For standing by her putative man, the exposed Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin has for the first time received some negative press attention amid the avalanche of coverage calling her “smart,” “accomplished” and “elegant.” But still off-limits has been any discussion in the mainstream media of her numerous ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

It’s not that the evidence is lacking. It’s that the politically correct elites have forbidden examination or discussion of it. Even to question whether Abedin has any connections with the Brotherhood, and whether those connections had any influence over Hillary Clinton’s decisions as secretary of State, is to demonstrate that one is a bigot, a racist, an Islamophobe, and a hatemonger, as well as a hysterical paranoiac.

Indeed, one infallible way to determine a stranger’s political positions on just about anything is to ask if he or she thinks Huma Abedin has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. If the stranger responds with righteous outrage, you’re dealing with a doctrinaire, mainstream liberal. If, on the other hand, the response is, “Yes, that is something that should be investigated,” you’re face-to-face with a Tea Partier.

That’s why Huma Abedin is the new Alger Hiss. For decades, ever since the former State Department official and advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was outed as a Soviet spy in the most celebrated espionage case of the nation’s history, the leftist establishment stoutly insisted that Hiss was innocent. Even today, some refuse to acknowledge the “present-day consensus among historians…that Alger Hiss was in fact a Soviet spy.”

But the controversy over whether or not Hiss was a Communist and a spy for the Soviets was (and is) not just a dispute over the evidence. It was, for the Left, a measure of whether or not you were a decent human being. Anna Roosevelt Halsted, the daughter of Eleanor and Franklin, said in 1956 that Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was “contemptible” and clearly “out to get” Hiss. Her mother said at a 1961 dinner party that Chambers was “utterly contemptible and probably a psychopathic liar.” Adlai Stevenson, present at the same gathering of liberal glitterati, agreed that the prosecution of Hiss was “one of the darker chapters in U.S. history.”

Such views were universal on the Left in those days and thereafter, despite the fact that it was abundantly clear from the beginning that Hiss was what Chambers said he was. But the denials began immediately, and with Hiss himself: when Chambers produced classified State Department documents that Hiss had given him when they were both Communist spies and the documents were proven to have been typed on Hiss’s typewriter, Hiss accused Chambers of “forgery by typewriter.”

Even today, some claim that military intelligence agents fabricated a typewriter identical to Hiss’s in order to frame him, although they lack a motive. Chambers is supposed to have falsely accused Hiss out of rage at Hiss’s rejection of his homosexual advances, but how this Communist spy and rejected homosexual convinced military intelligence operatives to forge documents to frame the object of spurned affections has never been explained.

Nonetheless, right up to the moment when material from the Soviet archives revealed that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy, and even after that, if you didn’t love Hiss, you weren’t just wrong: you were a bad person. It was reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s 2012 defense of Huma Abedin on the Senate floor, when he thundered that “these allegations about Huma, and the report from which they are drawn, are nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant.”

McCain called the accusations “sinister” and accused the members of the House of Representatives who had asked for an investigation of Abedin’s Brotherhood ties of launching “specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for.”

McCain’s indignation over these charges against Abedin was ironic, since he likely doesn’t have much of a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood, given the fact that he has cheerfully and unapologetically posed for photos with Syrian jihad terrorists. In the same way, the people who were angriest at the charges against Hiss were hard leftists who wouldn’t have been all that upset with the idea of working for the Soviets in the first place. And “homosexual” was a pejorative term for leftists only when used of Whittaker Chambers.

It is increasingly common for the Left (and its reliable water boys in the loyal opposition like McCain) to demonize its opponents. In Hiss’s day, it wasn’t so common, but his case was the first big instance of it. It is now generally accepted among leftists that those who dare to stand against any aspect of the politically correct agenda are not only wrong. They are evil, morally bankrupt, and stupid to boot – except for the diabolical ingenuity they employed to frame their pure-as-the-driven-snow victims.

This is a pernicious tendency that conservatives should identify and reject whenever and wherever it appears, for the simple fact that even if all her accusers are terrible people who kick their Shih Tzus and don’t recycle, that would not in itself tell us anything about Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. She could still be a Muslim Brotherhood operative even if her accusers were Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. And to hear the Left tell it, that’s exactly who they are: Alger Hiss and Huma Abedin are innocent, and if you don’t believe that, or even think the questions worthy of investigation, be ready to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness by an increasingly authoritarian and thuggish Left.