The PointBy Daniel Greenfield

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, was a humble man. He avoided much of the attention that came his way from the media. While he cultivated friendships and relationships with unexpected figures in private, he didn’t much like the media. Or talking about himself. One of his final interviews was to an Australian accounting group. Which should summarize how much he liked the media.

First Man cynically exploits Armstrong’s humility, his unwillingness to express strong opinions about what he did, to justify the movie’s political decision not to show the pivotal movement in which the American flag was planted on the moon.

This censorship has nothing to do with Armstrong and everything to do with a basic hostility to American greatness.

While Armstrong was largely apolitical, like many of his comrades, he felt strongly about space policy. And was less shy about expressing his views there.

Obama’s dismantling of the American space program while outsourcing transportation to Russia led to an uncharacteristic rebuke from Armstrong, as I documented in my extensive piece on Obama’s destruction of the space program, Muslim Self-Esteem or the Stars.

Obama claimed that he wanted to retain a working space shuttle. In office however he scrapped the shuttles leaving the United States wholly dependent on Russian Soyuz rockets. Around the time that Bolden was telling America that we would not go to the moon, his skeleton of a space agency, now concerned with Muslim outreach and Global Warming, was paying the Russian space agency $424 million for six Soyuz seats. “By buying the services of space transportation, rather than the vehicles themselves, we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met,” Obama said at the John F. Kennedy Space Center. Quoting him, Neil Armstrong wrote, “It was asserted that by buying taxi service to Low Earth Orbit rather than owning the taxis, “we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met”. The logic of that statement is mystifying.”

That part of Armstrong’s career, like the state of the space program under Obama, will be elided.

But Neil Armstrong did his part to make America great. Obama and his leftist allies did and are doing their part to make it small. The petty decision to censor the flag is small. It is the smallness of small people whose petty malice is thinly disguised as principle.

The same sort of people who would turn the space program into a Muslim self-esteem and global warming factory would censor the flag. And it’s a good thing that their scope has been reduced from running NASA to acts of cinematic revisionist history like Hidden Figures or First Man.

(Photo credit: NASA)