“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
BREAKING: Judge Tosses Key Evidence Against Luigi Mangione by Status Coup News
NY Judge rules items found in Mangione’s backpack can’t be used at trial including gun magazine, cell phone, computer chip, passport, and wallet. Judge criticized “improper warrantless search. Watch video and Read on Substack.
NY Judge rules items found in Mangione’s backpack can’t be used at trial including gun magazine, cell phone, computer chip, passport, and wallet. Judge criticized “improper warrantless search
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In what one criminal defense attorney told NBC News is a a “massive win” for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, NY State Judge Gregory Carro ruled key evidence found in his backpack in Altoona, Pennsylvania in December 2024 inadmissible in his upcoming September state of New York criminal trial.
Carro called the search of Mangione at an Altoona McDonald’s an “improper warrantless search” and ruled the following items blocked from being used at trial:
Gun magazine
Cell phone
Wallet
Passport
Computer chip
Certain statements Mangione made to Altoona police
“Even a partial win here is a massive win for the defense,” criminal defense attorney Danny Cevallos told NBC News about the ruling.
Despite the partial favorable ruling for Mangione, the Judge did rule that other key evidence could be used at trial—namely the gun Mangione allegedly used and a notebook prosecutors have described as Mangione’s so-called “manifesto.”
As I point out in the above video, the fact that the Judge ruled the police search of Mangione’s backpack improper and warrantless is significant for Mangione’s defense in two ways; first, it could persuade one juror out of 12—all the defense needs—that Mangione was railroaded and his rights were violated. Second, if Mangione is convicted in the state of NY trial, the Judge’s words can be one building block of a strong appeal.
Mangione’s NY state trial is scheduled to begin in September; his federal trial will follow soon after in October.
Status Coup would love to cover both cases on a daily basis ON THE GROUND in NYC—but need more financial support to afford to do so. If you value this investigative, ON-THE-GROUND justice journalism, please sign up as a paying member for as low as $5 bucks a month (16 cents a day).
The Last Mile helps teach residents skills that will get them jobs on the outside. It’s inspiring—but it’s still a prison with too many people behind bars
I’ve been to a fair number of jails in my life, mostly as a reporter, but before today, I’d never been to San Quentin. I knew its reputation: The notorious facility held the state’s death row and execution chamber, and was known for overcrowding and violence (by both residents and guards).
It was a place that represented everything that was wrong with the criminal justice system: Mass incarceration, particularly of Black men, long sentences with little hope, and an approach that was far more about punishment than the “rehabilitation” part of the so-called California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Not a place where a group of journalists, men and women, would walk freely among residents, shaking hands, chatting, doing interviews and hearing presentations, accompanied only by an unarmed lieutenant who is the chief public information officer.
Residents demonstrate tech skills in a new training facility. Photo by Matthew Kadi
But that’s what we did Thursday, and for a prison, it was remarkably chill. Lt. Berry met us as the door, and after going through a couple of old (actually historic) metal gates, we walked out into a sunny open space where people were playing baseball, basketball, and tennis. An inmate band was jamming. The guys smiled and joked with Berry, and she did the same. We were not surrounded by guards; in fact, a group of inmates signed us in to a new education center and offered us water and tangerines.
Some of this may well have been designed and orchestrated for our benefit.
Still, it’s a very different San Quentin today. CDCR has closed Death Row and moved those inmates to another facility (Gov. Gavin Newsom has paused all executions). The landmark prison has been downgraded from a Level 4 (high security) facility to what the guards called a “soft Level 2,” relatively low security. The guards I talked to couldn’t be happier; coming to work back in the day was scary and unpleasant. Today, they told me, it’s not a bad job.
It’s also part of an unusual experiment: With the help of a group called The Last Mile, the focus at San Quentin has shifted from punishment to rehabilitation, and dozens of residents are now full-time students, learning job skills and preparing for the time when most of them will re-enter society—with support, counseling, housing assistance, and in some cases, jobs waiting.
We were there to celebrate the completion of a $239 million complex that has turned old walls into open classrooms, and to meet some of the people who have turned their lives around. Kenyatta Leal, who was sitting across the aisle from me during the introductory program, spent 19 years at San Quentin, learned coding through The Last Mile, had a job waiting at RocketSpace even before he won parole, and now runs an apprenticeship program at Slack.
