MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WBTW) — South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said Thursday he wants “every liberal jumping off bridges in San Francisco because Herschel Walker won” while campaigning for him in Georgia.

Graham said politics is tough, and unlike football, there’s “no helmet in politics.”

“All this crap they’re throwing at you coming from Los Angeles. 13 days before an election. All you got going for you is the people of Georgia,” Graham said.

Graham’s comments come after another woman said she was pressured to get an abortion by Walker.

“Why are they so focused on Herschel? They are afraid of Herschel Walker,” Graham said. “Because if Herschel Walker wins that means we’re not racist. And if you’re a republican, aren’t you tired of being called a racist all the time by everybody?”

Graham also mentioned South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and said “what liberals fear the most” is “a strong confident Black man being a Republican in Washington.”

“We’re going to have a bunch of Spanish women become Republican congressmen because the border is broken,” Graham said.

Graham compared the situation to accusations against now—Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“Right at the end, all this stuff comes out,” Graham said. “There’s another one. And another one. And another one. Well, you know what? You know how that movie ended? Kavanaugh stood there. Stood his ground. Trump had his back, and he’s on the Supreme Court.”

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Graham said the people of Georgia will have Walker’s back and will send him to the US Senate.

The post Graham: ‘I would like each liberal leaping off bridges in San Francisco as a result of Herschel Walker gained in Georgia’ appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

San Francisco is arguably America’s most progressive city, so the lopsided recall of three school-board members on Feb. 15 stunned political observers across the country. Voters ousted Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga by margins of 59%, 48% and 42%, respectively. Other members were spared because they weren’t on the board long enough to qualify for a recall vote.

It’s not hard for anyone outside of the social-justice-warrior hothouse to understand what happened. Instead of trying to get the city’s schools running after the COVID-19 shutdowns, the city’s school board championed symbolic, far-left political issues that even most San Franciscans — including its liberal political leaders — found distasteful.

“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the Board of Education doing their fundamental job,” said Mayor London Breed. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. … They were focusing on other things that were clearly a distraction.”

That’s spot on. As the pandemic raged, the board was fixed on renaming 44 San Francisco public schools. It abandoned the effort in April 2021 when the blowback became too much to handle. The effort was absurd, as the board sought to remove names of figures including Abraham Lincoln, naturalist John Muir and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To highlight the idiocy, the board tried to change the name of Alamo Elementary School after it “mistakenly assumed that (it) was named for the Texas battle and not for the Spanish word for ‘poplar tree’,” SFist reported. The board also tried to paint over a historical Works Progress Administration mural at George Washington High School — an act that brought comparisons to the Taliban.

More substantively, the board changed a merit-based admissions policy at a top high school and replaced it with a lottery system to promote diversity — something that annoyed the city’s large Asian American community. Most of these battles resulted in litigation — not to mention contentious public meetings centered on the imperfections of 18th century founders.

This ideological insanity obviously diverted attention from basic educational concerns. The city’s schools remained closed. The board and its allied teachers’ union seemed to be in no rush to resume regular schooling, thus allowing the city’s students to fall further behind in their studies. Parents seen with anger, which culminated in the rare recall campaign.

Even political analysts on the mainstream left viewed the vote as a wakeup call for progressives, seeing it as a chance for them to understand that, fundamentally, public schools are about educating students rather than pushing for vast cultural change. But the reactions of the losing parties suggest that they remain in their ideological slumber.

“Don’t be mistaken, white supremacists are enjoying this. And the support of the recall is aligned with this,” López tweeted after her loss. The teachers’ union continued to chide venture capitalists and billionaires, who helped fund the recall campaign. Left-wing commentators saw the vote as the result as part of a conservative political campaign — never mind that Republicans comprise less than 9% of San Francisco’s voter registrations.

The San Francisco recall proves that parents everywhere want their schools to provide quality education — and that elected officials should knock off the fringe nonsense.

The post Even mother and father in liberal San Francisco have limits – Press Enterprise appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Her peak-and-valley journey has taken her from homelessness to a rent-controlled apartment, from pride over her daughter’s academic brilliance to the pain in knowing she would need to send her away for school, from out-of-work Lyft driver to unpaid advocate pushing for the Tenderloin’s children to be shown the wild beauty beyond these streets.

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It is a story bound and shaped by the Tenderloin, historically a first stop for the hopeful and a last for the desperate.

For Bryant it is simply home, another of its 36,000 residents seeking opportunity and security within its downtown boundaries, angry they have earned through hard experience the unusual urban ability to tell the difference between human waste and dog feces by smell alone.

“Unless you are living in the TL you don’t know it, you can’t be committed to it,” said Bryant, who is Black, taking in the winter sun beaming between buildings one recent morning.

The neighborhood, many things to many people over the decades, helps define the sharpest edge of this rich, troubled city at the epicenter of Blue America. This city is the domain of Democrats, a place that has produced a number of influential state and national political figures over several decades but is run largely by party members well to the left of their national counterparts.

This is also a city that once pioneered the ‘do-your-thing’ ethic of equality, a place where ideology has often clashed with practicality. That pair of cherished civic traits now complicating efforts to address its more visible, disconcerting social failures as Democrats argue over how the meaning of compassion in a neighborhood where violent crime is rising, drug abuse is visibly rampant and homelessness is the defining aspect of its streetscape.

The question at stake is whether a great American city can help a neighborhood, through a surge of law enforcement or through a preponderance of patient social work, or fail in a very public way? Free of Red State friction, the Democrats here have all opportunity and hold all the risk, facing a chance during a midterm election year to see if a city can save a central part of itself and remain true to its liberal virtues.

