Talking SF politics w/Misha Steier
San Francisco has a real bad rep in the national imagination these days. If you follow the news it can feel like this place is melting — nonstop crime, homelessness, hardened villains roaming the streets, Walgreens stores under siege, citizens cowering in fear. It’s like there’s a big media psyop being run to make it seem like even the tiniest decent left-leaning policy is leading to ruin and destruction. Even New Yorkers are afraid of San Francisco now.
Evgenia and I have wanted to focus more on local politics ever since we moved here a year ago. So to kick it off we decided talk with Misha Steier, a SF native who’s been involved with the DSA and the left scene. Misha and I first bonded over the Shahid Buttar fiasco, which the left in SF helped prop up and which I helped bring down — to everyone’s benefit but Shahid’s.
We talk about SF’s long-gone radical cred, people’s ignorance of local politics, ways to combat moneyed interests electorally, and the importance of journalism for democracy. Check it out.
—Yasha Levine
Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.
Talking SF politics w/Misha Steier
"R&D for American politics"-. Yes. The mad scientists' lab for how to make Dems suck and get away with it--sorta. Again, you guys have a perspective you just can't get anywhere else...
I thought the scary thing about SF politics is that you have even more deranged billionaires than we have here in NYC!
Rabid finance bros roaming wild in the streets! No rent control! Homeless people actually having to sleep rough!*
(Granted, SF is like “what if a tiny chunk of Manhattan was its own city” because the Bay Area is more Balkanized than, well, the Balkans.)
(*In NYC homeless people have a legal “right to shelter”, which means that the city will put them up in prison-like former motels, though they can at least come and go during the day. Some homeless people choose to sleep rough because the shelters suck, so before severe weather events the city sends out social workers to ask them not to freeze to death. Yay. Though Eric Adams has been doing California-style homeless harassment since he took office, because he’s a psycho ex-cop.)