Our Age of Zombie Culture

 (By Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 9 August 2025)

It’s not alive, but it’s not dead, either. It consumes a vast amount of resources. It’s mindless: what presents as its will is really a drift toward the mean, toward the unconsciousness of crowds. It will devour you, but don’t take it personally. Or maybe do. You profit-drunk, hubris-crazed humans probably brought this on yourselves.

By “it,” I naturally mean the zombie horde. 2025 has been a bacchanalia of zombies. “28 Years Later,” Danny Boyle’s second sequel to “28 Days Later,” ravaged box-office expectations for its opening weekend in June and went on to gross more than a hundred and forty million dollars globally. In the spring, a new season of the spinoff series “The Walking Dead: Dead City” premièred, and “The Last of Us” occupied HBO Max’s prime Sunday slot, reminding viewers that even megastar Pedro Pascal isn’t above a zombie-hosing gig. Also willing to parley with the undead: Seth Rogen, who brought in the aughts-era picador Johnny Knoxville for a zombie-themed episode of his comedy “The Studio.” Rogen’s character, a beleaguered Hollywood executive, is producing a film called “Duhpocalypse,” which Knoxville is headlining and which features a zombie plague spread via explosive diarrhea. This is just the mainstream stuff. For real heads, the first six months of the year also have yielded a Korean romantic drama series, “Newtopia”; a dark comedy, “Zombie Repellant”; and a bleak New Zealand indie, “Forgive Us All.”

As a symbol, zombies are malleable; you can make them stand for any variety of fear. Pose them one way and they reveal a post-covid apprehension about disease and infection. Put on your maga hat and they evoke invading swarms of immigrants. As with other supernatural adversaries, they are especially good at channelling anxieties about the hazy line between self and other. A typical zombie text starts from the premise that civilization has crumbled and that survivors are desperate; often, the remnants of the social order have militarized. There’s a stock scene—it occurs over and over in the “28 Days Later” franchise—in which a character turns on their infected loved one, and the question of who our heroes have become flares as urgently as the question of what they’re fighting. Because lose-lose situations are so endemic to the genre, a hint of relief can sometimes accompany the prospect of surrender to the putrefying mob. Zombiehood offers self-loss, the end of moral choice. In an era of globalization and of populism, zombies provide a vivid metaphor for being swept away—by a political movement, or by historical forces beyond your comprehension.

Some have argued that zombies represent something more mundane. In 2010, when “The Walking Dead” first came out, Chuck Klosterman suggested that zombie plots are dependably agreeable because they illustrate how “day-to-day existence feels.” Dispatching a zombie is not difficult, he pointed out, but it is draining, especially since you have to do it again and again. (“Blast one in the brain from point-blank range . . . That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place.”) Per Klosterman, killing zombies, like replying to e-mails, is an enervating time suck, and the allure of zombie stories is that they evoke the tedium of contemporary life, which is, increasingly, the tedium of scrolling endlessly on your phone.

Bottom of Form

Zombies and scrolling—yes. The two go together: the unhurried, inevitable motion that keeps placing new posts in front of your eyeballs, and the bodies inching forward as if by the turning of a crank. The impassive march of content and the shuffling tread of death. There’s something reassuring, if also terrible, about the inexhaustibility of zombies, and of content, and of zombie content. You can outrun it but you can never run out of it. When zombies are doing their jobs, they are darkly mirroring humans, and their continuity becomes a comfort. In “Zone One,” a dystopian novel by Colson Whitehead, the protagonist, Mark Spitz, is introduced as a sweeper of abandoned buildings in zombie-infested New York City. The mostly dull work reminds Mark of his own resilience. “Everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he’d experienced it,” Whitehead writes. “A cheerful thought, in its way, given the catastrophe. We’ll be back.”

Zombies are the dumbest monsters. Despite their ineloquence, though, I’ve started to view them as messengers, warning of a societal inability to tolerate loss. The audience for 2025’s reel of zombie apocalypses lives in a world shaped, in part, by Americans’ refusal to accept an aging Joe Biden’s ineligibility for President. It’s a world in which holograms of dead or absent stars, from Whitney Houston to Roy Orbison to the seventies-era members of ABBA, sell out concert venues. The cannibalization of I.P. in endless sequels and reboots is a phenomenon that has itself been rehashed ad nauseam in essays like this one. In June, the Times magazine reported on the burgeoning field of grief tech—the companies racing to develop digital representations of the dead which bereaved friends and family members can interact with. These simulacra can take the form of “griefbots” trained on the speech and writing of the deceased. Some have video components, evoking “The Shrouds,” the recent David Cronenberg film, in which new technology affords people live feeds of their loved ones decomposing underground. As the journalist Cody Delistraty wrote, “Today’s A.I.-driven afterlife offers . . . an ongoing, interactive discussion with the dead that prevents or delays a genuine reckoning with loss.”

