It’s time to dive back into Politics… it’s so over, Prop 50 and Gavin Newsom on Fortnite Fridays… One Battle After Another ¡Viva la Revolución!… A new challenger appears on the SF scene, Does he have the sauce… We’re so back?
The politics machine never stops. Dread it, Run from it, It arrives all the same. The past ten months have felt like such a blur, with way too many things to get into here, but I wanted to share some of the goings-on that I’ve found interesting and maybe you will too.
Firstly, for those in California, Prop 50 is on the ballot for this November, so surprise you get to vote on an off year!! Personally, I love voting, so this is basically like a bonus Christmas. You may be asking yourself, what the heck is Prop 50? so I’ve enlisted Sasha to explain1 :
Prop 50 is result of things being #NotNormal and these #UnprecedentedTimes were in.
Texas (and, seemingly to come, other states with Republican state legislatures) have embarked on an unprecedented kind of gerrymandering, where they are actively redrawing their congressional districts to affect the outcome of next year’s election and keep the House of Representatives under Republican control. Historically midterms have been killer for the incumbent party, so in typical fashion Republicans are trying to tip the scales in their favor in a vie to hold on to power.
In #Normal Times all states redraw their maps at the same time – every 10 years after the census, as prescribed by the constitution. State governments have a lot of authority to decide how to draw their districts, and in Texas, the legislature can redraw the districts at almost any time, but this is the first time they’ve used that power and they’re doing it explicitly to try and skew election results because the president told them to.
California’s state constitution doesn’t allow our state legislature to do something similar, but they have the power to amend the constitution if approved by voters. This is what Prop 50 is, an amendment to the state constitution, which grants the state legislature the power to redraw the congressional map until 2030. This would temporarily give our state government the same powers Texas (and other states) have, and the intent is to use this to alter California’s map in response to Texas and other states altering their congressional maps if/when they try and skew the election for Congress. It’s highly unusual, but again we’re in a #HighlyUnusualTime.
California has tried to prevent partisan gerrymandering within its borders, but there is no federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, and other Republican-controlled states are taking advantage of that to try and disenfranchise Democratic voters. Prop 50 would put California on an equal footing with those states through 2030, giving us time to respond to their actions and a chance to, hopefully, make changes at the federal level to reduce gerrymandering going forward.
So while normally we are opposed to Gerrymandering here at Damian Writes About Stuff, now is not the time so we Strongly Recommend a YES vote on Prop 50.
People have been begging Democratic leadership to show any sort of opposition to the administration, and Prop 50 is a concrete step in the right direction. It shows that the Dems aren’t out of fight yet, while also helping Gavin grow his national brand, which brings me to my next bit, highlighting one of Gavin’s forays into expanding his online reach.
Gavin Newsom on Fortnight Fridays with ConnorEatsPants. Online media is becoming more and more influential, and is cited as one of the key factors behind the Democrats losses in last year’s elections. Money is pouring into efforts to build up a more Dem-friendly online media ecosystem2 and search for the mythical “Joe Rogan of the Left” is on going. Everyone keeps saying the Democrats need a stronger online presence and the Gavin Newson Social Media Interns that run his twitter account have been going hog wild, with what I’ve heard pretty positive reception. That still didn’t prepare for this though.
Last Friday, he played Fortnite with streamer ConnorEatsPants on Twitch and what followed completely broke my brain. I was hearing questions and push back that is seldom heard from mainstream media, all while Gavin struggled to not to get downed while playing on his Splatoon 2 Nintendo Switch. This thread by reporter Benjamin S. Weiss has the full recap, but one of craziest moments was hearing them debating a one-state vs two-state solution, absolutely surreal for me, which is saying something with how terminally online I am.
The “median voters” in my life seem to generally like Dark Woke Gavin’s posting so it seems to be working for him??? He seems to be the frontrunner runner 2028 Democratic nomination so maybe it is his to lose.
Lastly, Gavin gets a shoutout for signing SB 79 into law overhauling zoning and making Transit Oriented Development easier to build, despite waiting two weeks to do so, but like I said he’s been occupied.
