Racist Democrats Finally Face the Music

A scandal in Oakland City Hall exposed one of my critics, as well as the racism that infects journalism even in supposedly “liberal” cities

It’s always nice to see justice, especially when it is delayed so long as to have been effectively denied. That said, watching one of my critics lose his position within a city government this week felt profoundly satisfying.

Even more satisfying is the revelation of bias among legions of professional “journalists” in the Bay Area who failed to scrutinize the scandal-plagued tenure of former Mayor Sheng Thao.

Oakland residents—and those of other cities served equally poorly by professional writers whose sustained failures rendered them complicit in white supremacy—deserve better.

What happened

City officials in Oakland, CA have recently set a new standard in public corruption.

Former Mayor Sheng Thao is under federal indictment and facing a potential sentence of up to 95 years in prison for alleged bribery. Several staff held over from her office were fired this week after public revelations of their racism. The most damning example was former Chief of Staff Leigh Hanson referring—in writing—to Black people as “tokens.”

Initially, the only staffer fired was Hanson. But after the Oakland chapter of the NAACP issued a statement calling on interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins to also fire other officials with histories of bias, including community resilience director Brandon Harami, he thankfully responded.

Brandon Harami

The other Oakland officials most recently fired included policy director Joe Genolio; and Brooklyn Williams, a staffer focused on public safety and education.

Beyond the saga that led to the overdue dismissals of Williams, Genolio, and Harami, the broader story is the sustained failure among journalists whose obliviousness reduced their own work to misinformation, and ultimately rises to the level of complicity in the corruption and racism they indulged.

Why did accountability take so long?

This is not the first time that Harami’s racism has been publicly documented. How was a climber with a history of embracing white supremacy allowed to serve in the office of the Mayor of one of the West Coast’s most diverse cities?

The answer suggests that racism extends well beyond Oakland City Hall, and infects the ranks of supposed journalists on both sides of the Bay who managed to cover up Harami’s history for the past half-decade in order to protect their own reputations. These include prolific “progressives” in San Francisco such as Tim Redmond, Joe Eskenazi, and Stuart Schuffman, in addition to more mainstream journalists including the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli.

It sadly also includes writers at national outlets (like Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy at the Intercept) who investigated the false accusations fabricated to silence me in 2020, discovered them to be based on a hoax, and yet declined to observe the racism and white supremacy that allowed anyone to indulge them in the first place. Lacy remarkably included Harami as a source despite obvious conflicts of interest, while ignoring—and then mischaracterizing—whistleblowers, as well as the documentary evidence they presented.

Every one of these writers smeared me in order to prevent a public debate that, if allowed, would have allowed long overdue accountability for Democratic Party leadership that remains thoroughly and unapologetically corrupt. The world-historical recent failures of the Democratic Party that brought Donald Trump back to the White House were all enabled by preceding failures by legions of professional writers who get paid to mislead their audiences.

Each of them also ignored (or mischaracterized) Gloria Berry, an Afro-Latina Navy veteran, grandmother, and elected party official who came forward to blow a whistle on the plot that my former staff tried to recruit her to join. They also disregarded documentary evidence that she brought forward exposing that plot as orchestrated by Pelosi’s political party and based on false pretenses. Most obviously, they ignored conflicts of interest among various accusers who were rewarded by the Democratic Party with jobs and appointments in exchange for their public racism and ignorant deployment of white supremacy to serve themselves and their careers.

Shooting the messengers

Berry faced retaliatory smears as a result of speaking out. Harami falsely accused her of transphobia, and also started various false social media accounts harrassing her. I endured the same pattern at his hands, myself.

For the past several years, a steady stream of Black Oakland residents have come forward observing Harami’s racism. They include community activist Seneca Scott, and Harami’s former colleague, LeAna Powell, who filed a state ethics complaint in response to the hostile environment she encountered in City Hall.