Online, there is already an insatiable urge to memorialize. Photographs—memories entombed and then sent flying around the web—saturate our digital lives. As with A.I., the technology seems to be accelerating us toward our own obsolescence. In “The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media,” the critic Nathan Jurgenson writes that an intensifying drive to “embalm” experience on apps such as Instagram “kills what it attempts to save out of a fear of losing it.” When Susan Sontag wrote that “all photographs are memento mori,” she meant it literally, in some cases: an early function of photography was to preserve the likenesses of the dead, making the camera an analog piece of grief tech. But her larger point was that the frozen image often exists in opposition to the dynamic moment and to the living being.

If Silicon Valley’s wilder promises are to be entertained, our spirits may one day be able to join our effigies on the internet. In Jesse Armstrong’s film “Mountainhead,” a venture capitalist played by Steve Carrell refuses to accept his cancer diagnosis and the medical care that goes with it. He is counting on bypassing death by uploading his consciousness to the cloud. The movie is bearish on his chances, though, and implies that he’s only hastening his end by ignoring his doctors. Meanwhile, in a case of life synchronizing with art, the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has pursued “anti-aging” measures—including penis shockwave therapy and plasma donations from his son—that have transformed him into a waxy, ligatured figure, like an ancient Egyptian burial doll.

We are bad at letting go. We recoil from sadness and we want to forget how to mourn. So many of our desires can be gratified, and so seamlessly, that maybe we’ve grown hypersensitive to the sensation of lack, willing to embrace any counterfeit that might insulate us. In such an environment, zombies elucidate the dangers of clinging to the past. One translation of Aaaaughhhh is “There’s a difference between not dying and being alive.” A summary of Gyyyyyuaaackmight be “Things can grow so corrupted or damaged that it’s better not to have them anymore.” In this nostalgic moment, zombie stories expose a toxic side of loss aversion, cautioning us not to settle for brainless facsimiles, for shoddy reproductions, for shambling reanimated corpses of what we once loved.

If zombies were simply inferior substitutes for humans, they wouldn’t be so worrisome. But zombies are destructive, and contain within them a critique of reactionary violence. In “28 Years Later,” England has fully succumbed to a “rage virus” that turns reasonable people into homicidal psychopaths and keeps the country submerged in the dark ages. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has managed to keep the disease at bay; beyond England lies a future of dating apps and streaming services.

The film almost insists on being interpreted as a Brexit allegory. Our protagonist, a young boy named Spike, is eking out a grim pre-industrial existence with his parents and a small group of survivors on a not-so-splendidly-isolated patch of turf off the coast of Northumberland. Misty myths of old Britain shape the movie’s iconography (a digital recreation of a legendary tree; a tower of skulls that evokes the country’s Shakespearean heritage). On the soundtrack, an archival recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem is distorted to draw out the words’ hysterical quality. If, as the scholar Corey Robin has suggested, all reactionary movements have, at their heart, a fear of loss, then Boyle’s England is a conservative paradise, in which an aggrieved desire for the past manifests as a literal virus. In this reading, the infected are both Brexiters, animated by a hunger to protect and restore a world that seems to them to have slipped away, and a symbol of what comes back, deformed, as a result of the reactionary project. With respect to gender roles, for instance, the aggressive zombies incarnate a warped and rotted form of traditional masculinity, a perversion of the warrior ideal.

A virtue of Boyle’s movie—and of the zombie genre more broadly—is that it showcases what, exactly, people can become so panicked about losing. In The New York Review of Books, Ben Tarnoff used the term “reactionary infantilism” to describe President Donald Trump’s “desire to be carefree” and his “abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take responsibility for oneself and others.” The infected have not, like true Burkeian conservatives, reinstated custom or ceremony; they’ve claimed a kind of license, an unshakeable self-confidence, a self-justifying power. They’ve regressed, as all zombies must, to babyhood. (I remind you that the undead’s weapon of choice in “Duhpocalypse” is explosive diarrhea.) Zombies are bottomlessly hungry, they’re preverbal, and they’re unreasoning. Revealingly, both “28 Years Later” and “The Last of Us”  curtain opens on Mark Spitz as a kid. Zombies are what happen when a juvenile life stage is unnaturally protracted. They represent the ugliness of our attempts, as grownups, to recapture the innocent egotism of infants.

