Call me a dreamer, but when I saw the special section in the Sunday Chronicle entitled “10 BIG IDEAS TO HELP FIX SAN FRANCISCO,” I hoped against hope that one of those “big ideas” was “Hire a lot more cops and let them crack down on crime.”
I should have known better. The Chronicle’s suggestion was to build what they call “peacelets,” a play on “parklets”: mobile mini-parks, “placed in areas of disorder and staffed by police officers.” Yes, even though San Francisco’s Police Department is desperately in need of more cops to enforce the law, the Chronicle’s brilliant minds would divert them to sit all day long in parklets, presumably greeting tourists and patting dogs.
What about crime? There was no mention of it. You’d think that “fixing San Francisco” would involve greater law enforcement, but no. Then, just a few pages away, the newpaper’s race columnist, Justin Phillips, wrote that he hoped the temporary measures S.F. has taken to clean up the city for the APEC summit wouldn’t be repeated in the future “as justification for dangerous, heavy-handed public safety decisions,” such as clearing streets of fentanyl users and dealers, evicting campers blocking sidewalks and parks, and stopping ranting zombies who terrorize innocent pedestrians. That’s Justin for you: anything that cleans up the city is heavy-handed, racist and bad. Anything that allows sociopaths to further denigrate the city is good.
Well, I beg to differ. I hope San Francisco doubles down on the APEC cleanup. I hope Oakland does the same thing, although I know that, with Thao and the woke City Council, they won’t.
As few as four years ago I wouldn’t have believed the good old Chronicle could become so block-headed. They used to be the newspaper of the middle class: pro-cop, anti-crime, in favor of common sense. Then their editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz arrived, hired a bunch of woke reporters, and the Chronicle went to the dogs. No wonder readers are abandoning it in droves.
The Chronicle no longer possesses even a shred of credibility. Nor do any of the other media bastions of wokeness. I hear KQED radio frantically begging for listener support and failing, time and time again, to meet their fundraising goals, thereby endangering the station’s continued existence. KQED radio, too, is a bastion of wokeness, possibly even worse than the Chronicle. As both of these media institutions head toward extinction, it may occur to their leaders—including Garcia-Ruiz—that ordinary people aren’t interested in being pounded over the head day after day by allegations of racism, police brutality and white supremacy. We want solutions to our problems, not leftwing analyses that lead nowhere except to further chaos and confusion.
Steve Heimoff