GRAHAM: Pakistan is a place I really worry about. [In] 85 countries, a woman can’t open up a bank account without her husband’s signature. She can’t inherit property. If you’re a young girl in Pakistan, life is pretty tough. So we’re trying to make life better for women throughout the world.

Suddenly, Lindsey Graham is an expert in how the people of a country 7,000 miles away whose language he does not speak and whose culture he does not understand, should be running their families. Lindsey Graham doesn’t like how young people in Rawalpindi or Lahore too easily accept the customs of their elders. He’d like to shake things up in Pakistani society. He’s got big ideas for how to create more enlightened Urdu-speaking households on the subcontinent, and he’s going to use your money to do it.

“We’re trying to make life better for women throughout the world,” Graham announces, like it’s an item on a “honey do” list. Take out the trash, feed the cat, pick up spaghetti sauce, make life better for women throughout the world. It’s all in a day’s work for an American politician.

“Overreach,” I hear you say. “These are the same people who can’t get the votes counted in a congressional election.” Yeah, but they’ve got bigger aspirations than that. And those aspirations are all over this bill.

FOREIGN AID IN YEAR-END SPENDING PACKAGE ATTACHED TO COVID RELIEF CAUSES UPROAR

On one page, you will find tens of millions of dollars set aside to recruit and retain women in the Afghan army. Why is the U.S. paying for this? Is that something that will help the United States in some measurable way? Why are we doing this?

The real reason Congress is spending that money, of course, is because crazy ideologues and various interest groups, and the federal bureaucracy would like to change one of the world’s last remaining traditional societies. Someday, some unhappy 26-year-old foreign service officer can write her master’s thesis in gender studies on how she undermined the patriarchy in Southwest Asia. That’s the whole point of it.

Meanwhile, no one in the State Department or Congress has paused to think about what the Afghans think. The very same people who lecture you about cultural imperialism think it’s totally irrelevant what the native population might think of this. It’s possible Afghans may not consider this progress. Maybe they are happy with their ancient culture, unsavory as we may find it. That culture existed a thousand years before ours, and maybe they’d like to keep it.

Come to think of it, why would anyone in Pakistan ever take advice from us on how to organize a society? “You must allow market forces to destroy your gender roles,” says a civilization that’s become miserable by doing the exact same thing. Maybe they’ll tell us to keep our money. But no matter what they say, we will not stop sending them our money.

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Foreign aid is the most effective possible way for the academic left to export its poisonous social programs to the rest of the world. The Roman Empire built roads. We demand poor countries become woke. Before long, our aid budget will consist entirely of advanced weapons systems for the Middle East and taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for Africa, and Lindsey Graham and the State Department will be happy about that.

But how will you feel about it? Well, who cares how you feel about it? You get $600, so shut up.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue on the Dec. 22, 2020 edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”