This zombie-baby parallel may explain the tenderness for the infected that occasionally pierces through the horror of “28 Years Later.” Boyle casts the zombie plot as a failed bildungsroman, a story about the parts of us that will neither mature nor die and leave us in peace. The film is permeated by pathos and a primal longing for safety. When Spike breaks free of his insular upbringing, he starts to see the infected as objects of pity rather than of revulsion. His empathy doesn’t last—the end of the film swings back to nunchuck heroics—but the critters retain an elegiac aura. If they’re warnings, they’re also embodiments of a relatable grief about being one thing and then being forced to become something else. To paraphrase the poet Louise Glück, we look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is zombies.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/our-age-of-zombie-culture

 

Fact Check: Timeline Of U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan - Key Decisions By Two Administrations

(By Eugene Kiely and Robert Farley, Factcheck.org, 17 August 2021)

The blame game has begun over who lost Afghanistan.  The fact is, President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were both eager to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end what Biden referred to in his Aug. 16 speech as “America’s longest war.”

The Trump administration in February 2020 negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, freed 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set a date certain of May 1, 2021, for the final withdrawal.

And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.

Biden delayed the May 1 withdrawal date that he inherited. But ultimately his administration pushed ahead with a plan to withdraw by Aug. 31, despite obvious signs that the Taliban wasn’t complying with the agreement and had a stated goal to create an “Islamic government” in Afghanistan after the U.S. left, even if it meant it had to “continue our war to achieve our goal.”

Biden assured Americans last month that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable,” and denied that U.S. intelligence assessed that the Afghan government would likely collapse. But it did — and quickly.

Here we lay out many of the key diplomatic decisions, military actions, presidential pronouncements and expert assessments of the withdrawal agreement that ended the U.S. military’s 20-year war in Afghanistan — a war that has “taken the lives of nearly 2,500 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen, cost a trillion dollars, and occupied the attention of four presidential administrations,” as the Afghanistan Study Group put it in a February report.

Trump Strikes a Deal

Feb. 29, 2020 — U.S. and Taliban sign an agreement that sets the terms for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, but do not release two classified annexes that set the conditions for U.S. withdrawal. At the time of the agreement, the U.S. had about 13,000 troops in Afghanistan, according to a Department of Defense inspector general report.

The withdrawal of U.S. troops is contingent on the “Taliban’s action against al-Qaeda and other terrorists who could threaten us,” Trump says in a speech at the Conservative Political Active Conference. (U.S. withdrawals, however, occurred despite the fact that the Defense Department inspector general’s office repeatedly reported that the Taliban worked with al-Qaeda.)

The pact includes the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters who have been held prisoners by the Afghanistan government, which is not a party to the agreement.

March 1, 2020 — Afghan President Ashraf Ghani objects to a provision in the agreement that would require his country to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. “Freeing Taliban prisoners is not [under] the authority of America but the authority of the Afghan government,” Ghani says. “There has been no commitment for the release of 5,000 prisoners.”

March 4, 2020 — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban pledged in the classified documents not to attack U.S. troops and coalition forces or launch “high-profile attacks,” including in Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. “[T]he Taliban have signed up to a whole series of conditions … all the Members of the Congress have all the documents associated with this agreement,” Milley says.

Despite the agreement, the Taliban attack Afghan forces in Helmand province, and the U.S. responds with an air strike.

March 10, 2020 — Under pressure from the U.S., Ghani orders the release of 1,500 Taliban prisoners, but at the rate of 100 per day.

May 19, 2020 — In releasing its quarterly report on Afghanistan, the DOD inspector general’s office says the U.S. cut troop levels in Afghanistan by more than 4,000, even though “the Taliban escalated violence further after signing the agreement.”

“U.S. officials stated the Taliban must reduce violence as a necessary condition for continued U.S. reduction in forces and that remaining high levels of violence could jeopardize the U.S.-Taliban agreement,” according to the report, which covered activity from Jan. 1, 2020, to March 31, 2020. “Even still, the United States began to reduce its forces in Afghanistan from roughly 13,000 to 8,600.”

