RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Times last week broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s long record of sexual harassment. Actresses including Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd came forward to detail Weinstein’s depredations, and so did former employees of the man who founded one of the most important independent film companies of the last 30 years, Miramax. The details were so jarring and the trail of abuse so long, that it was impossible to read the story and not come away wondering: How did no one know what he was doing?

But of course people knew about Harvey Weinstein. Like the New York Times, for instance. Sharon Waxman, a former reporter at the Times, writes in The Wrap how she had the story on Weinstein in 2004—and then he bullied the Times into dropping it. Matt Damon and Russell Crowe even called her directly to get her to back off the story. And Miramax was a major advertiser. Her editor at the Times, Jonathan Landman, asked her why it mattered. After all, he told Waxman, “he’s not a publicly elected official.”

Manhattan’s district attorney knew, too. In 2015, Weinstein’s lawyer donated $10,000 to the campaign of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance after he declined to file sexual assault charges against the producer. Given the number of stories that have circulated for so long, Weinstein must have spread millions around New York, Los Angeles, and Europe to pay off lawyers and buy silence, including the silence of his victims. But he had something else going for him, too. He knew his victims would be reluctant to go public because it might suggest that some of their success, their fame even, was a function of their inability to protect themselves from being humiliated by a man who set the bar for humiliating others at the precise level of his own self-loathing.

Hollywood is full of connoisseurs like Weinstein, men whose erotic imaginations are fueled primarily by humiliation, who glut their sensibilities with the most exquisite refinements of shame. A journalist once told me about visiting another very famous Hollywood producer—you’d know the name—who exhibited for my friend his collection of photographs of famous female actresses—you’d know their names, too—performing sexual acts for his private viewing. As with Weinstein, this man’s chief thrill was humiliation, and the more famous the target the more roundly it was savored: Even her, a big star—these people will do anything to land a role; they’re so awful, they’ll even do it for me.

One of the refrains you hear today from media experts and journalists is that they’d known about Weinstein’s transgressions for a long time. The problem, they say, was that no one was able to nail down the story.

Nonsense. Everyone had it, not just Waxman. Sure, reporters hadn’t been able to get any stars to go on the record. But that means the story journalists were pursuing wasn’t really about Weinstein’s sexual depredations. It means that what they wanted was a story about actresses, junior executives, or assistants who had been humiliated, maybe raped, and chose to remain quiet in exchange for money and/or a shot at fame.

Of course no one was going to get that on the record—very few journalists would even want to publish a story like that. But journalists always had the actual story of how a Hollywood producer humiliated and sexually assaulted women. How? Because he victimized journalists.

Fox News reporter Lauren Sivan told Huffington Post that a decade ago, Weinstein masturbated in front of her. She says she didn’t say anything at the time, when she was an anchor on a local cable show, because she was “fearful of the power that Weinstein wielded in the media.” She was right and her fear was understandable.

Writing in New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister remembers the time when she asked Weinstein an interview question at a book party, he screamed at her, spit in her face, called her a “c—t,” and then put her boyfriend in a headlock and dragged him to the street. Traister said nothing at the time because she figured she had little chance against “that kind of force.”

When “The Sopranos” took up the issue of Christopher Columbus back in 2002, the episode was widely panned as the series’ worst.

The show features Tony Soprano’s son reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” at the breakfast table—and then dismissing Columbus as a “slave trader” to his parents’ irritation. Likewise, members of Tony’s crew learn of a scheduled protest by Native Americans at a local Columbus Day parade, and then go to bust it up. In a discussion with his associates, one of them tells Tony that Columbus was “no better than Adolf Hitler. ” By the end, we have real life: Even the gangsters are divided, and everyone is aggrieved.

In its own time, critics ripped the episode as inauthentic. Fifteen years later, it looks spot on. Not for its depiction of Italian-Americans, but for the way it captures the strife and mindlessness that are the harvest of progressive protests pretending to be about diversity and expanded respect for other cultures.

In the run-up to this Monday’s parades and commemorations, one Antifa group called for a “Deface Columbus Day” in support of indigenous peoples who have been victims of “colonialism and genocide.” Some didn’t need the call: Even before the holiday weekend, Columbus statues across America have been beheaded, sledgehammered and splashed with paint.

In response to the provocations, some have tried reason. Christopher Scalia, a media consultant for the National Christopher Columbus Association, says the organization has just launched a new webpage called TruthAboutColumbus.com in hopes of putting forward a more balanced portrait of the man. Columbus, it says, was both a man of his time and a man ahead of his time.

