I should start off by saying that I am not a great fan of David Collins, now a former columnist for the New London Day, but I still maintain that his recent firing is yet another example of our media bending over backwards to kiss the ass of the fascists who are taking over this country.
Collins was fired after he refused to consent to a change to a column he wrote.
The column was about Greg Howard, a Republican who represents Stonington, who is also a cop and a fan of ICE. For the most part, the column (never published by the Day, but which Collins has distributed through Facebook) calls Howard out for a false allegation on Howard’s part that Blumenthal, by criticizing ICE, had endangered some of the fascists ICE agents, by identifying them, using the term “doxing”. Of course, the accusation had no basis in fact, so maybe Collins’ first mistake was imagining that the media should make an issue out of a Republican lying. It’s what they do, after all, so it’s not news.
Collins makes several good points, including those contained in this excerpt:
This is what Howard said about masked agents:
“Dems have their own extreme-left, brain-washed criminals that would use that rhetoric (from Blumenthal and other politicians) as a reason to interfere with or harm ICE agents, their homes or their families.
“It is likely for this reason, and the safety of themselves and their families, that ICE agents are trying to conceal their identify from the hundreds of cameras that film them. I don’t blame them one bit. This concern for their safety . . . is also likely why the ICE agents are trying to get in and out of areas quickly and in unmarked cars.”
Maybe Howard believes Stonington police should hide behind masks? What’s the difference? Why shouldn’t the transparency in law enforcement that serves professional police departments like Stonington so well apply to federal agents?
The difference is that Trump and Republicans like Howard are endorsing the use of fear tactics, a hallmark of democracy-destroying authoritarians.
Howard notes in his long email that local police traditionally make arrests without warrants, for DWI, domestic assault and drug and weapon possession.
But of course those arrests are based on police observing a crime, not a suspicion based totally on the color of people’s skin or their mastery of English.
Howard and other Republicans have crossed a dangerous threshold in supporting dark and Gestapo-like, masked police tactics here in Connecticut.
I hope voters here in Howard’s district, and the rest of Connecticut, are paying close attention to the fearsome police state Republicans are sponsoring.
He’s right on the law, by the way. Cops can dispense with the need for a warrant only when they arrest someone in the act or under other specific circumstances. Arresting someone because their skin is brown is not among those circumstances. Well, I guess I’m now wrong about that, given the Supreme court’s recent ruling, but it was the law when Collins wrote his column.
The Day ran an editorial (or whatever you want to call it) defending its actions, which you can read here. Among other things it criticizes Collins for having an email exchange with Howard instead of talking to him over the telephone, which seems odd as the dispute arose over the Day’s insistence that it insert an outtake from one of those emails into the piece, an option that would not have been open to them had the exchange been telephonic. And of course, one can understand why Collins would want the exchange in writing, since that would make it harder for Howard to deny whatever Collins wrote about him.
As I said above, I am not a great fan of Collins. He wrote some columns that I thought were unfair about some of our local Democrats, but of course the Day had no problem with those, inasmuch as the subjects were Democrats and, since they were Democrats, were not likely to attack the Day. Many years ago, in what seemed like a coordinated attack against it, the Day was besieged by right wing letter writers demanding that it be, to coin a term, “fair and balanced”, which of course translates into what has become the standard in the media today: bend over backwards to make Republicans look good, or in the case of a certain very stable genius, mentally competent, while doing the opposite to Democrats. Ever since that long ago time the Day has done its share of backward bending, and this is yet another example.