A psychology professor at Duquesne University is raising eyebrows by agreeing with another educator who says it would be ethical for white people to kill themselves.
“White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” says the top of a video presentation by professor Derek Hook at the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, college.
Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University Derek Hook, defends the quote “white people should commit suicide as an ethical act” as an “opportunity” to “castrate whiteness”.
This is part of an “anti-racist” discussion on “nice white therapists” held by AAPCSW. pic.twitter.com/IL839IjUCV
The video was posted by the anti-Critical Race Theory group Mythinformed MKE.
“This is part of an ‘anti-racist’ discussion on ‘nice white therapists held by the [American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work],'” the group wrote on Facebook.
The College Fix noted “the video appears to be from a summer session hosted by Hook, though the content is not otherwise publicly available.”
Hook, who himself is white, was quoting from Terblanche Delport, a South African philosophy professor at the University of Pretoria who wrote about white people killing themselves in 2016.
“[T]he only (life) purpose for whites, specifically Afrikaners, is to await their death or to commit suicide, like the samurai falls on his short sword when he has fallen into disgrace,” Delport said, according to Radio Free South Africa.
“White supremacy could only be ended once whites are dead,” continued Delport, who also is white. “We should be prepared to die silently, without having children, so that white supremacy could come to an end at last.”
“Here’s the kind of crazy gambit of this talk,” Hook said in his analysis. “I want to suggest that psychoanalytically we could even make the argument that there was something ethical in Delport’s statements.”
He suggested white folks could symbolically kill themselves or undergo metaphorical “castration.”
“I want to make the argument that there is some kind of ethical dimension to his provocations,” Hook continued.
“I think Delport took his white audience to the threshold of a type of symbolic extinction … he took them to a proposed end of whiteness.”
According to his Duquesne biography, Hook is a “scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with expertise in the areas of Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory (the work of Frantz Fanon in particular), the psychology of racism and critical social psychology.”
The College Fix noted: “The American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work is a liberal group that previously called on President Trump to resign days before his term in office ended due to the violence at the Capitol.
“The group ‘believes that Donald Trump’s presidential powers must be immediately revoked,’ according to a January 13 statement. ‘He has demonstrated an exploitation of such powers through the consistent promotion of racist groups and ideologies.'”
The city of San Francisco will launch a bold initiative to curb gun violence: paying “high risk” individuals to put the guns down and become more productive members of society.
San Francisco will launch the ‘Dream Keeper Fellowship’ as a pilot program in October, the San Francisco Examiner reported on Tuesday. Behind the whimsical name, the idea is simple: people “who authorities believe are most at risk of shooting someone” will be offered $300 per month to meet with “life coaches” instead, and to talk other “high risk”individuals out of committing gun crimes.
This monthly stipend increases to $500 as these individuals complete tasks, like meeting with mentors and applying for jobs.
As of July, shootings in San Francisco have doubled since last year, gun homicides are up by a third, and the number of non-fatal shooting victims has risen by more than 100%, according to the Examiner’s figures.
Mayor London Breed responded to this surge in violence not by hiring more police officers or authorizing a crackdown by law enforcement, but by promising to defund the police budget by $120 million, and reroute the money to welfare, black businesses, and other social-justice focused programs, all under the umbrella of the ‘Dream Keeper Initiative.’
While the budget cuts fell by the wayside in favor of a reshuffling of city finances, the soon-to-be launched program is a product of that same desire to tackle crime from a more woke angle. Police believe that conflict between just 12 black and Latino gangs is responsible for most of San Francisco’s homicides. As such, the new program will target the most dangerous of these gang members.
“We are going to invest resources in this 25-year-old who has eight previous arrests, who is on parole, who is a proud member of a neighborhood clique and who is not even seeking services,” David Muhammad of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform told the Examiner. “It’s just not a popular decision to make and may not be politically palatable, but that’s what you have to do in order to reduce gun violence.”
Commenters online ridiculed the program, equating it to bribing criminals not to commit crimes. “Violent criminals need jail,” David Freddoso wrote in the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “They do not need cash. People who shoot other people need to be walled off in prisons and kept away from the rest of us.”