Movie break: I couldn’t wait to talk about Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie One Battle After Another, you should go see it in theaters right now, right after you finish reading this. Without spoilers the story is about the present day life of an imagined revolutionary generation and how in the end they couldn’t accomplish their goals. One of the revolutionaries, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Bob Ferguson, is living an apathetic life with his daughter before his past resurfaces forcing him back into action.
This movie has everything, it was hilarious at points, super suspenseful, and Sensi Bencio fucking killed it so I give it a Must Watch in Theaters rating3. It is an interesting compliment to Ari Aster’s Eddington, which came out earlier this year. It similarly deals with politic conflict in a western setting, but leaves you full of despair that things will only get worse as opposed to the sorta hopeful ending of OBAA. We can’t rely on the previous generation, if you want change in the world you have to do it yourself no one is coming to save you.
Too much computer time is definitely bad for you so I decided to go outside and check out an event in person.
Saikat Chakrabarti is attempting the seemingly insurmountable task of unseating Nancy Pelosi. She has represented San Francisco in Congress since 1987, and while many have challenged her, no one has ever come within 50 points of her a general election. Saikat seems to seek out these odds, in 2016, working on the Bernie Sanders campaign and in 2018, he helped AOC for her first run which unseated a 20-year incumbent democrat. Now, he’s hoping to leverage those experiences here in SF.
I went to see him speak at a campaign event at The Chapel where around 600 politically motivated and mostly younger attendees came to hear from him. Before the speaking portion, I walked around and asked people how they heard of him, the majority people said online through podcasts, Instagram, or TikTok4. This tracks with the digital campaign style he is running, one we will likely see more off as a result of Zohran Mamdani’s success with it in NYC(which even got Andrew Cuomo doing shortform videos). One concern amongst the leftist I’ve talked to is that Saikat is wealthy; as he “won the startup lottery,” and has since taken a rather unusual trajectory. During the speech, he brought it up and gave a solid response, saying that he was incredibly lucky and that the experience made him realize how rigged the system is. At the end of the day, he said, he didn’t work any harder than teachers or janitors (which I though was a pretty decent answer). He over the rest of his policy positions getting more comfortable as he and the crowd warmed up before finishing up with a call to action for canvassers.
I’ll be honest and say I liked what I heard, he did well during the Q&A portion, and seems like he has enough charisma to make a splash. I’ve had a bit of writers block the past few months but was partially inspired to write about this event from reading Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 seeing a lot of parallels to current moment.
The book covers the 1972 presidential election through the eyes of Hunter S. Thompson as he follows the campaigns state to state, from the primaries to the conventions and the general election. In the more than 50 years since it was written, so much has changed, yet the Democratic establishment machine still tries to operate as it always has.
For those unfamiliar, the 1972 election saw Democrats searching for a candidate who could stave off a second Nixon term. The field was large, but most people assumed it was a formality, and that one of the establishment candidates would be a shoo-in to win. But through a grassroots movement, George McGovern defied all odds and secured the nomination5. Party insiders longed for a perfect centrist Democrat who could capture the votes of those uneasy with McGovern’s radicalism while peeling support from the right. To this day, they’re still looking. I picked up this book because many lefty journalists cite Hunter S. Thompson as an aspirational figure and wanted to see why. One of the interesting through lines of the book was how HST was apprehensive to be hopeful. Even as McGovern looked like he was going to win the nomination, he remained convinced that at any moment the floor would be pulled out from under him and was surprised each time it wasn’t.
One last thing I’ll leave you with was something Saikat said while talking about San Francisco’s historical role in national politics , from ADA and LGBTQ movements. It was something to the effect of: “The country moves when San Francisco pushes.”
- Minor edits for flow and humor ↩︎
- See this article by Taylor Lorenz on the more shady aspects of this: https://www.wired.com/story/dark-money-group-secret-funding-democrat-influencers/ ↩︎
- I could talk yo you all night about this ↩︎
- I did poll on my Instagram and about 50% of people who responded and live in SF had heard of him. ↩︎
- He went on to get absolutely spanked in the general, after establishment Democrats offered little help and the drama surrounding his VP pick. ↩︎
Damian Writes About Stuff 
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