In their never-ending quest to remove Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from the bench, leftists have latched on to a new angle: Thomas’s friendship with conservative billionaire Harlan Crow.

Crow, a real estate mogul and GOP donor, has taken Thomas and his wife, Ginni, on numerous trips over the past several years. The Left believes these trips are a problem since Thomas did not disclose them publicly. But, as Thomas pointed out in a statement, he was not legally required to include these trips in his financial disclosures, nor did he believe that it was ethically necessary for him to do so since Crow did not have business before the court.

Nevertheless, Thomas has once again become a target for impeachment, and Crow has become prey for a greedy mob that relishes any opportunity to smear Thomas and the conservative jurisprudence he represents.

A headline from the Washingtonian reads, “Clarence Thomas’s billionaire benefactor collects Hitler artifacts.” The article goes on to describe Crow’s “garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots,” such as Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito, and historical mementos Crow has purchased, including a Hitler-signed copy of Mein Kampf. The point of the article is to smear Crow — and Thomas, by association — as a Nazi, which is exactly what the Left has been doing. Here’s the Nation correspondent Elie Mystal:

These are disgusting accusations with no merit. Crow has dedicated much of his time and resources to fighting authoritarianism in all of its forms. His own mother was almost killed by a Nazi U-boat in the summer of 1939.

The reason Crow has a garden of “dead dictators,” as he calls it, is not because he admires authoritarians or hopes to be one. Rather, he wants to make sure that he, his family, and all those who visit his home never forget the threats freedom faces and the great lengths to which men will go to snuff it out. He did not commission these statues. He collected them from public squares in Europe and Asia after they had been toppled and said he thinks they ought to be historically preserved.

Let me ask this: How many of those reading this article right now have heard of Ceausescu or Broz Tito? My guess is quite few — which suggests that Crow has a point: We know way too little about history to be able to learn from it.

Moreover, it’s not as though Crow only collects Nazi memorabilia, as the Left suggests. He’s a history collector who buys artifacts of all kinds. His favorite mementos are an original syllogism from Abraham Lincoln about the evils of slavery, a letter written in 1493 by Christopher Columbus after his first trip to the New World, and signed documents from his heroes, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. “Many people have their own hobbies and have vocations,” he said back in 2015. “American history is mine.”

Crow does not deserve the attacks against him, nor does Thomas. Both are good men with honorable intentions who have spent their lives fighting for the very freedoms that the Hitlers and Stalins of the world detested. Those baselessly attacking them can’t say the same.