I’m keeping an eye on the new City Councilman from District 7, Ken Houston, who just may be the breath of fresh air the Council needs.
Houston caught my attention when, in a recent Council meeting, he reprimanded a certain Gene Hazard. Now, people who watch City Council meetings on KTOP will recognize Hazard as—let me be blunt—a loudmouthed bully who shows up at pretty much every City Council meeting for public comments. He rants into the microphone, always going over his allotted time, refusing to stop, screaming and accusing and complaining. And, until now, our anemic Council members have sat by quietly, allowing this disruption to continue. The worst was Nikki Bas, when she was Council president. You could tell she was as disgusted by Hazard as everyone else, but I suppose she allowed him to go on and on because he’s Black, and because she wanted to appear compassionate.
Well, last week Houston had enough. He informed Hazard that, basically, there’s a new Sheriff in town, and that he, Houston, intends to restore order and civility to public comments. Hazard didn’t like that, of course, and once again shouted and raved until, his mike cut off, he stalked off in defeat. We can only hope that Houston will have the huevos to call Security next time and have Hazard forcibly removed from Council chambers and eventually no longer welcome to public comments.
Meanwhile, on a slightly different but not altogether unrelated topic…
I heard an interview on NPR over the weekend with Cory Bush, the former Democratic representative to Congress from St. Louis, Missouri. Asked whether she thought progressivism is dead in America, Bush responded defensively. No, she said; the problem isn’t that voters repudiated progressivism in 2024, it’s that “Democrats didn’t have the right messaging.”
Let’s dispose of this hallucination right away. Memo to Cory Bush: Voters did repudiate progressivism! Bigtime. And the wave of conservatism sweeping across America has nothing to do with “messaging.” No amount of messaging by professional P.R. hacks and focus group consultants could have changed the election results. No amount of money, no billions from George Soros, could have prevented all those Democrats and Independents from voting Republican. No, Ms. Bush, your party’s problem was that the real message—not the fake one you promote--was all too clear to voters: they looked out across the land, saw what’s happening in progressive cities like Oakland, and decided that they didn’t want that going down in their hometowns. They saw the thugs running amok. They saw progressive District Attorneys favoring criminals over victims. They saw progressive politicians taxing the people and transferring the wealth to progressive causes that feel disreputable and smack of cronyism. They heard progressive demagogues accusing them of being racists. They saw college presidents discriminating against White and Asian students. They saw affirmative action which, in their collective wisdom, they perceived as un-American and unconstitutional. They saw the news media side overwhelmingly with progressives and twist the news to promote woke causes. They saw progressives defame police officers and try to defund police departments. They saw the Democratic Party taken over by ideologues who think race and gender are the only important issues. They were enraged by homeless encampments that progressives protected.
Those were the messages that Americans received constantly, not only through the television screen and on social media, but with their own eyes. They saw entire cities—San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Portland OR, Detroit, Baltimore, Philly, Los Angeles—circle the drain, while their progressive mayors and City Council members fiddled and dithered and blathered about pronouns and bathrooms and “equity.” And they—the American people—finally had enough. They threw out Democrats everywhere, or at least the most progressive, woke Democrats, and they hoped and assumed that the Democratic Party would get the message.
But no. Reality deniers like Cory Bush didn’t get the message. To Bush, Democrats have to remind voters over and over that they, the Democrats, favor clean water and clean air, and “peace,” and job security and equality for everyone, and less policing, so that, in her own words, everyone “can live a full, joyous, and decent life.” Well, the people heard Bush and decided it was a steaming load of pious crap. Just more pompous cliches from a deluded politician. That’s why Bush lost her primary last summer to a moderate Democrat, a former prosecutor. Not even the liberal voters of St. Louis were ready to return Bush to Congress. They threw her out the way we threw out Pamela Price.
Steve Heimoff