The Progressive Pantheon of Pathetic Heroes

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

American left-wing heroes are proving to be a creepy bunch.

So what do some of the most renowned “resistance” left-wing heroes have in common other than shared hatred of conservative America?

They are either criminals, pathological liars, or self-described performance-art victims.

Take Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the current face of progressive resistance to the enforcement of federal immigration law.

No one questions that Garcia had previously received deportation orders before he was re-arrested by ICE.

No one argues that his current wife, Vasquez Sura, had in the past successfully petitioned for at least two protective restraining orders against Abrego Garcia—to stop his violent beatings and his manic destruction of household items.

In the old Democratic Party, the worst allegation possible was to be cast as a beater of women.

No one contests that in 2022, Garcia was pulled over in Tennessee for speeding and recklessly veering out of his lane.

He was then found to have an invalid driver’s license. He was accompanied by eight illegal aliens without IDs. And his vehicle was registered to an imprisoned and likely human trafficker. Garcia had been variously recognized in deportation hearings as a member of the violent and lethal MS-13 gang.

Yet when ICE began to deport him, the left went ballistic and constructed him as some sort of civil rights saint.

Senators tossed drinks with the illegal alien.

A few politicos trekked on a holy hejira to El Salvador to demand from the autonomous El Salvadorian government the release of a Salvadorian citizen held in jail on Salvadorian soil—as if they were 19th-century Yanqui imperialists dictating to an elected Central American government that the United States had more rights of jurisdiction over an illegal alien than did the government of El Salvador over one of their own citizens on their own soil.

Feminists said little about his brutal propensity to strike women. Anti-gang activists went mostly mum about his MS-13 affiliations. Those decrying human trafficking were quiet about his transportation of illegal aliens.

Instead, all that was needed of this useful illegal alien pawn was the Democrat meme that Abrego Garcia was a victimized person of color and a target of Trump’s supposedly racist, restrictionist, and xenophobic border policies. His crimes in comparison were immaterial if not advantageous to the cause. No one bothered to remember the legions of innocent women killed and raped by violent illegal aliens.

Mahmoud Khalil was a different, far smoother sort of leftist icon. The pro-Hamas Algerian “student” came to the US supposedly for the chance at an Ivy League education. He soon stayed on a green card, becoming the poster boy of anti-Israel protests at Columbia.

To counter sometimes violent campus and urban pro-Hamas demonstrations and endemic anti-Semitism in elite higher education, the Trump administration decided that it no longer wished to import student force multipliers of widespread anti-American and anti-Semitic boilerplate.

In other words, the Trump administration ordered Khalil deported on the grounds that he was admitted as a guest student, not a perennial campus gadfly organizer spouting support for the terrorists of Hamas.

Note the U.S. is the host, Khalil the guest. And hosts need no reasons to disinvite unruly or obnoxious guests, who abuse the privileges (that most American citizens lack) of attending an Ivy League school.

Yet in the Democratic binary of oppressed/oppressors, Khalil fit the bill.

He was a “lite” Hamas supporter and a clever anti-Israel activist who oversaw demonstrations that were overtly anti-Semitic in his host country. The only lingering question is why do pro-Hamas, anti-American Palestinians so often demand to visit and study in the hated U.S. when there are universities receptive and conducive to Islamists and Hamas enablers closer to home?

The left seemed mostly uninterested in any of the 1,200 slaughtered on October 7 in a time of peace, only in those who championed the cause of that murderous rampage.

The left also went gaga over the wealthy, aristocratic, and supposedly charming young Luigi Mangione, the assassin of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. Not since the terrorist and mass murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev adorned the cover of Rolling Stone has the left so romanticized a stone-cold psychopath.

Mangione quickly became a supposed counter-culture freedom fighter, with his good looks battling the corporate insects who supposedly feed on hoi polloi.

In reality, Thompson was an up-from-the-bootstraps Midwesterner who, by merit, not birth, climbed to the top of the corporate world, murdered by Mangione, a spoiled, rich wannabe pseudo-intellectual who cowardly hid in wait to blow apart Thompson for the supposed crime of running the company that made a profit selling needed health insurance to willing buyers.

But for the left, the death throes of Thompson were out of mind and out of sight, while Mangione was interviewed and lauded on social media as a righteous revenger and the arm of the exploited.

Do we even now remember the faker Jussie Smollett?

He was the multiracial actor who was worried that he was a fading star in a soon-to-be-cancelled TV show.

