Tech billionaires, AstroTurfing and a sophisticated information war explains the Bay Area's rightward drift, Dean Preston says
One of the most prominent progressives in the city, the former SF supervisor talks about how the left has lost the messaging game in recent years — but says he believes the tide is turning.
The 2024 elections were marked by a notable rightward shift across the country. And one of the most surprising places this took hold was in the Bay Area where recalls, opposition campaigns and information wars — funded by tech wealth — found a surprisingly pliable audience in one of the most progressive places in the U.S. No, the Bay Area did not wake-up to find itself a bastion of conservatism. But lefty politics, a belief in the power of government and progressive policies to fix issues like crime, homelessness, housing shortages, education and more, were taken a few pegs down. In their place, centrism and moderation has taken hold.
One of the people voted out last November was former San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, a Democratic Socialist who was long known as one of the city’s most progressive officials. Preston, who represented parts of the Haight-Ashbury, Hayes Valley, Japantown and the Tenderloin, has not been shy about who he blames for the loss, after a race that was the most expensive in the city and drew opposition from national right-wingers like Elon Musk.
Preston admits he lost the information war in his district, and he has been considering the role that the media ecosystem is playing in our politics since: sclerotic and weakened mainstream institutions that are driven by corporate interests amidst their decline, billionaire-funded outlets and policy groups that work to distort narratives while hiding their own interests, with little in the way of pushback, and content creators who have been a largely untapped resource for leftists thus far. We sat down with Preston to discuss whether he thinks this conservative wave has crested in the Bay Area, and what the left can do to stop losing the information battle online. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Hard Reset: Hi Dean, thanks for chatting. How’s life outside of politics?
Dean Preston: I left office in the beginning of this year and spent some time catching up with family. I’m also continuing to weigh in on what’s happening in our city and our country. And I’m working with and trying to connect with progressive journalists and content creators and others, and trying to help improve the landscape locally where news is mostly dominated by these corporate and more conservative outlets.
HR: Tell me a little bit of what kind of message you’ve been working to get out and why.
DP: Just trying to challenge the mostly tech billionaire-led disinformation campaigns here that have infected our politics and increasingly dominated policy discussions locally. I’ve been trying to both weigh-in directly through social media and also taking a deeper dive into who in the Bay Area is approaching these issues from a progressive perspective.
One of the biggest challenges to moving sensible policies in San Francisco, and certainly leftist and socialist policies, has been the disinformation narratives coming from corporate and billionaire-owned PACs. It’s similar to what we see nationally, but it’s pretty intense in San Francisco — led by tech billionaires, supported by real estate billionaires.
We know what works to address homelessness. You tax rich people to pay for homes for people who are unhoused and the supportive services they need. And we’ve done that. And when we do that, we improve the situation and get folks off the street. But the billionaire PACs and their lackeys in City Hall put out a message that homeless people don’t want housing, they refuse housing, they won’t stay in housing, and they just pound that message over and over again. It works to shape public opinion.
HR: Can you name a few other disinformation narratives about the city that have taken hold in the face of facts?
DP: There’s lots of examples. Public safety certainly is one. The idea that the way to make our community more safe is to just spend unlimited amounts of money on police.
Alec Karakatsanis wrote a great book, Copaganda, on this very topic — how cities just throw more and more money at police. If you stand up to that, you are framed as anti-public safety, when in fact we know that simply increasing police budgets by another 50 or a 100 million dollars every year doesn’t actually make anyone safer and that there are much more effective ways to invest in public safety. That narrative has been really dominated by folks who want to turn San Francisco into more of a police state.
You can look at drug policy. There are places like Zurich which use a four pillars approach, including safe consumption sites. It’s been extremely effective in reducing drug addiction, overdose deaths, and associated crime. But when you put forward those kinds of ideas, like we did when I was in City Hall, you get drowned out by this very well-funded network of people who attack any solutions that aren’t just incarcerating people.
HR: San Francisco and the greater Bay Area is a place with one of the most illustrious, if not the most illustrious history of progressive politics in the country. Why do you think the media ecosystem has not reflected that recently?