Now 47, Bryant knows these tensions all too well. She grew up in the city’s Western Addition district and, in the notorious projects that defined the area, got to know her neighbor, now-Mayor London Breed (D). Bryant was homeless for years and now lives in a spacious, rent-controlled apartment — “a very nice place,” as she puts it, “in a terrible neighborhood.”

She has a 16-year-old daughter named Asha, a star student, now enrolled at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school far from Ellis Street. “I was ready to pack up and move with her to New Hampshire,” Bryant said. “And the reason I have not looked to move out of here is that I am too afraid of being homeless again.”

One other child lives at home with her, Genesis, the youngest, a nonbinary teen who suffers from a serious anxiety disorder.

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“I attribute it to the constant noise here — it is impossible to get used to,” Bryant said. “But I got to the point too where I could tell the difference between the smell of human poo and dog poo — and I hated that, hating the idea of being able to know that difference.”

An out-of-work Lyft driver now, she has been making ends meet with food vouchers and unemployment benefits. She has been protected in her home by pandemic-era eviction moratoriums. But she has also been working for two years without a salary to get her project, Weekend-Adventures, up and running.

The concept is simple: Arrange weekend day trips for the Tenderloin’s children to experience nature just beyond the neighborhood: the Muir Woods National Monument and the Marin Headlands, Lands’ End and the Point Reyes National Seashore. There are museums and aquariums and libraries close by, too.

“This is my heart’s work,” Bryant said, a wistful reminder of weekend trips decades ago over the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate with a grandmother who treated her to pumpkin ice cream on the other side.

She cannot find that taste here.

In mid-December, Breed declared the Tenderloin “an emergency,” largely due to the soaring cases of drug-overdoses, which have exceeded the number of covid-19 deaths in this city by nearly double over the same time.

The most controversial element of the plan was Breed’s decision to send additional police officers into the Tenderloin, probably a couple dozen, which she said was necessary to help disrupt the much-photographed open-air drug trafficking. Breed is also seeking more than $22 million in additional overtime for police and fire departments.

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She also wants officers to have easier, more timely access to surveillance camera footage in the Tenderloin. Voters here, historically leery of government surveillance, will probably decide through a ballot measure later this year whether she will get her way.

“All you heard during the emergency declaration hearings were people complaining about how we were treating those addicted to drugs, right?” Breed said during a recent interview at her City Hall office.

“And I was wondering: What about the people who live there, who are not addicted to drugs? What about the people who work there? What about the people who have been suffering for the longest with all of this? Where are their advocates? Why do they not have advocates?”

Breed’s critics on the left say she is criminalizing human despair — the homelessness, addiction and mental illness at the core of the Tenderloin’s problems, but not the underlying cause of them. Those who oppose Breed’s plan advocate for what’s called a harm-reduction approach to the crisis, rather than one that involves law enforcement.

Such an approach would emphasize social work and drug treatment over homeless encampment removal and small-scale drug arrests, treating it more as a public health emergency than one that requires arrests and jail time. City officials say more than 6,800 overdoses were prevented last year through the use of naloxone, a fast-acting nasal spray that counteracts the effects of potent opioids.

“I give credit to the mayor for stepping up and doing something — this is an emergency,” said David Campos, a Democrat and former county supervisor and police commissioner who will face an April runoff for a vacant state Assembly seat representing the Tenderloin. “But I don’t think arresting people is the solution.”

Breed is pushing the city’s Democrats in a direction that, at times, conflicts with the left’s most closely held orthodoxies. A member of the city’s dwindling Black community, she has had to alter some of her own long-held positions, particularly her life-learned skepticism around public safety and policing, in developing a Tenderloin plan with more law enforcement involved.

But she said the neighborhood’s rapidly declining condition have forced the change. Last year, according to San Francisco Police Department statistics, the number of murders, rapes and assault cases in the Tenderloin all jumped by double-digit percentages. The number of robberies declined.

“The main purpose of any leader, I believe of any city in this country, is to ensure the safety of the people that you represent,” Breed said. “And the fact is, when a line is crossed and there’s violence, there is a need for police officers — police officers to take the report, police officers to do the investigation and ultimately for police officers to make the arrests.”

The Tenderloin debate, and the larger questions about race, crime and policing that it implicates, has also set off a very angry, public argument among the city’s Democratic leadership, many of whose members have known each other for decades.

The White district attorney, Chesa Boudin, is facing a recall later this year. Three school board members were recalled this month after prioritizing — with campuses closed during an early peak in the pandemic — the renaming of more than three dozen San Francisco public schools while the board had yet to draft a plan to return thousands of students to classrooms.

Breed supported the school-board recall, which includes one member whom she initially appointed. The largest mainstream daily newspaper in the city used to the special election to remind voters that “competence matters, even for progressives.”

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“We’re in an extreme period right now, and even though we have Mayor Breed and Chesa Boudin and everyone in office in this city is progressive, we have to govern,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), whose district includes the Tenderloin. “At times that means leaving the ideological approach by the wayside as we focus on whether our transit system is running consistently and our schools are educating out kids.”

Adnan Alameri, a small-business owner and father of three, needs such an advocate. He voted for Breed, but he sees his neighborhood deteriorating quickly despite new resources, vigilance and social programs.

“I tell people I live in the Tenderloin and they are like, ‘Oh, okay, do you think we could meet somewhere else,’ ” said Alameri, who since immigrating from Yemen in 1993 has lived in the neighborhood with his family. “It’s like a war but we should be the ones deciding how to fight it. We are the ones who suffer so we should have the loudest voice.”

Alameri owns a 7-Eleven on the eastern edge of the Tenderloin, roughly five blocks from Twitter headquarters. His business calls unfold in a mix of English and Arabic, and on a recent afternoon, he is arranging a meeting between Tenderloin residents and the city Human Rights Commission.

The whiteboard in the employee area promotes an underlined “Cleanliness” on the list of store values. He is short, bald and grave.

