#FreedomFactCheck 2: Joshua Reed Eakle Says Biden Is Anti-War. Nope.

So I came across this post today and it had some points worth responding to. Joshua Reed Eakle is the co-founder of “Project Liberal” and Global Marketing Director for Students For Liberty. So when he says something, there will be a number of people who listen to him. So it should be concerning that he is repeatedly posting propaganda for the Biden administration, and also Trump by proxy, in one case.

Let’s start with that one. He started by posting this “chart” with no actual source, despite a ton of people in his replies demanding one.

Because this is obviously ridiculous, and there is no explanation of the colors or source for the data, he clarifies in a followup Tweet.

So what happens when one clicks this “source”? You get this.

But fun fact – you don’t actually get raw data here. You get  chart, citing a source, not linking to that source, and not explaining the design of the chart. No nuance. Just numbers, a conclusion, and a “trust me bro”. So I didn’t.

So I checked the site, and they have a handy calculator for total drone strikes, right? Well if they do, they certainly don’t update it often enough. Thing says US and US-led coalition forces did less than 4000 drone strikes ever, and that’s just not true. So I looked up the claim more specifically, and found this article. In the article, some interesting things are admitted. Their data is “Estimated Total Strikes… according to US sources and Airwars Local Monitoring”. The piece starts by saying “The overall number of declared US airstrikes across all monitored military theatres fell from 441 in 2021 to a minimum of 36 in 2022 – mostly due to the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Okay.

So their data is essentially “what the US admits to and officially reports”. Cool. Because here’s where those Trump numbers come in. Because it was widely reported that he was outapcing Obama on drone use. So how did he respond to that? Obama was the drone king, and we know this, because there was a reporting mandate on the use of drones which meant we could watch it in real time. We were using that to watch Trump beat his high score, and Trump was catching flak. So he cancelled the mandate in 2019. This means that the US can drone as much as they want, and we will never know the full extent of it.

This is why, if you reexamine the chart, you’ll notice a precipitous drop in Trump’s drone numbers in 2019 – when he cancelled the mandate. And since Airwars relies on data from official reports, this made it more difficult to see his numbers on that site. And did Biden put it back? No. No he didn’t.

So do we really know how much he’s employed drone use? No. No we don’t. And Josh shouldn’t throw ambiguous, sourceless charts around claiming otherwise, especially since in this one, it makes Trump look better than Obama on this, and those who actually looked into this know that isn’t true. But it gets less RTs and traction to be actually scientific, so Josh didn’t do that.

And I’m not faulting Airwars particularly by the way. They’re going off what they have. People just shouldn’t take that and run with it as though that’s an acceptable enough source of data to reach concrete conclusions. These are numbers. Numbers can be flawed and incomplete. Look into things, if you actually care about truth.

Like… yo… these two charts don’t even MAKE SENSE NEXT TO EACH OTHER. WTF are you doing?

The only thing this kinda noise does is muddy the issue and make it harder for everyone to understand. Link to your data sources, fully explain the chart with legends for colors, and generally, prove you actually understand your subject material… this is NOT how you do it. So far from “it” chief.

Similarly, he posted this weird list of things  Biden “did better” than Trump. And it’s uh… certainly something.

So let’s get something clear…

First? Biden pushed back a planned withdrawal several months in a condemned and botched withdrawal. From NBC in 2020:

Afghanistan’s Taliban group on Thursday welcomed an announcement by President Donald Trump that he would pull out all U.S. troops from the country by Christmas.

Trump had reached an agreement with the Taliban which would be called the “Doha deal”. This would later be pushed to May 1st, 2021, to  provide a more realistic timeline.

Then the Biden admin gets in, and pushes it to August, claiming Trump had no plan, and that the official government of Afghanistan should have a say. Pretending of course that the Taliban is not an official government body. Biden doesn’t do enough in the amount of time he has, and tensions build until attacks occur. Basically, it doesn’t appear to Afghanis that Biden is pulling out. So they get antsy and start making it happen. Because Biden procrastinated so much, this led the Taliban to not only have a buncha bases to knock over, but all the military hardware the US didn’t pull out in time. So the Taliban Biden claimed to oppose and not want to empower, not only quickly took over, but had a US-funded arsenal and bases to boot. Great job, Biden.

There’s more on this subject, but I’ll write that on a later date.

Next, he didn’t ban “drone strikes on unidentified militants”. He made em more difficult, but signature strikes can still be allowed with “approval for exceptions”, and allows for further exemptions. As the NYT article he sourcelessly cited says…

Still, exempted from the special procedures are strikes carried out in defense of American forces stationed abroad or in the “collective self-defense” of partner forces trained and equipped by the United States. Such strikes are permitted in the cases of “foreign partners and allies who are under attack or are threatened with an imminent attack,” the document says.

So if you can convince him to do it, or if someone can claim “imminent attack”, you can still do it. An improvement, but hardly a “ban”.

Next? NATO “allies” are only “defending” themselves with US weapons, infrastructure, and security assistance, and an absolutely massive amount of money. Which brings me to my next point. Josh can sure say using this chart…

… that “National Defense Consumption Expenditures and Gross Investment/Gross Domestic Product” is at an all time low. Using another source he didn’t link, probably because he got the chart from someone else and never went there. But click that link and it’ll show you this.

So in Biden’s first year, military expenditure was higher than it literally ever was under Trump. And perhaps according to whatever measures this decidedly limited site uses, it’s not at “record lows”, but the picture gets broader at another source…

This site has more sources, and more honest data. It also acknowledges the spike in defense spending with the War on Terror, and they also include VITAL DATA like foreign aid! And given the absolute ton the US has spent on Ukraine, Israel, and the like, especially recently, it’s both asinine and atrocious to ignore that, as a component. Here’s Ukraine, as of Feb 2022 (it’s been a year since, and like tens of billions more since that)…

… and here’s Israel…

So as you can see, even if the US isn’t buying stuff for official US militaries, funding and arming vassal states is a great way to keep the defense contractors happy, and if your argument is that this is acceptable because “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”, thus making it make sense to call it “defense”, foreign assistance is demonstrably and necessarily considered a component of national defense. Denying this, and somehow claiming defense spending is at “record lows”, is lunacy. But in the next sentence, he gloats over where that money went. Bragging about dead Russians. Loving a war for which he’d never enlist. Supporting wars with intermediaries of US proxy states.

So is Biden actually going to be most anti-war President of the 21st century? Maybe. But given the bar is Bush, Trump, and Obama, the bar is buried. Let’s see him reinstate the reporting mandate and retroactively report all strikes he did. Let’s see him cut all foreign aid to military powers. Let’s see him take peace deals between Russia and Ukraine or Palestine and Israel seriously, and not giving either side support until one is reached. Let’s see an end to vassal states and proxy wars. Because without that, spending will never slow, and the highest cost will be the lives lost forever, and the destroyed grounds, forever a scar on the affected regions.

And of course, liberties violations at home. Like the Patriot Act Biden takes credit for. Or his recent policies directly calling anarchists and anti-authority folks a domestic terror threat. It should be a marker of considerable irony that Josh and those like him talk of tens of thousands of civilian casualties from drones as a bad thing, but celebrate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of largely conscripted Russian military slaves. And while the US uses Ukraine as an arm of their policy, the real war is at home, with ever greater surveillance and police powers, courtesy a thriving military and intelligence industrial complex Eakle wants you to believe is drawing down.

Do better, Josh, and stop running cover for wars, just because of some aesthetic differences. It’s still Hell, even under Biden or one of his puppets. Pretending otherwise will only ever get you demons.