We live, sadly, in an era of fake news. Two of the prime peddlers of fake news in the world are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The former knows he’s lying when he says Biden didn’t win the election, just as he knew he was lying when he said Obama was born in Africa. The latter knows he’s lying when he says he’s not targeting civilians in his invasion of Ukraine.
But why do they tell such unbelievable lies? Because the purpose of fake news isn’t to have people believe it, it’s to confuse people, to make them think they’re not sure what to believe. If you can sow seeds of doubt in the public, you have a better chance of persuading them to believe your lies. As Josef Goebbels pointed out, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Trump and Putin both have studied Goebbels. So, apparently, has Oakland’s own Cat Brooks, whose “Anti Police-Terror Project” spreads all kinds of lies. The website still peddles phrases like “police terror,” as if the men and women of the Oakland Police Department are little better than Putin’s murderous thugs who blow up hospitals. In Brooks’s apocalyptic novella, “Police killings” and “brutality” continue to plague Oakland (when is the last time you remember an OPD cop killing anyone?). She has said that OPD “doesn’t keep anybody secure” (maybe we should trust our security to the armed gangs), and she is fond of posting photos of little girls holding posters that read #DefundOPD, Fund Music Programs (if we all sing Kumbaya grimly enough, perhaps the violence will go away). Brooks still believes in a sinister conspiracy of “white violence against our bodies,” and by “bodies” she means Black and Brown (but not Yellow?). And yet never, not once, does Brooks aim her searing condemnation at the thugs and gangbangers who are killing people, most of them Black, in record numbers—133 last year. She rails against “state sanctioned murder against Black, Brown and poor people” while letting the read murderers off the hook—those poor, misunderstood kids with AKs, who’ve been so traumatized by racism that they can’t stop themselves from killing.
Brooks knows that many people in Oakland, particularly young people who are idealistically inclined, don’t follow the news, at least in detail. She knows that these people already are inclined to mistrust authority, of whom cops are the supreme example. She knows that she doesn’t need to provide facts or reasoned arguments to persuade some people to hate the police. All she has to do is press their emotional buttons, which is something she does well.
Brooks has been silenced lately by the turn of events in which the public has rallied to the support of police. But she’s still out there, plotting her next move, and she still has friends on the City Council. So we have to understand just how radical Cat Brook’s agenda really is. Let there be no mistake: Cat Brooks is a revolutionary. She wants to decimate the existing social order (kind of the way Steve Bannon does, on the right)—to blow it up and then, upon its ruins, erect her own “justice-centered” new society, in which White people will get to enjoy the fruits of being at the bottom after so many centuries of being on top. That is not the vengeful sort of politics we should tolerate in Oakland. We can do better.
Steve Heimoff