IF WE IGNORE THE LESSONS OF SAN FRANCISCO, WE WILL DESERVE WHAT WE GET!

San Francisco is a not-so-shining example of progressive “success.” And like most success stories, it didn’t happen overnight. It took years of planning and execution for the streets to become overtaken by drug users and the mentally ill and for the crime rate to outperform the expectations of every sane resident and observer.

It all began when most residents weren’t paying attention to local government and it continued to increase as residents began accepting the chaos as normal. The failed experiment that began in San Francisco about 20 years ago, is just getting off the blocks here in Watertown but you can only see it if you are paying attention.

And most of our fellow lab rats are not.

If you would like a picture of how and why some residents and graffiti artists have dubbed their once beautiful city, San Franshitshow, you might want to stop here and review my previous post. It’s a combination of the frightening, the disgusting, and the ridiculous.

Progressives owning the majority on San Francisco’s board of supervisors (their version of our city council) for over 20 years and having elected a radically progressive district attorney have resulted in policies that reward criminals and increase drug addiction and unsheltered homelessness all in the name of compassion, personal freedom, and antiracism.

It is unlikely that progressives will lose their majority on the board of supervisors any time soon. They win at the polls in San Francisco for the same reasons they win at the polls in other progressive cities. They are highly organized and they make constant efforts to recruit new members − especially the young and idealistic.

And they succeed in selling the proposition that local government’s first obligation is to dismantle structural racism and reverse the power differential between whites and blacks.

And of course progressives win because most registered voters don’t vote. You know those nonvoters well. They’re the ones who recite the classic excuses: Why bother? My vote won’t matter. You can’t fight city hall. They’re all crooks anyway.

If we look around Watertown and do not see that structural racism has tainted this city, it is only because we don’t want to see it or we are too blind to see it. So, smarter, more enlightened people will bravely do the job for us.

The search for our next city manager will likely favor candidates who, above all else, can show our progressive fixers that they have a stellar track record of fighting for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).

Such a track record is especially important in Watertown where we are pitifully weak when it comes to EDI.

During the last election campaign, Councilor Bays scolded us for having a government with “terrible diversity” and Councilor Palomba lectured us that we need to have more diversity in government at the “director level.”

I don’t want to put words in their mouths and I’m not a mind reader but, as a reluctant student of progressive thinking, I feel that I am on solid ground when I say that, by diversity, they did not mean women, Scandinavians, Mormons, or even Asian Americans.  

Only by bringing black people into our government can we begin the process of making up for our history of oppression and structural racism. Never mind that blacks make up only about 4% of Watertown’s population!

Why such a minuscule number? Because of structural racism, of course. The number would be significantly higher if Watertown had long ago stepped-up and embraced the values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

You might have noticed that the people in Watertown demanding this racial justice are almost all white. Could that possibly have anything to do with the shortage of black people in Watertown? Have there been black candidates for director level jobs, who have been rejected because of skin color?

Progressives would probably answer that, given our well-known structural racism, they didn’t apply for those director level jobs because they knew they would be rejected because of skin color.

I have an interesting hypothetical question. What if progressives hit the jackpot and find a great black candidate for city manager, only to find that he or she is not a progressive ideologue, but a moderate, colorblind, best practices pragmatist? Wouldn’t hiring that candidate be politically self-defeating?

It’s not a crazy question.

Take for example, San Francisco.

London Breed is the first black woman to be elected Mayor of San Francisco. Following the murder of George Floyd, she jumped onto the defund the police bandwagon and announced that she would take $120 million from the police department budget and transfer the money to social services, primarily for the black community. Policing would be reduced and replaced with civilian crisis response and homeless support teams.

Kindness and respect by city government, already the norm, would be ramped up to a game-changing new level.

She made good on her promises. And then she watched her reinvestment payoff: drug overdoses and deaths increased, the homeless population rose, and violence skyrocketed. Who were the disproportionate number of victims?

The black community of San Francisco represent only 5% of the population but they are one-third of all violent crime victims.

Apparently, when you give drug addicts new hypodermic needles and cash for food, and then sharply reduce police presence, they will sell the needles, spend all the cash on drugs, and steal their food. And they are more likely to become the victims or the perpetrators of violent crimes.

Now, who could have possibly predicted that?

When Mayor Breed had seen enough and heard enough from victims of those violent crimes or their family members, she gave her now famous, U-turn press conference. Standing outside of city hall, she looked into the tv cameras and announced that:

“It is time for the reign of criminals to end. And it comes to an end when we are more aggressive with law enforcement and (wait for it) less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

Yes, she said bullshit and everyone knew what she meant − white, progressive, utopian, divorced from reality, totally out of control bullshit.

She was calling out the progressive board of supervisors and the radical district attorney and they naturally took offense. Board members responded by accusing her of “grandstanding,” “being in the pocket of the tech industry” and being “owned by billionaires and rich white men.”

The mayor explained her position in an interview with New York Times columnist/podcaster, Kara Swisher, titled:

Why This Liberal Mayor Doesn’t Want a Lecture From Progressives?

You can listen to it or read the transcript here.