Aug. 18, 2020 — In releasing a report that covered activity in Afghanistan from April 1, 2020, to June 30, 2020, the Defense Department inspector general’s office says, “The Taliban did not appear to uphold its commitment to distance itself from terrorist organizations in Afghanistan. UN and U.S. officials reported that the Taliban continued to support al-Qaeda, and conducted joint attacks with al-Qaeda members against Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.”

Sept. 3, 2020 — Afghanistan releases the final 400 Taliban prisoners, as required under the U.S.-Taliban agreement, clearing the way for intra-Afghan peace talks to begin.

Sept. 12, 2020 — After seven months of delays, Afghanistan government officials and Taliban representatives meet in Qatar for peace talks. The U.S.-Taliban agreement called for the first peace talks to begin on March 10.

Sept. 16, 2020 — The Taliban continued attacks on government forces. The Voice of America reported that “Taliban attacks in three provinces across northern Afghanistan since Tuesday killed at least 17 people, including six civilians, and wounded scores of others even as a Taliban political team was negotiating peace with Afghan government representatives in Doha, Qatar.”

Sept. 18, 2020 — At a press conference, Trump says, “We’re dealing very well with the Taliban.  They’re very tough, they’re very smart, they’re very sharp.  But, you know, it’s been 19 years, and even they are tired of fighting, in all fairness.”

Nov. 16, 2020 — Congressional Republicans, responding to news reports that the Trump administration will rapidly reduce forces in Afghanistan, warn of what Sen. Marco Rubio calls “a Saigon-type of situation” in Afghanistan. “A rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan now would hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says.

Nov. 17, 2020 — Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller formally announces that the U.S. will reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan to 2,500 by Jan. 15, 2021.

On the same day, the Defense Department IG’s office released a report for the quarter ending Sept. 30, 2020, that said the peace negotiations between the Afghan government and Taliban representatives had stalled and violence increased. “At the same time, the Taliban increased its attacks against Afghan forces, leading to ‘distressingly high’ levels of violence that could threaten the peace agreement,” the report said.

Dec. 2, 2020 — After past false starts, Afghan and Taliban negotiators agree on a framework to govern peace negotiations. “At the same time, the Taliban continued its ‘fight and talk’ strategy, increasing violence across the country to increase its leverage with the Afghan government in negotiations,” the Defense Department IG’s office said a quarterly report covering this period.

The IG report also continued to warn that the Taliban was apparently violating the withdrawal agreement. “This withdrawal is contingent on the Taliban abiding by its commitments under the agreement, which include not allowing terrorists to use Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies,” the report said. “However, it was unclear whether the Taliban was in compliance with the agreement, as members of al-Qaeda were integrated into the Taliban’s leadership and command structure.”

Jan. 15 — “Today, U.S. force levels in Afghanistan have reached 2,500,” Miller, the acting defense secretary, says in a statement. “[T]his drawdown brings U.S. forces in the country to their lowest levels since 2001.”

Afghanistan’s First Vice President Amrullah Saleh tells the BBC that the Trump administration made too many concessions to the Taliban. “I am telling [the United States] as a friend and as an ally that trusting the Taliban without putting in a verification mechanism is going to be a fatal mistake,” Saleh says, adding that Afghanistan leaders warned the U.S. that “violence will spike” as the 5,000 Taliban prisoners were released. “Violence has spiked,” he added.

Biden Follows Through

Feb. 3 — The Afghanistan Study Group, which was created by Congress in December 2019 and charged with making policy recommendations for a peaceful transition in Afghanistan, releases a report recommending changes to the agreement with the Taliban. “The most important revision is to ensure that a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops is based not on an inflexible timeline but on all parties fulfilling their commitments, including the Taliban making good on its promises to contain terrorist groups and reduce violence against the Afghan people, and making compromises to achieve a political settlement,” it said.

Feb. 19 — Biden reiterates his campaign promise to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan, saying during remarks at the Munich Security Conference, “My administration strongly supports the diplomatic process that’s underway and to bring an end to this war that is closing out 20 years. We remain committed to ensuring that Afghanistan never again provides a base for terrorist attacks against the United States and our partners and our interests.”

March 7 — Secretary of State Antony Blinken tells Afghanistan President Ashra Ghani that, despite future U.S. financial assistance, he is “concerned that the security situation will worsen and the Taliban could make rapid territorial gains.”