In recent months, he has watched fellow markets begin to go-along to get-along, selling single cigarettes, carrying extra tin foil, selling glass pipes — all items useful to drug users. He doesn’t blame the business owners, whom he says are just doing what it takes to get by.

“They keep adding program after program — and all of it makes it worse,” Alameri said of the city government. “It feels like quicksand: the more money and programs that come here, the more problems and people it sucks in.”

The Tenderloin provides instant sensory overload, head spinning on arrival, even to those who have visited often. One element is the sidewalk chorus of a thousand voices, all seemingly talking to themselves. The rise and fall of many monologues, mostly the result of drug use or mental illness, serves as the neighborhood’s musical theme.

The chorus sang out one recent Monday morning, the aftermath of a weekend evident in U.N. Plaza. In the morning sun, City Hall’s brilliant white dome reflected winter daylight in a million directions.

The city power-washing trucks worked away, clearing up human waste and hypodermic needles that did not make the sanitary-disposal boxes affixed to public-toilet kiosks. A “clean-energy vehicle” — in this case, a public bus — zipped by soundlessly on Market Street.

“You were in my way, man, my way,” one young man shouted at another. “My way, my way. My way.”

It is the sound that a frail Black man at the top of the BART subway station escalator hears from his contorted posture, probably gripped by the early stages of a fentanyl rush. So, too, does the White man doubled over in a nearby bus shelter, rushing or withdrawing. Behind him, in silence, someone leans his head against the wall of an expensive hotel and vomits quietly.

Police officers in small groups survey the scene — and do little more.

But there is some hope here, a line outside the Linkage Center, the just-opened clearinghouse for city housing, mental health and substance-abuse services. There are hot meals and, when the group Dignity on Wheels pulls up on Market Street, hauling a trailer full of portable showers and washing machines, there is a place to get cleaned up, too.

The leased building is across from U.N. Plaza, the most visible landmark so far of the social element to Breed’s Tenderloin plan. It is staffed to serve 100 people a day.

Outside, hidden from public sight by blue fencing, is an area where those at the center can use drugs to avoid severe withdrawal. There is no law yet allowing such a place — known as a safe-consumption site — but one is in the works in the State House.

“This is an overdose prevention site, and we are practicing harm-reduction here,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, who directs the city’s Department of Emergency Management and designed the emergency plan. “The question is how does what we are doing here turn the dial on what is happening inside the Tenderloin. That remains to be seen.”

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Carroll is at the Linkage Center almost daily now, sometimes haunted as she was on a recent afternoon by a woman suffering mental illness with only the clothes on her back and no identification of any kind. She is among the nearly 2,500 people who have visited the center so far, about a fifth of whom have left with a referral to some city service.

The short-term priority is keeping her and many like her inside the center until even a temporary solution might be found for shelter, for a shower and snack, for an overdose prevented with naloxone. A dozen doses were administered in the center during its second week of operation alone.

“There are people who come in who can’t go for more than 30 minutes without using,” Carroll said. “We are trying to engage them and frankly with this population, if you don’t give them space to do what they need to do, you can’t engage for long.”

The Tenderloin has been a carnival within San Francisco’s cultural carnival for decades, a neighborhood of very young and very old, the newly arrived and the barely alive, Red Light district and political refuge.

In the 1970s, its lower-than-average property prices made it an affordable first stop for Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees escaping war. Over the years, the mix has shifted. Latinos, many recently arrived from Central America, and Middle Eastern immigrants, many fleeing civil conflict in Yemen, have changed the cultural streetscape.

On a single block there’s “Korean Comfort Food,” Gulf Coast Mexican taquerias and Sudanese cuisine. The range of ethnicities is evident in the masked faces of the kindergartners who file, in best-behavior seriousness, through the halls of the Tenderloin Community School.

“The people who are coming to the Tenderloin, many of them, they’ve been displaced, they’ve been traumatized, they’ve experienced violence, they’ve gone in and out of institutions or jail or prison,” said Matt Haney, who lives in the neighborhood and represents it on the San Francisco board of supervisors. “They have been let down at every level in their lives.”

Here the city’s most concentrated population of people enduring homelessness and addiction live directly below $400-a-night hotel rooms and glamorous rooftop restaurants, a flickering fire pit as the centerpiece of each table.

Whole Foods will open soon across Market Street from the Linkage Center. A block down, the “Market on Market” caters to the nearby Twitter workforce, an expensive and expansive selection of international wines and other bougie fresh-food items filling the shelves. There’s a Trader Joe’s around another corner.

“What is especially painful is that it’s so close to such wealth and such innovation,” said Haney, who supported Breed’s plan and will face Campos in the April runoff for the open Assembly seat. “It’s new, it’s the future. And if the future looks like this you should rightfully be terrified.”

The neighborhood sometimes has the feel at times of a crisis zone, where disaster relief is being delivered, where food and medicines are being dispensed by a variety of volunteer groups.

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There are the colored vests, for example, a staple of any crisis zone. The Tenderloin is ablaze with colored vests.

Most of the vested are from Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit working under a city contract that pays its employees to help clear and keep clean the Tenderloin streets. There are 450 of the Urban Alchemy workers in the neighborhood.

They wear black-and-green vests. Most have served time in prison, the organization’s credo being that “the best people to heal society are those who understand what it means to harm it.”

Small clear holders, containing a dose of naloxone, dangle from a loop on their vests.

It’s work that happens alongside the daily rituals of the Tenderloin’s residents. A little after 8 a.m. one recent morning, a squiggly group of schoolchildren line up in single file, a few stamping in anticipation, others silent with anxiety, outside the steamed-up windows of El Jefecito Laundry.

