eternity”.
“He is wokifying the military, injecting the poison of critical race theory and transgender ideology to divide the troops, while launching a witch hunt to identify some mythical ‘enemy within’,” she claimed.
Right-wing commentator Kyle Becker jumped on the same bandwagon as he mocked the US military for being “humiliated on the world stage” after adopting LGBT-inclusive policies.
“Afghanistan is going to prove to be a hard lesson for the US military,” he tweeted. “But with a little bit more LGBTQ sensitivity training, free transgender surgeries and CRT indoctrination, we can make sure America is never humiliated on the world stage like this again.”
Meanwhile Fox Nation host Lara Logan spread a false claim that the US embassy in Kabul had flown a Pride flag from its rooftop ahead of the Taliban’s takeover.
“Why was the US embassy in Kabul flying the Pride flag, gay Pride flag, if what you can do is through diplomatic pressure?” she asked. “That is not a message that was well-received by millions of Afghans who do not see the world that way and are not really lockstep with woke ideology.”
And conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza went as far as accusing chiefs of staff chairman Mark Milley of “having fantasies of… putting troops in high heels, maybe transgender surgeries, transgender bathrooms”.
“We have our eye off the ball. The Taliban has its eye on the ball,” he said in a Newsmax interview on 17 August that apparently raised no red flags whatsoever.
The small fact that the actual order to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was issued by Trump, not Biden, was easily glossed over by the New York Post, which asked the former president how he would have done things differently.
Trump insisted it all would’ve been fine if he was in charge because he had a special understanding with the Taliban “where they knew they weren’t allowed to do this”. Sure, Jan.
