Message from last election: self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ need to read the room

‘Democrats for Change’ wiped out far left slate, taking control of San Francisco DCCC — and those coveted party endorsements

A Note from Gotham …

I apologize for the lack of newsletters over the past few weeks, but I have an exciting excuse — and it isn’t that my pit bull Skylar ate my keyboard (although I’m sure our new Rocket Dog Rescue puppy, Quinn, would if she could) …

In mid-April, I will be launching The Voice of San Francisco, a nonprofit online newspaper, with my longtime team from The Marina Times and many of the contributors you know and love, all in one place, featuring writers, videographers, podcasters, live events, and more. We will be here for you during this important election year and beyond, filling a crucial void in local journalism by offering essential news and investigative reporting on crime, drugs, homelessness, nonprofits, and corruption, along with politics, education, food, culture, and the arts. There will also be op-ed pieces, and of course Reynolds Rap, the opinion column backed by fact where I broke the City Hall corruption stories, and where I will continue to call out San Francisco’s grifts, gaffes, policies, and politicians.

At VOSF, we will amplify the unheard, challenge prevailing narratives, and shed light on important community issues. We want you to join us on our journey as your input will be a vital part of everything we do. As a California tax exempt nonprofit, we can also accept your tax deductible donations to help amplify our Voice and cut through the noise. To contribute, or to subscribe for updates, click here.

And now, my take on why self-proclaimed progressives need to read the room (and a look in the mirror wouldn’t hurt, either) …

In the final results of San Francisco’s March 5, 2024, election, the “Democrats for Change,” or as I call them, the “Democrats for Commonsense,” nearly wiped the slate clean of self-proclaimed “progressives” on the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) after the left-leaning body held a majority for years. The San Francisco DCCC governs the local Democratic Party and seeks to engage and inform via outreach, registration, chartered Democratic clubs, fundraising, infrastructure, and most importantly, endorsements for municipal ballot measures and local candidates — including sending out all those (love ’em or hate ’em) mailers. In San Francisco, where over 63 percent of voters are registered as Democrats, the DCCC’s endorsements can be influential. Recent DCCC leadership, particularly the most recent, was often on the wrong side of history with those endorsements, but never so glaringly as during two 2021 recall elections, when then-chair Honey Mahogany and her executive officers stood blindly behind three embattled school board members and an incompetent district attorney. 

During the pandemic, while San Francisco Unified School District students still had no path back to in-person learning and were stuck in their Zoom rooms with frustrated parents trying to juggle working from home and homework, board members Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga, and Gabriela López made the City a laughingstock of late-night television trying to rename schools bearing the names of “racists and colonizers,” including “The Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln. Their source material? That dizzying online cascade of user-generated content, Wikipedia. As the board bumbled over each name, they wrongly accused Paul Revere of seeking to colonize the Penobscot people and confused the name of Alamo Elementary School with the Texas battle rather than the Spanish word for poplar tree. Not only did they make mistakes, they made omissions — as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “labor leader Cesar Chavez didn’t make the list, despite his feelings toward undocumented immigrants, who he called ‘wetbacks’ and other derogatory names. He encouraged his supporters to report them to the authorities for deportation.”

Additionally, Collins made headlines for racist tweets stating to Asian Americans that “being a house [n-word] is still being a [n-word]” and accusing them of “white supremacist thinking” to “assimilate and get ahead.” After her fellow board members removed her as vice president, Collins responded not with an apology but with an $87 million lawsuit against the already financially strapped school district and five colleagues for violating her First Amendment right to post those racist tweets. In the end the three board members were overwhelmingly recalled.

Mahogany’s team was also behind ludicrous campaign mailers equating the recall of beleaguered, inept San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin with California women losing their right to choose because, well, Republicans. None of it made sense, especially since Boudin’s largest individual donor had also donated to, you guessed it, Republicans. Boudin, like the school board members, was recalled.

