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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Several months before Karen Bass left Congress to run for mayor, she blamed black disinterest in getting vaccinated on white people stealing all their vaccines. ”Individuals from other parts of the community who are white are coming into inner city areas they probably have never been in before seeking vaccines,” the racist politician claimed.

In Mayor Karen Bass’ world, when white people get shots they’re stealing them from black people. Every black problem can ultimately be blamed on white people. Even when black officers beat a black man, it’s because they’re a bunch of racists.

When Tyre Nichols was fatally beaten by five black officers during a traffic stop gone wrong, Bass could only focus on the white people who weren’t there. “Even with the black officers, I wonder how they would have reacted if it was a young white person?” she mused.

When Bass isn’t attacking white people based on race, she’s also attacking black people by denying their race. On Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show, Bass claimed that Justice Clarence Thomas was not an “African-American voice”, and argued that Larry Elder also wasn’t really black.

“We can’t get confused by Larry Elder,” Bass claimed. “I don’t care what Larry Elder looks like.”

When Biden considered Bass as his veep and then before her mayoral run, the media launched an effort to obscure her extremism and make her seem like just another urban politician.

But Bass allegedly began her career with ties to the Black Panthers and Maoists before becoming a community organizer. “If she’s an L.A. Black Panther – that was Geronimo Pratt territory,” David Horowitz had observed. “They were a street gang – the L.A. Panthers. And they were led by a lunatic named Geronimo Pratt.”

The Los Angeles mayor has since claimed that she began her activism in 1973 as part of the Campaign Against Police Abuse. “If you were going to be an activist in Los Angeles in 1973, you had to be involved in police abuse because the police were always abusing us,” she claimed, alleging that the police had broken into her house and vandalized her car.

That was also the year she visited Castro’s Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigade: a Cuban Communist front group. The leftist political elite that would rule Los Angeles was coming into being around alliances between white Communists, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. The smarter black and Latino nationalists like Bass became community organizers. It was then that Bass met close ally, future Los Angeles mayor and fellow ‘Brigadist’ Antonio Villaraigosa. It was Villaraigosa whose backing first got Bass into the State Assembly and to whom she owes much of her subsequent political career including taking over his old job.

That two out of three members of a Cuban Communist front group have been running Los Angeles since 2005 testifies to how successful the seventies radical coalition has been.

As a community organizer, Rep. Bass described the burning of Korean stores during the L.A. race riots as a happy event. “Like a miracle, a large chunk of the stores we wanted to close were burned to the ground,” the city’s future mayor had gushed.

“If people burned down those stores, they must have been unhappy with them,” she suggested.

The L.A. race riots provided Bass with a national platform. The media was eager to interview local activists and politicians were seeking answers about how to stop the violence. While Rodney King and countless Asian store owners suffered, Bass benefited enormously.

“This is a terrible thing to say. We all felt bad for his beating. But we cheered the fact that it was finally documented,” Bass mused in  ‘Burn, Motherf****r, Burn!’, a recent documentary, while watching footage of the beating.

“We need to figure out how to rebuild this city with quality and turn tragedy into opportunity,” she suggested at the time.

Historical revisionism is second nature to Bass and a decade ago she had taken to describing the race riots as a “rainbow uprising” and “a multiracial affair that involved whites, African Americans, Latinos and Koreans in the violence.”

The BLM riots in 2020 provided Bass with another opportunity.  “If I didn’t do this now, if I didn’t push as hard as I possibly could, I would live to regret it, because you never know when these moments are going to come,” she suggested while pushing her anti-police bill.

Much as the L.A. riots helped move Bass into political office, the BLM riots let her make the leap from congress to running the city. Like most mayors, Bass has promised to fix public safety, but her idea has been to replace police officers with social workers when responding to some calls.

In 2020, her office co-sponsored a briefing on “Black Lives Matter: Social Work and the Future of Policing” at which a brief claimed that “policing is a core institution of white supremacy.”

Bass’ career began with claims of racism and has reached its peak with more of the same.

And despite more recent claims to be a uniter and a peacemaker, she has never left her radical causes behind that allegedly go back to ties with the racist Black Panther hate group.

In 2016, Micah X. Johnson, a Black Lives Matter supporter, set out to murder white police officers. He succeeded in killing 5 of them. This racist attack was one of a series of violent assaults on law enforcement officers by black nationalists. Next year the FBI issued a report warning about what it called “Black Identity Extremists” targeting police officers. It listed Johnson alongside a number of other black nationalists, separatists and supremacist attackers.

Bass took the lead in demanding that the report be suppressed. “If we don’t get them to publicly retract it, denounce it and send out clarification, we can still de-legitimize it,” she urged.

“Could you name an African-American organization that has committed violence against police officers? Can you name one today that has targeted police officers in a violent manner?” she demanded to know despite a long history of such behavior from black nationalist groups.

Bass appeared to have forgotten not only about the Black Panthers, including branches such as the Black Liberation Army, responsible for the murder of at least 5 police officers, not to mention contemporary supremacist groups like those in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The racist violence that Bass had denied existed would arrive 2 years later: destroying neighborhoods and wrecking lives. LAPD officers were among the more than 2,000 officers assaulted nationwide by the black nationalists whose hatred Bass had tried to cover up. In the year of BLM, LAPD officers were assaulted 1,172 times: nearly double that of 2019. Over a hundred of those officially occurred during the violent riots she had described as “peaceful”.

Bass labeled the existence of the racist violence as “misinformation on particular networks that have basically lied about what happened over the protests–you know the majority of the protests were peaceful. They’ve only focused in on the ones where there was looting and rioting, and so that–and then they have demonized the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Race riots once again created an opportunity for Bass to rise while a city mourned.

The Los Angeles that Mayor Karen Bass rules over is a shadow of its former self. Overrun by legalized crime, people are fleeing in droves even as she promises to have the answer.

And her answer is a familiar one that dates back to her early anti-police activism.

A year after the riots, Bass told the Washington Post that she was worried about crime and violence, not about the victims, but that their existence would sideline her pro-crime agenda.

“I’m worried about the spoke in crime and violence that we’re seeing becoming an excuse to say, ‘No, we don’t need reforms. We need more police,’” she complained. “I have my fingers crossed that this time, we will not make that mistake: “Let’s pass more laws. Let’s incarcerate more people. Let’s have more police.’”

That does not bode well for public safety in Los Angeles. When Bass talks about public safety, she does it in terms of accusing the country she lives in of being a racist oppressive system.

Bass said that she was very happy to see “so much discussion has happened around systemic racism” and the “openness to examining our history, to examining the institutions of society, and for looking at where policing fits in there.” While Mayor Karen Bass wants to “examine” America’s history, it’s important to examine her history and understand how a racist came to take power in one of the greatest cities in the world.

Karen Bass’ career was bookended by two race riots. How long until there will be a third?

Other Parts of the Series:

Part I: Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot.

Part 2: LA’s Eric Garcetti.

Part 3: DC’s Muriel Bowser.

Part 4: KC’s Quinton Lucas.

Part 5: SF’s London Breed.

Part 6: Philly’s Jim Kenney.

Part 7: St. Louis’ Tishaura Jones.

Part 9: Seattle’s Jenny Durkan.

Part 10: Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey.

Part 11: Charlottesville’s Nikuyah Walker.

Part 12: Portland’s Ted Wheeler.

Part 13: Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Part 14: NYC’s Bill de Blasio.

Part 15: Enfield’s Mondale Robinson

Part 16: Boston’s Michelle Wu

Part 17: Chicago’s Brandon Johnson