There’s no doubt that there’s an emerging national backlash against Trump. Polls show it. Prices continue to soar on almost everything, and will go even higher as his tariffs kick in. Every poll indicates that even Republicans are beginning to have their doubts. Trump’s, and Republicans’, response has been, “Trust our Dear Leader,” but when a trip to the supermarket is cardiac arrest-inducing, trust has no curative value to this rape of the consumers’ economic health.
From the point of a Democrat, this is good news: I’ve waited for the tipping point against Trump for ten years now, so it’s exciting to see Americans finally waking up to his lies. But this does spark a fear in me—namely, that the woke Left, which is as much a threat to our values as MAGA, will interpret this anti-Trump response the wrong way. They will see it, or at least portray it, as a validation of wokeness. It’s not: but as they romp around the country doing press events, AOC and Bernie Sanders will say, “See? The American people are tired of being hoodwinked. They want our brand of progressivism!”
Yes, we’re tired of Trump’s narcissism, negativity and greed, but that doesn’t mean we want a return to the tired, degenerate policies of wokeism and its obsession with race. We—the American people—are going to have to make it clear that, while we want to sweep our politics clean of these rightwing menaces, at the same time we refuse to accept that race-based ideology is the antidote. It’s sickening that we’ve been put into this no-win situation wherein we have to choose between the lesser of two evils.
If I had to choose which politician here in Oakland best exemplified the inanities of wokeism, I think it would be Nikki Bas. Her website as a Supervisor provides plenty of proof of how misguided she. Here are a few of her claims:
“She led the passage of the strongest COVID-19 eviction moratorium in California.” Yes, she did: she politicized COVID to let renters avoid paying their rent and to punish landlords whom she characterized as evil profiteers. It was due to her anti-landlord stance that home prices have crashed and few developers are interested in building new rental properties here.
“She created a fund for community land trusts to prevent displacement and create permanently affordable community-owned housing.” Yes, she did, when the City Council approved her proposal to build “an 100% affordable proposal developed by nearby community members” on public land near Lake Merritt. This idea was developed by a group called Eastlake United for Justice, a typically shadowy group that promotes communism and the end of capitalism, and asserts that public safety must be “Black-led” and include defunding the Oakland Police Department. The group also defends what they call “informal (non-permitted) survival vending” along Lakeshore Avenue, i.e., the illegal sale of items, frequently stolen, that has so plagued that street on weekends. This “grassroots use of public space is beautiful,” the group chirps, which explains their—and Bas’s—determination to funnel Oakland’s scarce dollars into sketchy schemes to build public housing for Bas’s favorite constituents.
As for public cries to enforce the law around Lakeshore Avenue—including from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church-- Eastlake United for Justice says “we resoundingly oppose such efforts given the longstanding systemic racism within police departments and the criminal justice system.” This is the type of disreputable organization that Nikki Bas has aligned with and is now trying to promulgate from her perch on the Board of Supervisors.
I point these things out simply to emphasize that in Oakland we have a lot of very confused people who literally want a banana republic revolution to overthrow every institution in America. They are the leftwing version of what Steve Bannon represents on the right: destruction for its own sake. Politicians like Nikki Bas have risen to power with the support of these crazies. But they’re also watching the anti-Trump backlash, and will use it in the next election cycle to mislead their simple-minded adherents. We simply can’t let that happen.
Look, we can defeat Trumpism and at the same time avoid empowering the wokes. We should crush both extremes like the poisonous snakes they are. Only by returning to sane positions in the moderate middle can we unite all parties and work together to repair the damage both extremes have caused, and wish to continue causing.
Steve Heimoff