We got “shellacked,” in Barack Obama’s words about the 2010 off-year elections. The horrible news is that three regressive candidates—Sheng Thao, Nikki Defundo Bas and Pamela Price, all of whom we opposed—won. I know that many of my friends are terribly upset by this development, as well they should be. I am, too. At a time when America is rejecting radical-left, anti-police extremism, Oakland voters, it seems, have embraced this toxic philosophy yet again.
But there’s some good news: the three candidates who won did so by very small majorities, and had voter turnout been higher, they probably would have lost. Moreover, sensible Alameda County voters refused to let Rebecca Kaplan mess up the Board of Supervisors—a mixed blessing for Oakland, for if she chooses to remain on the City Council, we still have to contend with her. We, the loyal opposition, have no intention of allowing the regressives to push our city and county backward to the bad old days of lawlessness, cop hatred, encampments, racial animosity and rampant criminality. Thao, Bas and Price can expect blowback that begins now.
Leftist radicals predictably were ecstatic over the election results. Cat Brooks, the most radical of them all (Abolish the Police!) charmingly tweeted, in her inimitable way,
Hell. Fucking. Yaaaaassssss!!! Congrats
- Progressives for the win! Organizing to be done. There’s eight years of hot ass mess to undo. #libbysreignofterrorisover!!!
Not so fast, Ms. Brooks. Yes, we’ve had “eight years of hot ass mess,” but the truth is that most of the mess was caused by you and the leftwing racialists you celebrate. Libby Schaaf had very little power over a rogue, vengeful City Council. She deserves her share of the blame for Oakland’s collapse: she didn’t crack down on encampments when they first began to explode—as any normal mayor would have--and she was never explicitly tough on your anti-police hatred, which she should have denounced from the rooftops. But Oakland’s collapse is truly due to the “progressives.”
Let’s get one thing straight: the radical-left voters of Oakland who voted for this unholy trinity aren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. They’re compassionate (or like to believe they are), but most of them are White and feel guilt about their “entitlement”—a guilt that translates into voting for “progressives.” And while they vote to raise parcel taxes on homeowners, whom they resent, most of the younger ones are renters who whine about not being able to afford to buy a house or condo. They demand “social justice” but are often the first to complain when their cars are broken into, or their homes burglarized; and when cops don’t show up instantly to solve the crime, they whine about “slow police response.” Yet these are the same people who put up “Defund the Police” signs in their windows.
So, yes, we’re sad about the election’s outcome. But we’re more determined than ever to keep up the good fight. As Brooks’s tweet indicates, the radical leftists are over-confident. They actually believe they’ve been empowered to resume their attacks on law enforcement, confident that a cop-hating District Attorney will throw cops in jail while “decarcerating” the real criminals. They believe that their brand of “progressivism” hasn’t been repudiated across the length and breadth of America. Let me tell them the truth: this most recent Oakland election is a freak, an historic outlier, the last gasp of a failed ideology that is detested by most Americans. Enjoy your 15 minutes, Ms. Brooks, Ms. Thao, Ms. Bas and Ms. Price. We’ll be watching every step you take, every vow you break.
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Yesterday, Sunday, Nov. 20, was Transgender Day of Remembrance. It “honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence,” of which there have been increasing numbers, thanks to hatred by White Christian Nationalists—violence that mainly impacts Black men.
I wrote this post on Saturday, just before the world learned of the horrible mass execution of patrons at an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs. We don’t know much about the killer’s motive, but it’s safe to assume that he was driven by hatred of these people. Colorado Springs is a super-Republican city where a lot of homophobic evangelicals live—rightwing radicals who frequently denigrate LGBTQ individuals, and whose rhetoric, echoed throughout the Republican Party, incites unstable individuals to violence.
I’m proud to say I’ve been a trans supporter for decades. I knew very little of trans people before I arrived in San Francisco in 1979, fresh from the East Coast. I soon plunged into the raucous joyfulness of the Gay community, and through it met my first trans friends. There used to be a bar, The Headquarters, in Clementina Alley, that attracted a wide variety of South of Market denizens: gays, Lesbians, drag queens, leather freaks, S&M devotees, hustlers, businessmen glad to be somewhere they could relax, and assorted other types; it was my “Cheers,” where people knew my name and the bartender gave me free beers.
It was at The Headquarters that I met Desirée, a M2F trans woman, Black and small; I would dance with Desirée as the jukebox blared the latest disco tunes and folks played pool. A few years later, after I moved to Oakland, I wrote a frontpage article on the transgender community for the East Bay Express. Through my reporting I met any number of transgenders. I found out how loving, sensitive, sharing and spiritual they are, and how awful their journeys had been. As a gay man myself growing up in the horribly repressed 1950s and 1960s, I understood how painful being in that minority was in America, supposedly the land of the free, but free only if you were straight and White. But what I’d never imagined, until I met my new trans friends, was that their pain was at a level that far exceeded mine. It was a humbling experience, and I was grateful to the trans community for sharing their stories with me.
That was, of course, 30 years ago. It’s abhorrent that, in 2022, there is still so much animosity towards the LGBTQ community. The kind of religious discrimination we see in places like Florida and Texas makes me want to vomit. I wish I could tell the Republican ringleaders of the anti-LGBTQ cabal, people like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, how odious they are, with their lies that LGBTQ folks are “grooming” their children, or their insane insistence that parents who lovingly help their trans kids should be charged with felonies. That is an evil of Trumpian or Hitlerian proportions.
One of the things I love most about Oakland—one reason why I fight to make it a healthy city again—is its diversity, and specifically Oakland’s welcoming embrace of the LGBTQ community. I love that trans people can feel safe here, and that they know an entire city has their backs. Surely all of us—progressives, moderates, even conservatives—are united in this. I salute our trans friends for their beauty and integrity, and for showing us the true meaning of courage.
Steve Heimoff