City Hall Sure Is Toxic, But SF’s Demagoguery Is Most Damaging and Disgraceful
By: Anthony Lazarus
Tags: San Francisco, Culture, Communication, Civic Engagement, Politics

Amid the reopening of the city and the $1 billion-plus in homelessness spending, we learned that Sup. Aaron Peskin, the lion of San Francisco’s progressive movement, not only would seek treatment for alcohol abuse but also that he was apologizing for “the tenor” of his discourse. His long-noted nastiness, bullying, and berating, in public and private, became too much to ignore over the past year.

Rudeness, foul language, and other verbal abuses are certainly not exclusive to our civic affairs. There is a different and no less toxic streak (or perhaps “stain”) that runs through City Hall and permeates our public sphere: demagoguery.

It’s one thing to disagree on policy. It’s quite another to paint your opponents as an evil force that must be vanquished to “save” the city. Again, we can’t claim to have a lock. (“Willie Horton or will he not get elected?” sang Michael Franti decades ago about George H.W. Bush’s racist pandering.) But in this day and age, with our national civic project knocked dangerously off-axis by Donald Trump and his acolytes, we have a responsibility to call out our particular brand of demagoguery, wherever it comes from.

First, let’s define terms. Demagoguing is more insidious than name-calling and workaday assholery; it’s the exploitation of current or historical wrongs and prejudices through charged language and comments. They’re made for tactical political gain, and — this is important — to mislead, contaminate, or stymie debate.

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Demagoguery runs counter to San Francisco’s most exalted public values of tolerance and diversity. It’s also far more potent than trash talk (and for some of that, Peskin has finally been held to account). Once the demagoguing starts on any local issue — be it housing or a coffeehouse opening on Mission Street — people retreat to their corners and give no quarter to their perceived enemies. Discussion becomes difficult; the other side’s perspective becomes suspect, if not downright destructive.

Here’s a roundup of some recent and remarkable offenses in high-profile SF demagoguing, with the incendiary comments italicized. (If you have particularly crass examples, send them my way via email at anthony AT thefrisc.com, or via Twitter DM, and I’ll add them to the list.)

Car-free JFK as Jim Crow

Sup. Shamann Walton demagogued against car-free JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park: “So when we look at segregationist policies like closing JFK to Bayview, Mission, Lakeview, Excelsior communities, that shouldn’t even be considered,” Walton said at a public hearing in March. “We need to allow Black and brown and all communities of color complete access again.”

In the same meeting, Sup. Connie Chan made a point about racial equity in green spaces and recreation, but then proceeded to demagogue: “When we have road closures, more often than not, that essentially is what segregation is all about.”

Later Walton demagogued on Facebook that car-free JFK supporters were being elitist and anti-equity: “Anecdotally we already see a lot of people from one area and a certain class of people enjoying the exclusionary opportunity to access the park. I would love to know the racial equity breakdown and economic equity breakdown of people who get to enjoy this segregationist policy. I wonder if it’s a violation of one’s constitutional rights to try and exclude their access to PUBLIC SPACES?”

In a May hearing, Walton demagogued that car-free JFK was like “the 1950s South.” (When the supervisor was presented with actual data on park visitors during the pandemic, he wasn’t interested in the facts. What’s more, there are specific improvements that could be worked out, but good luck getting ahold of the elusive nonprofit that runs the Music Concourse Garage.)

Chasing Chesa

When he ran in 2019, Chesa Boudin was perhaps the highest-profile candidate for SF district attorney ever, thanks to his family history and his unapologetic embrace of judicial reforms that, as the racial reckonings of last summer underscored, have been long overdue.

Chesa Boudin.

Instead of a debate on ideas or policy, though, opponents went straight into demagoguery. We’re not referring to the candidates running against him, but outside groups led by the SF Police Officers Association, which spent more than $650,000 on mailers and TV ads that said, among other things, that Boudin was the choice of “criminals and gang members” who would “put our families at risk.”

With knives out from day one, every San Francisco crime story and viral video fuels into a feedback loop of justification for Boudin’s recall. (The Frisc doesn’t take a position on that effort because of nonprofit rules.) It’s worth noting that the city’s statistics show a mixed crime bag under Boudin’s watch — with reasons for urgency and concern, as we have reported, in contrast to the lawless hellscape depicted by the two recall camps and some media outlets. (From one recall website: “Under Boudin, our city’s criminal justice system has been suspended.”)

Full-throated Dean Preston Twitter

The slide into Godwin’s law is not too surprising on social media, given the propensity for name-calling and trolling. In a 2020 Twitter conversation, Sup. Dean Preston demagogued that organizer Corey Smith of the Housing Action Coalition was a “developer lobbyist,” and that the fanciest of foods, foie gras … good god, just read the tweet.

With Preston, there are always bogeyman elites (and elitist foods) to attack. It’s been such an open season on experts and expertise in the past several years that Tom Nichols, a contributor to The Atlantic, wrote The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters in 2017 to explore this anti-intellectual dynamic. Preston apparently hasn’t read it, as late last year he demagogued about the legitimacy of an academic in political science. The supervisor tweeted: “Are you seriously a professor of something?” at constituent and UC Berkeley Prof. David Broockman, who was calling out bureaucratic city processes that benefited existing homeowners like Preston himself.

Billionaires, bad!

