Local corruption enabling corporate control over Congress

In the midst of an ongoing series addressing Israel’s expansion of its violent aggression across the Middle East even beyond the horrific ongoing genocide of Gaza, this post focuses on a narrower theme: municipal elections in San Francisco.

Because it examines the political culture from which the Democratic nominee for the presidency emerged, as well as the former Speaker of the House, this post also has implications for the national Democratic party and its hypocrisy with respect to race and inclusion. Finally, this post is relevant to news media, the historic failures of journalists, and their ongoing susceptibility to parroting the talking points of elites, rather than observing reality or checking facts.

Hypocrisy comes at a cost

Observing the presidential race, The New York Times published the following passage on Monday morning: 

“The past four years have highlighted the ways that Democrats exaggerate the political importance of racial identity. Joe Biden, after all, promised to nominate the first Black female Supreme Court justice (which he did) and chose Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president — who has now succeeded him as the Democratic nominee. Yet Harris has less support from Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Biden also adopted the sort of welcoming immigration policies that Democrats have long believed Hispanic voters support. He loosened border rules early in his term, which helped millions of people enter the country. In spite of that change — or maybe partly because of it — Democrats have also lost Hispanic support.

Harris is still winning most voters of color. But the Democratic Party typically needs landslide margins among these groups to win elections. Today, a significant share of them view the Democratic Party with deep skepticism — roughly one in five Black voters, two in five Hispanic voters and one in three Asian voters, polls suggest.”

Even while observing the erosion of support for Democrats among communities of color, reporters remain unwilling to report established facts or acknowledge the disturbing reality that Democrats have proven to be as racist as Republicans, and no less committed to guarding Wall Street from the demands of working class Americans struggling to survive. 

It’s almost as if an entire political culture forgot its own history, and the legacy of a national hero whose likeness is carved in stone in the nation’s capital.

What white supremacy & racism mean

I have explained many times in many forums that most Americans conflate racism and prejudice, not understanding the significant difference between the two concepts, or how they relate to white supremacy.

Prejudice is rooted in interpersonal bias. It embodies unfairness, runs contrary to our nation’s stated ideals, and limits the prospects of individuals by enabling pernicious discrimination. Yet, relative to racism, the impact of prejudice is fairly limited.

Racism, in contrast, is a systematized hierarchy that characterizes not individuals, but the entire society that embraces it. As MLK explained, racism operates alongside capitalism and militarism to entrench public support for international violence and imperialism. It is enabled not only by prejudice and hate, but also by opportunism and power.

Ironically, racism is less about race and denigrating people of a particular race than it is about promoting people of the dominant background, and insulating capital from social or political challenges. After all, unapologetic racists tend to pursue an equal opportunity version of hatred: it is not particularly any race that they disfavor, but rather all of them, other than their own. That suggests that their uniting principle is not the race that they target for hate in any given instance, but rather the one they defend.

That’s why white supremacy tends to be a better descriptor of right wing racism than merely “racism,” which most Americans, and particularly its critics, fail to understand.

For instance, any number of professional writers have penned articles that question whether Donald Trump is a racist. Trump is certainly a white supremacist, and a shameless one, at that. That much is as clear from his actions and his governance record as from his recent words.

But to question whether an individual leader in the United States is racist is like asking whether a human being breathes air and drinks water, or alternatively, whether bears shit in the woods. 

In sad fact, this entire country is racist: from its top to its bottom, from its origins to the current moment, from left to right, from republican to democrat, from rich to poor, from west to east, and from San Francisco to Miami.

Questioning whether an individual is racist is a chimera. The question aims to probe whether leaders wield prejudice. But frankly, that’s not even terribly significant: mere deference to the established system allows the far more pernicious threat of institutionalized racism to flourish and expand. The only commitment from a public official that would carry any meaning is to actively dismantle racism, but the number of voices in federal elected office who have made that commitment can be counted on one hand.

A surprising—and revealing—endorsement

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is the equivalent of a municipal legislature, since San Francisco has the unique distinction in California of being both a city and a county.

Among the sitting supervisors on the Board, one is generally described as a socialist, despite coming from a wealthy family, living in a mansion, and playing a critical role in entrenching a corrupt national leader of the corporate Democratic Party. His name is Dean Preston, and he represents District 5, in which I used to live while running for Congress in 2020 and 2022. The district encompasses the historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and was recently redistricted to also include parts of the Tenderloin, an area renowned for urban blight and any number of social challenges from visible homelessness to addiction and mental health crisis.

