Slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk abused his political office by aiding and abetting Jim Jones's kidnapping, and subsequent murder, of a six-year-old boy. He purportedly staged a hate crime to enhance his victim status in the eyes of San Francisco voters. He routinely called political opponents "Nazis." So why has the California senate passed a bill seeking to name today as "Harvey Milk Day" in the Golden State? My article @ City Journal juxtaposes Sean Penn's Academy Award-winning portrayal with history's Harvey Milk, finding the celluloid hero quite different than the real-life goat.

This is the same group that thinks Che is cool. They have no clue as to what the guy really did, nor do they want to know. You know the type, they walk around with their hands over their ears going "La,la,la,la..." Don't confuse them with facts.

It says there are 5 comments, but there is only 1 (now two with mine). Just an FYI, something is not working right, Dan.

The people who follow the like's of Milk and elevate him and his actions are true believers. They know no facts or details nor do they want to or care.

When you hear these people making their weak reality starved cases, all I can think of is the 9/11 conspiracists. They are blind true believers.

You make a good point that can only be made looking backwards in time. Knowing the outcome of Jones Town for example, makes actions before hand look much different then they did at the time.
I have no doubt Milk had a lot of "things" that were bad or could be made to look bad if you are so inclined and being a conservative looking at liberals you are inclined.
In Milk's case, what he stands for today is way bigger then who he ever was. All of our heroes' have their dirty little secrets, if your motivated to look hard enough.

"All of our heroes' have their dirty little secrets, if your motivated to look hard enough."

But this is the opposite: a guy who is mostly dirty and little is just being made into a hero because it is now convenient. What did who do that was heroic? Be a gay guy who got elected to the city council? That doesn't make him a hero.

I think mike wishes his hero could've given him a milk mustache.

People apply the 'hero' label lightly and easily these days, eh?

I liked this article because I have been a victim of the underground homosexual Nazi's in California. I was born in S. California and raised mostly in N. California when in 1980 I witnessed the murder of a 17 yo boy at the hands of a practicing homosexual attempting to rape him. I was targetted! My story at WWW.HOPE7.HIGHPOWERSITES.COM
I vote for a JOHN DOE Day! God will help us to stop them, eventually. Good story!

More citations would have been nice.

Perhaps you can't look ahead and see that somebody you defended as "a man of the highest character" is going to do in 900. Except as he looked ahead he saw "gas chambers", and expected to be taken seriously about it. So what's the message: Don't take Harvey Milk as a good judge?

I don't think Dan concludes that Milk is complicit, but that he's not a great symbol of anything. Milk compiled points in dissuading an American president from taking action against a crime like kidnapping, and assuring the President that despite the allegations of wrongdoing, Jone's is reputable.

Not enough ana-lysis is done on the Nazi's, though. They were patriotic, and the spirit of German patriotism in the 30s is generally repudiated these days. Yet, it is not specifically a devotion to their country that we dislike them for. They tried to take over other countries--but still the Stalinist Soviets are not regarded in the same manner--who showed no restraint in taking over much of Asia.

It is their racial, eugenic genocide that we despise the Nazis for--but it's a genocide that they had to keep hidden from most of the German people, just as they had to keep the mercy-killings of the German invalids quiet. But the left doesn't generally buy "Who could have predicted the future?" from the German people--otherwise Milk could not have gotten away with calling public populist sentiments "Nazi". He would have known that only by power to maintain a cloak of secrecy and military might would an equivalent to the German gas chambers be possible.

But the left's mode of argument is to make every step along the way somehow foreshadowing of the Holocaust, as if nationalism itself can bring another episode on--remarkably without the mechanistic, reductionist view of life as individual as an elaboration of one's racial stock. The Nazi's were a power elite that categorically liquidated the infirm in their society a substantial time before they gassed the first Jew.

Well lets see Mike- if you look back at Neville Chamberlain he looks like a "hero" to many as well. Of course, Winston Churchill was considered a flake and accused of yelling "the sky is falling" a la chicken little before WW2 so I suppose him being a hero in say 1938 would seem ridiculous. ---- In other words men and women with sound philosophies and good instincts are many times considered wrong in their time and then are later vindicated. So as goes Harvey Milk we see a poor judge of character at the time.

I knew that Milk was a first class snake in the grass but the Jim Jones connection was simply stunning.

Thanks for accurately reporting history. Those on the left will stoop to anything to conceal what elements of the past which do not fit into the empire-mongering obsession.