There’s a desperation in the anti-police movement in the Bay Area, a sense that they know they’ve lost all public support, but they’re going down fighting, throwing increasingly lunatic ideas out there, in the hope that something sticks to the wall and makes them popular again.
It can’t and won’t happen; among normal people, wokes are about as popular as syphilis. The tipping point has been reached: crime and homelessness have become so bad that the entire population is turning more conservative than they’ve ever been. Not socially conservative: the Bay Area still celebrates diversity, supports women’s rights and is proud of its LGBTQ community. But “more conservative” in the sense that we realize we’ve been had by the frauds who, in the name of “social justice” and “equity,” have perpetrated their woke indignities upon us, and extracted such a terrible price.
Consider, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle’s race columnist, Justin Phillips. His job is to find racism everywhere, the way 1950s-era McCarthyites found Communists under every bed. Lately, he’s taken up his cudgel against the Oakland chapter of the NAACP, which “has completely undermined itself” and no longer “advances [the] interests” of “Black Oaklanders.” (Justin Phillips is, of course, the supreme arbiter of “the interests of Black Oaklanders.”) Why does Justin make this allegation? Because the branch has courageously called for the reinstatement of LeRonne Armstrong as Chief, as well as for hiring more cops. Justin is lashing out at the Oakland branch because they dare to oppose crime, while his policies (to the extent he has any) propagate crime.
Justin’s race mongering is tedious, but it’s also typical of his other race-obsessed colleagues. Cat Brooks continues to demand police defunding, a policy that has as much chance of happening as her getting elected mayor (which she tried and failed to do in 2018). Pamela Price continues to claim that her policies—not charging anyone below the age of 25, not adding enhancements to the most grisly crimes, letting thugs out of jail—are actually reducing crime, a statement whose preposterousness is proven by statistics showing crime exploding in Alameda County. Carroll Fife, the City Council’s O.G. of racialized politics, continues to bash landlords, to defend house-squatting (which is theft, pure and simple), and to attack her enemies in much the same vituperative manner as Trump. Nikki Bas continues to pour taxpayer dollars into sketchy “anti-violence” programs the public knows nothing about, and to yammer about “equity,” by which she means police defunding. I could name additional politicians, but you get the idea. There’s a willful blindness to what these people are doing, a whistling past the graveyard. What is buried in that graveyard, of course, are the impossible promises progressives have made and failed to achieve. By any measurement, everything that progressives deal with becomes worse; it’s a reverse Midas touch that turns gold into garbage. But instead of admitting defeat, they double down on their pipe dreams, and the city continues to die.
From a psychological point of view, it’s interesting to observe the wokes as their grip on power slips away. It’s like watching a horror movie where you know the monster is going to die in the end, but you have to keep watching anyway. The saddest part, though, is that this is no movie. It’s real life, our life, and we’ve allowed the most incompetent, dumbest, most malevolent people to be in charge. But not for much longer…
Steve Heimoff