Racist Mayor: Muriel Bowser
Third in a series.
By Matthew Vadum
Editor’s note: This is the third part in Frontpage Mag’s new series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments.
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser may have more self-control than other Democrat big-city mayors, yet she still manages to push the same racist Black Lives Matter propaganda that gives aid and comfort to rioters and insurrectionists who hate America.
Bowser, architect of some of the strictest pandemic lockdown protocols in the nation –she banned dancing at D.C. weddings— is generally shrewd enough to avoid in-your-face, overtly racist gaffes like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s announcement that she would only be granting 1-on-1 interviews to black or brown journalists, but the Washington mayor embraces critical race theory and wants to tear down statues of accomplished white people.
That doesn’t mean she always sees eye-to-eye with the radical activists of Black Lives Matter, but Bowser does her best to get their toxic message of social grievance out.
Under her leadership, the “defund the police” message that was added to the words “Black Lives Matter” that she had painted on the street in Black Lives Matter Plaza, the stretch of 16th Street Northwest in sight of the front of the White House that was appropriated by radicals, disappeared two months after activists painted the phrase.
She wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post that she decided to create Black Lives Matter Plaza when she “came face to face with a line of federal police blocking a street in my legal jurisdiction.”
“Here we were in my hometown, in the capital of the United States of America, with people all around us protesting for change, demanding reforms to the racist and broken systems that killed George Floyd and so many Black Americans before him. But instead of bringing the country together, the federal government was blocking the streets. It was clear the president [i.e. Donald Trump] was doing everything he could to tear us apart.”
While Black Lives Matter and Antifa ran wild in the nation’s capital last year, Bowser did her best to help the looters.
In June 2020, as the District was filled with federal troops and federal law enforcement, Bowser whined that then-President Trump was doing too much to combat race rioters.
The mayor wrote Trump a letter claiming that the deployed units were “inflaming” and “adding to the grievances” of the people sacking pricey Georgetown shops to protest the non-police-involved death of career criminal George Floyd.
“The protestors have been peaceful, and last night, the Metropolitan Police Department did not make a single arrest. Therefore, I am requesting that you withdraw all extraordinary law enforcement and military presence from Washington, DC,” the mayor wrote.
She complained that “unidentified federal personnel patrolling the streets of Washington, DC post both safety and national security risks.” Switching into black helicopter mode, Bowser claimed the “additional, unidentified units” were operating “outside of established chains of command” and adding to the confusion by not displaying “identifying insignia.”
In response to the rioting over the death of St. George of Minneapolis, Bowser appointed a woke committee last year to recommend statues of dead white males to tear down and public spaces to be defaced or renamed.
The committee was tasked with “evaluating named DC Government-owned facilities and making recommendations as to what, if any, actions need to be taken if the namesake is inconsistent with DC values and in some way encouraged the oppression of African Americans and other communities of color or contributed to our long history of systemic racism.”
Committee co-chairs, Beverly Perry, a senior advisor to the mayor, and Richard Reyes-Gavilan, executive director of the District’s public library system, said their “decision-making prism focused on key disqualifying histories, including participation in slavery, systemic racism, mistreatment of, or actions that suppressed equality for, persons of color, women and LGBTQ communities and violation of the DC Human Right[s] Act.”
The library system, by the way, honored communist Angela Y. Davis, calling her “an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited,” which shouldn’t be all that surprising to anyone who has spent time in D.C.
Among the statues and memorials the committee wanted removed were those named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, James Monroe, Francis Scott Key, and William Henry Harrison.
Unlike many of her colleagues, Bowser does not support defunding the police.
Last year the D.C. Council passed a budget slashing $15 million from the Metropolitan Police Department over her objections.
“This reduction would result in a level of sworn officers that has not been seen in DC since the 1990s, with seemingly no analysis on the impact this cut would have on the deployment of officers, officer response times to calls for service, and on community and neighborhood safety,” Bowser wrote in a letter to the council. “Fewer officers would protect a District population that has increased by more than 17 percent, and where calls for police service have increased by 21 percent in the last decade alone. These reductions will be felt across all eight wards.”
But she’s fine with filling cops’ minds with racist drivel.
In 2018, Bowser forced members of the Metropolitan Police Department to be indoctrinated with critical race theory as part of a training program. “We are committed to accountability to strengthen the bonds of trust between MPD and our residents,” she said in unveiling the woke brainwashing.
Maybe this explains why this writer saw a parked police car in D.C. that had what appeared to be a rolled-up white tee shirt on the dashboard with the word “WOKE” in large letters.
In February of this year, Bowser announced she would create the city’s first Office of Racial Equity.
“As we continue our recovery into 2021, we have a unique opportunity to double down on our efforts to put racial equity at the forefront and revitalize systems to ensure a more inclusive and prosperous future for all Washingtonians,” said Bowser. “We know that when more Washingtonians are given a fair shot, we are a stronger and more resilient city.”
The new office “will focus on developing an infrastructure to ensure policy decisions and District programs are evaluated through an equity lens and will be housed in the Office of the City Administrator,” according to a District press release.
“Only by building systems that are intentional in their design to account for our city’s legacy of racism and discrimination and are targeted to expand access will every District resident truly have the same opportunities to prosper in our society,” said Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie who introduced legislation creating the office.
Of course every single mayor of Washington, D.C., since the post became popularly elected in 1974 has been a Democrat, so if the District has a legacy of racism and discrimination those 7 left-wing mayors may have had something to do with it.
And in her mind, Muriel Bowser is paying it forward.