I was watching the local news last night about the robbery of a 7-Eleven. Caught on camera were the four hooded thieves, who rushed from a Honda, raided the store in less than a minute, and then took off. And the thought hit me: We’re in an insurrection.
Let’s face it, there’s an uprising in Oakland of criminals who are determined to steal everything they can: from stores, from pedestrians, from cars, from homes. They have no respect for our common values, as exemplified by the Ten Commandments. These people know they cannot be stopped—or rather, they will not be stopped because the will to do so in Oakland doesn’t exist. Given enough police, and the freedom to do their jobs properly, we could stop this insurrection. But we are led by people who fundamentally do not believe in policing, and the citizenry is further led astray by media influencers, like Cat Brooks and the cadre she surrounds herself with, who have convinced enough stupid people that police are the enemy, not criminals. And so the insurrectionists wage war against us.
And they are winning. The crime statistics prove it. So does the brazenness of their criminal activity. Nothing, or very little, gets done to deter them. Even if they’re apprehended, which is unlikely, Madame D.A. is likely to let them off the hook, especially if they’re people of color and/or under the age of 25, while permissive judges, whom we can charitably call “woke,” will give them probation, at best.
There’s a word for this: kleptocracy. It means government run by the most unscrupulous citizens. By kleptocracy, we usually refer to military dictatorships or juntas, or to nations ruled by plutocrats, but the word now is applicable to Oakland. You’ve heard of “failed states,” such as exist in much of Africa. Oakland is a failed city. We have an insurgency that is permitted to wage war on us through political inaction and a bureaucracy that is more interested in lining its own pockets than in protecting its citizens. Proof? Look no further than this recent report to the City Administrator on “the costs involved in serving and responding to the homelessness crisis in the City of Oakland.” It estimates that the city spends upwards of $120 million a year “to provide services to [Oakland’s] unhoused residents.” A great proportion of this money is for the salaries of homelessness bureaucrats. For example, in the Homeless Division of Oakland government, administrative analysts make $173,000 a year, while their administrative assistants earn $111,000 a year. In the Community Development and Engagement Unit, “which serves as a virtual front door” for housing services, program coordinators earn $480,000 a year. Meanwhile, over at the Housing Development Services Unit, a senior Coordinator makes more than $1 million a year, while even the lowliest administrative assistant hauls down $126,000 annually. I mention these outrages only to point out how meaningless and corrupt our housing bureaucracy is—and to suggest that that money could be put to so much better use by transferring it to the Oakland Police Department.
But that’s wishful thinking. The Fife-Thao-Kaplan-Bas gang that is deliberately starving our police department meanwhile stands stupidly, blindly by while this insurrection, this uprising, is gathering strength. Why do they do nothing? I can only guess it’s all part of their plan. As I’ve pointed out before, Communist and Socialist revolutionaries have a theory that poor people, led by violent criminals, will be the vanguard of the Intifada they yearn for. In the addled brains of our woke leaders, the monsters who robbed that 7-Eleven are the shock troops they’re organizing to topple the whole, damned, entire system, and install their own vision of hell. Meanwhile, the question for us law-abiding citizens of Oakland is: Do we stand by idly and let this rape happen?
Steve Heimoff