On this chilly day 11 children line up along Turk Street with Baby Yoda backpacks and Spider-Man lunchboxes, little parkas and big sweatshirts. This is their school bus, a chaperoned escort through the Tenderloin, past the addicts with foil and lighter flames in hand, past the ill and the hustlers.

“Line ‘em up guys, line ‘em up,” Aviaire Evans, a 33-year-old aerosol artist, calls out. “And …. we’re going to school, guys, let’s go.”

El Jefecito quickly behind them, the pedestrian bus edges up the crowded sidewalk toward Van Ness, where the brightly tiled Tenderloin Community School awaits. Evans, wearing the white vest of the Code Tenderloin group, shouts for the line to step right to avoid a smear of human waste, sending a flurry of rainbow running shoes and sparkly sneakers scampering out of the way.

Terrill Jones brings up the rear.

He is huge and, in his words, “every bit of 50 years old,” although he looks younger as he shepherds tiny stragglers across Turk. He has spent half his life in prison on robbery and weapons convictions. Out for three years now, he has traded Soledad State Prison for the Tenderloin.

“We’re gap fillers — finding the gaps in this neighborhood and stepping in,” said Jones, a member of the Code Tenderloin community group that runs the walking school bus. “I made an agreement with myself, and with God, that I would put the same energy I put into committing crimes into helping this community.”

This is the attritional nature of the Tenderloin project, military in its approach to secure and hold public areas. One proposal to help clear the streets is to give city authorities more authority to take people who cannot take care of themselves off the street, the legal process of conservatorship.

But the state law remains very restrictive and San Francisco has used conservatorship only twice in two years. City officials believe roughly 150 people should be candidates for conservator, still less than two percent of the city’s homeless population.

The crowd simply moves now around the Tenderloin, a parade of dealing, and addiction, and shelter-seeking that follows the paths of least resistance. The so-called balloon effect — when one part of a balloon is squeezed, another swells up — is as much an issue here as it is in the larger war on drugs.

“It’s still a whack-a-mole, push-people-in-a-circle situation,” said Charles Pitts, 50, a registered voter who has been homeless in the Tenderloin for the past four years.

Although she did not grow up in the Tenderloin, Breed appears to take personally the conditions on its streets, something she has publicly cursed about in recent weeks. She noted angrily that Black people now account for about 4 to 5 percent of San Francisco’s population and an estimated 40 percent of its homeless, many on the Tenderloin’s streets.

Her brother, Napoleon Brown, is serving a 44-year prison sentence at the penitentiary in Vacaville for a manslaughter conviction. In 2000, Brown pushed a 25-year-old man, Lenties White, out of a robbery getaway car. White was killed by an oncoming car.

Six years later, on the eve of her 26th birthday, Breed’s younger sister died of a drug overdose.

Breed acknowledges the troubled history many San Francisco residents, especially those of color, have had with the city police. In the Plaza East project where she grew up, you didn’t talk to police, only avoid them, she said.

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“My beliefs stem from how I grew up and where I grew up in poverty in this city — it wasn’t designed to be a part of any ideology,” she said. “It’s really based on what I saw, what I experienced.”

But her critics say her plan is simply a repeat of the nation’s “war on drugs,” a demand-first focus that punishes the addict, erecting with prison records and nuisance fines barriers insurmountable to even some of the most determined to recover.

“I will say that sadly, many of the very left-leaning progressives in the city who are politically active, they have a playbook,” Breed said. “And they use certain things as excuses as to what will or will not happen to incite fear in people.”

Among the most obvious divides over the Tenderloin is between Breed and the city’s elected district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a White Ivy League-educated liberal who grew up in a far different environment than the mayor.

Boudin’s parents were members of the Weather Underground, a far-left militant group founded in the late 1960s. When Boudin was just over a year old, his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, were convicted of killing two police officers and a security guard during a bank robbery. Kathy Boudin was released from prison in 2003, Gilbert last year.

Now 41, Boudin was raised in Chicago by university professors Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, leaders of the Weather Underground, which the FBI once labeled a terrorist group.

He earned an undergraduate and a law degree from Yale and studied at Oxford University. In San Francisco, he worked as a public defender, leading a seminal case that challenged the paying of cash bail to secure a defendant’s pretrial release as unconstitutional.

Asked in a recent interview what he sees in the Tenderloin, Boudin said, “I see, first and foremost, San Francisco’s most diverse community, the neighborhood that has the highest density of different immigrant groups and families of school age children.”

“I see a neighborhood that’s full of different ethnic cuisines, that adjoins our City Hall, and kind of glues together so many different neighborhoods,” he continued. “I see all that. And I see a neighborhood with tremendous resilience and one that has for decades been plagued by a combination of a very visible public health crisis and higher-than-average crime rates.”

In November 2019, Boudin ran successfully for district attorney after his predecessor, George Gascon, declined to seek reelection. Breed won her first full term as mayor on the same ballot.

Gascon went on to win the race for district attorney of Los Angeles County, where his prosecution philosophy, designed to reduce overzealous charging, mass incarceration, and excessive sentencing, were developed in large part in this city.

Boudin’s policies are largely consistent with Gascon’s. A new father of a 4-month-old, Boudin is viewed by his more conservative critics as too lenient on gun, gang, drugs and property crime.

Most recently, Boudin has come out against Breed’s decision to send more police to the Tenderloin.

Like many to the mayor’s left, he says more patrols will only punish homelessness and addiction, making it harder for those suffering most to build a life beyond the streets with the legacy of policy records or unpaid public nuisance fines. The small-time dealers, meanwhile, just cycle through. San Francisco police arrested more than 65 people last year on more than one occasion for drug dealing in the Tenderloin.

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“Right now in San Francisco, it is easier to get high than it is to get help,” Boudin said, arguing that the city’s top priorities in the Tenderloin must be preventing fatal overdoses and increasing access to residential addiction treatment.

