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. Along with local elected committee members, there are also eight ex-officio seats reserved for state and federal elected officials. The San Francisco DCCC governs the local Democratic Party and seeks to engage and inform their party 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% 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 blaringly as during two 2021 recall elections.
Former chair Honey Mahogany and her executive officers stood behind three members of the San Francisco Unified School Board — Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga, and Gabriela López — who made the city a laughingstock of late-night television trying to rename schools bearing the names of “colonizers” including “The Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln while using a dizzying source of historical fact called Wikipedia.
They also 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. And, 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.” After her fellow board members removed her as vice president, Collins responded not with an apology but with an $87 million lawsuit against the San Francisco Unified School District and five colleagues for violating her First Amendment right to post those racist tweets. In the end the three were overwhelmingly recalled.
Mahogany’s team also sent out ludicrous mailers equating the recall of embattled, incompetent San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin with California women losing their right to choose because, well, Republicans. None of that made sense, especially since Boudin’s largest individual donor had also donated to, you guessed it, Republicans. Mahogany, who lost the race for District 6 Supervisor to commonsense Democrat Matt Dorsey, tweeted in 2020 that she supported abolishing the police. That was a view surely shared by Boudin and most of his supporters, but it wasn’t shared by voters. Boudin, like the school board members, was recalled.
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 race. The only “progressives” who made the cut were current District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan and former District 4 Supervisor Gordon Mar from Assembly District 19, and attorney Michael Nguyen along with former Supervisors John Avalos and Jane Kim from Assembly District 17. Interestingly, Chan came in below Marjan Philhour, the moderate Democratic choice to replace her as District 1 supervisor this November (Philhour only lost to Chan by a little over 100 votes four years ago and that was before redistricting).
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 and later marrying her) their politics is so remote they might as well be campaigning from Point Nemo.
The far-left faction won so few spots they will have little impact and, in fact, 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. During his career, 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. 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 victim 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 potent 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 “harm reduction” nonprofit’s building and placing it in a van where the other body bag racks are already full. 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 city officials hand them $687 per month so they can 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 felons 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 they’re no longer in charge.
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