About a week ago, in an interview with the New York Times, billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he agreed with President Trump’s efforts to send National Guard units to “fight crime” in U.S. cities. Specifically, Benioff seemed to suggest that, as his company’s annual Dreamforce conference got underway, a little military-based law and order in the city could be useful (“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he told the newspaper). He has since been getting it from all angles.
Not long after Benioff’s comments, wealthy venture capitalist Ron Conway, who has long been a board member of Salesforce’s philanthropy wing, announced his resignation from the company. Conway, who had worked at Salesforce for a decade, told Benioff, in an email seen by the New York Times, that the two of them no longer shared the same values. “It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway apparently wrote.
Benioff was also chewed out by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs (she is also Steve Jobs’ widow), who criticized him in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. Suffice it to say, there has obviously been a lot of criticism on social media, as well.
On Friday, after a suitable uproar, Benioff put out a statement with a heart emoji in which he seemed to walk back his assertion that the National Guard was needed in San Francisco:
“Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco. My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused. It’s my firm belief that our city makes the most progress when we all work together in a spirit of partnership. I remain deeply grateful to Mayor Lurie, SFPD, and all our partners, and am fully committed to a safer, stronger San Francisco.”
Critics have characterized Trump’s National Guard operations as an authoritarian power move against Democrat-run cities. Aside from the fact that using the National Guard as a form of local law enforcement is not a practical or necessary endeavor, it’s worth pointing out that the whole notion that Democratically-run cities are the nation’s largest havens of crime and violence (many of the targets are notably liberal cities) is fallacious and easily disproven. A recent analysis shows that most of America’s most dangerous cities are not currently being targeted for National Guard deployment, and many of the most statistically dangerous cities are in “red” states, not “blue” ones.
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