“All violence is state violence,” Brooks informs us. Now, you may wonder how the fatal slaying of 23-month old Jasper Wu in Oakland was an example of “state violence.” After all, the people who shot little Jasper weren’t state employees; they were Black gangbangers, engaged in a shootout on the 880 freeway.
When I think about “state violence,” I conjure images of southern sheriffs and cops lynching Black men, or rogue cops beating up Black suspects. But “all violence”? Obviously this is not only an exaggeration but a deliberate lie.
But in Cat Brooks’ twisted paranoia, every violent act in America has something to do with “the state.” Why does she believe that? Because, as she reminds us over and over again, the “state” is based on White supremacy and patriarchal violence, and since every violent act occurs within the state, then every violent act becomes the state. “Violence” and “the state” are intertwined. “The state” itself becomes a violent act, always poised to crush the people Brooks considers her constituency, i.e., Black people.
Well, her point of view is nothing if not consistent. She’s been churning out this stuff for years. You define “the state” as violence, and then you insist on the equivalence of “the state” with every act of violence, and what do you end up with? A situation where every mugging, every common assault, every shoplift, every robbery, every carjacking, every murder is somehow the result of “the state” inflicting racism against its Black population. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: little Jasper was murdered, not by feral killers on a rampage, but by “the state.” It’s as if Uncle Sam himself pulled the trigger, not Johnny Jackson or Trevor Green or Ivory Bivins, the true killers. It’s as if “the state” compelled those three losers to shoot a small child barely out of his infancy. According to this fantasy, they acted, not with the conscious intent to inflict great bodily harm on someone they didn’t even know, but were compelled to because an out-of-control “state” drove them to murder.
Well, you and I know that this is one great, big stinking lie. But it’s the only thing that racists like Brooks have in their arsenal. Were Brooks to admit to reality and put morality before propaganda, she would warn her racial colleagues, as the Prophet Jeremiah did, to “amend your ways and your doings,” or risk the forfeiture of God. “Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not?” Jeremiah inquired of his people. Jeremiah spoke truth to his comrades, even as he loved them, or perhaps because he loved them. Cat Brooks cannot speak truth because she doesn’t have the courage—or perhaps because she knows that, if she did speak truth, her funding sources would dry up. Not able to speak truth, Brooks is reduced to mouthing the same stale old platitudes—such as “all violence is state violence.”
In order to combat these wokes, we—the reasonable citizens of Oakland—have to expose the intellectual foundations of their philosophy. And those foundations are shallow and unsupportable. All too often, journalists let people like Cat Brooks off the hook, by not challenging her absurd statements and demanding a reasonable explanation. Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, we saw a S.F. Chronicle reporter, or one from NPR or Oaklandside or KTVU, stand up to Cat Brooks—and Carroll Fife and Pamela Price and Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao and Dan Kalb—and demand real explanations for their hyperbole? But we never see that—because too many Bay Area “journalists” are caught up in the same wokeness. They begin with an assumption that all cops are bastards and all people of color are victims of a vast White supremacist conspiracy. From there, it’s easy for them to let Brooks or Fife or Kalb lie. What we’re facing, my friends, is nothing less than a progressive-media complex that is assaulting our culture, our values, our city and our country. It will never end until we, the People, end it.
Steve Heimoff