“The drug sales themselves are in many ways a symptom of a larger problem,” Boudin said. “Most of the residents that I speak with aren’t particularly upset that there are drug sales happening there, but they are particularly upset with all of the collateral implications, with the groups of people congregating on corners, with the human misery.”

Boudin said his office has not seen drug arrests in the Tenderloin increase since the mayor sent more police there. But he said he prosecutes about 85 percent of the felony drug cases the police bring to his office, a rate that has risen steadily over the past two years.

‘This is a God problem’

The fence around Boeddeker Park separates James Walker from his former life.

Tall and working up a slight glean of sweat, Walker is on the park’s well-cared-for basketball court in work clothes, shooting a lunchtime round of hoops on a crisp, bright day.

This half-hour is a gratifying routine, a regular reminder to Walker of his three decades as an addict on these same streets and his dozen years clean.

Around the park perimeter a homeless camp has sprung up quickly, using the chain-link fence as support for cardboard lean-tos and tents. Pint-size vodka bottles, scorched tin foil and cigarette butts bump against the curb along the street.

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When police and other city workers cleared the homeless from a postage-stamp sized park a few blocks away at Turk and Hyde, many simply moved here or farther up the street.

Walker knew those cycles for decades, the shifting geography of the drug trade and safe-sleep spots, before he became a husband, and a father to a daughter, and a limousine driver with a place to live on the far side of the Bay in Oakland.

“So they will just fill all the jails — and then what? I was a part of all that and it did no good,” said Walker, who is Black and maintains many friendships with people still on the Tenderloin’s streets. “London Breed is not going to solve this problem. This is a God problem.”

The post San Francisco’s Tenderloin a Liberal Problem appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

By Mark Barabak

Sunday, Feb 20, 2022 | 2 am

San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those.

Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The result of Tuesday’s recall was neither.

The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash.

What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls.

The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.

In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.

The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.

In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time board members wasted.

Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)

Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.

All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened.

Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it.

He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for removal.

It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in the lifetime of any adult within sight of Coit Tower.

But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco. It’s not a case of pro-Trumpers seeking to ban books, or conservatives stirring up unfounded concerns about critical race theory being introduced into grade schools. Parents have emerged as one of the most potent forces in politics, and woe to anyone seen as standing in the way of kids’ education.

Liesl Hickey, a veteran GOP strategist, has dubbed 2022 the year of the angry K-12 parent. “They are mad,” Hickey told the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter, “and they want to hold someone accountable.”

That’s what bodes poorly for Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Midterms elections are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and the voters most likely to turn out are those who are angry and wish to make known their discontent.

Public schools may be back to regular business by the fall. Inflation may be tamed and store shelves and car showrooms may be brimming with the inventory they now lack.

But it’s a good bet that parents won’t be forgiving or forgetting what’s taken place over the past two plague years, and in that way San Francisco’s recall election may be the early rumblings of a much larger shakeup to come.

Mark Barabak is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

The post From liberal San Francisco, college board recall is a three-alarm warning for Democrats appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

SAN FRANCISCO

Before the pandemic, before San Francisco closed its public schools for a year or more, Beth Kelly was on a political “cusp” between identifying herself as a progressive Democrat and a moderate one. Not anymore. This environmental lawyer and mother of two young children says she’s now “solidly in the moderate camp.”

That move may not sound like much of a change to people outside the Golden State. But it’s a significant shift in this famously liberal city where voters are pushing back against progressive policies that they see as ineffective.

On Tuesday, Ms. Kelly and other angry voters overwhelmingly recalled three members of the San Francisco school board. During a historical pandemic shutdown, the board made national headlines for its focus on renaming 44 schools, including those named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, while elementary schools were closed for 12 months and high schools for 17. In June, the city faces another test in a special election to boot District Attorney Chesa Boudin, one of a new cadre of progressive prosecutors across America. In December, the city’s mayor, London Breed, declared a state of emergency in the downtown Tenderloin district, vowing to end “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city.”

Why We Wrote This

San Francisco has long been a way-shower for progressive ideals. But progressive policies haven’t kept up with crisis-level social welfare needs – causing political backlash that may signal a deeper shift in liberals’ commitment to compassion-driven governance.

Could it be that San Francisco, where Republicans are only 6.7% of registered voters, has found the limits of liberal idealism? 

From her home in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District, Ms. Kelly describes “a shift rightward,” or at least “still left, but maybe less left” than before the pandemic. “People are getting fed up with ineffective policies, and homelessness and drugs.”

Others put it slightly differently. “This is a revolution for governance,” says Siva Raj, one of the parent organizers of the school board recall. It’s not right vs. left, he explains, but a grassroots demand “for elected leaders to actually govern.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Beth Kelly, an environmental lawyer, plays a math game with her two children before they head off to school on Jan. 27, 2022, in San Francisco. She supported the recall of all three school board commissioners in the Feb. 15 special election, and has become known through Twitter as the parent expert on the school budget – #BethBreaksItDown.

Left or right, up or down, many San Franciscans are dismayed at the state of their beloved city, which like other urban centers in the country has seen a pandemic spike in homelessness, drug use, and homicides, not to mention student learning loss – with subsequent political reaction. In New York, concern over public safety propelled a former police officer – Democrat Eric Adams – to the mayor’s office. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu, a Democrat, cleared a ballooning homeless encampment with a combination of social workers and bulldozers. Meanwhile, Glenn Youngkin last year recaptured the Virginia governorship for Republicans, running on a message of more parental control over education. In Congress, Senate Republicans are again swinging at their favorite liberal punching bag, messaging on the San Francisco mayor’s “reign of criminals” comment from December. If even San Francisco Democrats are unhappy, well then. 

