The city of Oakland, Calif. is billing small business owners for using public safety services after defunding its police department. The California city is clearly more concerned with accommodating criminals than those who make an honest living.
In a video recently shared by Almadea County supervisor candidate Chris Moore, a restaurant owner explains he received an invoice from the city after a police check-in following a robbery.
“They came one hour after we got robbed,” the small business owner said. “They walked through and put up a piece of wood with duct tape.”
“For the city to not only fail to protect…small businesses but on top of that give us an invoice for doing the work that they did seems fully irrational… It’s literally the definition of kicking someone when they’re down,” he said.
It’s no wonder hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of residents have fled California in recent years. The state that not all that long ago was a middle-class utopia has become filthy, dangerous, and too expensive for anyone between vagabond and multimillionaire. And it’s all by design.
[Read: How Democrats Like Gavin Newsom Got Away With Devastating The Greatest State In America]
The radical leftist tenure of California is a tale as old as time. Rulers seek to extract wealth from powerless, law-abiding citizens while heaping honor and privilege upon those who reflect, advance, and enshrine their power.
In California, government actors use taxpayer money to strip people of safety via police while coddling their clients. Criminals, illegal aliens, militant gender goblins, et al., are emboldened, while business owners, homeowners, and other people plagued with the scourge of normalcy are denigrated as a matter of state policy.
This is how blue states operate. Anarcho-tyranny is meant to keep you docile, scared, confused, defenseless, and poor. People become so concerned with the basics of life that they are unable to resist radical ideology, anti-human policies, and the bat-crap-insane economic decisions forced down their throats.
It’s what the late Samuel Francis described in the ‘90s as “the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”
“It is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent,” Francis said.
Recall the 2020 George Floyd riots. Murderers, vandals, and larcenists were overwhelmingly let off the hook, while police across the country were unable to protect their communities due to stand-down orders, cultural pressure, and widespread calls to defund their departments.
The 2020 Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in downtown Seattle was a secessionist movement that provided a haven for rape and murder. Police and emergency services were prevented from entering under threat of violence, and businesses were extorted for “protection.” Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse — who was reportedly in Kenosha, Wisconsin to help protect his community from the 2020 chaos — had the book thrown at him after shooting three men in self-defense.
Daniel Penny, who in 2023 restrained a sporadic career criminal with a pension for violence, recently had his motion to dismiss indictments filed against him in New York thrown out. Yet violent criminals routinely have their charges dropped and roam the streets of the Empire State with impunity.
This is where we are today. Blue America — which extends throughout the national managerial state and its corpo-cultural vassals — will bring its jackboot down on your neck until you relent and accept gleefully embrace its rule.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
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