THE WOKE AND THE BUSED: Willie Brown is a very bad person!

TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2019

Sharpton, Rock remember: Full disclosure! At one point in time, a few years back, we did occasional radio spots with Willie Brown.

At the time, he was co-hosting a daily radio show with comedian Will Durst. We didn't know what we know today:

Willie Brown is a very bad person!

We know that because of what he said right after last Thursday's Democratic "debate." And ladies and gentlemen, please remember:

Willie Brown said it, not us!

He said it in the San Francisco Chronicle. That said, who is Willie Brown?

Brown was once, roughly speaking, the most powerful pol in California. We refer to his 15-year reign as speaker of the State Assembly.

Later, he served for eight years as mayor of San Francisco. He's dealt with public schools.

Today, Brown writes a column for the Chronicle, and he's clearly a very bad person. Headline included, his review of last week's Democratic debates started out like this:

BROWN (6/29/19): Bad news for Democrats—none of these candidates can beat Trump

The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.

California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.

Willie Brown said it, not us!

In fairness, a political assessment isn't correct just because Willie Brown says it. But Brown's political assessment concerning "forced busing" plays nicely with the question we started asking last week:

If mandated busing was such a great thing in the 1970s, why don't Democratic pols support the practice today?

Every woke progressive knows he must say that our public schools are more segregated than ever. So why don't politicians like Harris propose "forced busing" today?

Oh wait! It now seems that Candidate Harris wants you to maybe think that maybe she almost does! We refer to what we read on the front page of today's Washington Post:

VISER AND LINSKEY (7/2/19): Harris’s debate thrust put Democratic candidates in a position they have not experienced for decades—having to contemplate a position on busing. Harris on Sunday said that she still supports busing and sees a modern-day use for it.

“The schools of America are as segregated, if not more segregated, today than when I was in elementary school,” she told reporters in San Francisco on Sunday. “And we need to put every effort, including busing, into play to desegregate the schools. . . . There’s no such thing as separate but equal, and so busing is one of the ways by which we create desegregation and we make it more equal.”

Harris’s campaign on Monday said that she supported federal resources for busing and cited legislation from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio). That legislation would authorize $120 million for a variety of purposes, including one to expand school busing services.

See there? Candidate Harris supports the Murphy-Fudge bill, whose rather small amount of cash would, at least in some smaller part, go to "expand school busing services!"

Question: Do the "school busing services" in question include mandated busing for purposes of "desegregation?" We won't even bother to look. but the Harris campaign apparently wants you to swallow that latest guff.

In such ways, we keep getting the impression that this particular candidate may perhaps have a small tiny bit of the demagogue in her.

For ourselves, we're sick of the kind of conduct Harris unloosed last Thursday, with others running to join the mob. As we'll report tomorrow, it reminds us of past mob action, including the demagogic gang attack on Candidate Clinton during an NBC debate in the fall of 2007.

(Russert and Williams launched the attack. A fellow named Biden joined in.)

We're sick to death of this dumb, demagogic type of mob action. Future scholars keep insisting that it didn't end well, even though the woke and the just always rushed to approve such attacks.

Back to Willie Brown! What makes Brown think that mandated busing would be an easy weapon for Trump? Let's consider some of the reasons why people disliked the practice back then.

THis being a large, diverse nation, various people disliked the practice for various reasons. For one example, consider something Al Sharpton said last Friday on Deadline: White House.

Inevitably, Nicolle Wallace's "favorite reporters and friends" took turns showering praise on Harris for the "surgical" way she'd gone after Biden the night before. Along the way, Sharpton said this:

SHARPTON (6/29/19): [Harris] and I are like nine years apart. We both were bused in the north, and a lot of the people did not want to deal with the racism in the north.

Busing in Brooklyn or Boston or Berkeley, where she was from, was a traumatic experience. Because we were going into neighborhoods where we were called names and all of that. That's what she was raising, that we lived.

