“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
Graham Platner for Senate Apr 6, 2026 Watch my full town hall in Biddeford, Maine where I answer questions about corporate money in politics, what we can do about renters rights, how we can make our schools safer, and building a better country together.
Yesterday, Congress certified the electoral vote count making a billionaire president again, starting after he’s sworn in on January 20th.
Yes, we chose a billionaire. Again. After other billionaires spent billions to convince us to make that choice.
As you’re reading these words, billionaires from America and around the world are making pilgrimages to his shabby golf motel to kiss our upcoming billionaire president’s ass and hand him envelopes with $1 million checks that represent a few hours (at most) of income for most of them or their companies.
Meanwhile, our billionaire president-in-waiting is packing his cabinet — the heads of all of the most important federal agencies — with even more billionaires. This is all being celebrated over on billionaire-owned Fox “News” and on billionaire-owned hate radio networks, as well as in the billionaire-owned Washington Post, LA Times, and the roughly half of American local newspapers owned by billionaire hedge funds.
Other countries enjoy benefits like free healthcare and college; modern mass transit; and affordable housing, food, and drugs.
They also have inexpensive internet and phone service without companies listening in and selling their information, schools that don’t even need to mention school shooters, and streets and parks filled with pedestrians and children instead of tents for the homeless.
Additionally, they benefit from renewable electricity that gets cheaper every year while cleaning their environment.
We, on the other hand, have the world‘s largest collection of billionaires.
Most Americans probably didn’t realize this was the choice they were making in the election of 1980 when Reagan and Bush promised “Morning In America.”
We’d been battered by that generation’s version of the Covid shock: when Arab nations got together to punish us for taking Israel’s side and cut off our oil supply in 1973, it threw us into a decade-long period of “stagflation” (high unemployment and inflation).
Nixon couldn’t handle it; odd/even days at the gas pumps merely infuriated drivers.
Jerry Ford couldn’t handle it; his “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons were a sad joke that guaranteed he’d become a one-term president.
Jimmy Carter made some good progress — particularly with his plan for a “national solar bank” that would provide 20% of the country’s energy by 2000 — but Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 election, ending Jimmy’s hopes for a second term.
By the time Reagan ran for office in 1980, inflation was still a problem; it was an echo of the 1973 oil embargo, amplified by a second oil shock resulting from the 1979 Iranian revolution, again exploding American gasoline prices and cutting economic growth.
Reagan — an even more talented actor than Trump (who NBC spent millions training to act for TV cameras) — convinced us he had it all figured out. At first, his promises were vague; something about supply-side economics, “trickle down,” and Laffer Curves that nobody really understood (and George HW Bush initially called “Voodoo Economics”).
Once he took office, America watched with hope and some trepidation as Reagan turned our economy inside-out, massively cut taxes on the country’s thirteen billionaires, repeatedly raised taxes on millions of working-class people, cut and taxed Social Security, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, gutted federal funds for education, killed off two-thirds of the country’s unions, and, negotiating the GATT and NAFTA agreements, beginning the process of offshoring over 60,000 factories.
Reagan never got inflation below 4 percent and he almost tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to roughly $2.2 trillion), but throwing around those trillions in borrowed money made it seem like the economy was getting better even as wages were frozen by monopolists and a lack of union representation.
And that’s how we got the billionaires.
Back in 1980, nobody in America was rich enough to shoot himself into space on a penis-shaped rocket, and superyachts were a fantasy. The nation’s richest man was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, whose net worth — at just a bit below $2 billion — wouldn’t even qualify him for today’s Forbes 500 list; he lived a low-key life and, like most wealthy men of that era, didn’t much involve himself in politics (there were laws back then against rich people subsidizing federal judges or politicians).
But Reagan’s changes in the tax code and destruction of unions led to a 50,000 billion dollar ($50 trillion) transfer of wealth from the pensions, homes, incomes, and bank accounts of middle class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich between 1981 and today.
