Cesar Chavez, Rapist, Pedophile, Progressive Icon

Cesar Chavez took the “g” out of grape.

The New York Times reports allegations from his closest aide, Dorothy Huerta, that the late United Farm Workers head pressured her into sex in 1960 and then raped her in a Delano, California, grape field in 1966.

These two encounters resulted in pregnancies and then adoptions. In addition to the eight kids his wife bore him, Chavez, genealogy tests showed, fathered four kids with three additional women.

“Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children,” she explained to the Times. “It’s really awful.”

Children?

Two 66-year-old women, daughters of union activists, told the newspaper that Chavez molested them during the 1970s.

Debra Rojas told the Times that Chavez first messed around with her when she was 12. The union boss told her that they would someday move to Mexico together and that The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” was their song. At 15, he put her up in a motel room where they had sex.

“I had love for him,” Rojas divulged to the newspaper. “He did his grooming very well. He should get an Academy Award for all he did.”

His molestation of Ann Murguia began after she turned 13. The sexual encounters, which never involved intercourse, occurred dozens of times.

“He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Murguia, she said,” the Times reports. “He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.”

The same American Left that removed statues of Theodore Roosevelt, Christopher Columbus, and Robert E. Lee has spent the last six decades elevating Chavez to sainthood status.

Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin celebrate official holidays in his honor.

Bill Clinton awarded Chavez a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barack Obama named a Navy vessel after Chavez, declared the bulk of his United Farm Workers headquarters a national monument, and pushed to turn his birthday into a federal holiday. Joe Biden displayed a bust of Chavez in the Oval Office.

Like Margaret Sanger, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, Harvey Weinstein, and others once held in high esteem by fellow progressives, Chavez operated with a cloak of invincibility for himself and a cloak of invisibility for his deeds. When investigative reporters and historians admire your politics, they generally protect your crimes and misbehavior. Thus, through ideological affinity, do naturally curious people become unnaturally indifferent.

This, of course, emboldens other sociopathic types who hold anointed views to imagine that they, too, can engage in crimes and misbehavior without consequence. A get-out-of-jail-free card exists for those who mouth the right words but do the wrong things. Power corrupts, Lord Acton reminded. So did Tolkien. So did the Founding Fathers. Yet so many wish to concentrate power in fewer hands. In extreme cases, they would yield it all to a charismatic leader.

Chavez demonstratively fasted for weeks at a time but compulsively touched underage girls. What would a psychiatrist say about all that?

Clearly, this public persona helped obscure secret behavior from the view of not just his progressive admirers but many others, too. Many people regarded him as noble. His followers worshipped a false god. That exalted status likely helps explain why so many stayed quiet for so long.

Even though Chavez’s Catholicism and cautious stance on race-obsessed rhetoric did not mesh with the emerging left’s extreme ideology, fanatics nevertheless turned him into a sort of Mexican Martin Luther King. They insisted that we imagine an organizer of grape workers who never really improved their material condition as a figure worthy of a national holiday, just like Jesus Christ, Christopher Columbus, and George Washington.

No statues for Ulysses Grant, but a day off for Cesar Chavez, they insisted. Why, then, should we ever let them act as the arbiters of who American society honors?

Understandably, this hero-takes-a-fall moment, however many decades too late, comes as a devastating blow to progressives who turned this man into a secular saint.

Liberals heeded Chavez’s call to boycott California grapes. Couldn’t he at least have paid them back by boycotting California rapes?

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