Whenever I hear some left wing radical talk about “the community” I immediately think “What community are you talking about?” Carroll Fife talks about “the community.” Cat Brooks talks about “the community.” Progressives love referring to “the community” as if all of us in Oakland woke.
That is emphatically false.
The latest example is a letter writer to the S.F. Chronicle, someone named Olivia McHaney, an Oakland progressive who perceives Sheng Thao’s proposed budget as “betraying our community by bending to police interests at the expense of social programs.” McHaney is upset, I think, because Sheng Thao isn’t proposing to defund the Oakland Police Department and give the money to shady violence prevention programs that, so far, do not work. McHaney appears to be an extreme police hater: she accuses OPD of “literally killing members of our community.”
That any sentient, sane human being should actually believe this is crazy; the massacre of Black people—which is what wokes like McHaney mean when talking about “the community”—is being perpetrated by Black people, not cops. The statistical facts prove this, but woke apologists are not moved by facts. This is why they can repeat the slur that cops are killing Black people when everyone knows that Black people are being slaughtered by Black people. But White people like me are not allowed to say this. This is how woke ideology has trampled upon truth. It makes the denial of reality a qualification for elected office.
If I thought Ms. McHaney was just another isolated nut job, I wouldn’t waste my time and yours by writing about her. But she’s hardly alone. There’s a substrate of Bay Area denizens who live in a fact-free bubble and who appear to believe that crime is actually the result of racism. Such a thesis is ridiculous in the extreme, and an insult to our common intelligence. Most of us understand that crime is committed by people who think they can get away with it. Such people aren’t completely incorrect, because time and time again, society does let criminals get away with lawbreaking. We see this every day, from the pilfering that goes on in stores (and is forcing so many of them to shutter) to the open-air drug dealing and illegal tents that dot our parks and streets. We, as a society, let sociopaths get away with behavior that no normal city would tolerate. Indeed, with the advent of London Breed and Brooke Jenkins, even the historically leftwing city of San Francisco has awakened to the dangers of unchecked criminality, and is holding criminals accountable for the first time in recent memory.
Sadly, that’s not happening on our side of the Bay. We have Pamela Price, an apologist for criminals especially if they’re Black; we have loudmouths like Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks, who want to shut down the prisons and unleash hordes of violent predators upon us; we have useful idiots like Dan Kalb, who have convinced themselves they’re martyrs to the progressive cause; and we have individuals like Olivia McHaney, who in their muddled way actually believe that “cops don’t keep our communities safe.” Yes, ma’am, they do.
Steve Heimoff