“I wish we could evolve past destroying our own businesses,” I heard a cannabis activist remark on the evening news concerning the latest assault on Oakanna, the Black-owned Lakeshore Avenue dispensary that’s been broken into many times.
Yes, I wish the same thing. But I wonder if the cannabis activist voted for the progressives who have driven Oakland into the ground: Barbara Lee, for Sheng Thao before her, for Carroll Fife or Nikki Bas, and for the former and disgraced District Attorney, Pamela Price.
I bet she did. Most of these Black activists positively adore the progressives; they vote for them the way Yellow Dog Democrats voted for the KKK in the Old South. What the activists don’t do is analyze how the progressives they vote for actually impact our—their--city. Were they to do that—well, they might change their political affiliation. But they don’t. They can’t. There’s too much cognitive dissonance between what they claim to want and what they do. It’s hard for humans to admit they’ve been wrong about something. It’s impossible for progressives. They’ve invested so much energy into their woke, race-based ideology that, if they changed their minds, their self-worth would collapse, not to mention their funding base (i.e., unions). So they keep on keeping on, mindlessly, oblivious to the damage they cause.
Whoever drove that stolen car into Oakanna’s front window and ripped it off clearly benefited from the Thao-Fife-Price ideology that favors criminals over normal people. Those progressives did a number of things for which History will condemn them. First, they empowered a criminal element in our city that already felt aggrieved. They told that element, in so many words, that their grievances were justified, and so was their criminality, which was merely the redistribution of stolen wealth. When the criminal element grew out of control, the progressives said that the true cause of crime was not a demented mind but an ill-defined “root cause” that had something to do with White supremacy. That was exactly what the criminals wanted to hear: “Hey, even the D.A. says we’re justified in stealing what is rightfully ours.” And so they stole, and the new D.A. winked and nodded as she let them out of jail.
The next step in their war on public safety consisted of breaking the Oakland Police Department. Gradually, one step at a time, they killed its budget. They increased the power of the anti-police mobocracy—the Police Commission, the Community Police Review Agency—and stood mutely by as the Federal Monitor gutted the department. Even as crime soared out of control, the progressives watched proudly as OPD was kneecapped. Libby Schaaf, who presided over this rape of OPD, bragged about her “modern-day progressive police department” and actually claimed, “We’re on the front lines, we’re the vanguard of police reform.”
Schaaf’s tenure as Mayor was a disaster, but Thao’s was far worse. Thao, whose chances of being convicted of crimes and going to prison are so high that her attorney recently “indicated he may want to seek a change of venue for his client,” consciously did nothing about homelessness and encampments, about rampant crime and lawbreaking, about abnormal people terrorizing the streets, about the filth and degradation that forced businesses and homeowners to flee town. Instead, while she was committing her indictable shit, she doubled down. Those of us who realized what was happening shook our heads in dismay. We tried to alert the public, but no one listened. Instead, they buried their heads in the sand, and elected—Barbara Lee.
Look: the cannabis activist wants us to “evolve past destroying our own businesses.” But evolution implies a forward-thinking epistemology. Unfortunately what we have in Oakland is not forward-thinking. It’s obsessed with the past, like the “The south shall rise again” irredentists, with their Confederate flags and statues.
These modern-day rebels of the Left want a return to the Seventies-style Black liberation movement, which went nowhere and died due to its singular irrelevance. It’s still irrelevant, but those stuck in it—whom we call woke--don’t know that its, and their, time has come and gone and will never, thank God, return.
Steve Heimoff