RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”