The many reasons why MAGA’s love for San Francisco shouldn’t stop at the Super Bowl
Homepage News, California Politics, Super Bowl
Erika D. SmithFebruary 10, 2024
It is perhaps a sign of our nonsensical political times that the silliest plays can reveal the gravest truths.
Just look at San Francisco.
As my Times colleague Julia Wick reported this week, conservatives have long believed that the city by the bay is a progressive hell of homelessness, rampant crime and drug addiction, holding up their collective noses to cheer on the 49ers in the Super Sunday’s Bowl. Anything to avoid being attracted to the Kansas City Chiefs and Travis Kelce and his girlfriend, the ubiquitous Taylor Swift.
This, of course, is the natural culmination of the many inescapable MAGA conspiracy theories floating around social media, most of which insist that Swift, Kelce and perhaps the NFL are plotting with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump and return Joe Biden to the White House. November.
I wonder who will win the Super Bowl, said Vivek Ramaswamy, the obnoxious former Republican presidential candidate and vice presidential hopeful. And I wonder if there will be a big presidential endorsement this fall from an artificial culturally supported bunch.
Not to be outdone, whoever runs the hugely popular and aptly named far-right X account End Wokeness wrote: What is happening to Taylor Swift is not organic and natural. It’s an operation, we all feel it. We all know it.
And so now we have influencers like Rogan OHandley (aka DC Draino) offering a two-week truce with San Francisco to encourage more Americans to root for the 49ers.
“Mr. Pfizer and his girlfriend will tour the country as ‘world champions’ to help elect Joe Biden,” he wrote. “World War III will likely ensue during a second Biden term and millions will die. The fate of the free world rests on your shoulders.”
In response to such staggering backhanded compliments, Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) told my Times colleague Wick that it was a little strange to see people who normally hate San Francisco now cheering for San Francisco.
In response to his response, I say it’s clear these people haven’t been paying attention. Because if they did, they wouldn’t hate San Francisco. Because they would know that much of the politics going on in the city lately is more aligned with the politics of a far-right conservative than that of a far-left progressive.
It’s true!
While those of us in Los Angeles have been busy electing an abolitionist to the city council, San Francisco began by ousting its reformist district attorney and then ramped up the criminalization of homelessness and drug addiction.
Why this is happening at least on the surface has a lot to do with Mayor London Breed. She has never really been progressive. But since the pandemic, she has moved even further to the wealthy and organized right, in an effort to calm increasingly fed-up residents and win an uphill battle for re-election.
When voters nominated Chesa Boudin as district attorney in 2022, Breed endorsed former prosecutor Brooke Jenkins to do so. Since then, Jenkins has come under fire for a variety of unprogressive issues, including the time she spoke the silent part out loud by supporting regular encampment cleanups because unhoused people should feel uncomfortable accepting offers of shelter.
Meanwhile, Breed emerged as an early and outspoken advocate for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide once and for all whether it is unconstitutional for cities in the West to strip camps of public property. And in January, the Supreme Court announced that it would indeed review rulings by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has long maintained that denying unhoused people a place to sleep is cruel and unusual punishment.
You wouldn’t know it from watching Fox News or following the social media posts of MAGA types, but Breed is hardly alone among Democrats complaining about the tents on sidewalks and RVs under highways, and how the courts are have limited options to do much about it.
Rather, it’s the progressives, the people who apparently no longer dominate politics in San Francisco, who are actually uneasy about the can of worms that the conservative Supreme Court justices are about to open. Even LA Mayor Karen Bass said last month that she’s concerned that cities are moving “in the direction of criminalizing people who don’t have a home because we can.”
But I’m leaving.
Even more reasons for the far right to reconsider leaving their hearts in San Francisco:
Even more reasons for the far right to reconsider leaving their hearts in San Francisco:
The policy of having the police arrest not just drug dealers but drug users, holding them until they sober up and then forcing them into treatment, you know, because that worked so well during the war on drugs. All in an effort to eradicate the very real problem of open-air drug markets that conservative commentators love to mock.
There is also an upcoming ballot measure that would require adults receiving benefits to undergo substance abuse screening and, if found to be addicted, to enter treatment to continue receiving financial benefits.
“Nothing goes without accountability anymore,” Breed told the San Francisco Chronicle, in words straight out of the Reagan era. ‘No more handouts without accountability.
Returning to these allegations of lawlessness, there is also a plan to ask voters to relax both restrictions on police vehicle pursuits and reporting requirements for officers’ use of force.
And just a few days ago, Breed announced that she is backing a ballot measure that would eliminate parts of Proposition 47, the 2014 law often criticized by crime-fighting Republicans for simply banning drug possession and property crimes worth less than $950 turned into misdemeanors. .
The new measure would make it easier to throw the proverbial book at people, especially those selling fentanyl.
We are making progress on property crimes,” said Breed, according to my Times colleague Anabel Sosa. “But the challenges we face related to fentanyl and organized retail theft require real changes in our state laws.
I could be wrong, but that certainly doesn’t sound like something someone who is the mayor of a progressive hellhole would say.
So fear not, far-right social media trolls and believers of MAGA conspiracy theories. On Sunday, safe in these serious political truths, you can make a guilt-free case for the 49ers and maybe even San Francisco the other 364 days of the year.
Travis and Taylor already have enough fans.

Fernando Dowling is an author and political journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He has a deep understanding of the political landscape and a passion for analyzing the latest political trends and news.