THE BERKLEY ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

The purpose of the Berkley Accountability Project, Dear Readers, is to inform, to laugh, and to inspire. And so we’d like to inform you that one of our recent blog subjects, the ever gracious and demure Cherise Hoak, has inspired our editorial board to engage in quite the chuckle.

It’s impossible to describe it with the same fervor and sense of panache as the author, so we’re going to yield the floor to the source and let her tell this tale below. And then in the spirit of Saturday Night Live’s Point. Counterpoint, we will examine her grievances in depth. Take it away Dan and Jane!

There’s a lot to unpack here and we don’t want to waste any of it. Let’s start at the top. Cherise Hoak’s elevator may or may not make it all the way there so we elected to get some exercise and took the stairs.

Good morning Mrs Hoak! No need to shout! As we pointed out recently, there’s no desperation as the content made by you and others has a way of coming to us. You, along with a few other local influencers, are a creator of sorts and we’re grateful for it.

That’s not very nice, Cherise.

But as long as Cherise is around to educate us on QAnon, the New World Order, Chinese weather balloons, and how the Left is turning the frogs gay, we don’t expect to run out of material any time soon. Throw in the 3 Amigos from the Underneath with Unger, Cochrane, and Edgren as well as their multiple social media accounts, and well, we may as well start mapping out a Florida retirement strategy. It seems that we’ve got all the job security we can handle.

Victims or perpetrators? It’s really just a matter of perspective. It’s a remarkably small group of highly active accounts. Spend enough time in the same four comment sections and the crowd can begin to look much larger than it is. Throw in your multiple Facebook accounts and it looks like 30.

As you know Dear Readers, this publication uses public records, including emails, documents, and meetings, as well as the words of Mrs. Hoak and others posted and disseminated through social media, text, and emails. We do that to support the opinions and analysis of this blog, because without some kind of backup we could just be spinning rumors and gossip in order to manipulate the audience, which is precisely why we try to show readers the material underlying our conclusions. What a novel idea for Berkley social media circles, we know!

But perpetrator or victim is a question which the subjects decide with their words and actions, not this blog.

For example, when Noel Edgren, administrator of a social media page with 10,000 followers, can routinely lie about people in the community with impunity, some people would rightly suggest she’s creating potential victims.

She’s also creating potential plaintiffs.

Mrs. Hoak dazzles us with talk about Twits and then gives way to flights of fancy, ruminating on Furries, Antifa and how rainbow flags are going to be the undoing of the Republic. From that perspective, it’s hard not to point to the viewing audience as victims of the local social media environment. We just hold our nose, put some Visine in our eyes to combat the fumes and report what Cherise and friends like Noel Edgren say. Pulling this behavior to the surface and putting it in public is a little like disinfecting a a biohazard. And if it’s making Mrs. Hoak irritable and restless, then we suspect our mission is having some success.

You think this isn’t work when 6 people and their dozens of other accounts are running rampant on the same 4 pages all day long? While Cherise pontificates on social media at 11AM on a Monday? We’re there like Batman. And yes, we knew there would be jokes made about this cast of characters, but we don’t even need to make them – they usually give us both the setup and punch line. We appreciate the teamwork. And we agree, there is a lot of sick and twisted content on social media. Let’s examine some of it below, together.

Recently, a few accounts that are highly active on local social media pages began to take on the mantle of anti-bullying advocate.

We agree with these sentiments. We would like to see the mistreatment and bullying stop on social media, so we went searching for other content from these accounts, supporting an anti-bullying message. And we found something alright. Apparently the anti-bullying curriculum has an unusually generous exemption for one’s own Facebook activity.

First, there seems to be a recurring theme in several posts about eggplant, similar in form to some harassing text messages from Planning Board member Gregory Unger that we disclosed earlier this year. Beyond that observation, we aren’t claiming to know who controls any account that hasn’t publicly identified its owner.

Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, Dear Readers, but we are beginning to suspect these 3 accounts may know each other really well. We’ll let you decide on where and who the messages are coming from.

