The Shadowy Millions Behind San Francisco’s “Moderate” Politics

An Article for the New Republic

San Francisco, as everybody knows, is the epicenter of American progressivism and has been since the 60s. They were here, they were queer, they were smoking dope in Haight-Ashbury flophouses and marching to end the war in Vietnam. In the subsequent decades, they went even further: they passed business-destroying regulations while simultaneously transforming into a tech mecca in the late 2000s for some reason.

But progressivism takes its toll, as many mainstream media outlets can tell you. No fewer than 9 major national articles decried the fall of San Francisco in 2023*; homeless encampments as far as the eye could see, open-air fentanyl use, streets paved in needles and human excrement. A filthy, wretched city in desperate need of saving.

I’m awfully hard on conservatives sometimes. It’s always “destroying community colleges” this and “remaking the Constitution” that. No wonder people are always asking on social media: why don’t you ever cover the problems with progressivism? Why do you go so easy on the Democrats?!”**

And so, in the name of fairness and balance, I travelled to the wasteland of San Francisco last September for The New Republic to write about progressivisim gone wrong. Exposed myself to the nightmare world of BART, wandered the fentanyl-soaked streets, bore witness to the endless homeless camps.

I deployed to Afghanistan twice, and I documented the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland of 2020, including the part where DHS and BORTAC were walking around with loaded M4s and throwing activists into unmarked vans. So believe me when I tell you that when it comes to San Francisco, it’s one of the cleanest cities I’ve ever been to. With the exception of the Tenderloin — and what city on earth does not have a Tenderloin of some description? — I saw beauty and/or affluence nearly everywhere I looked, be it the lush parks or deep blue bay, the extravagant wealth of Pacific Heights or boho chic of the Mission District. I saw no major encampments (there did used to be more but they’ve cleared out), though there was an open-air market for clearly shoplifted goods at 16th and Mission which someone warned me about ahead of time and which reminded me of a similar market enroute to the very nice Trader Joe’s I shop at every week. I was in San Francisco for five days and my phone’s pedometer tells me I walked over ten miles every single one of them. I rode both BART and Muni. At no point did I feel even remotely unsafe. I even got to see some rare San Francisco sun. It was a lovely trip.

To be fair, I live in New York City, one of the filthiest cities on earth (affectionate), so everything looks clean to me. Also, to be clear: San Francisco is no paradise. Though it’s violent crime rate is extremely low for an American city, it has the highest property crime rate in the country. It has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country, along with one of the lowest rates of shelter for the unhoused, and the fentanyl crisis ravaging this country hit especially hard in San Francisco. Some progressive policies, like eliminating middle school algebra in the name of racial justice, are genuinely unacceptable. And the housing crisis is absolutely out of control. Yet none of these things explain the doom loop articles, or why certain residents and ex-residents of San Francisco want you to believe it’s hell on earth.

Enter the tech bros.

Turns out San Francisco is an incubator for more than just start-ups. For years now, Silicon Valley dreamers have used San Francisco as a test lab for government takeover. It’s not working as well as they might like, but it’s working, and the strategy is spreading. They call themselves moderates, but most are anything but. Nor is this a local story. It’s happening in Seattle. It’s happening at a national level too.

You can (and I think should) read the article here.

They call themselves moderates. I call them anti-progressives. And some of them call themselves things like effective accelerationists (e/acc) and dream of crypto-fueled sovereign “network states” that operate like corporations and embrace unregulated, unfettered technological growth. This is bad actually, and if you want to learn more, you should check out Gil Duran’s work in The New Republic and also in his unbelievably well-named newsletter, The Nerd Reich. Go subscribe and get horrifying missives delivered regularly to your inbox.

Speaking of important and well-researched journalism,, this post would not be complete without a shoutout to the incredible local reporting that made this article possible. San Francisco has several fine papers and I learned a lot from all of them: the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, SF Standard (which, despite being owned by one of the anti-progressive movement’s largest financiers has some essential and absolutely scathing articles on the entire operation), and 48Hills.

Also: Mission Local, which gets its own paragraph because this article would not have been possible without their incredible and ongoing reporting of this phenomenon. They’re shouted out in the article and I want to shout them out here as well. I bought subscriptions to all these papers for the duration of this project, as I often do for stories with a local component, but Mission Local is a subscription I’m keeping. If you’re anywhere in the bay area, they’re essential reading.

(and by the way, if you would like to write your own article about San Francisco’s imminent demise at the hands of rabid progressives, Mission Local has you covered; just plug some words into their doom loop generator, submit it to The Atlantic, and await both fame and fortune).

Anyway, please go read the article if you would like to, it’s really good and you’d hardly believe how much research I did on it. As their local project goes national both in the Trump White House and in the Democratic party (“the progressives are why Harris’ centrist campaign failed!!!”), it’s good to understand where all these things began.

(The New Republic provides an audio version of the article but no audio for this Substack today; I’m writing this article on a Flixbus to Providence to see an old military buddy and losing the War on Carsickness pretty badly at this point. Give me a couple days and I’ll have that out.)

*The Atlantic, NYTimes Opinion, Newsweek, Hoover Institute, Washington Examiner, Financial Times, Business Insider, Wall St Journal, and CNN.

**cue raucus laughter from regular readers of this Substack

Thumbnail illustration is from the article and is an illustration by Julian Gower