I&I Editorial

Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg earlier this month floated his boundlessly audacious “Douglass Plan” – that’s Frederick Douglass – “comparable in scale to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.”

Buttigieg appropriates terms associated with economic freedom, like “prosperity” and “investment.” He envisions “injecting capital into the Black community, and taking bold steps toward fulfilling long-broken promises of true equity.”

He’s not the only 2020 Democrat guilty of inequality in capitalization, it so happens; Buttigieg’s rival Kamala Harris observes on her website that “Overall Black households will continue to have just a fraction of the wealth held by white households.” Capital B for Black, but small w for white.

Same with Elizabeth Warren: “Decades of outright discrimination by the federal government denied Black [capital B] families the same kinds of homeownership subsidies available to white [small w] families.”

You also won’t find the words “socialist” or “socialism” anywhere on Mayor Pete’s campaign website. “The big lesson for us is literally anything we do, they’re going to call socialist,” he told ABC last month, referring to himself a “democratic capitalist.”

But Pete the democratic capitalist’s Douglass Plan is a massive wealth redistribution on top of black reparations for slavery.

You see,while racial discrimination long ago ceased being the greatest barrier to black economic advancement, as the Manhattan Institute’s Jason Riley just observed in the Wall Street Journal, citing sociologist William Julius Wilson’s 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race, Buttigieg finds racism hiding under every bed, rug and floorboard.

This “institutional racism and implicit bias” even “means that a Black mother’s emotional pain after giving birth isn’t taken seriously by her doctors, so her postpartum depression goes undiagnosed.”

The nation’s unwitting racist doctors and nurses don’t even realize they’re racists.

Another problem Buttigieg has discovered is that “82% of teachers still identify as white.” The solution: give black educational institutions $25 billion and “provide guidance to schools on how to incorporate Black history throughout the K-12 curriculum” – in other words federal government indoctrination throughout American children’s lives.

Buttigieg is convinced that “slavery, in particular, is poorly taught throughout the United States.” His authority on this? An explicitly politicized report last year, “Teaching Hard History,” by the radical Southern Poverty Law Center that, among its other fatal shortcomings, slams HUD Secretary Ben Carson, and bizarrely notes: “Some teachers admit that teaching about slavery makes them feel their whiteness very keenly.”

‘Helping’ Blacks By Increasing Violent Crime

The Indiana mayor would also “end the hyper-criminalization and mass incarceration of Black Americans” and “undo the prison-industrial complex.” He would “eliminate wealth-based incarceration by making sure bail is never set beyond an individual’s ability to pay” and change “the legal standard under which officers are justified to use lethal force.” This would entail “policies and training that require de-escalation efforts and limit lethal force to circumstances when it is absolutely necessary.”

How many cops would die after being taught now not to shoot when their lives are in danger? The police in Buttigieg’s own city might have some thoughts on that.

He specifically plans to “eliminate unfair and discriminatory practices, such as broken windows-style policing” – the very approach that brought New York and others cities from the murderous chaos of the 1970s back to a state of civil order, saving countless innocent lives, many if not most of them non-white.

Finally we come to the pièce de ré·sis·tance, Pete as racial Robin Hood. “The legacy of slavery is a legacy of stolen labor and stolen wealth. For every $100 in wealth a white family has, the average Black family only has $5.04,” Buttigieg contends, based on a poll conducted by a political action committee that supports Democrat candidates. He proposes “The government would co-invest up to $10 billion” in minority businesses, college debt forgiveness connected to starting a successful small business, plus “over $100 billion in underserved communities.”

Add to this the heaviest government hand ever to lean on banking: “The Douglass Plan would provide five times the community reinvestment act (CRA) credit or ‘super credits’ to banks who invest more capital in minority-owned CDFIs [Community Development Finance Institutions].” The Community Reinvestment Act was a main cause of the devastating 2008 financial crisis, as equity instruments were poisoned with politicized, improperly scrutinized home mortgage loans, unbeknownst to investors.

As Riley documents in detail in his 2014 book Please Stop Helping Us, governmental largess has devastated blacks. Regarding incarceration, “the real culprit is black behavior – behavior too often celebrated in black culture.”

The great irony is that Riley gets his title from the same Frederick Douglass from whom Buttigieg claims his inspiration. “Do nothing with us!” Douglass demanded of the white-dominated society as he addressed Howard University grads in April, 1865. “Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.”

Instead of mischievously pushing his “Douglass Plan,” Pete Buttigieg ought to heed the pleas of Frederick Douglass.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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