On Aug. 31, 2021, as the world witnessed via live television the Biden administration's Afghanistan debacle, Reuters published a partial transcript of a July 23, 2021, phone call between President Joe Biden and Afghan government then-president Ashraf Ghani.
Before reading the quote, remember Biden held and still holds command authority over all branches of the U.S. government. He bears leadership responsibility, especially in defense and foreign affairs.
UNDISPUTED FACTUAL STATEMENT BY BIDEN ACCORDING TO REUTERS: "...I need not tell you (Ghani) the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren't going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there's a need; whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture."
Translation for Ghani and dominant media: Ignore reality; ignore my command responsibility; go with a flat-out lie that benefits me, Joe Biden.
Translation for everyone else: The Wizard of Oz Ploy. Even though the curtain has fallen, ignore the nattering fool behind the curtain.
In late July 2021, even Wiz Joe knew the situation in Afghanistan was a mess. By the third week of July 2021, it was clear the American withdrawal from Afghanistan was a history-damaging calamity in progress on Joe's watch. The Joint Chiefs of Staff warned him.
Joe was, and is, on the hook for the disaster.
Confident propagandists -- like the Wizard of Oz and Joe Biden -- love to play "Nothing to see here, move along" and variants that slickly ignore essential context or suppress key facts.
Instead of punishing the Taliban and aiding the Afghan government in order to secure the evacuation of U.S. citizens and deserving Afghan nationals, Biden was concerned with his own political viability. In Joe's brain, his own political viability took precedence over broader American security and the lives of American military and embassy personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.
In honest future history -- and honest histories will be written about Biden's fiasco because it was bloody, inept, and has an enormous consequence -- the Reuters report will foreshadow the Biden administration's epitaph: Even though it's an outright falsehood, we must project a pro-Biden picture and babble a pro-Joe narrative because because because.
Fact: Biden's advisers know dominant leftist media is a complicit ally in their falsehoods.
A consequence of that fact: On April 6, the Biden administration confidently released a 12-page National Security Council open-source propaganda spiel concocted to erase the Afghanistan disaster as (1) an issue in the 2024 election and (2) a historical fact that damages Joe and his underlings. And Biden, like the Wizard of Oz, resists the Afghanistan disaster's disabling facts because (to mimic the musical's song) they know the dominant media will let them get away with it.
To be blunt, the Biden administration and its media allies wage perception warfare on the American people.
Leftist media doesn't disable America's enemies. America's enemies use leftist media to disable America. On April 10, Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, told Fox News: "Since Afghanistan fell, we have projected weakness instead of strength."
McCaul is right. The huge Afghanistan foreign policy failure convinced Vladimir Putin he could attack and absorb Ukraine into his new imperial Russian state. It also emboldened communist China. Biden's April 6 flimflam is an example of gaslighting as a crime against the American people and honest history.
Gaslighting is generally defined as psychological manipulation forcing a target audience to question memories and perceptions of reality. Gaslighters deflect and divert. Biden's April 6 crock says, "President Biden's choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor."
That damnation of Donald Trump is utter bull. From late January 2021, Joe Biden had constitutional control of the Pentagon and the State Department. Biden was free to change policy and execute operations as he saw fit.
Hence the critical diagnosis psychologists regard as the gaslighter's most significant moral and intellectual crime: denial of responsibility. Gaslighters refuse to take responsibility for their actions. They blame others for their failures.