Real Heroism Isn’t Viral: Rob Astorino on Fathers, Family, and Courage
Rob Astorino argues that real heroism isn’t viral or flashy: it’s moms and dads who quietly show up, hold the line, and keep the family together while the world tries to tear it apart. He talks through his own journey from Dolphins-obsessed kid to county executive with a $2 billion budget, a newborn at home, and a decision to schedule politics around lacrosse games instead of the other way around.
He’s seen the fatherless crisis up close in government. With his kids leaving home and grief still fresh from losing his father-in-law, he makes one last push to men listening: be the unsung hero, make the quiet sacrifices of love and presence now, and don’t let a noisy culture convince you that fatherhood doesn’t matter.
QUIET HEROES IN A NOISY AGE
On a rainy day, former Westchester County executive and Newsmax host Rob Astorino joins the “Heroic Stories” podcast and pushed back hard on what the culture calls heroism.
“I don’t want to say there’s one particular moment or one particular hero,” he said. “I think the news makes heroes where they shouldn’t. And we have a lot of quiet heroism in this world and specifically in this country.”
Growing up, his heroes were football legends — Don Shula on the sidelines and Bob Griese under center for his beloved Miami Dolphins.
“I exalted them. I loved them. I still love the Dolphins. I go crazy,” he said. “But as you get older, you start to realize that the word ‘heroism’ can take on different meanings.”
Now, as a veteran of politics and media, he watches the word get stretched to meaninglessness.
“Because I’m in politics and I’m in media, it gets so distorted now where we put people up on a pedestal that should never be near a pedestal,” he said. “You just get this quick fame on TikTok, or you’re deemed a hero because of something that you never earned. The word has kind of become watered down where everyone can be a hero for no reason.”
Astorino still honors obvious examples — soldiers in dangerous deployments, cops, firefighters who run into burning buildings. But the people he keeps coming back to are the ones nobody sees.
“I think there are quiet heroes that make this country go,” he said. “They’re never going to get the headline, and yet this country, our society, our church could never function without them.”
What he wants most now is not a public title.
“I kinda hope that I’m a hero only to the people that love me and only to the people I care about,” he said. “And first and foremost, I hope that I’m a hero to my kids.”
THE FAMILY UNDER ATTACK — AND WHY FATHERS MATTER
Astorino’s vision of heroism is bluntly old-fashioned: moms and dads who stay, who sacrifice, who raise their kids in the faith.
“You know, there’s a reason why in the Ten Commandments it’s ‘honor thy father and mother,’” he said. “The bedrock of our society, of our humanity, is the family. And that family has become completely under attack right now in America and in this world — with this woke nonsense and tearing down masculinity and tearing down the mom and the dad as a unit.”
He points to declining church attendance and collapsing family life as two sides of the same crisis.
“We’re dealing with the consequences of that,” he said. “Unless we get that back, we are on a slippery slope with no turning back.”
For him, the heroes are close to home.
“My parents are heroes to me, and as you get older, you realize the sacrifices that they’ve made,” he said. “And I know the sacrifices that my wife and I have made for our kids, and they’re starting to realize it now.”
The couple’s youngest is 16. Their middle daughter is in college and about to turn 21. Their oldest son, 22, serves in the Air Force.
“I think they’re starting to realize now as they get older that the sacrifices that we make have such an impact on them,” he said.
“THIS ISN’T BABYSITTING. I’M BEING A FATHER.”
One phrase still sets him off.
“The thing that would bother me the most was when my wife was working or she was out, and I’m watching the kids and people would say to me, ‘You’re babysitting,’” he said. “Babysitting? First of all, my wife’s not paying me to stay here until she gets home. That would be the definition of a babysitter. I’m being a father. I’m being a parent.”
He remembers being the dad in the stands and how much it mattered when his own parents did the same.
“Every kid’s like, ‘No, you don’t have to come to the game,’” he said. “But I still remember growing up, you would always look — are they here? And how much that meant that they were there.”
He and his wife made a simple rule.
“With my kids, we were always at the games, always at their events, always there, whether they wanted us or not,” he said. “It was important to us to see them as they’re growing up, but we knew how important it was to them.”
Vacations are fine, he added, but those aren’t the real core memories.
“Really being the bedrock, being the parent, being the protector — for me, being the husband and being the father — that’s, I hope, what the heroism is,” he said.
His own father, he says, still shows up.
“My dad did for me — he’s my number one fan,” Astorino said. “After all of my TV shows and radio shows, he texts me, calls me. You take that for granted when you’re growing up. But as you age, you realize the things in life that really matter are right here in this house, in my house and family.”
FATHERLESS FAMILIES AND A COUNTY EXECUTIVE’S EXPERIMENT
Astorino’s concern for fatherhood followed him into office when he was elected Westchester County executive.
