This is a perilous time for Oakland. I say this because there’s a tendency for people to assume that, with the Recalls of Pamela Price and Sheng Thao, normalcy will again prevail. As one commenter tweeted in a string congratulating Seneca Scott, “Better days ahead for Oakland. The fever has broken.”
While I’m as grateful as anyone that we defeated Thao/Price in a landslide victory, I have to warn against premature celebration. The “fever” has not broken. It’s gone down a bit—but it could rise again quickly, because the root causes of wokeism still infect the body politic, ready to metastasize at any moment.
Among those root causes, Carroll Fife remains in power. She will be aided and abetted by the apparent winner of the At-Large seat on the City Council, Rowena Brown, another woke pol with anti-police inclinations. They’ll have plenty of money to fund their schemes because the voters—always happy to tax homeowners in the name of “social justice”—passed Measure NN, which will transfer massive quantities of taxpayer dollars into a secretive Black Box called “violence reduction.” We know almost nothing of these “anti-violence” programs because the bureaucrats who run them don’t want us to know. They need to hide the grifting, graft, waste, mutual back-scratching and corruption that corrode all such policies in Oakland.
Worst of all is that we still have to contend with Nikki Fortunato Bas. Although she’s a loser (in her race for Supervisor), she’ll soon be interim mayor of Oakland—and could be for a long time. Bas is in many ways the worst of the woke. Her long, sorry history of defunding the police should embarrass her, but far from apologizing for it, she’s doubling down in trying to cut dozens of positions from the Oakland Police Department. Bas will now bring her vindictive personality to the mayor’s office, where the only thing capable of stopping her will be an Oakland City Council notorious for inaction, racialized politics, cronyism and virtue signaling.
In short, this is not the time to celebrate. We need to stay organized, keep a close eye on City Hall, stand beside and behind our cops, and to continue our truly progressive efforts that kicked Thao and Price out of office. Next up: Carroll Fife.
Steve Heimoff