We toured the Audio Lab, the Video Lab, the San Quentin News office, and the place where the award-winning the Uncuffed podcast is created. The San Quentin News puts out a monthly paper that is circulated nationally and covers a wide range of issues—with no Internet access and no phone access. Those guys are amazing journalists.
Residents put out a monthly newspaper—with no Internet access or phones. Photo by Matthew Kadi
The chairs were not bolted to the floor. Residents could come and go without a jailer with a ring of keys. The students are all issued laptops, which they can take to their cells at night.
Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti started The Last Mile in 2010, with the idea of training inmates for jobs in tech. “At that point, we were told that by 2020, the US would have a shortage of 1 million coders,” Redlitz said. Teaching inmates that skill would allow them to leave prison and move into good-paying jobs.
Today, the market is different; tech workers need to be familiar with AI—which is hard to learn in a prison where nobody has Internet access. But The Last Mile has come up with workarounds and samples.
The next program will involve solar roofing installations, since skilled trades work will be in heavy demand for at least the next decade.
Most of the residents at San Quentin are in for long sentences, some for life—but they are all eligible for parole. Berry told me that the vast majority will be released at some point, and will be back in the community.
So many of the people I met on the tour said the same thing: Your life shouldn’t be defined forever by the worst thing you ever did.
The recidivism rate for TLM graduates is less than five percent.
This is all very inspiring.
And yet.
I met Demitrius, a middle-aged man who has trained as a web designer. He’s also trained as an optician; he can make lenses and glasses, and diagnose eye problems. We talked for a while, and I left that conversation with the same feeling I had when I walked out the gates two hours later:
Why are all these talented, well-trained, Black men (and a few white and Latino men) still locked behind bars?
Why is Gov. Newsom, who cut the ribbon on the new facility recently, adding $1 billion more money to the CDCR budget and not moving to close more prisons?
From Californians United for a Responsible Budget:
“The Governor’s own budget numbers make the case for prison closure,” said Amber-Rose Howard, Executive Director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a coalition of more than 100 organizations that asserts at least six more state prisons can close. “California is wasting more on CDCR while incarcerating fewer people. That is not fiscal discipline. It is a reckless commitment to prioritizing punishment as the answer to public safety. It is a political choice to protect unnecessary prison spending while communities are told there is not enough money for care, housing, food, health, education, and survivor services. This is negligent budgeting.”
Berry told me that the population at San Quentin tends to be older—and all the data shows that the older people get, the less likely they are to reoffend.
And yet: All these Black men are still spending the night locked in a cage, unable to be with their families, unable to access the sorts of things that most of us take for granted, in a system rooted in ancient punitive philosophy that never made any sense.
I told some of the other reporters in my group that I wasn’t a big fan of prisons in general, that I didn’t get the concept of long, even life sentences for many crimes, and that for all the reforms, what I was seeing at San Quentin wasn’t my idea of justice.
My colleagues pushed back: These people have committed very bad, violent crimes. They “owe a debt to society.”
Well: American society has so badly abused, violently oppressed, marginalized, traumatized, and undermined the humanity of Black men for so long that maybe society owes a debt to them, too.
Maybe ending mass incarceration, and letting the graduates of The Last Mile get their diplomas outside the prison gates, for good, would be a start.
48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
Plus: Silence from the Chron on Breed-Sherrill-Bloomberg story—and a move to save community clinics from the Lurie axe. That’s The Agenda for May 17-24
Want more of Tim’s election analysis and behind-the-scenes political news? Upgrade to his exclusive weekly Agenda newsletter here (or become a $10+ monthly 48 Hills donor here) to get more of his essential City Hall, state, and national analysis—direct to your inbox!
Every major news outlet in the city has reported on a study by the city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, that says Prop. D, the overpaid executive tax, will hurt the local economy.
It’s also wrong. The report (and the headlines) wildly overplay the relatively tiny impact Prop. D could have on the private sector as it saves hundreds of public-sector jobs—and services. It’s just super shoddy journalism across the board.
