The end of one year and the beginning of another is a natural
time for reflection, both personally and culturally, and one way to examine ourselves
as a culture is to think upon the figures we held up as the most admired
persons in the past year. The people we define as heroes and role models also
define us and what virtues and values we consider important. Unsurprisingly,
as polarized as Americans are politically, left and right have sharply contrasting
heroic ideals.
Of course, there are many examples of heroic and/or admirable
behavior that we can all agree on: a man who pulled
a driver from a burning vehicle; a high school coach who defused a possible school
shooting with compassion; a cancer-stricken teen who founded
a movement to help sick, homeless, and foster children. But beyond those, there
is a stark difference between heroes embraced solely by the leftist media and
those only the right would claim.
Let’s begin with Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” selection.
Because the news media lean almost exclusively left, teen climate Cassandra and
globe-trotting anti-capitalist scold Greta
Thunberg predictably was chosen for 2019. Of course she was – did
anyone imagine that token Republican Rudy Giuliani, who was among the final ten
candidates, would win? In all fairness, Time did select Giuliani in
2001, amid the patriotic spirit that swelled across the country in the wake of
the 9/11 attacks. But these are different times; now the spirit swelling across
the country is a wave of sheer panic about the environmental apocalypse that
the left assures us is coming within
the next twelve years if we do not jettison our exploitative capitalist
system and embrace Green New Deal socialism.
In the Time cover photo, Ms. Thunberg poses fearlessly
and humorlessly in the face of breaking waves of the oceans that Barack Obama
promised to heal. Like the heroic proletariat of Soviet agitprop posters, she
gazes toward a glorious collectivist future in which the government bestows equality
upon all and the planet flourishes once again as humans revert to a
pre-industrial economy.
By contrast to Time’s Thunberg, FrontPage Mag chose
to honor the freedom-loving, Trump-supporting Hong Kong protester as its Person
of the Year. Imagine Huffpost doing that. The right-wing Washington Free Beacon
chose
“the American troops” as its “Men of the Year.” Try to imagine the leftist
Slate or Salon doing the same.
Thunberg isn’t the only Progressive icon celebrated by the
left-leaning media at year’s end. Sports Illustrated recently unveiled
its 2019 Sportsperson of the Year – foul-mouthed soccer lesbian Megan Rapinoe –
in a hagiographic
profile in which the magazine scourges itself for its “entrenched gender
biases” (Rapinoe is only the fourth woman to take Sportsperson of the Year in the
award’s 66-year history). Rapinoe, who was also shortlisted for Time’s
Person of the year, first drew controversy by protesting during the national
anthem in solidarity with cop-hating former quarterback Colin
Kaepernick, another hero of the left who has just been lionized – again – by
sports apparel giant and China sycophant Nike with another signature shoe.
On the SI cover, Rapinoe is posed in men’s dress shoes
and wielding a sledgehammer, because “she’s smashing the patriarchy,” according
to SI. Sure, whatever. Asked what expression she wants to have in the
cover photo, Rapinoe replied, “What about a smirk? It’s kind of like a little, F--- you, I’m coming.” This may
play well to her leftist fans, but the right does not consider smirking
narcissism an heroic or admirable quality.
Granted, Rapinoe led the soccer team to a World Cup championship
– kudos for that – so it’s reasonable to consider her for the award. But does
anyone think that she would be Sportsperson of the Year if she were MAGA
hat-wearing and “heteronormative”? On the contrary, it is precisely because of
her leftist activism and patriarchy-smashing that SI picked her – just
as Nike picked Kaepernick as spokesperson not because of his on-the-field achievements,
but because of his political radicalism.
According to a year-end Gallup poll, President Trump tied
with former President Barack Obama as the most admired man of 2019. Former First
Lady Michelle Obama is the most admired woman of 2019 in America,
for the second year in a row. Pleasantly surprising, considering how the
mainstream media shun her, First Lady Melania Trump came in second place. I
think it is fair to assume that the votes were divided sharply along
politically partisan lines. The left idolizes the “let’s fundamentally
transform America” Obamas; the right favors the “let’s make America great again”
Trumps.
As for admired celebrities, the left reveres Trump
Derangement Syndrome sufferers like Jane Fonda, who has trendily turned to
protesting climate change, or hysterical actress/activist Alyssa Milano, or any
number of profanity-spewing, deplorables-hating Hollywood stars. The right’s
most beloved celebrity activist is arguably actor Gary Sinise, who has quietly committed
himself off-camera to improving the lives of wounded veterans. From the Gary Sinise Foundation
website: “We serve our nation by honoring our defenders, veterans, first
responders, their families, and those in need. We do this by creating and
supporting unique programs designed to entertain, educate, inspire, strengthen,
and build communities.” Every single day of 2019, Sinise did more concrete good
in the world for a worthy cause than all of Hollywood’s virtue-signaling egotists
put together did in the entire year.
Among “ordinary” Americans, an overnight hero of the right
who emerged at year’s end is Jack Wilson (pictured above), a 71-year-old former
reserve deputy sheriff, who stopped what surely would have been a ghastly mass
shooting by dropping a shotgun-wielding killer with a single shot during
services at the West Freeway Church of Christ in the Fort Worth suburb of White
Settlement. “I don't see myself as a hero,” Wilson told reporters, which is
exactly what selfless heroes say. “I see myself as doing what needed to be done
to take out the evil threat.” Wilson is a living refutation of the left’s
denial that good guys with guns are the best defense against bad guys with
guns, which is why the left hasn’t applauded his lifesaving courage under fire.
On the contrary, leftists have lamented that Wilson and several other parishioners
were armed in the first place; apparently they would prefer that the churchgoers
be unarmed and slaughtered rather than empowered to defend themselves.
This is just a smattering of samples (others that come to
mind: for the left, the so-called “whistleblower” of Trump’s purported Ukraine
scandal; for the right, Rep. Elise Stefanik, who emerged
as a key Trump defender in the impeachment hearing), but to sum things up
bluntly: the figures most admired in 2019 by the left are anti-Trump,
anti-capitalist, and/or anti-American; the heroes of the right are pro-Trump, pro-freedom,
and pro-American. This fundamental difference is one that not only defines America
as we enter 2020, but will define the choice America makes come November.
From FrontPage Mag, 1/2/20
