When looters invade a Louis Vuitton or Gucci store in Union Square, or a more modest Nordstrom in Walnut Creek, or a cannabis dispensary in Oakland, spokespersons of the woke Left often defend it as the poor merely getting stuff they need by other means.
The leftwing magazine Rampant, for example (which describes itself as “strengthen[ing] and expand[ing] the self-reliance of social movements and worker organizing”) notes acidly, “What is commonly called ‘looting’ is a redistribution of that wealth.” Such retail theft, they argue, is not a moral or criminal issue, but a question of “how material resources are distributed.” Since “millions of people need all manner of basic goods”—food, clothing, medicine, electronics—and these goods “exist in abundance” in stores, “It [is] far better to get those goods to the people who need them than to permit them to sit idly on shelves, out of reach.”
One strongly gets the feeling, from our current City Council, that the looting we’re seeing now is simply the inevitable, and desirable, result of a racist, patriarchal system that is in its final, crumbling stages. As long as an unjust, inequitable tyranny of male privilege remains intact, people have the right to do what they have to, in order to survive. (Of course, these same Wokesters never explain just why an impoverished, struggling looter needs a $1,000 Gucci bag, but never mind…)
Justifying theft, however, doesn’t stand alone, in the pantheon of Woke causes. It goes hand-in-hand with another of their favorite goals, defunding the police. Make no mistake, the rush to re-fund the Oakland Police Department that we’re now seeing as a result of our Summer and Fall of Violence does not mark a permanent restoration of sanity to our politics. No, the six City Council members who just voted for additional police academies did so under duress, and against their own innermost desire. They still wish to wreck the police department, only they understand that they have to be more discrete in their obviousness. This is why, instead of using the phrase “defund the police” which has become so odious to Americans, they resort to doublespeak, like “Reimagining public safety.” Let me assure you that, no matter how you describe their game, their goal remains the same: to replace police with “social justice warriors” who, trained in anti-violence practices, will sweet-talk looters, muggers and gangbangers into peaceful compliance with our norms and laws. Along the way, we—society—will also get rid of cash bail (which discriminates against poor criminals), and we’ll “decarcerate” the prisons (i.e. release thousands of criminals from jail so they can break the law again), and—while we’re at it—we’ll decriminalize shoplifting so that anyone who steals less than $950 worth of stuff from a store gets a get-out-of-jail-free pass.
If you think this sounds like a dystopian nightmare, you’re right. Only it’s not a nightmare, it’s the reality that this City Council has bequeathed us. The old adage, “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it” has never proven truer: this City Council, and, yes, this Mayor, asked for extreme Woke values to be applied to Oakland. They got what they wanted—and all of us are suffering.
Have a great weekend! Stay safe.
Steve Heimoff