The US Democratic presidential campaign of will host a racially segregated struggle session tonight at 8 pm ET for white men to falsely confess to the sins of other people.
“We need to be honest with ourselves and each other about the role we’ve played in our nation’s history — good and bad," said White Dudes For Harris in today.
I am responsible for my actions, not all men of my race. The alternative idea — that all white men alive today are responsible for the bad (or good) deeds of white men throughout history — is totally irrational and racist.
Notably, no such statement accompanied the Zoom calls for other races and sexes.
But like the "White Women for Harris" and the "Black Women for Harris," White Dudes For Harris is racist and sexist and anathema to the unifying "I Have A Dream" vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.
All sentient people, liberal or conservative, should denounce these awful, unAmerican Zoom calls.
It appears that Transportation Secretary will join this attack on white men as a class of individuals on the basis of their race and sex. This is degrading and dangerous.
The most important moment in Vice President Kamala Harris’ career came when she spoke out against racial segregation. In a 2020 presidential primary debate, Harris attacked President Joe Biden for opposing court-ordered busing to racially integrate schools.
“I'm going to now direct this at Vice President Biden,” Harris said. “To hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and careers on the segregation of race in this country. You also worked with them to oppose busing. You know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools.”
But it turned out that Harris had the exact same position as Biden on busing. A few days later, she admitted at an event in Iowa that she was opposed to mandating it. Harris called busing “one tool among many” to desegregate schools. In other words, Harris’ whole attack on Biden was based on a lie.
The media and Biden gave her a pass. The Washington Post wrote that “Harris’ views” had “come under criticism.” And Biden went on to select her as his Vice Presidential candidate.
But what was clear from both Harris’ original attack on Biden and from her follow-up was that Harris supported racial integration. Why, then, are the volunteers and supporters of Kamala Harris’ campaign being asked to segregate by race?
Progressive Democrat Matt Stoller wrote on X yesterday, “I got randomly put into white guys for Harris WhatsApp group and then was almost immediately thrown out after I said a whites-only group was nuts. This is apparently common now.”
Indeed, it is. A “White Women For Kamala Harris” Zoom call had 200,000 white women on it and raised millions of dollars for her campaign. There were so many people on it that Zoom crashed multiple times.
The women said they were inspired by “Black Women for Kamala Harris” Zoom, which had 40,000 black women on it. There were also race and sex-based Zoom calls for South Asian women, white men, and black men.
Now, you might say, “What’s the big deal if people want to organize politically according to their race and sex?” The answer is a lot.
The idea behind racially segregating Zoom calls is similar in some ways to the bad racist idea that was behind racially segregating schools, which is that black and white people are so different from each other that we should be separated.
But it’s different because today’s racial segregation is self-segregation, not imposed by the government, and is more about “safe spaces” for people of color. The white spaces are usually so participants can share feelings of guilt and hold each other “accountable” for “white privilege.”
We spent hundreds of years trying to get over bad racialist ideas. Getting beyond the idea that there are inherent differences between black and white people is literally the heart of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream speech,” when he talks of a future where white and black children will play together, not just because the playgrounds have been integrated, but also because race no longer matters.
And Harris herself constantly emphasizes King’s message that we should not be divided by race. Here she is just last year: “Why do you think we have so much more in common than what separates us? Well, I'll tell you. I know it based on every personal and professional experience I've had.”
So what changed with Kamala Harris? Why did she go from demanding racial integration of schools to racially segregating her campaign?
Well, I looked into it and what I discovered really surprised me.
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Nearly a full week has passed since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In that time, Harris has made clear that she will run on her record as a tough and effective prosecutor.
But anyone who comes to California knows that we are in a crisis. Our violent crime rate today is 31% higher than in the rest of the United States. Today, one out of four San Franciscans say they were a victim of crime last year
Now, you might think, “Well, you can’t blame Kamala Harris for that. That’s Gavin Newsom’s fault. After all, he’s the governor, whereas she’s the Vice President and was a US Senator before that."
But Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011 and was the Attorney General — California’s top law enforcement officer — from 2011 to 2017. And it was during those years that crime in California started rising.
According to a liberal think tank, the Public Policy Institute of California, violent crime here rose 26%.
