The essence of Carroll Fife’s willful twisting of reality is contained in these two quotes, which are from an Oaklandside Q&A a few days ago.
#1. “[The issue of OPD funding] is more polarized now because there are people who are intentionally whipping up fear. I’m not saying people should not be scared. But when your goal is to make people afraid, it’s easy to do in challenging times.”
#2. “People are like, ‘All these thugs are running the town, it’s lawless.’ But we’re giving no hope to young people who are growing up in communities that are already under-resourced. And we wonder why they don’t care about anybody else.”
Let’s examine both statements. In #1, Fife once again resorts to the meme that people like me, who complain about crime in Oakland, are “intentionally whipping up fear.” According to this paranoid theory, we “fear-whipper-uppers” apparently meet secretly and decide how we can scare the citizenry. Let me point out to the Council Member that no such artificial intervention for stoking fear is needed; crime in Oakland is out of control. Everybody knows it; everybody is scared to venture out, especially at night, and especially in certain neighborhoods. Of course, Fife can never admit that there is no plot “to make people afraid,” because to do so would be admitting that it’s her policies that have brought Oakland low, and this, Fife cannot do. So she invents a vast conspiracy that doesn’t exist and hopes to continue fooling an electorate that has proven, sadly, that it’s all too capable of being fooled.
In #2, Fife once against sides with the brutes who are terrorizing our streets, breaking into our cars and homes, mugging innocent passersby, and murdering little children during their gun battles on our highways. These poor, misunderstood “young people,” in Fife’s radical view, are simply the victims of structural racism. Since their communities are “under-resourced,” they have no choice but to become predators.
Well, that’s a horrible, terrible thing to say. For one thing, it implies that the people of color who by and large are committing these crimes have no free will, no moral agency of their own. Because structural racism is “under-resourcing” their neighborhoods, they’re compelled to rob, steal, mug, kill. How insulting to people of color! It’s certainly true that these brutes “don’t care about anybody else” (and how refreshing to hear Fife utter this truth!), but whose fault is that? The way I was taught, people are responsible for their own actions. There is never, under any circumstances, any excuse for assaulting someone and taking their property. There cannot be such as excuse; the nature of civilization mandates against letting these criminals off the hook. Yet time after time Fife (in concert with her good friend Pamela Price) makes excuses for criminals and shifts the blame for crime onto White people.
In the Oaklandside interview, Fife (and reporter Eli Wolfe, who interviewed her) makes much of the so-called “threats” Fife alleges to have received from “the people looking for me.” We’re supposed to feel sorry for Carroll Fife because she has “a target on my back.” Well, sorry, but I don’t feel sorry for Fife. I feel sorry for the innocent people of Oakland, the women, children and men who daily fall victim to the sociopaths who terrorize our streets. When I walk downtown after dark, I’m the one with a target on my back, not Carroll Fife. I’m not “whipping up fear,” I’m feeling legitimate fear because there are unrighteous individuals out there preying on people like me.
If Carroll Fife can’t perceive reality (and apparently she cannot), she doesn’t deserve to have any power in Oakland. The scariest part of her interview, though, is when she says she finally feels empowered as a politician because that nasty Libby Schaaf, “who did not like me,” is gone, replaced by a “progressive,” Sheng Thao, who shares Fife’s worldview on everything. As a result, Fife says, “I have a lot of unfinished business [including] fulfilling the Black New Deal…I’ll be damned,” Fife avers, “if I let folks who have threatened my life and denigrated the district run me out of office.” Well, then, damn Carroll Fife.
Steve Heimoff