Aren’t you proud of the City of San Francisco for their massive crackdown on criminal drug dealing in the Tenderloin and South of Market? Finally, after all these years, the City That Knows How has decided to act with moral courage, instead of the craven indebtedness it exhibited for so long toward “progressives.”
Give credit first of all to Mayor London Breed, and secondly to District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. What a pleasant contrast the latter is to Alameda County’s District Attorney, Madame Price, who is now the subject of a recall drive. These two women, Breed and Jenkins, have stood shoulder to shoulder standing up to the woke bullies of the far left, who believe that fentanyl dealers should be allowed to ply their evil trade on the city’s streets, and that homeless people can set up their tents anywhere they want.
History will have the final say, but I’ll wager that this time period will be seen in hindsight as when the ordinary people of San Francisco, who just want to live a decent life unharassed by sociopaths, rose up against their oppressors, the woke left, and told them to do their dirty work elsewhere. I don’t suppose the woke left will abandon San Francisco. But it’s gratifying to see their chokehold lessen.
Can we expect the same here in Oakland? Our city is very different from San Francisco. The woke or progressive virus has taken root here more strongly than in San Francisco, and hence is proving to be more intractable. The wokes current have majorities not only on the Oakland City Council but on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and, of course, Madame D.A. is the Mother of All Wokes; how awful that she’s in charge of our criminal justice system. In the Oakland Mayor’s office, we have a hopelessly unqualified person, herself with a dreary history of wokeism, who now has a city to run but has proven herself utterly unfit for the job. So getting rid of the wokes here is a challenge.
If you’re one of the people who occasionally feels overwhelmed by Oakland’s deterioration, take heart by glancing across the Bay and remind yourself that, if it can happen in San Francisco, it can happen in Oakland. This will, of course, require a course correction in the personal politics of individual citizens; both San Francisco and Oakland have long been bastions of the Democratic Party, which was perceived as the protector of working people. But that perception has been changing, as Democrats have made devil’s deals with radical leftists, selling out the party’s traditional values in favor of insane woke social engineering. The more the party cooperates with and even encourages radical progressives, the more it alienates voters like Allene Jue, a Chinese-American mother of two who lives in San Francisco. She told CNN how angry she’s become in recent years at the far left of the Democratic Party. “They care about policies that don’t really help someone who just lives in the city and just want to be safe, who wants their kids to be educated well. They forgot the core problems for regular people.” The CNN profile added, “California activists warn that these shifts in the politics of San Francisco – a place that has long been a beacon for progressives – are a signal to national Democrats ahead of 2024 that the party needs a course correction…” if it is to have any chance of surviving in its current form.
We in Oakland face the same challenge: either we purge local government of bizarre and smugly woke politicians like Fife, Price and Kaplan, or we face a future even grimmer than what we see today.
Steve Heimoff