THE LEFT GRAPPLES WITH WHAT TO DO ABOUT ONCE FAVORITE ARTISTS WHO ARE OR WERE VERY DAMAGED SOULS: First up, at Slate, “Does Rotten Apples Toss Out Some Good Ones, Too? The website seeks to sort the movies of bad men from everything else. That’s more fraught than you’d think:”

More than two dozen men with ties to the entertainment industry have been fired, suspended, or otherwise censured in the 10 weeks since the New York Times published its initial exposé of producer Harvey Weinstein. If you’re having trouble keeping up with all the boldface names you should now refile under alleged scum, you’re not alone. In keeping with the rest of the news from this terrible year, the downfalls of accused creeps quickly became a torrent of stomach-churning but easily mix-up-able updates. For moviegoers who wish to avoid films made by or starring sexual malefactors, there should be an effortless way to find out how to watch responsibly.

That, anyway, is the thinking behind Rotten Apples, a searchable database that aims to inform users if a movie involves an actor, screenwriter, director, or producer facing allegations of sexual misbehavior. Enter a movie in the search window, and the site’s left half will deliver a verdict in stark red or green: Rotten Apples or Fresh Apples. “Rotten” results include a link to an article about the pertinent accusations.

And in the book world one blogger asks, “The Book That Made Me a Feminist Was Written by an Abuser. ‘The Mists of Avalon’ changed my life—how do I reconcile that with what I now know about its author?”

By the time I left home for a women’s college in 1989, I’d reread The Mists of Avalon several times. I arrived ready to smash the patriarchy.

And then, in 2014, Moira Greyland, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter, told the world that her mother had sexually abused her and many other children for more than a decade. I didn’t even know how to process this information. I believed Greyland, absolutely, but I just couldn’t make this revelation fit with The Mists of Avalon and what that book meant to me. Bradley was not an author to whom I had a personal attachment. I’d never gotten into anything she’d written besides The Mists of Avalon. Had I been more of a fan, I might have seen the pedophilia threaded through her other work. I might have known that Walter Breen — Bradley’s husband and Greyland’s father — died in prison after being convicted of molesting a child. (Greyland says that there were many, many more victims.) Had I been more of a fan, I might have known that rumors about Bradley and Breen had circulated in the science fiction and fantasy communities for years.

As “Pervnado” extends to more and more of Hollywood, and as more and more past authors are discovered to either have committed real crimes, as Greyland’s parents did, or have simply run afoul of the left’s latest PC censors, there stands a good chance that a fair amount of pop culture history will be tossed into Orwell’s proverbial Memory Hole, as that’s always the left’s first instincts.

It’s much easier for those of us more or less on the right to believe that bad people can make great art (including great pop art), as we already know that many of the people who working in Hollywood and the music industry hate our guts — and in many cases, hate the notion of America itself.

Beyond Polanski’s brilliant Chinatown and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Manhattan, there’s a bottomless supply of brilliant pop culture created by awful people. In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas were Marin Marxists who believed the communist North Vietnamese were the good guys during the Vietnam War, and worked to put those themes into their movies, but who’d want to be without Apocalypse Now and the original Stars Wars?  The subtext of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey fits the definition of fascist moviemaking for both Susan Sontag’s 1975 “Fascinating Fascism” article and the chapter on Hollywood in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism perfectly. It also contains some of the most arresting images captured on celluloid and its production design and special effects techniques paved the way for the Star Wars, Alien and Star Trek movie series. Ayn Rand’s writing in the ’50s and ’60s was fueled by Benzedrine and she had an affair with young acolyte Nathaniel Branden while they were both married to other partners, but was (and is) many a teenager’s gateway drug into libertarianism. In the music world, John Lennon was a nihilistic pro-NVA wife beater, but also wrote some of the Beatles’ finest songs. Led Zeppelin’s terrifying excesses are legendary.

But as I said, this list is endless. As a result of Harvey Weinstein and the rest of the “Pervnado,” the left’s goal of airbrushing the works of artists who led deeply flawed personal lives out of history has followed almost seamlessly after the recent wave of their statue topplers. Back in August, while the left were still in full-on statue smashing mode, in “The Orwellian War on History,” Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote:

The history erasers claim they only want to show how fair our societies now are. Rubbish. This isn’t about making the present better, it’s a projection of political correctness into the past. It’s the punishment of historical figures – even good historical figures, such as Jefferson, and good historical events, such as the settlement of Australia – for not sharing our exact modern world view.

