The Road to Civilizational Collapse

On the cusp of the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama memorably told a crowd at Missouri University that “we are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” This notion that the incoming administration intended to burn down the old, flawed America, so that a social justice utopia could rise from its ashes, was greeted with ecstatic cheers from the crowd and from Progressives everywhere.

Obama’s promise took two presidential terms to gather momentum; former President Trump temporarily stalled its course. But under new President Joe Biden, that fundamental transformation is cascading to fruition so rapidly that one is reminded of a Hemingway character’s reply about how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Indeed, “fundamental transformation” no longer sufficiently describes the accelerating chaos in our country: economy-killing pandemic lockdowns; the collapse of law and order; unprecedented racial tensions; Big Tech control of the flow of information; spiking inflation and the threat of food shortages; a tsunami of illegal border crossings; a media-driven COVID panic dividing the country; the new racism of  Critical Race Theory; rising Antisemitism (always a reliable bellwether of barbarism metastasizing in a society); “cancel culture” assaults on freedom of speech; and more. Obama’s promise of “fundamental transformation” could more rightly be considered “civilizational collapse.”

If you think that sounds like hyperbole, re-read that partial list of our current crises. But what underlies those crises is the culmination of a concerted war of attrition on the three basic pillars that keep a society grounded and stable: love of God, love of country, and love of family. Faith, nation, family.

Faith

This year’s White House Prayer Breakfast featured a proclamation from President Biden in which, for the first time since the tradition was instituted in 1952, the word “God” was not uttered. This registered barely a blip in the news media, but it symbolized an unsettling, dramatic shift from the priorities and worldview of the previous administration. By contrast, former President Trump's 2017 proclamation mentioned God five times; in 2018, five times; in 2019, seven times; and his 2020 proclamation mentioned God 11 times. 

This August, the organization of chaplains at Harvard, a university founded by Puritans to train clergy for the new commonwealth, elected its newest president – an atheist who authored a book called Good Without God. He proclaimed in a New York Times interview, “We don’t look to a god for answers. We are each other’s answers.”

In a recent article, pastor and political scientist Ryan Burge shared research highlighting what he said “may be the biggest cultural shift in our lifetimes”: the exodus of Generation Z (those born in 1996 and later) out of religion. Nearly half (44.4%) identify as atheist, agnostic, or belonging to no religion in particular. That makes them the least religious generation in U.S. history.

These are only the most recent examples confirming that the secular left has gradually and fundamentally transformed America from a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values into one in which the diminishing number of devout Christians are openly demonized by the cultural elites as our “domestic Taliban.”

Men Without Chests

 

In a 1998 interview in the mountains of southern Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden told ABC News’ John Miller that then-President Bill Clinton’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia after the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Mogadishu proved the American soldier is a “paper tiger” – a toothless threat. Muslim youth are no longer intimidated by Western superpowers, bin Laden warned.

Barely three years later, Bin Laden and his cohorts showed the world just how unintimidated they were, launching the 9/11 terrorist attacks. America then took the fight to Afghanistan to root out bin Laden and prevent that desolate country from ever again serving as a base for terrorism. But twenty years later, thanks to a catastrophic mishandling by the Biden administration, the country known as the Graveyard of Empires is back under the control of fundamentalist savages – only now they have been empowered not only by Biden’s gift of approximately $85 billion worth of military hardware, but also by a victory that has galvanized jihadists everywhere – and our other enemies, as well – who feel confirmed in their perception that America and her allies are a paper tiger.

And in truth, what do they have to fear from us? America’s military is being undermined by a top-down subversion led by traitorous SecDef Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley, both of them Critical Race Theory enthusiasts who have shifted the military’s focus from foreign threats to combating purported “white supremacy” here at home and mythical “climate change” abroad. Their push for “racial equity” is corroding cohesion in the ranks, inculcating racial resentment, and eroding patriotism in our troops.

Across “the pond,” our European allies are more concerned about squelching wrongthink at home than crushing external enemies. In this recent, jaw-dropping interview of the British Chief of Defence Staff, General Nick Carter told Sky News as Afghanistan collapsed that the British military was “collaborating” with the Taliban to get British citizens out of the country. Asked how he felt about “collaborating” with an enemy that has committed atrocities against British military personnel over the years, Carter responded, “I think you have to be very careful using the word ‘enemy.’ I think people need to understand who the Taliban actually are.”

