That San Francisco has rejected far-left wokeism was amply demonstrated by the recall of those School Board members and, in particular, of Chesa Boudin. We now have further evidence that San Franciscans self-corrected their errant course, with the victory, declared yesterday, of Joel Engardio to the Board of Supervisors.
He upset an incumbent, Eric Mar, for the first time in a generation. The difference between the two men? Mar was a progressive, Engardio a moderate. The voters reaffirmed their unhappiness with progressives who, they felt, were taking their city in the wrong direction. San Francisco, it can safely be said, is no longer a “progressive” city but a moderately liberal one.
Sadly, the same can’t be said of Oakland. Yesterday another election was declared: that of Sheng Thao as Mayor. Let me tell you, folks, we’re going to see a recrudescence of some very bad stuff in our town. With Thao, a cop hater, at the top; the most radical, anti-cop City Council in memory; and a District Attorney who ran on prosecuting cops, our city and county are in for bad times. I’m going to make a prediction: crime is going to get much worse. Encampments will continue to spread. The streets will not be safe, especially after dark, and the City Council will continue to siphon money from taxpayers’s pockets and throw it at sketchy social experiments that have never worked and cannot work, because they’re based on fantasy. And finally, I predict that the Mayoralty of Sheng Thao will end in scandal and disaster.
It’s hard to fathom why Oakland keeps voting for people like Thao, Pamela Price, Nikki Defundo Bas and the rest of that cabal. It’s an intellectual conundrum: I’ve struggled to understand it for years. It’s so obvious that these “progressives” have driven Oakland into what it has become today. It’s so obvious they have no solutions to crime, homelessness, encampments. Gov. Newsom himself has criticized Oakland for wasting the money he’s sent the city. One has the impression, in thinking of the progressives who get elected to office, of bumbling, stuttering inmates of an insane asylum, thinking they’re making sense when, in reality, they’re hallucinating and speaking to phantoms. I don’t know what more evidence is needed of their incompetence than is provided by a tour of our city. And yet the voters—by increasingly slim majorities, let it be noted—keep returning the same failures to office, or keep electing new failures to replace retiring failures. It defies common sense and is tiresome to consider.
Yet consider it we must. This is still our town. It’s all we have; we must save it. There is no future in the kind of fantasy world that the City Council, and our new Mayor, envision for us. Or, let me correct that: there is a future, but it’s a horrible, nasty future. The War on Cops will continue, as if police were responsible for the murders that plague Oakland. Emboldened by their victories on Nov. 8, this autocratic, deluded regime—Thao, Price, Bas, Kaplan (assuming she stays on the Council), Fife, Kalb and the rest of them—will resume their horrible behavior, finding “racism” everywhere, blaming White people, corporations, systemic racism, greedy landlords, and inequality wherever they cast their glance, never holding criminals accountable for their own actions. God forbid a mugger should be punished! In Progressive Land, that mugger is simply a poor person robbing from the rich to help the poor—and we can’t criminalize poverty, can we?
Well, I have to end with this message to the voters who elected Thao and Price and re-elected Bas: You got what you wanted. Next time your home is burglarized, don’t call the cops, whom you detest and want to defund. Next time an encampment shows up next to your house, with feces and I.V. needles in the gutter, don’t call the cops, whom you claim are racist terrorists. Next time you hear the sound of smashing car windows in the middle of the night, and you look outside your window and see a pair of thieves breaking into autos, don’t call 9-1-1. They probably won’t come anyway, because the officials you elected refused to give the Oakland Police Department the money they need to staff the call center. Next time your rent soars, or your property tax bill skyrockets, don’t complain, because the progressives you elected have imposed yet more parcel taxes on homeowners. And one more thing: next time you’re tempted to leave Oakland, because things have gotten so bad, please do leave! Just move away, anywhere but here. You, the progressive voters of Oakland, got us into this mess: the least you can do, in repentance, is to leave us along, so we can try to heal.
Steve Heimoff