San francisco

What does Kamala Harris really believe?

When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Religion News Service reported that she ‘now considers herself a Black Baptist.’ Black with a capital ‘B’, note. The upper-case letter is one of the shibboleths of identity politics: it’s Black, not black, lives that matter. In other places we read that Sen. Harris is just Baptist, with no mention of race — but we can be certain that if Harris describes herself as Black Baptist, it is with a capital letter. The lower-case designation ‘black’ has been regarded as disrespectful in the African American community since long before BLM. (The legendary civil rights activist W.E.B.

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Kamala Obama

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.

kamala obama

Rise and rise of the San Francisco Democrat

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.

san francisco

San Francisco in decay

District Attorney Chesa Boudin personifies everything that’s wrong with San Francisco: weak on drugs, weak on crime, weak on racist assaults and weak, even, on the trafficking of minors. Some say that’s why the campaign to recall him is gaining momentum. Others counter that he doesn’t even matter.Boudin is a son of not one, not two, but four domestic terrorists. His biological parents went to prison for a Brink’s robbery when he was one, surrendering the boy to their Weather Underground bosses Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, to raise right. The Baby Underground grew up, got a Rhodes scholarship, completed a law degree at Yale, and went to work for the Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez.

san francisco

Do all black lives matter to BLM?

‘I understand black lives matter. But that’s not my movement, right now. My movement is to let them know that was my son. Horace Lorenzo Anderson was my son.’ And his son is dead. In a gripping, gut wrenching, heartrending, half-hour interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Sr tearfully beseeched social justice warriors and anyone watching that his son’s black life mattered, too. Horace Jr. was just 19 years old when he was shot and killed at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Ongoing Protest (CHOP), the police-free, six-block city encampment created with the blessing of Democratic officials.

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A love letter to San Francisco’s mean streets

From our UK edition

Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after the American writer, and on the same continent, and much of what she describes in Recollections feels very familiar: the flamboyant gay scene of the 1980s, swiftly followed by the devastation of the Aids epidemic, the navigation through second-wave feminism, the men who constantly told us ‘what to do and be’ while they scrutinised our bodies. When Solnit was young, ‘nearly everyone who held power and made news was male’. I was fist-pumping by the time I got to: ‘We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires.

Do progressive municipal leaders want their cities to fail?

In 2017, Seattleites nearly elected a slam poet as mayor. The 31-year-old biracial, queer, poetry artist and community organizer named Nikkita Oliver came in a close third to be the city’s top executive. While on the campaign trail at a slam poetry club, Oliver said the best way to push back against the Trump administration and to achieve a ‘real sanctuary city that is about equity,’ voters in Seattle must cast their ballot for her genitalia. ‘When you go into a community that is struggling and you put the money in a woman’s hands it’s more likely to benefit the community as a whole. This is science, y’all,’ she said being interviewed on a dimly-lit stage by a Gargantua of indeterminate sex or ethnicity sporting a bowtie and trucker hat.

seattle cities

The insufferable wokeness of public art

In the middle of the 20th century, the Central Intelligence Agency executed a commendable troll against the American left. Long rumored to be a joke, documents released in the 1990s revealed that during the Cold War the CIA secretly funded and promoted some of America’s biggest contemporary artists without the knowledge of the artists themselves. It was art as weapon. The US aimed to showcase the intellectual freedom and creative superiority of Western, capitalist societies against the drab, inhibited propagandist art of the Soviet Union by broadcasting this wildly inventive style in vogue at the time. The CIA propped up artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

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