How Big Tech, Real Estate, and Police Unions Use Public Relations, Agents of Chaos, and Poverty-Porn-Crime Videos to Wage War Against Criminal Justice Reform and Progressive Policies
Angela Davis stood with an immersed audience, eyes locked on her during brief moments of silent drawing breath. Anticipation dripped for every word to flow from her lips as the smell of flowers blew in the breeze outside a large Oakland backyard on a hilltop, with the sound of water trickling through the garden.
The attendees present paid a minimum of $100 to attend on June 12, 2024. They felt it was worth it not just to hear words of inspiration from Davis, who might give them hope in a time of confusion and darkness. They were there to support Alameda County’s first Black female District Attorney, Pamela Price, in her launch to protect her win in the DA’s office against a recall effort that started immediately after being elected in late 2022.
Also in attendance as a guest speaker was former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who had lost a recall in 2022 by a shocking upset, thanks primarily to many of the same shadowy networks pushing for Price’s recall and a recall effort against Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao.
For those who voted for Price and paid attention, it was appalling to see how she could barely set down a box of her belongings and get settled into her new office before she had recallers stalking her every move, accusing her of being incapable of performing her duties as DA while blaming her for every single crime immediately after it occurred. Local news attached her name to these accusations without question as if these issues had suddenly appeared and did not balloon out of control during and just before the pandemic.
Connecting our current political environment to the past, Davis best described an example of a similar time in history: slavery. Davis divided the world at that time into those who could imagine a world without slavery—a world with freedom—and those who could not fathom what a world without slavery would look like.
There is a significant number of people who are afraid to move toward the future. What we have been witnessing over the last years is the development of a vision of the future that is radical, that is anti-racist, that is anti-hetero-patriarchal. A vision of the future that is a vision of freedom. There are those who are afraid to move in that direction.
– Angela Davis
She said even enslaved people were afraid of something they did not know. Indeed, the slaveholders and benefactors of slavery could not imagine what life would be like without that institution. Comparing this tumultuous economic and cultural revolutionary period to the current one puts into perspective just how difficult Price’s ambitions are.
Price is attempting to change the current justice system from a primarily punitive one based on revenge for individual victims and private property in which those who commit crimes are “canceled” from society to a concept called Critical Resistance.
Critical Resistance is the theory that the criminal justice system should not be built on retribution. At its core, it believes basic needs like shelter, food, and freedom for communities keep them safe to prevent crime, not the threat of punitive punishment and the prison industrial complex (PIC.) It challenges punishment for complicated social issues and instead looks to find “cures.”
When protesters and advocates chanted “defund the police,” they meant taking some of the funding provided for police departments and the prison system and investing in communities—a process that would change over time, not one that removes police all at once. It is essential to note that attempts to do this have been made by city councils across the country, but no city has defunded the police. If anything, police funding has increased while crime complaints have also increased.
The current Alameda District Attorney’s office is changing its complex structure to work with victims and those who commit crimes to find ways to create accountability without racist violence. DA Pamela Price promised to do that when she ran for office in 2018 and 2022.
When Price was 13 years old, learning about Black history and the Civil Rights Movement, Angela Davis inspired her. It was the trial in March 1972 that made Davis famous. She defended herself against the system, putting the system on trial, and won. Price describes how privileged she felt to know Davis for as long as she has. Both Price and Davis laughed, joking they never would have thought they would be in a place where they would be protecting a District Attorney position.
Price’s relationship with Boudin is very supportive. When she first met him while he was running for DA, she believed he was brilliant. She was overjoyed when he won, she said, because that was the power of the people in action. She knew when he was recalled, she was going to get attacked next.
She describes unpacking boxes for her new office moving in, and people were already yelling in the back of her office. She thought, “You don’t even live here, do you?” She saw the attacks on Fox News by late February, only the second month into her tenure as DA.
Go to Fox News and search for Pamela Price, and 215 links will show up. Many tie her with George Soros, a Billionaire philanthropist boogieman for the right to blame with conspiracy theories of paying Antifa as well as anti-Semitic tropes. Inflammatory words like “Rape,” “Gang Members,” “Killing of Toddler,” and “Radical Agenda” fill Fox News Headlines regarding Price.
Price’s history is rooted in being raised in foster care with three supportive foster mothers. She became a civil rights attorney specializing in civil litigation.
In a recent interview with Oaklandside, she said one of her most significant accomplishments is supporting, creating, and improving victims’ services and the Victim-Witness Assistance Division. That division provides compensation for victims and payments for providers. It also pays burial expenses, medical expenses, mental health counseling, and loss of income claims.
Another notable accomplishment her office has focused on is the Consumer Justice Bureau and civil litigation. In the last year, the Bureau brought in settlements and judgments of over $20 million. Price told Oaklandside that under the prior administration, the average was $4 million to $5 million a year, and previously, media would typically cover those successes, but now news media mainly only covers negative stories about her administration.
Boudin said everyone in San Francisco wanted to discuss recall when he was DA. They wanted to look at videos of people stealing and breaking into cars. “We looked across the bay, not a whisper about crime or recalls,” he said. When Pamela Price was elected, he noticed the same rhetoric was ramped up for Oakland and the East Bay.
“People want to blame her for every single crime committed in Oakland as though there was never a crime committed before she was District Attorney.” He noted in 2020 and 2021, during Nancy O’Malley’s Alameda County DA tenure in the pandemic, Oakland had skyrocketing gun violence and murders. “It just so happens at the same time in San Francisco when I was District Attorney, crime rates were falling by double digits. Violent and non-violent crimes were down by 20%,” Boudin said.
Emphasizing that the demand for Price’s recall was not just about Price, Boudin noted other instances in which newly elected DAs are being removed around the country, using Florida as an example. Governor Ron DeSantis has removed two state prosecutors.
It’s not a coincidence. This is the playbook across the country.
