RUTHFULLY YOURS

Corporate America will do almost anything to stay on the safe side of public opinion—at least as it’s defined by the media. CEOs will apologize, grovel, resign, settle. They will even, as of this month, legitimize and fund an outfit that exists to smear conservatives.

The press is still obsessing over President Trump’s incompetent handling of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and that has suited some profiteers just fine. The notorious Southern Poverty Law Center is quietly cashing in on the tragedy, raking in millions on its spun-up reputation as a group that “fights hate.” Apple CEO Tim Cook informed employees that his company is giving $1 million to SPLC and matching employee donations. J.P. Morgan Chase is pitching in $500,000, specifically to further the SPLC’s “work in tracking, exposing and fighting hate groups and other extremist organizations,” in the words of Peter Scher, the bank’s head of corporate responsibility.

What Mr. Scher is referring to is the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” its online list of 917 American “hate groups.” The SPLC alone decides who goes on the list, but its criteria are purposely vague. Since the SPLC is a far-left activist group, the map comes down to this: If the SPLC doesn’t agree with your views, it tags you as a hater.

Let’s not mince words: By funding this list, J.P. Morgan and Apple are saying they support labeling Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage as “hate groups.” That may come as a sour revelation to any bank customers who have donated to the Family Research Council (a mainstream Christian outfit on the SPLC’s list) or whose rights are protected by the Alliance Defending Freedom (which litigates for religious freedom and is also on the list).

Similarly put out may be iPhone owners who support the antiterror policies espoused by Frank Gaffney’s Washington think tank, the Center for Security Policy (on the SPLC’s list). Or any who back the proposals of the Center for Immigration Studies (on the list).

These corporations are presumably in favor of the SPLC’s practice of calling its political opponents “extremists,” which paints targets on their backs. The group’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” lists Mr. Gaffney (who worked for the Reagan administration); Maajid Nawaz (a British activist whose crimes include tweeting a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad ); and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali refugee who speaks out against Islamic extremism).

The SPLC has tarred the respected social scientist Charles Murray, author of the well-regarded book “Losing Ground,” as a “white nationalist.” Mr. Murray has been physically assaulted on campus as a result. He happens to be married to an Asian woman and has Asian daughters, so the slur is ludicrous. But what’s a little smearing and career destruction if J.P. Morgan Chase gets some good headlines?

It isn’t only the lists. An honest outfit tracking violent groups would keep to straightforward descriptions and facts. Instead, the SPLC’s descriptions of people are brutally partisan, full of half-truths and vitriol designed to inspire fury.

We’ve seen what this kind of fury can do in Europe, with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the controversial filmmaker, by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamic fanatic. Ms. Hirsi Ali, who had worked with Van Gogh, still travels with security—and J.P. Morgan thinks it appropriate to further target her? In 2012 a gay-marriage supporter named Floyd Corkins smashed into the Family Research Council’s headquarters and shot a security guard. He told police he was inspired by the SPLC’s “hate group” designation. CONTINUE AT SITE

What we saw emerging in Charlottesville was the violent wing of the unholy alliance that exists in tandem with what is called “the swamp.” Democrats and even some renegade Republicans have their tentacles deep into our duly elected president’s administration with a malign purpose: to bring him down.

The ultimate aim is to overturn President Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton and usher in a pervasive, debilitating socialist and statist regime in America.

A friend and fellow journalist who lives in Charlottesville called me and pointed out that Virginia’s Democrat governor, Terry McAuliffe, has much to answer for with respect to the violence that ensued in his state and in Charlottesville.

According to my friend, the governor had deliberately chosen to spend the night in Charlottesville before the violence broke out. He had stayed at the city’s Boar’s Head Inn.

Certainly, eyewitnesses and reporters agree that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis, it was met with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. Indeed, Antifa – short for “anti-fascist” – protesters came armed with pepper spray, bricks, clubs, and worse.

