My colleague Brad Polumbo is right that “woke America needs new heroes.” It also needs a better sense of when to shove its heroes in our faces.
A large reason President Trump has such a fervid following is that he embodies the rest of America’s backlash against the cultural Left’s insistence on politicizing everything and making us embrace their wokeness.
Take the two targets of Polumbo’s thoughtful indictment of the Left: soccer star Megan Rapinoe and 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. His criticism of the Left’s glorification of those rings true: Thunberg is too young to know enough to be hectoring the world about climate science, and Rapinoe is merely “an unpatriotic, ungrateful, and dishonest celebrity.”
Were the Left to choose its own heroes without insisting that we all bow to their alleged wisdom, that would be fine; but they work hard to squeeze their ill-suited champions into every cultural space they can. Witness Sports Illustrated’s virtual deification of Rapinoe as its “Sportsperson of the Year,” quite specifically because of her left-wing political and cultural crusades.
Setting aside the inappropriateness of celebrating the “sportspersonship” of someone who brags about giving “F— you” messages with a “sh– eating grin,” why should those of us reading a sports magazine be badgered into honoring Rapinoe’s “social activism?” The first two paragraphs of Sports Illustrated‘s hagiography make clear the editors’ main goal is to promote her leftist politics. The mag praised her, from the start, for “the equivalent of flashing double-barrel middle fingers.” The entire piece is an advertisement for a cultural agenda: against (spurious) “gender biases,” against going to “the f—ing White House” if Trump is there, for being feted by Michelle Obama and Gloria Steinem, for kneeling during the national anthem, to opine about the cluelessness of “white people” and “whiteness” in general while fighting “white privilege,” and about “fighting the patriarchy.”
Since when did the magazine of rapier-edged wordsmiths such as Dan Jenkins and George Plimpton start reading like a caricature of bad college gender studies essays? It’s a near miracle that writer Jenny Vrentas didn’t find a way to work the phrase “cisgender heteronormativity” into it.
Meanwhile, Time chose Thunberg as its “Person of the Year,” as if a well-meaning but troubled 16-year-old with no scientific credentials and very limited perspective has added significant substance to the decadeslong climate-change clamor and mania. Already overheard at more than one Christmas party where I live are snide references to being lectured about greenhouse emissions by a girl who sailed to America on a super-expensive boat only to save no emissions because so many people had to fly across the ocean to make the logistics work.
Rapinoe and Thunberg are just the latest examples of how the Left insists on telling everybody else how to live. Religious traditionalists must not merely accept homosexual marriages for the first time in world history, but bake the wedding cakes. Not only should we accept abortions, but we should pay for the abortions of others. Illegal immigrants shouldn’t merely be treated with respect but also given legal “sanctuary” and free healthcare. We should admit racism was the very foundation of the United States, dismiss the importance of a common language, and provide sex-change operations for tiny tots.
Again and again, if you speak more than cursorily to avid Trump supporters, you’ll hear them say they need “someone who fights” to save the culture from these incessant assaults. If the Left doesn’t like Trump, it should stop giving him fuel for his fire. If Megan Rapinoe and her ilk want to send middle-finger messages to Middle America, well, Middle America may just strip the finger of its nail.
