Pamela Price, “Madame District Attorney,” has a Facebook page. Its formal name is “Pamela Price, Alameda County District Attorney - Personal.” Price describes it as “Minority-owned, Black-owned.” So I’m trying to figure out, What exactly is “Minority-owned, Black-owned”? The Facebook page? The Office of District Attorney? And why does Price need to refer to race at all? What would she say if Gavin Newsom had a “personal” Facebook page he called “White-owned”? She’d be howling from the rooftops.
Price’s description is ambiguous, perhaps by design. She can’t come right out and claim that the office of District Attorney is “Black owned” because that would cause a furor. But she can signal to her loyal fans that, yes, when she became D.A. the Office of District Attorney became just another front in the Black Lives Matter crusade. Madame District Attorney, in other words, has politicized her office.
From her first day in office, she let it be known that she would prefer not to send Black criminals to jail. For that matter, she also would like to shut down the jails (“decarcerate,” in wokespeak) and let all the prisoners back out into the streets. Then she fired or laid off most of the Assistant DAs who actually had the nerve to believe it was their job to lock up bad guys. Then she…well, you’ve been watching her shtick, including “Madame’s” latest demand for hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to re-do her office into the fancy-schmancy she feels she deserves. She’s a farce, and I honestly don’t think she’ll finish her term in office. Why do I say that? One word: Recall.
Which brings us to the other half of today’s double header, Justin Phillips, the S.F. Chronicle’s race baiter. Now that the paper has promoted him to a daily column, I could fill this entire blog, every day, with tearing apart his B.S. I won’t, because there are more important things for me to write about, but I can’t pass up his latest rant, from yesterday.
We’re all aware that Justin likes reparations. He’s let us know many times. Of course he does: As a Black person, he stands to benefit. He’s offered pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for reparations (none of which stand up to scrutiny), but why he wrote yesterday’s rant, I can’t figure out, because it’s so dumb. Basically, he talked to a bunch of Black people and asked them what they would do with the $100,000, or $900,000, or $1.5 million, or whatever the latest magic number is, were they to be presented with it. Their answers were predictable: buy a house. Pay bills. Help my family. The same answers you and I would give.
Like I said, I’m not sure what Justin hoped to accomplish by this column. Is it supposed to elicit our sympathy? It did just the opposite for me. The people Justin talked to can’t wait for a big fat check to land in their mailbox. Free money! They’re living a fever dream of hitting the jackpot, the way lottery gamblers fantasize about winning. Here’s the funniest line from Justin’s rant: “Listening to Black Californians who support reparations makes clear how much better the state’s social and economic health would be if the riches…are at least partially returned to their rightful owners.”
Lots to unpack in that statement. “Rightful owners”? That’s a stretch. According to whom, Justin Phillips? Why are Black Californians the “rightful owners” of the state’s wealth? And would the state’s “social and economic health” really be better if an amount of money equal to three years of California’s entire budget—some $800 billion--were thrown away on this maniacal scheme? I should think that our “economic health” would collapse altogether. Certainly there would no money left over for anything else. I suspect (although I do not know) that Gov. Newsom has serious concerns about the recommendations from his Reparations Task Force, especially the direct monetary payments. We’ll find out soon enough.
At any rate, forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but reparations is a bad, stupid, ahistoric, irrational and possible illegal stunt. It’s virtue-signaling from politicians whose careers depend on appealing to their “progressive” constituents. When Justin concluded his column with these words, “Now imagine how much better we all would be if millions of other Black Californians were able to do just that,” i.e., get all that free money, I just had to laugh. I’d be better off if someone sent me a million bucks, too.
Steve Heimoff