Under Mayor Lurie San Francisco has taken unprecedented steps to clear out encampments, arrest drug dealers, remove abandoned vehicles from the streets, and stop sideshows. Berkeley is following suit, toughening its anti-encampment policies significantly last year, although some of its new ordinances continue to be—as usual—challenged in court by pro-encampment radicals. In Fremont, as we’ve seen, the same regressive forces that have stalled encampment cleanups in other cities have been unusually aggressive. As I blogged the other day, they’ve managed to coerce Fremont into partially undoing its recently-approved encampment ban, and are actively working to scuttle the remnants of the ordinance.
But Oakland is where these unnatural forces learned to ply their trade. They’ve looked to our city for years to teach them how to throw spokes into the wheels and gears of encampment management policies. Oakland has been a training ground for permissiveness towards encampments in the same way Moscow used to be the hub of Communist training of apparatchiks during the Cold War: teach them all the devious methods of delay, obfuscate, infiltrate and organize, and then send them abroad to do their dirty work.
Why Oakland? Well, of course, the answer is that we’re the biggest city in the East Bay, with a long history of leftwing activism, including the Black Panthers and Occupy. The heads of these organizations come and go over the years, moving elsewhere, retiring or dying, but the movements they created live on. Every election cycle, the progressives, or “wokes” as we now call them, choose their new candidates, and the big unions (SEIU, CNA and so on) dutifully fund their campaigns, instructing their drones to knock on doors and attend rallies. The big media likewise get onboard, giving favorable publicity to union candidates while ignoring everyone else. And thus a corrupt system endures. Corrupt, because it has ensured that every route to money and media exposure is shut off to everyone but their favored candidates.
Take, for example, Ken Houston, about whom I also blogged a week or so ago. He came up with a perfectly logical, doable proposal to manage encampments and abandoned vehicles in Oakland, only to run face-first into a buzzsaw of resistance from some of his fellow City Council members. They’re repeatedly stalling on voting on his proposals. They’ve accused him of violating California laws. Carroll Fife in particular has used her ugly brand of snarky rhetoric to portray Houston as an idiot. “I don’t see that we need another policy to say we need to follow the law,” Fife said. For Fife, “the law” is simply an inconvenience if it interferes with her ideology, as it did when she illegally seized that house to launch her political career.
The anti-Houston supporters have alarmed the public by alleging that if Houston’s bill passes, the city would lose $40 million in state homeless funds—an accusation for which they’ve provided no evidence. The local media have virtually and intentionally boycotted Houston: I doubt that few Oaklanders outside his District 7 have even heard of him.
I’m not saying Houston is a saint. Some insiders describe him as a self-promoting grifter who oozes inauthenticity, and is ambitious to succeed Barbara Lee as Mayor. Having never met him (he didn’t respond to my invitation), I couldn’t say. But I’m looking at his encampment proposal and, hell yeah, it’s a good one. So why is the rest of the City Council so upset with it?
I know that professional wokesters, such as Barbara Lee and Carroll Fife—who are on the wrong side of both history and morality—will argue with me. “Steve,” they’ll say, “Oakland is very fortunate that we’ve been able to keep progressivism alive.” But tell me, is Oakland safer as a result? Cleaner? Wealthier? Less racialized? More attractive to investors? No, no, no, no and no. Whatever wokes have touched has turned to dust in their cold, dead grasp. It’s going to take a long time to cleanse Oakland of the virus of racialized progressivism, but I believe we’ve begun this long, difficult journey back to what Oakland used to be and no longer is—sane and prosperous.
Steve Heimoff