San Francisco will pay 10 people who are "at high risk of shooting someone" $300 PER MONTH not to be involved in shootings.
So leftists created a hijackers and hostages program. What happens when the program stops? Someone will die each day? https://t.co/KM1v1XAQPf
brb, building up my track record of interpersonal violence so I qualify for the ‘earn $300 a month by not shooting people’ scheme https://t.co/URfTcKnd4B
Similar initiatives, touted as successes by San Francisco officials, have yielded mixed results. One program, in Richmond, California, resulted in fewer firearm deaths, but more non-firearm deaths took place instead. Another program, in Stockton, California, boasted that 71% of participants finished the course with “no new gun arrests.” However, nearly a third were arrested during the course and the city saw a 60% rise in homicides, nearly double the national average increase.
Despite the criticism, the program has its true believers. “The notion of paying criminals not to shoot might be a sexy headline but it’s an extraordinarily inaccurate description of the intervention,” Muhammad told ABC7. He stressed that participants will be given their cash payments on pre-loaded cards and won’t be able to spend them on illicit goods, and will be required to actively engage with social services, rather than simply refraining from murdering people.
When seven soldiers said they wanted to get baptized, the military chaplains at Fort Irwin in California made it happen.
News of the spontaneous baptism was first shared in a Facebook post Monday morning by the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.
“With no chapel or equipment to facilitate, our chaplains came together and created a makeshift tub at the National Training Center/Fort Irwin and got the job done,” the division wrote. “A fine example of Lancers being experts at their chosen field craft!”
At press time, the Army’s post had been shared more than 30,000 times, received nearly 8,000 reactions, and had almost 1,000 comments.
“This is absolutely amazing!” wrote one Facebook user. “Makes my heart happy! Thank you, chaplains, what a blessing! Welcome to the family of God! Thank you for our troops! God bless each and every one of you! I pray God’s protection around you all!”
Another added, “This is awesome! Best decision they will ever make.”
“So happy for new brothers and sisters in Christ,” commented someone else. “Thank you for all your service. There is no greater joy than putting on the armor of God!”
‘I have legislation that will be introduced to impeach both Biden and Harris. And Nancy Pelosi can follow them out the freaking door.’
Which is more impeachable — former President Trump’s phone call to Ukraine or President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, which destroyed relations with our allies, gave the Taliban tons of U.S. military equipment, and resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members?
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) joined Glenn Beck on the radio program Tuesday to explain why she’s calling for President Biden to be impeached — but she’s not stopping there.
“I have legislation that will be introduced to impeach both Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris. And Nancy Pelosi can follow them out the freaking door,” she told Glenn.
Acclaimed Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz says that the mob’s takeover of arts and culture feels like something straight out of a Maoist “totalitarian state.”
In an interview with the Telegraph, Schwartz highlights the insanity of the left’s new “cultural appropriation” purity test, where if artists want to avoid retribution from the woke brigade, they are only allowed to write about “someone who is exactly like you.”
“Everyone in the arts in America is talking about the tyranny of cancel culture and cultural appropriation,” said Schwartz. “The funny thing is, no one dares to say it aloud. It’s like living in a totalitarian state.”
The composer of 2017’s Prince of Egypt slammed the new Maoist ideological militancy which employs censorship and intimidation tactics to suffocate independent creativity.
“We’ve lost the ability to have our world view challenged by another point of view. It’s as though we’ve become terrified of ideas. But ideas are how society progresses,” said Schwartz.
The celebrated creator of countless Broadway hits talks about US cancel culture and the survival of theatre https://t.co/l6zwonNGf5
The former president of the Directors Guild of America said that positive depictions of white characters are routinely decried as “white saviors,” adding, “What’s also strange is that if you write a character who is bigoted, people now assume you hold those views yourself.”
Noting that it’s a “weird time” for the arts, Schwartz underscores how the mob is mimicking the behavior of the Salem Witch trials, where “accusation is everything” and people are condemned and vilified for opinions they had 20 years ago.
The composer compared the mob’s treatment of those deemed to have made such infractions to “making people wander around wearing dunce caps saying they are sorry.”
Schwartz is by no means an obscure figure, having won three Grammys, three Oscars and a Golden Globe.