March 25 — Gen. Richard Clarke, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that “it is clear that the Taliban have not upheld what they said they would do and reduce the violence. While…they have not attacked U.S. forces, it is clear that they took a deliberate approach and increased their violence…since the peace accords were signed.”

March 25 — During a press conference at the White House, Biden says “it’s going to be hard to meet the May 1 deadline. Just in terms of tactical reasons, it’s hard to get those troops out.” He assures that “if we leave, we’re going to do so in a safe and orderly way.” Without committing to a pullout date, Biden says, “it is not my intention to stay there for a long time. But the question is: How and in what circumstances do we meet that agreement that was made by President Trump to leave under a deal that looks like it’s not being able to be worked out to begin with? How is that done? But we are not staying a long time.”

April 14 — Saying it is “time to end the forever war,” Biden announces that all troops will be removed from Afghanistan by Sept. 11.

In a speech explaining the decision, Biden says he became convinced after  trip to Afghanistan in 2008 that “more and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.” Biden says the U.S. achieved its initial and primary objective, “to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again” and that “our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear.”

Biden says he “inherited a diplomatic agreement” between the U.S. and the Taliban that all U.S. forces would be out by May 1. “It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something,” Biden says, adding that final troop withdrawal would begin on May 1.

“We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” Biden says. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” Biden assures Americans that the U.S. has “trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel” and that “they’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost.”

April 15 — In response to Biden’s decision to delay full withdrawal until Sept. 11, the Taliban releases a statement that says failure to complete the withdrawal by May 1 “opens the way for [the Taliban] to take every necessary countermeasure, hence the American side will be held responsible for all future consequences.”

April 18 — In a released statement, Trump criticizes Biden’s Sept. 11 withdrawal deadline saying, “we can and should get out earlier.” He concludes, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”

May 18 — The Defense Department IG releases a report for the first three months of 2021 that says the Taliban had increased its attacks against Afghanistan government forces during this period and appears to be preparing with al-Qaeda for “large-scale offensives.”

“The Taliban initiated 37 percent more attacks this quarter than during the same period in 2020,” the report said. “According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Taliban maintained close ties with al-Qaeda and was very likely preparing for large-scale offensives against population centers and Afghan government installations.”

May 18 — In a House hearing on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, downplays the prospect of a swift Taliban takeover when U.S. forces leave. “If they [Taliban] pursue, in my judgment, a military victory, it will result in a long war, because Afghan security forces will fight, other Afghans will fight, neighbors will come to support different forces,” Khalilzad says.

Later Khalilzad added, “I personally believe that the statements that the [Afghan] forces will disintegrate, and the Talibs will take over in short order are mistaken. The real choices that the Afghans will face is between a long war and negotiated settlement.”

June 8 — Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tells Foreign Policy that after foreign forces leave Afghanistan the group’s goal is to create an “Islamic government,” and “we will be compelled to continue our war to achieve our goal.”

June 26 — At a rally in Ohio, his first since leaving office, Trump boasts that Biden can’t stop the process he started to remove troops from Afghanistan, and acknowledges the Afghan government won’t last once U.S. troops leave.

“I started the process,” Trump says. “All the troops are coming back home. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. 21 years is enough. Don’t we think? 21 years. They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process when other things… It’s a shame. 21 years, by a government that wouldn’t last. The only way they last is if we’re there. What are we going to say? We’ll stay for another 21 years, then we’ll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous. … We’re bringing troops back home from Afghanistan.”

July 6 — The U.S. military confirms it has pulled out of Bagram Airfield, its largest airfield in the Afghanistan, as the final withdrawal nears.

July 8 — Saying “speed is safety,” Biden moves up the timeline for full troop withdrawal to Aug. 31. Biden acknowledges the move comes as the Taliban “is at its strongest militarily since 2001.” Biden says if he went back on the agreement that Trump made, the Taliban “would have again begun to target our forces” and that “staying would have meant U.S. troops taking casualties. … Once that agreement with the Taliban had been made, staying with a bare minimum force was no longer possible.”

Biden assures Americans that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan “is not inevitable,” and denies that U.S. intelligence assessed that the Afghan government would likely collapse.

Asked if he sees any parallels between the withdrawals from Vietnam Afghanistan, Biden responds, “None whatsoever. Zero. … The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.  It is not at all comparable.”

