It’s not as though TIME Magazine has to burnish its leftist credentials any further, but the magazine sure appears as if it wants to: on Monday, TIME released the names of their nominees for Person of the Year. With the exception of President Trump, there was not a single person on the list who could be construed as any kind of a conservative, but there was a hashtag, a monster, and an athlete who hates American police.
The hashtag #MeToo, a reference to the women around the country and the world who claim they have been sexually harassed or assaulted, is not offensive in itself, but it’s hard to claim that a hashtag is the equivalent of a person.
But then things get nastier: Colin Kapernick has become the emblem of people who feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with America, after he initiated the protests of the national anthem. This is the same guy who wore socks with police depicted as pigs on them.
A further plunge into the abyss: the selection of Kim Jong-un, a real-life monster who has subjugated the North Korean people to one of the most brutal repressions of the last 100 years, and is consistently threatening to throw the World into a nuclear conflagration with his missile launches.
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review:
But what I find interesting about the just-released shortlist is that picking anyone else on the list — including Xi Jinping and #MeToo — would amount, to one extent or another, to a troll operation of the president. … The most obvious example is Robert Mueller. To date, there is no reason to give him the title, other than for fan service to Trump-hating liberals and others emotionally invested in the Mueller probe. It’s conceivable that next year Mueller would deserve it. But not yet. … The Dreamers, likewise, would be a political shot. Unlike the #MeTooers, the Dreamers themselves haven’t really done anything special in 2017. They are simply a politically loaded prop for a larger argument. Jeff Bezos has done some newsworthy things in the last year, but his real relevance is that Trump hates him and that many of his supporters are determined to make him the next George Soros.