As guest Matt Zeller called out the Trump administration for shutting down visas for Afghan allies, host Charles Payne interrupted to “jump in before we go back too far in history.”
Guest host Payne seemed eager to hear from Zeller, an Afghanistan war veteran and co-founder of the group No One Left Behind, on how the Biden administration “ignored his plans on how to safely evacuate Afghan interpreters,” as Payne put it in his introduction. “Now our allies are at risk as the Taliban is reportedly going door to door looking for those who risked it all to help and work with the United States,” Payne added.
But Payne only wanted to hear about the Biden administration’s failures to protect Afghan allies. He was all ears about the “pandemonium at the gate,” that Zeller described. But, he soon added, “The only thing that would’ve been worse than this is what we called 'the Trump scenario,' which would’ve been the complete abandonment of these people.”
Payne was still interested as Zeller went on to say that more runway space is needed and that Qatar and Bahrain are running out of space to put the evacuees. “What was your idea? How do you think that this should have been accomplished?” Payne asked. Zeller explained that his group recommended taking the evacuees to Guam, which has the resources and experience to deal with them and had asked them to be sent there.
But then Zeller told viewers that Trump bears some of the blame.
ZELLER: The reason why we’re in this mess is because of two reasons. One, the Biden administration failed to plan for this, but the Trump administration were the ones who planted the seed for this. People like Stephen Miller shut down this visa program which created a backlog that existed once the Biden administration took office.
PAYNE (interrupting): Yeah. Let me jump in before we go back too far in history, let’s deal with right now. … How do we get them out? … We’re not really clear on how we rescue these folks. Does it have to become at some point a military operation to get them out safely?
Zeller said, “Yeah, it’s already a military operation.” But he was not deterred in making sure viewers heard why Trump is to blame.
ZELLER: What we need to do is this: We need to tell the Taliban we’re not going to be bullied, like the Trump administration allowed us to be. The Trump administration’s the one who made a deal with these people. The Trump administration’s the one who released 5,000 of their fighters which was what helped them eventually take over the country. We need to stop letting the Taliban push us around like they have been since the Trump administration. What we need to be doing is tell them we’re gonna stay as long as it takes, we’re gonna take every single one of our people, and we’re not leaving until that’s done. We are the United States of America, we’re the most powerful country on the planet, we should start acting like it.
Payne got back on Fox message: “I don’t know how bad they were pushing us around since we didn’t lose one military life for 18 months," he said, and there wasn’t this kind of chaos. I think things got a lot worse in the last seven days than they did any time prior to that.”
Then, before Zeller had a chance to respond, Payne ended the segment.
FACT CHECK: Trump’s own former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, and Trump’s former defense secretary, Mark Esper, have publicly stated that Trump undermined the withdrawal process. (The Washington Post has a good explainer on Trump’s deal with the Taliban.)
Either Payne was shockingly ignorant of what Zeller was talking about or he chose to ignore it – because the history of this 20-year war only goes back to January 20, 2021 on Fox.
You can watch it below, from the August 21, 2021 Cavuto Live.
There’s recently been a lot of talk about “systemic racism”. I’m increasingly convinced that practically everything we say or do is affected by some form of systemic (baked into our upbringing). Although a gread deal of progress has been made, we still have systemic misogyny, even among some feminists. Media bias may, therefore, be a form of systemic conservatism, a deep-seated inability to report the facts and only the facts.
That said, I do not actually believe in 100% unbiased reporting: it’s impossible to cover all the stories and the very selection of the stories that are reported cannot but be subject to systemic (often subconscious) bias.