It is fair to judge a political constituency based on the leaders it anoints. And if we take a critical glance at those who woke liberals have chosen to lionize in recent years, it produces a stunning indictment of their movement.
Recent events confirm as much. In a move symbolic of the sentiment shared by most of the liberal media, the left-leaning Time magazine declared the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg their “Person of the Year.” So, too, the angry leftist lesbian and soccer star Megan Rapinoe has burst to life as a resistance favorite this year, earning liberal media fanfare such as a fawning profile in the Washington Post, Glamour magazine’s “woman of the year” award, and most recently, Sports Illustrated’s “sportsperson of the year” (notice the deliberate gender neutrality), too.
Suffice it to say that woke America needs better heroes.
The fact that the self-declared “Party of Science” has made a child irrationally scared to death by grown-ups into the face of their climate advocacy is stunning. Of course, Thunberg herself deserves compassion, not derision — she has struggled with intense depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and more. This is undoubtedly exacerbated by the false sense of doomsday panic instilled in her by climate activists pushing an agenda. My Washington Examiner colleague Tiana Lowe summed it up well: “Given that Greta’s mental struggles and triggers actually led her to the brink of death, the whole thing smacks of child abuse.”
For liberals to look for leadership in a troubled teenager, who herself admits that she has accomplished nothing … well, it speaks volumes to the deep unseriousness of the left-wing climate movement. If liberals were simply concerned with the science of climate change, as they so often claim, perhaps they’d have rallied around an actual scientist instead of resorting to cult-like worship of a teenager who scolds them in almost apocalyptic terms for embracing modernity.
Likewise, the fact that so many liberals agree with Glamour’s characterization of Rapinoe as “the unapologetic pink-haired icon we’ve needed in 2019” exposes the emptiness of the ideology they are glorifying. After all, Rapinoe is certainly woke, but she’s also an unpatriotic, ungrateful, and dishonest celebrity who has contempt for the very country that has granted her, a lesbian, the future to thrive that was never afforded to gay people in almost any part of the world in all of human history.
Rapinoe dropped the U.S. flag on the ground to take advantage of a photo opportunity, pushed a fake, divisive narrative of sexism to score political points, and hates Americans who vote Republican — even her own father. On top of it all, she offers no meaningful policy agenda, political wisdom, or intellectual achievement of any kind. She even manages to turn moments of national unity into polarizing stands.
Her team’s otherwise impressive World Cup victory, for instance, was somewhat overshadowed by her antics, such as her viral, glib comment that she’s “not going to the fucking White House” to celebrate the country’s success.
If Rapinoe and Thunberg are the kinds of people modern liberals look to for inspiration, a period of serious self-reflection is long overdue. But sadly, all signs show that woke America is only doubling down on its affinity for empty idols.
