As I and others have pointed out, one of the central tenets of wokeism is that capitalism is evil. I’m not here to defend capitalism, or any other “ism,” but I think San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston is out of his mind when he blames homelessness, drug use and all of San Francisco’s myriad problems on capitalism.
"I think what you’re seeing in the Tenderloin,” he said in a recent documentary, “is absolutely the result of capitalism and what happens in capitalism to the people at the bottom rungs." Preston explained that landlords and “real estate speculators” are causing people to lose their homes, and this, in Preston’s view, forces them into drug-dependency, criminality, rampant self-destruction, and living on the street. And now that San Francisco finally has real leadership, in the persons of London Breed and Brooke Jenkins, their crackdown on crime “has actually made San Francisco less safe.”
I don’t think most San Franciscans would agree with Preston on that, but here’s the most shocking part of Preston’s interview: he called for drastic cuts to the San Francisco Police Department’s budget, which he called “very, very bloated.” “All kinds of waste” there, he said, adding, “I could cut $100 million out of that department.”
Defund the police! I thought that was yesterday’s news. But it’s arisen again, like Dracula, from the coffin, as it always will as long as a progressive has access to a microphone.
Keep in mind Preston is the same politician who proposed a law forbidding store security guards from drawing their guns, in order to thwart robbers. He’s also an alumnus of the law firm of John Burris, well known to Oaklanders as one of the top ambulance chasers in town, a lawyer who turns up at every opportunity to sue cops. Calling himself “a Democratic Socialist,” Preston declared his S.F. district an “eviction-free zone,” echoing the far-left rhetoric we heard here in Oakland last year, when the city’s eviction moratorium was under intense assault from property owners, many of whom are people of color with modest incomes, who were financially ruined when their tenants were given three years in which not to pay their rent, courtesy of the Oakland City Council.
What are we to make of politicians like Dean Preston? We can admire their compassion for the struggling underclass, I suppose. But we also have to question their proposed solutions to poverty. Socialism, of the type Preston proposes, is never the answer. We already have, in this country, a system that is quasi-socialist, what with Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the like. But we know, from the experience of socialist countries like Russia, that socialism is very ineffective in promoting innovation and the spirit of inquiry that has resulted in inventions like the Internet. We know something else, too, that Dean Preston doesn’t: government cannot be a substitute for individual initiative.
America, it’s said, doesn’t guarantee everyone an equal outcome, it guarantees that everyone has an equal place at the starting line. What the individual does during the race is up to him or her. The kind of behavior we see in the Tenderloin, which is Preston’s district, is not due to capitalism, as he alleges. It’s due to the stupid, self-destructive and sociopathic behavior of the fentanyl addicts, dope dealers, grifters and losers who choose that lifestyle. This is something that wokesters just can’t bring themselves to admit. Nothing compels citizens to behave badly—not capitalism, not socialism, not anything. People make those decisions of their own free will. Poverty doesn’t cause drug addiction or crime. If anything, poverty should be a spur to self-improvement, not a talking point for socialists like Preston (and Fife and Brooks and the rest of that crowd) to push their leftwing agenda on the rest of us.
We all know that wokeism is dying. The entire country is sick of it, and for good reason: People work hard for their money. They don’t want their precious dollars seized from them and handed over to dubious socialist politicians, who know only how to tax, tax, tax because they can’t come up with anything else to do. Politics can be brutal, but in the end, politics is fair. Wokeism has had its day in court and been found guilty. It doesn’t work. Its apologists increasingly appear mad, which they are. Fife, Brooks, Price, Preston, Thao—all pigs in a poke, not a dime’s difference between them. They share a theory built on hate, on resentment, on jealousy, and on the proposition that voters can be fooled. Maybe that once was true. It no longer is.
Steve Heimoff