I’ve mentioned before that I like to watch KTOP television. They show commercial-free meetings of the City Council, the Police Commission and other Oakland agencies, in all their chaotic, numbing stupor. One thing you can practically guarantee is that the audience will be filled with rude leftists who interrupt speakers by yelling and clapping whenever they’re moved to, at the expense of decorum. These people shout down speakers with whom they disagree, and clap wildly whenever one of their favorites, such as Carroll Fife, says anything.
We have to understand that these meetings are stacked with leftwing supporters of racial causes in Oakland, trucked in like melons by the unions, such as SEIU, California Nurses, IFPTE and others who heavily support Fife and donate lavishly to her campaigns. You might be tempted to think that they’re regular people who genuinely support Fife and her ideology (this is what they want us to think), but you’d be wrong: those hooters and hollerers aren’t regular citizens who feel so strongly about issues that they’re willing to skip work that day and attend meetings that can last hours. No. They’re stooges (paid?) whom the unions routinely round up and send to these meetings with the express intention of disrupting them.
This is the Fife playbook. She and her union masters hijack the meetings by packing them with APTP/Cat Brooks cultists and unruly, entitled old Black Panthers, who have nothing better to do than to thuggishly interrupt, hoot and jeer, and intimidate others from speaking. It’s incredible that Council members claim, as they often do, that they heard “the people speak” during, say, a meeting on Flock cameras. These are not “the people,” they’re fakes--imported shills for junk causes most real Oaklanders deplore. Shame on Kevin Jenkins, the Council president, for not calling these pests out and warning them that they’ll be ejected by security if they don’t shut up and behave.
The fact is, most people don’t have the time to go to these meetings. They’re working hard to support their families, or they’re senior citizens with mobility issues. They can’t shlep down to City Hall all afternoon or spend hours on the telephone waiting to be called to speak remotely. The City Council in particular has gone out of its way to making public comments as difficult and tedious as possible, resulting in a situation where only compromised extremists participate. This is not democracy: it’s a charade. Stack the meeting with only your supporters, tell them what to say, and instruct them to be boorish and crude if anyone has the alacrity to say anything positive about the police. And then claim that you heard “the people loud and clear” and, based on that, you’ve decided to defund the police.
What a joke.
Personally, I’d eliminate public comments at city meetings. Why bother with them anyway, when we all know they’re just staged little dramas whose scripts are secretly crafted in “closed session” between rogue politicians, like Fife, and rogue unions, like SEIU. There are many more democratic ways of finding out how the public feels about the issues, such as polls; and anyway, I’m not in favor of subjecting every issue to public comment anyway. The public is often misinformed about things, or biased. Public opinion can be, and is, used as a cudgel in a town like Oakland, especially by the worst of our politicians, like Fife, whom we must understand is not representative of the people, so much as a commodity bought and owned by the worst and most corrupt special interests in California.
There does come a time, it seems to me, when we, the actual people and not the fake ones, must rise up and overthrow the oppressive system that keeps us enslaved. Oakland government is such a system. We’ve been under the control of this monetized, racialized cabal for a long time—too long. They’ve had their chance to enact their policies—indeed, they’ve had no opposition for decades. But look around: is Oakland livable and safe? No. Is it economically successful? No. Have crime and grime become normalized? Yes.
This is a civil rights issue, folks, no less than the civil rights struggles of the past. Taxation without representation sparked one revolution, and may spark another. When you try something over and over again and it never works but only makes everything worse, it’s time to stop doing that thing. What hasn’t worked in Oakland, because it can’t, is the politics of progressive racialized wokeness, where if you’re the right skin color, you’ll be just fine, and if you’re not, drop dead.
Steve Heimoff