There's always been a similarity in approach and world view between the fundamentalist Christofascist crowd in America (the "American Taliban") and the actual radical Taliban in Afghanistan. Religious zealotry, nativism,viewing women as inferior to men and allowing men to dictate over them, etc., are commonalities.
With the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan after the corrupt Afghan government and its paper military collapsed, they gained a cohort of fans among the authoritarian far-right crowd here, as the excellent Michelle Goldberg notes in her op-ed piece ($$) in the New York Times:
"As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in August, a Gen Z alt-right group ran a Twitter account devoted to celebrating their progress. Tweets in Pashto juxtaposed two laughing Taliban fighters with pictures meant to represent American effeminacy. Another said, the words 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 just one example of the open admiration for the Taliban that’s developed within parts of the American right. The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of the Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar and the anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin — 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 way the Taliban “took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.'” (our emphasis)
Goldberg's entire column is well worth a read. If anything distinguishes the far-right, it's their advocacy of armed insurrection and imposing themselves on the majority by force. Their longing for a military coup to upend elections is emblematic of the threat to our democratic republic. To applaud the Taliban, which has killed thousands of our servicemen and women as well as their own Afghan countrymen, exposes their violent, unpatriotic, nativist, authoritarian disease, which must be defeated as one would a deadly virus.
