Here’s an email to me from Keith S. Schuerholz, the Parking Services & Transportation Liaison at the Oakland Department of Transportation. “The city's current policy is not to tow vehicles in which people are living in as their homes.” So now we know: another law abrogated by the wokes who run this town.
Speaking of wokes, I don’t like people who claim that any criticism of them is racist or misogynistic. I’m talking about Pamela Price, Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife. They can dish it out (as we used to say) but they can’t take it.
For example, here’s a tweet Price published on March 3: “Beware the critics of our journey for justice & equality then & today who are really just paid trolls with a preset agenda to hold back progress toward a better community. The devil loves to throw a rock & hide his hand but every lie has an expiration date!”
This is so ridiculous, it makes me wonder about Price’s mental state. Am I a “paid troll”, Price? As District Attorney, you should be more careful before hurling unsubstantiated defamations. Price doesn’t have the judgment or stability to hold such an important post. I am indeed a “critic of [her] journey” because it’s a journey to hell, and she insists on dragging the rest of us along with her. What Price and the others practice is called “ad hominem” attacks: directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining. Trump does this all the time (Liddle Adam Schiff, Sleepy Joe Biden, Crooked Hillary), but infantile slurs are not the exclusive province of the far right; the far left uses them too, or at least, people like Price, Brooks and Fife. They can’t give authentic answers to any criticism, so they insult the critics and hope that their none-too-intelligent followers will be amused.
Pamela Price is a rehashed version of the Black Panthers. When I was a young man, the Black Panthers had their 15 minutes of fame. But by the late 1970s they had more or less disappeared, and with them went their violent, racist ideology.
But did they really disappear? No. They went underground, brooding, vengeful, remembering their glory days, and planning their recrudescence. And so we come to today, when the ideological heirs of the Black Panthers are rising again, like vampires, in the form of Pamela Price.
Here’s how Price pays homage to the Black Panthers and her inspiration, Huey Newton, whose title in that violent revolutionary cult was Minister of Justice. “It’s my responsibility as a minister of justice,” Price tweeted, “to hold [police] accountable.”
There we have it: Pamela Price declaring herself the new Huey Newton. Have you ever heard an American District Attorney refer to herself as “a minister of justice”? Where are we, Nicaragua? Iran? This is Price’s wink-wink, nod-nod to the violent revolutionaries whom she’s adored since she was a little girl. As for her reference to “the devil,” that, too, is an homage to the Black radicals, particularly Louis Farrakhan, who loved to hate on “white devils and satanic Jews.”
Here’s how “Minister of Justice” Huey Newton referred to the police: “We used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police,” he said. Newton and his Black Panthers also popularized the term “off the pig,” meaning “kill cops.” This was a “thing” in the Sixties and Seventies, and, a bit later, in hip hop. Nowadays, Price and her people can’t come right out and say it—but it’s inherent in everything they say and do.
We mustn’t forget the ideological forebears of extremists like Price, Fife and Brooks. Here’s a charming little tweet from Cat Brooks on March 6: “I wish people would read before hopping on my threads trying to be relevant - policing is an institution of white supremacy born out of chattel slavery - very disingenuous to suggest anything else especially when there is so much research and facts - almost lazy existing.” Think about it: Brooks is comparing policing to “chattel slavery.” Ask the hundreds or thousands of Black men and women who have been murdered in Oakland by other Black people over the years: “Who condemned you to death and darkness?” The answer can only be: “The killer that shot me.” Not cops. Not slaveholders, the last of whom in America died 100 years ago. Not the law-abiding White citizens of Oakland, or the Brown citizens, or the Asian citizens. No, it was the Black killers whom Price, Fife and Brooks celebrate and apologize for.
Every once in a while, somebody emails me and says that all I ever do is complain. Where are my solutions, they ask. I’ve answered this over and over again. The solution is to stop voting these malicious people into office. You want to talk about being “woke”? Let’s wake up to the damage caused by these obsessed reverse-racists. It will take at least a decade for our beloved city, Oakland, to recover from the devastation caused by these lawless grifters. Every day they remain in power, Oakland drifts further into anarchy and decay. The longer we postpone what we have to do, the longer Oakland will suffer, until the day comes when recovery slips from our hands forever.
Steve Heimoff