DP: It’s a very well-funded AstroTurf movement, basically putting a different face on very reactionary, conservative interests originating from the tech world and the real estate world.
There’s always been a more conservative movement in San Francisco fighting back against progressive ideas. But there was a time where it was more of a battle of those ideas. You had the real estate industry and other very wealthy people who didn’t like things like a living wage and rent control and taxes on the rich — and they would say that.
What we’ve seen more recently is a network of AstroTurf groups that present themselves as if they share progressive ideas so that it’s more marketable in San Francisco, when in fact they’re funded by conservative, reactionary tech and real estate billionaires.
The Phoenix Project, which formed a year or so ago, has done an excellent job of tracking the money. A lot of it is really hidden, but they’ve brought to light various organizations which have these very harmless, positive-sounding names. It’s like Neighbors for a Better San Francisco or Together SF and all these groups. A lot of people join these entities thinking they’re getting engaged civically and in their city.
If those groups were much more upfront about who they were, people wouldn’t join it. If Chris Larsen came out and said, “Hey, my company gave $5 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration here, and I’m a crypto billionaire, come join my group.” There’d probably be like 10 tech executives who would join it. Instead they fund organizations that go out there and say, “Hey, we’re doing a neighborhood cleanup” and enlist a lot of people.
It’s been a really well-funded strategy in San Francisco, multi-pronged from faux civic organizations to think tanks and political groups. But in all of it, you just follow the money.
These folks don’t care about public safety in San Francisco and making the community safer. It’s a lever to pull to try to activate people. And in the same way that nationally, Trump and MAGA don’t care about actual safety, their immigration policies aren’t actually about making any community safer. It’s just about racism and winning elections. So there’s a lot of similarity in how these groups here roll, but what’s been very disappointing is seeing that the mainstream corporate media outlets platform these folks. These groups don’t get called out in the way they should. They continue to be sources for stories. And they are seen as actual legit organizations by the mainstream media, despite all the publicly available information that shows they’re not credible messengers.
HR: Do you think the wave away from leftists and toward moderates has crested?
DP: I don’t think I was voted out because of anti-progressivism. The guy who got elected put forward pretty much indistinguishable positions on almost everything…Now he’s on the board, and according to the Chronicle analysis of votes, he is one of the most conservative-voting supervisors, but he didn’t run that way.1 The point though is that I don’t think you can really look at the results of that election as a statement that voters of this district don’t want progressive leadership.
Often when you look to mainstream media to try to vet stuff and inform the public, and I think it’s pretty clear that the legacy media is no longer fulfilling that role. I’ve been really encouraged to see some amazing new energy and independent media sources. When I left office, I was considering whether we needed to actually launch more of a progressive media outlet right out of the gates. And through a lot of conversations I realized that there are a lot of great folks who are doing that already or were just about to start. There’s Bay Area Current, which just launched in the East Bay. There’s Coyote Media which just launched. There’s the News Relay Network, as well as lots of unaffiliated independent creators.
HR: Peter Thiel’s lecture series about the antichrist at the Commonwealth Club generated only a small kerfluffle. Do you think platforming of these ideas is beneath the Commonwealth Club, one of the city’s most prestigious venues?
DP: Well, I think so. I understand that some places are fine to platform bad folks and really evil stuff, but yeah, it’s pretty problematic to give space to this guy…The only reason Thiel gets listened to by anyone is because of his money. If he were saying this stuff on a street corner, someone would be calling the police and trying to have him taken away because they would think he was completely nuts.
…It continues to be very strange in the Bay Area that any of these folks have a seat at the table. The mayor of San Francisco has Sam Altman on his transition team. Why are we looking to these folks for guidance, instead of taxing them? These folks have no moral compass whatsoever and a weird dystopian view of where society should be. The sooner we push them out of any policymaking, the better. But in San Francisco, they’re in control of the mayor’s office, the board of supervisors and they bought the local Democratic Party, the Democratic Central Committee.
HR: What gives you a sense of hope or encouragement right now?
