By Chris Powell
Hysteria and sanctimony broke out in Connecticut and the country last Monday. Opponents of President Trump had dubbed it “Not My President’s Day” to protest everything his administration is doing or imagined to be doing. In Connecticut the protests were largest in three of the state’s sanctimony cities — about a thousand people in Hartford, 400 in New Haven, and 150 in New London.
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The protesters were appalled that the president is laying off thousands of federal government employees and has deputized his pal, the billionaire Elon Musk, to examine executive agency financial records in pursuit of waste, fraud, and accountability, as if the president, as head of the executive department, shouldn’t have access to such records. Trump and Musk, the protesters shrieked, were staging a coup and planning to abolish the civil rights of Blacks, homosexuals, and transgender people. The protesters seemed to think that any disagreement with them is criminal.
The supposed persecution by Trump may come as a surprise to the most powerful member of his cabinet, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a gay man married to another gay man with whom he has two children. But the hysterics may not know about Bessent, since news organizations have reported far less about his personal life than they did about the gay member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom journalism celebrated for his sexual orientation, not for his job performance.
Yes, Trump’s first few weeks back in the White House have been filled with nuttiness — like buying Greenland and Gaza, seizing the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Yet these issues are trivial sideshows. They oppress no one.
But many people are being oppressed in the sanctimony cities, right under the noses of last Monday’s protesters, whose grievances included Trump’s replacing federal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs with a simple merit system for hiring.
A year ago Governor Lamont jumped aboard the DEI bandwagon by creating an Office of Equity and Inclusion within his office and appointing a director who is being paid $175,000 per year to see that state agencies do more of the hiring “outreach” that state law already required them to do. The appointment was just politically correct posturing and patronage to placate the sanctimonious left flank of the governor’s political party, and it was as ironic as last Monday’s protests.
For infinitely more could be done for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and for fairness and prosperity generally, if Connecticut could ever alleviate the longstanding racial performance gap in its schools, a gap that is worst in the sanctimony cities, where most students are from minority groups and live neglected in single-parent homes, with fewer than a quarter of them performing at grade level in reading and math and most being advanced from grade to grade anyway and graduated from high school qualified only for menial work, destined for life in the underclass.
Last September a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School sensationally confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she remains illiterate after 12 years of education in the city. But there have been no protests about this. The sanctimony cities take it for granted that most of their students long have been and always will be sent into the world poorly educated. The governor, the General Assembly, and the political left take it for granted too.
The state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised investigations to discover how the girl could have graduated illiterate, but there have been none.
Meanwhile New Haven’s schools have the worst chronic absenteeism rates in the state, approaching 50% of students. But no one in that sanctimony city protests that either. In the sanctimony cities, the outrage is Trump, not what Connecticut has done to itself.
DEI initiatives and protests against Trump serve only to distract from the catastrophes of policy that Connecticut won’t confront because doing so would require asking painful questions about failure. If only the state had its own Elon Musk.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 
Once again, spot-on analysis of Connecticut’s self-destruction. We are a slow-moving train wreck.
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