Adriana Valencia for AC Transit & Fiona Ma for CA lieutenant governor
AC Transit Board of Directors Ward 3 & lieutenant governor
We resent having to write this endorsement this way. We particularly resent that we find ourselves watching this video of an AC Transit Board meeting so we can try to understand if Joel Young, the current at-large AC Transit board member and candidate for AC Transit Ward 3, committed an act of gender-based violence against fellow AC Transit board member Sara Syed?
We also resent that we read a legal complaint from a former employee of Fiona Ma, and that we had to try to decide if it was credible to imagine that someone—specifically, Fiona Ma, then state treasurer—would expose their “nude backside” and climb into bed with their employee. We resent that our brain was like oh, I see, she didn't expose her nude backside WHILE she climbed into bed with her employee, those were separate incidents. It makes us fucking furious to have those thoughts, and to have to ask whether that’s “typical of what happens when people share a living space”? That is not, in our experience, a typical thing that happens!
We should be talking about who has the political skill to improve AC Transit’s reliability. We should be talking about who has the political will to resist offshore drilling as chair of the three-member state lands commission. We should be asking why Fiona Ma and Eleni Kounalakis are swapping jobs and what that is all about, are there no other politicians in this state. We should be talking about issues and efficacy, not “character.”
We aren’t, though, because when we talk about scandals like these, we very much are talking about issues and efficacy. What we are actually talking about is discipline.
Oakland Review of Books
As a voter, you want a candidate whose values and politics align with yours, yes. But because power comes with endless personal, financial, and, yes, sexual temptations, politicians need to be able to resist them; ideally, they need to be swayed by what’s best for their constituents, but even failing that, to be completely cynical, they need to be swayed by the partisan, ideological, or even machine project they’re embarked on. Politicians aren’t just some person plucked out of nowhere; they’re a part of a team, an organization, a side, and their job is to play their role within it. Part of that job is not to fuck it up by getting creepy, weird, and/or rapey.
And so, when considering scandals like these, don’t ask yourself “why this act?” or “is this person capable of what they’re accused of?” First, because an honest analysis of gender-based violence requires putting aside this kind of wide-eyed faux naivete. Second, because the real question is what this says about their ability to work well with others in a disciplined way, which is a question we can answer.
What does it say about Joel Young, for example, that at a memorial for long-serving AC Transit board member Christian Peeples, as board members prepared to pose for a photo, Young came up behind Syed, a colleague with whom he has a strained relationship, and put her in what appears to be a headlock or, in a more generous reading, a neck squeeze? Someone leaked to East Bay Insider that an independent investigation of a complaint by Syed found that Young did violate the board’s policy against gender-based harassment. But resist the question of whether he got sexual pleasure from being a weirdo to his political enemy at his colleague’s memorial. Politics requires discipline. Instead, ask yourself what it means that there are two rival political cliques vying for control of the The Bus and one has decided that they need Young so much that they will debase themselves enough to tolerate whatever the fuck this is.
But we didn’t need this complaint from Syed to know whether or not Joel Young is fit for office. If you scratch, you’ll also find messy domestic abuse allegations (and that he once faked an endorsement from a domestic violence organization to counterbalance those allegations). He was censured by the AC Transit Board for allegedly using information from AC Transit Board closed sessions to benefit his own law firm, and he once spit in the eye of an Oakland councilmember’s campaign manager. Like, literally, he did that.
Discipline might be what you want from a politician as a voter, but loyalty is the currency for the local political machine. And so we are writing about Young and Ma together because both have shown they feel empowered—by their loyalty to the machine and by the machine’s to them—to have no discipline (and also that, for them, the point of public service is domination.)
As a result, we didn’t need to see Adriana Valencia share the ORB voting Guide last week on Bluesky to know we were going to vote for her. She is saying all the right things, is endorsed by all the right people, and isn’t plagued by scandals. We didn’t even need to see her share the Oakland Review of Voting Guides earlier this week to know that we were going to vote for her. We will say this: If she shares our stuff a few more times, look, we might start to really take note of all these indications of good character and discernment? She’s putting herself out there in really impressive ways.
But it doesn’t matter. She’s the other person on the ballot. Let’s hope she’s disciplined.
However, we are unfortunately stuck with Ma, who is against Prop 40 in exactly the same way as all the worst Newsomites in state government. (“We need our billionaires, our millionaires and all our companies and people who are paying taxes.” Uggh.) But the alternative is a Trump Republican who’s going to punish students for the sins of our overextended public schools by making it impossible for them to gain admission to CSUs. We saw her when she came to Oakland with Steve Hilton, and she sucks the way Steve Hilton sucks. So, you know, be disciplined, and do what you gotta do.
Find more of our voting guide here.