At times, it seems as though the elite left is winning.  They exult at drag queen story hours while conservatives moan and groan about how empires rise and empires fall (we're in the falling part).  But new San Francisco D.A., Brooke Jenkins, and Texas congresswoman Mayra Flores have won their offices with full-throated campaigns directly challenging the leftist political miasma we seem unable to find out way out of.

Attorney Brooke Jenkins was a success story even before the San Francisco mayor last week named her to replace recalled Soros D.A. Chesa Boudin.  She graduated from U.C. Berkeley, attended University of Chicago Law School, and enjoyed a career in corporate law.  Her riveting speech after being sworn in is worth listening to (starting at about 43:00).  In that speech, she tells of how she lost her first child at birth and how her grief compelled her to find some greater meaning in life.  Soon afterward, she left her corporate law career and joined the D.A.'s office.  She later resigned in protest in 2021 to join the recall movement, disillusioned and angry at the leftist bent of Boudin's leadership and the chaos on the streets and the courtrooms.  It is a political miracle of sorts, or maybe plain canniness on the part of the mayor, that this rebel was appointed at all.  At the ceremony, she spoke words rarely uttered in this leftist city: she vowed to make the streets safe again for all, including both the Asian community and the black community.  "We can no longer turn a blind eye to the gun violence going on in our black community here.  The families ... of this violence deserve justice."  These words, acknowledging violence and death in the black community, are never uttered by public officials, except if the death is at the hands of the police.  Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — all these mayors and D.A.s downplay a death toll that far outstrips the metrics of all mass shootings and police shootings combined.

D.A. Jenkins then went to work, firing all the ideologues and public defenders masquerading as prosecutors that Boudin installed.  (Many of them are now whining on Twitter about the unfairness of it all, while the S.F. papers, aided by leaks from the fired, begin their campaign to take her down.)  She has named other disaffected deputies to her leadership team.  Most of all, she has vowed that they will restore accountability to criminal law: no more outcry about deincarceration or restorative justice, although Jenkins has already said she is not throwing out the bad with the good.  Perhaps there is hope for San Francisco, and for California.

Mayra Flores, on the other hand, was born in Mexico and emigrated to the U.S. when her migrant worker father brought her here legally.  She worked alongside her parents in the cotton fields and went on to study and become a respiratory care practitioner, finishing her undergraduate degree at South Texas College later in life.  Her husband is a Border Patrol agent, and they live in South Texas with their four kids.  She is the first Republican to win a seat in Congress from that district in modern history.  Proud of her working-class life, she ran her campaign on "God, Family, Country."  At her memorable swearing in, she stood amid several beaming, almost tearful fellow Republican lawmakers as she took her oath.  Quite a moment.  No family political dynasty, no tony Ivy League connections brought her to the House of Representatives; her piety, bravery, and patriotism did.  In her speech, she told Speaker Pelosi in no uncertain terms who she is and why she ran for this office and what she intends to do about it. 

These are hopeful developments for anyone who respects our traditional political values and sees only ruin when we abandon them.  Brooke Jenkins and her mantra of safety and accountability, minus the Marxism, bodes well for San Francisco residents and maybe other cities, too.  Soros D.A. Gascon down in Los Angeles is facing his own recall.  Mayra Flores burns with the same fire as did our patriot founders in the War of Independence.  Her piety, courage, and nationalism, predicated on our first principles, has already moved mountains.  Both women will have to run again in November to cement their offices, of course, but a tide may be turning.

Image: PxHere.