As far as we know, Harris hasn't said anything about being called names during her Berkeley schooling. Nor did she say, last Thursday night, that she "was a beneficiary of busing," the propagandistically perfect formulation Ed Kilgore quickly assembled.

That said, Sharpton was describing one part of the mandated busing experience, opposition to which was so widespread in cities like Boston during the 1970s.

Imagine! Along with everything else, some people thought it might not be a great idea to put young children in situations where they'd have "traumatic experiences" on a daily basis! But that was p[art of what resulted from the era's ham-handed approach.

Chris Rock was bused in Brooklyn too. In September 2004, he shared some memories of the experience on CNN's Larry King Live:

KING (9/24/04): You were bused, right?

ROCK: Yeah, I was bused to—from Bed-Stuy to Garrison Beach.

KING: Which is an all—all-white area.

ROCK: Yeah, but it's a poor white area. It's more—it was actually a worse neighborhood than the one I lived in.

(LAUGHTER)

KING: So you had reverse busing.

ROCK: Yeah, it wasn't like—it wasn't even white trash. It was like white toxic waste.

(LAUGHTER)

It was like really—

KING: Were you beat up? Because you're a frail—

ROCK: I got beat up every single day. I got beat up every day. I got called "nigger" every day, girls and boys, every single day. Every day.

KING: Did this leave you with some kind of understandable white hatred?

ROCK: I guess some hatred. At the same time, though, you've got to realize there was— My best friend—since I was in the school, couldn't go anywhere—my best friend would end up being a white kid. Always. Normally a Jewish kid. Because they were getting their ass kicked, too, but only after careful interrogation. You know what I'm saying?

(LAUGHTER)

So it was just me and the Jews.

Some people actually thought that the era's blunderbuss approach to this matter was perhaps a case of putting the "blunder" back in "busing!" It came to be seen, not always unfairly, as a prime example of unintelligent over-reach by the highly self-impressed forerunners of today's self-impressed woke and bused.

Rock went on to do a TV show about his teen years; the show was called Everybody Hates Chris. Some people came away from the blunderbuss busing experiment with the thought that this kind of blunderbuss busing may not have been the very best way to improve the state of the world.

This doesn't mean that busing for purposes of diversification might not be a good idea in some particular circumstances because, of course, it could be. It means that the era of blunderbuss mandated busing carried a very heavy downside, as everyone could see at the time.

The downside to this blunderbuss action was large. Kevin Drum makes a few points:

DRUM (7/1/19): Let me just make a few points. First, forced busing during the ’70s prompted one of the biggest political backlashes of the past half century. By the end of it, Ronald Reagan was president and Reaganomics dominated America for the next 40 years. This was bad for everyone who wasn’t already rich, and it was especially bad for ethnic minorities.

Second, when Kamala Harris was a child she was bused . . . three miles. In lots of big cities, the bus rides were upwards of an hour each way. And it didn’t work. Virtually every city abandoned busing during the ’80s, and even Berkeley’s busing program was deep-sixed more than 20 years ago.

Third, what’s the point of pretending to be for it now? It’s not good politics and it’s mostly impossible policy anyway. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, African American and Latinx kids make up 80 percent of the population. You could spider web the city with Elon Musk’s hyperloops and you still wouldn’t be able to racially integrate the schools.

Question: What are Harris' proposals for improving instructional/experiential outcomes in big urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles?

Answer: Almost surely, she has none! That's because no one cares about low-income black kids, and there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever will.

That said, those of us who reside Over Here—we who are known as the woke and the bused—have to maintain our charades. We love to pose and posture and preen, pretending that we're The Very Good People and everyone else is Just Bad.

Anthropologists who report from the future have spoken to us about this prevailing "all-too-human" culture among the woke and the just. Despondently, these future scholars keep saying it didn't end well.

Tomorrow: Uh-oh! Bernie opposed it too!