His strident condemnation of the relatively small but vociferous mob who have weaponized cancel culture to terrify artists into being amplifiers for their various inane social justice causes should be applauded.
“I think the pendulum has swung so far it’s got to swing back now. It’s just too crazy,” concluded Schwartz. “The whole point about art is empathy. At the end of the day we have to deal with it if we want to live in a free society.”
Israel has gone further quicker than most governments in pushing people to take experimental coronavirus vaccines and imposing vaccine passports as a requirement for people to go about their daily activities. Last week, Israel Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz announced that holders of these vaccine passports, called green passes by the government, will be required to take yet another shot of experimental coronavirus “vaccine” — termed a booster shot — and, apparently, keep taking more booster shots and being exposed to additional side-effect risks each additional five to six months or their vaccine passports will be revoked.
If this new requirement can be imposed on people in order for them to keep their vaccine passports operating, there is no limit to the requirements that can be piled on. Israel is making the first move in transitioning from vaccine passports to everything passports.
To supposedly limit the spread of coronavirus, Israel or another government could next decide that a vaccine passport may be revoked if a person is caught not wearing a mask where required, not properly “social distancing,” gathering in a group larger than allowed, or posting on the internet or otherwise communicating ideas related to coronavirus that are deemed “misinformation.”
More broadly, to “protect public health,” vaccine passport could start being revoked because a person does not take a flu shot or whatever new shots or pills come out next — say for AIDS or Alzheimer’s prevention, fails to attend a yearly “wellness visit” with his doctor, seeks alternative treatment instead of taking prescribed pharmaceuticals, or does not make sure his children receive every recommended vaccination on time under a government schedule.
But, why must government stop at “protecting public health” as a justification for imposing new requirements for keeping vaccine passports operating, or why can’t government just announce that things that it claims protect from danger are deemed as “protecting public health?” Government can start revoking vaccine passports for people who are convicted of — or maybe just charged with — driving while intoxicated, behind on their tax or debt payments, or listed on the no-fly list.
This is just some of the low-hanging fruit for expanding requirements people must meet to be able to keep their vaccine passports operating and thus keep themselves in the new preferred caste in the developing caste system. Plenty more requirements can be added.
Further, each of a person’s actions or inactions looked at relative to vaccine passports will not need not be considered alone. Many actions and inactions could be weighed to calculate a score for each individual so that vaccine passports will be revoked if the score falls too low. Scores could also be used so a person’s vaccine passport would allow him entry some places but not others depending on score cutoffs.
In this age of computer algorithms, each person can have ten distinct scores that adjust to control the scope of his allowed actions in various circumstances. And, looking forward to a fully developed digitally connected vaccine passport having the ability to help surveille people, the scored actions and inactions will be better monitored for providing information to feed the continually adjusting determinations about revoking vaccine passports or determining where a person may legally be or what he may legally do.
Vaccine passports are a great threat to freedom in their current early iteration. If they are not eradicated early on, they threaten to become a much worse hazard over time as they transition from being vaccine passports to being everything passports.
Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, is in talks to buy Mailchimp, an Atlanta-based email marketing company, for more than $10 billion, per Bloomberg.
Why it matters: Mailchimp hasn’t taken a dime of venture funding since its 2001 formation, making it one of tech’s most successful bootstrapped companies. It’s also survived the rise, “death” and revival of email (and email newsletters).
The bottom line: “The deal would unite two providers of services for small businesses,” Bloomberg writes.
“Intuit has offered QuickBooks accounting software to clients for decades, supplementing it with services such as Credit Karma, which it acquired last year. Mailchimp is focused on digital marketing services, including social advertising, so-called shoppable links and automation products.”
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni Cohen said her mother, Cheryl Cohen, developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting the Pfizer vaccine, and died within three months of her second dose.
Cheryl Cohen, a healthy 64-year-old woman from Florida, died three months after her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. According to Chery’s daughter, Gianni Cohen, her mother suddenly developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) — a rare, degenerative and fatal brain disorder — soon after she was vaccinated.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni said her mother received the first dose of Pfizer on April 5, and her second dose on April 25.
