Derek Schmidt is welcome to a guest commentary in The Star — as long as it’s truthful

Derek Schmidt, Kansas’ attorney general and Republican candidate for governor, is welcome to a guest commentary slot in The Kansas City Star — period. It simply has to stick to the facts.

Schmidt called into Pete Mundo’s show on KCMO Talk Radio July 6 to say The Star had “reversed course and refused to run any response” to a recent column criticizing him. That’s false. And I am still 100% open to running a submission from him.

My editorial board colleague Dave Helling wrote a column last month about the attorney general’s support of the “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools” — a statement that the PAC 1776 Action asks candidates to sign. It says, in part, that signatories will take steps so that K-12 schools “restore honest, patriotic education” about U.S. history.

Helling’s take is that honest education about our nation’s history means teaching all its truths — including the uncomfortable facts about the Founding Fathers’ hypocrisy in championing equality while many of them owned slaves and women were not voting members of society, along with many other historical inequities.

Schmidt’s campaign manager — someone I’ve known for years through his work in the Kansas Republican Party — emailed me June 28 to ask about a rebuttal, as I’m the editor who selects the commentaries we publish in the Opinion section. Of course, I told him. “Please send it my way.”

The piece he sent me two days later simply was not fair. It was a denunciation of the specious characterization of “critical race theory” that has become the current obsession throughout much of the conservative alternative media world. Helling’s column wasn’t about that. He wrote about the 1776 Pledge.

While I’m not in the habit of disclosing private communications, I think it’s important here.

“I’m happy to give you the exact same play as the column: online and the print spot at the bottom of the page on Monday,” I replied. “But we need to work on the content of this a bit. The column … was about the 1776 Project, not critical race theory. The 1776 Project explicitly doesn’t mention critical race theory, so make the column about AG Schmidt’s full-throated support for it. That’s exactly what he should be laying out clearly: that he thinks its goals are 100% laudable.”

I asked for a rewrite by Friday at noon, since we were heading into the three-day July Fourth holiday weekend. I get Monday commentaries set by Friday at the latest.

After noon on Friday, the campaign manager sent me a barely-edited version of the original commentary, with critical race theory still its centerpiece. It made exactly the same straw-man argument as before.

“Sorry,” I replied. “If you want to submit something that isn’t about this description of critical race theory, but is instead about the 1776 Project, I’m happy to publish it.” When he objected, I told him I was on a deadline for the weekend and wasn’t going to argue about it then.

I emailed and called the campaign manager July 6. I still haven’t gotten a reply.

But the bottom line is pretty simple: I’m happy to publish Schmidt’s defense of signing the 1776 Pledge, and why he thinks it’s a good thing. However, I am not publishing a piece by anybody suggesting Kansas public schools are teaching “critical race theory” — an obscure legal concept that even lifelong students of race relations had never heard until this year, when conservative activists have weaponized it. And yes, of course I realize that running on a platform of “getting canceled by The Star” can be an effective campaign technique to a certain audience.

In the past week alone, I’ve run commentaries from GOP Sen. Jerry Moran and former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. Before I joined the editorial board, I served as the paper’s ombudsman since 2004. Throughout my tenure in that job, I would estimate that 80% of the criticisms of The Star I heard were from the right, and the columns I published roughly reflected that proportion.

Most important: I see it as my duty to represent the best points from all sides. That means not giving air to commentaries that aren’t offered in good faith.

So I’ll say it again: The Star is more than willing to publish Derek Schmidt’s robust defense of the 1776 Project and its 1776 Pledge. But we’re not letting anyone say K-12 schools are teaching an inaccurate version of something that isn’t even in the curriculum in the first place.

This story was originally published July 12, 2021 at 5:08 PM.