The most compelling question my friend asked was this: “Does the Democrat governor and mayor’s failure to secure the streets make them morally or legally responsible?” Indeed, McAuliffe had allegedly claimed that the white nationalists who streamed into Charlottesville that weekend hid weapons throughout the town.

Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.

In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.

Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.

But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk.

In the present climate of auditing the past, it is inevitable that Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood will have to be disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an unapologetic racist and eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the nonwhite population

Should we ask that Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of 21st-century moral sensitivity, Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a racist reference to abortion (“growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of”).

Why did we ever mint a Susan B. Anthony dollar? The progressive suffragist once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”

Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was California’s attorney general.

President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?

Wilson’s progressive racism, dressed up in pseudoscientific theories, was perhaps more pernicious than that of the old tribal racists of the South, given that it was not regionally centered and was professed to be fact-based and ecumenical, with the power of the presidency behind it.

In the current logic, Klan membership certainly should be a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why are there public buildings and roads still dedicated to the late Democratic senator Robert Byrd, former “exalted cyclops” of his local Klan affiliate, who reportedly never shook his disgusting lifelong habit of using the N-word?

Why is Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, in the 20th century, still honored as a progressive hero?

So, what are the proper rules of exemption for progressives when waging war against the dead?

Michael Chabon is a novelist who in 1988, in his mid twenties, shot to fame – or, at least, shot to that rather more modest commodity known as literary fame – with a novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I vaguely remember reading it. I think I reviewed it. I don’t remember if I liked it. I can’t imagine I loved it, because I think I’d remember that. I see from his Wikipedia page that he’s written several other books since then, but none of them has made it onto my radar, even though I review literary fiction and talk regularly to friends who do the same thing and who tell me about new books they’re excited about.

In any event, Chabon is still out there, and the other day, thanks to several of my Facebook friends, I became aware of a new article he’d written under the title “An Open Letter to Our Fellow Jews.” The piece wasn’t actually addressed to all of his fellow Jews – it was meant for those Jews who voted for Donald Trump and who have continued to back him even though his administration is, in Chabon’s words, packed with “white supremacist[s], anti-Semite[s], neo-Nazi[s] [and] crypto-fascist[s],” and even though Trump has a “long and appalling record of racist statements.” Despite this execrable record, maintained Chabon, Trump’s Jewish supporters have continued to make excuses for him and to argue that however bad it may look, Trump isn’t really an anti-Semite.

Well, Chabon insisted, such rationalizations are no longer possible. Trump’s Charlottesville remarks were definitive, demonstrating unequivocally that our President’s heart lies with the Nazis: “So now you know. First he went after immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people and people of color, and you did nothing….Now he’s coming after you. The question is: what are you going to do about it? If you don’t feel, or can’t show, any concern, pain or understanding for the persecution and demonization of others, at least show a little self-interest.”

As noted, I became aware of Chabon’s screed because Facebook friends of mine posted a link to it. The friends in question are New York Jews – and as far as they were concerned, Chabon was right on the money. A friend of one of these friends dared to offer a sane dissent: “I am a proud Jew and consider myself a Zionist. I have never heard our president utter a single anti semitic remark, as opposed to the left.” As for Israel, it has “never had a better friend, unlike Mr. Obama who trounced on Israel at every turn.” Verdict: absolutely true. But one of the Jews who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid wasn’t having it. “Keep supporting Nazis and the KKK,” she wrote. “Be proud.”

Do American Jews really believe that there is a sizable Nazi or KKK presence in the United States that represents a serious threat to them? Does Chabon? Chabon professes to deplore Trump in part because “he went after…Muslims.” By what trick of the mind do Chabon and those who agree with him shut out the almost weekly reminders of whom Muslims are going after? Chabon’s piece appeared on August 17, the very day of the Barcelona terrorist attack – after which the chief rabbi of that city, Meir Bar-Hen, told the Jerusalem Post that “Jews are not here permanently….I tell my congregants: Don’t think we’re here for good. And I encourage them to buy property in Israel. This place is lost. Better [get out] early than late.”