We had only 13 billionaires from 1980 to 1986 but — with Reagan’s final tax cut which took the rate on multimillion-dollar incomes from over 70% down to 28% — that number began to explode. By 1990, there were 99 billionaires in America; today there are over 800 of them, representing a more-than-50-fold increase in just four decades.
Not content with simply grabbing much of America’s wealth for themselves, a handful of our billionaires next reached out for control of our government.
They created media empires, think tanks, and policy centers, both writing and then pushing their own legislation that was dutifully carried into law by politicians they’d bought off. They outright purchased the entire GOP, along with a large handful of elected “problem solver” Democrats.
They set up institutions to seize control of our independent judiciary; five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court returned the favor by fully legalizing billionaires buying elections with their Citizens United decision in 2010.
Total spending on federal elections — for president, the House, and the Senate combined — was $92 million in 1980, $103 million in 1984, and $324 million in 1988. How quaint!
Just one billionaire — Elon Musk — spent over a quarter billion dollars putting Trump into office this past fall. Other billionaires jumped in, pushing total 2024 spending over $7 billion (and that doesn’t count dark money, which is almost certainly billions more).
Saudi billionaires jumped in to help billionaire Musk purchase Twitter for $44 billion, turning it, along with an alleged army of Russian-billionaire-funded trolls pretending to be Americans, into a massive megaphone to elect billionaire-friendly Republicans including billionaire Trump.
They’re now building “conservative” colleges and primary schools, funded with state tax money thanks to bought-off politicians, that will educate the generation coming up that billionaires are a necessary and benevolent force in the world.
And we don’t talk about our nation’s billionaire problem because billionaires own or control so many of the nation’s channels of news and discussion from social media to television networks to newspapers.
Even simple, traditional political endorsements get censored; G-d forbid somebody (who won a Pulitzer!) should draw a cartoon showing media billionaires bowing down to our new billionaire president. Or speak out on billionaire-owned social media.
Maybe one day America will join the other 37 OECD “rich” nations in offering to our average- and low-income people nearly-free college and healthcare, removing guns from our streets and schools, housing the homeless, and building modern mass transit.
Maybe our middle class will again become socially and economically mobile, we’ll rid ourselves of over $2 trillion in student debt, and we’ll never again be the only developed country in the world where people lose everything to bankruptcy because somebody in the family got sick.
For at least the next four years, however, we must content ourselves with the proud knowledge that we have more billionaires than any other country in the world. That they now run out government, with their top 1 percent owning fully 40.5 percent of our nation’s entire wealth ($43.45 trillion). As the Forbes “Capitalist Tool” headline gloats: “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country.”
Yep, sure enough: We’re number one! And Trump and the GOP promise to do everything they can to keep it that way.
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My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
A still from a video produced by Explosive Media depicting peace activist Guido Reichstadter atop the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, which he climbed to protest the war against Iran launched by US President Donald Trump.
(Photo: Screengrab/Explosive Media)
“Your dignity stands taller than the place you stood, and it will live forever in our memory.”
Explosive Media, one of the independent outfits generating the viral videos about the war in Iran, created a short piece on Saturday to honor the American father of two who climbed atop a bridge in the Washington, DC this weekend to demand an end to the conflict.
“In honor of Guido Reichstadter, the man who climbed the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge to make his voice of protest heard,” the group said in a post alongside the video short. “Your dignity stands taller than the place you stood, and it will live forever in our memory.”
As Common Dreams reported, Reichstadter climbed the bridge wearing a t-shirt that simply read “End War” beginning on Friday afternoon, remained in protest overnight, and told one reporter he intends to remain “for a few days at least.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/2050656100521840996
Reichstadter said he climbed the 168-foot-tall bridge “because the government of the United States is engaged in acts of mass murder in my name. And I refuse to be complicit in that.”
“The world is proud of you, Guido,” Explosive Media said in a separate post on social media. “Soon, side by side, we will celebrate peace and victory together.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Guido Reichstadter scaled the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC on Friday, May 1, 2026 in order to protest the Iran War started by the President Donald Trump just over two months ago.
