Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?

That question used to be part of an old joke. But the answer might soon be "no one" if certain New York politicians get their way.

New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio has called for a review of the historic relevance of public monuments in the city. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito has said she wants Grant's Tomb to be on the review list. It seems that during the Civil War, Grant issued an order expelling Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi in an effort to crack down on black-market trading.

Christopher Columbus is on the list as well, of course, and Columbus Circle and its giant statue of the explorer are under review as well.

All of this is part of that national effort by the left to cleanse history of historical figures with checkered pasts.

That effort has been in the news ever since that fight in Charlottesville, Va., over the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

President Trump became the subject of an all-out assault by my fellow members of the media when he blamed the violence that day on people from "many sides." But as I noted in an earlier column on this, we soon saw a familiar pattern emerge.

The inside-the-Beltway crowd at first thought they finally had the Donald on the ropes. But before long he shifted attention from the so-called "alt-right" to the so-called "alt-left."

Before long the public was learning about the "Antifa" protesters who later showed up in Boston doing things like throwing bottles of urine at the cops separating them from some conservative protesters. News articles revealed that many in the Antifa crowd argue that violence is justified in protesting people they disagree with.

Soon we were seeing a repetition of that old saying about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. That came when we learned that the ESPN network had removed a Korean-American sports commentator from covering the University of Virginia football game because his name is Robert Lee.

When this made its way around the internet, the typical preface was "This isn't from the Onion." It wasn't from that satirical site. The network really did replace Lee.

Similarly, when I was discussing the New York situation with fellow conservative Jeff Bell, I remarked that I'd heard that some right-wing wag had suggested renaming the FDR Drive because Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans after World War II.

When I looked it up, it turned out I was wrong. That was not some witty right-winger. It was an actual tweet from a Queens Council Member by the name of Eric Ulrich.

(Note: Political consultant Rick Shaftan notes that Ulrich is a Republican, so this tweet may have been satirical. However, there is an online petition to rename Roosevelt Island.)

Bell has perhaps the finest conservative pedigree in New Jersey. In 1978, his win over liberal Republican Clifford Case in the U.S. Senate primary helped spark the Reagan Revolution even though he lost the general election.

Bell works inside the Beltway and has a home in Virginia as well as one here in Jersey. That gives him a prime perch from which to observe the anti-Trump hysteria within the confines of I-495.

"A lot of people inside the Beltway don't understand people outside the Beltway," he said.

The Beltway types assumed that all right-thinking people supported the campaign to remove Confederate statues, he said. In fact, a recent PBS poll showed that 64 percent of Americans oppose it.

The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Virginia, Jersey-born Ed Gillespie, nearly lost the primary to an obscure and underfunded pro-Trump candidate named Corey Stewart who made retention of the statues his major issue, he said.

"What saved Gillespie was that in the final days he put up ads saying he was against taking down Confederate statues," Bell said. "This is not a niche issue in Virginia."

Like a lot of conservatives, Bell argues that the effort to remove historical artifacts has its roots in the Stalin methodology that George Orwell highlighted in "1984."

"Orwell satirized the idea of a 'memory hole' and now the left is starting to have a memory hole for anything they don't believe in," he said. "They don't want Americans to be proud of their country. They want to change the story into a triumph of evil."

That story might sell in New York City and in Washington, but most Americans don't want to hear it. The media went crazy when Trump tweeted that he wanted to preserve "beautiful" Confederate statues. But if the polls are any indication, most Americans agree with his tweet that it is "Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart."

The Beltway crowd may be questioning Trump's sanity.

But at least he knows enough not to mess with the memory of the guy who's buried in Grant's Tomb.

ADD - TIME TO CAN COHN: That effort by Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn to criticize the boss over Charlottesville shows he's either too unintelligent or too mendacious to remain in the administration.

Here's what Cohn said: "Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK."

What "citizens standing up for equality and freedom" is he talking about? Certainly not the Antifa crowd. These are the same characters that prevented several conservatives from speaking at Berkeley and who also attacked police at that recent free-speech rally in Boston.

What Cohn is doing is equating those violent activists with peaceful protesters. He's distorting Trump's plain words condemning violence on both sides - which there was plenty of.

In America, everyone is free to give their political views, right, left or center. What they're not free to do is attack others they disagree with.

The Antifa crowd has raised that to an art form. Even the New York Times has exposed them for their violent tactics. They even kept Ann Coulter from speaking on the campus where the Free Speech Movement began.

If Cohn can't figure that out, then its time for him to submit that letter of resignation he keeps yapping about.