Biden adds that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Biden also promises to help accelerate the issuance of special visas for Afghan nationals who helped the U.S. during the war.

July 24 — At a rally in Phoenix, Trump again boasts, “I started the move out of Afghanistan,” adding “I think it was impossible for him [Biden] to stop it, but it was a much different deal.”

Trump says that when he was president, in a phone conversation with the leader of the Taliban, he warned that after U.S. troops leave if “you decide to do something terrible to our country … we are going to come back and we are going to hit you harder than any country has ever been hit.” Trump says he believes the two “had a real understanding” but that after Trump left office “now they’re going wild over there.”

Aug. 6 — The Taliban takes control of its first province — the capital of Nimroz province in Afghanistan — despite the agreement it signed with the U.S.

Aug. 15 — Taliban fighters enter the Afghanistan capital Kabul; the Afghan president flees the country; U.S. evacuates diplomats from its embassy by helicopter.

Aug. 16 — In a speech to the nation, Biden says, “I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan,” and deflected blame for the government’s swift collapse.

“The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight,” the president said. “If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/

What You Know About July 4th Is Wrong

(By Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 02 July 2014)

You learned in school about what happened in July 1776, and think you have a good handle on events surrounding American independence from Great Britain. Right?  Well, if you think that was the day that America’s independence was declared by the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, you are wrong.  And if you think that that was the day that members of the Congress signed the new Declaration of Independence, as depicted in a famous canvas painting by John Trumbull, (which now hangs in the Rotunda of the Capitol of the United States), you are wrong.

And if you think that Thomas Jefferson alone wrote the Declaration of Independence, or the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was made to ring to announce independence, or that Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag at the request of George Washington, you are wrong, wrong and wrong. And if you never learned about George Washington’s own declaration, that’s another gap in your historical knowledge.  Here, adapted from George Mason University’s History News Network as well as from some other sources, including Joseph J. Ellis’s book titled “Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence,” here are some truths about July 4th that may be news to you. (Note: I’ve published some of this before for July 4th).

American independence from Great Britain was not decided on July 4th.

Actually, the Continental Congress voted on July 2, 1776 to declare independence. On the night of July 2nd, the Pennsylvania Evening Post published the statement: “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States.” John Adams thought July 2 was going to be the day future Americans celebrated, or so he said in a letter to his wife, Abigail Adams:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

In fact, Ellis makes the case that that Adams “liked to claim that the resolution of May 15 was the real declaration of independence and that Jefferson’s more famous declaration six weeks later was a merely ceremonial afterthought.” The resolution of May 15, which was actually approved on May 12, was a formal call for the colonies to write new state constitutions that would “replace the colonial constitutions. On May 15, Adams added a preface that placed the resolution in the context of the historical march to independence.

George Washington issued his own important declaration on July 2nd, Ellis wrote, without knowing what was happening in Philadelphia. In his General Orders on that day, he wrote:

“The time is now at hand which must probably determine, Whether Americans are to be, Freeman, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses and Farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of the unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the conduct of this army…. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”

So what happened on July 4th, 1776?

The Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, which was mostly written by Thomas Jefferson but subject to edits by the other members of the five-man team appointed to come up with the document (Ben Franklin, Robert Livingston, John Adams and Roger Sherman) as well as the full Continental Congress. Franklin had first right of refusal to draft the document, and he took it; Adams also said he did not want to, so the job fell to Jefferson. He finished the first draft during the third week of June, Ellis wrote.

But Americans didn’t first celebrate independence until July 8, when Philadelphia threw a big party, including a parade and the firing of guns. The army under George Washington, then camped near New York City, heard the news July 9 and celebrated then. Georgia got the word August 10th. And the British in London found out on August 30th.  Though both Jefferson and Adams later claimed the signing ceremony took place on July 4th, David McCullough wrotes in his biography of John Adams:  “No such scene, with all the delegates present, ever occurred at Philadelphia.”  In fact, most delegates signed the document on August 2nd, when a clean copy was finally produced by Timothy Matlack, assistant to the secretary of Congress; some waited even later to sign, and the names on the document were made public only in January 1777.

The Liberty Bell did not ring in American Independence, despite the famous story about how a boy with blond hair and blue eyes was posted next to Independence Hall to give a signal to an old man in the bell tower when independence was declared. The story was concocted in the middle of the 19th century by writer George Lippard in a book intended for children. The book was aptly titled, “Legends of the American Revolution.” There was no pretense that the story was genuine.  In fact, the bell was not even named in honor of American independence. It received the moniker in the early 19th century when abolitionists used it as a symbol of the antislavery movement. And the famous crack? The bell cracked because it was badly designed.