The People’s Budget Coalition protests deep cuts that could be prevented by Prop. D. PBC photo.
According to Federal Reserve data, about 484,000 people work in the San Francisco County. If 944 jobs vanished, that would amount to 0.19 percent of the city workforce. That’s a tiny, tiny number, so small that no economist can really predict it with any accuracy. The city gains and loses that many jobs every week, just through normal business activities.
How about the Gross Domestic Product? The report says the tax could lower the city’s GDP by $206 million, which sounds like a big number.
Sponsored link
Except that the city’s total GDP is around $268 billion (again, Federal Reserve data). So the loss would amount to (get ready) 0.07 percent. Again: This type of change happens all the time, for better and for worse.
The bottom line: The impact of Prop. D on jobs and the local economy is far too miniscule to even measure. The impact on essential public services is massive.
Don’t reporters do math anymore?
The San Francisco Chronicle still has a lot of old-school unwritten rules. The city’s largest daily newspaper doesn’t like to admit that other publications got a big story first, and often fails to report on news that would require an admission that someone else had the scoop.
I have lived with this for decades. So have many, many others.
The New York Times used to operate the same way, but it’s coming around. You now see Times stories that say “this information was first reported by Politico,” or whatever outlet had the break. The Chron is still struggling to adapt to a world where multiple independent news sources, some of them reliable, some of them less so, break stories in San Francisco that the Chron’s staff missed or ignored.
These days, a lot of what I write about is inspired by other reporters; I can’t cover everything, and I’m happy to credit, say, Mission Local for reporting on Sup. Rafael Mandelman’s comments to a right-wing political group. I pursued Mission Local’s lead, confronted Mandelman, and got a follow-up story that put the breaking news in perspective.
Now The Standard reports that the FBI is looking into the situation. That’s even more clearly news. Maybe the Trump Administration is using the FBI to attack Bloomberg (I don’t think anyone in Trump World cares about Breed at this point). That’s news. Maybe there’s a real investigation by career agents who look into public corruption; that’s news.
The current mayor, Daniel Lurie, ran on a platform of rooting out corruption, and he has endorsed Sherrill and said absolutely nothing. “The tone from the top is basically silence,” former Sup. Aaron Peskin told me.
That’s also news.
Peskin has formally asked the city’s inspector general (an office he helped create) to look into the situation. From his May 15 letter to Inspector General Alexandra Shepard:
The full picture, taken together, is this: a billionaire who had given more than $1.5 million to Breed’s campaigns, who funded the office where Sherrill worked, and who had employed Sherrill in a prior chapter of his career, personally called a departing Mayor and asked her to hand that same person a seat on the Board of Supervisors. The Mayor, by her own reported words, made the appointment in anticipation of personal financial benefit. Following the appointment, the Mayor accepted a six-month position as an adviser-in-residence at the Aspen Policy Academy, which collaborates with and is partially funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. That is the matter I am asking your office to investigate.
It has now been nearly a week since this reporting was published. The conduct described involves a sitting Supervisor whose appointment is alleged to have been made not in the public interest, but as a personal favor to a billionaire donor in exchange for the prospect of private employment. The Supervisor in question remains in office and is a candidate in the June 2 District 2 election.
Mayor Lurie — who made the fight against City Hall corruption a central and repeated pledge of his 2024 campaign, announcing “aggressive ethics enforcement proposal to restore trust, integrity and accountability in city government, ” and stating, “I am the only candidate who will dramatically reshape the bureaucracy, clean out the rot of corruption and hold every department accountable” has not spoken publiclyabout this matter, despite having endorsed Supervisor Sherrill in the current District 2 election. City Hall has taken no action.
This silence is precisely the circumstance your office was designed to address.
Again: news. By any standard.
The Chron at this point is showing its increasing irrelevance.
On August 28, three city clinics that serve vulnerable populations are set to close under the Lurie Administration cuts. The South East Mission Geriatric Services Clinic, which provides mental health services to seniors, and the Michael Baxter Larkin Street Youth Clinic and the Cole Street Clinic, which provide medical, sexual and reproductive, and mental health care to LGBTQ and homeless youth, will shutter; Lurie’s Health Department says those folks can find services at other sites.