“Republicans are going to cash in on popular revulsion on what appears to be an increasing criminality, certainly murders, as well as homelessness,” says Jerry Roberts, former managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and biographer of former San Francisco mayor and now Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was the last person to face a recall on the city ballot. That was in 1983.

The latest surge in socioeconomic crises brings liberalism to yet another threshold. Does this represent a pivot point for the city – or even Democrats nationwide, who might be ready to temper some of their most progressive instincts on COVID-19, crime, and education just as a crucial midterm election looms? Or, as Mr. Raj suggests, is it a call for politicians to refrain from “symbols over substance” and do the hard work when it comes to budgets, crime, and schools?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ed Ho, an engineer and father of two children in San Francisco public schools, relaxes at his home in the Sunset neighborhood on Jan. 27, 2022, in San Francisco. He supported the recall of all three school board commissioners.

As Ed Ho, a public school parent who voted for the recall, puts it: “We actually support criminal justice reform. We actually support Black Lives Matter. We want a better society. We want to close the achievement gaps in education. But the way that it’s being pursued now in this city is just off the rails.”

Out with the school board

On a recent Thursday at 7:15 a.m., Ms. Kelly opened the door to her world – a “work-from-home hustle” of juggling clients and children. Inside, it’s hardly the “chaos morning” she described when setting up this appointment. Her husband, a civil engineer, is asleep upstairs, having worked the night shift. He left word not to use his name or the names of the kids. 

Things quickly and quietly settle down, with mother and 5-year-old daughter on the sofa, reading aloud. Her 7-year-old son free-ranges with toys and books in the remodeled kitchen-dining room where a wall of large windows opens to a terraced garden. Eventually mom and kids migrate onto the living room rug, where they play a favorite math game with cards. Both kids are really good at this. Grandma arrives to pick them up, with the boy heading to second grade at a public school, and the girl to preschool.  

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Beth Kelly, an environmental lawyer, reads with her daughter before the child heads off to preschool on Jan. 27, 2022, in San Francisco. Ms. Kelly supported the Feb. 15 recall of three school board commissioners.

Parents of school-age children know how tough these last couple of years have been. As this attorney mom explains, her son has a “glitter sprinkle” of learning needs, and suffered educational setbacks without his individualized support from in-person school. Now that school is open, things are so much better. But last summer, Ms. Kelly was hospitalized for a month because “it was just too much – the pressure on families, working families.” 

Added strain came from her devotion to Zooming in on hourslong school board meetings that ran late into the night. One issue that caused an uproar was a rushed process to eliminate the entrance exam at prestigious Lowell High School in order to fight racism at the school and provide more opportunities for Black and Latino students. Parents of Asian students, who made up slightly more than half of the student body, were particularly upset. A judge ruled the board’s decision-making process violated the law, and declared its decision null and void.

Ms. Kelly’s interests, however, were focused on budget challenges. “I started looking at some of the board meetings. No one was paying attention to the structural deficit.” An admitted numbers geek, she began tweeting out reports from every meeting, missing family dinners, missing swim lessons. Under the hashtag #BethBreaksItDown, she became a tweeting sensation. The outgoing board inherited the nine-figure deficit, but she says the board’s inaction meant that more than $100 million in federal funds intended to catch kids up from learning loss instead went to fill the budget hole.

“I found the whole process extremely disturbing. … It’s a crisis. It’s nuts and bolts. You have to balance your budget.” Also disturbing – the nasty social media backlash from progressives who derided this white mom for sending her kid to a “white” school that is just 35% white. Another target for derision: the success of her school’s PTA in fundraising.

“This year has made me feel very unwelcome in both the public-schools sphere and certainly in the more progressive wing of things,” Ms. Kelly states. “There is a real liberal discomfort with affluence and whiteness.” That’s a lot of internal conflict for a city where two-thirds of the population is registered Democrat, half the population is ethnically white, and the median household income is nearly twice the national average. 

Nearly 30% of San Francisco’s K-12 students go to private schools. If progressives keep shunning these families, she explains, enrollment in public schools will continue to decline, and so will funds, which are based on enrollment. That means closing schools. “We need to bring those families back in,” she says. “We need education for everybody.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

First grade teacher Jeremiah Jeffries sets up a literature drop for the No School Board Recall organization in the Sunset District of San Francisco on Jan. 29, 2022. “The Board of Education kept us safe during the pandemic,” Mr. Jeffries says.

Clash in the city of tolerance

San Franciscans pride themselves on being tolerant and compassionate, a city of second chances. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, likes to invoke the prayer of her city’s patron saint, St. Francis: “Lord, make me a channel of thy peace.” 

This tolerance and activism, for instance, brought a sea change in the nation’s LGBTQ culture and laws. In his history of California, the late Kevin Starr writes that as a port city, with a “live-and-let-live” attitude, San Francisco attracted gays and lesbians from the 19th century onward.

Easton Agnew-Brackett, also a Democrat and resident of the Sunset District who voted for the school board recall, loves San Francisco for its weather, architecture, and stunning beauty – all of which make this the most expensive place to buy a house in the United States (median sales price: over $1.3 million). This college counselor grimaces over the “very, very expensive” cost of living, but embraces the city’s values. “As a gay parent, I am treated just like any other parent. And I can walk down the street with my kids and my husband and people don’t give me weird looks.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A mural is seen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district on Jan. 28, 2022. The neighborhood is testing progressive policies, seen by some as inadequate to combat a pandemic spike in homicides, homelessness, and drug use.

But that tolerance seems to elude city politics: “Like a knife fight in a phone booth,” the saying here goes – with consequences that can be fatal. In 1978, a former San Francisco supervisor assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to political office in the nation.

