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Do Presidential Medals of Freedom Really Mean Anything?
At a White House ceremony last Saturday, President Biden passed out Presidential Medals of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, with the same profligacy that he dispenses pardons to Death Row inmates. Nineteen recipients ranging from rock singers to fashion designers to the captain of Argentina’s soccer team scored the prestigious award.
The White House wrote in a statement, “These nineteen Americans are great leaders who have made America a better place. They are great leaders because they are good people who have made extraordinary contributions to their country and the world.”
The nineteen “great leaders” included Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour; U2 frontman Bono; fashion designer Ralph Lauren; Lionel Messi, the captain of Argentina’s World Cup-winning soccer team; Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington; Bill Nye “the Science Guy”; renowned anthropologist Jane Goodall; and late civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer.
Notable among these “individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors” were failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Left-wing billionaire financier George Soros.
It’s bad enough that Bill Nye the Gender Propaganda Guy and climate hysteric Bono get Medals of Freedom, but the vindictive totalitarian Hillary? The woman who publicly smeared more than half the country as “deplorables”? The woman behind too many lethal lies and hoaxes to count in a career devoted to power and the progressive agenda?
And George Soros? The Hungarian-born Democrat megadonor has done immeasurable damage to this country through the far-reaching tentacles of his Open Foundations activist organization and his funding of far-Left, pro-crime judges, prosecutors, and district attorneys all across the country. The 94-year-old, by the way, wasn’t present to receive the award; his son and heir Alex, an even more ambitious ideologue than his father, appeared in his stead (pictured above).
I give a pass to the great actor Denzel Washington, who deserves a Medal of Freedom just for his Equalizer vigilante series alone, but if this honor can go to Democrat shills like Bill Nye and demonstrably evil subversives like George Soros, then it means literally nothing.
Multiculturalism Trumps Feminism – Again
On Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast on Sunday, Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer refused to make a moral judgment about women under the boot heel of sharia law being required to cover up – demonstrating once again that Leftists will always rank multiculturalism above feminism.
Host Maher had referenced a 60 Minutes report stating that a woman walking through a Muslim neighborhood in London was “screamed at” for wearing a skirt rather than a burqa. The normally liberal Maher told Cryer that “there are places in western civilization that are not run by western standards and that doesn’t mean they’re just different.”
“We should agree that women should be able to wear what they want,” Maher continued. “If you don’t agree with that, you’re not a liberal to begin with.”
But Cryer rejected Maher’s point, noting that there are many places around the world where women don’t have the freedom to dress as they’d like. “In many places they used to get catcalled all the time,” Cryer said, as if a wolf whistle were the same thing as being threatened with stoning for dressing too westernized.
Maher replied, “Would you really want to have your wife live in Gaza or [somewhere else] where she would have to cover up?”
But Cryer would not concede Maher’s point, shrugging, “It’s not my culture.”
“You won’t judge it?” Maher pressed.
“I’m not going to judge it,” Cryer replied. “No.”
Even Maher felt that Cryer’s refusal to make a pretty easy judgment was “crazy woke.”
But it’s not crazy woke. It is the standard progressive position that the capitalist, Judeo-Christian West is the fount of all evil and oppression and exploitation throughout human history, but other cultures – especially Islamic culture – are entirely off-limits to criticism. It is the standard progressive position that it is verboten to make moral judgments of cultures that they perceive to belong to the class that is “oppressed” by Western civilization.
This is why the Left can claim to be allies of the feminist movement but then throw women under the bus when a group or demographic that is higher on the hierarchy of oppression is involved.
Maher should have pressed Cryer further by asking him where he would draw the line at refusing to make a moral judgment. Would Cryer condemn the Taliban for declaring, as they recently did, that women must not be visible even through windows in their own homes? Would he condemn the sharia requirement that women be stoned to death for adultery? At what point would the self-admitted “stupidly woke” Cryer, and millions of other progressives like him, be willing to make a moral judgment about a non-Western culture’s denial of women’s rights?
Black Rage
Among the most pitiable sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome are black female TV pundits like MSNBC’s Joy Reid and The View’s Sunny Hostin, both of whom can be counted on to offer up daily doses of the most unhinged, racist propaganda in all the airwaves. The fact that all their wasted breath has done nothing to halt the momentum of Trump and the MAGA movement has to be personally and professionally devastating for them.
Reid, for example, recently attempted to argue that Trump’s indisputable, fair-and-square reelection is actually “the most violent transfer of power in U.S. history” because it is simply the culmination of an “insurrection” that began on January 6, 2021. As Trump might say: “Sad,” especially because at this point, having lost 47% of her audience since Trump’s reelection, she is merely shouting into the void.
Hostin, for her part, delivered a rant on the ABC gabfest The View in which she absurdly ranked what she called the J6 “insurrection” among the worst moments in American history, including World War II, the Holocaust, and the 9/11 attacks.
Imagine waking up every day and being Joy Reid or Sunny Hostin, especially facing a new Era of Trump. It must be physically and psychically draining to be so consumed by bitter anger and racist hatred, and to have to watch as Trump moves back into the White House and begins to reverse the catastrophic damage wreaked by their fellow progressives. Sad.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior