Note: This was first published as a letter to RPI Subscribers. Subscribe for free here.
The numbers are sickening and impossible to ignore. Throughout the United States the Coronavirus “pandemic” looks more and more like a war on the elderly and sick than a mysterious new virus that was so dangerous and unknown that the entire country (with notable exceptions – South Dakota for example) had to be completely locked down tighter than Guantanamo Bay.
Nationwide, 42 percent of the Covid-19 death toll was comprised of Americans who were confined to live-in care facilities. While at first it was easy to simply gasp at a disease so cruel that it seemed to target older people, now that the smoke has cleared it is becoming painfully – and criminally – obvious that the virus had some very powerful human enablers.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has shamelessly used the coronavirus crisis to puff up his national political profile, ordered the elderly hospitalized with Covid back to their nursing homes where they could spread the virus like so many Typhoid Marys. Amid calls for a Federal probe into Cuomo’s callous and deadly decision to rip elderly patients from their hospital beds and send them back to cramped senior facilities, Cuomo demurs, blaming…you guessed it: Trump!
In Pennsylvania a particularly cruel (and unelected) creature, Rachel Levine, in charge of the state’s Covid policy oversaw a virus outbreak that claimed the elderly in care facilities as 70 percent of the entire state’s death toll. Astonishing! A real genocide of the old. Of course before she ordered those elderly hospitalized with Covid back to their care facilities to infect and kill others she moved her own mother out of the facilities and into a hotel.
Under the Mussolini of Michigan, the Covid-ravaged elderly were also returned to their care facilities where they could infect and kill their housemates. Governor Gretchen Whitmer seemed to actually gain pleasure from destroying untold lives with her strict lockdown orders, stooping so low as to strip a 77 year old barber of his license for daring to open his shop against her will as he faced starvation. She loved pushing around working people, who were nearly immune to the virus. But when it came to actually protecting the vulnerable layers of society, she was AWOL.
These shameful policies were followed in many states and while at first when little was known about the outbreak, there might be some room for acceptable error. But as it became clear the demographics of who were most vulnerable, it has become indefensible to focus all resources on shutting down restaurants, bars, churches, mom and pop shops, schools while ignoring that the virus preyed almost exclusively on the old and sick. Yes, shut down elementary schools where virtually no one fell victim, but throw open the doors to the old folks home where the virus raged like a tsunami. Brilliant move.
Coincidence? We should not discount the possibility that sheer government incompetence is responsible for this massive failure and resulting senior killing fields. Maybe there is more to it. The sanctity of life in the United States has been degraded for years, including via a foreign policy that considers half a million dead Iraqi children “worth it” to undermine Saddam Hussein’s rule. A foreign policy that doesn’t blink when an estimated 40,000 Venezuelan civilians die from US sanctions. A foreign policy that has spent the past nine years arming literal Islamist terrorists to overthrow the secular rule of Syria’s Assad with hundreds of thousands dead in the process and nary a notice in the US mainstream media.
When one embraces the idea that it’s OK to kill millions overseas to maintain a US global empire that only enriches the Beltway military-industrial-Congressional-media-think tank complex, it is not a far leap to embrace the idea that seniors are expendable. When some lives are not considered worth saving – from pre-cradle to grave – it is a slippery slope to view others also not worth saving.