And it reeks of PC paternalism. The idea that minority groups can’t cope with seeing statues of dead people who did some dodgy things is an affront to their intelligence and autonomy. It infantil­ises them, even suggesting they will feel physically wounded by history: after all, “there is a violence” to these statues.

It’s disturbingly ironic: this treatment of certain groups as fragile, as needing to have public life sanitised on their behalf in the way a new mum might baby-proof her home, is riddled with some fairly racist assumptions of its own.

One of the great things about public life is that it’s a patchwork of the historical events that made our nations. Take a walk through a city and you’ll see statues of soldiers, politicians, authors, suffragettes and others who shaped our societies. And most of them will have held views or done things we would consider questionable in 2017. So what? The point is they made history, and it’s right for the public sphere to reflect that.

The logic of the Year Zero crew is that we should see only historical figures they approve of (if there are any). They police history with an eye for policing what we citizens can see and by extension think about the societies we live in.

Earlier this month, when Minnesota Public Radio tossed Garrison Keillor’s segments of the Prairie Home Companion down the memory hole Rod Dreher wrote, “If you only chose to partake of art, music, and literature created by morally upstanding persons, you’d quickly come to the end of what’s available. Museums would empty out. Concert halls would fall silent. Bookstores would have to be repurposed as yoga studios, and movie theaters as hipster churches. The unfortunate truth is that bad, or at least deeply flawed, people often make the best art.”

BIG LEAGUE: MLB legend Darryl Strawberry reveals he had sex during Mets games. “The baseball star said he had dugout attendants find women sitting in the stands at Shea Stadium and see who wanted to have sex with him.”

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ONCE I BUILT A BLOCKCHAIN, MADE IT RUN; MADE IT RUN AGAINST TIME: New at Reason TV: Remy as “Bitcoin Billionaire.”

SWAMP SELF-DRAINS: Facing Republican attacks, FBI’s deputy director plans to retire early next year. I like the way the Post spins it, with facing Republican attacks taking the place of amid damning revelations.

AT VICE, CUTTING-EDGE MEDIA AND ALLEGATIONS OF OLD-SCHOOL SEXUAL HARASSMENT: “An investigation by The New York Times has found four settlements involving allegations of sexual harassment or defamation against Vice employees, including its current president. In addition, more than two dozen other women, most in their 20s and early 30s, said they had experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct at the company — unwanted kisses, groping, lewd remarks and propositions for sex.”

So a Website named Vice lives up to its name, and the Times is shocked that gambling is going on Rick’s Cafe. And get a load of the article’s subhead: “A media company built on subversion and outlandishness was unable to create ‘a safe and inclusive workplace’ for women, two of its founders acknowledge.”

Talk about burying the lede — Fox Butterfield is back at the Times!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I was struck by this passage: “People worked long hours and partied together afterward. And that’s where the lines often blurred. Multiple women said that after a night of drinking, they wound up fending off touching, kissing and other advances from their superiors.” This pretty closely echoes the complaints about Glenn Thrush that did not lead to him being fired by . . . The New York Times.

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE THE GOVERNMENT? Here Are The Senators Who Voted To Shut Down The Government Before Christmas. I remember when allowing a government shutdown was portrayed as “terrorism.”

IN AND OUT: Hip surgery in the morning, home by night.

YOU KNOW, MAYBE THESE DELICATE LITTLE THINGS SHOULD SKIP THE WORKPLACE AND JUST KEEP HOUSE: Women’s hearts may be more vulnerable to stress.

When I was a kid, feminists were always quoting Victorian pronouncements about women’s frailty in order to mock them.

MAINE’S VIKING PENNY: The archeological debate continues. And an interesting one it is. The Norse coin was allegedly discovered in 1957 at the Goddard Site (near Brooklin, Maine).

The article says that new analytic evidence supports those who argue the coin was found at the site.

Here’s how the article describes the Goddard Site:

While no other Norse artifact has ever been found there, the site did hold surprises—artifacts attesting to an explosion of trade contact between Native American groups, stretching from the eastern Great Lakes up to Labrador. At the same time the coin shows up, for instance, archery first appears in the region.

“The site has an unspeakably dense concentration of archers,” says Bourque. Excavations have turned up thousands of arrowheads, along with mounds of pottery sherds and stones that come from hundreds of miles away. “It’s off the charts,” he says. “The real mystery is—what the hell is going on at the site at the time?”

