Biden vs. Biden: Speech defending bungled Afghan exit exposes inconsistency and inaccuracy

 Americans aren’t troubled by the withdrawal policy – a majority support it – they are upset by the execution of the exit that occurred on his watch. They did not want to see Afghan allies executed as city after city were overrun. They didn’t want to see desperate Afghan civilians clinging to a C-17 military jets, some falling to their death as planes lofted to the sky. They didn’t expect the capital to fall in six days. And they didn’t expect to hear a top U.S. general warn terror attacks may once again launch from Afghanistan, threatening America.

In his nationally televised speech, Biden made one concession most Americans would agree with: his administration was caught off guard that Afghanistan fell to the Taliban even before the U.S. could get its diplomats, Afghan loyalists and troops out safely.

“The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” Biden told Americans, while insisting he sticks by his withdrawal decision.

The rest of the speech, however, failed to address the bungled exit with specificity and served as a reminder that – as The Washington Post declared in a front-page article last year – Biden has been “maddeningly inconsistent” on Afghanistan.

He opposed in 2009 the military surge that military leaders proposed, and President Obama authorized, one now widely credited with quieting the insurgency that killed numerous soldiers with IEDs and blue on green attacks from 2007 to 2010.

Biden also opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a mission cheered by Americans. And he overruled his own commanders this summer when he abruptly shut down the U.S. air base in Bagram when military leaders were arguing to keep a small contingent of U.S. troops in country beyond September. That decision looks more consequential with the chaos now at the Kabul civilian airport.

For most of his speech, Biden sounded the same ending endless war principles that his predecessor Donald Trump advocated. In so doing, he revised his own personal history, most importantly when it came to using the military for nation building.

“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy,” the president said Monday.

That statement ignored an important reality: Biden as a U.S. senator co-sponsored the first multibillion nation-building legislation for Afghanistan in 2002, insisting building a stable country and government was essential.

“Perhaps the most important question, however, is one of commitment,” Biden argued in sponsoring the law. “Will we stay the course and build security in Afghanistan, or will we permit this country to relapse into chaos?” He compared nation-building in Afghanistan as important as the U.S. effort known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II.

“After World War II, America used its soldiers as peacekeepers and its dollars as peacebuilders. This may have been the wisest investment of the past century: We turned our most bitter foes into our staunchest allies.” he said. “But if we're going to talk about a new Marshall Plan, we should be willing to back up our words with deeds. The original Marshall Plan cost $90 billion in today's dollars. Our total pledge for Afghan reconstruction is less than 1 percent of that, and we've only delivered a fraction of this pledge.”

A year later, Biden doubled down on nation building as essential to preventing chaos in Afghanistan, even as some Bush administration and conservatives questioned such a mission.

“Just two months ago, the President signed the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act of 2002, and Senator Hagel and Senator Lugar and I cosponsored that,” Biden crowed at a February 2003 Senate hearing. ”It was pushed forward by this committee, and we finally got it passed. But the act authorizes $3.3 billion for reconstruction and security of Afghanistan over and above the funds the President might see fit to allocate from other sources.”

Biden, then-the-ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, directly endorsed nation building during the hearing, recounting what local Afghans told him was necessary for success during a trip to the war-torn country.

“In some parts of this administration, ‘nation-building' is a dirty phrase,” Biden argued. ”But the alternative to nation-building is chaos--a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug-traffickers, and terrorists. We've seen it happen in Afghanistan before--and we're watching it happen in Afghanistan today.”

In his speech Monday, Biden also hailed the killing of bin Laden without noting he opposed the mission under Obama.

He suggested he had no choice but to follow the withdrawal plans started by Trump, even though he has reversed nearly every other approach Trump left behind, from the border to the budget.

Biden also declared he was “moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now” without noting he overruled his military leadership on keeping a small military presence in Afghanistan this fall. He also failed to note the U.S. departure of the Bagram air base was done so awkwardly Afghan commanders felt blindsided.

Aside from truth and consistency, the long-term consequences of Biden's approach and the chaotic fall of Afghanistan may be far more severe. A top general warned over the weekend Afghanistan could quickly become a terrorist haven capable of striking America again.

And on Monday, competitors like China used the Afghan debacle to sow doubt about America's commitment to allies like Taiwan.

COVID-19: The Power of Fear

by David Risselada

 August 10, 2021

in Current Events, Opinion

 Covid-19 has shown that fear of the unknown is a powerful motivator of behavioral change and decision making. Despite experiencing different variations of the flu virus every year, Americans responded to the novel-coronavirus with mass compliance to mask mandates and shutdowns, while anticipating the quick arrival of a magical cure. Through weeks of lockdowns where businesses were destroyed and lives ruined, we were continually told a return to normal would come only when everyone is fully vaccinated.

Human response to fear is something that has been under the microscope for decades. Since at least the 1930s, social scientists have been studying the effects of fear appeals, or fear messages, on human behavior. What is a fear appeal, and to what extent did an understanding of fear-based behavior shape the Covid-19 narrative?