Forty-five-year-old social justice activist named Guido Reichstadter, on Saturday morning, was still perched atop the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC, after first scaling the structure Friday afternoon in protest against President Donald Trump’s disastrous war against Iran, now in its third month, and the rapid and unregulated spread of artificial intelligencetechnology.
As Reichstadter, who described himself as the father of two children with master’s degrees in both math and physics, said in a video posted to social media on Friday: “Hi, my name is Guido Reichstadter, and I’m currently occupying the top of the Frederick Douglass memorial bridge in Washington, DC.”
“I’m calling on the people of the United States,” he continued, “to bring an immediate end to the Trump regime’s illegal war on Iran and the removal of the regime’s power through mass nonviolent direct action and non-cooperation.”
“I woke up on February 28th, and I found that hundreds of school children had been blown apart. I think there are many millions of Americans who reject the war in principle, but whose actions have not yet been sufficient to bring it to an end.”
In a separate video, he explained he was at the top of the bridge, which rises approximately 168 feet above the Anacostia River at its highest point, “because the government of the United States is engaged in acts of mass murder in my name. And I refuse to be complicit in that.”
While bridge traffic in both directions was closed at times on Friday and overnight, the bridge is reportedly open to traffic Saturday morning, though with some lane restrictions, as law enforcement said a “barricade situation” with the protester continued.
Reichstadter, who has staged high-profile protests in the past, spoke to Al-Jazeera via video stream on Friday to explain his actions and call for an end to the war that he says—and tens of millions of other Americans agree, according to polling—is a colossal failure by the Trump administration.
A 45-year old man is occupying the top of Washington’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge to protest the war on Iran.
Guido Reichstadter spoke to Al Jazeera from atop the structure – here's what he had to say. pic.twitter.com/YzHghEoS8m
“I mean, it’s an atrocity, right?” he said when asked what motivated him. “I woke up on February 28th, and I found that hundreds of school children had been blown apart. I think there are many millions of Americans who reject the war in principle, but whose actions have not yet been sufficient to bring it to an end.”
Democratic members of Congress, both in the US House and Senate, have now brought several War Powers Resolutions to the floor in an effort to end the US attack on Iran, which now includes a naval blockade of the country, but Republican majorities in both chambers, backing Trump, have thwarted those efforts.
Poll after poll, meanwhile, shows that Reichstadter is completely correct in stating that millions of people “reject the war,” but still the war continues even after a 60-day deadline, according to the War Powers Act of 1973, which says the president must either end military operations or get the explicit approval of Congress, which came and went on Friday.
On Friday, a video showed Reichstadter wearing a t-shirt that read “NO WAR” and unfurling a large black banner along the side of the bridge’s central arch as part of the protest.
Before scaling the bridge, Reichstadter also spoke with journalist Ford Fisher to explain his motivations and what he hoped to accomplish with his one-person direct action:
Reichstatder stayed on the bridge overnight, even as fireworks exploded overhead from a nearby Major League Baseball game.
NOW: Even as anti-war protester Guido Reichstadter remains on top of the adjacent bridge, fireworks are fired from a barge in the river as the nearby Washington Nationals Baseball game concludes. https://t.co/DFkhA6zABGpic.twitter.com/8HWUl7fjWL
In his statement concerning AI, Reichstadter said he wanted to “urgently warn the people of the US and the world of the imminent danger we are in of crossing a point of no return towards the development of artificial intelligence, which poses the risk of catastrophic harm to humanity, including human extinction.”
“I call on the governments of the world to take immediate action to end this danger by permanently banning the development of artificial general intelligence and machine super intelligence,” he said. “I also call on the people of the world to exert all possible influence through nonviolent action to compel their governments to end this danger with all possible speed.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Recent changes at the U.S. Postal Service mean that your ballot might not be counted if you drop it off at a post office or a blue USPS mailbox close to or on Election Day.
Instead of mailing your ballot, we strongly recommend that you use an official drop box, bring it to the City Hall Voting Center, or go to a polling place on Election Day. They’re the safest ways to make sure your vote counts.
