Lily Hi'ilani Okimura, a 27-year-old Hawaii native, told me she found out about former president Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis like everyone else her age: through TikTok. The news was enough to make her pause—but not because she cared.
“I—pardon my French—did not give a fuck,” she said. “What goes around comes around.”
To Okimura, a substitute K-12 teacher in Honolulu, and a growing number of progressive young Americans, Biden will not be remembered as one of the longest serving civil servants in history but as a war criminal. In these circles he is referred to as “Genocide Joe” because he insisted that Israel “has the right to defend itself” after it was invaded by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and supported selling the American ally arms. When news broke that the 82-year-old Biden had an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer, political leaders on both sides of the aisle flooded social media with well wishes, but Okimura and her far-left peers expressed a different sentiment: schadenfreude.
“I’m expected to feel sad for this monster?” Okimura asked in a video uploaded to TikTok, where she boasts more than 190,000 followers. “Meanwhile, what about the Palestinians in Gaza with prostate cancer?”
