Oakland’s massive blunder over losing Gov. Newsom’s offer of grant money for fighting retail theft made headlines around the nation. Once again, our city is a laughingstock—or an object of pity—or both. Obviously, heads have to roll over this major failure—but whose?
I have suggested Nikki Bas. As President of the City Council, this was in her wheelhouse. The fish rots from the head; if Bas had any honor, she would apologize and step down. Sheng Thao, the mayor, refuses to criticize Bas, one of her most loyal lieutenants, with whom Thao is widely believed to have made a deal whereby Thao would run for mayor in 2022 and Bas would wait her turn. Thao and Bas are now playing the old game of blaming an underling for the scandal they caused in order to protect themselves.
That underling is City Administrator Jestin Johnson, a former Atlanta city administrator, who was hired into his current position only last May. I’d hate to be in Johnson’s shoes right now. Thao, Bas and the entire city administration understand that somebody has to pay for this enormous scandal, and Johnson appears to be the chosen victim. Maybe he’ll be squeezed out, maybe he won’t. I couldn’t care less either way. What I care about is that Oakland is being led by kindergarten children in adult’s clothes, imbeciles who have no clue about running a major California city.
Nikki Fortunato Bas made her political bones running something called the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), whose website says it advances “economic, racial, and social justice.” (EBASE itself is largely funded by labor unions, such as the Teamsters and SEIU. Even their website was designed by “a progressive, social change organization.”) In other words, EBASE is one of those woke front groups that excuses criminal behavior by claiming that sociopaths have been “burdened by economic hardship and systemic racism” and thus must be exonerated for their bad behavior. (We see exactly the same mental reasoning in Pamela Price.) Among EBASE’s other false allegations is that “brutality at the hands of the police” is a regular occurrence, and opposing it is EBASE’s “holistic approach” to discovering “the roots of injustice.”
Look, it’s time to state the truth. Anyone who’s still blathering about “police brutality” is lying. I doubt if there’s a country in the world that has been tougher on cops than America. Bas has never criticized the culture of guns, gangs, violence and murder that infests the Oakland community she purports to love and defend. We don’t know if she’s deliberately spreading disinformation or is simply blind to reality or intellectually challenged. What we know is that Nikki Bas is motivated solely by her unstinting resentment of the police and by her unwavering allegiance to “social justice,” which, in the final analysis, is equivalent to a bias against Caucasians. EBASE’s clients, according to their website, are “people of color, immigrants [and] formerly incarcerated folks.” In other words, if you’re a White, law-abiding citizen, EBASE doesn’t care about you. And neither does Nikki Fortunato Bas.
These are harsh things to say, I admit, but the truth has to be told. Bas threw Johnson under the bus when she “expressed her concerns about missing the grant deadline” to him, thereby putting him squarely in the crosshairs; Johnson probably spent the weekend trying to figure out how to defend himself against the attack he saw coming his way. Thao continued the pile-on, in what looks like a coordinated political assassination. The Mayor, appearing uneasy in an interview on NBC Bay Area, said the scandal “is a question for the City Administrator [Johnson] and he is open to answering that…I would definitely urge you to reach out to the City Administrator’s office.”
In other words, according to Thao, there’s nothing to see here, folks! Don’t blame me, don’t blame Bas, blame Jestin Johnson’s sorry ass!
Look, this is what managers do all the time when they’re caught in flagrante delicto: find some flunky to take the heat. But the backlash to the Bas-Thao coverup is mounting. Seneca Scott just called for a massive turnout at tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) City Council meeting, in which citizens can express their own outrage at “this level of ineptitude from our elected officials.” Meanwhile, not a peep from either Bas or Thao regarding the missed deadline; instead, Bas is tweeting about Oakland Art & Soul Festival and Thao about Hispanic Heritage Month.
This whistling past the graveyard won’t help either of them. And it certainly won’t help us, the beleaguered people of Oakland, who, as Seneca said, demand answers. I can’t be the only one to suspect that Bas and Thao deliberately let the grant deadline pass because they don’t want the state to give money to the Oakland Police Department. That’s how much they hate cops, and how much they hate us.
Steve Heimoff