The Weekly Digest (March 26, 2023)
Happy Sunday, Brionies! Here’s what you need to know about San Francisco politics this week and beyond:
Top of Mind
SFPD officer, husband, and father Kevin Brugaletta was critically injured on Tuesday when high winds and rain felled a tree that crushed his car. Officer Brugaletta is in stable but serious condition at SF General. A GoFundMe has been set up to help his family with ongoing expenses (his wife is pregnant with their second child, due soon). Please support in any way you can.
Last week marked 20 years since the beginning of the Iraq War, yielding a flurry of op-eds and thinkpieces. Standing out from the crowd was this reflection by an Iraqi refugee who, despite having lost his brother in the war, still celebrates the freedom his country now enjoys.
City Hall
The Board of Supervisors and its committees are not meeting this week because it’s, uh… checks notes… “Spring Recess” – not to be confused with “Summer Recess,” when Board meetings are suspended for the entirety of August, or “Winter Recess”, which covers half of December. No, this is not a joke, and yes, this is more or less the same calendar as your typical middle schooler.
Sources close to the Board report that any supervisor who fails to return from recess promptly at the bell will have to serve at least three after-school detentions.
If you’re new to the Weekly Digest, you might want to check out the City Hall section of last week’s edition, where we explained the ins and outs of a little known, but significant, source of corruption in city government: “behested payments.”
Happenings around town
SOAR D1 presents “Where Does the Money Go?” with Supervisor Connie Chan
Monday, March 27 at 6:30pm, Richmond Rec Center
The Hoover Institution presents “Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions”
Tuesday, March 28 at 10am, online
Wednesday, March 29 at 4pm, 654 Mission St.
The Commonwealth Club presents “How Religion Shaped the Western World”
Tuesday, April 4 at 5:30pm, 110 The Embarcadero
Wednesday, April 5 at 6:30pm, 2505 Mariposa St.
The Federalist Society presents “A Conversation with Judge Carlos Bea (9th Circuit Court of Appeals)”
Thursday, April 13 at 6pm, Villa Taverna
Saturday, April 22 at 6pm, Rohnert Park
Log Cabin Republicans of San Francisco present Spencer Klavan on “How to Save the West”
Wednesday, April 26, event details coming soon
What we’re reading
Down on the peninsula, students at Stanford Law School decided to repeatedly embarrass themselves by demonstrating how little they understand the philosophical underpinnings of the First Amendment, joining with the school’s Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to heckle Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Notably, after a series of similar incidents at Yale Law School, a couple of conservative judges announced that they would no longer be hiring clerks from YLS due to the school’s tolerance for cancel culture and bias against conservatives, which boycott prompted a “course correction” (clerkships are the sweet, sweet flavor that ambitious laws students crave).
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: Stanford Law’s dean apologized to Judge Duncan, placed the the DEI dean on leave, and introduced a new curricular requirement for students covering the importance of free speech and, y’know, how to behave like an adult. What can we say? Go Bears.
Bonus: dueling Wall Street Journal op-eds by the judge and the DEI dean.
Bonus bonus: Liberal college professors to the rescue?
In other higher education news, the federal judge presiding over Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard tried to bury an important part of the trial record involving a “joke” memo written by a federal official and Harvard’s Dean of Admissions. The memo “referenced certain Asian stereotypes” and included “anti-Asian remarks.” What exactly is going on here?
SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina are a pair of cases that were argued before the Supreme Court last October, concerning whether universities subject to federal non-discrimination laws (Harvard, though a private institution, receives enormous amounts of government funding, which brings it under the jurisdiction of the Civil Rights Act) can ever use race as a factor in admissions. Essentially, SCOTUS will be ruling (in a few short months) on whether to overturn its earlier decision that affirmative action is permissible in limited circumstances.
These cases are being brought now because SFFA uncovered a trove of data showing that affirmative action practices at Harvard systematically disadvantaged Asian applicants with superior standardized test scores, academic achievements, and extracurricular resumes by giving them lower scores on subjective measures like “personality rating.” In other words, Harvard wanted to admit more black and Hispanic students, but wasn’t willing to get rid of its legacy admit and athlete pipelines, so it had to screw over the biggest pool of qualified applicants, Asian Americans, by saying that, on the whole, they’re just not fun enough or something.
What does any of that have to do with San Francisco? Well, a similar dynamic played out in 2020 when Lowell High School changed its admissions process from merit-based to lottery. Before then, Lowell was revered as a place where academically gifted students from families who couldn’t afford to pay $50,000 a year in private school tuition could receive a world class education. But progressives in the city decided Lowell wasn’t “diverse” enough, which is code for “too many Asians.” That decision, along with a series of racist tweets by a Board of Education Commissioner, prompted the successful recall of three members of the BOE in 2022.
Healthy liberalism is motivated by a skepticism of tradition, but that political philosophy becomes toxic when it morphs into a rejection of any and all forms of hierarchy as being inherently artificial, unjust, and biased – and never based on hard work or talent. Hence, the woke left’s War on Merit™, the first shot of which in SFUSD was fired by then-BOE president Matt Haney when he killed 8th grade algebra (in the name of equity, of course).
Unsurprisingly, and despite SFUSD’s attempt to fudge the numbers, math achievement scores tanked after now-Assembly Member Haney’s reform went into effect. And, to add insult to injury, SFUSD apparently didn’t equity hard enough, because our public schools perennially rank as having among the worst racial achievement gaps in the state.
Energized by last year’s recall, though, public school parents are fighting back, both in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area, and SFUSD is finally moving away from New Age-y nonsense in its curriculum.
Given the above, it’s not surprising that many Asians San Franciscans are shifting right politically. Of course – crime is also a motivating factor, something Supervisor Ahsha Safai hopes to capitalize on in his recently announced bid to become mayor.
Quick hits
Judge rejects plea deal proposed by Alameda County D.A. for man accused of 3 killings
Apropos of which, Alameda County D.A.'s office sees resignations over ethical qualms
California laws that violate basic constitutional freedoms are having a rough month in federal court.
The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office appears to have a serious ethics problem.
That’s certainly bad, but maybe not quite as bad as what’s happening over at TODCO.
Speaking of (allegedly) corrupt city contractors, check out this great interactive chart of who gets 5.8 billion of your tax dollars each year, courtesy of the Chronicle.
Board Of Supervisors Considers Plan To End Unsheltered Homelessness. The tldr here is that San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is aligned with activists who want to “destigmatize” living on the street. They know that if Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s A Place for All legislation is implemented, the city can compel homeless individuals into shelter in compliance with Martin v. Boise. So, rather than developing a campus model or a network of congregate shelters, HSH put forth a plan it knew was unfeasible, relying primarily on expensive permanent supportive housing units. A tragic case of ideology blinding folks to human suffering.
Gavin Newsom wants voters to approve his plan to fund housing for mentally ill people. See, also, here. But, as Tom Wolf explains, we don’t need more money, we need to spend the enormous amount of money we already have correctly.
Department of This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
As conservatives, we at the Briones Society are rarely shocked upon discovering an inane, counter-productive government regulation – but, c’mon, speed limits on aircraft? Seriously?!?
Palate cleanser