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Sexual predators can get off the hook if they are progressive enough — just look at Cesar Chavez

The bigger they are, the longer it takes them to fall.

That’s the lesson of Cesar Chavez.

A New York Times investigation revealed that the famed Mexican-American leader of the United Farm Workers labor union “groomed and sexually abused girls” as young as 12, “used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification,” and sexually assaulted Dolores Huerta, his closest female ally in the movement.

The details of Chavez locking the doors to corner vulnerable girls in their early teens are shocking.

Chavez, who died in 1993, has been a left-wing icon so long, he was profiled in the front of my first social studies textbook in the 1970s.

Bill Clinton posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Barack Obama designated his headquarters and gravesite as a national monument.

Joe Biden put a bust of him in the Oval Office.

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More than 50 schools and libraries are named for him as well as dozens of streets.

Statues of him stand on college campuses.

His birthday is a state holiday in California and Texas.

He’s been on a postage stamp and a Google Doodle, and in a Hollywood biopic and a Stevie Wonder song.

Awards are named for him.

He was repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

If only someone had spoken up earlier.

Huerta herself, now 96, admits: “For the last 60 years I have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement . . . I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work.”

Now, she says, “The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual.”

But the Chavez personality cult was too useful for too long to look too closely at a serial sex criminal.

Clinton would understand: No story of his predatory sexual behavior was too lurid to deter defenses of him until after both he and his wife were out of office and out of presidential campaigns.

Instead, former Time White House reporter Nina Burleigh quipped she would gladly give him the full Lewinsky treatment “to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”

Ted Kennedy, who actually killed a woman, was feted as a hero until the day he died.

So was famed liberal judge Stephen Reinhardt, who was revered when he was issuing key rulings for gay marriage, and was only posthumously outed for sexually harassing a female law clerk.

It has often been the case that tales of sexual harassment and abuse stay buried when the predators are riding high with progressives and liberals.

Ever wonder why we weren’t regaled with Andrew Cuomo’s handsy exploits at the height of COVID, when talk of his presidential prospects had fans declaring themselves “Cuomosexuals”?

Power has always made it easier for sexual abusers to lure and dominate their victims and to get away with it.

That’s a trend we see in every culture, among religious and political leaders, media figures, entertainers, sports coaches, teachers and principals, you name it.

But the left’s emotional style of hero-invention means looking the other way — while abusers are making hay, and until their usefulness has waned — in the service of the greater good of the narrative and “the movement.”

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. X: @BaseballCrank

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