But for a lot of people, particularly seniors, giving up existing health-care providers and moving to a place that may require multiple bus rides is not an easy option. For LGBTQ and homeless youth, the loss of familiar, culturally competent services is a serious problem.
Under state law, commonly known as the Beilenson Act, any move to close or significantly reduce public health services requires a public hearing. The Health Commission will meet Monday/18 to consider the closures, and a broad coalition will be on hand to push back. That meeting begins at 3pm in City Hall Room 208.
48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
These are the final days to call your Republican senator(s) and Republican representative to demand they oppose $70 billion in ICE funding. We’ve kept this funding blocked since January, but Republicans are now trying to rush it through and hoping everyone is too distracted by other news to notice. We must be as loud as possible and show the GOP that we won’t be fooled into complacency when lives are on the line.
Make calls for the No War Wednesdays Phonebank on Wednesday, May 20 (2:30pm ET/11:30am PT) to reach voters in key states and urge them to demand their Members of Congress block any more funding for Trump’s unjust, unauthorized war on Iran. We are weeks past the 60-day deadline for congressional authorization, and Congress must do its duty and hold the Trump regime accountable.
Phonebank for Randy Villegas, Indivisible’s endorsed candidate for Congress in CA-22 on Thursday, May 21 (8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT). Randy’s primary is just over two weeks away, on June 2, and AIPAC is spending heavily against him, while the Dem establishment has put its thumb on the scale to support his status-quo opponent. Villegas is the kind of fighter we need in Congress, and he needs our support to get there. Electoral phonebank events paid for by Indivisible Action. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee.
“We will not sit back and watch while Gov. Kemp takes orders from a felon-in-chief to turn Dr. King’s dream into a nightmare,” said the head of Common Cause Georgia.
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 13, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Republican state leaders are forging ahead with President Donald Trump’s campaign to rig congressional districts for the GOP, with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday signing a proclamation for a special legislative session and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster expected to make a similar announcement soon.
While GOP policymakers facing pressure from Trump have pursued mid-decade redistricting in several states ahead of the November midterm elections—in which Democrats aim to reclaim majorities in both chambers of Congress—Kemp’s proclamation explicitly states that any changes in Georgia would be for 2028, which is the next presidential cycle.
Kemp’s proclamation cites the US Supreme Court’s decision last month that a Louisiana map predating Trump’s redistricting push was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” which gutted the remnants of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.
In a statement condemning the proclamation, Common Cause Georgia director Rosario Palacios pointed to the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a key figure in the movement that led to the VRA as well as the Civil Rights Act the previous year.
“We will not sit back and watch while Gov. Kemp takes orders from a felon-in-chief to turn Dr. King’s dream into a nightmare. Too many civil rights leaders have done work in our state for us [to] take this sitting down,” Palacios declared. “Common Cause is mobilizing thousands of people to stop state lawmakers from passing any new maps before 2030 that destroy Black voters’ power for political gain. Voters should not have to rely on lawsuits to protect their right to fair representation. Congress must end this abuse once and for all so every voter can cast a ballot in free and fair elections, no matter their political party.”
US Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who is up for reelection in 2028, similarly ripped the Georgia redistricting effort on social media Wednesday: “There is an extreme movement in this country that will stop at nothing to hold on to power, even if it means stripping representation away from millions. I will fight this with everything I have.”
Republicans in various states have moved to “shamelessly capitalize” on the April ruling from the high court’s right-wing supermajority. On Monday, as the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Alabama GOP to rescind the creation of its second Black-majority district, Memphis voters sued over a new map targeting Tennessee‘s only majority-Black congressional district.
On Tuesday, as the Missouri Supreme Court declined to strike down a new congressional map that state voters are working to challenge with a referendum, five Republican South Carolina senators joined Democrats in blocking a GOP effort to advance Trump’s gerrymandering campaign in their state.
However, The Post and Courier’s Nick Reynolds reported Wednesday that South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (R-25) believes the governor “will call legislators back into a special session amid the redistricting fight.”
Also reporting on the anticipated move Wednesday, Politico’s Andrew Howard and Alec Hernandez noted that “McMaster’s plan—confirmed by four people familiar with the decision, who were granted anonymity to share private details—is a reversal of his position earlier this month and follows pressure” from the president and his allies.