On May 6, Cheryl experienced her first episode indicating “something was neurologically wrong,” Gianni explained. “She had extreme brain fog and confusion. She couldn’t remember where she was driving, and got really scared.”
On May 31, Cheryl called 911 because she was experiencing a severe headache. She was taken to North Shore Medical Center in Homestead, Florida, where she was hospitalized for 10 days.
Gianni said:
“She got taken to this hospital and I don’t know what they considered it, but they kept her for 10 days and released her home. She was in a very very bad state. She said, ‘Hey, I don’t know where I am.’
“My mother had mass confusion and brain fog. She could not do simple things and something wasn’t right. We had to have round-the-clock care with friends and families, thinking this was something that needed to be detoxed from her system.”
Gianni, who at the time did not know Cheryl had been vaccinated, said her mother’s condition grew progressively worse.
“She went from being able to work and do normal everyday activities to being able to do only basic things,” Gianni said. “Before she was vaccinated, she had her own apartment and worked every day as a sales representative. She cooked, cleaned and was in a great place in life.”
Around June 19, Cheryl experienced another severe headache, which became so bad she felt her head was going to explode, so she went to the emergency room and was admitted to the hospital, her daughter explained.
“A few days later, I visited her in the hospital and I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Gianni said. “She couldn’t walk, spoke in broken sentences, wasn’t making much sense, had uncontrollable body movements, was trembling and unable to be still.”
The daily regression was rapid. “It was mind-blowing, confusing and truly heartbreaking. Watching her brain have no control was hard,” Gianni said.
At first doctors couldn’t find anything medically wrong with Cheryl other than a slightly elevated white blood cell count, Gianni said. But then MRI imaging of the brain showed evidence of prion disease, prompting doctors to immediately perform a lumbar puncture — which ruled out acute infection, tuberculosis, syphilis, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prion diseases are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.
The CDC’s website states:
“The term ‘prions’ refer to abnormal, pathogenic agents that are transmissible and are able to induce abnormal folding of specific normal cellular proteins called prion proteins that are found most abundantly in the brain. The functions of these normal prion proteins are still not completely understood. The abnormal folding of the prion proteins leads to brain damage and the characteristic signs and symptoms of the disease.”
On July 12, a second lumbar puncture came back positive for CJD — a prion disease. Cheryl’s tau protein value was 38,979 pg/ml, while the spectrum for CJD positive patients is 0 – 1,149.
Cheryl was hospitalized for a month before she received her diagnosis of CJD. During that time “it was literally like watching something eat her brain alive,” Gianni said. “While shaking, she managed to get out the words, ‘This is fucking stupid.’”
“I said, ‘Mom, is this the vaccine?’ and she said, “yep.”
Gianni said she was surprised when she found out her mother had been vaccinated, as she comes from a family of un-vaxxers. She believes like many Americans, her mother felt pressured to get vaccinated because of her job and the media pressure.
On July 19, Cheryl was discharged to hospice, where she died on July 22.
“We didn’t know what to do,” Gianni said. “It’s fatal. There’s no repairing what was going on. It’s like fast-acting dementia. It was a really sad thing, so scary, so insane and something [her] doctors hadn’t seen before.”
Medical team says onset of CJD could be tied to COVID Vaccine
Gianni said her mother’s medical team said the onset of CJD could be tied to the COVID vaccine. Dr. Andrea Folds, one of the internal medicine physicians from Adventura Hospital who oversaw Cohen’s case, wrote a case report, which will be submitted Sept. 2 to American College of Physicians Journal.
In a written statement to The Defender, Folds said:
“This case identifies potential adverse events that could occur with the administration of the novel COVID-19 vaccine. Moreover, clinicians need to consider neurodegenerative diseasessuch as prion disease (e.g. sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), autoimmune encephalitis, infection, non-epileptic seizure, toxic-metabolic disorders, etc. in their differential diagnoses when a patient presents with rapidly progressive dementia, particularly in the setting of recent vaccination.
“Although there is currently no cure for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), early diagnosis is crucial to avoid the unnecessary administration of empiric medications for suspected psychological or neurological disorders.
