by Julie Kelly
A country without pity has lost its soul.
Sadly, that is the state of America in 2022. On the eve of the two-year anniversary—which is too celebratory a word to describe its aftermath—of useless, destructive lockdowns sold as a way to stop the spread of COVID-19, our country has been exposed as a place overpopulated with pitiless citizens gratified by the suffering of others. The common bonds that tether friendships and fellowship are in tatters, shredded by the nihilism of the ruling class, egged on by a mendacious corporate media, and amplified on ill-named “social” media platforms.
At the same time, ironically, we are led by a man who wallows in self-pity. Joe Biden shows no remorse for those suffering under his reign; Biden is capable only of feeling sorry for himself.
This was on full display during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, where he willfully ignored the American service members killed last year during his disastrous exit from Afghanistan to again exploit his own son’s tragic death to score political points.
When Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) unwittingly interrupted Biden’s sympathy set-up—as a novice to politics, Boebert presumably did not know what was coming while every other long-hauler in the House chamber clearly knew—to remind the commander-in-chief of his forgotten war dead, the reaction by those in charge was revealing. Rather than applaud her attempt to memorialize the 13 American Marines and soldiers killed by terrorists at the Kabul airport just six months ago, lawmakers groaned in disapproval.
Boebert, not Biden, immediately was branded the bad guy. In a pitiless America, those young men and women have been forgotten; so, too, are the thousands of Americans who were killed over 20 years in our longest and most expensive war, a war for which Joe Biden bears a measure of the blame and for which he has never apologized. (Parents of those killed in Kabul last year said Biden also brought up Beau when he met with them upon the arrival of their sons’ and daughters’ remains.)
Biden’s press secretary, a similarly soulless person perfect for the job of spinning the machinations of the regime with little pushback from the media mouthpieces into which she stuffs daily talking points, explained why her boss failed to mention the fallen. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained that Biden “didn’t have time” to offer condolences.
Who has time to express sympathy for others when one is busy seeking it for oneself?
For two years, America’s most vulnerable—children, the elderly, special needs people of all ages, and the poor—suffered untold horrors under lockdown policies promoted by political leaders, self-acclaimed “experts,” and the media. Only bad polling ahead of the midterm election forced the same ghouls to call for a magical end to the torment and so, without remorse, they seamlessly pivoted to save their empty political souls.
Look no further than Dr. Leana Wen, former head of Planned Parenthood and the corporate media’s go-to COVID propagandist who promoted collective child abuse for the better part of two years, now pretending her past crimes against humanity never happened.
In September 2021, Wen said we are “nowhere near” getting rid of masks in schools. Mandating daily testing and experimental vaccines, Wen told CNN, was the only way for America’s youth to free themselves of debilitating face masks; she even recommended further suffocating our kids with industrial-grade masks.
But Wen recently and abruptly changed course in order to keep her cable news hits coming. Agreeing with a recent New York Times editorial to end mask mandates in schools, Wen took to Twitter to warn “It’s a lot to ask young children to wear masks for several hours a day, especially when so many adults seem to struggle with it.”
Now, Wen doesn’t actually care about children, only about preserving her gig. And while the media gave the ghoulish Wen a pass for her cynical reversal, they instead went after someone they view as the real COVID villain: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the only political leader so far to express remorse about the human toll of his early lockdown policies.
As he approached a podium on Wednesday with masked high schoolers standing there as human props, DeSantis agitatedly advised them to remove their masks. “It’s not doing anything and we’ve got to stop with this COVID theater,” he said in disgust. He told the students they could keep the masks on if they wanted.
His antipathy, evident to anyone with a few operating brain cells, was directed at the adults who forced the teens to wear the masks. But that didn’t stop Wen-like media stooges from blasting DeSantis for “bullying” children. Never mind the obvious—that the real tormentors of America’s childre have been bullying for two years without hesitation, and without any scientific basis for demanding the abuse. DeSantis’ humanity at that moment exposed the complete lack thereof existing on the other side. So they attacked.
As the bipartisan ruling class wrings their uncalloused hands over the plight of Ukrainians, the multilayered plight they created and inflicted on the citizens here is ignored; the American flag, whether on lapel pins or the doors of cushy Capitol offices, is replaced with the Ukrainian flag. The act isn’t just cheap symbolism—it’s telling.
Bullets flying over the heads of children in Ukraine is a moral outrage worthy of the global elites’ full attention and fix-it funds; on the other hand, a 37 percent increase in the number of American children under the age of 18 killed by gunfire between 2019 to 2021 gets no attention from either Biden or the fierce lapel-pinned guardians of Ukrainian children in Congress.
And it’s not as if we are blessed with a deft ruling class capable of managing multiple crises at once. To the contrary, these are the same dunces responsible for the economic, moral, and institutional collapse of America. It’s far easier for a vacuous lame-duck senator from Ohio to wave the Ukrainian flag and pretend he’s doing something meaningful than it is for him to confront the plague of rising overdoses and gas prices in his own home state.
But the epidemic of callousness isn’t just afflicting political leadership in Washington. As a close observer of the aftermath of January 6, I can confirm that a sizable portion of our countrymen wishes us great harm.
The only regret they express about the execution of Ashli Babbitt is that she was the only one shot and killed that day. Ditto for Rosanne Boyland. Democrats are angry at Attorney General Merrick Garland for not bringing harsher charges against Capitol protesters; prison time for those who pleaded guilty to low level misdemeanors such as “parading” in the Capitol, despite its unprecedented nature, is met with outrage that the sentences aren’t longer.
After Joshua James, a father of three young children, pleaded guilty to the outrageous charge of seditious conspiracy late yesterday, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) took a victory lap on Twitter by linking a Washington Post article with the breaking news. What Cheney didn’t know, and never will, is that James was deployed to Iraq in 2007 in her own father’s deadly war on terror. A bomb exploded near him in Baghdad, killing three of his fellow soliders, and gravely injuring James. He mostly recovered from his physical wounds—and received a Purple Heart—but has suffered from severe PTSD since then.
We are to believe a patriotic Purple Heart veteran suddenly turned into a traitor over his support for Donald Trump? Who knows what prosecutors did to pry the extraordinary guilty plea out of him—James was in the building for around five minutes on January 6—and does anyone care? Certainly not the ranking member of the blood-stained Cheney family.
After my reporting on the suicide of Matthew Perna, these same ghouls flooded social media with hateful replies about his death. “Fuck around and find out,” is a favorite retort. Matthew’s aunt told me the funeral home was forced to monitor all comments made on his virtual guestbook page to stop the flow of cruel posts about her nephew.
Perna did nothing wrong; he committed no violent crime. Had he been an illegal immigrant or a criminal addict who died in police custody or a Ukrainian refugee, an outpouring of support and sympathy would pour his way. The #IStandWithMatthew hashtag would trend for days.
But not so in a country without pity. If the American Left could fill a political prison in Washington D.C. with millions, not just dozens, of Trump supporters, they would do so without a flicker of regret.
Donald Trump said during his CPAC address last week that “you can’t defend Western civilization if you would not be able to defend your own civilization.” The key word, of course, is “civil.” And it is not people such as Boebert who are uncivil, it’s the masses of Americans who want her punished, canceled, and perhaps brought up on phony criminal charges produced by Biden’s Justice Department for speaking up to the regime.
When half the country has lost its sense of pity for fellow citizens over political disagreements, and the ruling class reserves pity only for themselves and citizens in faraway lands, what can be left of American civilization?
What a pity.
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Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right and Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project. She is the co-host of the “Happy Hour Podcast with Julie and Liz.” She is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University and lives in suburban Chicago with her husband and two daughters.
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