This week I saw a tweet from an author, pastor, and activist with a following of nearly 400,000 people.

Spoiler alert: I hated it.

A former friend who is full-on MAGA wrote me and said “Our friendship is worth more than politics.”

I disagree.

He’s now against vaccines, voting rights, immigrants, LGBTQs.

I think all those people he is hurting are worth more than our friendship.

Here’s why I think we need friendships more than ever, especially friendships with people who have different experiences and viewpoints than our own.

Recently I listened to a great audio edition of the book Animal Farm with my seventh grader—I hadn’t read it since middle school myself. One of the things I was struck by were the similarities between the book’s Battle of the Cowshed and the Capitol Attacks on January 6, 2021. In particular, I was impacted by the way the post-event narrative is driven by similar mouthpieces of misinformation: Squealer the pig, in the case of Animal Farm, and non-fiction equivalents like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Ingraham, Paul Gosar and Andrew Clyde…

Last month I wrote about the need to resist being a snowflake. That’s especially hard in today’s culture, where a greater value is often placed on victimhood rather than traditional values like honor and dignity.

A couple of sociologists wrote about this in a book called The Rise of Victimhood Culture. The book examines emerging concepts of “microaggressions” and what the authors believe to be a culture victimhood in our society.  In particular, they observe that the concept of microaggressions reflects a trend in our society to value victimhood over the traditional value of having thick skin, a feature of an American culture that has traditionally revolved around individual dignity.  The very idea of microaggressions, the authors say, “violate[s] many long-standing social norms, such as those encouraging people to have thick skin, brush off slights, and charitably interpret the intentions of others”…

Tomorrow, September 18, 2021, supporters of President Trump will descend on our Nation’s capital for the “Justice for J6” rally.
As journalist Jonathan Chait put it, the horrifying events of January 6, 2021 have evolved “from a black mark that threatened to expunge [President Trump] from Republican politics, to a regrettable episode that his allies preferred to leave behind, to a glorious uprising behind which he could rally his adherents”…

It’s hard to describe the situation in Afghanistan as anything less than an unmitigated disaster. After 20 years of war, trillions of dollars, and more than 20,000 American casualties, things are more or less as they stood in summer 2001. It took only weeks for the Taliban to sweep through the entirety of Afghanistan, enter Kabul, and force the flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The Taliban is less a political movement than a large terrorist group back to brutalizing the Afghan people in the absence of American power. But the reaction in the U.S. seems to fall mainly into three categories: pity for the Afghan people, embarrassment at the failed mission, and good, old-fashioned finger-pointing.

There are far more important reasons why Americans should care about what is going on in Afghanistan.

First and foremost, ungoverned and misgoverned lands are incubators for terrorism…

In a 2017 article describing snowflake as “the ‘it’ new insult,” Brianna Stone defined it as “a slang insult, often used in a derogatory way to suggest that people—often, but not always, young people—who take offense to anything from political policy changes to offensive comments are as weak and vulnerable as a speck of snow.”

As Stone explains, the cut-down is hardly new. Over 150 years ago, you might have heard it used in Missouri to describe anti-abolitionists. During the 1970s, “snowflake” gained prominence as a way to describe white or Black people “who were perceived as acting white.” Twenty years later in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club, popularized by the Brad Pitt movie of the same name, the term tightened its grip on our discourse: “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone and we are all part of the same compost pile.” Lovely, isn’t it?