It is also true that Betsy Ross did not in fact sew the first American flag despite the story that George Washington himself asked her to. It is not known who actually sewed the first flag, but it was designed by Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration. Records show that in May 1780 he sent a bill to the Board of Admiralty for designing the “flag of the United States.” A small group of descendants works hard to keep his name alive.  You may have learned that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the Fourth of July. They did, but the well-known story isn’t all true.  On July 4, 1826, Adams, the second president, and Jefferson, the third president, both died, exactly 50 years after the adoption of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The country took it as a sign of American divinity.  But there is no proof to the long-told story that Adams, dying, uttered, “Jefferson survives,” which was said to be especially poignant, as Jefferson had died just hours before without Adams knowing it. Mark that as just another story we wished so hard were true we convinced ourselves it is.  By the way, James Monroe, our fifth president, died on July 4, 1831. And Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, was born on July 4, 1872.  Have a Happy Fourth!

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/02/what-you-know-about-july-4th-is-wrong/

Mainstream Media Invents Gay Marriage Chick-Fil-A Controversy

(By Patrick Hobin, NewsMax.com, 24 Jul 2012)

CNN and other left-friendly media outlets are running full speed with an erroneous story that brands the president of the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain a homophobe because he allegedly told a reporter he is “guilty as charged” when it comes to his company being opposed to gay marriage, The Weekly Standard reported.  But the Chick-fil-A president, Dan Cathy, did not condemn gay marriage. CNN and other liberal outlets made their own leap from Cathy expressing support of the traditional family and Christian growth and ministry to making Cathy appear to be condemning gay marriage.  A review of the original interview shows he wasn’t even asked a question about gay marriage nor did he say he condemns it.

The erroneous report caused such an uproar that even Boston's mayor threatened to deny the company business permits, and the Muppets announced the fast food chain wouldn't be able to license any new toys for their kids meals.  For example, CNN said in its story: “But the comments of company President Dan Cathy about gay marriage to Baptist Press on Monday have ignited a social media wildfire.  ‘Guilty as charged,’ Cathy said when asked about his company's support of the traditional family unit as opposed to gay marriage.  ‘We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that,’ Cathy is quoted as saying.”

In the actual interview, Cathy wasn’t specifically asked about gay marriage.  His remarks to the paper were as follows: “We don’t claim to be a Christian business,” Cathy told the Biblical Recorder in a recent visit to North Carolina. He attended a business leadership conference many years ago where he heard Christian businessman Fred Roach say, “There is no such thing as a Christian business.”  “That got my attention,” Cathy said. Roach went on to say, “Christ never died for a corporation. He died for you and me.”

“In that spirit . . . [Christianity] is about a personal relationship. Companies are not lost or saved, but certainly individuals are,” Cathy added. “But as an organization we can operate on biblical principles. So that is what we claim to be. [We are] based on biblical principles, asking God and pleading with God to give us wisdom on decisions we make about people and the programs and partnerships we have. And He has blessed us.”  And here's what Cathy says about marriage, the Weekly Standard reported: The company invests in Christian growth and ministry through its WinShape Foundation (WinShape.com). The name comes from the idea of shaping people to be winners. It began as a college scholarship and expanded to a foster care program, an international ministry, and a conference and retreat center modeled after the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove.  “That morphed into a marriage program in conjunction with national marriage ministries,” Cathy added.

Some have opposed the company’s support of the traditional family.  “We are very much committed to that,” Cathy emphasized. “We intend to stay the course,” he said. “We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.”  CNN and other outlets reported that Cathy spoke words directly addressing gay-rights issues and implied that he delivered anti-gay remarks.  GetReligion.org said the reporting “raises an interesting journalistic question: Is a defense of one doctrine automatically the same thing as an on-the-record attack on the opposite doctrine? In this case, is it accurate for CNN (and others) to say that Cathy made comments about gay marriage when, in fact, he did not speak words addressing that issue?”

 

The reporter of the original Biblical Recorder story, K. Allan Blume said, according to GetReligion.org, that Cathy was "very positive” and the conversation was not being portrayed accurately.  Many of those reports “turned [the original story] into a negative,” Blume said, according to the website. Blume said the term “anti-gay” never came up in the interview.  “He was not saying ‘guilty as charged anti-gay,’” Blume said. “[Cathy] never even brought up that subject. Everything he stated was on the positive side . . . He never stated anything negative.”