– Chesa Boudin
Price clarified that she was for sentencing reform, police accountability, and transparency in charging decisions. She also wanted to be more open and accessible to the people of Alameda County than has ever been done.
So far, she has made good on those promises, and her critics use how she runs the Alameda District Attorney’s office, which she was democratically voted in to run based on those policies, to recall her.
Davis said historical consciousness is not encouraged in the United States or our dialogue about social issues. She encouraged historical consciousness at this moment, pointing to the still relevant importance of the summer of 2020, which saw massive protests and demonstrations that demanded change in the justice system like never before. She said we are still in that conjecture.
That conjecture is about the foundations of a new future. So it does not surprise me there are those who do not want to see the representatives of that future remain in positions such as the District Attorney of Alameda County or the District Attorney of San Francisco.
In other words, the recalls we are experiencing are attempting to prevent the progress that voters democratically worked and voted on from happening before any of these new experimental ideals can take shape and possibly show conclusive results.
Davis explained that it was not just about Price or any progressive District Attorney facing a recall. It was about history in the making. She connected the relationship with Palestine and a massive movement worldwide that is rejecting colonial violence. She said it was about seeing a future that does not rely on institutions of racism and repression. Some want to get rid of these systems, but there needs to be an acknowledgment that others also want to hold onto them.
Regional Historical Consciousness
Applying historical consciousness requires understanding history and using it to observe current circumstances.
The missing historical consciousness of our current time connecting with the 2020 protests deeply involves the use of social media. There was a lot of loud outrage, which didn’t always make sense in the real world. “Defund the police” became a famous bumper sticker mantra among many activists, but its mechanics were never explained.
That’s likely because San Francisco, and Oakland especially, is filled with anarchists and abolitionists who would love to see capitalism burn to the ground without a thought of what institutions are, how necessary they are in people’s everyday lives, and if you do get rid of the old racist outdated ones what will you replace them with?
Too many people bought into corporations claiming to support Black Lives Matter and Pride as success. With terms like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) no longer in vogue with Human Resource programs, some companies are ditching their DEI teams altogether.
If ever a seething example of hatred towards Oakland leftists, look no further than the sale of the Oakland Whole Foods building, in which East Bay Times reminds us of the store’s 12-year success despite Occupy Wall Street Oakland General Strike protests directed against Corporate America and that Whole Foods in 2011.
The narrative is consequential, and ruling class members will remind everyone they intend to remain the rulers.
Defunding the police and “ACAB” might have been catchy slogans for those who were in on the joke, but they didn’t educate the public. Starkie leftists did not feel the need to bother with anyone who was not informed. Only a few driven progressives stuck around after protests and elections ended. These small collectives and individuals continued to research, organize, participate in politics, and proceed with collective political education, all roots necessary in understanding and activating critical resistance theory.
A new reality embroiled police as morale plummeted. They were once treated as heroes, but now they are often the villains of stories. There is no balance and no answers in the progressive narrative as to who would show up when violence occurred.
Progressives see human nature as needing food, shelter, and freedom, but they must also acknowledge that part of human nature will always include greed, jealousy, and hate. This is why social issues are so complex. They are not on either side of the argument, which can be easily solved with simplistic solutions.
These days, the narrative is getting much more substantial. Progressives are not against the police; they see them as first responders and investigators of crimes. They still see a need to focus on crime prevention with community investment. The trickiest part of community investment is that private equity will not be able to profit from it, and all of our answers to solving all of society’s problems have turned to private equity.
During those 2020 protests, Davis mentioned immense solidarity between Black people and Asians in the Bay area. This also included Mexican American historical references, often recanting stories of the Black Panthers Party working with Brown Berets and Yellow Pearls.
A transitioning peak moment in American history would arrive on Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters rioted in the capital and attempted an insurrection.
Throughout President Donald Trump’s presidency, civil division had been created at such a level that micro-civil war larping would occur in cities between activists, police, white nationalists, Trump supporters, and anti-fascists. Hate crimes had risen, and COVID-19, which originated in China, caused a new target towards Asian people and masking.
By Feb. 2021, something extraordinary had started to happen in Oakland. White nationalist propagandist podcaster Vincent James came to Oakland and posted on his Telegram channel and Instagram a homeless encampment on Feb 2. He had already started anti-Black posts targeted towards Asian engagement two weeks prior.
James published, “Media is Silent on Attacks Against Asians, Because They’re Mostly Committed by Black Males.” On Feb 8, 2021, and then on Feb. 12, he published a video entitled, “Media Blames Trump and ‘White Supremacy’ for Attacks Against Asians Perpetrated by Black People.”
It is conceivable James was provided funding to travel to Oakland, meet with people who have an interest in encouraging division among the community to tamper with Black Lives Matter, and call to “Defund the Police” by enlisting his help.
James had a reputation for organizing with groups like Proud Boys, and Proud Boys were very friendly with certain police officers in every city they went to. For years, numerous reports revealed police officers being members of Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. The most alarming connection at this time was that James was affiliated with America First/Groyper groups; he likely also had connections with Boogaloo groups.
On May 29, 2020, the first and largest George Floyd protest also involved a “Boogaloo” Air Force sergeant shooting two federal officers at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building next to the main Oakland Police Department branch, where protesters were being led in an angry march.
All that is needed is an additional “Agent of Chaos”—a provocateur—likely a local benefactor who is Black and has access to Black disadvantaged people in West Oakland, who could convince them it is Chinese people in Chinatown who are the root cause of their problems.
Astroturfing has been a common occurrence in politics; this line of questioning cannot currently be proven, but it should never be out-ruled, especially when we think of the unity and history of the Black and Asian communities.
In the time since the months that followed numerous random anti-Asian attacks in San Francisco and Oakland, organizing split and Asian communities focused their energy on more policing being focused in their communities.
