It’s hardly surprising that Barbara Lee reacted so emotionally to Trump’s takeover of the D.C. police and his implied threat to do the same in Oakland. Here’s what Lee said: “President Trump is wrong.” His comment was “not grounded in facts, but in fear-mongering. This is not leadership--it’s an attempt to score cheap political points by tearing down communities he doesn’t understand.”
Here’s what I say. First, yes, it’s a statistical fact that crime is down in Oakland, but as I’ve pointed out over and over, crime is down everywhere in America, in all the big cities, for reasons we don’t fully understand. So if Trump claimed that D.C. is suffering from the worst crime wave ever, he was wrong. But he didn’t say that. He painted a picture of D.C. as increasingly unlivable, and in that, he was correct.
Oakland too is increasingly unlivable. Crime may be down, but the city is hostile to normalcy. On any given day when I leave my home, within two minutes I encounter an insane person wandering the streets, and overturned garbage bins, and the ugly detritus associated with homeless people, like abandoned shopping carts or the ashes of an overnight campfire in a storefront. It’s of little comfort to me that auto hijackings are down 20% from a year ago, or that armed robbery is off by 15%. I’m not worried about those crimes (well, I am, but not to the extent that I let it affect my daily activities). No, what I worry about is the steady deterioration of Oakland, its slow descent into what Seneca Scott calls Gotham.
Is it a “cheap political point” to call attention to this erosion and rot? No. It’s truth-telling, and in the case of Barbara Lee, it’s “truth to power.” The quality of life in Oakland is radically worse today than it was five or ten years ago (much less twenty years ago), and for that I blame the political ideology of politicians like Barbara Lee. They have never had a solution for crime, filth or aberrant street behavior. Indeed, since the persons who commit these sorts of actions are usually people of color (sorry, libs, but the statistics don’t lie), Lee and her cronies have attempted to blame the rest of us—the good guys—for being racists and deliberately pushing people of color into behaving badly. The reason why Trump has gained traction in America is because those of us who love the law and respect the cops have finally grasped that liberals have ensnared us in a degenerate ideology that literally causes cities to crumble. Trump’s critique of certain American cities is not because they’re led by Black mayors, but because those cities really have become pigsties, harbingers of the end of moral society as we’ve known it.
And when Lee says Trump “doesn’t understand” the “community” of Oakland, whom is she kidding? He may not live here, but you don’t have to live someplace to understand it. I don’t live in Afghanistan, but I understand it well enough to know that the Taliban are a horrible, cruel religious dictatorship of sick, authoritarian men. Trump knows what Oakland has become: it’s no secret. Everybody knows it. Among liberals, it’s politically incorrect to say it, but the silence of the left doesn’t change the facts: Oakland has become the playground of sociopaths, enabled by politicians who owe their allegiance, not to the people, but to the unions and their racialized agenda. I don’t live in Baltimore, either (the other city Trump lumped in with Oakland), but I don’t doubt that Baltimore suffers from the same sickness that afflicts Oakland.
As for “tearing down the community,” here’s a question for Barbara Lee: Who or what is “tearing down” our city? I don’t think it’s Trump, 3,000 miles away. It’s our own homegrown sickos, preying on us and on each other, disrespecting every ethical code, giving us the middle finger and telling us to go to hell because they know we don’t have the will to stop them.
So, Barbara Lee, shut your mouth. You and the deviant philosophy you represent are responsible for the collapse of Oakland as a viable, productive and respectable city. Don’t blame Trump for pointing out an inconvenient truth to you. We can unite in opposing MAGA for the myriad stupid things it embraces, but we can also admit that, for once, Trump is right. Of course, Madame Mayor, for you to do that, you’d have to admit you’ve been on the wrong path for decades. Daniel Lurie and Matt Mahan—both good Democrats—are able to do that in San Francisco and San Jose. But not you. You’re as addicted to your racist ideology as an addict is to fentanyl, and as blinded. At your age, you’ll never become a responsible leader. We’ll just have to work around you to save Oakland.
Steve Heimoff