Two items from yesterday’s S.F. Chronicle struck me because both are about the horrible, damaging impact that far-left woke politicians have had on Oakland.
The first was an opinion piece by a retired man who lamented the loss of all three of Oakland’s big-league teams: the Warriors, Raiders and Athletics. He wrote mainly about his sentimental attachments to the teams and how much they had connected the city despite its well-known racial, ethnic, age and class divisions. I 100% agree, but would argue that the word “loss” doesn’t accurately reflect what happened. We didn’t “lose” the teams; they were deliberately driven out of town. What really happened was all three teams were hated by a cabal of powerful minority women who harbored big grudges against (male-dominated) sports: Rebecca Kaplan (Lesbian), Carroll Fife (Black), Nikki Bas (Filipino) and Sheng Thao (Hmong). All four practiced the most extreme form of identity politics and ended up the city’s leading practitioners of wokeness. Their self-proclaimed enemy was straight White men, and if they were connected to wealthy corporate interests (as all the banished teams were), our Fearsome Foursome wanted them out of town.
Due to their political power and the support of biased reporters in the local media, they got what they wanted. The three teams realized they were resented by the power structure, and high-tailed it out of Oakland. And our town is much the poorer for it.
The second piece that caught my eye was a letter to the editor from a woman who years ago moved from San Francisco to Nevada City. She recently returned for a visit and had nothing but praise for her former city. Classic Italian dinner in North Beach, her first Waymo, a “lovely hotel” in Mission Bay, and—best of all—“something unexpected: no sidewalk tents or homeless encampments.”
Can you imagine anyone visiting Oakland saying that? This city is still overrun by tents and encampments and the garbage that accompanies them, courtesy of our Mayor and City Council. What accounts for this difference? It’s obvious: San Francisco despite its progressive credentials finally realized that encampments are bad, and has moved aggressively to get rid of them. Oakland by contrast is run by the same progressive fools who invited the homeless here and continue to protect their “right” to violate laws by squatting pretty much anywhere they want, befouling the surroundings, and contributing to the city’s abnormally high crime rate.
The four women I mentioned above no longer control Oakland. Kaplan has moved on to a sinecure, arranged for her by her former colleagues, in which she draws a fat salary and benefits for doing nothing. Bas has been kicked upstairs to the Board of Supervisors, where she’s a menace to Livermore, Castro Valley and Fremont, but less of a threat to Oakland. Fife alone remains on the City Council, up to her usual racialized calumny of hating on White people, while Thao looks set to go to jail. A slightly more moderate crowd has moved on to the City Council, but when you’re just “slightly more moderate” than the insane communism and racism of Carroll Fife, that’s not saying much.
Steve Heimoff