To add just one thing to Quin’s excellent observations: Some of my lefty/opportunistic correspondents have asked: “How could something like this possibly happen? How could somebody accept an invitation to speak to a group without being sure what that group is about?”

Answer: Easily, in my experience.

Like politicians, opinion writers receive a great many invitations to deliver talks about the things we care about. I imagine that Steve Scalise gets a great many more than I do. But I myself have, within recent memory, accepted an invitation to give a talk (I believe it was to be about the national debt) to a perfectly respectable-sounding organization (Something Somethings for Liberty, I think) that turned out to be something else: Birchers, in this case, not David Duke nut clusters. I withdrew when I discovered what they were about. But it is not difficult to imagine that if I had a politician’s packed speaking schedule rather than my own comparatively leisurely one, I might have shown up and given my entitlement-reform talk to a bunch of people who think that Dwight Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.

On the other hand, it is more difficult to explain away all those photos of noted Democratic and progressive leaders in the company of Louis Farrakhan. Is there anybody who doesn’t know what he is about?