Sad Francisco
A Bay Area based podcast telling stories that aren’t normally covered in traditional media. Featuring community organizers, resistance leaders & underrepresented voices. Working towards the liberation for all, one episode at a time.
Episodes
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....
Keith McHenry co-founded Food Not Bombs in 1980, and has been arrested more than 100 times for serving free food to homeless people and protesting the US government. A history lesson on SF's Phil Burton Democratic Party machine, black bloc, and how FNB became labeled as a domestic terrorist group by the FBI.
Food Not Bombs
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
Seven Steps to Starting a Food Not Bombs
https...
Starting in 2021, a shoplifting panic was hatched and spread by corporate media, cops, and politicians, resulting in life-or-death consequences (see: Banko Brown).
Damena Page called from SF county jail to report on the conditions, abuse, and how reporting abuse can result in retaliation.
Amy Martyn is a journalist based in the Bay, who's been covering the shoplifting panic since the beginning of the pandemic.
Damena on Instagram
...Ten years have passed since the fire that disappeared the apartments and businesses at 22nd and Mission Streets, and killed Mauricio Orellana. Many people continue to suspect landlord arson. Slumlord Hawk Ling Lou inherited the buildings in the 1990s, and owns the now-empty lot, plus about 20 other buildings in San Francisco (some under family members' names).
On May 15, 2025, despite overwhelming community dissent the Planning Com...
Sophie Lewis's book Enemy Feminisms depicts some of Western history's most despicable women, like Alma Bridwell, a Pentecostal preacher who spread the gospel of the KKK, and May French Sheldon, an explorer and genocide apologist for Belgium during the Rubber Terror in the Congo Free State. They were also some of the most celebrated feminist figures of their time, weaponizing feminism for capitalists, authoritarians, and white supre...
Seasons change, fascists remain. Another one where Toshio and Tofu have a semi-incoherent discussion about things in the works at Sad Francisco HQ.
The protests that corporate media is mostly ignoring
(Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam, Waging Nonviolence)
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/03/resistance-alive-well-us/
Citations Needed
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
Fairness and Accura...
In 1989, the Golden Gate Bridge was blockaded for the first time by a group of protesters going by the name Stop AIDS Now…or Else! They were sick of their friends dying in a government-facilitated genocide of queer people (the medical industrial complex and corporate media were complicit, too).
It wasn't till 2016 that another group of protesters (black.seed) blockaded the Bay Bridge, this time propelled by the Ferguson uprisings ...
Chris Roberts is who you call to learn how the Navy’s atomic weapons tests made parts of SF toxic, and the government’s radiation experiments on people incarcerated at San Quentin, military officers stationed at Pittsburg, and the 49ers.
Read Chris’s reporting and listen to Rebecca Bowe’s companion podcast:
Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunter's Point
sfpublicpress.org/exposed
"The Naval Scientist Who Wanted To Know ...
Zionists are still trying to pinkwash Israel's genocide, co-opting queer and trans institutions in the service of the Netanyahu dynasty and the Christian Zionists behind Project Esther.
One way they're doing this is by attempting to de-fang the radical history of Dyke March, a march that has happened every Saturday of Pride weekend in San Francisco since the early 1990s.
With Lisa Roth of Dykes for Palestine, and Jemma and Kira f...
This week, rewind to one of our earliest episodes on how for two years, the SFPD was uninvited to Gay Pride. In solidarity with the cops, politicians boycotted the 2022 Pride parade, and a few pro-cop LGBTs sold everyone else out.
New episode on the radical history of the Dyke March coming next week, also with Jemma!
Gay Shame's 5-0 Out of Pride video series: https://gayshame.net/index.php...
Self abnegation is the total denial of oneself—which is how Emile Suotonye Deweaver describes what it took to get paroled by a white supremacist institution that is about reproducing power hierarchies, not repair or rehabilitation. He writes about the experience (plus notes on shibari and Dungeons & Dragons) in his new book about surviving 21 years in the California prison system, Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine.
Ghost in th...
Annalise Ophelian directed and StormMiguel Florez co-produced MAJOR!, the beloved documentary about the beloved Miss Major. The Roxie is screening the movie for its ten year anniversary this month; its messages about community, role models and resilience are relevant as ever given our current political moment.
Annalise and StormMiguel discuss how to make a documentary without objectifying your stars, making movies in the Bay, and t...
Protest is an expression of shared anger and a way to meet and skill-build with people whose politics are aligned with you own. But how do you measure the success of a protest if you have specific material demands?
It’s an eternal question with no obvious answer that Andrew Lee deals with in their recent essay, “The end of protest,” up now on Substack.
Andrew’s “The end of protest”
https://substack.com/@xandrewleex/p-161567796
Def...
Tourmaline's work spotlighting the life of Marsha P. Johnson began with collecting a popular archive online, then a film, and now a biography that's out May 20. In the book, you learn about the notorious Black, trans heroine who moved to New York when she was thirteen, rioted at Stonewall, protected the dolls with Sylvia Rivera and their group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries/STAR, performed in and around the Village, and...
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