Sad Francisco

Trung Nguyen teaches Asian American and ethnic studies at San Jose State. His presentation at the last American Studies Association conference covered how the interests of US empire, Airbnb.org, and refugee landlords market property ownership as a humanitarian act.

Trung's site
https://tpqn.org/

Iyko Day: The Yellow Plague and Romantic Anticapitalism (Monthly Review)
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/t...

"Meet the New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia" is Jimmy Wu's recent piece for Bay Area Current, a new publication covering labor, culture and politics based in East Bay. In it, Jimmy beautifully describes some of the aesthetics and icons preoccupying the tech elites and their media mouthpieces right now. 

"Meet the New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia"
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech...

In 2022, rightwing influencers began using the term "doom loop" to paint San Francisco as a crime- and fentanyl-ridden hellhole that whose downfall was due to too much woke progressivism.

It didn't matter that the doom loop narrative wasn't based in reality: the media took it and ran with it. The narrative has since lost its resonance in San Francisco, but it's now being deployed in several other cities.

Jeremy Mack is back to ta...

Jenny Chan founded Pacific Atrocities Education in San Francisco after learning about some of Japan's terror campaigns across Asia through World War II. It's history that Japanese conservatives are trying to suppress.

The Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 was the chemical and biological warfare facility that conducted experiments on about 14,000 people in China. None of those 14,000 survived, while the lea...

Jemma DeCristo RETURNS! Her new book The Aesthetic Character of Blackness is out, and covers how revolutionary Black art is co-opted by capitalists and the state, and art's limits as a revolutionary tool (and it's widespread use as a counterinsurgent one).

The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us (Duke University Press)

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-aesthetic-ch...

Janetta Johnson and zen blossom speak from the home base of Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in SF. They speak on Miss Major (who led TGIJP for years); the year Janetta turned down the SF Pride grand marshal title; and the status of the Bay Area's reputation for being a haven for trans people.

TGI Justice Project
https://tgijp.org

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
...

Public universities are under constant threat of budget cuts, but somehow administrators find millions to toss at extractive tech, like ChatGPT Edu.

SF State professor Martha Kenney describes how administrators at the CSUs spent $17 million on a contract with OpenAI without asking students or professors if it was a good idea—subsidizing an industry built on hype and plaigiarism.

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San Francisco tried to atone for the war on drugs with a DEI program for recreational weed store owners. In the end, the real winners were rich white dudes like London Breed's old roommate, Conor Johnston.

Chris Roberts—America's top cannabis journalist and historian reporting from America's number-one cannabis producing region—returns. We go deep on his recent Chronicle piece detailing how it all went w...

dee(dee) c. ardan is live in the studio apartment for the first episode about trans/queer media from the Bay's past, showing that indeed, this place has been trans as hell for a long, long time.

Starting with issue one of the 1970s zine GAY SUNSHINE, we deduce how the Bay gained a reputation for being the place you come to push the trans agenda and make life hell for conservatives.

The Tenderloin in 1966: One of the earliest trans/queer actions (that we know of) against police and state violence happened at Compton's Cafeteria. Today, that space (111 Taylor Street) is occupied by Geo Group—otherwise known as the corporation that is America's number-one private prison and ICE profiteer.

Zei Wilder is helping organize the local effort to get Geo Group out of San Francisco and turn th...

For Major, who passed on October 13.

Truthout piece

https://truthout.org/articles/to-honor-miss-major-we-fight-for-the-trans-and-queer-spaces-she-built/

Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary

https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C5592116

A more recent episode with fil...

This episode was recorded before the ceasefire deal went into effect on Oct. 10. Surprising no one, Israel has already broken its promises, continuing to kill Palestinians and withholding aid.

UC Berkeley lecturer Peyrin Kao just ended a 38-day hunger strike to keep Palestine on the minds of people on campus and to raise money during Israel's US-backed starvation campaign. A few ...

Bench Ansfield is a professor in the History department at Temple University. Their book "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" covers how racial capitalism, political corruption, and the insurance industry created a world where landlords can profit more by burning their own buildings down than maintaining them. They were also part of the research team on the 2019 documentary "Decade of Fire".

Alexis Shotwell is a professor of gender and feminist studies and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. She's also an anarchist organizer particularly interested in the anarchist fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin.

Alexis's website
https://www.alexisshotwell.com/

Punch Up Collective
https://www.punchupcollective.org/

Episode with Deeg on LAGAI-Queer Insurrection!
https://www.pat...

Court support has spread to Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 100 Montgomery Street, while the mayor and SFPD continue to be complicit with ICE, against the city's sanctuary city policy. 

Lxspinguinxs (updates about SF anti-ICE actions on Instagram)
https://www.instagram.com/lxspinguinxs

Lea
on Substack
https://leftylea.substack.com

on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/leftylea_in_sf

Los Angeles T...

Boiler Room is a global event promotion company known for enlisting local DJs and promoters to produce Boiler Room-branded parties. This year, Boiler Room was acquired by a Zionist private equity firm, Superstruct/KKR.

Three people who DJ and throw parties in the Bay—Daria Lourd, DJ Fridge, and Juanny—on creating culture that is removed from the Boiler Room industrial complex.

9/19 at The Stud: No Bias
...

Tracey Helton Mitchell writes about living in San Francisco with an addiction in her memoir "The Big Fix" and now works in harm reduction in the city.

The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin
https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C3207933

Tracey on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@traceyh415.

Tracey on TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@traceyh415

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street - HBO documentary...

Jen Snyder organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America, and recently wrote a piece for Jacobin about socialist policies like free MUNI, and taxing landlords for leaving homes empty. Things that are so popular in San Francisco, people voted to pass them. But then oligarchs and their minions defanged, reversed, or litigated them to death.

San Francisco's Ultrarich Are Blocking a Zohran-Style Agenda
...

Discussing the word "affordable" and how it's weaponized by the real estate industry.

What is Affordable Housing? zine
https://gayshame.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/What_is_Affordable_Housing_2025_zine.pdf

Gay Shame zine: Steal This House: Dissecting the War on Houselessness and the Housing Crisis in the SF Bay Area
https://gayshame.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Steal-This-House-Chronological-Order....