Chris Powell: Using Charlottesville for a partisan political agenda

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, that state's congresspeople and Democratic officials everywhere insist that everyone must speak out against the aspiring Nazis and Klansmen who went looking for a fight in Charlottesville the other week and were given one by street-theater-loving leftists as the city's police withdrew.

Many people are heeding the Democrats' calls, holding church services and "vigils" to declaim against "racism and hate." Even University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst felt compelled last week to issue a statement essentially declaring that she's not a Nazi, as if anyone had suspected her.

But no, we all don't have to speak out against "racism and hate."

For Nazis and Klansmen are not really numerous in this country. The few dozen who descended on Charlottesville may have constituted most of those who would even dare show themselves. The reaction to them is so disproportionate to their significance that it plainly has a partisan political purpose -- to keep discrediting President Trump for his inability to speak sensibly and accurately about anything.

But anyone who wanted to know that about Trump knew it long before Charlottesville. Further, people who live normal lives and behave decently can be safely assumed not to be Nazis or Klansmen. But people who demand that everyone certify  that he is not a Nazi or Klansman cast insinuation against everyone and engage in political intimidation. The sanctimony of the church services and "vigils" compounds this insinuation and intimidation, a merger of religion and politics that offends the political left when the right attempts it.

Even so, sanctimony is a great tool politically and it is getting out of hand. This week some environmental and religious groups planned a "vigil" at Hartford City Hall in support of an ordinance banning disposal of fracking waste. For apparently God isn't just against Nazis, Klansmen, and Trump; He stands with the left on energy policy too.

As they marched in Charlottesville the Nazi thugs carried torches for intimidating effect. The people holding "vigils" against "racism and hate" carry candles to reinforce their sanctimony. Invoking religion, the candles are more intimidating politically than the torches.

* * *

It's no wonder that Governor Malloy and leaders of the General Assembly like to attend "vigils" and posture against "racism and hate." It's a lot easier than a job they were elected to do: producing a state budget.

The state Senate's Democratic leader, Martin Looney, of New Haven, says municipal officials are wrong to complain about the delay of the budget. The budget is so late, Looney says, because legislators are trying to arrange "more aid to municipalities and more education aid."

Not really. The delay results from disagreement over the governor's plan to divert $400 million from teacher pension fund contributions, use the money to finance state government, and make municipalities replace it by raising property taxes. Most Democratic legislators would prefer to raise state taxes instead, particularly the sales tax.

The money here is not "aid to education" but compensation for members of teacher unions, who, as part of the majority party's biggest component, government employees, have to be bought off just as the state employee unions were recently bought off with a new contract that preserves their jobs and compensation for four years.

Without a budget the governor is reducing "aid to education" for all but the poorest cities and towns. It would be nice if this policy could last for a year or two so Connecticut could see if anything changes in student performance. For decades nothing about student performance changed as aid went up. Would anything change if aid went down?



Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: In Charlottesville, the success of violence as tool of social change

''Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.''

- An old children's line

They call themselves Antifa, meaning “antifascists.” George Orwell would have been the first to point out that the anti-fascists are, in fact, a modern offshoot of the brown shirts one associates with Hitler, violent fascists pledged to break the bones of those who disagree with them so that by means of force their intellectual opponents may be silenced. A broken bone is a very convincing argument, as any thug well knows.

Naming is a process of attaching words to events in such a way that the general public may apprehend the events as they had occurred in real time through the assigned words. This process also is open to perversion. But as a general rule, the process breaks no bones and is constitutionally allowed, even when the resulting descriptions violate what we may loosely call the truth.

Naming bears no arms. But fascism, the antifas movement, Nazism and its modern evocations, KluKluxery, the White Separatist movement, are all fully armed and pledged to violent means. All use ideologically neutral populations to accomplish their chief aim, perfectly described by Karl Marx in his "Theses On Feuerbach'': “Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it.” In the hands of thugs well concealed behind the veil of First Amendment rights, violence is an effective change agent, and violence is the Alpha and Omega of all the  above mentioned groups.

What we all witnessed in Charlottesville over the weekend was the success of violence as an instrument of social change. The violent and murderous events in Charlottesville were, everyone can agree, preeminently a failure of crowd control. And what a crowd it was.

On the fringes were professional violent agitators, as usual beating plowshares into swords. Possibly more than 80 percent those arrested, after Antifa thugs and anarchists and Klu-Kluzers and White Separatists were brought together on the streets of Charlotte, were from somewhere else. Two groups – peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters and a group protesting the eradication of Southern history – were used as masks by Antifa, anarchists, KluKluzers and racist separatist groups to accomplish their violent ends.

