They come for John Kass

Last week I missed the excellent John Kass’s Chicago Tribune column on “The Soros-funded prosecutors.” The column was published in the Tribune on July 22 under the headline “Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: An overwhelming sense of lawlessness.” (The link goes to the column at Jewish World Review, which posted it on July 23.)

The column opens:

President Donald Trump is sending federal law enforcement into the big cities run by Democratic mayors, where murder and gang shootings are out of control and where once vibrant downtown areas are on their way to becoming ghost towns.

And naturally, the Democratic mayors, backing Joe Biden, are on the defensive, upset that the president might win political advantage, even as the mayors feud with their own police departments, as the violence rises in their towns, as children are gunned down.

But these Democratic cities are also where left-wing billionaire George Soros has spent millions of dollars to help elect liberal social justice warriors as prosecutors. He remakes the justice system in urban America, flying under the radar.

The Soros-funded prosecutors, not the mayors, are the ones who help release the violent on little or no bond.

Kass’s column today is headlined “What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?” Kass relates:

In response [to his July 22 column], the Tribune newspaper union, the Chicago Tribune Guild, which I have repeatedly and politely declined to join, wrote an open letter to management defaming me, by falsely accusing me of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.

Newspaper management has decided not to engage publicly with the union. So I will.

For calling out Soros, Kass has been accused of promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In his column today he cites a few articles supporting the Soros connection in positive terms. Apparently Soros can only be named if he is to be praised.

In this context, Kass could also have cited Andrew McCarthy’s March Commentary cover story “The Progressive Prosecutor Project.” Commentary was of course formerly published by the American Jewish Committee. It continues to support the cause of Jewish continuity and to oppose anti-Semitism as an independent magazine under the editorship of John Podhoretz.

The case against Kass, such as it is, is a crock. Kass’s column today is a statement of defiance:

I will not soil my name by groveling to anyone in this or any other newsroom.

The larger question is not about me, or the political left that hopes to silence people like me, but about America and its young. Those of us targeted by cancel culture are not only victims. We are examples, as French revolutionaries once said, in order to encourage the others.

Human beings do not wish to see themselves as cowards. They want to see themselves as heroes.

And, as they are shaped and taught to fear even the slightest accusation of thought crime, they will not view themselves as weak for falling in line. Instead they will view themselves as virtuous. And that is the sin of it.

Those who do not behave will be marginalized. But those who self-censor will be praised.

Yet what of our American tradition of freely speaking our minds?

Bretibart’s Joel Pollak covers the story in “John Kass Defies Chicago Tribune Cancel Culture: ‘I Will Not Apologize for Writing About Soros,’” where I learned of it.

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