After listening to the podcast or reading the transcript, you will realize that the title is incomplete. For greater accuracy, it needed two additional words: Black and White, so that it would read this way:

Why This Black Liberal Mayor Doesn’t Want a Lecture From White Progressives

The mayor was fed up with being lectured to by white people who did not grow up in poverty, while living in rundown, crime ridden public housing, right there in San Francisco, as she did. She was being lectured to by white people who did not understand, firsthand, the complicated relationship that residents of black neighborhoods have with the police − not trusting the police but badly needing them for protection.

The mayor announced that addicts and the mentally ill would no longer be free to camp on the streets. From this point on, if they refused appropriate treatment for their illness, they would be taken into custody − a progressive taboo - and brought to a treatment center.  Members of the board called this policy a violation of individual rights. The mayor called it accountability and tough love. They simply did not have the inalienable right to harm themselves or harm others, on the streets of her city.

With public sentiment on her side, the mayor had won the moment. The board would have to give-in and honor her demand for a special ordinance that would grant her emergency powers for the most crime-ridden district.

But the board would stand firmly against the mayor on a key request that goes to the heart of their beliefs − no increased police presence, because police are the problem and never the solution.

So the San Francisco Police Department, according to a study commissioned by city hall, remains 400 officers short of being adequately staffed, with retirements on the horizon.

In the meantime, the voters have shown signs that they might be ready to call an end to the progressive experiment.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the prosecutor who refuses to prosecute, will face a recall election in June. If he loses, Mayor Breed will choose a replacement, who does not believe that the only good prison is an empty one.

This week, three members of the San Francisco School Board faced their own recall election. The entirely progressive board took a radical left turn that aroused even the most complacent, accepting, liberal voters. While parents were clamoring to get their kids back into classrooms, which surrounding school districts had already done, this board was too busy with their antiracist agenda to perform their most fundamental obligation.

The board had identified 44 schools that had been named after individuals who board members determined were being racists, oppressors, colonialists, or some other category of moral criminal. The list included George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Paul Revere, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dianne Feinstein.

Dianne Feinstein?

All of the old names would have to be replaced in order to “protect” minority students by providing them with a “safe space.” You might question the value of an educational system that would protect students by cancelling Abraham Lincoln.

You might also question the strategic wisdom of alienating supporters of Dianne Feinstein, one of the most popular liberal politicians in San Francisco history. There are not enough progressives to win elections without the support of traditional liberals and some moderate Democrats.

The seven members of the board were preoccupied with more than just school names. They were also busy addressing a serious violation of the principles of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

The Lowell School is San Francisco’s elite high school. Admission to the school has always been merit-based, using standardized test scores and letter grades to select the most deserving students. Asians consistently top that list. They are also the largest racial group (37%) in the district.

Black students are consistently at the bottom of that list and they are also the smallest racial group (6%) in the district. Performing poorly on standardized tests is clearly a direct result of structural racism. The obvious solution was to ditch the merit system and replace it with a lottery.

The Asian population was incensed. These were working class families, unable to afford the cost of sending their children to private schools.

Siva Raj, a tech entrepreneur and a recent immigrant from India, watched as his children struggled academically and emotionally with being shut out of their school while children in surrounding districts and private schools were back in their classrooms.

Raj co-founded an initiative to recall members of the school board. Only three members would be subject to recall since the other four members had not served the requisite period of time.

“For Asian immigrant parents, the only way to achieve the American dream is education,” said Raj. “What upsets them is the feeling they’re being shut out.”

So much for Equity, Diversity and especially Inclusion.

Asians organized their communities to protest the lottery decision and to support the recall. The vice-president of the school board tweeted that those Asian Americans were exhibiting “white supremacist thinking” and later tweeted “were like slaves who benefited from working inside a slave owner’s house.”

The school board, already a laughingstock, voted to replace her as board vice president. She responded, as any team player would, by suing the district and the board members who had voted against her for $89 million. The judge, unsympathetic to her pain and suffering, threw it out of court.

Mayor Breed blasted all members of the board for shirking their responsibilities to the city’s children and endorsed the recall. Governing as a commonsense pragmatist, she seems to be winning the hearts and minds of San Franciscans.

Shocking Update: The results of the February 15 recall election are in. All three members, including the board’s president, were voted out by 70 to 79% percent margins. Had all board members been subject to the recall, they all would have lost. The remaining four members could be recalled in July.

In June, District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the prosecutor who refuses to prosecute, will face the voters in his own recall election. Mayor Breed has not endorsed the recall, but neither has she endorsed Boudin. Her support, which would go a long way to saving his job, is conspicuously absent.

The members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors must be more than a little concerned that the lab rats in their city-wide experiment have teamed-up and are turning on their keepers.

Is San Francisco finally showing signs of a backlash against progressivism? If they are, it took a lot to push them to the brink. How much more decline would San Franciscans have been willing to endure, had their mayor not stepped forward and called an end to the bullshit?

How fortunate is Watertown that San Francisco has shown us where we could be headed if enough voters don’t wake-up and demand a stop to the bullshit?

 

Paul Revere, The Battle For Watertown