Try to imagine State Senator Rob Samson’s surprise when he woke on June 9 and discovered, having read a rare Hartford Courant editorial, that he was “turning to Trump-style racism.” The editorial was titled ominously, “In trying to control what students learn, the Connecticut GOP is once again turning to Trump-style racism.”
Ever since the Courant had reduced its own editorial page staff
months ago, the paper had been printing, in its own editorial space, commentary
written by other left of center news outlets. No editorial staff members are
listed in an updated Courant staff directory.
The Courant recently unburdened itself of its headquarters.
The paper was later gobbled up by a New York based hedge fund, Alden Global
Capital, roundly denounced by opinion writers as a frequent job slasher. But
the Courant had been bleeding employees to other Connecticut news outlets for
quite a while.
The paper’s last editorial page editor, Carol Lumsden, was
recently brought aboard the Hearst Media Group as an opinion editor. Other
former commentary toilers in the Courant vineyards had preceded Lumsden. Colin McEnroe, host of The Colin McEnroe Show on Connecticut Public
Radio, a longtime opinion writer at the Courant, now writes a weekly column
that runs in eight Hearst Communications.
The Courant’s slash and burn anti-Republican editorial is
worth quoting at some length. Context, not always supplied, is always important.
The Courant begins with a jab at Connecticut’s much
diminished Republican Party: “If anyone thought the Connecticut Republican
Party was moving into a more moderate post-Trump world, the tirade engineered
by Senate Republicans over the question of how the history of race is being
taught in public schools put that narrative to rest.”
The Courant further asserts in its editorial that Samson is
swollen with vile racism: “When Rob Sampson pushed his race-baiting measure
onto the Senate floor, the Republicans showed their hand.” Republicans too are
race-baiters, owing largely to their political association with Trump. The
Courant barley avoids using the old McCarthy tactic of falsely accusing his
sometimes innocent targets of being a clear and present danger to the Republic.
And parents in Greenwich and Guilford are also tainted with racism: “The danger
is people like Rob Sampson and the parents in Greenwich and Guilford who want
to replace knowledge with fear, truth with might. They are the ones whose hate
we need to keep far from our schools.”
The Connecticut Republican Party was never temperamentally
connected with Trump. There are not in Connecticut a host of Trumpian politicians
screeching from the rooftops of Connecticut’s GOP, though there are responsible
conservatives within the party’s ranks. Sampson is one of these.
Conservatism in Connecticut precedes Trump by several
decades. William Buckley, a lifelong nutmegger, characterized Trump, before his
formal entrée into national politics, as “a vulgarian.” The magazine Buckley
founded, National Review, very early on in the Trump campaign, sought to
disentangle itself from the Trumpian ethos in an issue entitled, provocatively,
“Never Trump.”
One of the authors of that issue, David Harsanyi, later recanted in the same
magazine: “Many of us would prefer a more articulate and chaste classical
liberal as our president. I don’t have any special fondness for Trump, either,
but I also don’t hold any special antagonism for him. Political support is a
transactional arrangement, not a religious oath, and Trump has done much to
like. I support policies, not people. If Trump protects the constitutional
order, he deserves to be praised for it. If not, he doesn’t. But the notion of
some Trump critics that conservatives have a moral duty to uniformly oppose the
president for the sake of principle or patriotism — or because they once
opposed him during a GOP primary -- is plainly silly.”
To ask Republican Party officials to denounce, on often
unmentioned grounds, the nominal head of their party during hotly contested
campaigns, and then to intimate that officials are racist if they do not make
a sufficiently enthusiastic denunciation, is worse than silly. The suggestion that Trump
and all who associate with him are racists is a virulent form of McCarthyism
with its horns and hooves and tail in full display.
The amendment brought forward by Samson, limited to young and impressionable children attending
grades K-12, would not, he insisted, disallow any teaching material that was
historically true. For instance, teachers would be allowed under the Samson
supported amendment to inform students that some founders of the country owned
slaves, because they did own slaves, and never mind that this historical truth
might cause some discomfort to impressionable children. Likewise, teachers
would not be prohibited from informing small children that the Republican Party
opposed slavery, while the Democrat Party of Jefferson Davis’ day supported
states’ rights against an opposing federal government led by the great emancipator,
Abraham Lincoln, who prosecuted a bloody Civil War to end slavery and preserve
what one of the founders of the country, Alexander Hamilton, called energy in
the executive department of government. Anything historically true may be
taught, however uncomfortable to settled prejudices.
However, Samson insisted, impressionable young children
should be taught in such a way as to be free of the imputation that they
themselves are personally tainted with an imaginary ingrained and inexpugnable racism
or, sometimes worse, soul crippling white privilege. They should not be made to
feel that their skin color is a mansion of Hell housing the devil of racism. They
should not be forced to think they are inferior because of their race, the
color of their skins, their religious beliefs or the political affiliation of
their parents. And parents in Greenwich and Guilford are right to insist that
the education of young minds should not alienate children from the golden
perception of Martin Luther King, and before him Fredrick Douglas, that it is
fair and just to judge people on the content of their character and
discriminatory and unjust to judge people by the color of their skin.
Sampson’s own reaction to the media “hit piece” was mildly
benignant. He advised the mud throwers to read the amendment “which only seeks to fight systemic,
institutional racism” and commented, speaking for all conservatives in the
state, “When
you’re taking flack you must be over the target.”
Whether Samson is right or wrong, he is not a racist. Former
President Donald Trump is not a racist. The Republican Party is not racist.
And that is the truth.
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