And it’s not like Kamala Harris was helpless to do anything about crime while she was a US Senator from 2017 to 2021 or as Vice President since then.
Now, it’s true that, 20 years ago, Harris ran as a tough-on-crime District Attorney in San Francisco. In 2020, Tulsi Gabbard criticized Harris for incarcerating people for marijuana.
But the number of people in prison for drugs was never very large. Even in 1997, the height of the war on drugs, just one percent of all prisoners in the US were in for a first or second nonviolent drug offense. And California legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996 and for all use in 2016, so it was really a non-issue.
And then, between 2010 and 2014, Harris changed. By 2019, she described herself as a “progressive prosecutor.” In 2020, Harris denied that police prevent crime. “For too long, the status quo thinking has been. You get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong.”
But that’s not a mainstream view among criminologists. In fact, an overwhelming amount of evidence, including a study commissioned by the Obama administration, shows that more police do reduce crime, from shoplifting to murder.
In the same interview, Harris claims that there is less crime in wealthier neighborhoods because they put money into schools, not police.
“By the way, if you want to look at upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods, they don't have that patrol car. They don't have those police walking those streets. But what they do have — they have well funded schools.”
This is also wrong. The reason police don’t walk the streets of those neighborhoods as much is because there is less crime there. And when there is a crime there, you’d better believe that those upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods want the police showing up immediately.
It’s inconceivable that Harris didn’t know this. She was San Francisco DA. She knows perfectly well that there are more police in poor inner-city neighborhoods because there is more crime there.
Not only was Harris lying, she was doing so in service of making the argument that we should defund the police.
And defunding the police had consequences. Most crime experts agree that the calls to defund the police resulted in police pulling back, thereby emboldening criminals and causing murder and other crimes to rise.
Somewhere around 3,000 black lives were lost to homicide thanks to the defund the police movement.
During the 2020 primary debate, Harris talked of her support for “Initiatives around re-entering former offenders and getting them jobs and counseling.”
But according to NBC News, at least 7,000 former prisoners became homeless in Los Angeles alone in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Now you might think, Harris isn’t responsible for that. But she mostly was. After all, it was Harris who, as Attorney General, wrote highly biased summaries for two ballot initiatives, propositions 47 and 57, which caused the increase in crime and homelessness.
In 2014, Proposition 47 decriminalized open-air drug dealing, drug use, and shoplifting. And in 2016, Proposition 57 released many prisoners, including violent ones, despite the lack of the rehabilitation and societal re-entry system that Harris claimed to have created.
Together the two propositions, along with incentives for homelessness in the form of cash and free housing, caused homelessness in California to rise 50% over the last ten years, from 113,000 in 2014 to 181,399 in 2023. California today has 12% of America’s population and one-third of America’s homeless.
And I’m not the only reporter to come to this conclusion. Even NBC News, which is pro-Harris, last year said that “California’s reforms created a prison-to-homelessness pipeline, as counties were overwhelmed with an influx of returning inmates.”
The situation Harris created in California means that she cannot claim to be a strong defender of vulnerable people. Of the 25% of San Franciscans who say they were victims of crime last year, 42% of them were victimized more than once, and only half bothered to report it.
And Harris is responsible in another way for the crisis and that’s through her role as a top immigration official in the Biden administration.
It’s true that “Border Czar” was never her formal title, but Biden clearly put Harris in charge of dealing with the root causes of immigration, and she didn’t do that.
And now the increase in border crossings from 400,000 in 2020 to over two million per year, due directly to the Biden-Harris administration’s more liberal immigration policies, is overwhelming homelessness shelters and services.
I was on Skid Row in Los Angeles last week and discovered migrant women and children living in dangerous conditions. One migrant mother with a two-year-old child told me that other homeless women had fought with knives outside of her tent.
Experts agree that the increase in the US homeless population last year was a direct result of the influx of migrants from around the world.
Harris should have massively expanded homeless shelters to deal with the influx of former prisoners and migrants to the street, but she didn’t. In May, Harris announced $5.5 billion in new funding, supposedly to address homelessness. But she dedicated just $290 million to homeless shelters and services and just $30 million for addiction rehab and recovery.
Why is that? Why did Harris go from a tough-on-crime prosecutor to someone who called for defunding the police and has starved cities of the money they need for homeless shelters?
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