Next comes the curious case of “Lucy Kelson”, whose online persona seems to have developed enough plot twists for its own streaming series. We’re not sure if Sandra Bullock is still acting the part through a secondary Facebook account or if this is an homage, but we didn’t expect America’s Sweetheart to be going off script quite this way:

And as always, there’s more. A few weeks ago, we received these comments below on our Facebook page. It appears that the owner of the account below, who has also been newly active in some of these same local Facebook pages, is trying to stake out a career as a private investigator of some sort.

He also appears to be a big fan of Berkley Planning Board member Gregory Unger and his boat. Our Neighborhood Watch captain, Unger, appears to have built himself quite the fan club with all of this talk about eggplants on the high seas, and we’re not talking about Parmesan. Is it a coincidence?

Lots of coincidental talk about serving eggplant on Greg Unger’s boat

Mrs. Hoak seems to be blissfully unaware that there’s a little matter of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and First Amendment to contend with before we deploy Seal Team 6. She also seems to be under the impression that the Selectwomen, or Twits as she graciously refers to them, are going to be able to sign up to prosecute and fund the losing end of a civil rights lawsuit by trying to shut down – a blog? That’s an interesting idea for a town whose municipal checkbook is not exactly lounging on a yacht in Monaco. Unfortunately they are not Roman Emperors, it’s not like they can just deploy the Praetorian Guard onto the internet streets. Or can they?

But after the Town of Berkley dispatches with paying attention to those trivialities, formalities and the law, according to sources we just invented for purposes of this paragraph, Chief Newhook will next dispatch SWAT to a public meeting and enforce Facebook etiquette by armored vehicle.

The considerably less cinematic explanation is that criticism of a blog does not, by itself, create some obvious government mechanism for making the blog disappear. Hoak, Cochrane, Edgren, Unger, and others who have been featured in the Berkley Accountability Project are upset that the Town of Berkley’s residents are finally getting to see and evaluate their words for themselves.

This site only exists for two reasons. The first is to use public records to examine years of Berkley government decisions involving personal relationships, hiring, appointments, spending, conflicts, and the use of public power, and to explain why, in our opinion, some of those decisions reflect exactly the kind of favoritism and poor governance that public service is supposed to avoid. And then to document it and leave it standing online for the rest of our lives so that those who come next understand why public service is NOT supposed to be about taking care of yourself and your friends first above everyone else. The second is to deal with the trash bags that are stacking up on the social media sidewalk in increasing numbers. If we don’t have the oxygen of their words, actions, and behaviors, then we don’t have anything to write about.

We’ll wait to receive Mrs. Hoak’s change.org petition, signed by the likes of Mr. Unger, Daffy Duck, Willie Nelson, Hugh Hefner, Boss Hog and Wendy Cochrane so that the Town Clerk can check it against the voter rolls. In the meantime it should be noted for the record that morning meetings have been better attended than those at 6 PM ever were, and none of them, whether at 10:30A or 6PM, have been attended by Mrs Hoak in recent memory – Check it out for yourselves or you can just take Cherise’s word for it below.

We haven’t proven that the Selectwomen are scheming – yet. We believe it’s more likely to be a plot organized between the Illuminati, the Rothchilds and the Gates Foundation to turn the deer queer and undermine the fabric of Berkley somehow. Of that we have no evidence, but little doubt. Our entirely fictional sources go so far as to say that someone who looks like George Soros was recently spotted at the Boondocks having human embryos cooked sunny side up, just the way he likes them. Where there’s smoke there is definitely fire.

And yes, it is time to come forward and admit that this blog is a Ray Donovan fixer type for the Berkley Board of Selectwomen: a combination of military arm, dirty tricks squad, courthouse researchers, the Avengers, Batman and Robin, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, The OJ Simpson Dream Team, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn, and Chuck Norris all rolled into one.

We do their dirty work and then profit together, splitting the BOS stipend 3 ways:

The Berkley Accountability Project: $0. McCrohan: $0. Vincent: $0.