For a guy who loudly insists he’s a Democrat, Santa Monica Mayor Phil Brock sure is surrounded by a weird number of Republicans. You don’t need to take my word for it—Brock proudly lists this information on his endorsements webpage and social media accounts. Let’s review.
Six out of the 21 elected officials Brock lists as endorsing him are Republicans. They are:
- Margaret Clark, Mayor Pro-Tem, City of Rosemead: alternate for 49th Assembly District Republican Party
- John Cruikshank (not “Cruickshank” as Brock has him listed), Mayor, Ranchos Palos Verdes: the Republican challenger to be LA County’s 4th District supervisor
- Joe Franklin Mayor, City of Manhattan Beach: Franklin’s website lists a number of Republican endorsements, including the former Republican Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley and George Chen, the mayor of Torrance.
- Peggy Huang, Council Member, City of Yorba Linda: Huang ran for Congress as a Republican in 2020. The linked tweet has pictures of Huang with former GOP Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
- Marty Simonoff, Councilmember, City of Brea: Simonoff has previously run for the California Assembly as a Republican.
- John Mirisch, Councilmember, City of Beverly Hills: Mirisch ran as a Republican to fill Congressman Ted Lieu’s state senate seat when Lieu vacated it to run for Congress. Mirisch has previously cost Beverly Hill taxpayers nearly $10,000 in a public records lawsuit filed by a journalist over police records relating to allegations of domestic abuse against Mirisch by his wife.
He also lists, his fellow city councilmember (the fourth councilmember in his nearly three-year council majority) Lana Negrete. Negrete is not openly a Republican (she wasn’t a Democrat until shortly before she sought the Santa Monica Democratic Club’s endorsement in 2022), but the signs are all there, such as her apparent support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Here’s Negrete in a picture at an RKF campaign event in July 2023 posing with RFK himself and LA4Kennedy organizer Zeke Hindle.
RFK’s 2024 presidential run was widely considered GOP ratfucking from the start, which was confirmed when RFK announced he was dropping out of the race and endorsed Donald Trump.
Brock himself has headlined events (along with Negrete) organized by Hindle.
The events were not explicitly run as RFK campaign events. However, they were run under the banner of two organizations run by the same group of people, including Hindle, Freedom Advocacy Fund and Mobilizing Civic Engagement. The donation links on both of those group’s websites are hosted by Anedot, a Republican fundraising platform that also has ties to No Labels, another Republican operation. Last week Brock posted a video to social media of Hindle interviewing him, representing himself under the Mobilizing Civic Engagement label.
Moving down Brock’s endorsements page, we get to the individual endorsements section, which includes Janet McLaughlin, an antivax RFK supporter who Brock was considering adding to his slate before she failed to return her nomination papers. We also get local MAGA Republican Marc Verville, who Brock and his council majority placed onto the city’s audit subcommittee, replacing one of this year’s Democratic Party endorsed city council candidates, Natalya Zernitskaya.
The organizational endorsements section contains yet more Republican endorsements. There’s the LA County Taxpayers Association, which claims to be nonpartisan but is full of Republicans like Cruikshank and has an extreme anti-tax position. There’s also the Blue Wave Democratic Club, an astroturf Dem Club run mostly by partisans affiliated with Westside Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park. Park was a lifelong Republican who registered as a Democrat before her run for Los Angeles city council in 2022, as well as a John Lee, another local politician who switched from being registered GOP for political benefit. The Blue Wave’s other endorsements this year include disgraced Los Angeles city councilmember Kevin de León. A future article will look more at this group, run by former city councilmember and current Pier business operator Greg Morena.
Moving to the listed personal endorsements, the name Marc Verville jumps out. As Juan Matute has previously covered for Santa Monica Next, Verville is a MAGA Republican with a donation history to show for it.
Also listed is John Putnam, who is one of Brock’s slate mates this year. Brock’s campaign and the independent expenditure committees backing his slate wasted no time claiming all four of them are Democrats. However, Putnam is another case of switching party registration right before jumping into local politics. He has an extensive Republican donation history, including $25,000 to Mitt Romney and Republican PACs in 2012 and $2,300 to Rudy Giuliani in 2007. Putnam also donated to Republican Larry Elder in the 2021 recall campaign against Gavin Newsom (CSV download, opens in Excel; this can also be downloaded directly from the California Secretary of State of here).
Brock did not list Houman Hemmati, but Hemmati endorsed Brock’s slate a week before it was officially announced back in August. Hemmati is a Fox News darling who routinely goes on a number of their shows.
Hemmati got Brock his own Fox News appearance after he picked a fight with a homeless person on the Promenade, which Fox News used as a blurb in an apparently recurring “liberal cities are dangerous shitholes” segment.
Brock claims he’s not a regular Fox News viewer, but then where did he pick up lines like “it’s no longer ‘WOKE’ time in the city we love”? Maybe from one of the weird MAGA Twitter accounts he enjoys when he’s not busy being horny on main (NSFW!). (Lest anyone think I’m being unfair to Brock, his liking that tweet wasn’t a one-off slip of the thumb.)
Or maybe it was something he picked up while talking to the far-right Epoch Times. As Damien Newton has previously reported, Epoch Times is owned by the Falun Gong new religious movement. “The Epoch Media Group’s news sites and YouTube channels have spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation, and false claims of fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election.”
John Alle, known primarily for the signs he places on his Promenade property, has also appeared on Epoch Times. Brock, Negrete, and their fellow city council majority members Oscar de la Torre and Christine Parra tried to align with Alle back in April, but the leopard promptly ate their faces when they decided to vote to oppose his signs. Alle is also a Trumper and last year decided to pretend to be a homeless person for…reasons.
Or maybe he picked up “woke” from the Republicans he gave a separate interview to in June on the Retail’s Most Wanted pofcast. Most of the guests of that podcast are Republicans. One host, Marty Carpenter, has a long history of working for Republican officials.
The extent to which Republicans love Phil Brock and he loves them back is pretty staggering, but it’s not surprising. As I covered two years ago, the initial major independent expenditure backing for Brock and his 2020 slate (including de la Torre, who is once again his slate mate this year too) came from a local MAGA landlords association, which Brock and de la Torre rewarded by putting the principle of their independent expenditure committee, Dominic Gomez, on our housing commission.
I don’t know about you, but like I said at the start of this piece, this sure seems like a WEIRD amount of MAGA Republicans to surround yourself with as a Democrat—and this isn’t even all of them!
