Editor:
I’m interested in reading letters from the conservative side of Alameda, but so far, it’s been disappointing. This week there is a letter from Jordan Ma, a Jeff Smith wannabe. Ma appears to be emulating Smith’s bloviated rhetoric, and I wonder if they share the same thesaurus.

Like Smith, Ma distorts facts. He accuses Darin Ow-Wing of “pivoting” from Smith’s “cogent polemic” against Big Government (i.e. Gavin Newsom and the Democrats) and the mess they’ve made of the insurance market. Smith mentions that Gavin Newsom signed a bill that targets insurance fraud, but that’s a good thing, right?

Ma needs to read Smith’s letter more carefully. Smith never explained why his condominium insurance premium increased so sharply. I asked a lot of people about their insurance premiums, including people who live in condominiums. None of them have had anything like the sharp increase that Smith is reporting. For myself, my home and car insurance premiums have not had any unusual increases. Is there something going on at Smith’s complex that he’s not telling us? Smith repeats the usual talking points, such as “the insurance markets need to be more competitive,” but Democrats want that too. The devil is always in the details. Instead of offering empty rhetoric, Smith and Ma could explain the key differences in the Republican and Democratic fixes for the “California insurance nightmare.”

Ma says that Ow-Wing’s pivot is to blame Smith’s increased insurance premiums on climate change, but that’s a distortion because Ow-Wing doesn’t address Smith’s premium. Since the majority of Smith’s letter discusses the “insurance nightmare” in the state of California, it was fair game for Ow-Wing to address that topic. Ma might be inclined to deny that climate change has any impact on risk in the insurance markets, but I’d like to see him try to deny that the risk models for insurance companies have been changing for the worse.

Ma claims that Ow-Wing is suffering from “cognitive dissonance.” But Ow-Wing acknowledged that “our government is messy” and Smith’s “various arguments about government overreach may or may not be accurate.” Does this mean Ma and Smith also suffer from cognitive dissonance?

Distortion is a rhetorical device, too, and Jordan Ma wields it poorly.