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By Antony Stark

There was an interesting juxtaposition of articles recently in two recent issues of the Centinal.

On September 23, the Centinal Staff Writer produced a hard-hitting and timely attack on the almost supernatural weakness of the Establishment Republican Party in Connecticut called “It’s Time To Let The RINOs Lose.”

Its message was as stark as it was relevant, timely and necessary:

“Send a message: vote AGAINST CT GOP leader Ben Proto and his cadre who are afraid of espousing Republican values and against anyone supported by those RINOs who’ve been around for years. Send the message that we want strong leadership who will articulate and fight for our values, instead of fomenting discord and handing out favors to friends and special interest groups.”

I realize that some Republicans think that this advice is akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face. In fact, I recently spoke to a CT Republican congressional candidate, one I respect as a reliable conservative voice, who worried that such advice sacrificed possible electoral victory for a devotion to ideological “purity.”

However, the question begs to be asked: “Exactly WHAT has the current Republican Party leadership… tepid, timid and steeped in RINO me-tooism… actually accomplished by continually following such a strategy?

Is calling attention to the reality of toxic RINO failure actually just a naïve, quixotic call for a simplistic form of politics that seeks to adhere to unadulterated conservative principles at the expense of compromise with voter realities?

The answer may be found in a second article published two days later titled, “Mike Goldstein Battling An Elusive Jim Himes” that, probably inadvertently, indicated why the first article was so spot on correct.

This second article was written by Dr. Joseph Bentivegna, a vocal supporter of Dr. Michael Goldstein, who is running against incumbent Jim Himes for the Congressional seat in CT-4 Fairfield County. In the article, Dr. Bentivegna heatedly condemns Mr. Himes for refusing to debate the Republican nominee.

In light of the clear explanation of the obvious worthlessness of running RINO Republicans given in the Centinal Staff article… which laid out in great detail the futility of nominating such inevitable losers in almost ANY district in Connecticut… one has to wonder why Mr. Bentivegna is so surprised that Himes has arrogantly dismissed a squish, gadfly candidate as weak and irrelevant as Dr. Goldstein by refusing to debate him?

Dr. Goldstein’s nomination was certainly not inevitable.

In fact, many MAGA-conservative oriented CT Republicans who understood the futility of putting their faith in the ability of a “moderate” Establishment Republican to ever win, tried hard to prevent such an arrogant dismissal by Himes by attempting to buck Republican Party Central and nominate a fighting MAGA-conservative candidate.

This was seen as something of a minor insurgency by the Establishment Country Club Poo-bas, who – despite all evidence to the contrary – remain wedded to the idea that electing a conservative in Deep Blue Connecticut is impossible, even though nominating “moderates” hasn’t resulted in a Republican congressional or senatorial election victory in decades.

Moreover, Democrats control of the Governor’s office, the state government and all the major cities further underscores the uselessness of running “moderate” RINO Republican candidates.

Disgusted with the multi-level failure of the Republican Party in Connecticut, the MAGA-Conservative grassroots Base was electrified by the prospect of actually nominating someone who would rather fight than simply try to “out-moderate” the Democrat opposition. This insurgency managed to garner so many grassroots votes for the conservative candidate at the Party Convention that even the normally docile CT Establishment Republicans, centered in Dr. Goldstein’s home town of Greenwich that has historically dominated the Convention process, had to accept the convention’s vote and endorse the first undiluted, Tea Party MAGA-conservative in its history.

Deciding to openly contrast himself with the Convention endorsed candidate, Dr. Goldstein apparently felt compelled to run yet ANOTHER standard Republican campaign devoted to RINO Republicanism and insisting that a MAGA-Conservative could not win against Himes in Blue Captured Connecticut… despite the fact that Himes had already defeated all the previous Republican moderates that ran against him.

By presenting himself as a champion of “moderation,” Dr. Goldstein put his candidacy above the desires of MAGA-conservatives and refused to unite behind the endorsed conservative favored by the grassroots voters who were sick of endlessly losing with RINO candidates on the ticket. Dr. Goldstein therefore remained in the race and thus divided the party by forcing a primary that was needless, distracting and costly in terms of both time and money. What was most urgently required a joint effort against Himes. 

Apparently, the same RINOs whose logic is that standing firm on MAGA-conservative principles undermines party unity are themselves happy to undercut it when they – against all past electoral evidence – gleefully abandon unity with MAGA-conservatives in the name of “pragmatic”
electoral politics.

This so-called “pragmatism” Dr. Goldstein championed adheres to the following logic:

Connecticut is not Texas; the presence of so many Democrats and “moderate” Independents in Connecticut demands that Republicans must appeal to “moderate” voters in order to win elections; therefore, conservatives cannot be nominated because they will never win.

Desperate to win the primary, this is the logic that Dr. Goldstein followed.

