On a personal level, I think he’s a good guy. Even in the depths of his issues, he was willing to go out of his way to help other students–including non-white ones. But certainly deeply misguided, and the evidence available to anyone who looks says he still has some disturbing views.
Charley has roundly (and fairly, based on the limited information he had) criticized Seamus Romney for his post attacking John Sanzone and co. Charley argues that while his “past” is appalling, Mr. Sanzone has perhaps changed his ways. He says he’s now a “progressive”. But it’s not true, by any definition of “progressive” that any of us would recognize.
I will concede that he has probably changed his views on homosexuality now that he has come out. And he has apparently replaced the virulent racism of Stormfront with the casual racism of the average Tea Party Congressman (even down to the “but some of my best friends are Jewish” defense in the Chronicle article). But this is Massachusetts, and we have higher standards than that.
If you’ve been following the story, you already know about his 120+ posts on white supremacist site Stormfront, in 2004-2005. The Chronicle article has now been updated with information about his being asked to leave college in 2007 over a KKK-apologist rally he organized, and his posting on Stormfront as recently as 2009. By the way, I strongly opposed, and still do, the decision to ask him to take personal leave. I’ll take back my youthful desire for the Dean of Students to be fired over it, but I believe in free speech on college campuses even when it offends some people. Or even makes them cry, as the email Sanzone tried to send to the student body did to some of the professors who saw it.
John Sanzone claims he doesn’t remember his 2009 post on Stormfront. But it wasn’t his only racist activity at that time. The same year, he posted a Holocaust-denying comment on the blog Tigerhawk and claimed the American government was Stalinist. Perhaps he doesn’t remember because there were so many.
In 2010, he was less focused on the racism and more into denying global warming. But he did find time to accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of exaggerating the KKK’s influence because any random people could get together and claim to be the KKK? I’m not even sure what he was going for there…
In 2014, he posted on his blog Sanzone and Park in apparent support of a lawsuit claiming that affirmative action is racist against Asian Americans–the canard conservatives everywhere are now using to attack it.
I’ll give him credit. He has come a long way. I think he has a valuable contribution to make to the community. He’s a smart guy and I think he’s genuinely trying to do the right thing. But politics isn’t the place for him to make that contribution. I don’t blame him for trying.
I do blame whoever recruited him into the race, without having an honest discussion with him about his strengths and weaknesses. Whoever did that is like the “admissions” people at for-profit colleges, taking students who are way out of their depth for all they’re worth, sucking up their money for degrees that are useless if they even complete them, with hopelessly rosy promises of academic and professional success.
So I have to ask: Who talked him into this? Who had an incentive to get John Sanzone into the race?
I have to tell you that I regret being pulled into what appears to be a private hell for Mr. Sanzone. I don’t live in Cambridge and have no vote in any of the elections.
This entire exchange leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve been pulled into an essentially voyeuristic intrusion into a miasma that I wish I didn’t know about. I understand that as a candidate, he brought this upon himself, so I have no issue it now being public.
I don’t know about anyone else here at BMG, but I’m eager to move on.
So am I. This little window is endemic of how ugly and petty the entire tenor of the campaign has been. Nadeem Mazen has unfairly been maligned with an Islamophobic whisper campaign, two of the challengers are a couple that is running against the planning board that rejected their restaurant permit, and a lot of accusations back and forth about taking out of state and developer money on all sides.
Cambridge is hurting, and it’s going to continue to hurt so long as we have a broken city charter that isn’t designed to meet the needs of a modern city. I am hopeful that there won’t be rancor after the election, a swift Mayoral and ‘Vice Mayor’ vote, and then a cooperative council term. Hopefully the bad eggs are silenced by the people’s vote.
…before realizing it had been front-paged. Not a big deal, but I usually don’t bother if my rec won’t give the diary visibility it doesn’t already have. Then I realized that all of the promotion blurbs by editors of diaries by non-editors seem to have disappeared. What happened?
I’m looking at the front page using Firefox on Windows Pro 7, all seems normal.
I use Google Chrome.