A redistricting push in South Carolina is expected to target the seat held by Democratic Congressman Jim Clyburn—who last month warned that the Supreme Court ruling on Louisiana’s map and the VRA “threatens to send our country deeper into the thicket of never-ending redistricting fights, with repeated aggressive map redraws, protracted legal battles, and relentless partisan tugs-of-war, all of which are destined to result in more regressive court decisions.”
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US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 15, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday accused US President Donald Trump of “orchestrating a $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies” amid new reporting on the terms Trump is seeking in talks to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.
ABC News reported late Thursday that Trump is expected to drop his lawsuit in the coming days “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government.
The president is also expected to receive a public apology from the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first White House term.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement that the reported settlement terms represent “another installment” in Trump’s “ongoing effort to turn the federal government into a personal cash machine for his unpopular extremist movement.”
“This is a massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people,” said Raskin. “Worse still, this is only the beginning—a declaration that the prior payouts were just a down payment, and that he now intends to earmark billions more in taxpayer dollars for his political allies, sycophants, and private militia of unemployed insurrectionists.”
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“The president has no authority to conjure up billion-dollar compensation schemes or raid the Judgment Fund, which exists to settle valid lawsuits. Trump is systematically converting neutral government mechanisms into a presidential slush fund to build his army of political dependents,” Raskin continued. “Congress must act immediately to reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government.”
According to ABC, which cited unnamed sources who emphasized that the settlement’s terms should not be considered final until officially announced, the deal is “expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”
“The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight,” ABC noted. “Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars.”
ABC’s story came on the heels of reports earlier this week revealing internal Justice Department discussions on settling Trump’s lawsuit, which he filed in late January. Last month, a federal judge questioned the constitutionality of Trump’s suit, noting that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”
“Real story: Judge was about to throw out the case because Trump controls both parties,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) wrote late Thursday. “Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a ‘settlement.’ Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency.”
“Mind-boggling corruption,” Goldman added.
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New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers an address to the crowd at his 100 Days Rally at the Knockdown Center in New York, NY, USA on April 12, 2026.
(Photo by Jason Alpert-Wisnia / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s not just that government can help, it’s that government must help and our government will help.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday delivered a rebuttal to former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s infamous quote about “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.”
During an event announcing the location of a second city-run grocery store, Mamdani recalled Reagan claiming in 1986 that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
“It’s a good quote, but I disagree,” Mamdani said. “I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’ We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani mocks Ronald Reagan’s infamous quote.
“I can think of nine words more terrifying than ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…’”
The mayor added that “when government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today.”
“It’s not just that government can help,” Mamdani emphasized, “it’s that government must help and our government will help.”
In an announcement, Mamdani revealed that the city is planning to open a 20,000-square-foot grocery store in the Peninusla development in the Bronx by the end of next year. This marks the second announced location for a city-run grocery store, following an earlier announcement for a planned store in East Harlem that is set to open by 2029.
“Making sure every New Yorker can buy fresh, affordable groceries in their own neighborhood is a key part of our affordability agenda,” Mamdani said. “We are proud to begin this work in the South Bronx and remain committed to opening a store in every borough before the end of our first term.”
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Journalist Thomas Smith got invited into the secretive glass-fronted tower in Mission Bay, and came away with a new perspective on the AI giant
A modern glass office building with a sky bridge and landscaped seating area, home to artificial intelligence company OpenAI, in San Francisco, May 27, 2025.Smith Collection/Gado
By Thomas Smith May 17, 2026 (SFGate.com)
Normally, when I approach the incognito San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI, a benignly terrifying security guard in a rugby shirt stares me down.
Last week, though, I got to waltz right past him.
Well, almost. Apparently I waltzed a bit prematurely. As I first entered the lobby, he professionally but firmly walked me back outside and showed me how to properly scan a QR code that would grant me access to the beating heart of the buzziest, most controversial company in tech.
After that, the waltzing could continue unimpeded, because I had been formally invited inside OpenAI’s secretive mothership. And what I saw there told me a lot about the company’s future.