If you must mail your ballot, here’s what you should do:
Vote early! The sooner you send your ballot, the better.
Seal, sign, and date your ballot envelope.
Walk your ballot into a post office. Don’t use a mailbox.
Prop A: $535M Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bond: Yes Prop B: Weird Do-Nothing Tweak to Term Limits: No! Why?? Prop C: Business Tax Poison Pill: No Prop D: Overpaid CEO Salary Tax: Hell Yes!
Want to know why we recommend voting this way? Keep reading for our research and snarky analysis!
Want to know why we recommend voting this way? Read the entire guide for our research and snarky analysis!
Looking for a voter guide outside of SF?
We focus on San Francisco, but if you are in the Bay Area we recommend voting with Bay Rising Action’s voter guide for Oakland, Alameda, Contra Costa, Sonoma and beyond!
Yes, the world is falling to pieces and democracy itself is being flushed down the robot shitter by AI billionaire oligarchs and their buddies in Washington. But the good news is, we can still vote! At least for now.
Here in SF, most people don’t even know there’s an election in a few weeks. And, as always, low turnout is a goal of the right-wingers who have money but fear large numbers of voters. So we’re here to walk you through your ballot—don’t forget to turn it in before the June 2nd deadline!
If you’re curious how the Pissed Off Voter Guide became the most trusted progressive guide in San Francisco, it’s because we show our work (and use a community process—reach out to get involved!). Click through to read our full voter guide, where we share our analysis and the strategy behind our endorsements for the most important contests on the June ballot:
Connie Chan for Congress: Send a progressive champion to DC! Remember: you can only vote for one candidate for Congress! It’s not a ranked choice race.
Overpaid CEO Salary Tax: Tax wealth inequality by voting Hell Yes on Prop D, which will raise $300 million annually for city services just by taxing companies with overpaid CEOs. And don’t be fooled by the poison pill Prop C Business Tax, written by the Chamber of Commerce to torpedo Prop D.
Lori Brooke (D2) and Natalie Gee (D4) for Supervisor: Break up the Mayor’s rubber stamp majority on the Board by sending two independent supervisors to City Hall.
There are only two other props on the ballot, and we’re supporting the Prop Aemergency services infrastructure bond but opposing Prop B, which weirdly tightens term limits on the only elected offices that already have them (Mayor and Supervisors), but leaves out all the other citywide offices with no term limits. Huh?
And don’t forget to check out the down-ballot races. We’re proud to support independent candidates for Judge (Alexandra Pray) and School Board (Virginia Cheung). Click through to read the full Pissed Off Voter Guide to learn how we navigated CA’s weird Top Two primaries to decide our statewide endorsements, and why we’re endorsing progressive-enough billionaire Tom Steyer for Governor.
Don’t stop pestering everyone you know about how important it is to vote in this election. Voting matters! Look, if it didn’t, the GOP overlords and the Supreme Court wouldn’t work so hard to keep us from doing it.
Rouse from hibernation, Pissed Off Voters, and vote while you still can! We’ve got work to do.
Love,
The League
Paid for by the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters. Financial disclosures available at sfethics.org San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters https://www.theleaguesf.org/
Even an eighth-grade algebra student knows that you can’t divide by zero — and prices can’t fall by more than 100%, writes Marc Sandalow.Examiner file
Here’s something for “reckless, feckless and defeatist” haters of President Donald Trump to ponder now that algebra is back in San Francisco’s middle schools.
Trump repeatedly boasts of reducing drug prices by 600%, sometimes as much as 1,500% — a seeming mathematical impossibility. Last week his health secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., came to his defense twice, once in testimony before Congress and once before reporters in the Oval Office, insisting that Trump’s claim is one of “two ways of calculating” percentages.
Those who understand basic arithmetic ridicule the assertion as “MAGA math.” It conjures up the twisted reality portrayed in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which fear arises that Big Brother will declare that two plus two is five.
