I’m sickened by the results of the mayor’s race. I thought Loren had a real chance. I’m also disgusted with the progressives of Oakland. Time and again they elect these incompetent socialists who do not know how to govern, how to lead, or how to rescue the city that their wokeness has brought to the brink of disaster.
What’s that old saying? “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” By that measure, Oakland progressives are psychopaths. How else are we to understand Oakland, where people like Carroll Fife get re-elected and an unelected bureaucracy continues to impose its will on the people? I have to confess I don’t know how to square this with the result of the Recalls, which seemed to be a resounding repudiation of wokeness. I’d thought that when we got rid of Thao and Price, Oakland had finally turned the corner and realized the destructiveness of racialized politics. But apparently not.
How come these Thao-Fife-Price-Lee voters can’t see the direct connection between their woke ideology, and the crime, dysfunction and poverty that infect Oakland? When they see drugged-out homeless people lying in the gutter, do they not remember that Libby Schaaf invited the homeless people of the Bay Area to move here? Do they not realize that Oakland has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on homeless services, with absolutely nothing to show for it? Do they not realize that hobbling the Oakland Police Department, as progressives have done for years, only results in a profoundly dangerous city?
The answers are no, no, and no. Progressives understand nothing of the cause-and-effect nature of their policy choices. They’re blinded by ideology, by feel-good virtue signaling. They think that raising taxes and giving our money to the homeless—as Lee has promised to do--will improve our city when the exact opposite is true: Oakland (and California as a whole) have wasted far too much money on homeless services that don’t work. It’s an insult to working people. The only way to end encampments is to crack down on them, hard, as San Francisco and San Jose are starting to do. But not Oakland. God forbid that we should get tough on sociopaths and druggies who befoul our parks and streets. Instead, Oakland’s peculiar brand of compassion demands that we hard-working taxpayers fine ourselves through higher taxes and then hand it over to the grifters and losers who flock here because they know they can get away with their B.S. And, of course, there’s always a gigantic bureaucracy to manage this homelessness-progressive complex. That, too, is funded by us taxpayers, and gives grifters like Lee the ability to give her friends good-paying city jobs while bowing to the corrupt labor unions that fund her campaigns.
It’s such a drag. To see what happens in Oakland year after year brings tears to my eyes. We’re now about to see a resurgence of far-left woke policies in Oakland, where Carroll Fife is empowered to manifest her madness, and Barbara Lee finally gets the executive dream job she’s always wanted, so she can plow Oakland--“the wokest city in America” (as she has called it)—further into the ground. Brace yourselves for a slew of new, race-based programs run by poverty pimps and race hustlers, led by the intrepid Barbara Lee.
I sincerely hope Lee will understand one thing: Oakland has changed. It’s no longer the woke bastion she thought it was. The city has moved rightward—not into MAGAdom, obviously, but toward a more balanced center, that is cop-friendly, intolerant of crime, and demands inclusion for everyone, not just POC and the homeless. Ms. Lee, congratulations, but don’t let this victory cloud your judgment. Govern from the center, not the far left.
As for Loren Taylor, you ran a good race, dude, but you should have listened to me when I said you needed to confront the Black community—your community. You needed to tell them that racism is not the cause of their problems; their own values and errant behaviors are. I think you know that, Loren, but you couldn’t bring yourself to say it, because you feared you’d lose the Black and progressive vote. Well, you’ve now lost a mayor’s election, for the second time in a row. Your political career in Oakland is over because you didn’t have the courage to speak truth. You’re a good man, Loren Taylor, but not a brave one.
Steve Heimoff