Violent agitators who march under false flags to commit criminal acts should instantly be denounced by men and women of good will everywhere – including President Trump, who is not a racist, a KluKluxer or a white separatist. How difficult can it be to publicly denounce the Klu Klux Klan, an anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic hate-group that dates from the late 1860s?

Not too difficult, apparently, because 48 hours after Charlottesville police, told to stand down, failed to suppress rioting in the streets, Trump issued the following lucid and unambiguous denunciation: “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to all that we hold dear as Americans.”

This pronouncement will be too little, too late to satisfy the partisan hounds intent upon deposing Trump for the unpardonable crime of defeating Hillary Clinton in a presidential election -- whether by lawsuits or by inflaming the national media against him; not a difficulty chore, since Trump already has alienated most of the nation’s left-of-center media. Belaboring the media and pointing out their sometimes embarrassing hypocrisies, pro-Trumpeters insist, is part of Trump’s politically eccentric charm.

Among repugnant hate groups, one may count with some confidence violence- prone anti-fascist fascists, loudly baying Trump-deposers with knives in their brains, and a left-of-center media that prints with relish rhetorical pot-boilers from, say, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, among other Democrats inflamed by national ambitions.

Trump, Murphy said, had incited peace-loving anarchists and members of the national antifa movement to commit acts of violence against hateful groups that even Mother Teresa would consider disreputable. Moreover, those who fail to agree with Murphy’s sentiments and do not vigorously denounce Trump are themselves co-conspirators: “Silence or weak condemnation will be rightly read as complicity with this newly emboldened racist movement.”

This is a giant step-up from guilt by association, otherwise known as McCarthyism. The failure to assent vigorously to Murphy’s views is itself proof of complicity. Disagree with Murphy and you are racist, anti-Jewish and homophobic. Only an anarchist could seriously buy into such wild denunciations.

Is Murphy a fascist because he did not instantly denounce antifa and anarchists, which deployed fascist methods to shutdown free speech in Berkley, the home of the Free Speech Movement in 1964? Of course not.  

How would one know, Dwight McDonald once asked, if the world were moving into a new Dark Age? One possible answer: cults, separated from the broad way of Western civilization, will be everywhere.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist whose work often appears in New England Diary.

Don Pesci: King Kong meets a couple of frenzied Nutmeg State'Never Trumpers'

We all know that President Trump is thin-skinned, as witness the bloodstained Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe. Recently, Trump tweeted about Ms. Brzezinski, now affianced to Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman who is the Joe of Morning Joe, that she had visited him recently and was “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”

The usual kerfuffle in social media ensued, and Trump was bare-knuckled by what he considers media thugs, purveyors of “fake news.” Following the pummeling, Trump tweeted, more temperately, “Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!" {Editor's note: The show actually has high ratings.}

If tweets had been available in the glory days of President Andy Jackson, the father of the modern Democratic Party might more easily have signaled to John Calhoun, once Jackson’s vice president, that if the newly elected senator from South Carolina continued to press nullification in response to federal tariffs adversely impacting the economy of his state, Jackson would send federal troops to South Carolina to apprehend Calhoun and hang him from the nearest oak tree. 

Troops were sent; South Carolina abandoned its Nullification Ordinance; Calhoun was not hanged; tariffs were made less onerous, and a nullification dispute between the North and the South abated for a few decades, after which a bloody Civil War decided the issues of nullification and slavery.

Try to imagine, if you will, the incendiary tweets that the Civil War might have generated.

Resemblances between Trump and Jackson have been made by the lying media – but, really, Trump is no Jackson. He has not yet threatened to hang his persistent Connecticut “Never-Trumpers,” U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, from the state’s gypsy-moth- infested oak trees.

Relations between these three are iffy, according to a story in The Hartford Courantheadlined “Amid Vitriol, Can Trump, State's U.S. Senators Come To Terms On Coveted Appointments?” 

The coveted appointment is the position soon to be vacated by retiring U.S. District Judge Robert Chatigny, who some years ago improperly intervened in the execution of mass- murderer Michael Ross, for which Judge Chatigny was rebuked, though not fired. It is nearly impossible for an aggrieved public to fire a renegade judge. Even Andy Jackson could not have fired Chatigny. Old age is now bearing him off.

The legal world, according to the story, is waiting with bated breath “to see how Trump and two of his most strident critics come to terms over coveted political appointments.”

The Courant reporter uses the expression “strident critics” to characterize the opposition of Blumenthal and Murphy to past presidential choices. But this is a considerable understatement. Critics render opinions; U.S. senators register votes. And Blumenthal and Murphy, both “Never Trumpers,” have opposed virtually all of President Trump’s major appointments. The usually cautious Blumenthal, a former attorney general for two decades in Connecticut, went so far as to impute racism to former U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s choice for U.S. attorney general.

