Recommendations of the Editorial team
Few people can claim as universal popularity as the Oscar winner Tom Hanks. (The incumbent president certainly not.) After an alumni group of the West Point military academy had canceled a award ceremony in honor of Hanks-a long-time veteran advocate-Trump celebrated the decision. And insulted the actor as “destructive, woke” and unworthy for the honor.
West Point withdraws honor
“Our great West Point (is getting great!) Skillfully canceled the award ceremony for actor Tom Hanks,” Trump wrote on Truth on Truth on Monday. “We do not need a destructive, Woke recipient for our esteemed American awards !!! Hopefully the Academy Awards and other fake award ceremonies will check their standards and practices on behalf of fairness and justice.”
The alumni association of West Point informed its members that Hanks would not receive the Sylvanus-Hayer Prize-an award for non-graduates who do not maintain the motto of the academy “Duty, Honor, Fatherland”. This emerged from an email that the “Washington Post” published on Saturday.
“This decision enables the academy to continue to concentrate on their core mission. To train. Kadetting. To fight. And to win. As officers in the most fatal force in the world, the US Army,” wrote the President of the West Point Association of Graduates, the retired colonel Mark Bieger.
Political motifs in the background
The decision does not make sense. The award has already been awarded to former President Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Hanks’ “Forrest Gump” co-star Gary Sinise, Ross Perot and Henry Kissinger. The award ranged from politics to culture. And had no measurable influence on the military performance of the US Army.
So why exclude Hanks? The actor is considered liberal. He appeared in “Saturday Night Live” sketches, who parodyed Trump’s supporters. And angered parts of its base. Qanon displacement ideologists distributed unstoppable claims. Hanks and other celebrities are involved in a secret child abuse ring. In February, Maga billionaire and ex-Trump Minister Elon Musk shared a contribution by a conservative activist who defamed Hanks as a “pedo”.
Symbolic figure in cultural struggle
But at its core it is not about Hanks himself, whose coffee company Hanx for the Troops donates all profits to veteran organizations. But about the president and his government.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, West Point became the focus in the campaign of the White House against alleged “Woke” enemy pictures. Pete Hegseth, Fox-News moderator at the weekend and now Defense Minister, carried out a cleansing of the faculty, administration, curriculum and guidelines of the academy-in the sense of Trump’s demand that US military academies have to be avoided, the following un-American, split, discriminatory, radical, extremist and irrational theories teach “, including the assumption” that America’s founding documents are racist or sexist; and ‘gender ideology’. “
The administration seems enough to contradict this political course that the presence of Hanks- worshiped by millions of fans at home and abroad as “America’s father” as “America’s father”.