America, Cheering on and Promoting Barbarism

When J. D. Vance boasts that cutting support for Ukraine is among the things he is proudest to have done, he is stating the moral position of this administration and this president. A genocidal war marked by rape, torture, murder, child abduction, and the calculated destruction of civilian life is met with pride in aiding its advance. The leadership of the United States applauds its own depravity and is intent on blurring the line between good and evil until the country itself can no longer tell the difference.

There was a time when American leaders understood, even if imperfectly, that power carried obligations, and therein lies the deeper degradation. But Trump and Vance have spent years rewiring the American public to accept moral inversion as patriotism. They have required their supporters, and the country itself, to treat the spectacle of rape, torture, murder, and child abduction not as a source of horror, but as something to be tolerated, rationalized, and ultimately cheered on so long as the crime serves Russian aims.

They have taken one of the clearest cases of barbarism in the modern world and turned it into a loyalty test, demanding that Americans applaud abandonment and sneer at the attacked. And if you do not support not only this debased policy but them and their policies as a whole, you are dismissed, smeared, and cast as an enemy. That is the deeper degradation, a political culture steeped in disinformation, spewing lies to defend its own depravity while falsely red flagging and smearing those who still object to barbarism.

That is what Vance was celebrating. That is what Trump has made official. And that is the disgrace of the United States under this administration, the kind of shame decent Americans should feel in their very souls.