Kimpton’s baby
I was invited to OpenAI’s headquarters because of my role as a tech journalist, to attend an off-the-record educational seminar.
Stepping off the MUNI T Line and arriving at OpenAI’s building, I was greeted, as I always am, by nothing. The AI giant’s offices are entirely unlabeled. There’s nary a sign or logo anywhere to tell the casual visitor that they’ve stumbled upon the locus of all AI power in the universe. Next door, Uber’s headquarters scream “UBER” from every glass-fronted, glimmering surface. OpenAI — subletting from Uber — keeps its building silent.
That ends as soon as you step inside.
After signing in with front desk staff (who have the friendly demeanor of people who know they’re being protected by a rugby-shirted man with biceps like tractor tires) I was escorted to a lobby to wait for our session to begin.
OpenAI’s lobby is loud — aesthetically, if not aurally. The space looks like a Kimpton hotel and a Victorian cabinet of curiosities had a baby.
Every object — a 1950s metal robot figurine, a copy of Roger Fouts’ “Next of Kin,” a vintage camera — had clearly been placed there with intention, to communicate a message.
A copy of “On the Origin of Time,” which details Stephen Hawking’s theories about the universe, lay open next to comfy reading chairs, as if to suggest that OpenAI’s engineers often casually thumb through such books. For reasons that are opaque to me, a vase of white flowers and also a disembodied deer antler sat beside it.
A lone gold pocket watch, sitting nakedly in the middle of a vast wooden table, felt like a test. Grabbing it as a memento seems like it’d be easy, until you remember that it’s sitting in the house of the company building much of America’s AI surveillance apparatus.
After a brief wait, a staff member walked me and several colleagues back to a fairly unremarkable seminar room, somewhat surprising given all the quirky detritus I’d just passed by.
Also surprisingly, though, OpenAI left us relatively free to wander before the presentation started (albeit with a directive not to photograph anything). So I left the room.
Inside OpenAI’s lobby, I found a concert grand piano. It’s a player piano, and there’s not even a stool for a human musician to sit on. This feels ominously on-brand.
Deeper in the building, I found a booth filled with themed books and pamphlets that urge the visitor to “Feel the AGI immersion.” It was staffed by a gigantic, papier-mache frog.
I took a pamphlet. It was covered in vague word soup about human flourishing. I realized ChatGPT almost certainly wrote it.
In the bathrooms, I found trays of toothbrushes and anti-redness eye drops, presumably to fix yourself up after a long night spent iterating on foundation models.
I circled back to the seminar room. A digital sign outside read, “We’re making AGI–and friends!”
Amid this onslaught, the company has lately felt walled-off. OpenAI’s building, again, is entirely incognito. Reaching an actual human at the company, even as a member of the media, feels almost impossible. Cryptic messages on X from Sam Altman are often the only hint that OpenAI is about to do something big.
That wasn’t always the case. When I served as an independent OpenAI beta tester in 2021, the company had a chummy, academic lab feel. You could send a Slack DM to OpenAI’s VP of product in the middle of the night and get an immediate response.
After ChatGPT took over the world, that vibe changed. OpenAI stepped back and locked down.
New models dropped at random times, and both tech journalists and the company’s own customers scrambled to understand what had landed in their laps.
On my visit, though, I saw indications that OpenAI is working to shift this narrative. That fact that I — a journalist who once accused the company of lobotomizing ChatGPT — was allowed in the door in the first place is one indicator of a change.
And while there’s plenty of bizarre kitsch inside OpenAI’s headquarters, the walls are also covered in signs that talk about the company’s origins and future, connecting its work to the artificial intelligence pioneers who came before it (including, encouragingly, early female scientists like Grace Hopper) and an imagined future where AGI becomes a utopian “infrastructure stretched across continents.”
Facebook famously had an on-site sign shop, too. But its blocky, letterpress signs always felt like tech-themed Soviet propaganda posters, sporting simple, vaguely Orwellian slogans like, “Do it faster” and, “Our work is never over.”
OpenAI’s signs are more deliberately crafted and narrative, with paragraphs of explanatory text, historical photos, charts and illustrations. They look like museum exhibits.
