In this issue:
No Kings 2 is Saturday. Get in the street.
Join the Human Banner this Saturday at 11 AM
Help Save Democracy by Voting Yes on Prop 50!
Come speak up for low-income families and tenants’ rights
Support our friends at Indivisible Tri-Valley to Bring Miguel Home
Update #2 on Government Shutdown
Indivisible SF supports the Airbnb boycott
Deadline approaching: File a Public Comment against the Federal Voter ID requirement
Win: Governor Newsom Signs Most But Not All LGBTQ+ Defense Bills
Countering Misinformation in the Media: What You Can Do
Want to help us do this work?
Upcoming events: Find them on our Events page!
No Kings 2 is Saturday. Get ready to get in the street.
No Kings is this Saturday, October 18th. We’re gathering north of Embarcadero Plaza at 1:30 PM and then we’ll march to Civic Center Plaza for a rally hosted by our partners, the National Nurses Union.
Want to march with the Indivisible SF contingent?
Join us at Market and Drumm as we assemble behind the truck on Market St on the South side of Market. You will need to arrive as early as 12:30 PM to get a spot. Bring your flags, signs, inflatable frog (or other animal) costumes, and of course, all of your friends!
This is a nonviolent, peaceful protest. This is extremely important—we need you to stay safe, bring joy, and know how to keep things peaceful. For a quick primer on how to protest safely, watch this short video.
Wondering how you can help the most? We need more event monitors and route ambassadors. You may be assigned to walk with the march until a particular intersection, then stand there for visibility to help keep pedestrians safe. Or, you may be helping professional staff monitor the rally. You may be given a bullhorn and asked to direct marchers. No matter what, it’s a safe role and we’ll train you beforehand.
Please sign up to volunteer today, and ask your friends to sign up.
In addition to volunteers, we’ll also need money. We’ll use your donations to bring good sound, good signs, and more No Kings and future events (protests and other). Please send your donation to our Venmo or our ActBlue.
You can also put up flyers. (Be sure to follow DPW’s rules about posting signs.) You can print your own at home, or at your library. Get the flyer PDFs from our No Kings 2 webpage.
As usual, we will send out all of the information you need before the event. Look out for that email Friday night or Saturday morning.
Get more details on our website at https://indivisiblesf.org/no-kings-2. And start spreading the word: this Saturday, October 18, we say NO KINGS!
Join the Human Banner this Saturday at 11 AM
The Human Banner at Ocean Beach for Saturday, October 18 is going to spell out NO KINGS! YES ON 50. With over 1,000 people already committed to forming this message, it will most likely be larger than the 3,000 people who participated in the June NO KINGS! human banner that received international as well as national attention.
Human banners are a chill, peaceful way to exercise our right to free speech. Starting at 7 AM, a designated crew arrives at Ocean Beach to etch the outline of the message into the sand. By 10 AM, participants start to gather on the seawall to watch the process. At 11 AM, the participants descend onto the beach to fill in the outline of the message in an atmosphere that is both serious and festive. The human banner is then captured in aerial photography. Finally, at or before noon, participants will hold hands and walk to the water’s edge forming a line. For more information visit Human-Banners-at-Ocean-Beach.org.
If you want to do the human banner and the march and rally, you can take the 5-Fulton or 31-Balboa from Cabrillo and La Playa, or walk up to Geary for the 38, but you should expect that the other several thousand people will be doing the same thing. Please be patient and accept that you might have to settle for a less-than-ideal bus route. Also, both routes will stop at Market, so you will either have to walk or take the subway from the end of the bus line to your destination. This might be a good time to carpool with your fellow beach-goers in a taxi or other hired vehicle.
Help Save Democracy by Voting Yes on Prop 50!
Still unsure why it’s so important that we all vote yes on Prop 50? We’ve got a deep dive that explains how districts are created, the impact of gerrymandering, and why it’s essential that prop 50 passes. Read all about it on our blog.