But what if the critics could be proven wrong? With apologies to those who understand mathematics on a much higher level than I do, here’s one explanation supporting Big Brother’s calculation.
Let’s start with something everyone can agree on: 0 = 0.
And you don’t need algebra to know that any number subtracted from itself is zero. Which means, in algebraic terms, x – x = 0. Or, x – x = x – x.
Furthermore, any number multiplied by zero equals zero. So, it is also true that 4(x – x) = 5(x – x) is a mathematically sound equation.
Now comes the more complicated calculation, which will soon be introduced to San Francisco eighth graders. In algebra, one way to simplify an equation is by dividing each side by an identical number.
So, divide both sides by x – x and you end up with 4 = 5. And if 4 equals five, then 2 + 2 = 5.
Perhaps Big Brother, Trump and Kennedy are right!
Kennedy, who holds degrees from Harvard and the University of Virginia and attended the London School of Economics, insisted that his boss’s math was accurate.
“If a drug was $100 and its price rose to $600, that would be a 600% increase” Kennedy said last week (that’s actually a 500% increase, but who’s counting?). “If it drops from $600 to $100, that would be a 600% savings.”
Under new proposal, SFPUC would be able to purchase infrastructure the utility would otherwise be required to install itself
“Right,” the president proclaimed.
Actually, that’s wrong, as most eighth-graders could tell them. You can’t divide by zero. And prices can’t fall by more than 100%.
Say a 300-pound man balloons up to 600 pounds. That’s a 100% increase. But if drops back to 300 pounds, he hasn’t lost 100% of his weight. If he had, he’d be gone.
Though it might be confusing to some — including Trump and Kennedy — going from 300 to 600 is a 100% increase. Falling from 600 to 300 is a 50% decrease.
Of course, haggling over numbers is only important if you are concerned about reality. And reality, as comedian Stephen Colbert once observed, “has a well-known liberal bias.”
Were Trump or Kennedy making an honest mistake, they would correct themselves. But assertions such as “the U.S. has already won the war in Iran,” or that prices have plummeted since Joe Biden was president, or that the U.S. economy is the hottest in the world are not meant to fact-checked.
“This is the problem with the media,” Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said after the 2016 election. “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it.”
And the White House is counting on Americans not understanding algebra.
In the final season of the HBO comedy series “Veep,” the buffoonish Jonah Ryan insists he has more delegates than the math shows in his quixotic run for the presidency. He then learns that algebra was developed by Muslims in the 9th century.
“How do you explain that when I add up my delegates — with Christian math — the number is quite different?” he says, vowing to end the teaching of “Sharia math” in schools.
Americans have grown accustomed to MAGA math. It explains how Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 by a margin of 1.5 percentage points was a “historic landslide,” how Washington, D.C., no longer has crime, or how such an unpopular president can have a “100% approval rating.”
And if bringing algebra back to eighth grade doesn’t make believers out of them, perhaps the White House can find alternate facts that will.
By J.D. Morris, Staff Writer May 2, 2026 (SFChronicle.com)
Gift Article
Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress, poses for a photo between supporters in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood during the opening of his second campaign office.Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti was largely unknown on the city’s political scene when he launched his campaign for the House seat held by Rep. Nancy Pelosi for decades.
While he spent seven months in Congress as chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Chakrabarti has barely waded into San Francisco politics in the 17 years since he first moved to the city.
To Chakrabarti and his supporters, his scant experience in local governance isn’t a weakness — it’s an asset in his campaign as an outsider who wants to push the Democratic Party in a bolder, more progressive direction. But as the race to succeed Pelosi intensifies ahead of the June 2 primary, Chakrabarti’s critics have repeatedly cast him as unqualified.
Donors supporting state Sen. Scott Wiener, the presumed front-runner, paid for mailers that describe Chakrabarti as barely connected to San Francisco. One Wiener supporter was even linked to a mysterious van that made a similar argument in a more provocative fashion.
