First, I want to thank everyone who took the time to write to nextdoor.com in response to my plea yesterday. We had a record number of you urge nextdoor to reinstate Jack Saunders. We don’t know what will happen; yesterday was Memorial Day, and possibly the nextdoor.com people weren’t at work. Today, we’ll see what happens. I’ll let you know. But we’re not done fighting. This travesty of political censorship at nextdoor has got to end.
And now, on to an op-ed in last week’s San Francisco Chronicle that once again shows the leftwing bias that infects their editorial pages. The op-ed ostensibly was an analysis of the upcoming Alameda County District Attorney’s race (in which the Chronicle basically endorsed Seth Steward). But the editors who wrote it—most likely, the paper’s editorial page editor, Matthew Fleischer, who has made no secret of his political proclivities—just had to get in their fair share of abusing the Oakland Police Department. It’s as if Fleischer has a fly up his butt and just can’t resist dropping insults against OPD as though they were objective truth. In fact, when you think about it, this op-ed piece has more in common with the Soviet-style cancel culture of nextdoor.com than it does with authentic journalism.
Here are some of the op-ed’s more egregious examples of yellow journalism:
Fleischer (assuming he wrote the thing) begins by referring to “repeated allegations of excessive and deadly force that have plagued various local police departments, most notably Oakland…”. Now, you know, and I know, that there is virtually no “excessive and deadly force” perpetrated by OPD against citizens, and there hasn’t been for years. It’s true that there are allegations, but they’re usually from cop haters like Cat Brooks, whom Fleischer ritualistically allows to publish her rants on his beloved editorial page. You would think that a real journalist would not permit someone as discredited, by her own community, as Brooks to fib in the Chronicle’s hallowed pages, but Fleischer has shown an inability to separate his own hostility toward law enforcement from his responsibility to practice fair and objective journalism.
From there, Fleischer moves on to state, with the categorical imperative of a fact, that our police agencies uphold “a flawed and too often racially unjust system.” Once again, this is Fleischer stretching the truth so exorbitantly that you might say he’s deliberately lying. What exactly is “flawed” about OPD, Matt? Is it that Oakland cops have the temerity to arrest violent thugs? And if a majority of the violent crime in Oakland, or at least a great proportion of it, is committed by Black people (and based on arrest records, it is), then what is “racially unjust” about that? I’ll tell you what is unjust: the violent, sociopathic gangbanger behavior against innocent members of the community. To hear Matt Fleischer tell it, cops are the cause of the 134 Oaklanders killed by guns last year. Of all Fleischer’s twisted beliefs, this “blame the cops” is perhaps the most objectionable.
But wait, there’s more! Because of this “flawed and racially unjust system” of policing, Oaklanders and Alameda County residents are “simultaneously fearful and deeply distrustful of the system meant to protect them.” I, Steve, declare that, as an Oaklander and resident of Alameda County, I am not “deeply distrustful” of the police. I don’t think you, the readers, are either. We welcome the police, we honor and respect them. Matt Fleischer, listen to the voices of real people in Alameda County, not your little woke buddies like Cat Brooks. The Black community honors and respects cops. So do Brown-skinned people and Asians. The percentage of people in Oakland who are “deeply distrustful” of cops is very, very low. Matt Fleischer, you are projecting your own internal objection to police onto everybody else, in the psychologically distorted way of attributing to others what is in your own mind. Stop it!
But Fleischer just can’t stop himself. He wants to get in a shot against the retiring D.A., Nancy O’Malley, but he’s not really allowed to make spurious allegations against her, so instead, he resorts to the oldest trick in the reporter’s arsenal: citing unnamed others to express his own opinions. O’Malley “has drawn criticism for failing to file charges against police officers who killed people.” There it is, Fleischer projecting again. Who are these unnamed accusers who have criticized Nancy O’Malley? Cat Brooks? Carroll Fife? We don’t know because Fleischer doesn’t identify them. It’s another trick of biased reporters to comb through a big population of people, find one or two who object to something, and then quote them as though they matter, as though they speak for a larger community, as though they know what they’re talking about. It’s called “quote shopping.” And did Matt Fleischer ever consider the possibility that just because a cop shoots someone doesn’t make the cop guilty of anything? Bad guys who resist arrest, who threaten others on the street, who wield weapons against cops, run the risk of getting shot and killed. But to Matt Fleischer, any cop who shoots someone is automatically guilty. Matt, the reason O’Malley didn’t indict any cops is because her office thoroughly investigated each incident and determined that the cops acted legally. But you just can’t handle that. Because the cops you hate weren’t tossed into jail, you’ve decided to use your editorial page to smear the police, denigrate them, and propagandize to your dwindling base of older readers. Stop it, Matt. Just stop it.
Steve Heimoff