This week I am sharing a profile of Oakland organizer Seneca Scott that I wrote for the
, out today. As you will learn in the essay, Oakland is experiencing an insane crime wave, and at the same time, Oakland police are stretched so thin thanks to “defund” efforts that they simply cannot adequately address crime in the city.Residents report having to wait up to 15 minutes when they dial 911. Imagine calling 911 in the middle of the night because someone is in your house, and you have to wait 15 minutes before anyone answers. As a result, the city may lose state funding for its 911 emergency service, which means soon there may not even be a 911 to call.
Mayor Sheng Thao and district attorney Pamela Price have pursued woke progressive policies regarding crime in the city, such as seeking less prison time for two gang members who shot and murdered a toddler. As you can imagine, crime has spiked.
I spoke to
, a journalist based in Oakland and co-founder of , who told me he once saw two cars full of masked thieves within the space of two minutes near his home and it didn’t even occur to him to phone the police because, of course, it wouldn’t do any good.On a personal level, I connected to this piece because of my recent firing from the editorial board of The Seattle Times, which was a political awakening for me. I was profoundly disappointed to see the largest newspaper in the Pacific Northwest betray fundamental values of journalistic integrity, namely truth and free speech.
The experience of such speech intolerance at a newspaper in the United States, and among the Seattle community, caused me to reexamine some of the tenets of woke progressivism that I had in good faith given serious consideration over the years.
Then on October 7, Hamas carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and we all experienced a political awakening.
The argument that had gotten me fired proved prescient in the context of Hamas’s attack, for I had noted the selective outrage of leftists who will ignore atrocities if the perpetrators have the proper political optics. The other part of my argument was that cognizant evil is worse than delusional evil, so while Gazan support for Hamas is condemnable, it is worse when professors at elite Western universities do the same.
But the tide is turning. Many Americans, including many progressives, are sick of the excesses of progressive extremism.
Enter Seneca Scott, a former union organizer, former Oakland mayoral candidate, family to Martin Luther King Jr, and one of Oakland’s strongest voices against the city’s progressive approach to crime.
But this is not just a story about Oakland. For reasons explained in the essay, what works politically in Oakland will likely work in many American cities. That makes Oakland an ideal laboratory. Or as Seneca Scott put it, “Oakland is America’s Bakhmut. If we can stop it here and turn the tide, we can do it for the rest of America.”