Steve Tavares, who generally does a good job reporting at his East Bay Insiders, was wide of the mark yesterday when he wrote that “It’s going to take some time to analyze what precipitated the Year of the Recall’ in 2024…the reasons why voters voted to remove two of the highest profile officials [i.e. Thao and Price] in the region remains [sic] conjecture.”
The definition of “conjecture” is “to form an opinion or supposition about (something) on the basis of incomplete information.” A conjecture is an educated guess: my conjecture is that progressive District Attorneys, like Pamela Price, contribute to crime because young thugs know they will likely face few or no consequences if they break the law. Now, I can’t formally prove this assertion. In fact, very few things in life can be formally proven. The British empiricist David Hume (1711-1776) demonstrated the futility of trying to prove that the red ball moves on a billiard table when the white ball smashes into it. But although it may not be provable, we know that every time we’ve ever seen one pool ball smash into another, the latter moves. Thus we make an educated guess: the red ball moved because the white ball hit it.
In the case of the recalls, I think we know perfectly well why more than 60% of Oaklanders and Alameda County voters chose to recall both women. We have enough evidence to conclude that voters were sick and tired of progressive policies that they believed contributed to crime by letting offenders off the hook. Polls and elections everywhere show this. We saw it in the recall of Chesa Boudin as D.A. of San Francisco, in the electoral loss of George Gascon as D.A. of Los Angeles, and in many other instances. We can’t prove, with mathematical certainty, that these progressive D.A.s lost their jobs for any particular reason, but we can make educated guesses that no reasonable person could possibly object to. And the educated guess that Steve Tavares seems to have missed is that progressive D.A.s as well as Mayors who are perceived as being soft on crime (by, say, defunding the police) are no longer wanted by the American people.
I hope we don’t lose track of this truth. I don’t want to see it become a debating point for years. “Why were Price and Thao recalled? We’re going to have to let political scientists and historians debate this into the future.” No! If we open the door, even a crack, to wokes, they’ll try to convince us that the Recalls were due to outside billionaires, or racism, or some other crazy lie. We need to keep our eyes on the prize: the Recalls happened because voters woke up and fired incompetent, dreadful people.
Sometimes the truth is staring us in the face. There will always be contrarians and apologists for one political cause or another who question truth: examples are Holocaust deniers, election deniers and vaccine skeptics. We can’t make a law forbidding some idiot from claiming that the Mossad actually brought down the Twin Towers. But we can ignore and shun these people, who are only trying to stir up trouble. The truth is, in the year 2024 the American people—including Oaklanders and Alameda County residents—made an educated guess that wokeism is an infectious, dangerous disease. They may not have been able to prove it, but they felt it in their bones. They know cause-and-effect when they see it: a cue ball will cause another ball to move, and soft-on-crime policies lead inevitably to societal distintegration.
Steve Heimoff