Top 10 of 2020: #2 – Trump Republicanism in New Britain

The New Britain Progressive covered a lot of major news in New Britain during 2020 – much more than just ten top stories. As the New Britain Progressive now presents our traditional Top Ten stories of the year, it is truer now than in the past that it is difficult to name only a few articles as the top among a great deal of important news. But here are a few, in this year’s annual series, that the New Britain Progressive would like to share as our Top Ten. Other Top Ten stories can be found at “Top Ten Stories of 2020.”

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New Britain Republicans, indeed, Connecticut Republicans, may be anxious to distance themselves from the public debacle that their president, Donald Trump, has been to the nation. But that attempt at ostensible distance has appeared in contrast to the actions of the New Britain Republican Party that have been very much in line with Trumpism. (“New Britain Republican Moves Appear to Echo Trump“.)

After giving lip-service to the goals of thousands of people in New Britain protesting against systemic racism this summer, New Britain Republican politicians then proceeded to oppose key reforms activists had sought. Soon-to-be-former-State Senator Gennaro Bizzarro (R-6) voted against the state’s new police accountability law. Then, in the election campaign this year, Bizzarro was accused of dog-whistle racism because of a campaign ad that featured Bizzarro with a white police officer, saying a vote for him was, “because our safety matters” – appearing to double-down on his vote against the police accountability law by echoing the politics of crime that has a been a Republican staple since Richard Nixon’s notoriously racist “southern strategy.”

In city hall, Council Republicans voted down the creation of a community police review board and, recently, Republican Mayor Erin Stewart vetoed the removal of the statute of Christopher Columbus from a prominent city park. And more than a few people have asked why Council Republicans would so easily support a white candidate to fill a vacancy on the school board, but then pass over Democrat Veronica T. DeLandro as the Democrats’ choice to succeed Rep.-Elect Manny Sanchez (D-24) on the City Council.

Meanwhile, the New Britain Republican Party made their standard-bearer in the 26th Assembly district election this year a politician, Peter Ceglarz, who had been who had been forced out of the 2015 election for City Council after social media posts that were widely criticized as racist. (“Republican Candidate For 26th District Stirred Social Media Controversy in 2015“.) Even in 2015, Stewart was widely viewed as dragging her feet on pushing Ceglarz off her Council slate until the attention of the statewide press to the matter risked harm to Stewart’s reputation and statewide ambitions.

It may seem astonishing that New Britain Republicans, trying to distance their brand from Trump, would bring back someone like Ceglarz, would oppose DeLandro, would campaign on racist code-words and would vote against or veto anti-racism policies. These things would, indeed, be astonishing – that is, except that New Britain Republicans do appear, in fact, very much the party of Trump. How 2020’s news put this on stark display is one of the New Britain Progressive‘s Top Ten Stories of 2020.

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Republican Candidate For 26th District Stirred Social Media Controversy in 2015

August 2, 2020 – Opinion

“Racially Divisive” Posts Sunk Ceglarz’ Council Candidacy In The ’15 Municipal

By John McNamara

The New Britain Republican Town Committee’s (NBRTC) slate of legislative candidates for the November 3rd Election includes a nominee who stirred controversy in 2015 that forced his withdrawal from the Councillor-At-Large race that year.

Piotr (Peter) Ceglarz, a member of the NBRTC from Ward 4, is making his second run at incumbent Democrat Peter Tercyak for the General Assembly District that includes John Paul II, Pulaski Middle School, Saint Francis Church and Holmes School polling places.

In 2014 Tercyak defeated Ceglarz for re-election in an uneventful race with both candidates participating in the Citizen Election Program (CEP) of public financing. In the 2015 municipal election Ceglarz joined the Erin Stewart slate as one of five at large Council candidates.

His short-lived campaign for city office was anything but uneventful. Soon after the July nominations racially-charged social media posts attributed to Ceglarz’ Facebook page surfaced spreading white nationalist, hateful memes that have become all too familiar in Trump Republicans’ playbooks and are ever present on Facebook and Twitter.

At issue were Facebook posts by Republican Ceglarz in which he shared and agreed with messages from right-wing groups defending the Confederate flag and referring to such organizations as the NAACP, United Negro College Fund and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund as “racist.” In another post President Obama is linked with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin over gun ownership rights. Ceglarz also disparaged minimum wage workers in disseminating his views at the time of his candidacy for City Council.

