Chris Powell: The Red Guards raid city hall; hypocrisy makes the world go round

Propaganda poster for China’s Red Guards in the late 1960s.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut now may have its equivalent of Chairman Mao's Red Guards, consisting of Central Connecticut State University students and members of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group who, according to news reports, pretended to purge racism from the office of the Republican registrar of voters at City Hall in New Britain.

Having gone to the registrar's office to obtain voter registration cards, the president of Central's Social Work Club, Taina Manick, sighted a tiny Confederate flag in a stand of four other tiny flags among some knickknacks. She was immediately triggered. She returned the next day with her colleagues and cameras to record them scolding the registrar, Peter Gostin, and asking him if he is a racist.

Gostin denied racism and confessed he had not given much thought to the flags and knickknacks, which had been sitting on a shelf in his office, unremarked, for 14 years. The Red Guards asked Gostin if he would surrender the offending flag and he quickly agreed, whereupon they lifted it in triumph, photographed it, dropped it in a trash can, laughed, and departed.

Afterward Gostin said he was glad to be rid of the source of offense but did not understand why his visitors needed to "make a big show" about it and question his character.

But of course making a big show -- displaying self-righteousness -- is the point of today's indignation industry, of which the new Red Guards may be the shock troops, and the smaller the offense, the bigger the show must be to gain attention.

Ironically, as the Red Guards were bullying the hapless registrar, the National Assessment of Educational Progress was announcing that the huge and infamous racial-performance gap in Connecticut's schools has persisted for another three years. The gap is worse in cities like New Britain. So is violent crime, which also affects racial minorities disproportionately.

Indeed, Connecticut suffers many other distressing racial disparities. None has been caused or sustained by the tiny and long-overlooked flag in the New Britain registrar's office.

But maybe the Red Guards can keep scouring Connecticut for other things from which they can claim to have taken offense. Maybe someday they will find one more relevant to social justice than their comic self-righteousness is.

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A few weeks ago as the campaign of the anti-abortion Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Georgia, former football star Herschel Walker, was rocked by allegations he had paid for the abortions of former girlfriends, Democrats scorned Republicans for sticking with their candidate despite his likely hypocrisy. Republicans, Democrats sneered, cared about nothing beyond gaining a majority in the Senate.

Last week, after weeks of insisting that he had recovered from a stroke and should remain the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman participated in a televised debate with the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, the television talk-show doctor. Because Fetterman now has trouble understanding spoken words, he was granted use of video equipment to caption the questions.

Nevertheless, even Democrats acknowledged that their candidate's performance was painful to watch. As the debate began, Fetterman's first words were, "Hi. Good night, everybody." At times he was incoherent and contradicted himself.

But, of course, Democrats are sticking with Fetterman. though elected officials need at least normal communication skills, which their candidate now lacks. Like the Republicans, the Democrats figure that nothing matters except taking control of the Senate.

And both sides have good reasons.

Republicans figure that Walker, while an ignoramus, at least will be able to take instructions from the party's Senate leadership to prevent President Biden's appointment to the Supreme Court of another judge who, to placate the Democratic Party's crazy left wing, professes not to know what a woman is.

Democrats figure that, impaired as Fetterman is, he at least will be able to take instructions from the party's Senate leadership to prevent a Republican attempt to placate the party's crazy right wing by impeaching the president for what some see as his own worsening dementia.

Politics, thy name is hypocrisy. Get used to it.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.