Here’s how Lux, an avowedly socialist online magazine, in a wide-ranging interview, describes Cat Brooks’ latest dilemma: “Cat Brooks fights for police abolition in Oakland as the defund backlash sets in.” The interview, published this month, was by a journalist, Piper French, a leftwing writer from Los Angeles. French set out to craft a rather adoring profile of Brooks: in a tweet touting her interview, French wrote, “This piece explores the political dimensions of grief - how injustice can materialize as the loss of those you love most - and the work of people trying to keep others from that pain.” French’s implication is that Brooks has suffered a great deal of “pain” and “grief” in her life, and this accounts for her efforts to defund, if not actually abolish, the Oakland Police Department.
Hmm. Yet French is enough of a journalist to understand that the idea of “defunding the police” is “under siege” in America, with everyone from Joe Biden and New York Mayor Eric Adams to L.A. Mayoral candidate Karen Bass and the San Franciscans who voted to recall Chesa Boudin repudiating it (not to mention every Republican in the country). French even gets Brooks herself to admit that her cause celebre is on life support: “We, along with every other organizer in the country,” Brooks told French, “had our asses handed to us, at least on the communications front, with ‘defund.’”
Well, it’s progress, I suppose, for Brooks to acknowledge she “had her ass handed to her” over defund. It’s like getting an alcoholic or drug addict to admit that they have a problem—which can be the hardest part of the recovery process.
So can we expect a repentant Brooks? No. French writes that the head of the Anti Police-Terror Project remains committed to her goal of abolishing the police department. Brooks, in other words, has learned nothing from the cold fact that the American people—including people of color—have utterly rejected her. Instead, Brooks identifies her problem as, not the message itself, but in how she communicated it. In so doing, Brooks seems stuck in Kubler-Ross’s Stage 3 of Grief: Bargaining. She’s thinking, “If only I had said it differently…” or, as French puts it, Brooks is trying to “come up with a better way to communicate the possibilities that [her] movement offers.”
Meanwhile, Brooks is determined to plow ahead. “The movement is nowhere near dead — nor are we done.” Which actually sounds like Brooks is trapped in Kubler-Ross Stage 1: Denial, demonstrating that these 5 Stages are not impermeable realities, but have porous boundaries through which delusionists like Brooks can float osmotically from one to another.
The sad truth is that Brooks may not be redeemable. Some people, unfortunately, are so far gone, they’re beyond rehabilitation. It’s hard to imagine Brooks turning away from her hatred of law enforcement, which she has based her political and financial career on. After all, the person who could write that the “Anti Police-Terror Project is building a replicable and sustainable model to end state-sanctioned murder and violence against Black, Brown, and poor people” has lost touch with reality. Still trapped in her 1960s-style militant Black Panther rage, Brooks has never once acknowledged that the true source of “murder and violence against Black, Brown, and poor people” is—yes--“Black, Brown, and poor people.”
The only way for Cat Brooks to redeem herself morally and politically would be for her to publicly apologize to the people of Oakland, and especially to the men and women of the Oakland Police Department, for the lies she has told over the years—lies that have misled and radicalized unstable individuals who believe them. But that, I think, is as unlikely as Donald Trump apologizing for his lies. The truth is, Brooks and Trump have more in common with each other than either would care to admit.
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Meanwhile, speaking of lies, Sheng Thao’s grow more grotesque by the day. Here she is in a mass email she sent out on Saturday: “I am backed by a coalition of grassroots supporters who chip in $5, $10, and $25 at a time.”
Yet here’s The Oaklandside, reporting last Wednesday:
Unions have spent over $600,000 backing Thao
“Labor unions have gone all in supporting Thao’s campaign for mayor. A coalition including unions…have spent over $600,000 through two political action committees on pro-Thao mailers, ads, polls, and more…The massive amounts independent groups like unions and businesses are spending to support Thao…is unlike anything ever seen in Oakland mayoral politics…”.
So much for “grassroots supporters,” unless you consider Big Unions, which pretty much run Oakland, to be anything but what they are: a gigantic, and secretive, special interest. To be perfectly honest, if a bit blunt, Sheng Thao is resorting to the lowest possible campaign deception, based on unconscionable misrepresentations. In so doing, she deeply insults the intelligence of Oakland voters. Thao seems to believe that we’re so ignorant of facts that she can say anything she wants, and we’ll take her word for it.
Look: Sheng Thao is a conniving, deeply fraudulent candidate; this latest allegation that she violated the law by forcing her employees to campaign for her, and then fired one who refused, is very serious, and will be investigated. Thao also tried repeatedly to defund the police, while denying she ever did so. I guarantee you, if she’s elected, she’ll try again, egged on by Carroll Fife and whatever “progressives” manage to claw their way onto the City Council. Sheng Thao IS the status quo she claims to be running against. Oakland can’t afford four more years of her pro-crime, pro-encampment policy!
Steve Heimoff