But it’s not just Wiener’s fans who are making that argument. Some local progressives and labor union leaders who support another major candidate, Supervisor Connie Chan, are also deeply skeptical about Chakrabarti, a wealthy former tech engineer who has little history of backing the local candidates and causes they support.
Chakrabarti is largely self-funding his campaign, but his fundraising reflects that he is getting a lot of support from outside San Francisco: 66% of his donors through March were from outside California. Additionally, Politico previously reported that Chakrabarti voted once in San Francisco in 2010 — and did not cast a ballot in the city again for a decade. He spent several of those years living in other places.
“He’s a total imposter,” said Aaron Peskin, a Chan backer who was a longtime member of the Board of Supervisors. “He’s very interested in being an elected official, but he has … no track record in … San Francisco that I’m aware of.”
Allies of Chakrabarti have a far different view.
In Chakrabarti, supporters see a fighter who is willing to take strong stances on issues such as Israel’s war in Gaza, healthcare and wealth inequality. Chakrabarti has promised to support an arms embargo on Israel, push to make Medicare available to all Americans, and back tax increases on the country’s richest residents — including himself. He has also said he will challenge party leadership when necessary to advance his goals, including by voting to oust Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. as the House Democrats’ leader.
“The system is broken. The establishment has been failing us,” former San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Honey Mahogany said at a recent Chakrabarti campaign event. “We need new blood. We need a new generation of leaders … who are not in the pockets of the special interests.”
Chakrabarti has blasted the influence of deep-pocketed tech donors who have lined up behind Wiener, his main opponent. But Chakrabarti’s campaign has been bankrolled heavily by his own wealth, which he accumulated by “winning the startup lottery” in his early years in San Francisco.
He moved to the city in 2009, when he was 23. A few years later, he became one of the earliest employees at Stripe, the payment processing company now valued at $159 billion. Stripe’s success made Chakrabarti a centimillionaire for earnings above $100 million, and he has spent about $5 million of his own money on the race so far.
He told the Chronicle that his time at Stripe also fueled a political awakening.
“I was seeing the cost-of-living crisis going crazy around me,” Chakrabarti said of his early years in San Francisco. “I started to realize I wasn’t working on the actual problems that were facing people in tech. So I quit.”
After leaving the tech industry, Chakrabarti got involved in federal politics, starting with the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. He subsequently co-founded two political groups, helmed Ocasio-Cortez’s successful 2018 House campaign and became her first chief of staff once she was elected.
His time on the East Coast has been a major source of scrutiny in his House campaign.
In 2018, he purchased a $1.6 million home in Gaithersburg, Md. — and signed a deed in which he listed that house as his primary residence, according to a November report from the San Francisco Standard. He has said he bought that house for his parents and described the primary residence declaration as a mistake that he has since corrected.
Nonetheless, the Maryland house became a launching pad for criticism from Wiener, who referenced the Standard story in a March video attacking Chakrabarti. Abundant Future, a super PAC that supports Wiener, has gone even further, sending multiple mailers that cast Chakrabarti as a carpetbagger.
Chakrabarti has fired back, accusing Wiener of misrepresenting the details of the Maryland home purchase and calling the attacks on his San Francisco residency as “nativist in a way.”
While he made a name for himself as a progressive on the national level, Chakrabarti’s limited track record with local candidates has been more politically diverse.
Chakrabarti supported Supervisor Bilal Mahmood’s successful 2024 bid to unseat Dean Preston, a democratic socialist who had been the most left-leaning member of the Board of Supervisors. He also backed another moderate supervisor candidate in a different district and voted for moderate Mayor Daniel Lurie.
Chakrabarti told the Chronicle that his electoral preferences haven’t always aligned neatly with the city’s political camps. He said he previously supported Preston but felt “lined up a bit more” on housing policy with Mahmood, who favored more aggressive measures to build housing for all income levels. He said he voted for Lurie because he believes that “the tribal politics in this city is one of the reasons for its dysfunction” and he thought Lurie could change that.
Chakrabarti also noted that he has supported some local progressive candidates, including Chesa Boudin’s successful bid for San Francisco district attorney in 2019 before his recall in 2022.