One of the most outspoken leaders of the Anti-Asian hate movement was Carl Chan, President of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. He later became one of the leading members of the recall campaign against Pamela Price.
On Feb. 3, he called a press conference in Chinatown with then-Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, President Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas, who represents Oakland’s Chinatown district, and Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan. While Bas and Kaplan attempted to condemn the attacks, Schaaf condemned them for trying to “defund the police.”
“I apologize to you, Council Member Bas, but I also have to set the record straight. I’m very pleased to hear from both of you. I’m very pleased to hear from Council Member Nikki Bas and Council Member Rebecca Kaplan that they support these additional resources that the Chinatown community has asked for today. But I have not forgotten that this last summer, they brought a proposal to cut 25 million dollars from the Oakland Police Department as a political statement, not because of operational or financial need,” Schaaf said.
Bas later responded, saying the City Administrator was responsible for the budget cuts that removed foot patrols from the Chinatown community. Local news reported Schaaf’s comments but not Bas’s.
It should be noted that the recall campaign and its supporters have consistently accused Oakland of “defunding the police,” but this has also never been the case, as funding for the Oakland Police Department has increased 18% through Schaaf’s term as crime rose.
A new Oakland police chief, LeRonne Armstrong, was sworn in on Feb. 8, 2021. The first tour he walked with Libby Schaaf was in Chinatown on Feb. 11. I remember because I happened to be there that day when taking pictures of OPD’s solution to the rise in violence in Chinatown, a “Mobile Command Unite.”
Chinatown was a highly politicized vital point in changing the narrative from “defunding the police” and funding crime prevention community programs to one that centered on individual victims of crimes needing an army of police capturing criminals with a DA who locked them away for good.
Since then, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao won the 2022 election against Schaaf’s preferred choice, Loren Taylor. Thao fired Armstrong shortly after starting her term when the Oakland Police Department again became embroiled in scandal, and now Thao is also facing a recall.
As for all the activism for the Stop Asian Hate Movement, one TikToker who goes by SadFrancisco, Toshio Meronek, noted that Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was one of the crafters of the Asian American Foundation (TAAF), which had garnered funding for the movement.
The ADL is an active advocate for Zionism and has recently been criticized by Wikipedia editors as not being neutral enough to use as a source of information regarding the Israel war on Palestine.
In a strange observation of research, I noticed a common theme occurring: many of the advocates demanding a focus on individual rights for victims, more resources for police, and harsh punitive punishments for shoplifting, drug use, and homelessness were supporters of Israel’s Zionism project. That makes sense, considering many police departments, including Oakland’s, have trained and maintained close relationships with the IDF in Israel. The ADL proved these trips.
Considering this bigger picture look at Chinatown and the Chinese-American community being used as a political pressure point of fear and crime against the Black community, organized retail thefts started to rise at this time as well.
Please keep in mind that I am not trying to drive one path of conspiracy from this long thread of information. Instead, it is a quest to observe repeating patterns. Never assume anything based on the first piece of information given the moment it is given to you.
Always presume all possibilities until they are eliminated and the best path is clear. With thoughtful observation and evaluation of patterns, one can better evaluate the situation and predict the future.
Astroturfing Politics in Media
The people who don’t want systemic change, as Angela Davis had been referring to, are not packaged as your typical confederates claiming the South will rise again.
Instead, they come packaged as “moderates,” reasonable intellectuals, concerned parents, and Tech-bros. Corporate journalists and editorial boards are rewriting public relations press releases paid for by corporations and billionaires, backing up the opinions of loud Twitter “X” activists who are paid by the same billionaires funding Super PACs for recalls. Creating a counter-culture to the once loud and proud progressive activists that had plagued Elon Musk’s app for far too long before he purchased to dominate the algorithm for people like himself.
These “moderates” would frame progressives as too empathic, so empathic they are cruel in enabling bad behavior. The kooky—race-baiting, obsessed to the point of being racist, out of touch, fighting against building housing to keep things as they once were because they hate the newcomers’ progressives—that is how they have shaped the narrative.
After the 2020 elections, the political term moderate was thrown around Twitter and across mainstream media as the medicated answer to the unbalanced nature of the previous four years America had experienced under President Donald Trump.
The threat of a coup in the capital was over. Now, it was time to attack progressives, many of whom had rung the alarms of fascism rising in the country for years before the January 6th insurrection. Progressives were winning elections and dominating cultural conversations; that would change.
Reflecting on how a chain of recalls triggered across the Bay Area from San Francisco’s DA office and School District to Alameda County DA and Oakland Mayor—with many of those same recallers attacking two sitting councilmembers in electoral races—researching Chesa Boudin was necessary.
One article stood out in examining the environment and sentiment that was felt in San Francisco at the time of his recall in 2022: The Atlantic’s “How San Francisco Became a Failed City And How it Could Recover by Nellie Bowles,” a whimsical, extensive essay that describes San Francisco as always having issues surrounded by beauty and charm that tragically fell into doom and despair.
Bowles notes a critical turning point in the recalls in San Francisco being the all-out fights around school boards, much of which spilled onto Twitter. She noted the racial tension between the school board members and Stop Asian Hate activists who would claim they were being racist.
It might be a fascinating case study on how intersectional communities can be pushed against each other using their identities, differing class struggles, and political interests despite likely having the same interests in improving their schools. It could also be another case study on how corporate media needs to investigate who pays for the recalls.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed had once proudly embraced the “defund the police” movement. By spring 2022, Bowles describes a change in her tune when the city’s gay pride parade banned police officers from marching in uniform. Breed announced that out of solidarity, she wouldn’t march either.
Bowles’s article was written in June 2022, just after Boudin was recalled and before Pamela Price won her race for Alameda District DA. The moderate recallers she describes, like Michelle Tandler, are now Republican and pro-Israel wars reposting Israel’s far-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches.
