Racist Mayor: London Breed
Fifth in a series.
By Daniel Greenfield
Editor’s note: This is the fifth part in Frontpage Mag’s new series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“Yes, I’m the mayor, but I’m a black woman first,” Mayor London Breed told a crowd of oppressed folks like millionaire movie star Jamie Foxx at San Francisco’s first ‘Kneel In’.
Black Lives Matter, the highest-paid mayor in the country claimed, “is born out of pain. It is born out of racism that we are gonna fight against. It is born out of our struggle, our blood, sweat, and tears.”
Breed knows a lot about racism. Not so much about fighting it.
During the previous election, a mob of her supporters showed up at an event for an Asian opponent and taunted her as a “skinny-ass rice-eating m_______r.”
“This is London Breed’s house,” one of them shouted.
London Breed doesn’t have a house. She lives in an apartment because she knows better than to invest in the real estate bubble of the city that she’s wrecking every day.
But when an Asian Republican put up a billboard attacking her, there were immediately false accusations of racism. Breed’s spokesman claimed that, “race-baiting like this is divisive, dangerous and shameful, and must be rejected.” The ad had no mention of race.
“London Breed is counting the money–that’s her paycheck. The mayor makes $350,000 a year while people are dying on the streets–they have to pick their dead bodies up. A mayor getting a big fat raise while people are dying,” Ellen Lee Zhou, the Republican candidate, explained.
Despite overseeing a city in which people are fleeing or dying, Breed draws the biggest salary of any mayor in the country. Combined with benefits, at $452,421, Breed makes a lot more than the mayors of New York and Los Angeles. Another 31 staffers in her office earn over $200,000.
Breed had used false accusations of racism as a sword and shield even while her city is dying.
In the final months of last year, the number of San Franciscans escaping jumped 61%. 1,700 students vanished from San Francisco public schools leading to the lowest numbers in decades.
Everyone except the mayor is running away. They’re fleeing filthy streets overrun with crime, junkies, and human waste. Instead of enforcing the law, Breed is proposing to spend $1 billion, part of the money with which California bailed out the city, on subsidizing homelessness.
San Francisco’s infamous free hotels complete with free drugs and booze made the homeless crisis worse as junkie vagrants began coming from all over the country demanding their free hotels and their free drugs and booze.
“People are showing up in San Francisco from other places and asking where their hotel room is,” Mayor Breed complained.
After spending $100 million on $200 a night hotels, the homeless crisis is worse than ever. If you think homelessness is bad when you’re spending hundreds of millions subsidizing it, try spending a cool billion “fighting” it. But that’s nothing. Advocates want to spend $9.3 billion.
Meanwhile, 70% of homeless in San Francisco were turning down permanent apartments. Homeless advocates blamed the high junkie vagrant rejection rate on the lack of Wi-Fi.
“Uprooting a Cause of Homelessness – Racism,” a Breed op-ed was headlined. When Breed wasn’t running free hotels for junkies, her op-ed boasted of injecting critical race theory to explain why junkie vagrants were defecating on the streets of San Francisco.
Breed boasted of “the Supporting Partnerships for Anti-Racist Communities initiative… to conduct research around the intersection of race and homelessness.”
And then the black mayor of a city whose patronage system was set up by its former black mayor, Willie Brown, claimed that “colorblind solutions do not work for a problem that is, in many ways, a symptom of the structural racism embedded in the city.”
If there’s any structural racism in San Francisco, it’s coming from Brown and Breed.
“Our entire city is suffering now and we all need to do our part to share in that sacrifice,” Breed declared last year.
There were few sacrifices on show when Breed went partying at the French Laundry.
After Governor Gavin Newsom was caught violating his own rules at a party at the French Laundry restaurant where dining per person can run between $350 to $850, Breed was caught a day later at the birthday party of the daughter-in-law of a Hong Kong billionaire allied with the Communists who had urged the people of the city to be a “good son” to the Communist regime.
Both Newsom and Breed are proteges of Willie Brown. As is Kamala Harris.
To understand San Francisco, you have to understand Brown. The former mayor transformed the city and its political mafia consists of FOWs or Friends of Willie. And friends can be a polite term. Everyone had something to offer Willie and he had something for them.
London Breed used to babysit Willie Brown’s kids. Brown moved her through the city’s system of political patronage with internships and appointments. Now Willie’s girl is in the White House, Willie’s boy is in the governor’s mansion, and his babysitter is running the city into the ground.
Breed borrowed Brown’s habit of blaming any criticism on racism.
And Brown hasn’t dropped the habit. “There is one problem we have not dealt with in this country and that is race,” the former political boss recently claimed.
At a speech the city’s black powerbroker who put his former mistress in the White House argued, “Have you ever heard of a black man being arrested for insider trading? Does this mean that the black man has a higher morality? No, but it does mean that the black man was never in a position to be able to commit insider trading,”
There’s no bigger insider than Willie Brown. No one has heard of him being arrested, but most city reformers still hold out hope for him and his mafia of oppressed political insiders.
