What the Biden Administration Has Taught Me

We are coming up on four years of Joe Biden as President of the United States, though he is dropping out of the presidential election, and I am running out of will to live. Since the president’s ascent to power, the globe has descended into chaos, with military conflagrations mushrooming left and right. Biden’s reactions to each of them have been bad, often uniquely bad.

This is probably most widely recognized when it comes to Israel.

Joe Biden has uncritically parroted the death count provided by Hamas. “In his State of the Union address in March,” notes David Adesnik, “Biden told Congress that 30,000 Palestinians had died in the war, without giving any indication that this number came from a Hamas-run ministry.” Back in February, the New York Post reported that while Biden had at one point discounted the Gaza Health Ministry’s claims as fabricated, he later repeated the organization’s death toll of 27,000 during a meeting with the king of Jordan. When pressed about the source of that figure, Biden’s underlings evaded the question.

Anti-Israel protests have been handled no better. Greg Wehner has written an illuminating piece on how Biden has addressed the issue. In the face of massive antisemitic and anti-Israel riots on college campuses, the president said: “There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia or discrimination against Arab-Americans or Palestinian-Americans.” The riots on campuses were antisemitic, not “Islamophobic.” Yet that sentence mentions Arabs or Muslims three times and Jews only once, obscuring the anti-Semitism of the protests and protestors. “Law enforcement sources indicated to Fox News Digital there has not been a spike in Islamophobia across the U.S.,” adds Wehner.

And on the subject of the term “Islamophobia,” and why it is problematic, let me quote Douglas Murray: “The most succinct summary of the problem is often erroneously attributed to the late Christopher Hitchens. It is that Islamophobia is ‘a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.’” True enough. For a nuanced discussion of the term’s origin, see Robert Spencer’s article on the topic. Regardless of who actually coined it, notes Spencer, the term has been frequently deployed by the Muslim brotherhood. That is hardly surprising. “Islamophobia” is a word almost uniquely suitable for silencing dissent, since it implies that opposition to a set of beliefs is inherently reprehensible.

For reasons of domestic American politics, the terrorists’ Nazi connections are a topic of interest. This is an underreported aspect of the war in the Near East. As Daniel Greenfield describes, Nazi Germany both sponsored and served as a model for Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas would later arise. “The Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang had been built in imitation of the Nazis,” he explains. Greenfield also cites the famous statement which al-Banna made about the Palestinian Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem: “Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.” The kinship between the Third Reich and the terrorists in Gaza is easy to discern even now. It is exemplified by the copy of Mein Kampf discovered in a hideout used by Hamas members.

Biden’s willingness to accept the rhetoric of terrorists is all the more sickening given his and his allies’ attempts to paint their opposition as Nazis. A recent example is the “unified Reich” scandal, which journalist Robby Soave has aptly summarized. As Soave recounts, “former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account shared a new campaign video created by a random fan.” The video included a barely visible reference to “the creation of a unified Reich,” but as Soave explains, this was clearly part of a preexisting video editing template which had been used to make the clip. Absurdly, mainstream media outlets proceeded to spin this non-story into a supposed use of Nazi rhetoric by Trump. Joe Biden was quick to jump on the bandwagon, publishing a reaction video. “A unified Reich?” Biden asks in the video. “That’s Hitler’s language. That’s not America’s.”

To make such a comment while doing Hitler’s work is beyond disgusting. The president of the United States is supporting latter-day Nazis in Gaza and has the gall to accuse others of Hitlerite sympathies on just about the most spurious grounds imaginable. As Max Liebermann said when the original Nazis came to power, “I can’t even eat as much as I want to vomit.”

As if all that were not bad enough, one White House policy advisor’s statements indicate that the administration is being cautious in anticipation of this year’s presidential election. According to the official, Biden’s reelection would enable him to be even tougher on Israel.

Make no mistake, the evil Joe Biden displays extends beyond his cabinet, and did not begin with his presidency. It is worth remembering that Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, who already steered American foreign policy away from Israel and towards Iran. And currently, it is not as though the American left as a whole were much more decent than the people in power. The left-wing media are largely in lockstep with the Biden administration when it comes to Israel, if not more radical.

The problem is with the political left, plain and simple. It is not limited to any one country. Consider this. In May, the United Nations General Assembly voted to extend nearly full membership to the non-existent state of “Palestine,” effectively rewarding the terrorists for their slaughter of 1,200 Israelis. While reading Elliott Abrams’s article on that disgraceful event, I was struck by the political divide I saw. As Abrams summarizes, the votes against the proposition came from “Argentina (due no doubt to its new president, Javier Milei), the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, the United States, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, and Palau.” Take out the microstates, and that leaves Israel itself alongside its traditional ally, the United States, plus three countries with right-wing governments: Argentina, Hungary, and Czechia. Giorgia Meloni’s Italy was at least among the abstainers, whereas France and Portugal supported the motion.

The Biden years have fundamentally altered my perspective on the left. Notwithstanding his reputation as a right-wing figure, Jordan Peterson has repeatedly stated that the left and the right are both necessary for a healthy polity, as that they correct each other and compensate for each other’s blind spots.

Five years ago, I would have agreed. Now I cannot bring myself to do so. Perhaps, occasionally and in small doses, a democracy does need moderate liberals of the Bill Clinton breed. But I see no value in a political platform to Clinton’s left. And even his foreign policy showed much of the usual liberal weakness.

Let’s look at two more battlefields: Afghanistan and Ukraine.

