Last month’s shooting death of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers has created a split in Silicon Valley. The Pretti incident has become the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: The tech industry is finally speaking out against the
Last week, many Americans watched in horror as video footage chronicled the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was executed by an ICE agent during a Minneapolis protest. Pretti’s death was the second in a single month at the hands of ICE. Weeks earlier, Renee Good,
Mayor Daniel Lurie delivered his first state of the city address last week, using the occasion to deviate for a moment from his usual promise to combat a non-existent crime wave by sending more police onto mostly quiet city streets. Instead, Lurie took a page from recently elected New York
The San Francisco Charter, the 548-page document that serves as the city’s constitution, is getting a rewrite at the behest of Mayor Daniel Lurie. To that end, Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman have appointed 31 San Franciscans to review and recommend changes. Revisions will then be
A new book by Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, painstakingly chronicles the rightward move of Silicon Valley’s tech titans, culminating in their embrace of President Donald Trump. Once considered reliably liberal, Musk and his peers have taken up authoritarianism with a relish
The year 2025 saw the inauguration of San Francisco’s 46th mayor, Daniel Lurie, a political neophyte and an heir to the billion-dollar Levi-Strauss fortune. It also saw the shift to a more conservative Board of Supervisors. But all was not rosy in the so-called moderate camp. Last November, saw
Ian Firstenberg @ 48 Hills
Khari Johnson and Yue Stella Yu @ CalMatters
This map highlights the astroturf connections present between the various groups that are responsible for weaponizing the San Francisco doom loop narrative against progressives for conservative political gains from 2021-2025.
Adam Shanks @ SF Examiner
An Astroturf Network channeled anxiety created by the COVID-19 pandemic to ratchet up fears surrounding crime. The narrative was a ruse: San Francisco crime had been on a downward trajectory for decades. What the Astroturf Network wanted were candidates sympathetic to their narrow and selfish interests. They spent vast amounts
The SF Astroturf Network Map represents the interconnected corporate real estate, tech and right-wing billionaires that have backed dark money-funded political pressure groups to push for specific gentrification, privatization, and big business-friendly ends.