In one example of racial division, Bowles cites Kit Lam from Twitter being insulted by recalled San Francisco School Board Allison Collins, “Her comments deeply insulted my family and the entire Chinese community in San Francisco.”
Allison Collins wrote what can probably be considered a poorly worded tweet in 2016, saying:
Many Asian Americans believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact, many Asian American teachers, students, and parents actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.
When we reflect on how the Supreme Court recently overturned affirmative action because Asian activists felt it was an unfair advantage against them, maybe we can question if some Asian Americans unknowingly uphold white supremacy to assimilate into American values.
Nonprofit Asian American Advocacy Fund said regarding the Supreme Court decision, “The white supremacist agendas behind these lawsuits use the small number of Asian Americans against affirmative action as pawns in their efforts.”
Lam became a proud recaller. He now supports non-profit executive and Levi heir Daniel Lurie as mayor of San Francisco against London Breed. With a life of immense wealth, Lurie’s anti-poverty nonprofit has been running in San Francisco for two decades, his children go to private school, and he is against rent control. Breed helped with Boudin’s recall by publicly beefing with Boudin and later installed one of Boudin’s former colleagues, turned recall advocate Brooke Jenkins, for District Attorney. As she appeared in media backing the recall campaign, Jenkins received $100,000 from a recall consultant group.
Then there is Diane Yap.
In “The Lords of Vance, Ami Chen Mills lays brick-by-brick details of San Francisco’s recall politics and how it gave us JD Vance.
Chen Mills described corporate media’s avoidance of investigating where the recall money was coming from while playing into tensions on social media and school boards as locals the journalistic research.
Giving credit to the “unpaid digging by Bay Area alternative journalists like D. Scot Miller and Kevin L. Jones (co-hosts of the Doom Loop Dispatch podcast), Toshio Meronek (“Sad Francisco” podcaster), and Emily Mills (citizen journalist @sf_mills on X)” Chen Mills revealed a disturbing connection between local and national funding in politics.
Yap played a significant role in the school board recalls as president of Friends of Lowell Foundation in SF—who also accused then school board member Allison Collins of racism.
Yap is well known for posting racist tropes on X.
She wrote essays for the Manhattan Institute, which also publishes Christopher Rufo, the architect of anti-DEI and Critical Race Theory. Local citizen journalist Emily Mills discovered that Friends of Lowell shared an IRS mailing address with Moms for Liberty.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Moms for Liberty has spent the last few years attempting to overrun school boards and purge schools of LGBTQ+ materials, POC history, and even gay-friendly Disney films.
Now, after the San Francisco school board recalls, several San Francisco schools are listed to be closed, including Harvey Milk Elementary, the only one in the country with a civil rights emphasis, according to Mission Local.
If you check Bowles’s Twitter “X” account these days, you’ll find she also pushes an anti-Palestine narrative, particularly with an article from The Free Press that criticizes Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message, as one that should not be taken seriously regarding his concerns around Palestine.
Bowles is now Head of Strategy for The Free Press, a digital media company that features writers like Bari Weis, the journalist who broke the “Twitter Files” for Elon Musk right after he purchased Twitter in April 2022. It has also featured Seneca Scott, a prominent recaller for Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and DA Pamela Price.
In a Free Press Article titled “The Black Activist Trying to Save Oakland from ‘Phony’ Woke Progressives,” Scott said Democrats demonize white men or attach anything wrong with society to white supremacy, and that is “bullshit.”
Claiming to be Oakland’s version of a Roman philosopher speaking truth to power, he started a non-profit called Neighbors Together Oakland (NTO) as a multi-racial, multi-class coalition between Black people who want more police and affluent white people in neighborhoods who disagree with progressive politics.
Scott said he used to have leftist views, but a Left Coast Right Watch reported in March 2024 a history of far-right alignment. One person interviewed who knew Scott before 2014 found him “talented but lazy,” condescending, selfish, transphobic, and disrespectful, particularly to women.
Attempting to run for city council in 2020 and Oakland mayor in 2022, Scott has had an intense history of harassment towards journalists, LGBTQ+ community members, and Jewish council members, making anti-Semitic statements towards them while claiming they are not doing enough to denounce the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel. He has threatened city council member Carroll Fife, saying she would “feel the 2nd amendment.”
While NTO claims to be a “post-partisan organization of solutionaries,” it works alongside real estate developer and Bay Alarm heiress Mollie Westphal. The relationship between Westphal’s company, Monarq Properties, and Scott’s nonprofit is prominently featured on Monarq’s landing page.
NTO hosted Compact Magazine, a purportedly “centrist” publication run by Matthew Schmitz, a former editor of a conservative Christian journal, and conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari. NTO is also raising money via GiveSendGo, a Christian supremacist-owned crowdfunding platform popular with neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and Proud Boys, including some who were involved in the January 6 riots at the capitol.
Left Coast Right Watch, “AN OAKLAND NONPROFIT FOUNDER’S HISTORY OF FAR-RIGHT ALIGNMENT”, by MARK MISOSHNIK
By May 2024, Attorney General Robb Bonta filed cease-and-desist orders against Seneca Scott regarding NTO, citing the organization’s failure to file the proper paperwork and illegal solicitation and receipt of donations despite failing to register as a nonprofit.
Scott has more of a reputation for throwing insults and shitposting on Twitter “X” about particular politicians than he does as a philosopher and neighborly type.
Scott recently debated with Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist and journalist who wrote San Fransicko (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins 2020). Shellenberger and Scott’s doom loop narrative, “Has Criminal Justice Reform Made Our Cities Unsafe,” in The Free Press debate forum, hinges on the idea that the 2020 protests and calls for defunding the police automatically created criminal justice reform in San Francisco and Oakland, thus causing the rise and crime that happened during the pandemic.
While Shellenberger is called an environmentalist, he is most vocal about progressives ruining San Francisco and San Francisco being a wasteland.