“At one point during his cross examination of Sessions,” The Courant  piece noted, "U.S. senator and mud thrower from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal subtly suggested that Sessions might have a soft spot in his heart for the KKK. Blumenthal noted that Sessions had received some awards during his twenty years in the Congress, among them an award from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the latter of which Blumenthal noted is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to a story in the Washington Examiner.

"'Given that you did not disclose a number of those awards,' Blumenthal asked Sessions, 'are there any other awards from groups that have similar kinds of ideological negative views of immigrants or of African-Americans or Muslims or others, including awards that you may have received from the Ku Klux Klan?'"

Should Trump seek to appoint to the U.S. District Court a judge who had received awards from the Klu Klux Klan, Blumenthal might just “blue slip” the nominee. The two Connecticut Democratic senators can “issue a blue slip, which kills the nomination by preventing the Judiciary Committee from scheduling confirmation hearings,” according to the story.

Blumenthal insists – wrongly – that such measures are “traditional.” They are extraordinary. Tradition holds that senators from the same party as the president may issue recommendations for judgeships; Blumenthal is a “Never Trumper” Democrat now suing Trump for having violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, while Trump is a duly elected Republican president who is under no obligation to accept judicial nominations from suit-prone party opposition pests such as Blumenthal.

One hopes that such issues will not erupt into a bitter twitter war.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is an essayist who lives in Vernon. Conn.

Peter Certo: The KKK is but part of America's new ruling racist coalition

Movie poster in 1915. The movie is often cited for reviving the Ku Klux Klan.

An election that might have marked the ascension of America’s first woman president has instead proven historic for an altogether different reason. Namely, that Americans voted for the unabashedly anti-democratic alternative offered by her rival.

And they did it despite his almost cartoonish shortcomings.

Trump didn’t just offend pious liberals with his hard line on immigration, disdain for democratic norms, and disinterest in policy. He transgressed standards of decency across all political persuasions.

He bragged about sexually assaulting women. He disparaged injured war veterans. He was endorsed by the KKK. And now he’s America’s voice on the world stage.

How could that happen? Here’s one theory you might’ve heard:

After years of seeing their jobs outsourced, their incomes slashed, and their suffering ignored, the white working class threw in their lot with the candidate who cast aside political niceties and vowed to make their communities great again.

It’s a nice story — I even used to buy a version of it myself. But while Trump surely did clean up with white voters, the evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that they were as hard-up as the story goes.

For instance, pollster Nate Silver found during the GOP primary that Trump supporters pulled in a median income of $72,000 a year — some $10,000 more than the national median for white households. And while many did come from areas with lower social mobility, they were less likely to live in the stricken manufacturing communities Trump liked to use as backdrops for his rallies.

So if it wasn’t the economy, was it Hillary?

Clinton was clearly unpopular, in many cases for defensible reasons. She was cozy with Wall Street. She backed poorly chosen wars. Apparently people didn’t like the way she e-mailed.

But when you consider that we chose to give the nuclear codes to a man whose own aides refused to trust with a Twitter account over a former secretary of state, it hardly seems like Trump voters were soberly comparing the two candidates.

Instead, Vox writers Zack Beauchamp and Dylan Matthews poured through scores of studies and found a much more robust explanation — and it isn’t pretty.

It’s what pollsters gently call “racial resentment.”

That is, Trump’s core supporters were far more likely than other Republicans to hold negative views of African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. They overwhelmingly favored the mass deportation of immigrants. And they were the most likely Republicans to agree that it would be “bad for the country” if whites comprised a smaller share of the population.

What’s more, another study found, racially resentful voters flocked to the GOP candidate regardless of their views about the economy. Their views on race drew them to Trump, not their job prospects.

Scores of other data back this up. Despite years of job growth and the biggest one-year bump in middle-class incomes in modern history, another researcher found, Republicans’ views of both African Americans and Latinos nosedived during the Obama years.

Not even a slowdown in immigration itself staunched the venom. Net migration between the U.S. and Mexico fell to 0 during the Obama years, yet Trump still launched his campaign with an infamous tirade against Mexican “rapists” and “murderers.”

None of that is to accuse all Trump voters of racism. But even if the bulk of them were just Republicans following their nominee, the social science strongly suggests that one of our major parties has been captured by whites so anxious about the changing face of America that they were willing to vote alongside the Klan.

That fringe has turned mainstream. The Trump years to come may herald any number of horrors, but the scariest part may be what we’ve learned about ourselves.

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and the editor of OtherWords.org.  Distributed by OtherWords.org.