DP: Certainly a lot of folks have been inspired by Mamdani’s success in New York and a triumph there of actual progressive policies. And I think every time we’ve gone to the ballot with socialist ideas in San Francisco, the voters have passed them despite massive spending on the other side against them.
We’re certainly in a chapter where we have billionaire control over the levers of power in San Francisco, but I don’t think it’s going to last that long, between budget cuts and rising rents and increasing evictions and other things that are really problematic and that people are going to tire of. I’ll also say, I’ve been out a bunch of times at the immigration court protesting with folks and trying to protect immigrant neighbors, and there’s a ton of people doing amazing mutual-aid work, resistance work against the Trump administration, labor organizing, tenant organizing, and folks who are fighting for working-class people.
HR: Thanks, Dean.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
People are starting to refer to a paradigm of “two economies” here in the U.S. — where the A.I. boom has sent the stock market soaring, driven economic growth and helped explain why an expected drag from tariffs and other policies has not yet shown up in force. But as we have noted here, there are warning signs for the other economy, as this piece in the NYT details:
Hiring has stalled. Jobs are particularly hard to come by for young people entering the labor market; youth unemployment is at 10.5 percent, a level not seen in nearly a decade, absent the pandemic.
Another good piece by Writer Cody Delistraty that unpacks something we’ve been chewing over too: how the marketing of A.I. as all powerful, dangerous and magical helps the industry retail its product and mythologize about its potency. To quote the famous jam: “Peaches come from a can / They were put there by a man.” People make these products and program them. And Delistraty’s look at the pseudo-spirituality that has accompanied the introduction of other powerful technologies — telegrams, telephones, and photography — is a critical reminder about the bogus claims and promises that follow new technologies in the realm of the spiritual, mystical and unknown, but never pan out.
Curtis Yarvin, who evidently was at a party hosted by the SF Standard in April, told the news outlet that he is considering fleeing the country, because as the Standard wrote, “the Trump administration is failing to kill democracy to his liking and he fears political retribution from Democrats if they regain power.” Just pure projection, all the time, from these folks.
A funky new event space in Oakland has been hosting a sold-out series of talks called “Death to Spotify,” to help cultivate ways around a musical ecosystem that doesn’t prioritize or value the artists who give its service value. I realize the pandemic seems like a lifetime ago, but it feels like there is suddenly a ton of new energy in the Bay Area: venues opening left and right, event series’, talks, plays, festivals, music and shows, and most interestingly, new spaces being created around reimagining the status quo.
A deep study of social media discussion around the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad found that outrage over the ad “was a conservative media creation.” Open Measures, which runs these type of social media studies, concluded that a small number of random social media posts were used as a weapon to mischaracterize the entirety of liberals in the U.S. when the majority of posts about the ads had nothing to do with accusations of racism.
The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession (Wired)
The best two pieces I’ve read so far on the Bari Weiss affair:
Patrick Redford in Defector: What makes the Free Press an attractive prize for Ellison is its choice of enemies—or, to engage in a smidge of Weissian anti-writing, whom it never goes after. The Free Press only punches down and to the left, never at those who hold real power but lustily at their critics and adversaries. If you are a billionaire buying a media organization in order to consolidate your power, you could not find a more eager servant than Weiss, someone blissfully captured by the richest people alive, and invested in smashing the last vestiges of liberal power in this country: universities, civil servants, and the media.
Elizabeth Lopatto wrote a scathing letter to Weiss in The Verge: I honestly cannot believe you’ve willingly decided to go into the worst kind of job that exists: management at a dying company…You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat shit and own the death of broadcast TV news, a thing that is going to die no matter what you do. Nice work!
Prosecutors are using the ChatGPT records of the alleged arsonist behind the catastrophic Pacific Palisades fire in the case against him, saying he “prompted ChatGPT to generate a ‘dystopian painting showing in part a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it,’ in the months before the fire, and also asked it to generate an image where “hundreds of thousands of people in poverty are trying to get past a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it. On the other side of the gate and the entire wall is a conglomerate of the richest people. They are chilling, watching the world burn down, and watching the people struggle.” (CNN)
The Chronicle terms it as more “moderate.” https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/supervisors-voting-coalitions-politics-20892175.php