The continuous narrative pushed by more prominent names like Shellenberger bleeds into mainstream corporate news, eventually creating a demand for politics to make extremely reckless policies. Shellenberger is not a sociologist or social scientist and claims these issues are a consequence of mental illness and push institutionalizing addicts and the homeless.
Poverty porn in the Tenderloin with concerned citizens who stand around and record like they are TMZ reporters. The clips are reposted by accounts that demand fast sweeps and locking people up for drug use.
The dehumanizing of homeless people in these videos has caused insatiable attitudes that led to false accusations. In this case, Chris Hayes would describe stories that sounded like they were made in a lab but were started on Twitter. “X” was sometimes verified on local news and then was amplified by Fox News.
Some of the duplicate large Twitter “X” accounts that propagandized for Trump during his presidency have also joined to help the narrative against Oakland and San Francisco.
Another San Francisco recall-doom loop to the East Bay pipeline is the connection with Seneca Scott and Susan D. Reynolds, former editor of The Marina Times. The Marina Times was acquired by Street Media, the parent company of LA Weekly and Irvine Weekly, by publisher and CEO Brian Call. The purchase was announced Dec. 2020.
Reynolds, who claims to be an independent journalist, also received money from CEO and Publisher Earl Adkins, who owns Gotham by the Bay. Others who were seen receiving these funds were Stanley Roberts, “Mr. Behaving Badly,” who made a YouTube series in 2021 called “Gotham by the Bay, executively produced by Reynolds with an interview of Erica Sandberg, who is also an author at one of Street Media’s publications “The Voice.”
Scott also started a YouTube channel called Gotham Oakland. In this podcast show, muppets of political opponents are made and mocked. Progressive leftists are “soggies,” and all white leftists are racists in Seneca Scott’s narrative.
Scott coined the Gotham term so much that by January 2023, a famous TikTok food blogger named Keith Lee used “Gotham City” to describe the Bay Area to his millions of followers when he visited. He successfully infiltrated the term into local Black culture, maintaining a derogatory image of the Bay Area despite the narrative being paid for by an older, wealthy white man. The term was likely used often in a popular social media account called “Bay Area State of Mind,” which features hip-hop culture and side shows. Now, it is focusing on posting anti-Sheng Thao propaganda.
Recently, Mission Local revealed that Susan D. Reynolds, the former editor of Marina Times, is the target of ethics complaints for being an operative for the Mark Farrell campaign in the San Francisco mayor race.
Reynolds, who claims to be an independent journalist, took a $100,000 payment from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. According to Mission Local, the complaint showed that Neighbors for a Better San Francisco was responsible for most of the funds spent to recall then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2021 and 2022. The group is backed mainly by Bill Oberndorf, a hedge fund manager and big-time Republican donor.
Just your average San Francisco moderates.
All have pushed the narrative that San Francisco and Oakland are doomed cities that require brand-new leadership and tough-on-crime policies. They focus heavily on sweeping homeless people into non-profit programs; they can not provide details about how the programs would be run or what they would provide. It all sounds pretty close to former Donald Trump’s policy plans, which were revealed to have been crafted by the makers of Project 2025.
In other words, we could be dealing with local-level planning of Project 2025 networked plan and not even know it.
The details behind “Gotham by the Bay” funding have deeper roots.
In “Lord of the Vance,” Chen Mills leads to a path of a local tech version of Project 2025. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, was nationally famous for calling for the “slow death” of still progressive SF Board of Supervisors members.
“Tan has poured over a hundred thousand dollars into props and recalls and while he calls himself a moderate Democrat, he is allied with Balaji Srinivasan, CTO of Coinbase, who calls for whole sections of San Francisco to be walled off from “Blues,” or Democrats. Srinivasan is famous for the tech-bro version of Project 2025, “The Network State” manifesto, also published online. The book promotes tech communities starting whole new cities, even new countries—as successors to the nation state, or “network states.”
The Recall Effort
An Agent of Chaos is a modern reflection of an independent agent. Rather than the classic agent provocateur attached to one agency, they can thrive independently through a shadowy, well-funded network with a collective agenda. They are provocateurs, someone so arrogant that they believe they can outwit the public by gaslighting with half-truths and narcissism toward their class while playing a good role model to the upper class.
They use the old Roman tactic of divide and conquer. Despite themselves possibly being BIPOC, they will use identity and race as tools to weaponize arguments of victimhood and fallacy. Racism is but a tool to chisel away at unity in democracy so wealth, resources, and power can remain in the hands of those who have maintained control. What would otherwise be mutual agreements in policies through communities? Agents of Chaos can wedge apart using identity and trauma, turning rational thought into fears, chaos, and confusion.
When those in power use their vast resources, networks, and money to abuse recalls, they must stay hidden. They are similar to the Wizzard of Oz. There is no real magic behind them, only a big green curtain of money and finance they hope will never be revealed. In their mind, they know best how to run things, which is why democracy is but a speed bump to trample over.
Passing out crumbs and promises to Agents of Chaos who hope to achieve a permanent seat at the table, only a few will benefit from maintaining the status quo by breaking all social progress that has been fought not only for this generation but also for many generations past.
Agents of Chaos have found their connections and will do anything to achieve the heights of class. They’ll undergo a hazing process in which they discard long-time friends, community members, and their once-touted righteous principals to cause chaos in their class to prove their loyalty.
In late summer 2022, Brenda Grisham appeared on a local KPFA radio show called Law & Disorder with Cat Brooks to discuss the Christopher LaVell Jones Foundation and her son, who the foundation is named after.
Brooks co-founded the Anti-Police-Terror Project (APTP), a nonprofit based in Oakland that has hosted countless radical political actions in the Bay Area and Sacramento. This includes leading some of the largest George Floyd protests in 2020, in which APTP requires all participants to remain peaceful and not vandalize property. APTP is best known for providing a first response to families who have lost loved ones to police violence, connecting them to services and resources.