Ms. Kelly says equity, compassion, and social justice are her “core beliefs,” and she and others are deeply troubled by the demonization of those who disagree with progressives on the school board issue. Anti-Asian tweets by one school board member, the Lowell High School changes, plus a surge in hate crimes against Asian people have galvanized that community.

A school board supporter, Julie Roberts-Phung, who co-chaired the no-recall effort, cites doxxing and harassment of people opposed to the recall. Pictures of two board members were painted with swastikas and burned, she says. This school board is the most credentialed, diverse board she’s seen – one that responded to parents’ concerns about pandemic safety.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Charles Pitts, who has been homeless for four years, chats outside the Linkage Center, which provides health and social welfare services at U.N. Plaza in the Tenderloin on Jan. 27, 2022, in San Francisco. Mr. Pitts sleeps in the Mission District, where it’s safer; gets a small government check; and buys from Costco outside the city and then sells his wares at twice the amount inside the city.

“We have deep-seated issues around racism in San Francisco,” she says. “There’s a lot of people who describe themselves as liberals but are taking positions that are opposite of Black and brown families in San Francisco.”

The city is a hotbed of local politics, says Mr. Roberts, the former managing editor. “It’s kind of like Beirut. There’s so many factions. It’s bare-knuckled and in your face.” The issues being vigorously argued over today – education, public safety, homelessness, race – go back decades, he says. 

In a way, today’s backlash could be described as a fight over how to be the most effectively compassionate. 

“San Francisco is plagued with idealism. We really do want to care for everybody that can’t care for themselves,” former Mayor Willie Brown told The New York Times in January, when asked about the city suffering from a crisis on the streets. But that idealism has created its own set of problems, as anyone walking the streets of the Tenderloin can see.

Safe passage in the Tenderloin

It’s a bit like parting the Red Sea. For two hours every weekday morning and afternoon, JaLil Turner and his team of 15 to 30 volunteers make sure the sidewalk along Jones and Turk streets in the Tenderloin is clear of drug dealers, drug users, tents, and any other potential dangers, so volunteers can escort young children safely to and from Tenderloin Community Elementary School.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Maria Cortes with the Safe Passage program, run by the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, helps schoolchildren cross the street on Jan. 28, 2022, in San Francisco. Ms. Cortes has two children at the local elementary school and lives in the Tenderloin neighborhood. Volunteers work two shifts, 8-10 a.m. and 2-4 p.m., protecting every corner the children pass through to get to their school and after-school programs.

“Kids are coming through,” announce the escorts, as they roll out in teal-and-orange safety vests. If they see someone openly using or dealing drugs, the escorts ask that person to move to the other side of the street. There’s no belittling or talking down, says Mr. Turner, and if someone refuses, there’s backup – a police officer who walks the route and more safety “ambassadors” contracted by the city. 

“Our group is essentially all things to help the Tenderloin,” says Mr. Turner. He manages the Safe Passage program for the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, a nonprofit that is deeply committed to this neighborhood of 50 blocks sandwiched between the luxury stores of Union Square to the east and the imposing beaux-arts City Hall, opera house, and symphony to the west.

This is the area that shocks Mr. Turner’s friends who visit from Kansas, where he went to college. The visible concentration of people struggling with substance use disorder, mental illness, and homelessness does not comport with their paradisal image of San Francisco. Also living here: the city’s largest concentration of children, 3,500 of them, as well as older adults, many of them Asian. “It’s a melting pot,” says Mr. Turner, with many young immigrant families from the Mideast and Latin America.

The Safe Passage patrols reflect that. Tatiana Alabsi, from Yemen, wears her safety vest over an abaya and hijab, and speaks Arabic. Her son goes to the school. Spanish speaker Maria Cortes, a volunteer from Mexico, has two boys in the school. The patrols start off from a sparkling YMCA in Boeddeker Park, with two “captains” peeling off at street corners along the route. Mr. Turner understands it can be uncomfortable for people to work in this area, but for him, it’s the opposite. His grandmother was a drug user who frequented the Tenderloin, and as a child, he and his mother would sometimes come here looking for her. He does this work “from the heart” to help others in a similar walk. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

JaLil Turner, manager of the Safe Passage program run by the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, chats before heading out for the afternoon session, on Jan. 28, 2022, in San Francisco. The program, with the help of volunteers, provides safe passage for children to and from school in the Tenderloin, and also for older adults.

Mr. Turner walks the entire route, checking in by radio every 15 minutes with his crew. Along the way, he points out fresh murals in the neighborhood, a small Yemeni eatery where he sometimes gets lunch, a street sanitation crew, and a gated corner park in pristine condition. The cleaned-up park is another improvement since the state of emergency, maintained by his nonprofit’s staff. He also passes a man behaving erratically, a sidewalk party, and at an opposite corner close to the school, drug dealing. About a dozen young people are milling about there. Which one is the drug dealer? “They all are.” 

In his three years doing this work, he has observed the stark contrast between policing and conditions in the Tenderloin and everywhere else in the city. Residents here vigorously protest the way that homelessness and drug use have been “contained” in their neighborhood. Behaviors are “allowed to happen here” that are not tolerated elsewhere, says Mr. Turner.

“If you’re selling drugs in the Presidio and you’re caught, you’re usually arrested and prosecuted. You’re not out in a day or so. You do it in the Tenderloin, and that same person you saw dealing, who was arrested in front of your eyes yesterday, will probably be out tomorrow.” It’s not unusual for him to see Tenderloin dealers commute from Oakland with him on Bart. “If you’re a drug dealer and you can go to a place where you won’t be prosecuted, you’ll probably go there every day.”