Ready to vote? You should already have received your ballot in the mail. Watch our video to see how easy it is to turn it in.
Want to help raise awareness about Prop 50 and get it over the finish line? Join Indivisible SF with our in-person canvassing that we’re doing every weekend until November 4th!
Come speak up for low-income families and tenants’ rights
Whether you’re a NIMBY or a YIMBY, we should all agree that any upzoning of our city should be done in a way that protects low-income people and tenants from displacement. Supervisor Chyanne Chen is sponsoring an ordinance that would help. Among other things, it grants tenants whose units are being demolished the right to stay in their home until at least six months before construction starts (three months for low-income households). It also requires project sponsors to provide relocation aid to low-income tenants, and requires the project sponsor to offer each displaced low-income tenant a comparable unit in the new development at the tenant’s previous rental rate. These protections are essential if we want to have any affordable rental units in SF.
Show your support for this important initiative by making a public comment at this week’s SF Planning commission hearing at 12pm on Thursday October 16, Room 400 City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.
Tell the commissioners: we need to protect renters in SF!
Support our friends at Indivisible Tri-Valley to Bring Miguel Home
Miguel Lopez, a long time resident and hard working member of the Tri-Valley community, was illegally abducted by ICE last May during a routine check-in, held at a detention center near Bakersfield, and then deported to Mexico in early June, where he remains today.
There is a hearing for Miguel coming up on October 30 in San Francisco and we want to get a big group together to show support for Miguel, his wife Rosa, and their children. Bring friends, family, and signs to help us bring Miquel home.
RSVP on Mobilize to join us.
Update #2 on Government Shutdown
The partial shutdown of the federal government continues into its 15th day with Congress still gridlocked over the Appropriation bills and a short-term Continuing Resolution (CR).
As explained in our "Hold Fast on the Trump Shutdown" newsletter article and Call to Action (CTA) from two weeks ago, the MAGA regime has been steadily shutting down the federal government ever since they took office so that they can slash health care and other domestic safety net programs to fund tax cuts for billionaires.
Our job is clear. We need to do everything we can to make the MAGA shutdown a public political problem that they have to address. We must continue contacting our representatives, speaking up and making noise in the public arena, and build the No Kings march on this coming Saturday, October 18.
Indivisible SF supports the Airbnb boycott
Last week, Indivisible SF spoke at a press conference in support of the Airbnb Boycott led by San Francisco unions. Airbnb’s cofounder and board member Joe Gebbia supports Trump and MAGA. The company filed a lawsuit refusing to pay $120 million in city taxes, seriously constraining our budget. And its continued abuses limit our housing supply and contribute to the housing crisis in our city.
Airbnb does not deserve San Francisco. It does not deserve our business. Please join us in boycotting Airbnb by forgoing booking rooms on the website. For more information, visit https://www.boycott-airbnb.org/.
Deadline approaching: File a Public Comment against the Federal Voter ID requirement
In addition to legislative, policy, financial, and law-enforcement attacks on our democracy, the MAGA regime is committed to undermining our right to vote and aims to disenfranchise certain voter populations.
Their proposal to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), submitted by the right-wing America First Legal Foundation, would impose new voter registration ID requirements for people using the National Mail Voter Registration Form. In essence, this rule change would impose requirements similar to the SAVE Act that Democrats blocked in the Senate. We must oppose this effort to disenfranchise voters because there is no empirical proof of voter fraud in any meaningful or significant way that would change any election.
This rule change targets mail-in voting, a focal point for the Trump administration due to the high percentage of Democrats who vote by mail. It won’t affect people who are already registered to vote, but is meant to keep large numbers of new voters from registering because they would be the ones that have to show specific identification.
Provide your comment in opposition to this amendment by Monday, October 20, 2025.
Win: Governor Newsom Signs Most (But Not All) LGBTQ+ Defense Bills
Governor Newsom recently announced a list of bills he has signed or vetoed. He signed most of the bills supported by Equality California, most of which we pushed for as well. Our phone calls, emails, and hand-written letters made a difference.