Grisham’s son was murdered in Oakland at the age of 17 by gun violence in what is considered an act of mistaken identity or senseless violence. KQED reported in 2013, she started her foundation and was organizing with several groups of moms fighting to stop the violence in Oakland. Her son’s murder has never been solved.
In her interview with Brooks, Grisham said the issue connecting her son’s death in Oakland was gun violence. She said that with a political group called “Their Lives Matter,” she lobbies Congress to speak to congressional members about gun laws. She also said she was a chair of a gun violence committee.
“It takes a lot to transform something that’s been there for a while. Guns that kill people…it doesn’t matter who’s holding the gun; it’s the fact that the gun took somebody’s life. And we can’t keep playing games like we aren’t on the same team because we are.” – Brenda Grisham.
On the 12th anniversary of Jones’s death, Dec. 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Grisham’s friend, Cat Brooks, donated $200,000 to Grisham’s foundation from a $3.5 million donation that had been anonymously donated to APTP.
By March 28, 2023, Grisham was on Fox News saying the newly elected Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price was too soft on crime and that those progressive policies would favor criminals, changing her narrative framing.
Grisham, for ten years, organized with mothers like Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant’s mom, who had advocated for the BART police officer who killed her son on New Year’s Day 2009 to be held accountable. DA Price recently gave Johnson her son’s cellphone, which had personal pictures the mother had longed for, which the previous DA denied giving back.
Grisham has worked with organizers who believe in critical resistance and justice reform for many years. She believes the original root issue is gun violence in Oakland and the need for gun reform. It should be noted that Fox News has spent over a decade supporting the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) narrative to fight for gun expansion rights.
When the Fox News host asks Grisham, “If this DA is not listening to victims’ families, like you, like yours, then who is she listening to?”
“Well at this point we’re really not sure who she’s listening to…first and foremost, the civil rights of the victims should be very important,” Grisham said.
The rights of individual victims become the recurring narrative and theme for the recall campaign.
In July 2023, just six months into Price’s term, Grisham launched a recall campaign, becoming the principal officer for the committee Save Alameda for Everyone (SAFE): Recall DA Price, along with Carl Chan., leader of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce.
Two and a half years after the height of the call for criminal justice reform started to take backstage to anti-Asian hate crimes, Grisham and Chan were a perfect optical team to take down a Black progressive DA in the ultimate game of 4D chess. Both would receive strong support from Oakland’s NAACP chapter, which would go unquestioned as they teamed together and consistently raised attacks against Price for garnering news coverage without question.
If the NAACP, a well-known Black-led organization that has a history of fighting for civil rights, is against Price, she must not be supported by the Black community, right?
Yet, there were many questions in the Black community. Despite the Chron’s own Justin Philips writing two articles noting these questions being raised, the Chron has continued to publish articles about the NAACP’s harsh criticisms of Price as a respected leader and advocate of the Black community without referencing them.
Philips wrote in Sept. 2023 that not only was he critical of the local NAACP chapter, but current and former members of the National NAACP have been critical of the chapter’s decisions to stand behind former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong after Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao fired him when he after he publicly criticized the Federal monitor of the police department.
This created a lot of distrust among the conservative Black community, which confidently supported Armstrong, who was from Oakland and seemed to be making good on promises. However, Armstrong was under investigation and has since been blamed for handling allegations of perjury and bribery by an OPD detective.
The NAACP’s support has remained unwavering, along with their support of Loren Taylor, who was with them when they recently announced their support of Thao’s recall.
Taylor, who lost the mayor race to Thao and demanded a recount of votes with the NAACP, has already announced he would run for mayor again if Thao is successfully recalled. Taylor was previously endorsed by former Mayor Libby Schaaf, who strongly supported real estate and police unions. While the official stance of the NAACP website is against allowing coal in sittings like Oakland, the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club is speculating that coal terminal lobbyist Greg McDonnell may have
According to East Bay Action, McDonnell’s Independent Expenditure Committee “SOS Oakland” is backing Brenda Harbin-Forte, the leader in Mayor Sheng Thao’s recall who is running for Oakland City Attorney, which all recall supporters are also backing.
Reporter Betty Yu of KTVU featured Empower Oakland as a non-profit group that will educate voters while interviewing Loren Taylor, emphasizing it will not be a personal or political platform.
Yet Empower Oakland’s newsletters have been consistently critical of Mayor Sheng Thao. Their voter guide points to recalls and supports former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong for city council-at-large as well as Brenda Harbin-Forte for City Attorney. Harbin-Forte is leading the recall against Thao.
It is interesting how the NAACP would rather keep pushing support for Armstrong as a representative of the Black community representing crime and safety while ignoring the current Black Chief of Police, Floyd Mitchell, who has a history of decreasing crime in Temple, TX. Armstrong now has a legacy of not taking responsibility for his failings as Oakland’s Chief of Police as the crime had risen under his leadership.
Armstrong is running for City Council at Large in Oakland. He recently supported Scott’s Seafood in Jack London Square outcry over a hotel being turned into a homeless shelter, saying it would hurt businesses. Scott’s Seafood is paying Armstrong’s campaign mailers.
When it comes to Grisham’s flip-flop in activism, it appears she and Armstrong have a longstanding connection as well, so it may have been a case in which she decided to side with the police narrative. Much support is backing this network, including churches so that they could have networks and longstanding relationships there. Either way, all of the connections lead to money.
All 14 of Alameda’s police unions support Price’s recall, which has not been a surprise. However, they may have an issue with Price’s unwavering commitment to holding police officers accountable.
In April 2023, the DA office charged Officer Phong Tran with perjury and threatening a witness. A year later, Oaklandside reported eight officers in total, including four commanders, allegedly botched an examination of bribery and perjury charges against a homicide investigator.