To Bourque, the coin is a clue in this other mystery. All sorts of objects that seem out of place in 12th-century Maine show up in this one spot, as if it were site of a pre-Columbian World’s Fair for northeastern coastal America, from Lake Erie to Newfoundland. Unlike the sagas—all story, little evidence—this site is full of interesting evidence in search of a story.

A trade fair. OK. But it’s Maine, so it could have been a pre-Colombian L.L. Bean.

DISTANTLY RELATED: The Gault Site near Florence, Texas was a source of high-quality flint. I heard a lecture a few years ago where the archeologist said he suspected the Gault Site was part of a trade network.

CHRISTMASTIME FOR THE JUCHE: Christmas Broadcast Aims to Free North Korean People From the State Ideology Proclaiming Kim Jong Un a God.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

THAT WAS DIFFERENT SOMEHOW, I’M SURE: Joe Scarborough, Who Proposed Bill to Leave the UN, Blasts Nikki Haley for Criticizing UN.

SWAMP SELF-DRAINS: E.P.A. Officials, Disheartened by Agency’s Direction, Are Leaving in Droves.

5TH FLEET SANTA SENDING SPECIAL GIFTS: Santa Claus on the USS Theodore Roosevelt launches a Super Hornet.

MCCABE REMEMBERS TO FORGET: “The dossier is rather obviously the key to the surveillance of the Trump campaign conducted by the Obama administration.”

MORNING, MIKA: Mika Brzezinski apologizes for comments about Mark Halperin accusers.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Was The Steele Dossier The FBI’s “Insurance Policy?” “There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in. No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden. The best laid schemes . . . gang aft agley.”

POLITICO: Top FBI official linked to reporter who broke Trump dossier story: James Baker, the FBI’s recently reassigned general counsel, was in touch with David Corn of Mother Jones in the fall of 2016, GOP sources said. “The GOP sources said the documents — made available recently to lawmakers by the Department of Justice — revealed that James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, communicated with Mother Jones reporter David Corn in the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election. Corn was the first to report the existence of the dossier on Oct. 31 and that it was compiled by a former high-level western spy.”

Hmm. Stay tuned.

MARC THIESSEN: Trump should make vulnerable Democrats who opposed his tax cuts pay the price in 2018.

President Trump raised eyebrows when he invited Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp to fly with him aboard Air Force One for a tax-reform rally in her home state of North Dakota earlier this year. For a vulnerable Democrat running for reelection in a deep-red state that Trump won by 36 points, appearing with the president was a political gift. Trump called Heitkamp up on stage, shook her hand and heaped praise on her, describing her as a “good woman” — the perfect visuals for campaign ads portraying her as a moderate willing to defy the “Resistance” and work with the president.

The move puzzled Republicans, who wondered why Trump was giving a boost to one of their principal targets in the 2018 midterm elections. But then came the moment that Heitkamp must now regret. As he made his case for the tax bill, Trump turned to her and said, “Are you listening, Heidi?” And then he added this blunt message: “Do your job to deliver for America or find a new job.”

Heitkamp did not deliver, nor did the four other Senate Democrats running for reelection in states Trump won by double digits: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia (a state Trump won by 42 points), Jon Tester of Montana (by 20), Claire McCaskill of Missouri (by 19) and Joe Donnelly of Indiana (by 19). Now it’s time for Trump to make good on that threat.

With Trump’s national approval rating averaging at just 38.5 percent — among the worst of any president in the first year after his election — some might suggest that he is in no position to impose political costs on his opponents. But his approval rating is between 50 and 60 percent in the five states where these vulnerable Democrats are running (except in Indiana, where it is 41 percent), making him a formidable adversary.

Trump should spend the coming weeks and months holding nonstop rallies in every one of these states to promote his tax reforms and how they will benefit ordinary Americans. He should tour companies that are using their savings from the corporate tax cuts to hire more workers, and businesses who are investing in new plants and equipment because the tax bill now allows them to write off those investments. He should visit small businesses who will benefit from the lower pass-through tax rate, so they can explain what it will mean to their workers. And he should hold town halls with middle-income families who will benefit from the individual rate cuts in the bill, so they can share what an extra thousand dollars in their pockets every year will mean to their families.

Dems who voted against this bill didn’t just vote against tax cuts. They voted against publicizing sex harassment in Congress, and against repealing the ObamaCare mandate.

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REP. GAETZ: EMAIL EVIDENCE FROM McCABE INDICATES THAT HILLARY CLINTON WAS GOING TO GET A ‘HEADQUARTERS SPECIAL’ FROM THE FBI.