The Angel of The Year: 2022

The Angel of The Year award is given to, “that person or entity who has been praised, lauded and publicly adored more than any other being on our planet over the past year.” To be awarded this honor, the recipient must have attained exalted status in more human minds than anyone else. 

The words “publicly adored” are a central criterion. The opinions of individuals vary widely, and counting them is all but impossible. But what appears in the public square is definable and even measurable. That allows the Angel of The Year award to be based upon more than personal opinions.

How well the public square is associated with reality is not an issue in determining the Angel of The Year; what matters is that the recipient is presented as the incarnation of virtue in the sight of the most people… often and widely.

The angel of the year is always easy to identify: praising them generates more approving nods and enthusiastic agreement – often slaps on the back and full-throated approval – than anyone or anything else.

The difficulty with this award is that the public square includes many “great hero” figures over a single year, or sometimes for only part of a year. And so we’ll be specifying a number of runners-up. These people were certifiable angels of the square, but didn’t burn bright enough or long enough to take the top spot.

We have two runners-up for Angel of The Year 2022. They were clearly worthy of honorable mentions, even though they couldn’t win:

    • Sam Bankman Fried. The operator of the FTX crypto exchange was feted world-over. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair appeared on stage with him, he was invited to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, Fortune magazine asked if he were the next Warren Buffet, The New York Times invited him to prestigious conferences, he was endorsed by NFL star Tom Brady, supermodel Gisele Bundchen and comedian Larry David. And because of all this (and more), people trusted him with billions of dollars.
    • Anthony Fauci. There are two camps of opinion on Fauci, Collins, Daszek, et al: One group thinks they’re demons and the other thinks they’re saints. Still, Fauci has to receive an honorable mention, because everything big and authorized stood behind him and certified his team as angels. (The anti-Fauci camp was silenced in the public square.) Institutional backing for the Fauci group became clear with the release of the Twitter Files, which established that the FBI, CIA, DOJ and the rest of the alphabet soup censored anything negative related to Fauci and his friends. That’s an astonishing level of support; in any other year it would have won this award for them. The Fauci team had thousands of people fired and canceled for their benefit; normally that would be unbeatable.

As with our Demon of The Year award, this award process leads us to some intriguing thoughts. Nonetheless, we likewise have to move along to this year’s winner.

And This Year’s Winner Is…

There can be no doubt that the Angel of The Year for 2022 has to be comedian, actor and current boss of the Ukraine, Vladimir Zelinsky.

To consider the breathtaking scope of this man’s public adulation, we’ll begin with the major awards he was given in 2022:

    • The Order of The Lion, first class, by the Czech Republic.
    • Commander of Grand Cross of the Order of Viesturs, by the nation of Latvia.
    • Order of Vytautas the Great with the Golden Chain, by Lithuania.
    • The Jan Karski Eagle Award, by the nation of Poland.
    • The State Award of Alexander Dubček, by Slovakia.
    • The Sir Winston Churchill Leadership Award, by the United Kingdom.
    • And from the US government, he was awarded the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal and the Ripple of Hope Award.

Over the same year, Zelinsky spoke, to standing ovations, at the US Congress (twice), to the highest government assemblies in a large number of less powerful countries, to the Grammy awards and to many others. He has been praised, nightly, on more or less every television channel (official and otherwise) across the Western world. He is all over social media, where his words are lauded at length.

All of this is in addition to an address to the United Nations in late 2021 (along with visits to Apple, Stanford University, and others) and an appearance at the Golden Globes awards in early 2023.

New species have been named after him, he has been given Oscar trophies, has been awarded multiple honorary degrees from universities, and there is presently an effort to give him a permanent bust in the US Capitol building.

This adulation is utterly unprecedented. Never, in all of human history, has any man or woman been so glorified in such a short period of time.

All that is highly esteemed, all that is mighty, and all of Western Officialdom has hailed Vladimir Zelinsky as the Angel of The Year. And so this award can go to no other.

Who will the award go to next year? He, she, they or it will be named in January of 2024.

Stay tuned.

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freemansperspective.com

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