The Biden administration’s approach to the Afghanistan withdrawal was defined by narcissistic posturing. Strategic sense was subordinated to clumsy attempts at domestic political pandering. Jed Babbin writes:

In April 2021, Mr. Biden announced — without first consulting our allies who also had troops in Afghanistan — that he’d withdraw all our forces before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. There were no conditions in Afghanistan compelling that retreat, so the deadline was entirely arbitrary.

That is not the only flaw Babbin identifies in Biden’s exit strategy. American soldiers were removed first, then military technology, followed by civilians – exactly the opposite of what should have been done. In the end, $7 billion in military equipment were left to the Taliban.

The president brought the United States an ignominious defeat, and facilitated a totalitarian terror group’s complete takeover of Afghanistan, a country of over 41 million people. His popularity, deservedly, never recovered.

“A disastrous Taliban takeover wasn’t inevitable,” argues Frederick Kagan. Instead, it was facilitated by the president’s decision to initiate the withdrawal “at the start of the fighting season, on a rapid timeline and sans adequate coordination with the Afghan government.”

As an article by Jamie MacIntyre makes clear, the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban, the Doha agreement, had already set the United States on a disadvantageous course. But the Taliban were violating the agreement anyway, and Biden had the option to “reverse course.” Instead, he made executive decisions that further exacerbated an already misplanned exit. “The nearly unanimous advice” from Biden’s experts was to keep a small contingent in Afghanistan, but he refused. He also opted against closing the embassy in Kabul, even though his experts told him it would be unsafe without sufficient  forces in the country to protect it.

And what of Ukraine? As Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg puts it, “Biden should have provided Ukraine with the weapons it needed to win quickly, but instead, he […] provided a cautious IV-drip of arms. Biden opposed providing many major weapons systems[…] before changing his mind.” The F-16 fighter jets are a good example. According to the Associated Press, Biden finally chose “to allow allies to train Ukrainian forces on how to operate F-16 fighter jets — and eventually to provide the aircraft themselves —” in August 2023. That was over a year after the Russian invasion began. The administration had spent a long time fretting that delivering the aircraft “could escalate tensions with Russia.” Escalate? It was Russia that had invaded a neighboring country, and was continuing its war of aggression there, with boots on the ground. How could the provision of fighter jets possibly have constituted an escalation relative to that?

Only recently, reports ABC, has the Biden administration allowed Ukraine to use American arms “to fire back at Russians attacking Kharkiv from just across the border.” And that permission is exceptional; Washington still refuses to grant a broader authorization to strike within Russian borders using American weaponry. This despite the security analysts cited in the article, who agree that allowing the Ukrainians to conduct such strikes would provide them an immense strategic benefit. “We haven’t even tried to actually help Ukraine win yet,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges is quoted as saying. That puts him in agreement with other experts.

The president tirelessly berates his political opponents for their weakness, real or imagined, on the issue of Russia. At the same time, he himself has played into Putin’s hand from the moment he entered office.

Joe Biden has earned his place among the great monsters of the twenty-first century. He doesn’t do the killing himself, but he certainly permits it.

Let us return to what I was saying earlier. Biden’s term in office has fundamentally changed my estimation of the political left. My view of the left is far more cynical now than it was before.

Abe Greenwald has written a powerful essay on “The Woke Jihad.” The article begins with a deeply insightful paragraph that captures, in a poignantly visual way, what many of us have probably been thinking:

In April, a long-haired flower child on the campus of Princeton University was captured on camera[…], guitar in hand, ready to play. Spread on the grass before him[…] is not a peace sign or a tie-dyed bedsheet but the flag of the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Look closer, and you’ll spot the keffiyeh around his neck. […] This tree-hugging terrorist supporter is the moronic face of a harmonious marriage.

This is exactly right, and Greenwald offers a partial explanation of how the two ideologies interlock. The terrorists are ruthless, culturally alien, and profoundly convinced of their own victimhood. The leftists like all those things.

I would argue that this liking is rooted deep in the philosophical structure of the left-wing worldview. Atrocities were already committed by the Jacobins, the first modern leftists. Stalinism’s excesses were already anticipated in the writings of Marx and Engels. In light of recent events, I find it harder than ever to view any of the trappings of leftism as benign. When I see “a long-haired flower child” now, I see someone likely to be a supporter of terrorism and genocide, however consciously or unconsciously.

In his treatise Socialism, Ludwig von Mises contends that the socialist creed is born of “petty resentments” against the capitalist system. Socialism, he writes,

is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

He sums this up as “a policy of destructionism.”

Von Mises was a libertarian, and I am not one. But I think his interpretation that socialism is a “destructive” tendency rooted in “resentment” of an established order is applicable to leftism more broadly. As such, leftism may have value in an environment where the preexisting social order is so utterly rotten that even a leftist system would be preferable. In a case like that, its destructive potential might be helpful. But otherwise – hardly. In sum, I have almost come to sympathize with Curtis Yarvin’s terribly simplistic opinion that “the main event is the struggle between left and right. Which is the struggle between good and evil. Which is the struggle between order and chaos.”

I write this in a somber mood. Again, 41 million Afghans are living under Taliban rule. Reportedly, over 10,000 non-combatant Ukrainians have been killed since the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion, with millions displaced. And given the circumstances, I count Ukrainian combatants as innocent victims, too. Finally, 1,200 Israelis are dead – and that’s without even mentioning the civilian casualties of Israel’s necessary war to eradicate Hamas.

The United States will elect its next head of state this November, and early voting will begin even sooner. Americans must look hard at the choices set before them and the path the world can continue to take or take anew. As so often throughout the last three, my mind goes straight to H. P. Lovecraft’s words:

Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.

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