Harami’s counter-attack on Powell included several accusations. He accused her of aligning with the coal industry. He also outrageously accused her of stealing a laptop. White “journalists” at Oaklandside repeated his smears targeting Powell, even though those claims never had any grounding in reality.

Meanwhile, former Chief of Staff Renia Webb has launched her own campaign for Mayor, after having been forced to resign from City Hall by former Mayor Thao’s corruption. Webb has publicly reflected on the disgraced former Mayor’s alleged bribery, as well as the illegitimate involvement of Thao’s romantic partner, Andre Jones, in the work of the Mayor’s office.

Somehow, these repeated pleas for accountability fell on deaf ears. With a single revealing exception, the whistleblowers were heeded only by Black journalists. Zennie Abraham featured LeAna Powell’s concerns, while the SFBayview was the only outlet to accurately convey the experience of Gloria Berry. The only white journalist on either side of the Bay to publicly reflect on Harami’s racism over the course of five years was Susan Dyer Reynolds from the Marina Times and the Voice of San Francisco.

How did every other journalist in the Bay Area manage to ignore Gloria Berry, LeAna Powell, Renia Webb, and me? I was hardly the only person of color marginalized by the biases they observed and tried to expose.

If racism has been so prolifically tolerated among Democrats in the nation’s most supposedly liberal city, what might that suggest about the party generally? Democrats & their supporters are far less conscious—and far more racist—than their enablers seem to think.

The revealing words of a courageous whistleblower

Speaking on a podcast with Seneca Scott earlier this month, LeAna Powell shared the following reflections (starting at 25:25) on the failures of news outlets and their complicity in the corruption and racism that pervaded former Mayor Sheng Thao’s tenure:

I’m a journalist myself. I used to write for Oakland Voices, and that group was set up to diversify media…[N]ow more than ever, I am so grateful for the opportunity to become a journalist through Oakland Voices.

But I see the need for programs like that and podcasts like yours so much more. Every single person that talked to me in regards to….this situation, I believe that everybody I spoke to was White, for one. And for two, people only were interested in the part of the story that they wanted to share….but nobody really told the story that shed light on what my plight was.

I was hired in the wrong way. They hired me to use me. They hired me to use me as a pawn. They just did not expect that I would fight back. It really hurt me because it takes a lot of courage to speak up and let somebody know when something is going wrong.

[W]hen I finally had the courage to speak up about it and go to the public ethics [commission], and go through multiple public ethics investigations, at least four [members] now on the public ethics commission [investigated].

Nobody has gotten to the bottom of this case.

There have been multiple journalists that have reached out to me via email or by call. They have even done interviews with me and not put them out….

They highlight a certain narrative, and it most often doesn’t reflect if you’re Black. You’re dark Black like me? You don’t get the justice. You don’t get the story told that you seek to share. I told each one of those people the majority of the story and not one of them put it out.

It was the Black media…Zennie [Abraham]…who put out the entire interview. It was you [Seneca Scott] who allowed me to speak. None of those other media sources allowed me to share everything and when they did record it, they clipped it out.

It really made me not trust people anymore.

I already didn’t trust my elected officials that I initially did trust, but when I started seeing things unfolding and questioning things, I was getting harassed and pushed into a corner and I had nowhere to turn. Then when I thought I was going to media that would share my story, and I went to all the major ones, all the ones that you watch on tv and all the ones that you read online.

They did not share my truth. The truth is I’m a Black woman who really believes in working in this city and being in the ground, in the mud, working for the people of Oakland….

Her reflections on her marginalization at the hands of white journalists is no less damning that the long overdue departures from City Hall of the figures indulged by those very same journalists.

It is a sad day when the party widely known as “the lesser evil” becomes a conduit for racism and bigotry, especially in smug liberal enclaves that falsely think themselves immune from those disturbing patterns.

Paid subscribers can access a further section exploring the implications of this saga for the legitimacy of the federal courts.