In July, Preston was endorsed by House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi, even though their policy visions appear as if they could not be more diametrically opposed.

Preston has built a public reputation around advocating for affordable housing (while repeatedly impeding market-rate construction projects). In contrast, Pelosi is an unapologetically corrupt plutocrat who has used her seat in Congress as a way of securing inside information to leverage in her stock market portfolio, through which she has gained over $200 million during her time in office. Her legacy also includes the historic privatization of previously federal land in San Francisco, and she has responded to concerns about social equity with a flippant rejoinder dismissing them: “We are capitalists.”

When Pelosi endorsed Preston, a great many people scratched their heads, curious why an oligarch with a focus on national politics would deign to endorse a local politician whose vision has so frequently challenged her own.

It is remarkable to witness a major city, from which both the Democratic nominee for the presidency and the former House Speaker emerged, without a single reporter sufficiently independent to observe the obvious answer to so simple a question.

What no one else has the independence to observe 

Pelosi endorsed Preston for a simple reason: he emerged as her most crucial political ally in 2020 by falsely accusing the only viable challenger Pelosi has ever faced—me—of various sorts of misconduct.

The character assassination that doomed my 2020 campaign, and eventually chased me out of San Francisco, was shameless, orchestrated in bad faith, and enabled by institutional actors across the Democratic Party, as well as journalists who continue to falsely claim independence from it.

It was quintessentially public, organized specifically to mislead journalists and subvert the integrity of San Francisco’s most contested federal election since 1987. Yet a city of nearly 1,000,000 people seems to have forgotten the disinformation promoted by several of its elected leaders in the service of entrenching the most powerful among them.

Pelosi endorsed Preston to reward party loyalty. But not a single writer in San Francisco possesses the independence to observe how Preston earned it.

Why have reporters ignored what should be obvious to anyone paying attention?

Perhaps because they made themselves complicit themselves in a racist smear campaign orchestrated to mislead voters and undermine a federal election, and denied themselves the opportunity to reflect on local politics without implicating their own professional interests. There’s a reason why the only professional journalists to explicitly observe the racism implicit in my character assassination all live outside San Francisco.

Who cares?

It’s not merely the case that Preston helped orchestrated a disinformation campaign that skewed the results of a congressional election, insulated the corrupt leadership of a corporate political party that was on the ropes at the time, and lied to the public.

For what it’s worth, Preston was far from alone: other figures who plotted to mislead the public and subvert the integrity of a federal election with weaponized racist lies included several former campaign staff who had been removed from our campaign after I won the 2020 primary, particularly Jasper Wilde and Emily Jones; Jackie Thornhill, who was at the time working as an aide to San Francisco Supervisor Raphael Mandelman and on the Board of an LGBTQ Democratic club whose disturbing and recurring white supremacy has been publicly recognized by several of its recent past presidents; and Brandon Harami, the current Chief of Staff to Sheng Thao, the embattled Mayor of Oakland facing a federal investigation for corruption.

In the time since he smeared me, Preston’s district was expanded to include the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s most diverse neighborhoods. Preston’s public racism and white supremacy deserve to be documented, but because writers across San Francisco have unfortunately shared it, they lack the independence to publicly observe it.

One journalist—who revealingly chose to remain anonymous—even admitted to the California Globe that he & others published premature articles privileging false claims about me based on nothing more than baseless accusations aimed at subverting an election.

[A] lot of us published first without waiting to see who else came forward. Turns out it was no one, and people were hurt in the process, including political campaigns….[M]any journalists were caught up in the [#metoo] movement at the time and believed accusers because so many had gone on for so long without ever being believed. But, as we’ve seen, it really goes both ways.”

The various publications that smeared me failed to pursue any modicum of fact checking. Some have implicitly acknowledged their errors by publishing subsequent stories calling into question their previous articles that ultimately insulated corporate control over the Democratic Party by allowing Nancy Pelosi to duck debates despite public demands for one.

In fact, it appears that the San Francisco Chronicle’s front-page coverage of Pelosi’s history of ducking debates played a key role in prompting my character assassination, which followed a week later. Yet none have retracted or corrected any of their stories based on the racist lies that they now acknowledge anonymously.