“When I was Westchester County executive, one of the things that we did — and it taught me a lot — we tackled the issue of homelessness and also of fatherless families,” he said.
He insists that tackling fatherlessness is not partisan. He kept running into the same wall: a system that makes it risky for fathers to work and show up.
“One thing I kept hearing was the way our system is set up now in the federal government, state government, even local government, where it’s based purely on income,” he said. “There’s no incentive for the father to go work, because if he does, he loses some of the things that he needs to get up that ladder in life. And he makes a choice: ‘Well, if I go to work, I lose, I can’t afford to get cut off on housing or other assistance that gets me over the hump.’”
The result, he said, is a trap.
“They choose to stay in this cycle, and they stay out of their kids’ lives because they can’t afford the payments and the support, the child support,” he said. “And it just spirals.”
So his administration tried something new.
“We actually figured it out,” he said. “How about we, sort of like loan forgiveness — if you stay employed, and we can help you with that, but if you stay employed and if you stay in your child’s life, after X amount of time we forgive 25% of what you owe in back payments. And to the point where it becomes 100% and they actually are in a fulfilled life again with their kids.
“The statistics are so overwhelming that when a child is growing up without an active father in his or her life, the outcomes for that child are so diminished,” he said. “It’s staggering.”
DIVORCE, HOLIDAYS AND STAYING CLOSE
Astorino doesn’t speak about fatherhood as an outsider. His own parents divorced when he was still in high school.
“My parents got divorced when I was, I think I was 16 or 17,” he said. “That’s not an easy age. No age is easy when your parents go through the divorce, but especially when you’re growing up.”
His father chose to stay close.
“My father made sure he lived five minutes away. We were always there,” he said. “He was at every game again. So we were fortunate, my sister and I, that we had both parents who were actively with us in childhood, in young adulthood, and making sure that they were there.”
He and his wife have tried to model something similar in a complicated family tree.
“My wife’s parents are divorced. My parents were divorced,” he said. “And yet at every holiday, everyone is all together. So the kids never realized. They were like, ‘When did you guys get divorced?’ It’s like, they’re always together. And so they see the love, they see the laughter, and they had a normal upbringing despite the setbacks.”
THE DRIVE HOME WITH A NEWBORN
When Astorino talks about parenting, the images are specific: the first drive home from the hospital, the car seat, the crumbs on the floor.
“Anyone who is a parent will tell you their life changed dramatically,” he said. “When that first child is given to you by that doctor or nurse and you are holding this little thing that hasn’t even been washed off yet, you realize you are 100% responsible for this child’s upbringing and life. And there’s no manual.”
“I still remember, oh my God, that drive home with our first kid,” he said. “Put him in the car seat. I have never driven slower in my life. And it’s like, when you type real slow you always make mistakes. I’m driving like this, looking at him, like, is he okay?”
Then you get home, he said, and you still don’t know what to do.
“But you figure it out,” he said. “The one thing that you know is you love this little human, and that human feels that love back even though they can’t communicate. It’s the most important thing that we do.”
He remembers watching the required hospital video about shaking-baby syndrome and thinking, who would ever do that?
“And then you get home and you have no sleep for a week, and the baby is crying at three in the morning and you’re like, ‘Go to bed!’” he said. “And then you’re like, okay, okay, that’s right, that’s right. And you have to learn it all on your own.”
Those moments stick.
“Every little bit is in my head, it’s in pictures and I never want to forget that,” he said. “The days are long but the years are short, and boy is that true. You just get exhausted as a parent.”
A $2 BILLION BUDGET AND THREE LITTLE KIDS
When Astorino took over a county with a $2 billion budget, his children were still small.
“My son, who’s 22, he was born in 2003. Our daughter was born in 2005,” he said. “I got elected in November of ’09, so they were young. And then our youngest — my wife was pregnant during that whole crazy campaign in 2009.”
Campaigning meant long days for him and long days at home for his wife.
“I’m running around all over the place, getting up very early in the morning and out the door, coming back late at night exhausted,” he said. “She’s exhausted — pregnant and two other little kids.”
Only recently, he said, did she admit how hard that season really was.
“It wasn’t really until a couple years ago that she admitted there was some anger during that time, some resentment, that I’m out and about,” he said. “But she was terrific. She let me do exactly what I needed to do. We pulled off the upset and I got elected.”
Then came the moment that forced him to choose.
“I still remember, it was October of 2009 and I had this massive fundraiser scheduled — and she goes into labor,” he said. “So she’s at the hospital. I go to the hospital obviously and I have the hospital band on. It was October 8, and she gives birth. So our daughter was born at like four in the afternoon. This event was scheduled at like seven o’clock.”
