Chris Christie goes full anti-conservative on Face the Nation
Quin Hillyer
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a slash-and-burn Republican candidate for president, made an absolute mess Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation of arguments against the prevalence of “social issues” in current conservative discourse.
Never one to pass up a chance to smear a Republican rival, Christie took patently unfair shots at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on one “social” issue while completely misstating the facts on another. Christie should be ashamed, except that he has never been one to show appropriate shame for much of anything.
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Christie’s general thesis is that DeSantis and other conservatives are the ones emphasizing social-issue “culture wars” related to race and gender only to “create conflict” in order to score political points. This is hogwash.
As my colleague Tim Carney and others repeatedly have shown, it isn’t conservatives trying to use politics to force change against existing standards, but leftists who are using strong-arm tactics to force sudden changes in millennia of human practices. The Left then accuses conservatives of “politicizing” the issues when conservatives are merely trying to defend against the new assault and protect what had been the status quo.
When CBS’ Margaret Brennan unfairly presented Florida’s education standards pertaining to race and slavery by taking one sentence completely out of context, Christie accepted her premise rather than pushing back. He used the premise as occasion to trash DeSantis.
“Gov. DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed,” Christie said.
Not even close.
After leftists began teaching extreme race- and gender-based theories in schools, DeSantis responded, rather than instigated, a tremendously thoughtful push-back that actually requires teaching “the history of African peoples,” including “the passage to America,” “the enslavement experience,” and “how the individual freedoms of persons have been infringed by slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination.” Also, they explain that “an enslaved person” was treated as “property with no rights,” and that slavery violated “founding principles of liberty, justice and equality.”
A short while later, Christie again was belittling conservatives’ concerns, this time about the agenda of extreme transgender activists, and again was wildly off in his facts.
Describing it as one of “these smaller issues,” Christie uttered this whopper: “Let’s remember something else on the transgender issue with minors, Margaret. You’re talking about over the last three years less than 1,000 minors … who have been involved in this, in terms of transitioning, in a country of 330 million people.”
Christie is off by an astonishing factor of 90. In the three most recent years for which numbers are available, some 90,000 United States children have “transitioned,” and multiples more have “switched pronouns” and taken other steps short of full transitioning, often with the explicit encouragement of school officials but without their parents’ knowledge.
Christie had the gall on Face the Nation to present himself as a champion of parents’ rights, all while belittling the concern with transgender issues — one of the most central of which involves having government schools and officials treat parents as enemies.
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When Christie goes on the attack, sometimes he is quite effective, and sometimes both effective and accurate. His elitist snobbery against supposed culture warriors and his blood-lust against perceived political opponents, though, was on awful display today on CBS, along with a severe lack of concern for accurate context and actual facts.
It was a thoroughly discreditable performance, yet another reason why Christie is a bridge too far for many Republican voters.