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Biden repeats same story 'nearly word for word' within minutes during campaign speech


President Joe Biden addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
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President Joe Biden told the same story twice within minutes while speaking at a campaign reception in Manhattan Wednesday.

The story was a retelling of the events of a 2017 White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which Biden says helped inspire him to run for president.

“But then along came, in August of 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia,” he said at the event. “You remember those folks walking out of the fields literally carrying torches, with Nazi swastikas, holding them forward, singing the same vicious, antisemitic bile — the same exact bile — bile that was sung in — in Germany in the early ‘30s. And a young woman was killed. A young woman was killed.”

He continued by bashing the response to the rally from “the former guy,” or then-President Donald Trump, who described the conflict as having “very fine people on both sides.”

Trump's remark was taken out of context, PolitiFact reported.

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Biden also noted his reservation toward announcing a candidacy, citing fear of what could happen to his children, before launching into a retelling of the story.

“You know, you may remember that, you know, those folks from Charlottesville, as they came out of the fields and carrying those swastikas, and remember the ones with the torches and the Ku — accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan. And in addition to that, they had — there were white supremacists," he said. "Anyway, they were making the big case about how terrible this was. And a young woman was killed in the process.”

The second telling also included details about Trump’s comments and a concern for the well-being of his children. White House staff noted the president’s lapse in a media pool report.

“After briefly touting his economic record, POTUS reflected on his decision to seek the presidency,” the report reads. “He told the story about the events of Charlottesville in 2017 as the reason for his campaign. A few minutes later, he told the story again, nearly word for word.”

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In the same speech, Biden claimed to have been a professor of political theory at the University of Delaware. He did not acknowledge that the position was an honorary one, or that he never taught a full semester’s worth of classes, Snopes reported.

U.K. charity and improvement agency Social Care Institute for Excellence explains that repeating oneself in old age can be due to memory problems associated with dementia. A study funded by the Pentagon found increased odds of high-ranking U.S. officials developing dementia in their old age, something that could represent a national security threat.

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