His instinct was simple.
“I’m like, you know, I’m canceling this thing,” he said. “She’s like, ‘No, I’m exhausted. Please, the nurse is gonna take the baby, just go do this thing.’”
He went. And then it hit him.
“I walk into this event and I said, ‘We just had a baby.’ Everyone’s like, ‘Why are you here?’ And it kind of hit me — why am I here?” he said. “This is one of the greatest moments of my life. The checks were already collected. Who’s gonna care? I had the greatest excuse in the world with proof. I had eight pounds of proof.”
That tension between public life and home life never fully goes away, he said. But he did something concrete about it in the schedule.
“I would give my scheduler all the kids’ schedules,” he said. “‘All right, here’s my son’s lacrosse schedule or whatever. Plop it into the schedule and work around it. I’m not doing anything. I’m going to the games.’”
The young staffer didn’t understand.
“He goes, ‘Well, you already went to a game this year,’” Astorino recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, okay. Well, I’m going to all of them. And you can figure out the schedule.’”
Years later, that same aide got married and had kids.
“I joke with him all the time now,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Do you want me to handle your schedule? Do you want me to fill up your day so you can’t be there to take the kids to the doctor?’ And he starts laughing and goes, ‘My God, I wish I knew then. I would’ve been a little more understanding.’ That’s life. You go through it.”
KEEPING GOD AT THE CENTER
For Astorino, faith has never been separate from his work or his fatherhood. It has been the backdrop.
“Fortunately, my parents, they made sure my sister and I went to church when we were growing up,” he said. “God, Jesus, the Catholic Church has always been part of my life routine. It was the way I was raised. It was the way my wife and I decided to raise our kids.”
He still smiles at childhood memories of Mass and the stop that always came after.
“I was joking with my kids recently,” he said. “I said, ‘You know what would always happen after when we were growing up? We would always go after Mass to the bakery and we could pick out a donut or whatever. We’d go home. Not that that was a reward, but it was part of the routine.’”
He carried that rhythm into his own home — and into his media career.
One of the jobs that most shaped him came when he was unexpectedly out of work.
“I left ESPN Radio, which I helped start in New York, at the end of 2005 to run a campaign that I lost, so I was out of work,” he said. “I remember getting an email from a friend of mine who I went to Fordham with. And he’s like, ‘Hey, are you still Catholic?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, why?’”
The answer: SiriusXM and the Archdiocese of New York were launching a Catholic channel.
“They needed somebody to run it, to launch it and to run it,” he said. “The idea of Catholic radio seemed boring to me. But I went in to meet people at Sirius and Cardinal Egan.”
They asked him how he would build it.
“I’m thinking to myself, this is either gonna go really bad or it’s gonna go really good,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Look, it’s just gotta be contemporary. You’ve got to reach people like me who may not go to church each week because I’m dealing with three kids and runny noses and we’re all over the place, but I want to go to church.’”
They hired him.
“It was one of the greatest jobs I’ve had. I thoroughly loved it,” he said. “I got to go around the country interviewing cardinals and bishops. I went to the Vatican a bunch of times, met Pope Benedict. It was just a great, great thing.”
Still, his favorite moments with God are the quiet ones.
“My favorite time is to be during the day at an empty church,” he said. “No matter where I go, when I’m traveling, I always either find a local church or the cathedral. I love to go during the day where it’s just quiet.”
He describes it in sensory detail.
“As you know, the smells and bells of the Catholic Church are the best,” he said. “You go in there and you smell the candles. You hear the silence. You see the crucifix. And you just have a chance to be in the moment, nothing else. You’re just sitting there talking to God, just unburdening yourself or just having that time.”
When he was young, the prayers were simple — and sometimes silly.
“I remember it would be like, ‘Please let the Miami Dolphins win tonight,’” he said, laughing. “Or, ‘Please let me win an election or let somebody win.’ Jesus isn’t up there on Sundays wearing aqua and orange, and he ain’t a Republican or Democrat.”
Now the petitions are sharper.
“Of course I’m praying, ‘Please get my son home safely,’” he said. “Pray for the things that really matter.”
His deepest consolation is seeing that faith take root in his children.
“Our daughter just started going back to church,” he said. “She went to college and, you know, when you go to college it’s the last thing you’re thinking, but she started. We went up to see her and we went to Mass with her. She came home, she wanted to go to Mass. My son’s back at church. He’s in the Air Force in Arkansas. And that to us is like, we did something right.”
For him, the church has always been a refuge from public pressure.
“No matter how crappy things would get — and trust me, when you’re in politics or public life, things can get pretty crappy — I would always be able to go to that church in the middle of the day and nothing else mattered,” he said. “That was like my shield.”
