What did Cat Brooks mean when she tweeted that “libbysreignofterroris over”? Libby is, of course, outgoing Mayor Libby Schaaf. As someone who follows Oakland politics pretty closely, I was not aware of bad blood between Brooks and Schaaf. So why the “reign of terror” remark?
Three possible reasons suggest themselves, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Libby is White, and Brooks, IMHO, seems to be prejudiced against White people. Libby also is Jewish—not that I think Cat Brooks is an anti-semite, but she has said troubling things about Jews, including this Facebook and Instagram post: “Zionists: feel free to self-select yourself off of my friends list/newsfeed/timeline.” She also, bizarrely, called Seneca Scott “an anti-Semite” during the campaign, despite the fact that he isn’t, suggesting a bit of psychological projection on her part.
I raise this issue because it’s obvious to me that Cat Brooks—unelected and unaccountable—has an outsized influence on the City Council. For years, she’s pushed it further and further to the Left, to the extent that the Council abandoned all responsible leadership, instead devoting themselves to a single issue: Racism, which they found everywhere they looked. Driven to the point of obsession by this fantasy, the Council pointedly ignored all the mounting problems Oakland faced—garbage everywhere, crime, a demoralized police force, businesses and the middle class leaving town, encampments, a disintegrating downtown—and focused on a single issue: “social justice.” This was right up Brooks’ alley, since she’s made a living off peddling “social justice” memes for years. And that, perhaps, is the real reason why Brooks hated Libby Schaaf: the Mayor was a moderate liberal, who didn’t buy into Brooks’s lies. The Mayor did her best to stand up to the City Council that tried to impose Brooks’s agenda on the city; but with our “weak Mayor” system, Libby Schaaf had very little power over a rogue City Council.
We now have one of the rogue City Council members, Sheng Thao, as our new Mayor, and she has made it clear she intends to push Brooks’s agenda forward. What is that agenda? Brooks continues her war on the police; the website of her Anti Police-Terror Project still insists, not only that “We Must Defund OPD,” but that OPD must be “abolished”!!! Yikes. Let there be no mistake that Brooks’s acolytes on the City Council have adopted her radical ideology; their anti-police actions over the years prove it. Lately, they’ve had to conceal their true hatred of OPD because they knew how out-of-step it was and is with Oaklanders. But the desire to abolish the police still sleeps in their hearts and minds; and now that they’ve seized power, there’s no reason to expect a change of heart. If anything, quite the contrary: a renewed anti-cop agenda.
It makes me laugh and cry when I hear Sheng Thao talk about how much she likes the police. During the campaign, she bragged about how she “put in a fifth, sixth, and seventh police academy” to hire more cops. But what she didn’t tell anyone is that, mere months previously, “Thao advocated for not approving the extra police academies Mayor Libby Schaaf wanted in her budget proposal,” according to Oaklandside. That was the real Thao, the progressive, radical, cop-hating, racially-obsessed Thao. It was only after Oakland’s Summer of Murder in 2021, when her constituents were freaking out about all the death, that Thao had a road to Damascus epiphany and, already planning her run for Mayor, decided to pretend that she’s always been in favor of more cops.
DON’T BELIEVE IT.
Cat Brooks’s vision of a smaller, weaker and—if possible—completely crippled OPD still creeps through Sheng Thao’s deepest desires. Lest Thao interpret her win as a mandate, it most emphatically is not. She won by fewer than 700 votes; on any other day, she easily could have lost. Most normal politicians would understand the need to moderate their views in order to accommodate all the people who voted for her opponent. But I suspect Thao, prodded on by her Puppet Master, Brooks, will push “progressive” schemes to whole new levels of absurdity. The people of Oakland will continue to suffer as a result. No good can come of this mayoralty.
Steve Heimoff