Riddle: What does a Democratic National Committee member say the moment he wakes up from a sound sleep?

Answer: The same thing he says during all his other waking hours, and the same thing DNC members have been saying for many decades: “Conservative racists and white supremacists are lurking everywhere…. Yeh-yeh-yeh … everywhere, everywhere.”

Consider the DNC’s latest pathetic ad campaign, which reads: “If Trump wants us to believe he does not support white supremacy, tell him to fire the enablers of white supremacy working for him in the White House.” What’s remarkable is that while the imaginary “white supremacy” of Trump’s aides and advisers makes Democrats squawk with fiery indignation, the DNC not only countenances a number of very real, impossible-to-miss racial supremacists of its own, but it actually celebrates and honors them.

In August 2015, for instance, the DNC issued a formal resolution officially endorsing Black Lives Matter (BLM), a black supremacist movement founded in 2013 by a coterie of revolutionary Marxists. Numerous BLM activists have openly called for the murder of white police officers — and in some cases white people generally. Moreover, the demonstrators at all BLM events invoke a famous call-to-arms by the Marxist revolutionary, former Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and longtime fugitive Assata Shakur, in which Shakur quotes a passage from her beloved Communist Manifesto.

Notwithstanding BLM’s racist and violent (and Marxist) track record, the movement’s leaders were frequent guests at the White House during President Obama’s second term in office. One of those occasions was September 16, 2015, when BLM activist Brittany Packnett — making her seventh White House visit — proudly told reporters that the president had offered her and her comrades “a lot of encouragement” while exhorting them to “keep speaking truth to power.” The following month, the DNC invited BLM activists to organize and host a town hall forum where the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates could discuss “racial justice.” In December 2015, President Obama lauded BLM for shining “sunlight” on the problem of racist policing in America, and on a subsequent occasion he likened BLM to the abolition and suffrage movements, which he said were also “contentious and messy” but ultimately noble. And on July 13, 2016 – a mere six days after a BLM supporter in Dallas had shot and killed five police officers and wounded seven others – Obama hosted three BLM leaders at a lengthy White House meeting along with the legendary racist anti-Semite, Al Sharpton.

By then, Sharpton was well-established as “Obama’s go-to man on race.” Indeed, Obama had addressed Sharpton’s National Action Network on multiple occasions, lauding the organization for its “commitment to fight injustice and inequality,” and for doing work that was “so important to change America.” He had also characterized Sharpton as “a voice for the voiceless and … dispossessed,” and had praised Sharpton’s “dedication to the righteous cause of perfecting our union.” From January 2009 through December 2014, Al Sharpton – the most visible racist anti-Semite of the past generation – visited the Obama White House on 72 separate occasions, including 5 one-on-one meetings with the president and 20 meetings with staff members or senior advisers.

And the DNC had no problem with any of this.

Nor is the DNC troubled by the fact that its own National Chairman, Thomas Perez, who served as Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during President Obama’s first term, has repeatedly shown himself to be a profoundly ugly racialist. Under the rubric of “disparate impact” theory, for instance, Perez believes that bankers and mortgage lenders who reject the loan applications of blacks at a higher rate than the loan applications of whites — regardless of the reason — are akin to Klansmen. While such lenders discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print,” says Perez, their subtle brand of racism is “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.”

Former Justice Department veteran J. Christian Adams has given damning testimony about how Perez and other Obama officials believed that “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.” Christopher Coates — the Justice Department’s former Voting Section Chief — has corroborated Adams’ assertion that the Obama Justice Department routinely ignored civil rights cases involving white victims. And an Inspector General’s report released in March 2013 stated that Perez believed that voting-rights laws do “not cover white citizens.”