In fact, those stories, ignored evidence, suppressed whistleblowers, mischaracterized their experiences, and led to them being smeared, themselves.

Even the Intercept, which once prided itself on bringing the stories of whistleblowers to light, suppressed whistleblowers who tried to exposed the corruption of journalism and politics in San Francisco, and ultimately reinforced it. Writer Akela Lacy initially amplified the racist plot orchestrated by Preston and others, and even after the publication revised its story four times in two months (all without public corrections or retractions), continued to mischaracterize whistleblowers, their roles in the city, their roles on our campaign, and their observations of the orchestration of lies that Lacy published. After one of the whistleblowers faced retaliatory smears, herself, she went on to publish her own reflections in the San Francisco Bayview.

How is a sitting member of the Board of Supervisors poised to potentially win reelection and represent a minority community in America’s “mOsT pRoGrEsSiVe” city without any public discussion of his history of white supremacy?

But what about Harris?

Anyone familiar with San Francisco politics, the ascent of Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi’s role in the Democratic Party, should frankly not be surprised by this history.

Some might imagine that, because Harris is herself a person of color from San Francisco currently serving in the White House, the city must not have a problem with race. After all, if the city can send the first female, Black, or Asian Vice President to Washington, how could San Francisco possibly embody racism or white supremacy?

They key lies in recalling what racism and white supremacy mean. There are plenty of opportunities for people of color even in racist systems, as long as they support capital and militarism. That is precisely what Harris has done across her entire career. She came to Washington after years working as a predatory prosecutor, embodying domestic militarism. And while she is depicted by journalists as if she were a progressive, Harris has signaled her allegiance to Wall Street as part of her presidential campaign.

Voices of color who challenge the political orthodoxy that Harris has always embraced endure a remarkably different experience in San Francisco.

A proudly “progressive” racist city

San Francisco enjoys a reputation as one of the country’s most progressive cities, largely because of the cities, cultural legacy, and the relative prominence of LGBTQ voices within the city’s political establishment.

But the city’s racist history looms in the background, and was firmly established long before I was subjected to it.

In a previous era, Chinese Americans were viciously targeted with violence, discrimination, and hate.

More recently, Latinos have suffered indignities ranging from arbitrary police violence to gentrification and random harassment by fellow San Franciscans. 

San Francisco’s Black communities, meanwhile, have been eviscerated through a combination of aggressive policing and gentrification imposed by a brutal housing market. They have also endured one of the most vicious, pernicious, and long-standing examples of environmental racism anywhere in the United States.

The Hunters Point shipyard was the site where the Pentagon assembled nuclear bombs ultimately detonated on civilian populations in Japan. But the only weapons of mass destruction in our species’ history used intentionally to kill civilians didn’t only kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese people only to send a message. They also poisoned tens of thousands of San Franciscans, most of them Black, who have predictably experienced some of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world.

In 1964, author and playwright James Baldwin filmed a documentary film exposing the racism in San Francisco that remains widely unobserved.

“Take This Hammer” documents a racist history that unfortunately continues unabated to this day. As reviewed by Richard Brody in the New Yorker:

Baldwin, guided by the social-services executive Orville Luster, interviews young black residents and learns of the massive uprooting of their neighborhoods under the guise of urban renewal. The movie’s participants speak in detail about unemployment, police harassment, despair over the prospects of the civil-rights movement, and anger at their own exclusion from the city’s prosperity and governance; one young man discusses his hope for violent revolution by black Americans and his belief that it can be organized. Baldwin, talking with Luster, calls white liberals “missionaries” unwilling to take risks for comprehensive change.

How little things change. Smear campaigns continue to routinely target Muslim public servants, and reporters remain willing to do the dirty work of white supremacy by indulging lies orchestrated to serve power and enabled by prejudice.

Republicans are hardly the only major American political party dedicated to white supremacy. As the voices featured in “Take This Hammer” observe, white supremacy lurks as prominently (even if less visibly) in progressive enclaves as it does in the South. Dean Preston, and the “journalists” across San Francisco who have indulged his self-serving racist lies, offer a walking case study of that unfortunate pattern.

Paid subscribers can access an additional section discussing voices omitted from “Take This Hammer” due to pressure imposed by the broadcaster’s Board of Directors, and watch the Directors’ Cut that includes them...