Yikes.
John Sexton at Hot Air reminded everyone about the two CNN reporters whose car was broken into in San Francisco last week while they made a report on the city’s crime.
On Tuesday, CNN aired the report, concentrating on how Asian Americans view Democrats in the country’s most liberal city. It’s not good:
Allene Jue used to vote in a simple, rapid manner – scan the names on the ballot and pick the Asian sounding names.That was before 2020.“Something turned on during the pandemic and lit a fire,” said Jue, a Chinese American mother of two girls, ages 3 and 5, living on the west side of San Francisco. Throughout the pandemic, Jue watched as violent hate crimes against Asian Americans brought fear to the community with not enough response from local law enforcement or prosecutors. As the school closures wore on and on in California, Jue saw her local school board discuss progressive policy issues like renaming schools ahead of focusing on simply returning students to the classroom.Jue, who generally considers herself a Democrat, recalled her anger at liberal local politicians.“They care about policies that don’t really help someone who just lives in the city and just want to be safe, who wants their kids to be educated well,” she said. “They forgot the core problems for regular people. I wanted to do something to try to change and take that power back. It was fear and frustration, a lot of frustration, that I turned into action.”Her involvement began with stuffing envelopes for recall campaigns against the district attorney and several school board members and then grew – she even appeared in Chinese language campaign ads for a moderate Democrat running for city supervisor.
Charles Jung, a civil rights attorney and bay Area advocate, told CNN he witnessed the frustration: “Asian Americans feel like Democrats are focused on the wrong things, that they’ve let ideology run amok. If Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core Democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”
Identity politics is coming to an end. A moderate gay white man unseated the progressive Chinese American supervisor “of the majority-Asian American Sunset District.”
New Supervisor Joel Engardio dislikes using the word progressive to describe san Francisco. To him, progressive means “moving into the future and building a better city.” That is not the direction of San Francisco.
Engardio concentrates on the issues regular people across all political spectrums worry about regularly: safety and schools. He also wants to cut the red tape to allow small businesses to grow in the city.
But minorities think about schools and safety more than whites. It’s a fact, as Jung pointed out (emphasis mine):
“Democrats have a really hard time talking about public education and public safety,” said Cheng. “That’s the common denominator between the Asian and Latino community – we are immigrant communities. We came to America for stability and opportunity. Public safety and public education are the things that give us stability and opportunity. We need education and we need to feel safe.”
Regular people on the left might care about the woke issues touted by Democrats, but those issues are unimportant.
Community advocate Forrest Liu said people aren’t as dense as some politicians might think. They’re not falling for the photo ops and hot air:
Liu spends his day conducting field interviews to try to understand the political shift that took place among San Francisco’s Asian voters, because Liu believes it’s predictive of what will happen in the upcoming national elections. “I want to understand why they made the decisions they made last year and what they want moving forward. And what we should be advocating for,” said Liu.What he’s learned so far, he said, is the community is far savvier than politicians may think.“There are some politicians out there who are like, ‘Let me get in a photo with some Asian people. Let me walk through Chinatown, shake hands with a few Asian community leaders and that’s it. I got the Asian vote,’” said Liu. “No. You actually need to be in tune with what this demographic needs.”Liu said the political discontent that led to Engardio’s victory remains, even as publicity around “Stop Asian Hate” may have faded.“‘Why should I feel unsafe?’ I would say that’s the summary of the emotion of the people I’m interviewing. They still feel unsafe.”
Jue said, “I’m Asian, my family’s Asian. If I have to worry about just stepping out to run an errand, I think that’s a huge problem and I can’t live in a city like that.”
The Bay Area kept schools closed. Instead of educating children, the school boards prioritized school name changes. The school board had to return a school back to merit-based admissions after outrage.
Who led the charge in the San Francisco school board recall? Asian Americans.
Jue is one of the many who participated in the recall. She’s a working mother, and her kids are about to enter preschool.
Jue also helped recall socialist Soros-backed DA Chesa Boudin. The recall wasn’t even close. Everyone had enough as crime skyrocketed.
Jue is still a registered Democrat but admitted “she struggles” with the party going into 2024. She’s seen people change: “I know of folks that have traditionally voted Democrat that are now voting Republican because they do not feel that the Democratic Party is representing them.”
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