Michelle Goldberg writes:

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.”

“The far right, the alt-right, are all sort of galvanized by the Taliban essentially running roughshod through Afghanistan, and us leaving underneath a Democratic president,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank devoted to countering violent extremism. They’re looking at Afghanistan, he said, “from a standpoint of us getting ‘owned,’ in the parlance of the internet.”

This is not the first time that right-wing American extremists have been inspired by Muslim militants; several white supremacists lauded Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11. The difference now is that the far right has grown, and the distance between the sort of right-wingers who cheer for the Taliban and conservative power centers has shrunk. [Continue reading…]