Sowing Discord
By Julie Pitta
San Francisco’s billionaires are waging war on Progressives, spending millions in a disinformation campaign that is as disingenuous as it is relentless.
The battle plan is to rouse voter discontent, most notably over the conditions on city streets. The misery on San Francisco streets is all too real. The billionaires’ assessment of its causes is deeply flawed.
Billionaires blame Progressives’ policies when nothing could be further from the truth. The City’s ills are the direct result of decades of so-called moderate mayors who prioritized big business over struggling San Franciscans.
The City’s mayor enjoys extraordinary power, controlling most of the discretionary part of San Francisco’s nearly $14 billion budget as well as appointments to most departments and commissions. In fact, legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors cannot be funded without mayoral approval.
San Francisco hasn’t had A Progressive mayor since Art Agnos left office more than 30 years ago. Progressives held a majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a single election cycle, one that ended in 2022.
The truth is that Progressives have been largely alone in fighting for solutions to bring a modicum of relief to struggling San Franciscans. They’ve consistently pushed for higher minimum wages, affordable housing and programs for unhoused San Franciscans, often facing staunch opposition from pro-business mayors.
Those programs frequently call for sacrifices on the part of those who’ve made their fortunes in the Bay Area’s fertile landscape. The billionaires have little interest in paying their fair share for doing business in San Francisco and its environs. They’re using disinformation to vanquish any opposition to their selfish interests.
It all began with a series of richly funded recall campaigns.
Political Actions Committees (PACs) like GrowSF and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco came on the scene during the recalls of former school board members Alison Collins, Gabriela Lopez, and Faauuga Moliga.
These wealthy PACs capitalized on parent discontent over pandemic-forced school closures. The three board members were criticized for their caution; no matter that San Francisco’s aging schools were woefully unprepared to make in-person teaching even remotely safe.
One recall begat another. Their next target was District Attorney Chesa Boudin, elected on a platform of reforming a deeply unfair criminal justice system. Boudin became fair game once he promised to prosecute white collar criminals. Again, piles of PAC money funded a cynical disinformation campaign: Boudin was blamed for changes in crime patterns regardless that his scant year in office could have little impact on crime patterns one way or another.
The accusations stuck, as they do, when millions are spent to spread half-truths and outright lies. Collins, Lopez and Moliga were ousted as was Boudin.
Between the school board and Boudin, San Francisco billionaires had their finest moment. The Redistricting Task Force, a nine-member panel appointed by the mayor, the Department of Elections and the Board of Supervisors, set about to redraw the City’s 11 supervisorial districts. The mayor’s appointees to the commission were all but handpicked by the City’s corporate elite. At least one was a member of GrowSF.
Among the factors the task force was charged with was ensuring the voting power of communities of interest (defined as ethnic, political, social and economic minorities) remained intact. Instead, the pro-business majority created a map that diminished the power of the communities the task force was sworn to protect.
That was always the plan: Districts with a concentration of minority voters tend to vote for Progressive candidates.
The results were immediate: District 4 Supervisor Gordon Mar, a respected member of the Board of Supervisors and a Chinese-American in a neighborhood with a large Asian population, was defeated by the narrowest of margins. Mar was replaced by Joel Engardio, a onetime member of GrowSF. Billionaire money fueled the disinformation machinery, blaming Mar for a myriad of sins including a crime increase that even law enforcement says was the result of COVID-19.
More than a year before the November 2024 election, the billionaires are once again taking aim. Several months ago, GrowSF announced campaigns to “Dump Dean” and “Clear Out Connie,” referring to District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston and District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan. Preston, who has a long history of fighting for tenants’ rights and advocating for affordable housing, is painted as anti-housing. Chan, who as budget chair recommended a handsome 8.5% increase for the San Francisco Police Department, is called anti-police.
Last February, Michael Moritz, TogetherSF’s billionaire backer, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times complaining that Progressive policies had ruined San Francisco, saying the City is suffering from “the tyranny of the minority.”
Moritz has spent $11 million during the last 15 years to buy influence at City Hall. He, and business leaders like him, enjoy all the access and power that money can buy. The pain on city streets is the direct result of policies they’ve pushed and elected officials they’ve bankrolled.
San Francisco’s problem isn’t the tyranny of the Progressive minority, it’s that of billionaires like Michael Moritz.