“Furthermore, tracking adverse events could potentially lead to further characterization and understanding of both the novel COVID-19 messenger ribonucleic nucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine as well as the etiology of sCJD. More importantly, recognizing adverse effects provides individuals with vital information to make a more educated decision regarding their health.”
Prior to Cheryl’s diagnosis, Gianni said another doctor had mentioned someone who had come in with similar symptoms, had been vaccinated, developed a rare disease and was also released to hospice.
Gianni filed a report with the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS ID 1535217), sent medical records to the CDC and gave her mother’s brain to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center.
Gianni said no autopsy was performed because the cause of death was confirmed as CJD.
Gianni said the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation is also aware of her mother’s case but hasn’t updated cases on its website since 2019, making it difficult for others to draw correlations between any arising CJD cases and COVID vaccination, Gianni said.
mRNA vaccines could trigger development of prion diseases, study shows
According to the paper’s author, immunologist J. Bart Classen, one-time National Institutes of Health (NIH) contract scientist and proprietor of Classen Immunotherapies, he based his conclusions on analysis of RNA from the Pfizer injection. He did not have enough information on Moderna.
Classen published a second paper July 25, on vaccines associated Parkinson’s Disease — a prion disease signal — using the UK Yellow Card adverse events database and data on the AstraZenecaand Pfizer COVID vaccines.
Classen determined both vaccines had the ability to induce prion disease, and the results of the study were consistent with monkey toxicity studies showing infection with SARS-CoV-2 results in Lewy Body formation –– clumps of abnormal protein particles that accumulate in the brain.
“The findings suggest that regulatory approval, even under an Emergency Use Authorization, for COVID vaccines was premature and that widespread use should be halted until full long-term safety studies evaluating prion toxicity have been completed,” Classen wrote.
Could COVID vaccines accelerate disease already in progression?
It often takes years for abnormal folding of certain proteins to produce prion disease, but Classen suggests COVID vaccines could be accelerating disease progression in individuals who either already have subclinical prion disease or have mild prion disease that has not been properly diagnosed.
There is also evidence indicating the vaccine spike protein can prompt misfolding of essential RNA/DNA binding proteins, called TDP-43 and FUS, and catalyze a toxic “chain reaction.”
Because the spike protein can so quickly set abnormal protein clumping into motion, Classen speculates this “could allow fairly rapid detection of prion disease after immunization.”
At the same time, Classen cautioned flawed adverse event reporting systems will likely fail to capture neurodegenerative diseases that take more time to develop. Most vaccine adverse event reports are for acute events, Classen said, whereas few of the adverse events that occur “years or decades after administration of a pharmaceutical are ever reported.”
Moreover, prion disease symptoms are often non-specific or overlap with other conditions, making diagnosis difficult and underreporting probable.
For these and other reasons, Classen suggests the clinical relevance of his findings “could be logs in magnitude higher” than the Parkinson’s signal he detected through his research.
A Facebook and Google partner that uses artificial intelligence to compile data from tracking people’s web history has put together a report that outlines ways to mentally program people to get the Coronavirus vaccine. NATIONAL FILE has obtained a copy of the cynical report from Resonate, a company based in Reston, Virginia in the Washington, D.C. area that goes out of its way to denounce “racism” and employs executives who previously worked for the Washington Post, AOL and other corporations. The report is called Moving The Needle: How To Reach The Vaccine-Hesitant And Resistant. The report gives tips on how to manipulate people’s values of “safety,” “reputation and public image,” “social clout,” and even their religion and shopping habits to coerce them to get the vaccine. The report explicitly states, “DRAW THEM TO VACCINATION SITES BASED ON THEIR SHOPPING PREFERENCES.” The report also compiles information on the children of vaccine-hesitant people and vaccine resisters.
Resonate’s listed partners include Facebook and Google. Resonate acknowledges that its data collection allows its clients to “gain a deeper understanding of every consumer who engages with your digital media presence across all platforms including Facebook, Linkedin, etc.” This Facebook and Google partner has used people’s personal information to build an extremely creepy profile of the “Vaccine-Hesitant” community. And Resonate makes it clear that they are tracking people’s “web traffic” in order to build their research. Here are some screenshots from Resonate’s website describing how they get their information from “web traffic” and how they partner with Facebook, Google, Oracle, and others.