Still, no sitting elected official in San Francisco has endorsed Chakrabarti’s campaign. None of the city’s labor unions has endorsed him, either — which is rare for a leading progressive candidate. Many labor groups have rallied around Chan’s bid, though some have backed Wiener.
Mike Casey, a Chan supporter and president of the San Francisco Labor Council, said the supervisor had consistently backed union causes throughout her time in public office, but he couldn’t say the same about Chakrabarti.
“He doesn’t know our issues. He hasn’t been there when we’ve been fighting to raise the minimum wage or make sure that low-wage workers get healthcare,” Casey said. “How can you claim the mantle of being a progressive if you don’t even have a strong alliance with the traditional progressive organizations and institutions like organized labor?”
Eric Jaye, a political consultant who estimated he has been involved with more than 100 local campaigns, said Chakrabarti’s thin list of local endorsements could hurt him with voters.
“I don’t think his money erases all of that,” Jaye said. “San Francisco politics tends to be highly reliant on validation from trusted sources. … It’s still a place where voters would like to know that somebody that they know and trust has vetted you.”
Chakrabarti isn’t worried.
“I’m running as the outsider to the political establishment — that means it’s going to be hard for me, in a primary like this, to get local endorsements,” he told the Chronicle. “That’s not going to stop me from being a pro-labor candidate. … Going into November, I do hope to earn the endorsement of local progressive and union groups.”
While the local progressive establishment has largely shied away from backing Chakbarti during the primary, so has his former boss, Ocasio-Cortez, a national progressive superstar. Chakrabarti told the Chronicle he has “a good relationship” with Ocasio-Cortez and hopes to earn her backing in the future.
Yet Chakrabarti has had little difficulty spreading the word about his candidacy, especially online.
One of his advertisements, in which he touts his national political experience while walking through Dolores Park, has more than 1 million views on YouTube. He is a prolific poster on social media sites: On Instagram, he has more followers than Wiener and Chan combined.
Chakrabarti has also paid handsomely to amass an army of paid field organizers who his campaign says have knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors — a task other campaigns typically rely on volunteers to complete.
“I feel like his presence is really strong,” said San Francisco resident Risa Takenaka, 28, who attended a recent Chakrabarti campaign event and said she was inclined to support his campaign.
Takenaka was among a large crowd of people who recently packed into a Castro storefront that Chakrabarti has turned into his second campaign office in the city. She said she was unmoved by the attacks she has seen against Chakrabarti.
But some other attendees told the Chronicle they were thinking about Chakrabarti’s local track record as they contemplated whether to back him.
Don Bliss, a 66-year old San Francisco resident, called Chakrabarti’s decision to support some moderate local candidates in the 2024 election cycle as “rather disturbing for a progressive.”
“I’ve questioned his local bona fides,” Bliss said. “I don’t think that the argument is strong enough to not vote for him, because he does have significant local connections … but I am weighing that as part of my decision.”
Hafeth “Omar” Mansouri, the manager of Key Food Market on Fillmore Street — around the corner from the first San Francisco home Chakrabarti bought 13 years ago — said he’s known the candidate for years and runs into him on the street regularly.
Mansouri, 45, has grown into a strong supporter of Chakrabarti’s political efforts, recently appearing in a social media video with the candidate and Hasan Piker, a popular leftist streamer with a history of controversial comments.
“What he says and what he does — it resonates with me,” Mansouri told the Chronicle, citing Chakrabarti’s stances on several issues, including the war in Gaza. “He’s progressive.”
In his interview with the Chronicle, Chakrabarti stressed that he has considered San Francisco home for much of his adult life. He also made it clear that he thinks the national focus of his past political work can help him deliver for local residents.
“I really believe that the issues San Francisco is facing — whether it’s the cost of living crisis or the homelessness crisis — these are the issues that we’re facing hardest, but they are national issues,” he said. “We have to do these big, structural changes nationally to fix these (problems) for our communities right here.”