In June of this year, Oaklandside revealed former chief LeRonne Armstrong and his immediate successor Darren Allison were investigated and faulted for leadership failures. “Armstrong and Allison failed to ensure OPD’s internal affairs division rigorously and fairly examined the accusations against the detective. Investigators concluded Armstrong and Allison both fell short in their authority and responsibilities as commanding officers.”
In April this year, Price also filed manslaughter charges against 3 Alameda cops in the death of Mario Gonzalez in April 2021. Previous DA Nancy O’Malley had refused to charge the three officers.
When Price assumed office in January 2023, she established the Public Accountability Unit and reopened cases involving police officers that her predecessor had investigated and declined to prosecute.
The result of a second autopsy, requested by attorneys representing Gonzalez’s son in their civil lawsuit against the Alameda Police Department, determined that the cause of death was caused in part by “restraint asphyxiation.”
The City of Alameda paid the family’s claim out of court for $11 million in December 2022.
For Oakland, the Riders case spawned a Negotiated Settlement Agreement and federal oversight over the Oakland Police Department, which is still in effect today, more than twenty years later. However, Oakland’s former police chief Armstrong and the public denounced the continued oversight after decades of the department falling into scandals.
Strong police support is not the only theme behind recall proponents. Real Estate is the other. Chan, who calls himself the mayor of Oakland, is the director of Claremont Development, often described in articles as an East Bay real estate company. Chan was also the first prominent outspoken leader in the Chinese-American community to speak and hold press conferences with former mayor Libby Schaaf back in 2021, claiming he was randomly attacked with racist words he remained unclear with of details.
Chan has since opposed Oakland Police Department budget cuts while advocating for camera surveillance installation in Chinatown. According to Oaklandside, in August 2021, he called for Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and send the California Highway Patrol to conduct traffic enforcement. Three years later, Newsom has granted Chan his wish, sending the CHP into Oakland streets and recently asking for them to be allowed to do more police chases, which Oakland restricts because they have caused civilian deaths.
The day after Chan was attacked, he spoke at a pro-law enforcement rally.
The defense attorney for the man accused of attacking Chan with a hate crime said he was concerned the press conferences and statements were being used to promote an agenda. The defense attorney said he acknowledged there are cases of Asian hate crimes that need to be taken seriously, but in this case, Chan’s story was inconsistent, and there was no evidence. It was also noted that the defendant had a history of mental illness.
One of the strongest backers of the doom loop narrative in Oakland has been Sam Singer, the same PR agent who engaged in the narrative war against Moms 4 Housing when Oakland councilmember Carroll Fiffe was Director of ACCE. He once said it would be an improvement to the neighborhood to remove the Black mothers from West Oakland. Singer now attacks Fife again, along with Price, Thao, and Bas, despite Bas and Fife not being part of any recalls.
His language in one Twitter “X” post regarding the sale of a Kaiser property in Oakland paints a picture of “violent economic decline” because the property sold at a low price. He also has a disdain for homeless people and their political opinions.
Singer’s Twitter “X” is filled with reposts from Chris Moore and Seneca Scott. Moore owns a property management company in Oakland and has played a role in Moore being on the Board of Directors for the East Bay Rental Housing Association. He has been featured on EpochTimes, claiming landlords were losing their homes and that evictions are good for tenants. EpochTimes is a far-right propaganda outlet that has recently been indicted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for being a money-laundering operation.
Most recently, campaign mailers against Nikki-Fortunato Bas’s Alameda County District 5 race revealed they were paid for by the California Real Estate Independent Expenditure Committee, National Association of REALTORS, and California Association of REALTORS as the California association being the top funder. This is important since Moore claims he leads the recalls against Price and Thao.
(Chris Moore, a Board member of the East Bay Renters Association and one of the backers and architects of the recalls, posts “Defund the Police” against Nikki and mentions Asians, which is typical to garner some sort of attention to create fear in the Asian community and imply she does not care about the Asian community. It should be noted Nikki is Filipino.)
Chris Moore also ran for Alameda County Board of Supervisors D5 against Nikki Fortunato Bas but lost the primary.
The Pamela Price Recall campaign’s two main funders are Philip Dreyfuss, a financier at Farallon Capital, a San Francisco hedge fund, and Isaac Abid, a former partner at HP Investors who owns multiple commercial properties in Oakland. HP Investors recently stepped away from the Oakland property portfolio. Abid is taking it over with his new private group, Northgate, to create a privately funded enhanced services district.
Dreyfuss is not only funding Price’s recall but Thao’s recall as well.
Abid has openly stated his opinion that Price would enable crime, and crime is bad for Oakland because it harms property owners. He also acknowledges that a big part of downtown Oakland’s problem is the need for foot traffic and customers. The pandemic may have made it difficult for businesses to recover in Oakland, but a continuous crime doom loop narrative does not help.
Abid told reporter Laura Waxman in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 2024. He believes the economic climate in downtown Oakland needs “the presence of concentrated private capital in a pedestrian-scale neighborhood that’s mixed-use” in an area with many high-end luxury multi-family buildings, retail shops, and office buildings.
The Victim Mentality
To be a public symbol of victimhood meant to garner sympathy, you need to be self-righteous—or maybe selfishly righteous. True victimhood, in its purest form, is created out of survival mode. Manufactured victimhood is political theater with no policy substance.
The overarching theme and reasoning for Price’s recall continue to be about victims as individual stories meant to garner sympathy from those who would want revenge if it were the case; the same thing happened to them, be it business owners and their property or landlords and their property. However, PR agents like Sam Singer know that to get to people emotionally, you need to use stories of families and the trauma of loss.
Speaking at a news conference with recall organizers Grisham and Chan on Oct. 5, all 14 of Alameda County’s police unions announced support for the recall of District Attorney Pamela Price. They claim Price’s main principle as DA is to bring justice to victims. They argue that in the two years Price has been in office, they have seen a “revolving door of justice.”
