When the woke mob was tearing down statues of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and more in 2020, like so many, I was quickly appalled by the so-called online lessons his teachers were submitting his then eight-year-old intellect to, so I started searching for things for him to read.
I looked on my local library’s shelves for the good guys with six-shooters and laser guns I had grown up with, but could not find any such heroes in the youth section—a few of the titles were upstairs among the adult fiction.
He flipped through Harry Potter books, The Hunger Games stuff, and more and kept shaking his head.
“I don’t know dad, all these guys are dumb.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is always some girl who has to think for the boy,” he said. “That’s great for the girls, but I want a book where the boy hero is not stupid and, you know, where he does something cool.”
I started to say that Harry Potter was the main hero in those books, but before I spoke, I remembered that the girl characters in those stories actually do all the hard thinking. I then swallowed all the advice I’d give later on men and women and realized he was right to want heroes that resonate with him.
“What about the history stuff — all the cool heroes from history?” I asked as I walked to peruse the nonfiction in the youth section. He didn’t follow, but I took a look. There were a lot of books on those shelves, but they were all weak and politically correct — some of them were obnoxiously so.
I found him looking at comic books and asked what American heroes they had talked about in school.
“Paul Revere, but he just rode some horse and shouted the ‘British are coming!’”
“Do you know that the British were marching out of Boston to take the people’s guns?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“Did you talk about the ‘shot heard ‘round the world’?”
He shook his head.
“Did you know that the British in Boston, under General Thomas Gage, actually seized Paul Revere’s guns?”
“No, why?”
I told him I’d tell him the whole story at bedtime. That night, as I told the story, I realized a book needed to be written for his generation. So, I began to research and to write Cool Heroes for Boys—20 True Tales of Adventure, an adventure-laden book where every story is about a 15-minute read — the ideal length for a bedtime story.
A few years after that library visit, my son (Christian) and I went to Boston to walk the Freedom Trail on the anniversary of the shot heard round the world; in fact, over the years of research, we went together to explore the history of many other heroes.
Along the way, freedom — especially our Second Amendment-protected freedom — became a big part of our exploration, as boys need the action scenes.
He sat up when he found out that George Washington had two horses shot out from under him in the Battle of Monogahela; the story of Sergeant Alvin York’s capture of the German soldiers thrilled him, but most of his questions were why York, at first, refused to fight; he wanted to see the revolver Sam Walker fought with and was blown away by how it helped to win the West; a young Teddy Roosevelt’s pursuit of outlaws in Dakota Territory made him want to hunt bad guys; he wanted to hear more about Alan Turing’s code breaking in World War II; and he really wanted to know why Davy Crockett stood against then President Andrew Jackson and how and why he died fighting at the Alamo.
What I found is that we can’t expect today’s teachers to expose our children to heroes for boys (most of their teachers will be women). Parents and grandparents need to find ways to expose our boys to heroes who shaped America and the world. The best way to do that is through real stories of adventure and triumph.
This is critical; after all, if we leave them without understanding the true history and nature of our freedom, then we’ll leave them vulnerable to woke teachers or professors who might deceptively turn them against what has made America the light of the world — I know quite a few well-educated, conservative parents who don’t understand why or how their sons or daughters were turned against their own freedom.
The truth, and all the critical thinking it inspires, is the armor they need to defeat ideologies designed to convince young minds that our freedom needs to be voted away.
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Frank Miniter on Frank Miniter:
In this age of fake media narratives, I think we all want to know why, to understand the real stories behind and beneath the headlines. This is why I started and am the editor of TheHeroicGent.com.
Indeed, many people before us have asked and sought answers to the big questions, but we can't really understand the answers without pulling them apart, experiencing them, even physically confronting them.
This viewpoint led to a life of books and adventures as a newspaperman and then magazine journalist. As a boy, I devoured books from authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Ernest Hemingway and I went into the wilderness to understand what they were telling me.
I found Norman Mailer's The Fight and soon I found myself in a gym in New Paltz, New York, being taught to box by former heavyweight champion of the world Floyd Patterson. I boxed in his gym until I left for college.
I was drawn to and rattled by books on war from George Orwell, William Manchester, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and more and so I went to and graduated from Norwich University, the oldest private military academy in the United States, a place that still teaches honor and old-school gentlemanly conduct, and then I went into journalism.
Journalism took me to Colorado and to the wilds of Wyoming before bringing me to Park Avenue in New York City to work as an editor for Outdoor Life magazine. My pen soon took me down the Amazon, to runs with the bulls of Pamplona, to hunts with the Apache, to the Kalahari and to so many other places around the world to meet people and to ask questions and to confront the truth they were showing me. I followed my reporting to small, African villages for magazine features. I met gang members in New York City for The Future of the Gun. I spent time with G. Gordon Liddy—and actually got him to back down and laugh—as I wrote the New York Times' bestseller The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide. I went onto the streets of Pamplona with Juan Macho for This Will Make of Man of You. I hunted down cyber hunters, and had some real and weird clandestine meetings, for my novels Kill Big Brother, The Deep State Revolution and The Year of the Dragon.
Along the way I won numerous awards for writing, and have contributed articles to Forbes, National Review, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, Foxnews.com and many other outlets.
I interviewed the president of the United States in the Oval Office. I have questioned many other leading Americans. I’ve also been a guest on Fox News’ Fox & Friends and on many other TV news programs, including One America News, Townhall’s Capitol Source, NewsmaxTV’s Midpoint, NewsmaxTV’s America’s Forum, the Christian Broadcast Network, Washington D.C.’s Local News 8 ABC, Glen Beck’s show on The Blaze TV, The World Over with Raymond Arroyo and PublicSqaure.net. I have been asked on as an expert guest on hundreds of radio shows, including Dennis Miller, Dick Morris, Michael Reagan, Radio America Network, Janet Mefferd, Lars Larson, NRA News, Tom Gresham’s GunTalk, The Mancow Experience and Rusty Humphries. I have also given seminars and speeches to many large audiences.
I am still in the search for answers and am humbled by what I have found so far. I hope you’ll come along with me on some of these quests.
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