There is a lot of competition for the distinction, but surely one of the most vile charges made in connection with the orchestrated flurry of ethics charges against conservative justices is that Clarence Thomas’s friend Harlan Crow is some sort of Nazi enthusiast.
As this Wall Street Journal piece explains, Crow “is an inveterate collector of historical artifacts: books, manuscripts, statues, paraphernalia of all kinds.” His collection “is head-spinningly large and diverse, housing roughly 15,000 books and 5,000 manuscripts.” It includes “a lot of material on the abolitionists” of slavery, as well as “a handwritten manuscript of Abraham Lincoln, a syllogistic note on the wrongness of slavery, and an early edition of Jonathan Edwards’s pamphlet ‘The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.’”
Crow’s collection has some “Nazi linens and artifacts placed in cabinets, out of the view of visitors,” as well as statues of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and others displayed in his garden. It is ridiculous to infer from the first set of items that Crow might have Nazi leanings, just as it would be ridiculous to infer from the latter set that he might have Marxist leanings.
I’m pleased to publish an open letter from dozens of signatories who identify themselves as both proud friends of Harlan Crow and “proud Jews.” Their letter attests to Crow’s “love and respect for the history of the Jewish people” and “his passion to ensure that the United States and indeed the world never forget the horrors of World War II.” They affirm that Crow “is a good, kind, charitable man whose politics one may not like but who in every possible way is not a Nazi sympathizer. Rather, he is a tzaddik—a righteous one.”