But for all the talk about the “real” Columbus, protesters are unlikely to take up the invitation for further study and debate. For the defining fact of the modern progressive is that he is a pest, and what he wants here is simply to ruin any public celebration an ordinary American might enjoy, whether it be Italian-Americans celebrating Columbus or NFL fans sitting down to watch a game.

Ditto for the call to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. Few Americans would have an issue with dedicating a day to the achievements of our continent’s native peoples, or even with the claim that these achievements have not been given their just due. But again, the anti-Columbus movement is not about making room for the celebration of indigenous peoples. It’s about taking away a holiday enjoyed by others, or at least creating enough dissonance to suck the life out of it.

Their problem is that Columbus is not so easy to exorcise from American life. At the time of the Revolutionary War, Columbus symbolized the New World and its break from the Old. Still later the idealized Columbus, which was feminized along classical lines, became even more important than the man. There’s a reason the nation’s capital became the District of Columbia.

Later, Catholic immigrants—and not only Italians—saw in Columbus a way to connect their faith, which many American-born citizens regarded as alien, to their new home. It is no coincidence, for example, that the University of Notre Dame’s main building features a series of Columbus murals that depict the story of what some regard as America’s Catholic founding. CONTINUE AT SITE

Newly disclosed emails shed light on the period leading up to a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin and top campaign aides to President Donald Trump.

The new information appears to bolster lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya’s position that she wanted the meeting to argue her case for overturning the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law targeting Russian human-rights abuses. Ms. Veselnitskaya has previously said the meeting wasn’t organized to provide damaging information about Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The meeting became a flashpoint of controversy this summer when Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., released emails showing that he had been told the purpose of the meeting was for the Russian government to provide allegedly incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton.

Scott Balber, a lawyer for the Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov, provided emails Monday from the period leading up to the meeting, which Mr. Agalarov helped arrange for Ms. Veselnitskaya. In an interview, he also offered more information that, along with the emails, supported Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that the meeting wasn’t about Mrs. Clinton.

Ms. Veselnitskaya has waged a yearslong campaign against the Magnitsky Act. As part of that effort, she routinely reached out to Russian authorities, she said earlier this year. She didn’t respond to a request to comment Monday.

In October 2015, Ms. Veselnitskaya shared information about her anti-Magnitsky campaign with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, a top official appointed by the Kremlin, Mr. Balber said. In May 2016, less than two weeks before the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya also provided Mr. Agalarov with a five-page set of talking points that included the same information she had given Mr. Chaika, Mr. Balber said.

Included in the information she shared with the men, Mr. Balber said Monday, was a single reference to Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Veselnitskaya alleged that a U.S. firm, Ziff Brothers Investments, had dodged taxes in Russia and later donated to Democrats, including possibly Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Chaika’s office released a statement in spring 2016 alleging Ziff Brothers Investments of evading taxes in Russia. The company hasn’t been charged and has previously declined to comment on the allegations.

JULY 2017: As U.S. sanctions against Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election move forward, here’s a look at various contacts between President Trump’s associates and Russians. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday explains why each contact is significant. Photo: Getty

According to Donald Trump Jr., the meeting proved disappointing. In July of this year, after reports of the meeting first emerged, he said that Ms. Veselnitskaya “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Clinton,” but “It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” When Ms. Veselnitskaya then raised the issue of the Magnitsky Act, Donald Trump Jr. said he cut off the meeting.

The meeting is now being probed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether associates of Mr. Trump colluded with Moscow as part of his probe into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election, according to people familiar with the matter. CONTINUE AT SITE

Visiting the United States in 1831, when Andrew Jackson was president, Alexis de Tocqueville was appalled by the “vulgarity and mediocrity” of American politics. After meeting Jackson, Tocqueville concluded that the low tone of American society started at the top. In Tocqueville’s estimation, Jackson was “a man of violent character and middling capacity.” Worse, he seemed to have no talent for politics: he rode “roughshod over his personal enemies” in a way no president had done and treated members of Congress with disdain. “Nothing in all the course of his career had ever proved that he had the requisite qualities to govern a free people,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “so the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union had always been opposed to him.”

Considering his view of Jackson, imagine what Tocqueville’s first impressions of President Trump might be. Real-estate mogul, host of The Apprentice, owner of beauty pageants, and backer of WrestleMania, among other louche enterprises, Trump would seem to confirm Tocqueville’s worst fears about debased standards of American public life and leadership. And yet, Trump campaigned on issues that have a Tocquevillean resonance. Put another way, Tocqueville highlighted certain dangers to democratic liberty and greatness that Trump—who, it is safe to assume, has not read Democracy in America—instinctively seized on to win the presidency.

