I think readers know me enough to know that I never lie to you. I tell truths that are uncomfortable for others, especially the race-obsessed political scoundrels, all too common in Oakland, who drain the public coffers while lining their own pockets. People like the sainted Barbara Lee, our union-manufactured Congresswoman Lateefah Simon, and, from back East, Ayanna Pressley, the representative from Massachusetts who has gotten notorious as a member of “The Squad,” alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
The former three were at the Grand Lake Theater this past week to screen a lavish new documentary about Pressley. In her remarks, Lee praised Simon: “Lateefah took this [progressive] baton from myself, and I took it from Ron Dellums, and she is keeping this (12th California) Congressional district as the most progressive in the country.”
I’m sure Lee meant this as a rave for Simon, and for herself and her late mentor, Dellums, but most of us would agree that it was really a rebuke, even though Lee didn’t intend it to be. Ron Dellums was the worst Mayor in Oakland’s history. He accomplished nothing, except to swell his pension and make sure the unions at whose trough he fed maintained their death grip on Oakland. His legacy is crime, a bankrupt city, trash-filled streets, drug addicts living in our parks, collapsing home prices, working people fleeing, and a once-thriving downtown business corridor now reduced to nail parlors, convenience stores and the stench of urine.
Way to go, former Mayor Dellums!
Pressley lied when she delivered her own remarks at the screening. As she travels around the country, “from Illinois to Massachusetts to Texas and California,” she said, “people want us to be bold and aspirational. They want us to fight like hell [against] the dictator in the White House.”
We have got to parse these words carefully. It is profoundly true that the American people, by clear majorities, want to resist Trump and his MAGA cult. It is true that tens of millions of Americans fear and loathe the “Christian” theocracy that Trump, Vance and the rightwing Catholic majority on the Supreme Court wish to foist upon our country. It is true that Americans are upset by Trump’s contempt for the Congress, a co-equal branch of government. But it is not true that Americans want this fight to be led by radical, woke “progressives.” They—we—would much rather the fight be waged by moderate Democrats, social liberals and independents, than by a squad of wannabe Communists and depleted Black Panthers.
Simon, in her speech, called Congress “racist, a place…with the Ku Klux Klan.” This is typical Black Power rabble-rousing. Simon, as well as Lee and the other Squadistas, always call their political opponents “racists” when there’s no evidence that they are. Whenever someone criticizes affirmative action or teaching Ebonics or any of the other leftist lunacies, they’re immediately accused of being the R-word. Simon, Lee & Co. can’t fight back with actual concepts or ideas, because they have none, so they’re reduced to ad hominem attacks smearing their opponents’ character and motives. (Donald Trump does this all the time.) Simon uses the language of the church in order to sound more palatable—she practices “radical love,” she insists, ha ha—but in her more truthful utterances what we hear is the Communist Manifesto, redux: “[We] choose solidarity and community,” she maintains. You can practically hear her followers chanting “Off the pig,” which was a precursor to “Defund the police.” There’s no difference at all between the two slogans, not a dime’s worth of distinction between the Black Panthers who wanted to kill cops in the Seventies and the mental pygmies of today, who wish “only” to defund them. In their martyrdom, these woke fanatics are determined to take Oakland with them to hell, in a Gotterdammerung of grifting and garbage.
Steve Heimoff