In the run-up to the 2018 mayoral election, former supervisors and longtime progressives Mark Leno and Jane Kim teamed up to take on moderate London Breed. The plan was that by joining forces, one of the progressives would best Breed once the ranked choices were tallied.

But Leno and Kim didn’t make a policy argument or advocate for a different approach to governance; they demagogued. “Wealthy special interests are trying to buy this election with negative attack ads threatening our core values. So stand up to the billionaires,” they said in a video together. “The city belongs to us, not the billionaires.”

Breed won majorities in almost all of SF’s 11 supervisorial districts.

Speaking of the mayor’s race, who could forget how Sup. Hillary Ronen demagogued that Breed was in the pockets of “the same rich white men that steered the policies that have created the mess we are in today.”

In her notorious not-racist speech, Ronen asserted that “behind the last mayoral administration and the one before that, there were the same tech moguls and real-estate billionaires who make money off our staggeringly high rents,” an outlandish distortion of what SF’s housing shortage has wrought.

Breed’s beef and BLM

Last year Mayor London Breed lashed out at George Gascón, the SF DA who quit in 2019 to run for the same gig in Los Angeles against incumbent Jackie Lacey. As Lacey, the county’s first female and Black district attorney, drew heat from Black Lives Matter activists, Breed penned a screed about her opponent in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Black-owned and operated newspaper.

She called Gascón a self-centered flip-flopper, a terrible manager, and more. He did not, as she noted, prosecute cops involved “in a series of high-profile shootings.” (Gascón’s record in San Francisco also featured his own demagoguery, for which he subsequently apologized).

Pointed criticism is a good thing when you think someone is wrong for the job; it can be raised without demagoguing. But Breed crossed a line with a story from her experience in community work, before public office.

A young Black man she knew got caught up in a violent situation — “wrong place at the wrong time,” Breed wrote. She said she reached out to Gascón, and that he rebuffed her. Charges were later dropped, “but not before his life was totally derailed,” the mayor wrote. “Gascón, who now portrays himself as a flagbearer for the Black Lives Matter movement, wasn’t willing to lift a finger for that young man’s Black life.”

The case, for which Breed provided no other detail, is separate from her reported attempt as supervisor to have Gascón review her brother’s 44-year prison sentence. Breed demagogued anyway: “Gascón showed how little actual Black lives matter to him.”

Mission cultural cosa nostra

The Don Corleone character in the first installment of The Godfather comes across as an adoring patriarch — as long as he gets his way. Erick Arguello, a founder and president of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, might have seen the movie. “I’m gonna boycott your business,” he reportedly told the owner of a new bakery in 2018.

Erick Arguello.

According to this still-stunning story published by Mission Local, which calls Arguello “one of the de facto gatekeepers” of 24th Street, Calle 24 sought to fight the incoming bakery because it was taking over a space in the wake of an eviction.

The property in question, at 24th and Alabama streets, was the site of an operatic family drama: It once housed La Victoria bakery, a neighborhood mainstay for more than 60 years. A trust, controlled by a stepmother, owned the business and evicted the stepson who ran it. The property was then sold in early 2018 to Mike Fishman, Russian immigrant and owner of the Richmond’s Cinderella Bakery. (The evicted operators eventually moved into another location on 24th and Capp streets, using a similar name to the original bakery.)

That La Victoria’s eviction was done by this family trust, and had nothing at all to do with Fishman or Cinderella, had no bearing, Arguello told reporter Julian Mark. “We’re a Latino cultural district, and we’re seeing a lot of Latino businesses being evicted,” he said. The history of Cinderella Bakery was “in the Richmond … not here in the Latino cultural district.”

Arguello demagogued: “It doesn’t matter who comes. It’s replacing a business that has a lot of history in the Latino community.”

Cheese or pepperoni, it’s a tool of white supremacy

The head of the PTO at Francisco Middle School told the SF Chronicle that Alison Collins, before being elected to the SF school board, once approached her as she unloaded 10 pizzas from her station wagon, and demagogued about the nation’s favorite food: “Are we having pizza again? Is that ethnically correct?”

That’s pretty much everything you need to know about the now-demoted SFUSD board member, but if you must, read her racially demagoguing tweets and her demagoguing $87 million lawsuit against her colleagues and very own school district. (Also, she didn’t help unload the pizzas. ’Nuff said.)

With the Great Highway, Gordon Mar shows us how

No doubt we’ve missed a lot of instances of demagoguing. (Send some my way! I’ll add them to the list.) Let’s close with a counterexample, a sober alternative to demagoguing. The topic is the possible permanent closure of the Great Highway to cars, which has seen heated debate.

In a recent post in the neighborhood paper Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon, Sup. Gordon Mar defends the need for some vehicle access, even while acknowledging that the roadway’s future must be car-free (because, you know, climate change). You could say there’s some political double-talk and can-kicking here, but let’s appreciate that Mar doesn’t cast himself and his pro-car constituents as aggrieved victims, and he doesn’t paint advocates for closure as reckless:

“I hope we can also look at one another as neighbors and community members with a shared stake in this street … We can disagree, and do it with compassion and respect, and emerge from this deeply challenging year knowing we have far more in common than what divides us, whether it’s a highway or a walkway.”

Compassion and respect in spite of our differences: That’s something we don’t hear nearly enough in this town.

Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus

Alex Lash contributed to this report.

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