Breed blamed the homeless crisis on “escalating housing costs”. Why are housing costs so high? That’s a question she can take up with Mr. Clean and his sugar daddy.
Last year, Breed posted that she had come clean about her relationship with Mr. Clean.
Mr. Clean was her “close, personal friend” Mohammed Nuru who had just been busted in a public corruption probe. The Nigerian immigrant who claimed to be, “Mr. Clean”, was being paid $380,000 a year to keep the city clean. And he was failing miserably at this task. Nuru was yet another crooked Brown crony who had funneled money to Breed. That was after he dated her.
In her post, Breed disclosed “a ‘gift’ of approximately $5,600 from Mohammed Nuru.” She also refused to fire her old boyfriend or disclose his gift until she absolutely had to.
Willie Brown is funding Nuru’s defense. No doubt out of the goodness of his heart.
“The complaint alleges corruption pouring into San Francisco from around the world,” the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California warned.
That’s certainly true considering the case of Walter Wong.
The immigrant businessman had served as a permit expediter. Getting building permits is a long, miserable, and expensive process in San Francisco. That’s one of the reasons that building housing, including for the homeless, is so expensive in San Francisco.
The case helped bring down Nuru, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Harlan Kelly, Juliet Ellis, Kelly’s girlfriend and Chief Strategy Officer, City Administrator Naomi Kelly, Kelly’s wife, and Sandra Zuniga, the head of Breed’s Office of Neighborhood Services, and Nuru’s current girlfriend.
The race card that had shielded many of them for so long had finally come due.
Past accusations against Nuru had been dismissed as racist.
An effort to get rid of Juliet Ellis in 2014 over conflicts of interest failed when her boyfriend and CNN’s Van Jones cried racism.
“What the good ol’ boys did down in the South 50 or 60 years ago,” one activist claimed. “We are here today for another black lynching.”
This was the sort of race-baiting San Fran officials used to protect their abuses.
The collapse of the government of a major city, one whose elites include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House’s Kamala Harris, went mostly ignored by the media.
The same press that found the time to track down and interview the childhood friends of Republican politicians has shrugged at the top Democrat bureaucratic political class of the city which serves as the source of the party’s funds resigning, being indicted, or pleading guilty.
And yet what the SF corruption meltdown says about Democrat governance is very important.
The Wong scandal and the homeless crisis are really the same scandal. When you understand that, you not only understand San Francisco, but the Democrats.
There is a lot of money for Democrats to be made from making it impossible to build in San Francisco and then from trying to house the homeless. ‘Holistic’ is a popular word in SF and its crises are all holistic. They’re manufactured disasters that make money by wrecking the city.
And the Democrat machine is making money on both ends of the mess.
Make it too difficult to build in the city and the price of housing goes through the roof. And then make money expediting permits. Fill the city with homeless in response to a manufactured crisis and there’s a lot of money to be made cleaning their waste and housing them.
After Proposition 47 legalized shoplifting, neighborhood pharmacies are vanishing from San Francisco. Even the corporate chains are disappearing. But that’s okay because some sort of badly cobbled together government effort will replace them at a cost of hundreds of millions.
The politically connected will make money from the holistic synergy of manufactured misery.
The more Democrats break a city or a state, the more money they make. The party’s political hacks can’t actually fix anything and they don’t bother to try because it’s easier to create the problem, and then break everything even more by way of a fake solution.
San Francisco, once a prosperous and dynamic city with lots of history and its own culture, is going the way of Detroit, Newark, and hundreds of other urban centers that were pumped and dumped by the Democrat machine which reduced them to subsidized welfare hellholes.
The permanent state of crisis in San Fran isn’t incompetence: it’s by design.
Mayor London Breed has survived all the scandals. For now. Her predecessor, Ed Lee, another Brown crony, would probably be indicted in the Wong case if he weren’t dead. His predecessor, Gavin Newsom, is fighting to survive a recall. And Newsom’s predecessor was Willie Brown.
San Francisco is a city with some of the most overpaid politicians in the country, with the dirtiest streets, the worst homeless problem, and even worse corruption. And Willie Brown’s babysitter sits atop the rotten pile of greed, abuse, and misery while mugging for every media camera.
And Breed always plays the pity race card. The most highly paid mayor in the country is still the victim of racism because no one appreciates everything she’s doing to wreck San Francisco.
“Black leaders get it harder than anyone else,” Breed complained. “If I were a white man who accomplished everything that I’ve already done for this city—over a billion dollars for affordable housing, a thousand new shelter beds—I would be treated way differently than how I’m treated now.”
But no matter how bad things get, Mayor London Breed is always her own biggest fan, announcing her own grade “Goodness, of course I’d give myself an A, A plus!”