The Left‘s fawning admiration for some of history‘s most reprehensible figures speaks volumes about its true nature. A closer look at the individuals it has elevated as heroes over the years reveals not only its ideological leanings but also the glaring contradictions between the values it professes to uphold and the increasingly radical positions it actually embraces.
Four months after his rebel forces overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro accepted an invitation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to visit the United States. The charismatic 32-year-old lawyer-turned-revolutionary arrived in New York in April 1959 and took the city by storm.
Despite Castro’s promises to implement democratic reforms once stability was restored, President Dwight D. Eisenhower remained skeptical and chose to avoid meeting with him.
Although U.S. officials had reservations, the American press eagerly embraced “El Comandante,” as he was known in Cuba. As BBC writer and historian Tony Perrottet described it, “Castro was now as big as Elvis and was mobbed by New Yorkers from the moment he arrived at Penn Station. Newspapermen compared him to George Washington; women swooned.”
A ‘mythical, romantic hero’
If possible, the sensational media coverage of Che Guevara’s visit to America five years later may have surpassed that of his famed commander’s earlier trip. The adoring portrayal of the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary and Castro’s second in command masked the reality that Guevara was a ruthless killer who lived in luxury while the Cuban people suffered in poverty.
During his address to the United Nations, Guevara defiantly declared, “Executions? Certainly, we execute! And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary!”
Surprisingly, his audience appeared unfazed by his incendiary rhetoric.
The Collegiate Times reported that following his speech, Guevara “was rushed from one socialite party to the next. … New Yorkers gushed over him.”
It was only after his departure that “the New York Police Department discovered his plot with the Black Liberation Army to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument,” according to the report.
It was said Guevara especially relished his role as “judge, jury, and executioner” at Cuba’s La Cabana Prison. It is believed he sent over 500 people to their deaths without due process.
In his bestselling book Motorcycle Diaries, Guevara said, “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood.” And in a letter to his father, he reportedly said, “I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”
Guevara has continued to be venerated by many on the Left. A PBS description of him said, “Ché remains a mythical, romantic hero — an uncompromising revolutionary, selfless, dedicated, incorruptible, ready to die for his beliefs.”
The right crime at the right time
Perhaps the Left’s most useful, timely, and consequential hero was George Floyd, a drug-addicted criminal who died in May 2020 after then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. The fact that Floyd was black and Chauvin was white provided the New York Times with the opportunity it had been waiting for since the previous summer.
During an August 2019 staff meeting, then-Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet shared management’s plan to make “race” a top issue in the 2020 election. He told staff that the New York Times intended to “shape” political discourse in America by portraying then-President Donald Trump as a racist and by reshaping American history with slavery at the center of the narrative. This marked the introduction of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project.
Although the New York Times moved forward with the 1619 Project immediately, advancing race as a primary matter proved more challenging. But Floyd’s death and the race-fueled riots that followed thrust systemic racism to the forefront.
Just as Baquet anticipated, it took about a nanosecond for the Democratic Party, the rest of the legacy media, and Big Tech to follow the New York Times‘s lead. And so, in the midst of a pandemic and a deep recession, America’s “systemic racism” became the most pressing matter of the day. Baquet couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome.
A cold-blooded killer
Unbelievably, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate who stalked and gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two, outside a midtown Manhattan hotel in December, quickly became a hero of the Left.
Rather than outrage over Mangione’s crime, many on the Left celebrated Thompson’s death, citing UnitedHealthcare’s record of denying healthcare claims. They justified Mangione’s actions because they, too, were denied insurance coverage in the past.
More amazing still, some women were smitten with Mangione. ABC News reported that approximately two dozen women showed up to support Mangione at his arraignment, some waiting outside in frigid temperatures for hours to secure seats in the public gallery.
“Most of the women wore face masks, and a few appeared visibly emotional as Mangione entered the courtroom,” the outlet reported.
One woman told ABC, “This is a grave injustice, and that’s why people are here.”
Death threats on the subway
In May 2023, Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man struggling with mental illness and under the influence of K2, a potent synthetic marijuana, boarded a Manhattan subway car and shouted death threats at passengers. In response, Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old Marine veteran and architecture student, intervened and placed Neely in a chokehold, killing him.
While Neely’s death was undeniably unfortunate, passengers expressed gratitude for Penny’s decisive action in neutralizing what they perceived as a grave threat. That would have been that, but Penny is white, and Neely is black.
The public was shocked two weeks later when New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office caved to left-wing pressure and charged Penny with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
Penny was acquitted by a Manhattan jury in December. It was a case that never should have been brought. For many Americans, the verdict symbolized a triumph of justice, restoring faith in the legal system. On the political Left, however, the outcome sparked outrage.
A Hamas sympathizer
The Left is currently rallying behind Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent who was taken into custody last weekend by immigration authorities for his leadership role in last year’s anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. Khalil, a green-card holder and recent Columbia graduate, was a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student group that “fights for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
The City Journal reported that “CUAD was one of the primary agents of chaos on Columbia’s campus during last spring’s ‘encampment,’ during which rioters smashed windows, defaced and occupied buildings, disrupted classes, and harassed and threatened Jewish students.”
Democrats, including senators, seeking to prevent Khalil’s deportation launched a “Free Khalil” campaign, arguing that he has been targeted merely for expressing controversial opinions. They overlooked the fact that Khalil not only voiced his pro-Hamas beliefs but also acted on them, leading to a protest that quickly escalated into illegal activity.
Considering the Democrats’ refusal to stand in support of a 13-year-old boy battling brain cancer or for the mothers of young women brutally murdered by illegal immigrants, their fight to keep a terrorist sympathizer in the United States seems a stupid hill to die on.
Heroes it has no right to claim as its own
Finally, while the Left today celebrates civil rights icons such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it never mentions the extraordinary ways Southern Democrats demonized them at the time.
King’s house was bombed twice, once while his wife and baby were inside. On another occasion, shots were fired at his home. He was arrested by local law enforcement on bogus charges several times. But these arrests and the mug shots that followed only served to lift King and the movement he led to national attention.
Parks was not the first black person to sit in the white section of a bus, nor was that the first attempt by activists to organize a bus boycott, but her act of defiance gained national attention. Coming on the heels of Emmett Till’s lynching in August 1955, the national press began focusing on the shocking injustices endured by black Americans in the South.
Historian Robert Caro detailed this period in the third volume of his widely acclaimed series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Shortly after the boycott began, Montgomery’s Democratic mayor organized what was described as “the largest pro-segregation rally in history.” More than 10,000 people gathered to hear Democratic Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland speak.
According to Caro, Eastland told the group, “In every stage of the bus boycott, we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, incredibly stinking n******. African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots, and knives. All whites are created equal with certain rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead n******.”
The Democrats’ despicable treatment of black people during that era should disqualify them from claiming early civil rights activists as their own.
The heroes it worships
ACCUSED UNITEDHEALTHCARE CEO MURDER SUSPECT TO RECEIVE NEARLY $300,000 IN DONATIONS
There is much truth in an old Japanese proverb, “When the character of a person is not clear, look at their friends.” Similarly, when the character of a political party is uncertain, look at their heroes.
A glance at the unsavory individuals the Left has elevated over the years reveals all we need to know about Democrats’ character. It also offers a clear explanation for why the party’s approval rating is currently sitting at a record low.