Thank you so much for your calls! You made this happen.
However, he vetoed two bills according to EQCA's roundup:
AB 554 (González): Expanding Access to HIV Prevention Would have guaranteed access to groundbreaking PrEP medications without cost-sharing or insurance barriers like prior authorization, safeguarding access to HIV prevention regardless of federal rollbacks.
SB 418 (Menjivar): Protecting Access to Healthcare Would have codified federal nondiscrimination protections in California law and expanded access to care for transgender people by requiring health plans to cover 12-month prescriptions for hormone therapy.
In both explanation letters, Newsom cites worries about healthcare costs, even though hormone therapy is the cheapest tier of prescriptions and a similar law in Washington did not raise healthcare costs. Even though steady medications, nondiscrimination in healthcare, and prevention of HIV transmission would improve health and also most likely save healthcare costs in the long run.
Newsom did sign AB 1487 (Addis), which will create the Two-Spirit, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex Wellness and Equity Fund to fund grants to healthcare organizations serving these communities. This pattern raises the question—does Newsom only oppose healthcare costs when those costs are borne by penny-wise and pound-foolish private insurers?
Newsom now owns LGBTQ+ health outcomes. Anything that could have been prevented by these bills is on him.
Newsom has reluctantly shown spine. But the partial support makes California a follower, not a leader, in defending the LGBTQ+ community, with whom he is still far from restoring trust. Still, this is a much better outcome than feared. With his pen, Gavin Newsom has proved himself as an ally, if not a fully reliable one.
Read our blog, and contact Gov. Newsom about these bills.
Countering Misinformation in the Media: What You Can Do
You can take action to counter misinformation in the media. Programs like Indivisible’s Truth Brigade and the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) monitor and summarize right-wing and mainstream social and traditional media content so that the public can know what they are conveying. The Truth Brigade teaches the “truth sandwich”, a research-backed method for responding to malicious media content. A monthly campaign provides social media truth sandwiches-to-go on a salient issue and explainers for background. September’s campaign, “Liar, Liar, Planet on Fire”, addressed climate disinformation. The October campaign, “Safety, Not Scapegoats”, targets the militarization of domestic law enforcement.
We welcome you to join the Indivisible Truth Brigade. The Truth Brigade’s social sharing platform provides editable Truth Sandwiches pre-formatted for different social media. And in the Truth Brigade Slack, once you’ve joined, you can receive advice on your original draft posts and proofreading support for long-form communications such as letters to editors of local media outlets. If you like to put the “social” in social media, you can join in monthly “storms” where Truth Brigade practitioners meet virtually to share and post their work products simultaneously.
To delve deeper into the weeds of today’s information environment, dig into the Media and Democracy Project (MAD). MAD provides a monthly overview of the current media economy and what activists can do to “Fix Media Now” on the third Monday at 4PM Pacific and a monthly long-form media writers’ workshop on (usually) the second Thursday at 5PM Pacific.
Read more on our blog.
Want to help us do this work?
We will plug you in where your skills can do the most good to resist this administration.
If you would like to join and do important work with us, we welcome you! Currently we are in need of volunteers to help with the following:
Making artwork for our calls to action, blog posts, and other projects.
Maintaining our website, newsletter, and Zoom account.
Posting our events to Funcheap, Indybay, Broke-Ass Stuart, and other local blogs
Maintaining our social media platforms including Mastodon, Bluesky, TikTok, Meta, and more.
Joining and building out an on-the ground flyering team. We’re looking to distribute information on our events in the real world. We want people who can print and post flyers around their neighborhood. It’s a great way to get your steps in.
Publishing our newsletter with MailChimp on Newsletter Night (Tuesdays at 5 PM).
Making short-form videos to help educate people on our topics in an accessible way.
Tracking federal, state, and local legislation and working with our state and local legislatures and Mayor Lurie.
No experience is needed; we will train you and provide everything you need. If you would like to help us, please contact us at [email protected].
