I’m sensing a strong anti-Fife movement in my District 3 and also throughout Oakland. I get this through comments on nextdoor and Facebook, on this blog, in personal conversations, and in general email strings I find myself part of. People have had it with her wokeness, her refusal to engage with her own constituents, her reverse racism, her extremism, and the negative attitude she takes towards almost everyone who’s not 100% in agreement with her.
It’s not that voters think Fife isn’t entitled to her views. She is. It’s that she has zero tolerance for anyone who doesn’t share them. She seems obsessed with a few narrow, partisan issues, especially race. At a time when Americans are longing to move beyond these constant battles about racism, Fife refuses to. She constantly stirs the racial pot, angering people who have far more important things to worry about: potholes, inflation, climate change, muggings, murders, theft, carjackings and home invasions, to name but a few. You would think a City Council member would be concerned about the worries of her constituents, but the general feeling out there is that Fife isn’t.
For me, Fife’s nadir—when she went beyond the pale into outright lunacy and anti-white racism—was when she called Libby Schaaf a “white supremacist.” Here’s Fife’s letter from February of this year to her “movement family”: “Last week Mayor Libby Schaaf blamed Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan and Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas for a recent spate of violent crimes in Chinatown. I have never seriously used the word ‘triggered’ before, but watching the press conference, I instantly understood the feeling. To watch a white woman use her power, position and privilege to lie about a woman of color to the news media…it was a blatant act of modern day white supremacy on Schaaf’s part.”
Think about it: a City Council member calling Libby Schaaf a white supremacist! We’re not talking about some Trumpian rightwing nutbag from a red district in the Deep South, we’re talking about Schaaf, a lifelong liberal Democrat, who has championed civil rights all her political career. One can differ with Libby Schaaf on any number of issues—I certainly do. But to resort to the ad hominem slur of calling her a white supremacist tells us something sad about Carroll Fife.
There’s talk of a recall. It would be very difficult to unseat a member of the City Council. It would require money. I’ve heard estimates of a minimum of $50,000. I, personally, think that if a recall got seriously underway, it could succeed. All we’d have to do is quote Fife’s own words to convince a majority of voters that Fife has consistently tried to sabotage the Oakland Police Department. Voters aren’t stupid. They may lean progressive, they may have enormous empathy for homeless people and drug addicts, but they don’t want to be afraid to walk on the streets after dark. They don’t want to hear about murder after murder, shooting after shooting, robbery after robbery, looting after looting, assault after assault. Even the most die-hard liberal’s thoughts turn toward the police in times like these—and when you have a Carroll Fife, so closely aligned to Cat “Abolish the Police” Brooks, it shouldn’t be that hard to convince voters that Fife’s continued presence on the City Council is a menace to our safety.
Believe me, there are some well-connected people in Oakland who would support a Fife recall. Someone would have to fund it, and someone would have to lead it. Those may be prohibitive parameters. Still, it’s important to start the conversation. Maybe I just did.
Steve Heimoff