Grisham organized with Chan and said, “Fixing the system is one thing, but destroying the system is another.”
One of the families at the press conference was Patricia Harris and her husband. Their story in the San Francisco Chronicle is framed as Harris’s son, Jarin Purvis, being fatally shot in Oakland in 2020.
Arguing that the accused accidentally shot his friend in 2023, Price amended the complaint against the man accused of the shooting “when they were playing with the gun and were unaware it was loaded, according to the district attorney’s office. The suspect was sentenced to about four years in prison.”
Most people would not look further into that case to find out what happened, and the Chron does not elaborate on the back story or name the individual accused of shooting Purvis.
The accused has a name. His name is James Joseph Vega. As the Castro Valley Forum reports, Vega was a friend of Jarin Purvis when he and other friends were playing with Vega’s gun and smoking marijuana in the bedroom of an apartment on the 3400 block of Redwood Court in Castro Valley, according to police reports. Remember, Chron reported this happened in Oakland.
“The gun jammed when Vega attempted to test-fire it. Vega, Purvis, and a group of friends examined the gun. Another man took it apart and cleaned it. Witnesses said Vega and Purvis were playing with the gun and laughing when the gun accidentally fired. Purvis was shot in the face and killed.”
Even after police reports initially said Purvis likely shot himself, Vega provided a full confession and told police he did not realize the gun was loaded.
So the question here is, does sending a young man like Vega for life so his friends’ parents can feel some sort of justice sound like a functioning justice system for all of society? Or does that sound like a justice system that only works for specific individuals? Is Vega a threat to society for playing with a gun and smoking weed with his friends? What if Vega has children, parents, and siblings? How many other victims would be involved in what should have been an accident that both Vega and Purvis were involved in?
Harris once said at a rally in Aug. 2023 that Price does not understand or feel her and her husband’s loss.
Does Harris’s feelings matter as an individual more than the health and well-being of society? Is putting more money into prisons and policing the answer to solving issues like this? Or would teaching gun safety and providing counseling to the families involved make more sense and be a cheaper solution? Which solution would be more cost-effective and cheaper?
Are Recalls UnDemocratic?
“Voters in Alameda County should remember that I refused to take money from police unions during my campaign because the people deserve a district attorney who is free to hold everyone accountable, including law enforcement,” said DA Price in a press release statement, responding to police unions supporting her recall.
For too long, DAs have been beholden to these unions, and the result has been a system that neglects the needs of our community and is riddled with racial disparities. I promised to change that, and I’m delivering on that promise. This kind of backlash is to be expected.
Blaming me for decades of failure that took place under the influence of these police unions is both misleading and a disservice to the voters who have been calling for reform. It’s easier to point fingers than to actually solve problems,” DA Price said. “This recall is a distraction from the real work we need to do together to fix a broken system.
I thought it fitting to end this long research story with Pamela Price’s words. She is not big on using public relations or attempting to sway people with manipulative tactics. She is abrupt and to the point. She has work to do. She has been clear on what kind of work that is.
Price and others have said these recalls are undemocratic. I disagree with that straightforward narrative. Based on Angela Davis’s advice to look at the recall with historical consciousness and Chesa Boudin’s emphasis that this recall is about so much more than Price, the patterns and networks involved made it clear that it is the money involved. It is also about the industries that stand to make money if the recall is successful that makes the act of these recalls, in particular, rather undemocratic.
If, in the future, we elected a deceptive politician who claimed they would do the work of the people who voted for them but instead did something so egregious, even illegal, that it harmed the public’s future, a recall would be in order.
But in these cases, what is undemocratic is the shadowy networks and manipulative playbooks being written to shape and change democratic public institutions to fit billionaires’ fantasies.
The use of social media, bought by a billionaire who is currently attempting to sway public opinion using that app to vote for Trump, to undermine, confuse, and mislead voters, is undemocratic.
Corporate media, owned mainly by a few conservative billionaires and venture capitalists who also want to sway opinions and politics, does not give time and space to news journalists so they can investigate stories. Instead, journalists are paid to rewrite prewritten PR statements and set up a few interviews within their networks. Journalism is our voice for democracy, but if it is owned and run by the powers it is meant to check, that is also undemocratic.
What is undemocratic is the requirement for large sums of money to get into politics. The need to amass a large amount of wealth to have your voice heard. What do we hear most often? Wealthy conservative people complain that their views are being suppressed and they should have more monopoly on freedom of speech and the platforms available to provide it.
If I were to bet on anything this election, it would be that regular working and nonworking people of all backgrounds are sick and tired of the games. They are sick of being treated poorly at their jobs, being let go and discarded after working so hard at these corporations. Being told poverty is a choice to be ashamed of, not a social problem created by wealth inequality.
They are tired of the deceit and gaslighting. Frankly, this is mass social manipulation and abuse.
I could compile all this research because of the many fed-up citizen journalists who took it upon themselves to research where the money came from. The recalls in San Francisco pissed a lot of people off like concerned parent Emily Mills who now spends a tremendous amount of time doing research journalists should have been doing.
For many years, I researched rising fascist movements in the Bay Area with Abner Häuge, journalist and founder of Left Coast Right Watch. With their help, I published the story about Vincent James of Red Elephants coming to Oakland in February 2021 and publishing anti-Black media content meant to cause rage and fear in the Asian community. Later, I found Left Coast Right Watch’s well-researched story on Seneca Scott.
With that and the great journalism provided by nonprofits like Oaklandside, Mission Local, and MetroSiliconValley, a patchwork quilt of all their hard work has been made to review, research, and evaluate.
Please protect and support these journalists and researchers so they can continue to preserve democracy and shine a light on the shadowy networks attempting to control our governments. Staying informed is how we create historical consciousness.
Thank you all!
