Bernie & Pelosi Fight Back: Endorse Dean Preston
Ever blurb a book? I never had— until Trouser Press Books asked me to write one for Wanna Beat by David Polonoff. It’s about San Francisco at a time when I lived there— late 70s, 80s. The protagonist even went to a benefit concert I had helped produce, a benefit for striking miners. So I agreed to do it and it’s on the back cover. There were a few lines in the book I liked on page 4— “The search for a calling was my calling” and “The Revolution had come and gone. Higher consciousness chemically attained and discarded. The rock stars had fallen. The counterculture was now something sold over the counter.” What a time; what a place!
That San Francisco is gone. Gone, gone, gone. My favorite city for so many years and now I avoid it… never go near it. It was taken over; sadly, it sold itself. Every place changes. Essaouira changed. Amsterdam changed. Boston changed. New York changed. But they’re still Essaouira, Amsterdam, Boston and New York. San Francisco… not so much. It’s like the body snatchers got it— rich, motherfucking, soul-devouring body snatchers. I hate them; I hate what they did to my city. And they’re still trying to stamp out the last remnants.
There’s still a progressive left on the Board of Supervisors— the governing body Harvey Milk served on— as well as Dianne Feinstein, George Moscone, Tom Ammiano, Harry Britt, Leland Yee, Mark Leno, Fiona Ma, Gavin Newsom, Leo McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law, Ron Pelosi. The guy on it now is Dean Preston, the only member elected as a Democratic Socialist. The Borg— led by Elon Musk (literally)— is going bonkers to delete him. A tenants rights advocate, Preston was elected to the Board in 2019 when conservaDem London Breed was elected mayor. He represents District 5— the city’s most progressive area: the Haight, Fillmore, Western Addition, Hayes Valley, Japantown, Tenderloin, Civic Center.
The landlord class is coming after him again— and in a big way. Elon Musk— part of the Bay Area’s heart of evil— tried recruiting a candidate against him by offering $100,000 to someone who could defeat him. Preston faces 4 conservative opponents— and lots of Big Money— in November. His top opponent, and the one with most of the anti-working class cash, is Bilal Mahmood, a lackey of the billionaire class trying to pass himself off as a progressive. Mahmood is being financed by some of the big-tech Goliaths who have turned San Francisco into a hellscape: crooked crypto-billionaire Chris Larsen, vicious right-wing slime-dog Garry Tan, Ron Conway… and a PAC for rich people to contribute to his defeat, which has raised and is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On Wednesday, Politico, reported that Pelosi had endorsed Preston (as had Bernie). “Last fall,” wrote Dustin Gardiner, “Preston gained national attention after billionaire provocateur Musk called for his imprisonment for supporting an ordinance to prohibit security guards from using firearms to prevent theft.”
Preston hasn’t been shy in referring to Musk as a “billionaire fascist,” something few politicians have the guts to do, and he has also stopped using Twitter.
On Wednesday night, the city’s conservative-controlled Democratic County Central Committee voted to back voted overwhelmingly to support their opponents, Mahmood and in another supervisorial race, another conservative challenger, voted overwhelmingly to support their opponents, Marjan Philhour, while Pelosi voted for Preston (and the other progressive, Connie Chan).
In a post on Facebook, Preston wrote that “She has stood strong against Trump and MAGA Republicans at every turn, and has been a tireless fighter for our LGBTQ community, reproductive freedom, voting rights, and more. Here in District 5, Speaker Emerita Pelosi has championed crucial federal investments in our neighborhoods. I’m so grateful for her support in this race.”
Long before Musk was born, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Blue America has never advertised on Twitter and never will. If you would like to contribute to Dean Preston's campaign, or if you would just like to piss off Elon Musk, you can do it here. If you do, you'll be striking a blow for San Francisco... and for American democracy!
Either we ignored Brandeis or we made our choice plain and simple in 1980. And we're nothing if not consistently wrong about it ever since.