To live in America in the third decade of the 21st century is to experience something similar to that which many, particularly those on the right, warned about not long after the turn of the millennium.
Following the jihadist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which shook the country to her core, there was a great concern that the waning Christianity in our cities and cultural institutions would open a wide door to the growth of a militant, hostile, imperial Islam. And the response to 9/11, which included two wars, neither of which were won despite not a single lost battle over the course of 20 years of combat, did little to calm those concerns.
There’s an awful lot of damage to consider if you look back over those 20 years. But the more I think about our spiritual decline and loss of Judeo-Christian cultural primacy, the less I can help to consider one data point — perhaps among many — that marked an unmistakable break from our tradition as a confident, biblical civilization and has led to this … whatever it is that we now are.
I’ll get to that data point in a second.
But what brought it to mind is this disgusting little nugget of news:
Outagamie County’s human resources director was arrested overnight and is in a southern Wisconsin jail.
Jail records from Sauk County show Adam Westbrook was booked at 3:40 a.m. Friday.
According to the records, sheriff’s officials are recommending he be charged with four counts of possession of child pornography and four counts of sexual exploitation of a child. No formal charges have been filed in the case.
FOX 11 has learned Westbrook was taken into custody in Neenah after multiple agencies, including the Neenah Police Department and the State Department of Justice, executed a search warrant as part of a Kenosha County investigation.
The Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office told FOX 11 it won’t be releasing any information about Westbrook’s arrest yet, as it’s part of a much larger investigation where the safety of children is a concern.
According to his LinkedIn account, Westbrook started working for Outagamie County in September of 2023. He worked in a similar capacity for the City of Sheboygan and City of Oshkosh in 2022 and 2023, staying in each position for less than a year. Before working in human resources, he was the city attorney in Neenah.
Why would we care much about a local news story, however despicable, in the context of our societal evolution? Because it turns out that Adam Westbrook isn’t so much a nondescript public-sector employee with a perversion for kiddie porn; he’s a member of the local Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence anti-Catholic drag queen troupe:
It’s a sick society that gives government jobs to pedophiles and open blasphemers. If you despair that America isn’t lost just as a post-Christian civilization but as a burgeoning anti-Christian one, too, you might be guilty of overdramatizing the situation, but you certainly aren’t wrong to have the concern.
What’s more, you probably saw a lot of this coming. One warning sign of it came from overseas.
As you know, American troops spent two decades in Afghanistan and left without making much of a dent in the barbaric and perverted practice of bacha bazi — the use of young boys as sexual playthings by mature men. So complete was our complicity in sanctioning that practice as it had been “enjoyed” by the locals in many an Afghan village that there are today quite a number of American soldiers wasting away in prison for using force in an effort to stop it and other iterations of child molestation in that benighted country.
And an even larger number of soldiers who were drummed out of the Army. One of those who managed to save his career was a Green Beret, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, who had to endure a months-long fight and solicit the help of U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter in order to ward off a dishonorable discharge:
Martland has admitted that he and a supervisor were “absolutely wrong” to hit the Afghan Local Police commander while deployed in Kunduz Province. But he said they were moved to act after the commander kidnapped and raped a local boy, and beat the boy’s mother for seeking the Americans’ help.
“We already had two other ALP commanders receive no punishment from the Afghan government for the rape of a 15-year-old girl and the honor killing of a commander’s 12-year-old daughter for kissing a boy,” Martland wrote in a January 2015 memo that Hunter’s office provided to NBC News. “My Detachment Commander and I felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our ALP to commit atrocities.”
Martland and his supervisor, Capt. Dan Quinn, were pulled from Afghanistan. Quinn left the military, while Martland fought his punishment. He eventually turned to Hunter, a former Marine, who fought Martland’s removal and drafted a bill that would allow U.S. troops to confront sexual abuse.
And yet when our Taliban enemies recaptured the country, they made a concerted effort to stamp out bacha bazi and punish the rampant pedophilia in that society.
The lack of will to impose even the most basic of our values — protecting young boys from sexual slavery — on a culture that had harbored the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks stands as one of the most crucial inflection points in our spiritual decline.
And now it appears that the American version of bacha bazi features adult men attempting to dress up as whores while grooming and molesting children. It’s hard to say this is any better.
A confident Christian America would have insisted on eradicating bacha bazi, just as a confident Christian Great Britain eradicated the similarly barbaric practice of sati, or the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. A famous story of Gen. Sir Charles James Napier, at the time the commander of British troops in India, outlined what such a response would look like. Told of the practice and given the excuse that sati was a long-standing custom among the Indians, Napier laid down the law, as one would expect of a commander secure in the belief his society was superior morally as well as militarily:
Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
The United States spent two decades in Afghanistan, and one reason our puppet regime could not hold power there when our troops finally pulled out was a local public disgusted with what it saw as the moral rot America had brought and allowed while occupying the country.
The fear was that Islam would rush in to replace a waning Christianity in America, as it has done to an extent in a disintegrating Europe. That didn’t materialize.
What did was worse. Wokeness — and the perversity it celebrates and elevates according to the principles of intersectionality — is worse.
America is in palpable decline concurrent with the decline of Christianity in our culture. What has replaced the values of Christianity is not a vibrant, enlightened, and scientific secular liberalism. It’s arguable whether such a thing exists or is even possible.
So we might just find that the barbarism of bacha bazi could outlive our status as a Christian nation — and if it doesn’t, we’ll have the Taliban, and not the two decades and $4 trillion spent in Afghanistan, to thank for that.
And worse, we might just find that while failing to stamp out that disgusting practice in Afghanistan, we’re made to surrender to a version of it here at home.