Mahogany, once considered a rising star in the City’s left of progressive politics, tweeted in 2020 that she supported abolishing the police. That was a view surely shared by Boudin and most of his supporters in 2020, and by some until this day, but it wasn’t shared by the majority of San Franciscans in 2021. While Mahogany and other far-left progressives stubbornly refused to see what most Democrats wanted, the party moved on without them, ignoring their recommendations and their candidates. In 2022, despite the endorsement of her own DCCC committee, Mahogany lost the race for District 6 supervisor by a wide margin to Commonsense Democrat Matt Dorsey.

On March 5, Mahogany didn’t run to retain her DCCC seat, likely because she saw the chalk on the slate. “Democrats for Change” dominated the competition, landing nearly all of the slots for both Assembly District 17 and Assembly District 19. Ironically, Supervisor Dorsey garnered the most votes in his DCCC contest. The only “progressives” who made the cut from AD 17 were attorney Michael Nguyen along with former supervisors John Avalos and Jane Kim, and from AD 19, former District 4 supervisor Gordon Mar (who lost his 2022 bid for re-election as District 4 supervisor to the more moderate Joel Engardio) and current District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan. In what could be a foreshadowing of November’s election, Chan garnered less DCCC votes than Marjan Philhour, the moderate Democratic choice to replace her as District 1 supervisor. Philhour only lost to Chan by 123 votes four years ago, and that was before redistricting mandated by the 2020 census data, generally considered favorable to Philhour.

Kim, like Chan, is not really a progressive Democrat. She identifies as a socialist, along with current District 5 supervisor and San Francisco Democratic Socialist kingpin Dean Preston. Along with Avalos (a misogynistic dinosaur best known for cheating on his wife with a subordinate, then firing her and later marrying her), their politics is so remote they might as well be campaigning from Point Nemo. In fact, the far-left faction won so few spots they will have little impact, and some high-profile candidates didn’t even make the team:

Natalie Gee, the aide to District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton (and hopeful to take his termed-out seat) is best known for defending her boss’s use of the n-word to a Black sheriff’s cadet. “The alleged ‘slur’ is only a slur if someone who isn’t Black says it … In this context it wasn’t a ‘slur,’ it was normal communication. Even a sign of solidarity,” Gee tweeted.

Sandra Lee Fewer preceded Chan as District 1 supervisor but chose not to run for a second term after she participated in a chant of “Fuck the POA” (San Francisco Police Officers Association) during a Nov. 5, 2019, election night party for Boudin. As if Fewer’s behavior wasn’t crass enough, her husband is a retired police officer accused multiple times of brutality. During his career, which began in 1978, John Fewer reported using a baton nine times, his fist or another object five times, chemical agents twice, and a carotid restraint where he choked a suspect once. Officer Fewer was also sued three times, resulting in an arbitrator’s award of $3,500 to the plaintiff; the other two led to settlements with the City totaling $35,000. 

Mano Raju is the current public defender, another regressive Democrat who believes drug dealers are the true victims of the opioid epidemic. Raju has accused District Attorney Brooke Jenkins of “cruelly targeting drug users” and launching a new “war on drugs, which began under Richard Nixon in the 1970s.” What Raju ignores, of course, is the thousands of people who have died due to fentanyl, a cheap synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin that has completely changed the game.

This is perhaps the most perfect example of how self-proclaimed “progressives” have lost their way. There is nothing progressive about the Medical Examiner carrying a body bag out of a nonprofit-run “harm reduction” building and placing it in a van where the other body bag racks are already filled. There is nothing progressive about Honduran drug dealers building mansions in their home country by selling fentanyl to poor, mostly people of color in predominantly underserved and immigrant communities. There is nothing progressive about drug tourists pitching tents in front of businesses and homes because the City hands them $687 per month to get high and terrorize the very taxpayers funding that “assistance.” There is nothing progressive about the Hall of Justice being a revolving door for repeat offenders or S.F. General Hospital being a revolving door for the drug addicted and the mentally ill. As I often say, San Francisco needs big change, and this past March, voters sent that message loud and clear: far left radicals in progressives’ clothing need to read the room, look in the mirror, and understand why their power is slipping away.

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Follow Susan and the Marina Times on Twitter: @SusanDReynolds and @TheMarinaTimes.