Braun Crosses the Line

During the Newark mayoral election, Bob Braun, former columnist for the Star-Ledger and currently N.J.’s most prominent anti-reform blogger, was candidate Ras Baraka’s biggest booster. But now Braun is outraged that Mayor Baraka is refusing to support a boycott of the city schools.

It’s hard to think of a less civic-minded stance: the leader of N.J.’s largest city urging parents to unlawfully keep their children home from school. To his credit, Baraka isn’t listening and says that he is monitoring the (rocky) implementation of Superintendent Cami Anderson’s One Newark plan, which creates a universal enrollment registration for Newark’s charter and traditional schools. In other words, Baraka is acting like a mayor.

But this week Braun wrote,
Hey, Ras–remember that video that Jeffries [Baraka's opponent in the mayoral campaign] thought would sink you? The one in which you faced down the gang leaders on a cold winter night? You looked like a leader then, big time. Angry but righteous.
That’s what you need to do and to be now. Righteous and angry.
Face down Christie’s gangbangers before they do even more harm to the children of Newark.
That video, by the way, was first picked up by the Daily Beast and described thus:
In it, Baraka indicates that whites are the “enemies” of blacks and suggests “We got to plan to remove them and then we got to seize power.” He was apparently addressing gang-affiliated teenagers and trying to impart a message of black empowerment, but even in context the language is extremely inflammatory.
Now Braun is the one who’s inflammatory (not to mention sexist: in a subsequent post called "Boycott the Cruel One Newark Plan" he labels Cami Anderson as “frigid,” surely not an adjective applied to men). More importantly, he exposes his true intentions, which have nothing to do with children and effective schools and everything to do with promoting a political agenda infused with paranoid Ravichy fantasies about "corporatization" and greedy hedge-fund managers.

Kids belong in school. Braun would rather that they stay home in order to boost his personal agenda. Talk about outrageous.

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