In February 2020, San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton introduced legislation on behalf of the city’s official African American Reparations Advisory Committee for a reparations plan. The Advisory Committee had been formed to “highlight ways that City policies have harmed Black lives” and to determine “specific actions to address discrimination and inequities in areas such as housing, education, transit access, and food security.” This occurred at a time of renewed efforts across the country to push a Black action agenda at a time when Donald Trump was campaigning for a second term in the White House (which he went on to lose that November).

Ever heard of the Oakland Commission on Homelessness? Probably not, I bet. Is it even a real thing, what with all the other pseudo-agencies the City Council has created over the years? Yes, it is real, and as we’ll see, it’s a horror show, a Frankensteinian concoction of absurdity that exists simply to give sinecures to far-left activists who have curried favor with Council members.

It is a fact that every tax increase that Oaklanders have endured for years was either introduced by, or supported by, labor unions.

One of the worst outcomes of the woke-led “struggle for racial equity” has been the “discrepancies by race” theory. That’s where far-left activists insist that any measure of anything must result in equal outcomes for all races. In other words, if you’re measuring criminal behavior, you want convicted criminals to equal the racial breakdown of Oakland’s population-at-large, i.e., White 30.5%, Black 21%, Asian 15.5%, Hispanic 27.8%. Ditto for school graduation rates, income levels, home ownership. In a just and equitable society, the progressives argue, every measurable result of anything would find that precisely those percentages would be found. Any other result must, ipso facto, be the result of racism, and the insidious “structural racism” they discover everywhere they look.

If you’re a hater, you can characterize gayness as you will: sodomy, pederasty, the admonitions of Leviticus, the love that dare not speak its name, the Greek vice, bestiality, “vile affections” (St. Paul), unnatural pleasures, an abomination, “homosexuality is sin” (Jerry Falwell), “God hates fags” (Westboro Baptist Church), “sick unfortunates” (Ronald Reagan). Homosexuality has always been the most reviled of human behaviors. We know this from every civilization which has left records of itself, from the ancient Jews (of course), Japanese and Hindus through the Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and the Dark and Middle Ages, to our own era. Those men and women practicing same-sex love were shunned, exiled, excommunicated, or subject to severe, violent physical punishment, including castration and death. (Yes, it’s true the American Indians had their berdache, but they were usually ostracized.)