Rob AriasYes folks, you read that headline right. Former Emeryville Mayor John Bauters may be pursuing a new career … in reality television (and No, this is not an April Fools story 😉).
The former two-term councilmember, three time Mayor briefly disappeared from the public spotlight after losing an excruciatingly close contest for County Supervisor last fall. It was recently revealed that he had taken a position with a PAC funded by a Piedmont hedge fund manager.
So what has Bauters been doing for the past six months? Competing in a reality show is one answer.
Bauters will be revealed as the surprise guest in episode four of the Fox Network reality series “The Snake” the entertainment website Screen Rant has exclusively revealed. They’ve shared a clip of the episode showing Bauters entry into the show where he emerges from a “mystery” crate set to tense background music. The wood crates are used to introduce new contestants conjuring a “reptilian” vibe.
“Who’s this ****?” chimes in one of the bewildered contestants who are gathered at a dinner table.
“Dinner parties are best attended when you’re fashionably late,” the openly gay Bauters says introducing himself while donning a slate colored 3-piece suit and his signature bow-tie.
“Go home,” chimes in a young female contestant. “No, I’m here for a while. But you might go home,” Bauters retorts.
“You look like you sell vapes,” another young male contestant asserts to a smirking Bauters as the other contestants chuckle.
“I’m a politician and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have to use some ingenuity and some of the skills I’ve picked up along the way in politics to make sure I win.” Bauters reveals in the clip to an off camera interviewer. “I’m used to having to figure out how to get votes. I’m used to having to work people over to get them to ‘yes.’ You know, you don’t survive in politics without knowing how to read people. I read them like a book.”
The show, hosted by comedian Jim Jefferies, premiered on Fox on June 10 and similar in format to other reality shows like “The Mole” where alliances, betrayals, and interpersonal dynamics are at play.
The initial 15 contestants—pooled from professions like law enforcement, bounty hunting, OnlyFans content creation, and others where persuasion is an important skill—compete in challenges focused on manipulation and social gameplay.
The weekly challenge winner earns the title of “The Snake” and gains control of a unique “Saving Ceremony,” initiating a chain of selections in which players save one another until one person is left unchosen and eliminated from the show. The last person standing will earn a $100,000 grand prize.
“Adding a former mayor into the mix continues the trend, considering some of the stereotypes about politicians,” Screen Rant assesses. “If he tells the truth about his career to the other contestants, that could put a big target on his back.”
The episode titled “Surprise Snake,” will air live on Fox on Tuesday, July 9th at 9 p.m. and will be available for streaming on Fox.com and Hulu the following day.
How have the nightly have fallen. Next you’ll be seeing him hawk vitamin supplements on late nite tv.
I guess he took Jon Lovitz’s advice to “lower your standards” 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
“The Snake” is certainly on-brand for him.
I found him more of a weasel.
All of a sudden, everything makes sense.
You were 100% right about this guy Rob!
Seems like he’s just taking a break after a long campaign. Good for him. He worked his butt off for the city for years. Let him have some fun
‘I’m used to having to work people over to get them to “yes.”‘
It’s a show about manipulation and if that isn’t the most rapey, thuggish line I have heard – sounds like he’s had a lot of practice in Emeryville with people like you that enabled him.
Right, “Getting to Yes” which is basically required reading for planning, public policy, business, and political science is all about thuggery.
Have you ever watched a reality TV show? People play up things like that. If you believe the ACT on a reality TV show then you haven’t been paying attention to the 8 years he has been working for the city. He’s actually pretty compassionate and good at listening to people. That’s how he gets to yes.
Ah yes, “Getting to Yes” – the classic book on principled negotiation. Funny how Bauters skipped the chapter on integrity and went straight to the appendix called “Working People Over.”
Calling it an “act” is cute, but some of us lived through the reruns.
Oh, we’ve been watching long before Fox handed him a crate to jump out of.
When someone makes a career out of smiling at you while rearranging the knives behind their back, “reality TV” doesn’t feel that different.
All the really courageous people who told us about who he really was were punished, ostracized, and bullied, but the joke was on emeryville for letting this clown be king.
Dude’s got the personality of an amoeba.
reality tv is how we pick our leaders now – good for him
Of course John Bauters crawled out of a crate on a reality show called “The Snake.” Emeryville residents have been watching that act for years and now the rest of America gets a taste.
After his humiliating loss for County Supervisor, Bauters could’ve chosen a thousand ways to serve. Instead, he chose the camera. Again. First a hedge fund PAC gig, now this reality TV stunt. Because at the end of the day, ihis centrist politics was never about public service, it was always about him. The selfies, the press quotes, the bowties – all dressing up a ruthless hunger for control and applause.
The only thing “progressive” about Bauters was how he weaponized his gay identity to shut down critics and play petty identity politics whenever anyone – especially people of color or working-class organizers – challenged him. Something Courtney Welch learned too. If you didn’t fall in line, he copped an attitude. Ask anyone who stood up to his developer-backed agenda or questioned the way he bulldozed dissent as the yimby bike mayor. He didn’t build coalitions – he built cults of personality and ruled by fear and manipulation.
And now he’s on national TV talking about how he’s great at “working people over to get to yes”? That’s not strategy – that’s who he’s always been: a narcissist with a need for constant validation, not a leader. Kalimah Priforce saw it from the jump. Called it out. Got attacked for it. And now everything Bauters does just proves the man right.