GRIEF, EMPTY NESTS AND THE NEXT PHASE
Astorino and his wife are just a few years away from an empty nest. They’ve already tasted the grief that comes with that new season.
“My father-in-law passed away very recently,” he said. “We were all together obviously for this. I think it’s hard for a kid to see his or her parents cry. That’s vulnerable. And they saw us cry a lot over the last couple of days.”
After the funeral, they ended up back where it all started: just the five of them.
“Everyone was home. It was just the five of us again,” he said. “We had breakfast together, we watched a movie together. And as my wife said to me, she goes, ‘It’s like all the babies are under the roof again.’ And it’s a nice feeling because it doesn’t happen much, nor will it going forward.”
He’s honest that he doesn’t yet know what the next phase will feel like.
“Professionally, as long as I’m still able to do stuff and work, I’ll feel some fulfillment,” he said. “But I think once our 16-year-old, in two years when she’s out, I don’t know what that phase is gonna be like.”
His wife, he said, is ready.
“My wife loves the phase she’s in,” he said. “She says this all the time: ‘I love where we’re at. I wouldn’t want to go backwards. We enjoyed it, even though it was difficult, but we’ve done that. We did our responsibility. We love them. And at some point it turns back to us — our turn to go travel,’ which we love to do, ‘and move to a second phase.’”
He laughs at how different their wiring is.
“She can’t wait till she retires,’” he said. “My God, I never want to retire. And those are things we gotta figure out because it’s going to be just my wife and I again. The circle of life, right? We started together and then things changed when we added kids. And now when the kids are out, it’s back to just us.”
What he does know is that parenthood doesn’t stop when kids move out.
“The kids, we can’t tell them, ‘Go to your room.’ They’re adults,” he said. “They’re gonna come home when they can or when they will. They’re starting out. We’ll help them as much as we can. But at this point it’s advice — and they take it or they leave it. You watch them make the mistakes, you try to shield them, but they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.
“I am getting some gray hairs now,” he said. “It’ll be an interesting phase.”
UNSUNG HEROES IN THE STANDS AND THE AISLES
When Astorino looks around at ordinary life, he sees quiet heroism everywhere — especially in parents who serve when nobody is watching.
“There are plenty of people, the moms or the dads, who were the CYO coaches,” he said. “I was one of them. And I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed every moment of coaching my three kids in CYO basketball.”
He remembers putting on the whistle and heading to practice.
“I loved putting that whistle on, going to practice and spending time with them,” he said. “On the final year with my last child, winning the championship — I mean, they’re like, ‘Okay, why are they so excited? We’re in eighth grade.’ Me and the other coach were just like almost in tears how excited we were, just because we had that moment with our kids.”
He watched other parents quietly show up again and again.
“There were so many other parents who I saw were so dedicated to their kids,” he said. “They showed up at all the games, they were working in the cafeteria to make sure things ran, or doing security at the CYO games or at the football game — moms and dads who just put in a heck of a lot of effort to make sure that they were actively involved in their kids’ lives.”
Often there’s no thank-you at all.
“They may never get a ‘Thanks for coming to the game, Dad,’ or ‘I’m glad you were there,’” he said. “But we know it’s in them and we know how important it is.”
Quiet heroism isn’t limited to the sidelines.
“Every time I see that, when I see a mom with a shopping cart with a screaming kid, I just want to say, ‘Can I help you in any way?’” he said. “We’ve been there. It gets better. And I think that’s really the heroism that makes the most impact on me — the little things that nobody gets thank-yous for.”
“BE THE UNSUNG HERO”
At the close of the conversation, Astorino turned back to the men listening — especially the dads and grandfathers.
“I hope you know how important you are in society and how important you are to the church and how important you are especially in the lives of your wife and your children,” he said.
His advice is simple and sharp.
“Be the unsung hero,” he said. “You may not get the accolades, you may not get the pat on the back or even the thank-yous, but it all adds up. It’s like making deposits in a bank, and when you’re done, that retirement IRA of emotion and gratitude is gonna be there and you’re gonna be lucky that you made that effort.”
The payoff he’s looking for isn’t money.
“The interest is gonna be, ‘I did well. My kids are okay. They’re on their own. Hopefully they’re healthy,’” he said. “Some of those things obviously are out of our control, but they’re on the right path.”
He jokes about an old stereotype he grew up with — and rejects it.
“The joke when we were growing up was the moms would always take care of the kids and the dad’s job was to make sure the kids stayed alive until mom got home,” he said.
Then he stops joking.
“But we’re more than that,” he said. “Being a dad, being a man in this day and age — don’t allow us to be devalued or to say we don’t matter. We matter. We are so important to the development of kids and to the stability of families and to society. Take it seriously and be as goofy as you want, but know how important it is.”