During the primary campaign he allowed his surrogates to launch a fact-free, false and rather ugly innuendo attack directed at one of his opponent’s supporters, while he sat in his backyard making yawn-inspiring videos from his lawn chair and giving occasional speeches to the faithful discussing such world-shattering issues as the heavy traffic on I-95 and the minutia of arcane Heath Care regulations.

Being the clear favorite of the Establishment machine, Dr. Goldstein narrowly won in an historically low-turnout primary, mainly by maximizing the vote in his hometown of Greenwich.

But to what effect?

He wound up alienating… and in November, may likely lose… the enthusiastic conservative-MAGA voters he will desperately need to have any chance of winning against a formidable and well financed incumbent like Mr. Himes.

This is the kind of thinking that represents the self-destructive mentality that he, and unfortunately, too many other CT “moderate” Republicans, cling to despite its repeated failure.

This is the mentality that allows the Ultra-Liberal Himes to insult, ignore and scoff at the Republican Party “challengers” for his seat by denying them even the dignity of a debate.

This is the flawed logic that will most likely make Dr. Michael Goldstein the FORTY SIXTH “moderate” Republican candidate IN A ROW to lose a federal election in Connecticut!

Mr. Bentivegna can whine all he wants, but it is clear that a polished and well-practiced fraud like Mr. Himes knows that no Establishment Republican opponent can ever pose as a “moderate” as well as he can, all while he very effectively lies about his down-the-line Liberal voting record with the most Marxist elements of his party.

Yet while the future for Republicans in CT is bleak, it need not be hopeless.

To avoid such hopelessness, it must recognize that in the current milieu, there is no future for any Republican who does not have the courage to fight as a MAGA-Conservative.

It must recognize that it has no ground game when it comes to recruiting younger voters to the MAGA-Conservative cause because the aging, Establishment RINOs who are in control of the party don’t believe in that cause and fear it as a threat to what little remains of their “power.”

The CT Republican Party requires a new direction, a new strategy and, most of all, newer, younger candidates who connect with the issues of Millennials and Gen Z voters. It should seek out new such directions, forge such new strategies and encourage such younger candidates.

The young are starving for a party that has the stamina and the vigor to fight for its principles. I note that we can see this in the case of young Chris Pettinella, who is the President of The Edmund Burke Society at his high school in Trumbull. After years of effort, he finally earned the right to form a conservative club and display a bulletin board in the high school as a balance to the SHADES Club bulletin board that featured Kamala Harris.

How I wish the geriatric RINOs had that kind of devotion to principle and dedication to take on its opponents.

Instead, we are saddled with the 75-year-old Dr. Goldstein, floundering through what appears to be an ultimately futile campaign, where all indications are that he will become the latest in a long list of losers run by an Establishment RINO Republican Party that is incapable of winning elections because its sole strategy is to ape the policies of their Democrat Liberal rivals as closely as possible while still masquerading as “Republicans.”

It is a “logic” that is rapidly moving the CT Republican Party beyond being virtually powerless to becoming extinct.

The fact is that there are simply not enough wealthy lawyers and rich corporate types in the Greenwich yacht clubs to drag the listless Establishment “moderates” they favor to an electoral victory.

In accordance with the national trend, Republican Party Central in Connecticut must evolve with the grassroots of the party toward one dominated by MAGA-Conservatives, who are willing to fight their Democrat opponents rather than imitate them. The Republican Party must be made to move beyond the perpetual failure handed to them by an increasingly paralyzed Establishment, which has demonstrated its impotency by losing election after election after election after election…

Wake up Connecticut Republicans!

Adapt to the new MAGA-Conservative reality… or suffer continued electoral losses that are the consequence of feeble RINO obsolescence.

As the Centinal Staff Writer well argues, it is better to let RINOs lose than to go on excusing their failure and denying the existential danger they present to Republicans winning elections in Connecticut… or anywhere else for that matter. There are simply not enough RINOs to matter, let alone to allow them to force the Party to follow a “logic” that proceeds down a path to electoral defeat, which the grassroots voters reject for the empty, flaccid failure that it is.

We must reject the RINO “logic” of perpetual electoral defeat.

If not, it may be that Connecticut, like California, will wind up becoming a one-party state that doesn’t even bother to run Republicans anymore because they have appeased and shaved issues and sold out to such an extent that they ultimately stand for nothing that merits casting a ballot for them.

Being a pale version of your enemy inspires no one; standing for nothing is, as seen in the past 45 federal level elections in Connecticut, a recipe for eternal electoral disaster.

The “logic” of RINO appeasement, RINO submission and RINO weakness on the issues will inevitably result in the Connecticut Republican Party becoming as extinct at the lumbering, clueless dinosaurs they resemble so much.

Antony Stark is the co-author of the book “The Seventh Crisis – Why Millennials Must Re-Establish Ordered Liberty.”

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