We need to get rid of a misconception that’s floating around out there: that if someone supports the police and wants the city to manage homeless encampments, then that person must be a Republican. This falsehood has been circulating on social media. It is the far left’s version of the Big Lie that was started by Trump and continues to be pushed by his far-right cultists.
The fact of the matter—which the far left doesn’t want the public to know—is that support for cops is not a partisan issue. It never has been, in the history of America. You can be liberal and progressive and still respect the women and men who put on the uniform.
In the same way, you can insist that Oakland manage these encampments, instead of letting them sprout up all over the place, and still be a progressive liberal.
The far left, which dislikes cops and is against any management at all of homeless encampments, likes to smear their political opponents as “rightwingers” and “trumpists.” I’ve been called that, especially on Twitter and nextdoor.com, and so have some of my colleagues at the Coalition for a Better Oakland. But most of us are lifelong Democrats; the smear is a Big Lie.
After all, even liberals can be fed up by the antics of the far left. Consider the situation in San Francisco, where a very serious Recall campaign is underway against members of the School Board. That Board, at the height of the pandemic, did two really dumb things: they decided to rename schools that had been named after people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even California’s senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein, on the crazy notion that they were racists. And they did away with the entry requirements for Lowell High School, which for decades had made Lowell one of the best high schools in America.
These things turned off huge numbers of San Francisco voters, who are among the most progressive in America, but who know crazy when they see it. The school board wasn’t trying to reopen schools, or figure out how to keep them safe. Instead, they were advancing their own woke ideologies, in reckless disregard of the interests of school kids and their parents. San Franciscans arose in righteous indignation and started a Recall that seems likely to succeed.
Of course, pro-School Board types immediately branded the Recall supporters as rightwingers and racists. But that meme has gotten really stale. In their increasingly frantic and frenzied final days, the far left has no more intellectual fuel with which to appeal to voters. All they have is the Big Lie, and a shrinking base that grows more radicalized the more marginalized they become.
I am a Democrat. I was raised in a Democratic household. I cherish workers’ rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and the right of a woman to control her own reproductive health. I believe in science, not religion, as the source of human truth. We need to raise taxes on the richest Americans, and on corporations that pay no taxes because they control the legislatures in Sacramento and D.C. I began an anti-Trump, anti-Republican blog well before Trump got elected president. I will allow no one to smear me as a trumper. Nor will I waver in my support of the Oakland Police Department. Who, in their right mind, would be upset by me expressing my support of OPD on Twitter? The answer is: someone from the woke far left—and those people truly are out of their minds.
Steve Heimoff