Using press conferences and media to create political theatre along with fears of crime, the ruling class is appearing out of the shadows, funding puppets of propaganda to arouse fear, division, and hate.
Their focus is attacking newly elected 2022 progressive leaders with unfounded expensive recalls while propagating a Doom Loop narrative. If they can convince everyone to fear their neighbors, fear other neighborhoods, and better yet—fear new governing tactics that provide social services instead of leaning on police state tactics—then the ruling class accomplishes their goals of keeping the masses divided and weak.
One manipulative tactic frequently employed is identity reductionism, a deceptive abuse of identity politics. Unlike genuine identity politics, which acknowledges identity’s complex historical and material roots, identity reductionism reduces individuals to a collection of surface-level traits, reducing social problems to tokens of representation and treating individual political advocates like players on a game board.
This oversimplification often exploits and commodifies identity for political gain. A typical example is seen in election campaigns, where a candidate’s race, gender, or sexual orientation might be strategically emphasized to appeal to specific voter demographics.
All political parties use identity reductionism as a disingenuous way of connecting with people, making them feel seen and embraced inside a community they can relate to. Since pop culture is propagandized, anyone from any end of the political spectrum can be acceptable. Without conscious, deliberate political awareness, there is often no telling the difference between entertainment and propaganda.
Many individuals and organizations use political arguments based on identity reductionism to validate single-issue politics over all other issues. Social media can host a “main character syndrome” where only those who agree with the main character in that algorithmic echo chamber are in a true sense of reality. Anyone who challenges their narrative is wrong and should be automatically exiled or “canceled.”
This is the modern-day existence of political discourse that whirls around and around. It causes so much confusion that news workers can only transcribe what is happening. If they are outstanding journalists and fortunate in their positions with free editorial reign, they can ask detailed questions and have the responses published.
If a politician needs to be removed from office, the opponent’s race, religion, political affiliation, gender, and class background will be considered a chess piece. In the background will be public relations specialists, “Agents of Chaos,” influencers who curate a narrative, real estate associations, landlord lobbyists, police unions, faith leaders, and other organizations that can be mustered up for credential backing.
This is when the term playing “4D chess” comes in. The billionaires and real estate-police-prison-tech industry complex have set up the board, and their pawns are ready to move. This network can evolve with other industries depending on the area of interest.
With endless streams of doom loop articles and “poverty porn” videos on social media connecting the dispossessed class to crime and business closures that were failing due to changes in consumerism before the pandemic, ridiculous political advocates of the ruling class exhaust the public.
This method is described in Jonathan Tapllin’s The End of Reality, How 4 Billionaires Are Selling A Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. Taplin describes how former President Donald Trump’s former Senior Counsel, Steve Bannan, and former CEO of Paypal Peter Theil, plotted to use Facebook and social media. Bannon’s idea was to flood the public with so much misinformation and bullshit people would become disoriented and lose all meaning of reality. It is an old playbook that all dictators, including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, have used.
In the case of Bay Area recalls, the constant news drip of news generally wouldn’t make the news. The hyperventilating speed at which police surveillance video would be released to the public and reposted by propagandists online with an attached retelling of their interpretation of the story without knowing the details.
If you’ve ever worked for a corporation, you’ll recognize how they run like a dictatorship, not a democracy. That is why corporate media is at odds with ethical journalism, which was created to protect democracy and hold truth to power. Journalism seeks truth, dictators seek propaganda that hides the truth, and corporations use jargon to emphasize market branding and control how much is known.
We live in a “time is money” society, and corporations have played lip service to values, but if they do not make money, they will not have value to their investors. All good dictatorships need propaganda to pacify the masses and keep them from rising against them.
The goal is to overstimulate the media with repetitive narratives that do not tell the full stories so that people forget what created these issues. By causing chaos in public spaces of debate, it makes all politics look dysfunctional and needs “moderate leadership” funded by what ends up being out-of-touch billionaires to save the day.
In 2021, amidst the pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian sentiment fueled by rhetoric like then-President Trump’s labeling of COVID-19 as the “China virus,” high-profile incidents of Black-on-Asian violence generated significant fear within Asian American communities.
White nationalist “Agent of Chaos” propagandist Vincent James came to Oakland and posted on his Telegram channel and Instagram a homeless encampment on Feb 2, 2021. He had already started anti-Black posts targeting Asian social media engagement two weeks prior. The fear campaign against Black people as criminals had begun, and it would pay off.
With many Twitter “X” influencers and the added San Francisco School Board recalls, the fear of crime opened the door for progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin to be recalled in 2022.
At around the same time James arrived in Oakland, Oakland China Town’s Chamber of Commerce President and Real Estate Agent Carl Chan held a press conference with then Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. He raised concerns regarding his experience of being attacked in a hate crime. He shared an image of his attacker walking away. Betty Yu of KTVU shared the pictures, and her post went viral. She would carry on a focus on crime content, starting with anti-Asian hate crimes.
