Oakland

Oakland, California In April, when spring fever ran high and California saw protests against the unending lockdowns, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised that ‘politics and protests will not drive our decision making. Science, data, and public health will drive our decision making. #StayHomeSaveLives.’ As it turns out, the anti-lockdown movement was right to be suspicious of tyranny. Not only are the decisions about opening up — or, more accurately, not opening up — political, but local and state governments are intent on taking the crisis as an opportunity to alter our way of life forever. Newsom has now tied reopening to ‘racial equity’, through reduction of COVID rates in black, Hispanic and Pacific Islander communities.

Kamala Harris is no radical. Indeed, no matter how vaguely inclusive the label ‘progressive’ may be, Harris’s long record as a California prosecutor makes it difficult to shoehorn her professional career under that rubric. The real Kamala Harris is a liberal careerist with no deep convictions whose ability to woo wealthy supporters allowed her to win a seat in the Senate.Harris’s story bears extensive similarities to that of Barack Obama. Born biracial to two academically-gifted parents, a contentious divorce found young Kamala being raised by her mother in a linguistically foreign country — French-speaking Montreal, rather than Indonesia. And, like Obama, Harris’s younger sister is named Maya.

The great conundrum facing the anti-American left at the moment is how to react to the violent protest ripping up various Democratic-run cities. What is the preferred narrative? The two main choices are 1) it’s all peaceful protest, the 'right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’? or 2) let ’er rip: we’re out there destroying stuff and hurting people because the country’s falling apart and the sooner the better.