The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
GOP hosts muckraker posing as muckraker
Fun fact: In the 1980s, the Imperial Wizard (the national leader) of the Ku Klux Klan lived in Connecticut. He was also Catholic, which was sort of a big deal, because Catholics had long been on the KKK’s list of undesirables.
His name was James Farrands, and his explanation to a New York Times reporter was that, once a Catholic became president of the United States, it took the curse off Romanism. The reporter questioned what would happen if a black person were to become president.
The wizard reportedly rolled his eyes and said, “There’ll never be a black president.” So much for seeing around corners.
The wizard “ran” the national KKK out of its headquarters — his garage in Shelton.
This may be an unfair memory to bring up, right when Shelton is having another bad run. In recent weeks, the school system there had to deal with a Snapchat photo of a student in blackface lifting both middle fingers and using a common distasteful racial epithet.
What could be worse? Funny you should ask. On Oct. 11, a student field trip from Shelton was kicked out of the Smithsonian, specifically its National Museum of African American History and Culture, after a student spat off the balcony, apparently hitting an AfricanAmerican person in the crowd below.
The town will probably use these as “teachable” moments, although, really, not spitting on people in museums should come right after toilettraining. These are middle school kids.
We just have to hope and pray Shelton gets six months or a year, troublefree, to collect itself. What’s that you say? Oh dear. Next week, the Connecticut Republican Party is hosting an evening of “enlightenment” featuring political activist James O’Keefe at a venue in ... Shelton.
O’Keefe, leader of Project Veritas, is a trafficker in fraudulence posing as a crusader for truth. More succinctly, he is muck pretending to be a muckraker.
O’Keefe’s most famous triumph was the “exposure” of ACORN, an organization working in poor communities on issues such as voter registration, predatory lending, gun violence and fair housing. By 2007, there were 260,000 members working out of 100 field offices around the country. The staff and the leadership were predominantly black women.
In 2009, O’Keefe released a video. It showed him and a confederate, Hannah Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute, walking into an ACORN field office and asking for help getting some more prostitutes, some of them underage, situated. The video showed staffers giving helpful answers.
If you know anything about this story, what you know probably ends there. Here are some things you don’t know. The video shows O’KeefeasSuperflypimp walking into ACORN in a fur coat and rakish, widebrimmed hat while carrying a cane. He actually wore a shirt and tie on his visits to ACORN and claimed to be a law student. That’s the lie at the beginning. When O’Keefe and Giles left the San Diego office, an ACORN employee immediately called the police. He bought the story that these two people were sex traffickers, played along with their questions and then reported them. O’Keefe eventually had to pay a $100,000 settlement for smearing that guy.
Meanwhile, state and federal agencies got very worried about what ACORN was up to and launched investigations. What they found — especially the California Attorney General’s office, which obtained the raw footage — was a video heavily and selectively edited to show ACORN staffers in a bad light.
The investigations found compliance issues and sloppy bookkeeping but no major misuse of federal finds. By the time it got straightened out, the bad publicity had created a vortex that pulled ACORN down. It no longer exists as a national organization.
O’Keefe moved on to a series of other crusades, almost all of which involve telling someone a lie, an odd tactic for a project whose name is the Latin word for truth. He sent an impostor to the Washington Post to make a fake sex abuse claim against thenU.S. Sen. Roy Moore. It was supposed to prove how easy it would be to fool the Post. It proved the opposite. The newspaper sniffed out the ruse immediately and exposed it.
O’Keefe was arrested for trying to tamper with the phones of thenU.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu while posing as a telephone repairman. He tried to discredit a CNN journalist by luring her onto a boat full of sex toys and props. Creepy, weird and unsuccessful.
In 2014, Democratic staffers in a Senate campaign were visited by a series of volunteers who offered to fill out and mail ballots of college students who weren’t around. The staffers replied that such help is illegal. They eventually figured out they were being targeted by O’Keefe and his accomplices.
Oh sting, where is thy death? Most of O’Keefe’s undercover operations seem to prove the absence, rather than the presence, of malefactors. Unless you count him.
This is who the Connecticut GOP has seen fit to bring to Shelton. It is trouble not of Shelton’s making, but it doesn’t help. I’m not sure how the party picked out its venue for this gig, but Shelton did go big for Donald Trump in 2016, by about 20 percentage points.
There are two Republican parties in Connecticut. One is the party I grew up admiring. In that party, I saw leaders such as Russell Post, Larry DeNardis, Gerald Stevens, Stew McKinney, John McKinney, Jon Berman, Nancy Johnson and Chris Shays. I didn’t always agree with them, but they usually stood on principle.
The other party is the party of punks, the kind of people who think O’Keefe would make a great speaker and that Trump is an acceptable president.
Somehow, these days, that second party is the one I mostly hear about. That should worry the good people, who are still in the ranks but largely voiceless.