J.D. Morris covers San Francisco City Hall, focused on Mayor Daniel Lurie. He joined the Chronicle in 2018 to cover energy and spent three years writing mostly about PG&E and California wildfires.
Before coming to the Chronicle, he reported on local government for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where he was among the journalists awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2017 North Bay wildfires.
He was previously the casino industry reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Raised in Monterey County and Bakersfield, he has a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.
Library of Congress Jul 29, 2010 SUMMARY This film shows the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, and the devastation resulting from the subsequent three-day fire. The 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck at 5:12am and was centered along the San Andreas Fault, which slices through coastal California. Most of the cities of central California were badly damaged. San Francisco, with thousands of unreinforced brick buildings – and thousands more closely-spaced wooden Victorian dwellings – was poorly prepared for a major fire. Collapsed buildings, broken chimneys, and a shortage of water due to broken mains led to several large fires that soon coalesced into a city-wide holocaust. The fire swept over nearly a quarter of the city, including the entire downtown area. Dynamite was used with varying success to prevent the fire from spreading westward. Over 3,000 people are now estimated to have died as a result of the disaster. For the surviving refugees, the first few weeks were hard; as aid poured in from around the country, thousands slept in tents in city parks, and all citizens were asked to do their cooking in the street. A severe shortage of public transportation made a taxicab out of anything on wheels. Numerous businesses relocated teporarily in Oakland and many refugees found lodgings outside the city. Reconstruction of the city proceeded at a furious pace and by 1908, San Francisco was well on the way to recovery. The scenes in the film are preceded by titles, many of which are sensationalized. One entire scene showing a family eating in the street was almost certainly staged for the camera. The film was probably made in early May, as one scene can be precisely dated to May 9, and another to sometime after May 1. CREATED/PUBLISHED [United States : s.n., 1906?]. SUBJECTS Earthquakes–California–San Francisco. Fires–California–San Francisco. Buildings–Earthquake effects–California–San Francisco. Ferries–California–San Francisco. Street-railroads–California–San Francisco. San Francisco (Calif.)–History. Oakland (Calif.)–History. Transportation–Earthquake effects–California. Actuality–Short. RELATED NAMES AFI/Adams (L.F.) Collection (Library of Congress) DIGITAL ID lcmp003 03734s1 03734s2 03734s3 03734s4 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/lcmp003…
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Alice Club PAC recommends Xavier Becerra By admin | April 30, 2026 | Uncategorized Alice PAC Recommends Xavier Becerra for Governor On April 27, the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club Political Action Committee (PAC) voted to rescind its endorsement of Betty Yee, who is no longer running for Governor, and to put forward a new... Continue reading →
California Gubernatorial Debate Watch & Discussion at Manny’s Tuesday, May 5, 6pm Manny’s, 3092 16th Street Register Here Join us at Manny’s for a live California Gubernatorial Primary Debate watch party, followed by an expert panel discussion! We’ll be screening the debate in the living room, creating a space to... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
Public Banking Coalition monthly meetings Next call: Nov 11 Excitement is building for public banking and once a month, PBI hosts an hour-long Public Banking Coalition online meeting to share the excitement and successes. Find out the latest updates on the advances being made all across the country from local advocates themselves... Continue reading →
When you volunteer for Saikat, it’s on us to give you a great experience and a genuine chance to make a difference. We don’t want to waste a second of your time. That’s why we’re always optimizing. And I’m excited to report that this Saturday we talked with 300% more... Continue reading →
Trump Regime Takedown: Every Saturday Saturday, March 7, 2026 12:00 PM 2:00 PM Tesla San Francisco999 Van Ness AvenueSan Francisco, CA, 94109United States (map) Google Calendar ICS Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together... Continue reading →
This Sunday’s Town Hall: Announcing This Week’s Progressive Town Hall: Every Sunday at 4pm ET/1pm PT RSVP HERE Join PDA activists online from across the country to discuss the importance of progressives reclaiming the American story from the MAGA right, an issue of heightened importance as we’re now within one... Continue reading →
We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