On this day, walking along Turk Street, he was pleased to point out two police officers on motorcycles – another novelty since the state of emergency, he says. Meanwhile, the nearby shopping district of Union Square is bristling with seven marked police vehicles, plus a trailer-sized emergency operations center, on the block where the Louis Vuitton store is located. In November it was hit with a sensational “smash and grab” robbery. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The upscale Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco’s Union Square, seen on Jan. 28, 2022, was the site of a recent smash and grab robbery. There is now a lot of police presence in the area.

At 2:40 p.m., the Tenderloin school begins the coordinated end-of-school routine. Six groups of kids are released at intervals over the next half hour. They make their way down the Turk Street sidewalk, masked and toting backpacks, a Safe Passage worker leading the way and another one bringing up the rear. 

Now in its 13th year of operation, the entire Safe Passage effort is finely tuned. That’s a point of pride for Mr. Turner. But he also comments that the best thing for a nonprofit is to no longer be needed. “I feel like I will never not need to be here.”

Time for “tough love?”

In November, the Tenderloin Community Benefit District wrote to Mayor Breed pleading for help. Families met with her, describing daily dangers that they and their children encounter on filthy streets.

The intensity of challenges seemed to reach a boiling point in December when the mayor, citing persistent, worsening public safety and an opioid crisis with an average of two overdose deaths a day, declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin. It allowed for more enforcement and disruption of illegal activities, and cut through red tape to stand up the Tenderloin Linkage Center – a one-stop resource for people who need health, housing, or social welfare services.

“I know that San Francisco is a compassionate city. We are a city that prides ourselves on second chances and rehabilitation, but we’re not a city where anything goes,” she said.

The mayor, whose sister died of an overdose, said she was raised by her grandmother to believe in “tough love.” Described as a moderate, she is often at loggerheads with the progressive board of supervisors. She supported the recall of all three school board members and recently said that she is “not on the same page” with District Attorney Boudin.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Unhoused people chat outside the Linkage Center at U.N. Plaza in the Tenderloin on Jan. 27, 2022, in San Francisco. The center provides one-stop services, including food, vaccinations, showers, laundry, and help with housing.

“I think we’re sort of suffering the effects of what people have called progressive policies that have been in place for many years but in fact don’t really serve the very people they are purporting to serve,” says Maggie Muir, a Democratic consultant in San Francisco.

The tussle over policies comes into sharp focus at the new Linkage Center. On one hand, it’s being praised for bringing siloed agencies together under one roof and making them easy to access. It’s located at U.N. Plaza, across the street from a “safe sleeping” homeless encampment in front of City Hall. A man emerges from the center and happily says people there were able to connect him with temporary housing. He’s been homeless and fighting substance use disorder since he was let go by the National Park Service two years ago. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A homeless man who used to work for the park service chats outside the Linkage Center after getting signed up for housing, on Jan. 27, 2022. The Linkage Center provides one-stop services, including food, vaccinations, showers, laundry, and help with housing.

But the center has come under sharp criticism for a fenced-in, outdoor area that allows “safe use” of drugs, denounced by some as enabling users. Outside the center, a few men lean against the building, one of them holding a makeshift pipe to his face – the kind often used to smoke fentanyl, crack, or crystal meth. A young man walks up to people loitering outside the center’s entrance, announcing, “I got meth. I got crack.”

Open dealing and use without consequences “create an environment where people get caught in an endless cycle of addiction without actually getting the help they need,” says Ms. Muir.

At the state level, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he wants to make conservatorship easier for homeless people “who truly can’t help themselves.” That’s something that would have to go through the state Legislature and is sure to face stiff opposition from civil rights advocates.

On criminal justice reform, Ms. Muir points out that San Franciscans have consistently elected progressive, reformist prosecutors – the question is, what does reform look like? Mr. Boudin narrowly won in 2019 on a campaign of ending mass incarceration and holding police accountable. But Ms. Muir faults him for releasing people from jail without a real assessment of whether that person has a support network to prevent him from reoffending. Criminal justice reform and public safety “should be able to work together.”

And on housing, many cite a resistance to new projects. Progressives object to market-based housing, while residents on the west side oppose higher-density dwellings.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Del Seymour, founder of Code Tenderloin, which helps people overcome barriers to long-term employment, pauses in the Tenderloin on Jan. 28, 2022, in San Francisco. He is a community leader who lived in this neighborhood for more than 30 years, and also co-chairs San Francisco’s Local Homeless Coordinating Board.

Del Seymour lived in the Tenderloin for more than 30 years and is deeply involved in neighborhood issues through his nonprofit, Code Tenderloin. He guffaws over the premise that San Francisco is a liberal city. “That is the biggest San Francisco myth of anything,” he exclaims. “These people are so holier-than-thou,” he says of the NIMBY crowd. “It went from Summer of Love to not in my backyard.”

He would welcome a city that is much more liberal – with mental health services in place of the Tenderloin’s 40-plus liquor stores, for instance. And he doesn’t want to see a greater police presence. “We don’t need no more stinkin’ badges down here,” he says, citing heavy-handed law enforcement. “We manage ourselves pretty well.”

He’s unhappy that the mayor declared a state of emergency, calling it a matter of “dignity.” The crisis in the Tenderloin is decades old, he said. “The only thing that’s changed is the model of the cars.”

And yet, he’s pleased with the new one-stop Linkage Center. He’s also pleased that the city is buying buildings, such as a hotel, to shelter homeless people. Earlier in the pandemic, about 400 tents blocked sidewalks in this compact district. Now, it’s down to about 40 – not counting the encampment, according to the district supervisor’s office. “Things are looking up,” says Mr. Seymour. “I can see light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not a train.”

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If there’s anything good about the pandemic, he says, it’s that “finally the homeless are coming into focus.”

Indeed, the pandemic has stirred things up in this city. Unlike in Congress, no Republican threat will force the hand of leaders here. It’s Democrats themselves who are left to work their way through these complex challenges, toward the sweet spot where compassion meets effective governance.

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