Those of us not blinded by political careerism and multicultural brainwashing understand very well who the Taliban are, and if you can’t use the word “enemy” to describe fanatics who celebrate the beheadings of infidels, then what meaning does the word have? One could argue that the General was trying to be cautious and diplomatic under circumstances in which British citizens were still in danger, but seriously: what must every British soldier who survived serving in Afghanistan, and the families of those who didn’t, think about the most senior military officer in the United Kingdom refusing to use the word “enemy” to describe the Taliban? It’s hard to see it as anything but a grotesque betrayal and a white flag of surrender for all the world to see.

‘Unseen’ Terror

 

In the wake of the Biden administration’s catastrophic exit from Afghanistan, which has left a militarily-empowered Taliban in control of that graveyard of empires, Islamic terrorism is set to become resurgent all across the Western world. The fact that we are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks lends the threat a grim symbolism.  

Coincidentally, a new thriller novel is now available that addresses the subversive Islamist threat that already exists in America – not a fictional one, but the very real and insidious presence here of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Before turning to full-time writing, the book’s author, Jeffrey James Higgins, had a varied and extraordinary career in counterterrorism and international drug law enforcement, as you will read in our interview below. His first novel, Furious: Sailing into Terror, is a cinematic page-turner in which a traumatized woman is trapped aboard a sailboat in shark-infested seas, at the mercy of a singularly horrifying predator onboard with her. Now Higgins has released a new novel from Black Rose Writing called Unseen: Evil Lurks Among Us. In it, a rookie detective on the trail of a serial killer in Washington D.C. has his eyes opened about an even greater danger – Islamist infiltration in the nation’s capitol.

I reached out to Higgins with a few questions about the book and his work.

Mark Tapson:           Jeffrey, tell us first a bit about your counterterrorism career and what led you into it. Are there any lessons learned from it that you think the average citizen needs to be aware of?

Jeffrey James Higgins:     I took a strange path into counterterrorism. I wanted to be a writer since I was five years old, and after college I worked as a journalist to pay the bills. When I was between reporter positions, I took a job as a private investigator, thinking it would help my detective fiction. I became enthralled with the excitement and nobility of police work, and I joined a sheriff’s office, then DEA. That led to a twenty-five-year career in law enforcement.

Ironically, I’m libertarian and believe in legalizing most drugs, so during my career with DEA, I focused on violent offenders. I started in NYC and investigated transnational criminal groups who were killing and abducting people—then 9/11 changed everything. I was in the first group of people to arrive at the collapsed north tower of the World Trade Center, where I carried bodies out of the rubble. Standing in the remains of those glorious monuments to capitalism, I swore I’d hunt down the monsters behind the attacks.

I assisted the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force with the PENTBOMB investigation of the al-Qaeda attacks, and when my partner and I identified a man who allegedly conspired with the hijackers, I knew DEA’s drug enforcement tactics were effective against terror cells. As a DEA liaison to Department of Homeland Security Operations Center, I advocated for DEA’s inclusion in counterterrorism operation, despite pushback from bureaucrats who wanted to keep DEA as a single-mission agency.

I volunteered for DEA’s nascent office in Kabul, Afghanistan, and there, I battled bureaucrats to go after the people I’d vowed to hunt on 9/11. I wrestled a suicide bomber, accompanied the military on a terrorist raid, and fought a Taliban operative. Our office trained the Afghan Counter Narcotics Police and led them on their first mission out of Kabul, where we arrested Taliban drug traffickers and freed a sex slave. As the first DEA undercover in Afghanistan since before the Russian invasion, I negotiated with a Pakistan drug trafficker for the delivery of 500 kilograms of heroin to NYC. I clashed with the military, intelligence community, and diplomats who refused to acknowledge the nexus between drugs and terrorism. Even DEA tried to stop me from investigating terrorism, but I persisted.

I joined DEA’s new FAST team, a foreign-deployed tactical team, and returned to Afghanistan. Finally, in 2006, congress passed 21 USC 960 (a), the narco-terrorism law, and I made the first arrest and conviction under that law and cemented DEA’s involvement in counterterrorism. I also investigated Haji Bagcho, a Taliban supporter and drug trafficker responsible for at least 19.7% of the world’s heroin supply. When I transferred to DEA’s Narco-Terrorism Group, I took Haji Bagcho to trial, and he became the most prolific heroin trafficker ever convicted in the United States.

I also investigated many other interesting cases, including the arrest and conviction of an Iranian operative who tried to purchase surface-to-air-missiles. I was extremely fortunate to serve my country, travel the world, and conduct historic investigations.