So he staged a violent crime in which he hired two burly assailants with red MAGA-like hats to 1) ambush him in the early morning hours, 2) be warded off by the feisty, heroic, cell-phone- and sandwich-holding diminutive Smollett, and 3) manage nonetheless to “whiten” Smollett with bleach (defying the laws of chemistry by not freezing when thrown on Smollett in the arctic winter Chicago night temperature) as they tossed a “noose” over his neck, shouting MAGA slurs about his black-cast Empire television series.

Smollett’s rent-a-thugs were taped buying the tools of the ambush. They had cashed Smollett’s checks as proof of his hire and confessed both to the crime and its practice run.

Yet, Smollett became the immediate heroic victim and thus proof, according to the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, of endemic racism.

What a horrific America when brilliant and brave black stars had to fight off red-hatted, noose-carrying, bleach-bringing, Empire-hating, 2-AM-lurking, white-male, MAGA racist bullies, prowling randomly in sub-zero temperatures for targets in a liberal, mostly black neighborhood, and on the lookout for innocent, brilliant, brave, young, black, movie stars so often wandering in the deep night.

The left not only fell for that skit but for days ran with Jussie as proof of what black men have to put up with from the white establishment in Chicago.

There are lots of criminals who could be added to the leftist pantheon.

The now iconic George Floyd, despite the tragedy of his detention and death, was resisting arrest while stopped under the influence of drugs, while likely trying to pass counterfeit money, while an eight-times convicted felon, and while a former four-year convict who previously had staged a home invasion and robbery and aimed a gun at the abdomen of a female occupant. No wonder he soon appeared memorialized on murals with wings and a halo.

Michael Brown, of the lie “hands up, don’t shoot” that went viral, was supposedly gunned down in the back as he vainly tried to flee a white racist cop looking for prey in Ferguson, Missouri.

No matter that in truth, Brown was a thief who had just strong-armed a store clerk and was confronted by a policeman while brazenly walking down the center of the street.

Brown then attacked the cop and sought in vain to grab his weapon. After their struggle, he ran away, then turned and charged the officer until he was shot.

For the left, he was another instant, noble victim of racist white police.

So naturally, weeks of protests followed, sometimes violent, as liberal elected officials visited Ferguson to show solidarity against “the militarization of the police” and to honor Michael Brown. White, entitled CNN anchors paraded in their newsrooms while holding their hands up, chanting the lie “hands up, don’t shoot.”

Octogenarian Native American activist Leonard Peltier was recently granted limited parole. He was successfully convicted a half-century earlier of murdering two FBI agents—allegedly executing two defenseless young officers with coup de gras shots to their heads as they lay wounded.

For decades, he posed as a “political prisoner” of a racist, white-rigged system. And despite an earlier failed prison break and serially refused pardons, nonetheless, in the fleeting hours of the autopen Biden administration, Peltier was finally released home under supervision—a defiant leftist resistance hero and unrepentant murderer to the end.

Both these violent and suave heroes were canonized by the left because of their perceived opposition to corporate America, or law enforcement, or a conservative administration, or white people, and, in particular, more recently, to the hated Trump.

Given its cosmic morality, the left never really cared that Jussie Smollett not just lied but that his lies could not possibly in a Newtonian world be true, or that assassin Mangione showed all the mercilessness of a professional Mafia hit man, or that it proved impossible for the guest “student” Khalil ever to voice disapproval of the mass murdering act of Hamas on October 7, or that America in 2025 did not need to import more wife beaters, human traffickers, and gang members.

Why does the left make martyrs out of monsters?

One, in postmodern America, there are too many victims for too few victimizers. So to distinguish the one from the many requires all the more psychodramas and grammar-school dramatics. Violence and claims of racism add to the hero’s mystique.

Two, the heroes are mere pawns in a larger game of “social justice” in which both useful idiots and ruthless criminals alike can advance the cause.

Morality, then, is never defined by the means but only by the eventual ends. Facts don’t matter; only the noble lies for the cause.

Three, the worshipers are, for the most part, affluent and safe; the worshiped are not so tame.

So it became easy to immortalize a Garcia—as long as he does not live next door.

It is virtuous to praise publicly a Mangione—unless he is armed and hiding in wait for your parents.

Smollett is a noble victim, at least when you’re not a cop at 3 AM trying to sort out all the preposterous lies of Jussie’s noose, bleach, and “bruises.”

“Hands up, don’t shoot” is a catchy civil-rights call to arms—at least when Michael Brown is not strong-arming you in a store or he is not charging you head down.

You can play-act Gandhi—when you’re not Garcia’s battered girlfriend, or you do not answer the door at night when George Floyd barges in with a pointed gun, or you’re not wounded and begging for your life when Leonard Peltier pulls the trigger.