When the going gets stupid, the stupid turn pro. On Monday, in an essay due to appear in the forthcoming print edition of National Review, I wrote, “The Christopher Columbus protests are coming.” That very day, a vandal in Baltimore took a sledgehammer to what is believed to be the oldest Columbus monument in the United States, a 225-year-old work whose cornerstone was laid in 1792. For maximum publicity value, the vandal or an associate brazenly posted the video of his handiwork to YouTube as he gleefully narrated. If you’re not disgusted by the horrific damage to the monument, you might be a member of the “concerned activist” community that enjoys making its political points by smashing things to bits.

On the same day, the Christopher Columbus statue towering 76 feet over New York City’s Columbus Circle learned that his status is under review because he triggers the most powerful two officials in town.

As George Orwell saw it, in 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

New York City in 2017 is a one-party place where high elected officials literally parade down Fifth Avenue next to terrorists who were convicted of shocking crimes in the 1970s, but where an inanimate hunk of metal commemorating Christopher Columbus that has stood in the city for 125 years is declared a menace to society. The hard-left city-council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito — who last made headlines when she appeared next to convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera on a float at the head of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in June — called for taking down the Christopher Columbus statue that stands on a column overlooking the vast roundabout named after him. The statue has been a proud symbol of the city since 1892, when it was first installed in honor of the 400th anniversary of his landing in the New World, and is closely associated with New York’s large Italian-American contingent.

“There obviously has been ongoing dialogue and debate in the Caribbean — particularly in Puerto Rico where I’m from — about this same conversation that there should be no monument or statue of Christopher Columbus based on what he signifies to the native population . . . [the] oppression and everything that he brought with him,” said Mark-Viverito on Monday.

That inspired the equally far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio, who marched behind Lopez Rivera in the Puerto Rican Day parade, to chime in that the Columbus statue “obviously is one of the ones that will get very immediate attention because of the tremendous concerns about it.” De Blasio has announced a 90-day review of “all statues and monuments that in any way may suggest hate or division or racism, anti-Semitism — any kind of message that is against the values of New York City.” One assumes that when de Blasio orders Columbus to be toppled from his perch, he’ll do so in the middle of the night (à la removals in Austin and Baltimore) for our own safety.

Start pulling on one strand, and pretty soon the cloth becomes unrecognizable. If the statue over Columbus Circle must go, why should the name Columbus Circle remain, or New York’s annual Columbus Day Parade? Why should that federal holiday be named after him anyway? Why indeed should the District of Columbia retain its name when calling it the District of Cesar Chavez would be so much more in tune with our times? Shifting political currents already forced one name change on Columbia University (when Alexander Hamilton was a student, it was King’s College). Once was seemingly enough. But administrators had better think twice before they order new stationery.

Dennis Prager conducted the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra last Wednesday night, and what had threatened to become another dispiriting episode in the culture wars turned instead into an evening of passionate advocacy for high culture and classical music. Santa Monica is one of the most liberal cities in California, so it was not wholly surprising that when the orchestra’s conductor invited Prager, a conservative talk radio host, to conduct a Haydn symphony for an orchestral fundraiser, a rebellion broke out among some musicians and the city’s political class. Two violinists in the ensemble, both UCLA professors, penned a letter suggesting that their fellow musicians boycott the upcoming performance. “A concert with Dennis Prager would normalize hatred and bigotry,” wrote Professors Andrew Apter and Michael Chwe in their March 27, 2017, letter. A webpage asked readers to urge their friends not to attend the concert, since attending would help “normalize bigotry in our community.” Local politicians weighed in. Councilman Kevin McKeown warned that the orchestra’s decision to invite Prager may “affect future community support for the Symphony.” Mayor Ted Winterer sniffed that he had “certainly . . . not encouraged anyone to attend.”

Fortunately for the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra, the boycott attempt, despite sympathetic coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was a dud. And the concert was a rousing success that ideally won new converts to classical music and to the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra itself.

