By Eric Utter, American Thinker, 1/5/22
Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers has become persona non grata to progressives. This is, truthfully, a remarkably easy feat. He started irritating them around a year ago, when he criticized politicians who didn’t obey their own COVID-19 mandates. More recently he deplored the “woke mob” and “cancel culture.”
The woke mob became truly apoplectic when Rodgers wasn’t clear about his vaccination status and then spoke with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, subsequently saying he had availed himself of the same COVID-19 treatment Rogan claimed to have used successfully. You know, the so-called “horse de-wormer” — which is not a Dr. Fauci–approved “vaccine.” (Of course, the COVID vaccines aren’t really “vaccines,” either, but that’s another story. Nothing to see there.) Due to the aforementioned indiscretions, Rodgers came off as someone the left detests most: a free thinker. Ergo, he was The Enemy.
To top it all off, Rodgers was a guest on Monday Night Football‘s “ManningCast” during which the hosts — ex–NFL quarterback Peyton Manning and his brother Eli — discuss the game at hand and other matters. Rodgers was asked what he likes to read. He first told the Manning brothers that he reads “a lot of French poetry” before pointing to a bookshelf behind him and noting that he had “Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand over here.”
Judging by the woke mob’s response, it would have been better if he had said he had “The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx over here” or “Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov over here.”
One denizen of the vast sewer that is the Twitterverse declared: “It’s been very difficult watching Aaron Rodgers, my all-time favorite player, embrace everything I loathe. But Atlas Shrugged? Trade him. F— it.” So teams are to start trading players based on their reading material? Somewhere, Xi Jinping smiles.
The Palmer Report tweeted: “Aaron Rodgers just bragged that he has Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on his bookshelf. Explains all his lying about being vaccinated and such. He’s one of those ‘screw everyone else before they can screw you’ wackos. People like this are always a danger to others.”
The truth is, those on the left hate anyone who disagrees with them, and anything that calls their propaganda into question. They are wildly intolerant. And they act on their bigotry, fear, and rage by smearing their opponents and trying to cancel them. There can be no more virulent me-first ideology than that. Factually, historically, it is the authoritarian, communal, anti-freedom left that is always a “danger to others.” An existential danger. Just ask the families of the roughly 100 million people it killed in the 20th century alone. See also: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, et al.
It is tragically amusing — and highly illustrative — that so many self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” will go to almost any length to prevent others from being exposed to viewpoints that contradict their own.
Perhaps the New Orleans Saints’ Drew Brees was secretly forced to retire…after he was seen holding a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm? We’ll never know. Will the NBA’s Enes Kanter Freedom be called on the carpet if it is revealed his bookshelf sports a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon? Will the general manager of a professional sports team get the axe if he admits to reading, say, The Fountainhead?
How ironic would it be if leftists start a book-burning club and fuel their first conflagration with copies of Brave New World and Darkness at Noon? Or maybe they will bring them to retail outlets and businesses before they — mostly peacefully, mind you — burn them down. That would be a twofer!
Perhaps someday soon we will see anti-Rodgers messages on the back of NFL helmets: “Burn Books.” “Coercion, Not Free Thought.” “It Takes All of Us…to Think the Same Way.” “End Individualism.” “Books Don’t Matter.” “Stop Reading.” “Don’t Read Their Stories.” And “Inspire Groupthink.”
The left is not pro-democracy. It is afraid of freedom. It is not pro-science. It is afraid of knowledge. It holds no answers. Because it is afraid of truth.
Brave New World, indeed.
Source: http://www.capoliticalreview.com
Get Citizensjournal.us Headlines free SUBSCRIPTION. Keep us publishing – DONATE