Julie Pitta is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and senior editor at Forbes Magazine. She is a neighborhood activist and an officer of the San Francisco Berniecrats. Email her at julie.pitta@gmail.com. Follow her on X (Twitter): @juliepitta
Categories: Commentary
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
The author, a leading voice in the D1 progressive movement, struggles to understand why San Francisco voters are unhappy with the status quo. It’s unfathomable to her that the Sunset District, with its large Asian community, voted to oust progressive Asian supervisor Gordon Mar, or that SF voters ousted progressives on the Board of Education, or that DA Boudin got recalled. In her myopic worldview, it cannot possibly be true that these ousted progressives were incompetent, or that their agendas were not well-received by most SF voters. But how can the author explain the last 12 years of progressive leadership in SF without insulting the average SF voter, including SF Asians on the West side, who think even more change is needed? Don’t believe your lying eyes, she says. Yet again, you have been victimized by billionaires and white people. In fact, for the last 12 years, the SF government has really been run by billionaires and white people who spread “half truths” and “outright lies”. SF voters are yet again victims of a “disinformation machine” funded by you-know-who.
The author, a regular contributor to the Richmond Review, consistently spews out the same divisive race and class-based arguments to instill fear in voters and elect progressive leaders. Year after year, our SF government gets bigger, yet our problems remain unsolved. We can’t even get the basics right. According to the author, it’s always somebody else’s fault (you know who). Let’s try a different approach, one that focuses on whether we are getting the results we deserve for this huge expensive government. Until proven otherwise, let’s give the benefit of the doubt to all fellow San Franciscans, regardless of their social status or skin color.
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Wow, this is so misdirected on so many levels. Ideological, rigid and unrealistic “progressive” policies have resulted in a shift of resources away from public safety. This was Connie Chan’s campaign promise – notwithstanding that under heavy constituent pressure she acquiesced to an emergency increase early this year. And for good measure, excessive oversight and bureaucracy over basic policing functions, which along with perhaps well intentioned ballot initiatives have effectively decriminalized significant swaths of criminal conduct.
Progressives enable and empower the mental health and addiction crisis on our streets, disclaiming any accountablity measures or limits on the “civil rights” of folks who want to live how and where they like in our shared public spaces.
This letter seeks to scapegoat hard working SF residents who live and work in SF and want to raise our families in an environment that includes basic health and safety by tarring us as intolerant selfish billionaires. Could not be farther from the truth and will not work as we approach elections next year.
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The author erroneously asserts that the current mood is “billionaires v progressives”: in fact, the current mood is “everyone who is not an uber-progressive refusing to look at the reality of failed uber-progressive policies” v “uber-progressives refusing to look at the reality of failed uber-progressive policies.”
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The author erroneously posits the current condition to be “billionaires” v “progressives.”
Actually, the current condition is “uber-progressives who refuse to accurately observe the result of uber-progressive policies” v “everyone else”
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A few points.
(1) Talking about the school board recall and not mentioning renaming is just nuts to me. It was emblematic of where the Board’s priorities were. And blaming the facilities as if the Board doesn’t have some impact there (even if it’s just working with the Admin) is also missing a connection.
(2) The DA recall as being because he promised to crack down on white collar crime. This is just a ghost story. What significant specific white collar investigation was avoided by the recall? You mean to tell me that “billionaires” who can afford the best white collar defense firms in the US were so afraid of the overworked-as-it-is SF DA’s office that they Star Chambered a bid to remove him from office? For real? We can have a debate over a point made pretty well in this week’s New Yorker – whether the City is safer than it has been if one takes the very long view. But as part of that debate, we have to be honest – we have to note several proud stands taken by the former DA when it came to his enforcement priorities.
I cannot speak to the redistricting portion of the piece – it’s something I just don’t have visibility into. But, by and large, this piece seems to suffer from a bias of “believe the voters when they vote for what I want” and “suspect manipulation of them when they support stuff I don’t want”
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Thanks for telling it like it is.
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Funny to hear the commentariati whine and moan because julie just pulled their crime-drugs-equal-progressive-politics rug out from under their teeny tiny feet.
Chicago, Memphis, Indianapolis, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Topeka, Montgomery, Cincinnati, … etceta all have drugs and crime issues. Half of them have non-progressive politicians. People driving into the city from other parts of the bay area to do crime because there is a tremendous amount of wealth in San Francisco has nothing to do with whoever runs the city, … BUT the last time I looked, it is non-progressive London Breed who has been the mayor for 4 years and you people bend over backwards to blame … wait for it … progressive politics.
Your screeds indicate you know nothing about San Francisco or San Francisco politics.
Thank you Julie. Unfortunately some people prefer framing societal problems into a public relations campaign that they use as a cudgel — rather than understanding the larger economic political forces that are really shaping the political environment and spilling over into what is happening in San Francisco.
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