A fear appeal is a carefully contrived message meant to influence attitude and or, behavioral change. An effective message will contain two elements  ̶ ̶ ̶  the threat itself, and the recommended course of action. The appeal should focus on the intended target’s perceptions on how the threat directly affects them. If the message is shaped correctly, it should make them believe there would be dire consequences for not complying with the recommended steps to alleviate the danger. According to the book, Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st Century, developing a fear based message is an art “which requires an intricate understanding of human behavior.”

One of the most influential studies concerning people’s reactions to media messaging occurred after the War of the World’s radio broadcast in 1938. They conducted this study to examine the panic that ensued as millions of people reacted to the play as if they believed Earth was really being invaded by Martians.

There were two key findings which directly relate to fear messaging and reactions to Covid-19. One, the people’s trust in media figures, or people in the play depicting media figures, was an essential element in the panicked reactions. Two was the mental frame of reference. Just as popular media normalized a belief in alien life, the threat of a killer virus wiping out mankind falls within the existing framework of people’s mental judgment.

Not only is this idea popularized through by Hollywood movies like 28 Days Later, and television series like The Walking Dead, but also through continuous fear campaigns concerning other viruses like MRSA and Swine Flu. If a message, or stimuli, does not contradict what people already believe to be a possibility, it is more likely to be accepted as valid. This is useful information for someone who may be crafting a fear appeal to influence your behavior.

Skeptical Americans who have questioned the plandemic from the beginning have suspected that the intent was to frighten us into accepting the vaccine. Many people understand Marxism and the concept of The Hegelian Dialectic. This is the idea, based on dialectical materialism, that all social progress is because of conflict.

The Hegelian Dialectic suggests that problems are deliberately created, coaxing the public into demanding a pre-planned solution which is waiting to be implemented. While this seems to be a conspiratorial idea, a deep dive into the study of Marxism shows the concepts exist, at least theoretically. There is evidence that shows this theory, in relation to our response to fear, could have been used in exploiting our reactions to Covid-19. The persuasive strategy of fear-then-relief is believed to produce automatic compliance to persuasive suggestions when the threat in a fear appeal is suddenly removed.

Fear-then-relief is a technique where the persuader deliberately places the intended target in a state of fear, then removes that fear, replacing it with kind requests for compliance to whatever the recommended course of action may be. As far as Covid-19 is concerned, the media kept the public in such a state of panic ̶ ̶̶ and with a friendly smile, assured us everything would be o.k. if people would comply with two weeks to flatten the curve, mask mandates, and now, the vaccine. While people are growing weary of the continued insistence that everyone be vaccinated, compliance to mask mandates was unquestionably high, giving credibility to this technique.

Numerous studies have been done (see another here) showing the fear-then-relief technique to have scientific validity. One of the overwhelming conclusions is that people, when relived of the anxiety of a fear-producing stimulus, enter a mindless type of state, making them more compliant. It could be theoretically argued that the promise of normalness returning with the vaccine is the fear removal process. Even though the media is continually pushing vaccine propaganda, many people are choosing not to get the jab.

Many hundreds of thousands, however, who were no doubt deeply traumatized by the Covid-19 event, are mindlessly complying without question. Interestingly, Cass Sunstein writes in his book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, that most people do not have the cognitive ability to think deeply enough about complex situations, or every choice they must make; because of this, their behavior and choices are easily persuadable. People who are opting out of getting the vaccine are clearly those who are taking the time to research the issue beyond the media hype.

There is a question as to how long the state of mindlessness lasts. The research has shown that if given the opportunity, or if placed in a situation where a mindful decision had to be made immediately following the removal of a fear stimulus, automatic compliance may not be the result.

The continuously changing information surrounding Covid-19, and the confusion associated with it, could be a deliberate strategy to avoid this, keeping people anxious and willing to get the vaccine. That is a theoretical speculation, but given the fact that the narrative has shifted to demanding we all get vaccinated because unvaccinated people are making those who got the shot sicker, it is speculation that should be taken seriously.

Human reactions to media messages and fear appeals have been studied for decades. They are refining the use of fear to motivate behavioral and attitude change to a highly tuned science. There is plenty of evidence, for those who would choose to look, suggesting Covid-19 was a carefully planned psychological operation based on what they already know about our reactions to fear based stimuli.

It is entirely possible, based on the fear-then-relief principle, that they fully expected people to line up for their shot without giving it a second thought based on the assumption that life would return to normal. As the poison pushers realize that not everyone will mindlessly fall for their fear antics, they will no doubt ramp up the fear based messaging. The end goal is to get you to accept that full vaccination is the only way to save humanity. Researching the issue for yourself is the key to not falling for these fear appeal strategies.

You can find more about David on his website and you can find his most recent book on Amazon

Biden Cheated

 1.) We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics. Joe Biden