Cesar's Salad "Profoundly Shocking"
"Profoundly Shocking"
I have a few too many online subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. I don’t know why I continue them since they often seem to parrot one another. Of course there is too much biased political reporting for my decidedly heterodox interests.
The NYTimes, which I usually like, is a fantastically successful paper. Not because of its reporting or opinion pages. It makes bank on recipes, fashion, Wordle and Wirecutter. They bring in the bucks that pay for the talent, and afford them the luxuries of serious investigative reports. Such was the case with last week’s boom boom bombshell, extra extra, report on the long deceased big union organizer Cesar Chavez, now credibly accused of being a serial sexual abuser, creep, perv, sicko, monster, degenerate, sleazeball, scumbag, dirtbag, molester, rapist, groomer, abuser. And that’s just what we know now. Five years, more than sixty interviews, corroborating documents, 23andMe confirmation, actual letters in the subject’s own hand.
Not great.
But uh oh, most of this wasn’t much of a revelation.
Some biographies exposed extramarital affairs. Internal union emails discussed one victim’s claims for over a decade. A family member confronted Chavez to his face in the 1980s. One of the women posted publicly on Facebook more than ten years ago, naming him directly, before she was pressured into deleting it. Wayne State University in Detroit was sitting on a letter written by a 13-year-old girl that told the story in her own handwriting.
It wasn’t much of a secret.
The Times published its findings on March 18th. Within 48 hours, marches were canceled in Austin and Tucson. Streets will likely be renamed. Governor Gavin Newsom announced he was reconsidering a state holiday. The UFW, the organization Chavez built, issued a statement calling the allegations profoundly shocking
Profoundly shocking? From an organization whose internal emails had been discussing one victim’s claims for many years.
This isn’t a reckoning. It’s just another tap-dance (without the music) by those who just got outed for their ugly silence. These institutions didn’t suddenly have to confront new revelations about a complicated man. They already knew he was a monster. They just couldn’t keep a cork on the sewage.
The cancellations weren’t out of grief for the victims. They were canceled to distance themselves from what they already knew. Where’s the outrage machine now? How quickly will this be out of the inconvenient news cycle?
I don’t like hero worship as a rule, because so few people are fit enough to deserve such adulation. True heroes, in my experience, are usually just people who aren’t aware of it. Cesar Chavez surely improved the lives of generations of farmworkers. He also raped a child. Oops.
He was a big deal. In 2024, the Cesar Chavez Foundation took in $40.5 million in revenue and holds assets valued at $260 million. I’m guessing the Foundation’s board will be having some meetings this week. Look for discounts on all that merch!
He was useful until he wasn’t. The ugly stories became inconvenient and impossible to hide. Every institution that sat on those secrets can lock their doors in shame. It wasn't the victims they were protecting.