The offensive posts led to immediate calls for Ceglarz to exit the campaign by Democrats and drew in media coverage that eventually caused Stewart, protecting her “socially liberal” Republican brand outside of New Britain, to dump Ceglarz once the television and newspapers came calling.

The social media-savvy Mayor with a constant presence on Facebook professed no knowledge of the Ceglarz posts on the day she asked him to leave the slate. “Earlier today I became aware of several postings on Facebook, made by Peter Ceglarz, that were both ill-advised and indefensible in their nature. While I consider Peter to be a good friend, there is simply no room in this campaign for that sort of divisiveness,” the Mayor responded in a written statement.

Ceglarz complied with Erin Stewart’s order to withdraw but without any apology or remorse saying he was the victim of “a political hit job.” Reacting to the press coverage back then Ceglarz, in a comment to the New Britain Herald, called the paper “the most biased and liberal paper in the state. Sorry but your recent story about me was the biggest B.S. and P.O.S. NICE way to kiss ass with (former Democratic Chair John) McNamara and (former Councillor David) DeFronzo and then calling things racist. Get your facts straight and cover the truth and not lies.”

Coming off the GOP bench to run a third time, the unrepentant 2020 Ceglarz has scrubbed his social media of any of the publically shared racist taunts that abruptly ended his run for office five Augusts ago. Of more concern, however, is how his personal views may inform his stances on legislative issues that effect the residents of his district in a multi-cultural, diverse community.

Unfortunately, Ceglarz’ 2015 posts are an example of the vitriol that has been injected via social media into New Britain politics going back to at least 2009.

Last year older posts attributed to Democratic Council candidate Antonio Lavoy, Sr. were widely condemned for vulgar remarks directed at Erin Stewart, transgressions for which Lavoy apologized. And early in 2019 former Mayor Timothy Stewart referred to Democratic women in Congress as “bitches in heat” in a Facebook post during the State of the Union address, a flip remark that brought his forced resignation as head of the Chamber of Commerce after dodging an earlier controversy with the help of State Senator Gennaro Bizzarro, the city corporation counsel and Chamber Board Chairman.

“Stewart had already been facing calls that he resign or be removed as the head of the Greater New Britain Chamber of Commerce from a scandal from 2017 in which he made a comment that was widely criticized as racist,” according to the New Britain Progressive. “Stewart had made an online comment that, ‘Unfortunately the inmates continue to run the neighborhood,’ in a discussion regarding the city’s North Oak neighborhood, a neighborhood that has a large Latino and African American population.”

Inflammatory rhetoric, personal insults and racial invective are nothing new in political discourse in New Britain and elsewhere. But social media — pervasive and unfiltered — accelerates division and does harm to civic engagement. There’s no stopping the bigoted and uninformed, egged on by the highest office in the land, to post their rants. But elected leaders and those who aspire to leadership have a special responsibility not to offend nor tolerate those who do so.

Author’s Note In 2015 I was the Democratic Party Chair and Mayoral candidate and was among Democrats calling for the withdrawal of Ceglarz from the Council race.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on NB Politicus.

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New Britain Republican Moves Appear to Echo Trump

October 29, 2020

Editorial

While New Britain Republicans avoid their own party label, recent state and local actions by Republicans appear to resemble the political tone of Republican President Donald Trump.

Nationally, the Republican Party has been under the control of Trump. With Republican rank-and-file voters still heavily supporting Trump, Republican politicians nationwide, loath to cross their party’s extreme conservative base, have largely fallen into line with the Republican president’s bigoted policies and politics.

But, with Trump widely unpopular in Connecticut, local Republicans have sought, at least tacitly, to distance themselves, and the local Republican Party brand, from the increasingly reviled Trump Republicanism.

Democrats are quick to note that, while Democrats, like State Senate candidate Rick Lopes and Democratic State Representative candidate Manny Sanchez, openly identify themselves as Democrats on their campaign signs, Republicans, such as their opponents, Gennaro Bizzarro and Alden Russell, respectively, appear to not. Meanwhile, certain City Council members elected as Republicans have sought to portray themselves as Democratic office-holders. And, while Republican Mayor Erin Stewart does not deny being a Republican, she does claim that she is a “social liberal”.

This summer, massive protests that occurred nationwide, including in New Britain, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, as well as the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and other African Americans, developed into a movement. That rising antiracism movement called for changes, statewide and in New Britain, to reform policing and for other measures to address systemic racism.

With that movement juxtaposed directly against the unsubtle racism and white supremacism of Trump, local Republicans ostensibly backed consideration of change called for by activists. But that ostensible support began to unwind, as the theory of action turned into concrete proposals for changes in state and local laws.

