For decades, to many people around the world, John Wayne represented the best of America: strong, courageous, selfless, tough, and fair.
To some, John Wayne was America. But John Wayne was also a man of his times. He had stereotypical views of blacks, women, and other minorities. And in today’s woke culture, that’s reason enough to cancel him.
Democrats in Orange County, Calif., have passed a resolution demanding that John Wayne Airport be renamed and that Wayne’s “name and likeness” be removed from the Orange County airport.
Liberals have hated John Wayne for decades, despising his unabashed, pro-American patriotism. Now, they think they have the muscle to erase him from history.
The resolution, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, calls on the Orange County Board of Supervisors to reverse the 1979 decision to rename it after Duke, and cites remarks he made in a 1971 interview with Playboy.
“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people,” he said in that interview nearly 50 years ago.
In that Playboy interview, Wayne declined to feel guilty as a white person for slavery, saying “I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves.”
This is a major problem. A white person refusing to feel guilty about something he didn’t do, didn’t take part in isn’t guilty of? How dare he!
Since no one can truly be held “responsible” for slavery, Jim Crow, and other oppressions of blacks – at least, no one alive today – a culture has grown up, now adopted by liberal whites, to promote the concept of “collective guilt.” In order to assign collective guilt to white people, black activists must invent an entire mythology and create new sins so that they can shoehorn their demands into some kind of moral crusade.
Renaming the airport is only the first step. Wayne’s persona is so embedded in the American consciousness the only way the cultural Nazis can accomplish their task of erasing Wayne’s memory from existence is to begin by demonizing him.
The Democratic resolution hails a “national movement to remove white supremacist symbols and names is reshaping American institutions, monuments, businesses, nonprofits, sports leagues and teams, as it is widely recognized that racist symbols produce lasting physical and psychological stress and trauma particularly to Black communities, people of color and other oppressed groups, and the removal of racist symbols provides a necessary process for communities to remember historic acts of violence and recognize victims of oppression.”
Anyone stressed or traumatized by the name on an airport needs serious psychological help. In fact, you could make the same argument about people who topple works of art. A lifeless statue means one thing to some people and another thing to others. That’s the point that’s been lost on the dullards who only think of destruction.
The activists are telling us, “You can’t think that way. Only our point of view is valid.” Used to be in America, it was perfectly alright to think a different way than everyone else. Everybody thinks what they want and even if it’s wrongheaded and objectionable, that’s what freedom is all about.
But “freedom” today is a relative term. The activists scream for freedom while trying to take it away from others. That they don’t realize that the irony in that makes them dangerous to human liberty.
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