Some of us are out here grinding every day to feed our families, trying to make this city livable, while he’s playing snakes and ladders on Fox primetime. What’s next, a Fox News contributor spot where he lectures us about liberal pragmatism and bike lanes while cashing checks from the same people who gentrified our neighborhoods?
Let the man have his moment in the snake pit. The longer he’s on this show the more will be revealed of how much his spineless drivel called the shots in Emeryvile town. I hope the other “contestants” can muster a retort to his BS that puts him to shame. But what’s worse is that they will pull off what couldn’t be done for the years he was in power.
Just don’t let him slither back into public life like we forgot what he really was. The unions won’t forget.
John Bauters has a huge c***. All you little pricks are jealous. It takes courage to put your d*** on the table like that. You shrimps would shrivel back into to mediocrity you were born from.
I don’t understand why he would willingly go on this show, unless he’s not planning on returning to politics. I watched this episode last night – he hasn’t participated much yet but it already doesn’t cast him in a good light. It’s all self-inflicted – he says he knows how to “work people over” (he seems to enjoy it) and cringingly proclaims he can “read people like a book”. On top of that, he’s filmed talking to one of the contestants and allies himself with her. But in an off-camera interview, he tells us he doesn’t think she’s a strong competitor. How two-faced!
Only people who seem to be okay with this are right wing nutjobs and libertarians. He’ll declare himself a Republican soon enough.
Ya’ll are too much. Get a life. It’s a reality TV show. Even 3rd graders know that there’s no reality in reality tv. (Insert eye roll emoji here)
Right, and even 3rd graders know when the class bully puts on a costume and calls it “playtime,” like a former mayor trading public service for public spectacle. We don’t mistake bad leadership for entertainment value. Some of us don’t get to roll our eyes when we’re too busy cleaning up the deficit mess he left behind with our tax dollars. Reality TV might be fake, but John Bauters’ fragile, two-faced ego is very real — and unfortunately, so were the policies and power games he played while people were actually trying to survive in this city. If you think it’s “just a show,” you probably thought his leadership was, too.
Exactly. Everybody on those shows are basically assigned to play a role. It’s fun and games. Don’t confuse reality TV with reality.
Sure, reality TV is fake – scripted drama, manufactured personas, the whole bit. But what’s wild is how John Bauters didn’t even need a script to play The Snake in real life. The bowtie, the smug one-liners, the manipulative power plays? That wasn’t casting – that was Tuesday night at City Hall.
He works for a PAC funded by hedge funds, real estate tycoons, and crypto billionaires to stop progressive policies. He is also Executive Director of the Oakland chapter of the Abundance network – also representing corporate developer interests.
Some of us aren’t confused. We just remember when the stakes weren’t a cash prize and camera time – they were our homes, our city city resources, and whether or not our voice mattered if you weren’t in his clique.
So while y’all are busy saying “it’s just a show,” the rest of us are making sure history doesn’t get rewritten with a bow on top. Because when bad leadership gets repackaged as entertainment, it’s not just cringe, it’s dangerous.
Anyone who has interfaced with Bauters where he didn’t need something from them (their vote, their influence, or their allyship) knows who he really is.
If it wasn’t something that elevated his profile in local politics (you know, those annoying things that elected representatives are tasked with looking into and providing answers to), he wasn’t interested.
There was a calculation with every decision he made (is this going to help me get to the next rung on the political ladder?). Did he extract a few bike lanes and million dollar affordable units from the commoners in his 8 years? Sure. But the true benefactor was always him and his profile and the local media exposure he constantly yearned for.
At his core, John is an actor and an egomaniac which makes him ideally suited for this show. I bet he wins.
Would you rather we didnt have greenways and bike lanes? The city was much improved under his leadership and evolved from an industrial zone to one where people actually enjoy being in.
Funny how every time someone critiques John Bauters’ leadership, his defenders, like the ones that showed up to his hubris of a victory bike party (only for him not to win) start acting like he personally invented bike lanes.
The Emeryville Greenway was first officially commissioned and celebrated back on April 21, 2012, with the opening of the Doyle-to-9th Street segment connecting Emeryville to Berkeley. That was years before Bauters ever held office. Infrastructure like that is the result of long-term planning, regional partnerships, and decades of community work – not the legacy of one politician in a bowtie taking credit for it on Twitter/X. We can have safe streets and safe democracy. The price of a bike lane shouldn’t be unchecked power.
The real issue here isn’t bike lanes or greenways. It’s how some folks want to reduce an entire city’s governance to bike infrastructure while ignoring everything else – like the financial mismanagement, the bullying of residents and activists, the developer sweetheart deals, and the culture of retaliation that Bauters fostered. That’s the definition of special interests: when you tell yourself the ends justify the means, no matter how dirty the politics get. A Greenway shouldn’t come with a grey area for ethics. No amount of bike infrastructure is worth authoritarianism in local government.
Nobody’s mad about bike paths. We’re mad about a government that prioritized PR optics over community wellbeing, and a former mayor who openly told the world exactly who he is: “I’m used to working people over to get to yes.” That’s manipulation. He admits to it. You don’t get to pave over corruption with asphalt and call it progress.
So no, you can’t slap bike paint on a street or a bowtie on a snake and call it good governance. Emeryville deserved and still deserves better.