Here are some pages from Resonate’s Vaccine Hesitancy Report:
Resonate is profiling people who don’t want to take the vaccine, and paying attention to the number of children they have.
Resonate offers “5 TIPS FOR REACHING THE UNVACCINATED” including “APPEAL TO THEIR CORE VALUES AND DRIVERS,” stating, “consider emphasizing the social clout from getting vaccinated” and “DRAW THEM TO VACCINATION SITES BASED ON THEIR SHOPPING PREFERENCES.”
The Resonate company is drenched in social justice activism. On its website the company Resonate states, “We denounce prejudice by embracing diversity. We support the equal rights and equal treatment of all people. We recognize each of us needs to be a catalyst for change, to illuminate the best in all of us, to help build a better country, where intolerance of any race, religion, or culture will not be allowed to stand.”
On June 4, 2020, the company’s CEO stated: I am appalled by the tragic and gut-wrenching events that unfolded this week. Respect, inclusion and diversity serve as a foundation of our company’s culture, the basis of our strength and the fuel for our innovation and shared success. We don’t tolerate racism and we stand against racism in any form. We believe the only path forward is an inclusive society that treats all people equally, with dignity and respect. As a company, our emphasis has always been on understanding people and the richness of who we are as unique individuals. With this central to our culture, we stand for the equality of all people, for our freedom of expression and for the pursuit of liberty. We denounce prejudice by embracing diversity. We support the equal rights and equal treatment of all people. We recognize each of us needs to be a catalyst for change, to illuminate the best in all of us, to help build a better country, where intolerance of any race, religion, or culture will not be allowed to stand.”
President Joe Biden wanted the now-departed Afghan president to create the ‘perception’ that his government was capable of holding off the Taliban – an indication he knew it was only a matter of time before the US ally fell to the Islamic group even while reassuring Americans at home that it would not happen.
In the last phone call between Biden and his Afghan then-counterpart Ashraf Ghani, the American president said they needed to change perceptions of the Taliban‘s rapid advance ‘whether it is true or not,’ according to excerpts published on Tuesday.
The call took place on July 23 – weeks before the fall of Kabul – but Biden on Tuesday repeated his assertion that his team was caught flat-footed by the rapid Taliban takeover of the country.
‘The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan national security forces that we had trained over the past two decades, and equipped, would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban,’ Biden told the nation in a televised speech from the White House on Tuesday.
‘That assumption that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown turned out not to be accurate.
‘But I still instructed our national security team to prepare for every eventuality, even that one. And that’s what we did.
‘So, we were ready when the Afghan security forces, after two decades of fighting for their country and losing thousands of their own, did not hold on as long as anyone expected.’
Four weeks before Kabul collapsed, Ghani pleaded for more air support and money for soldiers who had not had a pay rise in a decade.
A transcript obtained by Reuters from an anonymous source reveals two leaders oblivious to the impending disaster and an American president focused on spinning the message.
‘I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,’ Biden said.
‘And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.’
The Taliban were already capturing district after district across the country, while the US and Afghanistan were at loggerheads over tactics.
In the months leading up to the chaotic US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was completed on Monday, Biden was telling the public a different story – that the withdrawal would be done smoothly and that Washington’s Afghan allies were in control.
‘I don’t think anybody anticipated that,’ Biden told ABC News when asked about the swift disintegration of the Afghan security forces.
In April, Biden said that the US couldn’t stay in Afghanistan forever and that it was time to bring the troops home.
‘We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely. And we will do it in full coordination with our allies and partners, who now have more forces in Afghanistan than we do,’ Biden said.
‘And the Taliban should know that if they attack us as we draw down, we will defend ourselves and our partners with all the tools at our disposal.’
In July, Biden said that the withdrawal, which was to be complete by August 31, was ‘proceeding in a secure and orderly way.’ He gave no indication that it would be chaotic.
When asked if a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable, the president responded: ‘No, it is not.’
Biden said that the Afghan government has ‘300,000 well-equipped (forces) as well-equipped as any army in the world – and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban.
‘It is not inevitable.’