Start with the most obvious—and contentious—issue: Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States. Though Trump’s rhetoric on the subject was often crude, the idea was eminently sensible. Trump spoke to the long-term interest of American citizens in remaining a unified and self-contained people—what Tocqueville called their “self-interest, well understood.” Today, the American project of assimilation has come under sustained attack. Multiculturalists and globalists in government reject the idea that immigrants should adopt American culture and argue that foreigners should have the right to live in America in disregard of its immigration laws. Trump seized on this shift to call for secure borders and a renewal of America’s national identity. At the same time, he remained open, in principle, to immigrants from all nations.

Tocqueville had been struck by Americans’ love of country; he would not be surprised by the appeal of Trump’s full-throated patriotism, especially when set against his critics’ championing of multiculturalism and globalization. For Tocqueville, national identity was bound up with religion, which, in the United States and in Europe, meant Christianity. Long before the 2016 presidential election, though, Democrats had clearly come to regard Christianity as an obstacle to their goals. At the Democratic National Convention, party leaders removed all mention of God from the party platform, and boos erupted on the convention floor over a voice vote about whether to restore the reference to the deity. Democrats have subordinated the religious beliefs of the Little Sisters of the Poor to feminist concerns about the availability of contraceptives in government-run health-insurance plans; they have compelled conservative Christian businesses to provide services for gay weddings. Ironically, it was Trump—the twice-divorced, lapsed Presbyterian—who took up the cause of beleaguered Christians, reaching out to evangelical and Catholic leaders alike, promising to stand up for them in their battle to preserve religious liberty. Tocqueville would have approved.

You don’t have a buy a party hat or uncork the champagne. It’s a minor holiday. But Columbus Day is still worth celebrating, and those who attack it are worth rebutting.

The focus should not be the navigator himself. He was a courageous, if misguided, explorer, who set sail for China, thinking the globe was much smaller and not knowing a vast landmass would block his journey. When he died 14 years later, he still believed he had landed in Asia, still thought baseball and football teams should be named “the Indians.”

What the holiday really commemorates is a much larger event that forever changed the world: the opening of the Americas, North and South, to a permanent connection with Europe. That has continued unabated for over 500 years and led to momentous achievements, from mass democracy to mass prosperity.

The Vikings may have landed earlier in Newfoundland, but they did not begin a continuous stream of trade and migration. The Chinese may have made it as far as the West Coast, as some speculate, but then they stopped all seafaring. Whatever the archeologists may discover, the voyages produced nothing enduring.

Columbus’ landing did. His discovery, coming soon after the printing press was invented, was quickly publicized and soon followed by explorers from all Europe’s maritime powers. Their quests for gold, silver, and souls began an unbroken stream of contact and cultural exchange, which made our hemisphere and, later, our country a creative offshoot of European civilization. As citizens, we may trace our family’s ancestry to India, Iran, or China, but our civilization is, at bottom, rooted in Europe’s history, religions, peoples, and culture.

It is a living heritage. American courts still rely on common law doctrines forged in medieval England. Our religious heritage came from Jerusalem, by way of Rome, Wittenberg, and Geneva. We read Bibles translated for the court of King James. Lincoln’s speeches grew out of its daily readings. We read Plato in Athens, Georgia. We study the fall of the Roman Empire with a shudder of foreboding about our own future.

It was these cultural connections that America celebrated at its greatest World Fair, in Chicago in 1893. The “Columbian Exposition” celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage (and Chicago’s own recovery from its devastating fire two decades earlier).

If the 400th anniversary was big, you might expect the 500th anniversary to be even bigger. It wasn’t. There were no big celebrations and, of the plethora of books marking the occasion, many were sharply critical.

America was—and still is—embarrassed by Columbus’ “discovery” of America. That’s why radicals have attacked Columbus statues across the country. Antifa has called for more attacks this year. It’s their way of celebrating the holiday. Still, those noxious attacks are less important than the quiet confusion and awkwardness many Americans feel about celebrating Columbus’ voyage of discovery.

They are right to feel some ambivalence. The rose-tinted histories of an earlier generation glossed over two overwhelming tragedies. The first is that European viruses arrived with the people and their animals. Local populations had no immunities and as many as 90 percent died. It was the horrific, unintended effect of two isolated biosystems meeting.

The second tragedy was deliberate: the enslavement of millions of Africans, transported to dig mines, harvest sugar cane, and farm cotton and tobacco across the Americas. The middle passage from Africa was a deadly one, the work crushing, and the treatment as chattel slaves inhuman.