On Wednesday evening, no protesters showed up outside or inside Disney Hall, Frank Gehry’s famed curvilinear eruption of steel designed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The orchestra’s affable full-time conductor Guido Lamell polled the house, virtually full, before the music began. How many audience members were Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra attendees? he asked. A good number of people clapped in affirmation, leading Lamell to offer his sympathies for their having made the “cross-country trip” from Los Angeles’s Westside to downtown. How many were attending their first classical concert? Another burst of applause. Then came the key demographic question: Are there any fans of Dennis Prager here? The response was thunderous. “OK, I get the message,” Lamell laughed. “I won’t keep you away from him for too long.”

Lamell opened the program with a lively reading of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro overture, which he rightly introduced as one of the greatest opera overtures of all time (actually, its only competitor for first place is the Don Giovanni overture). Then he turned over the podium to Prager. Two string players joined the welcome, clapping with their free hand on their knee. Prager told the audience about attending his first classical music concert, which brought him to tears and led to a lifelong love affair with Haydn. The Classical period, he said, represents “controlled passion,” in contrast with the Romantics, who did not control theirs—yet passion will break out in the fourth movement of this Haydn symphony as well, Prager explained. Wonderfully, Prager had chosen a work from the criminally underperformed middle period of Haydn’s prodigious symphonic output. These so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies contain some of Haydn’s most pathos-filled, dramatic writing, and the Symphony No. 51 in B-flat major, composed in 1771, was no exception. It opens innocently enough with a brief, quizzical exchange between frisky strings and mournful horns before bursting forth into agonizingly poignant and dark harmonies. Cleverly syncopated passages in the first movement make the rhythm tricky. Major and minor keys interweave, adumbrating Schubert’s bittersweet longing.

Hillary Clinton’s memoir of the 2016 presidential campaign will arrive this fall, and NBC News has a preview:

In audio clips of Clinton reading from the book, “What Happened,” which were first obtained by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Clinton recounted her thoughts as she toyed with the idea of telling her Republican rival to “back up, you creep” as he stood behind her during the second presidential debate.

“My skin crawled,” Clinton said.

No doubt a lot of reporters have similar reactions to America’s 45th President. Tuesday night in Phoenix must have presented a particular challenge for any journalists who are still trying—or at least pretending to try—to cover Mr. Trump objectively. That’s because he spent much of the evening criticizing the news media.

According to the Washington Post:

“I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories,” Trump said. “ … They don’t report the facts. Just like they don’t want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and the KKK.”

The Post described the scene inside the Phoenix Convention Center:

Three times, the crowd burst into chants of “USA! USA! USA!” And once, at the mention of Trump’s former rival Hillary Clinton, they chanted: “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” Several parents put their young children on their shoulders so they could get a good look at the president.

But as the night dragged on, many in the crowd lost interest in what the president was saying.

Hundreds left early, while others plopped down on the ground, scrolled through their social media feeds or started up a conversation with their neighbors. After waiting for hours in 107-degree heat to get into the rally hall — where their water bottles were confiscated by security — people were tired and dehydrated and the president just wasn’t keeping their attention.

This seems plausible. Political speeches that run more than an hour are almost always tiresome, even when the audience is hydrated. Still, given the fact that Mr. Trump’s opponents constantly seem to be able to field energetic, angry crowds at public events all over the country, it is bound to cause more chatter about which political party’s base is more energized.

By one important measurement, it’s still not close. With the arrival of July fundraising reports for the major parties, it appears that Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez may be on his way to setting a record—but probably not the one he intended. According to the Post:

After a strong $12.2 million raised in March — the first full month of Perez’s chairmanship — fundraising has dried up considerably. The $4.7 million it raised in April was the lowest for that particular month since 2009. The $4.3 million raised in May was the worst for that month since 2003. And now the $3.8 million raised in July is the worst for any month since January 2009.