When Biden was asked if he trusted the Taliban, the president replied: ‘No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.’
The president was then asked about his own intelligence community’s assessment that the Afghan government would likely collapse.
‘That is not true,’ Biden responded. ‘They did not reach that conclusion.’
‘The intelligence community did not say, back in June or July, that in fact this was going to collapse like it did,’ Biden told ABC News earlier this month.
Biden said that he was not told that the Taliban would take over as quickly as they did. Instead, he said there was a possibility it would take more time.
‘Not even close,’ Biden said.
Behind the scenes, however, Biden apparently knew that the situation was more precarious.
Two weeks after his remarks to reporters denying that a Taliban takeover was inevitable, Biden and Ghani spoke for about 14 minutes on July 23. It was their last conversation before the Taliban captured the capital.
Ghani fled the presidential palace, Kabul and the country on August 15.
By then a chaotic evacuation was already under way, helping tens of thousands of people to safety as the cost of 13 American troops and dozens of Afghans killed in a suicide attack on Kabul airport.
But in mid July, Biden was intent on Ghani delivering a public message and public plan that would shore up confidence in the Afghan government.
‘You clearly have the best military, you have 300,000 well-armed forces versus 70-80,000 and they’re clearly capable of fighting well, we will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is and what we are doing,’ he said.
He pushed Ghani to allow his Defense Minister General Bismillah Khan Mohammadi to pursue a strategy that would focus on defending major population centers.
And he urged the Afghan president to bring together some of the most powerful anti-Taliban warlords in a show of support to reverse perceptions of a crumbling government.
‘But I really think, I don’t know whether you’re aware, just how much the perception around the world is that this is looking like a losing proposition, which it is not, not that it necessarily is that, but so the conclusion I’m asking you to consider is to bring together everyone from [Former Vice President Abdul Rashid] Dostum, to [Former President Hamid] Karzai and in between,’ he said.
‘If they stand there and say they back the strategy you put together, and put a warrior in charge, you know a military man, Khan in charge of executing that strategy, and that will change perception, and that will change an awful lot I think.’
Ghani responded by saying Afghanistan was facing not just the Taliban, but their foreign backers.
‘We are facing a full-scale invasion, composed of Taliban, full Pakistani planning and logistical support, and at least 10-15,000 international terrorists, predominantly Pakistanis thrown into this,’ he said.
But he also asked that American close air support be ‘frontloaded’ to help with the challenges faced by the Afghan army immediately.
Details of their conversation emerged a day after the last U.S. troops were flown out Kabul ending America’s longest war.
In a follow-up call later that day that did not include the US president, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, General Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command commander General Frank McKenzie spoke to Ghani.
Reuters also obtained a transcript of that call.
In this call, too, an area of focus was the global perception of events on the ground in Afghanistan.
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Ghani ‘the perception in the United States, in Europe and the media sort of thing is a narrative of Taliban momentum, and a narrative of Taliban victory. And we need to collectively demonstrate and try to turn that perception, that narrative around.’
‘I do not believe time is our friend here. We need to move quickly,’ McKenzie added.
A spokesperson for McKenzie declined to comment. A spokesman for Milley did not respond by publication time.
Seven Soldiers Spontaneously Baptized in ‘Makeshift Tub’ at California Base
When seven soldiers said they wanted to get baptized, the military chaplains at Fort Irwin in California made it happen.
News of the spontaneous baptism was first shared in a Facebook post Monday morning by the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.
“With no chapel or equipment to facilitate, our chaplains came together and created a makeshift tub at the National Training Center/Fort Irwin and got the job done,” the division wrote. “A fine example of Lancers being experts at their chosen field craft!”
At press time, the Army’s post had been shared more than 30,000 times, received nearly 8,000 reactions, and had almost 1,000 comments.
“This is absolutely amazing!” wrote one Facebook user. “Makes my heart happy! Thank you, chaplains, what a blessing! Welcome to the family of God! Thank you for our troops! God bless each and every one of you! I pray God’s protection around you all!”
Another added, “This is awesome! Best decision they will ever make.”
“So happy for new brothers and sisters in Christ,” commented someone else. “Thank you for all your service. There is no greater joy than putting on the armor of God!”