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The company seems to be realizing — perhaps belatedly — that if it doesn’t actively tell its story, other people will. And other people’s version won’t necessarily be flattering.
OpenAI probably isn’t ready to send my rugby-shirted friend home and throw open its doors — or its models — to the world. But the company no longer seems content to sit, walled-off, in its glass-fronted Mission Bay tower either.
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) addresses voting rights supporters at the All Roads Lead to the South rally in Montgomery, Alabama on May 16, 2026.
(Photo by @saedaaya/X)
Labor rights and voting rights groups were among those who gathered in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama for the All Roads Lead to the South Day of Action.
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates…
In a show of resistance to the US Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and Republicans’ efforts to redraw congressional districts across southern states in a bid to retain power despite their party’s unpopular agenda, labor and voting rights groups were among those that arrived in Montgomery, Alabama Saturday for “Day One” of a mass mobilization against GOP lawmakers who they said are intent on “resurrecting Jim Crow.”
While groups including the Movement for Black Lives and National Jobs With Justice boarded buses in Atlanta Saturday morning to join more than 250 organizations at a rally at the Alabama State Capitol, other organizers began the “All Roads Lead to the South” National Day of Action with a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—the same site of the historic 1965 voting rights march that became known as Bloody Sunday.”We started here because we wanted to stand on sacred ground and consecrate ourselves,” said organizer LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter. “You cannot fight hate with hate, you have to stand in the spirit of love, and so look around—this is what love looks like.”
The march and rally were organized in response to a ramp-up of efforts by the Republican Party and right-wing courts, including the far-right majority on the US Supreme Court, to redraw electoral maps in states including Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee.
The mass mobilization was organized after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais last month, effectively eviscerating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has held that voters of color have the right to legally challenge racially discriminatory congressional maps.
The Supreme Court this week allowed Alabama to revert back to an electoral map with just one majority-Black district out of seven, despite that fact that 26% of Alabama residents are Black.
Tennessee Republicans also adopted a new electoral map that splits up the state’s only majority-Black district, and the Missouri Supreme Court approved a congressional map that targets the state’s 5th District, represented by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.
Arriving in Montgomery, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones (D-52) said voters across the South need “a united front… to take on this new Confederacy… We know what the intent of these governors and state lawmakers are, to dismantle every gain made during the civil rights movement and dismantle the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, which was the Voting Rights Act.”
Rep. @brotherjones_ in Montgomery: “We’re here united to take on this new confederacy, 60 years after the Selma March… because we know their intent is to dismantle everything gained during the civil rights movement.” pic.twitter.com/op87I4g8hT
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) May 16, 2026
“Our parents and grandparents marched, organized, bled, and won,” said organizers ahead of the rally. “The Voting Rights Act was theirs. The fight to keep it is ours. Right now, state by state, that law is being dismantled. We know that we cannot fight the same battles the same way. New times demand new tactics—economic pressure, political organizing, community action, culture, and faith. But we know what we know: Organizing works. And we have unfinished business.”
At the rally, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) emphasized the need for solidarity from across the US, with supporters of voting rights mobilizing in states near and far from the South—the current center of the GOP’s attacks.
“They think they can draw us out of power. They do not know the sleeping giant they just awakened,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “When Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voting rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of.”
AOC: “It is time for the North to pull up to the South and let them know exactly what they have uncorked with this injustice. They think they can draw us out of power. They do not know the sleeping giant they just awakened. What they thought was the final blow is actually just… pic.twitter.com/kQvixR2Olv
Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, said labor groups joined the mass mobilization because “the bridges we have to cross are not only in Selma.”
“Jim Crow didn’t just come for the ballot. It came for anyone who tried to organize and have a voice,” said Smiley. “Efforts to rollback equality and democracy are happening in the occupied cities, shop floors, and now the halls of the Capitol across the country.”
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) called for the rally to mark the beginning of a “Freedom Summer,” with rallies at “every State House” in the country to pressure state legislators to end the GOP gerrymandering efforts, which President Donald Trump has explicitly called for.
“Let’s declare a Freedom Summer and go to every courthouse this summer, to tell those legislators, ‘We will not go back,’” said Sewell.
Dozens of satellite events were also taking place across the US on Saturday.
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