I want to give a shoutout to Ken Houston, the City Council member from District 7. He’s the council member I’ve been awaiting for years, someone to resist the woke garbage from people like Carroll Fife. Someone who represents us, and not the grifters.
Houston has recently gotten some bad publicity over apparently giving the finger to someone during a Council meeting, which was caught on video. Some people are acting like this was some sort of completely unacceptable action that was inappropriate for a City Council member. Well, I support Houston. I don’t know exactly who he was giving the bird to—I think it was to someone in the audience, not to another Council member. If so, I don’t blame him. As I’ve written before, Council meetings are packed with demagogues who have nothing better to do than go to meetings and harangue the chambers. Meetings are also stuffed with robots who are rounded up by the unions, told what to say, and then do as they’re told. Both of these groups—the slackers and union buffoons—are nothing but pawns in the unions’ game; what they say isn’t worth hearing, and I don’t blame Houston for being fed up with them.
The East Bay Times wrote an article about Houston yesterday and it made some excellent points. First, it said that the election of Houston and some other Council members, such as Janani Ramachandran and to some extent Kevin Jenkins, “reflect[s] a sea change in Oakland politics.” The new Council “appears to be setting a new agenda for Oakland.” Gone is the vicious, racist anti-police hatred that was exemplified by Sheng Thao, Nikki Bas and Rebecca Kaplan—now mercifully peddling their crap elsewhere—and Carroll Fife, still on the Council, a recrudescence of the 2020-era defund the police movement, who finds herself pretty much alone and isolated on Council votes these days.
The sea change represents years of efforts on the part of activists, including me, to educate the people of Oakland about the true nature of crime and racial disparities. The public was told lie after lie, year after year, by professional race mongers, especially Fife and her friend Cat Brooks. These liars repeatedly charged the police with being rogue monsters who deliberately roughed up Black people. Their lies found ready anchorage in some communities, and were amplified by woke media voices, including Darwin BondGraham at Oaklandside and Sarah Ravani at the San Francisco Chronicle, two uber-progressives who to this day refuse to admit their biases. But after half-a-decade of exploding crime, the death of downtown, budget crises and scandals, the people of Oakland—despite the opposition of the progressive media—perceived the truth: they’d been lied to by their leaders and the media. They had thought that, by voting for Sheng Thao and Fife and Bas and Kaplan, and by scribbling “Defund the police” graffiti on walls, and ACAB slurs on lampposts and sidewalks, they were helping poor people of color of Oakland. We told them they were wrong, but they wouldn’t listen. But finally, the Truth managed to bust through the woke lies, as Truth is apt to do. The voters truly awoke, fired Thao and Pamela Price, and elected these new, sane, morally courageous City Council members, resulting in the “sea change” the East Bay Times referred to.
Praise the Lord! Let’s keep the momentum going. Let’s retire Carroll Fife as soon as we can—as a representative of District 3, she’s useless anyway, now that her City Council colleagues have identified her as a loser. (She may well resign before we can recall her.) Let’s let Houston and Jenkins and Ramachandran know we have their backs. Let’s let the City Council know that the idiots that pack their hearings deserve to get Kevin Houston’s middle finger, and theirs, too. Let’s let the sea change continue to roll on, inexorable and unstoppable, like a river, like Dr. King’s “mighty stream of righteousness,” not the “cup of bitterness and hatred” Fife, Brooks, Bas and their cronies have tried to foist on us.
Steve Heimoff