https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274220/civil-rights-movement-and-stolen-valor-bruce-thornton
After the recent Democrats’ presidential primary debate, California Senator Kamala Harris was the media’s consensus winner. It’s early days yet, but Harris is shaping up to be the Democrats’ favorite for defeating the hated Donald Trump and returning to the glory days of Barack Obama’s presidency. This makes sense, as Harris most closely duplicates the persona, tactics, and policies of the progressive messiah.
Harris’s moment came when she chastised and befuddled the now-fading frontrunner, Joe Biden. Biden’s mortal sin in this age of the “woke” Inquisition was his opposition in the Seventies to forced busing of schoolchildren, usually black, to achieve the integration of schools. Her clever use of her own personal experience in Berkeley, with a maudlin evocation of herself as a “little girl,” was pure demagoguery against which the slow-witted Biden had no response.
It didn’t matter to the media that Harris’s claim that she participated in the desegregation of Berkeley’s “public schools” was misleading. Berkeley’s one high school was already de facto integrated, and its three junior highs were desegregated in 1964, when Harris was three. Harris participated in the desegregation of the elementary schools. Also left unsaid was the fact that affluent, progressive Berkeley had little of the violence that marked other cities.
But Harris brought up her personal experience in order to exploit the connection of busing with racist violence of the sort that took place in Boston in 1976, as represented by the iconic, Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph of a white teenager using a flag-pole flying Old Glory to seemingly spear a black attorney. Though the assailant missed the attorney, and whites were injured and killed in retaliation, the striking photograph and busing in general became another historic example of endemic white racism. This was the point of Harris’s reference to her own experience, to give these connotations of “busing” some pathos by referring to herself as “a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” and whom Joe Biden wanted to deny pedagogical equal opportunity.