Chan is now one of the leaders of the Recall Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price Campaign.
In late summer 2022, Brenda Grasham 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 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 lobbied 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 progressive policies—the same ones she had organized with Cat Brooks and the mothers she had supported in previous years—would favor criminals, changing her narrative framing.
Currently, the recall movement is focusing on political attacks against the Anti-Police Terror Project (APTP), spreading slanderous accusations aimed to discredit political opposition that is perceived to have any connection to their movement.
For a decade, Grisham worked alongside mothers like Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant’s mother, who fought for accountability after a BART police officer killed her son in 2009. Recently, DA Price returned Oscar Grant’s cellphones, which contained cherished personal photos that the previous DA had withheld from his mother.
For many years, Grisham has worked with organizers who believe in critical resistance and justice reform.
It should be noted that Fox News has spent over a decade supporting the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) right-wing narrative to fight for gun expansion rights.
Framing the story as one of anarchy, the Fox News host asked 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 Grisham was about to launch.
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 Chan.
Two and a half years after the peak of the criminal justice reform movement, which was overshadowed by concerns about anti-Asian hate crimes, Grisham and Chan emerged as a strategically advantageous duo to challenge the Black progressive District Attorney in their benefactors 4D game of chess, embodying a calculated political maneuver.
Grisham joined former Alameda DA Nancy O’Malley in advocating for Price’s recall on Oct. 23. O’Malley criticized Price, stating she was unqualified and incompetent, ignored victims’ rights, lied, and shifted blame for issues within the DA’s office.
Price has previously said she inherited an office needing extensive review and reform, particularly after uncovering instances of jury duty discrimination against Black, Jewish, and Gay jurors.
Claiming defendants should face harsh penalties, “The color of your skin should not give you a pass,” Grisham said. “If the law says you murdered someone, then 25 years is where you need to start.”
Is this Monopoly for real?
Studies have shown that increased severity in punishment does not deter crime. So, on a surface level, this campaign is for victims’ rights to vengeance instead of healing social problems at their roots.
That is a difficult challenge to navigate, considering Grisham lost her son. She may believe the murderer will be found, when in reality, based on statistics, the murderer may have been killed or is already in prison.
How do you convince victims of such crimes, who lost loved ones and can not feel safe in a world of such violence, to work with ideas in a justice system of critical resistance and restorative justice? Because some of these victims are willing to throw society into eternal illness and debt for their vengeance, and they likely will never be satisfied in their pursuit of justice.
Critical Resistance is the theory that the criminal justice system should not be built on retribution. At its core, it believes the 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.”
Restorative justice is a framework that centers on understanding the impact of a crime on all parties involved and finding ways to address and repair the harm caused.
This is likely why Cat Brooks and the moms who once organized with Grisham have not called her out. The recallers would like nothing more than to see these Black women publicly attack Grisham, who wears her victimhood on her chest like a police badge of honor. She is unwilling to heal and let go or listen to others who also need to heal in their community from their losses, so it is a loss for everyone involved. There is no winning by making what once was public.
Examine the latest victim example the police unions used in their claim to recall DA Price, and you’ll find it is full of pitiful contradictions that are ruining who knows how many people’s lives.
Speaking at a news conference with Grisham and Chan on Oct. 5, all 14 of Alameda County’s police unions came out in support of the recall of District Attorney Pamela Price. Their principal claim was once again 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.”
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.
Price amended the complaint against the man accused of the shooting, saying he accidentally shot his friend in 2023, as Chron wrote, “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.” To learn why Price only charged four years and how the story turned from a poor mother’s son being fatally shot to a friend playing with a gun, I needed to do some searching because Chron was not going to write all that.
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 to prison for 50 years, which was the initial possible time, so his friends’ parents can feel some sort of justice sound like a functioning justice system for all of society? 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 considered an accident in which Vega and Purvis were involved?
Additionally, much of the victimhood propaganda narrative focuses on private property and businesses, blaming crime for businesses closing or leaving when it is just failing businesses. That leaves an opening to attack Mayor Sheng Thao and blame her for failures in Oakland without regard to the after-effects of the pandemic.
Grisham, Chan, and the leader of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s recall, Brenda Harbin-Forte, received strong support from Oakland’s NAACP chapter, which would go unquestioned as they teamed together and consistently raised attacks against Price and Thao, 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?
There is this idea that being Black equates to fighting for civil rights, suffering, and victimhood. It is a game of identity reductionism meant to infuse the masses with confusion based on what is historically known as the right side of history: the portrayal of civil rights leaders. There can be no questioning civil rights leaders. That in itself would be racist, especially if you are white. Justice is now only for victims’ rights, no longer about systemic racism and addressing the underlying causes of crime.
Yet, the Black community had many questions regarding the Oakland NAACP chapter, including questions from the National chapter. 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 leading voice and advocate of the Black community without referencing any further background.
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 Mayor Thao fired him when he publicly criticized the Federal monitor of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), directly after another scandal under his watch was revealed.
