The New York Times and other elements of the Democratic Party want to mire Colorado State Treasurer Walker Stapleton in nonsensical noise about the Ku Klux Klan.

They want the Republican gubernatorial candidate answering questions about the Klan, pushing a narrative built on selective racial piety.

A Times story Tuesday began with the headline “Family History Haunts G.O.P. Candidate for Governor in Colorado.”

The article explains how Stapleton’s great-grandfather, former five-term Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton, was a Klansman. True. He was a Klan member for a short time in the 1920s, before he double-crossed the organization with a raid that exposed Klan members in the police department. The Klan voted June 30, 1925, to banish Stapleton. He died in 1950, 25 years after getting booted by the Klan and 24 years before Walker Stapleton’s birth.

After smearing Walker Stapleton with history the candidate had nothing to do with, the Times story gushes about the prospect of his Democratic opponent becoming the first “gay and Jewish governor in the nation.”

The article quotes a historian talking about the Old West, when Colorado had segregation and lynchings. After establishing that context, the article opines about Stapleton representing a “an older, more traditional West.” Democratic opponent Jared Polis represents “a new more liberal West.” The one that doesn’t want lynchings, of course.

The formula makes Colorado’s gubernatorial contest “a nationally watched contest.”

“The question is which West voters want,” the Times explains. This is classic propaganda. It associates the Republican with grotesque history, the Democrat with modern virtue, and suggests the outcome determines the future of “The West.” It makes fake news seem big.

The story of Stapleton’s great-grandfather, “who led one of the state’s darkest periods,” highlights the media’s double standard for politicians on the left and right.

When U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd died eight years ago, the Times commemorated him under the headline “Robert C. Byrd, a Pillar of the Senate, Dies at 92.”

The hateful senator was “a pillar.” He was a cherished “institution,” and more good things.

“He had become an institution within an institution, as President Obama suggested in a statement of Tribute on Monday,” the Times explained.

Democrats made Byrd a modern-day majority and minority leader in the Senate. The Times and other media routinely addressed him with adulation. At the time of his death, he had served a record-breaking 57 years in Congress.

No one can dispute Byrd’s flagrant racism, which wasn’t far in the past. He filibustered all night against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 40 years after the Klan booted Stapleton. Almost 40 years later — in this century — Byrd told Fox News Sunday our country’s race problems are “largely behind us,” we “talk too much about race,” and then he repeatedly used the N-word on national TV.

Unlike Walker Stapleton, Byrd was not the distant offspring of a Klansman he had never met. Byrd, himself, organized and served as a leader of the Klan. He recruited 150 members, who elected him as the “Exalted Cyclops.” He, not his great-grandfather, interfered in civil rights progress and efforts to correct racism. He, not his great-grandfather, saw no shame in the N-word. We’re not talking about behavior in 1925, but years into the 21st Century.

As a Democrat who consistently obtained more power, Byrd could do no wrong in the eyes of the liberal establishment. His name adorns at least 55 buildings and public works projects. That includes two federal courthouses.

The Byrd memorials have seldom piqued the interest of The New York Times, other media, or other elements of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the Times found a 12-year-old at Denver School of Science and Technology Stapleton who needed counseling after learning the school’s namesake joined the Klan almost a century ago.

The next time activist reporters ask Stapleton to talk about the Klan, he should indulge them. He should inform the public about a Klan-inspired law that remains in Colorado’s constitution, doing exactly as the hate group intended.

Colorado’s Blaine Amendment, which the Klan fought for, keeps minority children from educational choices available to peers who are disproportionately white.

In the 1870s and into the 20th Century, public schools routinely denied enrollment to minority immigrant children.

“Catholic city councils (like Boston’s) gave whatever support they could to Jesuit private schools to allow at least some of the children to attend institutions that functioned essentially as public schools,” explains an article in The Harvard Crimson, titled “The Lessons of Blaine’s Racism.”

When religious schools enrolled minority and immigrant children, the Klan pushed for Blaine Amendments to ensure public money could not pay for any child’s education in a sectarian school. The teachers’ union used Colorado’s Blaine law in 2015 to stop the Douglas County School District’s plan to award scholarships for a diverse array of Christian and non-Christian sectarian schools.

The Klan’s legacy survives, but not in the son-of-the-son-of-the-son of a man who turned on the Klan and got kicked out. Let’s worry more about the Democratic establishment’s embrace of 37 Blaine laws, 55 memorials to the former Exalted Cyclops, and a media with Selective Klan Outrage Syndrome.

The New York Times smeared Stapleton on Tuesday with the media empire’s notorious yellow fingerprints. Don’t be fooled by politically biased media hit jobs, which will escalate as November draws near.

The Gazette editorial board