Where Are the Profiles in Courage?

Laken Riley's murder & the death of the free press demands an immediate response

Laken Riley on Facebook

Without a free press, we do not have a democracy.

Exhibit A is the Associated Press airbrushing out the fact that 22-year-old Laken Riley was murdered by a criminal alien from Venezuela previously arrested for child endangerment in New York City.

AP focused instead on the dangers to “female athletes” jogging on the beautiful trails around Lake Herrick in Oconee Forest Park on the University of Georgia campus.

Laken was a nursing student at Augusta University. Now she will be pushing up daisies as the country comes to terms with President Joseph R. Biden’s disastrous immigration policies.

The situation is dire. Before Laken’s tragic death it was police officers in New York City being attacked by criminal aliens, who engage in “fistfights” with police, former and likely future President Donald J. Trump said at CPAC on Saturday, February 24, noting that their homeland heads would deal with them swiftly. “They would be dead within seconds,” he said 36:25 minutes in.

Of course many of our men and women in blue not only in New York but in big and small cities across the fruited plain end up dead, along with citizens like Laken Riley they seek to protect from criminal aliens flooding our country.

We, too, must deal with this crisis swiftly and the reality that criminal aliens have flooded the Southern border by the tens of thousands out of millions of international migrants walking into our country illegally since the dawn of Biden assuming power on January 20, 2021 and dismantling Trump’s safe border policies with the stroke of a pen.

If Biden will not rein in the unfolding migrant crisis, Republicans in Congress and the truly loyal opposition must put a roadblock in the way of Biden & co. as the Constitution not only allows but requires. And they must do so ex post haste.

The House impeachment of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is but the first step. As I have written, after the other necessary constitutional steps are effectuated — again, only if Biden will not act — the number two in the line of succession, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), could stop the madness with the same stroke of a pen.

But it will take profiles in courage to take our country and our democracy back.

To quote Susan Hayward, one of the twelve Hollywood legends I write about in Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends when a fire broke out at Cannes and the men ran for safety, “Where are the men?”

Indeed where are they? The hour is late. And, the fork-in-the-road is obvious.

Postscript (2/28/24): About the time I was writing this piece, fearless journalist Lara Logan, formerly of CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” was on Capitol Hill testifying to “information dominance” that shuts out voices of truth in the media. Truly a “profile in courage.” Chris Plante was reporting on her testimony this morning in the 9 o'clock hour of his daily radio show on WMAL in Washington DC and throughout the country on the Clear Channel radio network. Another “profile in courage.”

Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends, the new edition published on February 24, 2024. She recently finished writing a book about the life of Ernest Hemingway, viewed through the prism of faith, due to be published Christmas 2024.