Armstrong’s firing 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.
So, the question for these recall advocates who claim incompetence and demand accountability is: who is expected to be held accountable? Is it only the mentally ill strangers who commit crimes?
Or the officials in power who overlook the actions of their subordinates that cause public harm, like the two police officers who had DUIs on duty and the previous Alameda DA did nothing about it?
Or is it the progressive DA who intends to hold those in power accountable, the only one considered incompetent?
Or are the journalists who intend to reveal the truth about who is financing the recalls in the wrong and need to “disappear?”
How far does it go?
And is there any redemption for anyone if everyone commits the crime of making human errors?
Behind all the victimhood and accusations comes down to money, control, and maintaining power.
Behind the Pamela Price Recall campaign are two main funders: 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.
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.
Dreyfuss is funding both Price’s and Thao’s recalls. Tech Billionaire Venture Capitalist Ron Conway has chiefly financed Thao’s recall.
Then, Harbin-Forte, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s leading recall campaigner, is also running for Oakland City Attorney and received $24,000 in campaign support from hedge fund executives backing the proposed West Oakland coal export hub.
The SOS Oakland committee was established last year by Greg McConnell, a lobbyist who has expressed concerns about public safety in Oakland, aligning with the local NAACP chapter’s criticisms of progressive city leaders and calls for increased law and order.
Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and Coinbase executive, launched Abundant Oakland in July. The group aims to “structurally fix” the city’s significant challenges and “re-architect” how 35% of the nation’s GDP ($9.5 trillion in economic activity from San Francisco to Oakland) is managed. Abundant Oakland supports Harbin-Forte.
Pollak is also a significant funder of Empower Oakland, founded by former Oakland Councilmember Loren Taylor, who lost the mayoral race to Thao. Empower Oakland is now actively campaigning for Thao’s recall and opposing progressive city policies.
The recalls have branched into occupying much of city hall.
As they say, all you need to do is follow the money. But many of the questions I’ve asked are of a narrative concern since the spin is spinning us all out of control.
While the narrative framing has focused on victims’ rights, it has also focused on change, making us look at the ugliest parts of society, which have been neglected for decades while pretending these social issues spang out of control overnight.
Some progressive ideas and solutions will be experimental, uncertain, and imperfect. We might have to pivot and see what works and what does not. That is what social sciences are for. Unfortunately, social scientists and experts rarely sit at the table of conversation regarding what will be done.
The people who are loudly for recalls and social engineering projects like Project 2025 nationally and locally demand old-school tough-on-crime policies that have never been proven to work. They are proven to cause higher rates of recidivism, that is, the rate at which people who have been incarcerated re-offend. It is often measured by rearrest, reconviction, or return to prison.
And we now know that some states and parts of California, like Fresno, intend to imprison unhoused people for not having housing.
The recall-doom loop narrative imagines a society that should always look and feel clean, safe, and perfect. It should maintain law and order and assimilate into a preferred social norm. It ignores human needs such as housing, food, desires, and protection for those who can not work or are at the margins of society.
That is probably why building walls and exclusive militarized cop-protected cities are all the rage with billionaires and their pawns these days.
Those who have abundance in the ruling class always speak of scarcity. In this day in age of technology and AI opening up possibilities to humanity, I’m calling bullshit on your scarcity and your need to control our minds, bodies, and governments.
What is most offensive about the current recall movement in the Bay Area is not the act of recalls themselves. No, they are meant to be used in extreme cases of governing dysfunction.
It is the cast of mostly grotesquely rich white men peddling these recalls behind BIPOC movement leaders casting themselves as victims to garner sympathy and fear and use identity reductionism.
They use community trauma as a catalysts to create social engineering and herd the masses to vote for their deceptive measures.
Because these men and the people who benefit from their funding believe they know what’s better for the public better than the public does. They can govern in the shadows and enrich themselves.
Now that they have AI, they no longer need most of their working class and openly participate in breaking the social contract. It is a slap in the face to our intelligence to say we low-class imbeciles do not know better and should not be allowed to vote or participate in politics. Only those with the most wealth should decide our fate.
Some progressives might fall into the pits of identity reductionism and lose the plot. We must accept that it will take time to make progressive change. It is not a fast, easy, reckless process. It will not occur perfectly curated by the mind of one who stays chronically online, spouting theory.
Progress will not always be in comfortable spaces. We may have to organize with people and compromise our divine morals.
But that is what makes us human. Our morals, beliefs, and differences are simply concepts of our imagination, ideas fermented from our culture and fond creation, not to be measured merely as good or evil.
Purity and superior edges into fascism, comparing imperfection to dirty, shameful behavior meant to be purged or “canceled.” It is far more difficult to accept that some people need a journey of healing their trauma with patience and time inside community space. It is better than exiling them so they become menaces to society.
All we need to focus on now is healing society one patchwork at a time, shaping it into an imperfect world that provides basic needs. Everything else we want will fall into place.
Very insightful stuff! Glad to have stumbled upon your writing