 The Weekly Standard wrote, “To say that Cathy condemned gay marriage is stunningly dishonest. And yet, Cathy's had to endure headlines such as, "Boston Mayor Blocks Chick-fil-A Franchise from City over Homophobic Attitude" — and that headline comes from Time, which is allegedly one of the more responsible media outlets. CNN, Time, and many other news organizations owe Cathy and Chick-fil-A some serious corrections and/or clarifications.”

Chick-fil-A is not without its backers, however, as the backlash of the non-controversy has a backlash of its own, with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asking supporters to eat at one of the fast food chain's more than 1,500 locations on Aug. 1 as part of an "appreciation day."  "The goal is simple: Let's affirm a business that operates on Christian principles and whose executives are willing to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse by simply showing up and eating at Chick Fil-A on Wednesday, August 1," Huckabee wrote on his Facebook page.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/gay-marriage-chik-fil-a-controversy/2012/07/24/id/446402

Here’s the Snopes link too… http://www.snopes.com/politics/sexuality/chickfila.asp

Along with the original interview… http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=38271

In the follow-up to the original article ( http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=38301 ), I was particularly impressed with the following passage:

“It remains to be seen whether the controversy will harm Chick-fil-A, but the company likely will survive and might even pick up some new customers. That's partially because its base is passionate about its food and, for the most part, apparently appreciates its traditional stance…because its base remains in conservative states. Texas has the most Chick-fil-A restaurants at 262. Including Texas, five states have more than 100 restaurants, and they're all in the South. North Carolina, which has 143 Chick-fil-A restaurants, passed a constitutional marriage amendment in May defining marriage as between a man and a woman. By contrast, the entire state of New York has one Chick-fil-A restaurant. Washington state doesn't have any. Neither does Oregon. Or Vermont. This means that many of those calling for a boycott don't have a restaurant in their area to boycott -- and they've likely never been to a Chick-fil-A.

After watching the uproar, Focus on the Family's Glenn T. Stanton, who often debates the issue of gay marriage and takes the traditional side, told Baptist Press, "I'm gonna have to stop by there for spicy chicken sandwiches and a milkshake more often."  "We hear almost monthly of new major companies announcing their support for the gay community, regardless of what most of their customers want," Stanton said. "And here we have the CEO of a clearly on-the-record traditional values company simply saying he supports the traditional family and how tampering with it is contrary to God's will. And the split-second reaction from these activists is to slander him and his company in the press and blogosphere. It just takes one company taking an alternative position to make the gay activists and liberal press hit the ceiling. But that's where we are today."  Stanton said the message by some opponents of Chick-fil-A apparently is, "Speak up for the natural, traditional family and we will come after you."  "If you don't believe this," Stanton said, "just watch how Chick-fil-A will be treated in the coming months. They [Chick-fil-A's critics] are the new close-minded fundamentalists."

My take, in case you were wondering, is that I don’t have any issue with gay marriage rights.  I have several friends that are married to a same sex partner and I’m very happy for them.  In fact, I’m jealous that they found someone and I haven’t.  What I do have an issue with though, is when people get slammed for voicing their opinions.  Being “pro” something doesn’t automatically make me “anti” something else.  I donate to cancer research organizations but that doesn’t mean I’m “anti-polio cure” because I don’t donate to polio research organizations.  If your argument is that traditional family negates the concept of gay marriage, fine.  Then Chick-Fil-A is anti-gay marriage… and they have a right to be. 

 

If the anti-Chick-Fil-A group got their “genie lamp wish” granted, Chick-Fil-A would go out of business and a differing opinion would be eradicated.  How is that different from misguided people in the 1950’s whose genie lamp wish would be something along the lines of “to have all the queers disappear”?  If the culture of oppression from before needed to change to allow gay marriage to happen, why do the pro-gay marriage advocates want to institute their own culture of oppression?  America was founded on the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  People should be free to say and do what they what as long it doesn’t interfere with my right to do the same.  Being the most vocal doesn’t make you the majority, or even right.  Your voice needs to be heard but you also have to let others speak too, even if you disagree with them.  Being close-minded on either end of the political spectrum is wrong.  That’s why the “Coexist” bumper sticker had to be created.