In July, Sen. Gennaro Bizzarro (R-6), who represents the district which includes New Britain, voted against the sweeping police accountability legislation, which makes a large number of changes to the laws concerning policing in the state. Despite Bizzarro’s opposition, the legislation was approved into law, with New Britain’s Democratic state legislators voting for it.

Bizzarro’s vote against the reform drew sharp condemnation from anti-racism advocates in New Britain.

Bizzarro’s position as the head attorney for the city of New Britain has also caused some to raise questions about his role in the drafting of the heavily criticized August version of proposed ordinance to create a police civilian review board. The proposal, introduced in August, was widely panned because the review board it proposed would have been advisory-only, appointed entirely by the mayor and lacking subpoena or independent investigatory powers.

In July, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition and the Black Ministerial Alliance of New Britain, with the support of the NAACP New Britain Branch, the People’s Coalition of Central Connecticut and others had called for a “People’s Agenda” in New Britain. One of the key items the People’s Agenda was a call for,

The creation of a Civilian Review Board with subpoena powers whose membership is selected by the community.

In response to the August proposal, Council Democrats offered an amendment that would have given the review board subpoena and investigatory powers and made it appointed by the Council rather than the mayor, among other changes. But Council Republicans voted down that amendment, before voting down the police civilian review board, altogether.

During the debate on the police civilian review board, Council Democrats repeatedly asked the city attorney present at the meeting who, in the city’s Corporation Counsel office, wrote the criticized August version of the proposal. Democrats said that the version of the review board proposal that was introduced in the Republican-majority Council in August was a considerably weaker proposal than the version Democrats had agreed to in bipartisan discussions earlier in the summer and expected to be introduced by the Republican majority.

The reason Council Democrats were asking how that version came out of the Corporation Counsel’s office seems obvious. Bizzarro, in addition to being State Senator, is the head of the Corporation Council’s office, which is the city attorney’s office, since he is Mayor Erin Stewart’s political appointee as the official city “Corporation Counsel.”

Stewart has also come under criticism for the defeat of the police civilian review board. Critics have accused the Republican mayor of wanting to appear supportive of reforms after the killing of George Floyd, but not really wanting real reforms, like a strong, independent community police review board, to actually be approved.

Meanwhile, as the drama surrounding police accountability was happening, the New Britain Republican Party had nominated a candidate for state representative who was controversial on issues of racism.

The Republican candidate in the 26th Assembly district this year is the same candidate, Peter Ceglarz, who had been forced out of the 2015 election for City Council after social media posts that were widely criticized as racist.

As columnist John McNamara, who was the 2015 Democratic candidate for mayor, wrote this August,

His short-lived campaign for city office was anything but uneventful. Soon after the July nominations racially-charged social media posts attributed to Ceglarz’ Facebook page surfaced spreading white nationalist, hateful memes that have become all too familiar in Trump Republicans’ playbooks and are ever present on Facebook and Twitter.

At issue were Facebook posts by Republican Ceglarz in which he shared and agreed with messages from right-wing groups defending the Confederate flag and referring to such organizations as the NAACP, United Negro College Fund and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund as “racist.” In another post President Obama is linked with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin over gun ownership rights. Ceglarz also disparaged minimum wage workers in disseminating his views at the time of his candidacy for City Council.

Stewart, who called Ceglarz, “a good friend,” was widely viewed as dragging her feet on the matter, even after Democrats openly pointed out Ceglarz’ posts. As McNamara said,

The offensive posts led to immediate calls for Ceglarz to exit the campaign by Democrats and drew in media coverage that eventually caused Stewart, protecting her “socially liberal” Republican brand outside of New Britain, to dump Ceglarz once the television and newspapers came calling.

But Ceglarz’ return as a New Britain Republican standard-bearer in 2020 is viewed by many as further tarnishing local Republican efforts to distance themselves from the bigoted politics of Donald Trump.

With the disintegrating support for Trump in Connecticut, Republicans would have great political incentive to distance themselves, and the brand of their local Republican Party, from Trump Republicanism. But, New Britain Republican opposition to anti-racism policies and their nomination of a defender of the most notorious symbol of racism in the United States go in precisely the opposition direction.

Stewart, like her disgraced father, is fond of saying, “actions speak louder than words.” But the Stewarts and other Republicans apparently cannot see the irony that their actions actually reveal terrible things about their real character.