First a glossary, for those of you who might not be well-versed in San Francisco's political clade. For historical reasons, it is impossible for a Republican to get elected in this city, so all the Republicans register as Democrats and call themselves "moderates". What they actually are is "neoliberals", or, if you like, methane-breathing space zombie free-marketeers. The people to the left of them call themselves "progressives". And "centrist" means somewhere between "Libertarian" and "MAGA".

Mission Local: What do new advocacy groups really want?

They may be difficult to tell apart, but together they represent a tsunami of political spending unlike any San Francisco has seen before. [...]

"What's new is the scale, the tone, the focus on raw politics and the, for lack of a better word, brazenness of the behavior," he said. "You have many of the richest people in the world behaving like aggrieved and powerless activists ... When the powerful begin to behave as if they're powerless, it can heat up the conversation awfully fast."

Sometimes, the groups' objectives can be described as urbanist [...] But others are straightforwardly conservative, such as weakening police oversight; increasing punitive consequences for drug users and dealers, homeless people and the mentally ill; and increasing the power of the mayor in a city with one of the strongest mayoral systems in the country.

Yes, they want an imperial mayor because these techbro edgelords fundamentally don't believe in democracy. They don't want consensus, or oversight; they want their own strongman in place, and they want the bought to stay bought.

Breed, like the rest of the Willie Brown machine that she inherited, stays bought.

Ross, for his part, said the involvement of the wealthy was damaging in more ways than one. The fact that there are such vast sums of money at play in the city, and the fact that San Francisco is often a "test lab" for new technology industries like short-term rentals, ride-sharing or driverless cars, means local regulations have an outsized importance -- and electoral campaigns doubly so.

"The problem in San Francisco with politics is different from the problem you have anywhere else in the country," said Ross. "Most places, there's not enough money to run effective campaigns. San Francisco is the opposite: There's too much money."

Mission Local: A fun interactive graph showing the interconnected network of these PACs and donors:

While the policies and strategies of the groups are all a little different, they are pulling in the same general direction. This constantly evolving coalition is largely unified by a desire for more police funding, harsher penalties for drug crime, more support for housing developers and housing construction, and the concentration of mayoral power. A huge proportion of the network's cash comes from extremely wealthy tech and real estate donors.

48 Hills: The dizzying web of big-money influence:

Breed's entire re-election campaign at this point seems to be promoting ballot measures that demonize the poor and promote the cops. I suppose that's a strategy. [...]

The San Francisco Democratic Party endorsements are not what Mayor Breed would like. The party backs both incumbent judges (Breed has taken no position, but her allies clearly want to intimidate the judiciary since they have nobody else to blame at this point for crime.) The DCCC also opposes Props. C, E, and F, which are lynchpins of the mayor's agenda and re-election campaign.

That's why the billionaires want to take over the party. In the March primary, the DCCC will have a lot of influence. In the November general, when probably 100,000 voters who pay little attention to local politics will show up to vote against Trump, the Democratic Party endorsements will have a huge impact.

And Breed's allies want to be sure the balance of power shifts, and she gets that nod.

Guardian: Inside tech billionaires' push to reshape San Francisco politics:

"This is a $20bn hostile takeover of San Francisco by people with vested real estate and tech interests, and who don't want anyone else deciding how the city is run," he said, referring to the combined wealth of the most prolific new donors. [...]

The priorities of these deep-pocketed figures have varied. Oberndorf, the hedge fund manager, had been a long-time charter school advocate and major Republican party donor. Larsen, the crypto investor, has been a strong backer of expanding police ranks and surveillance capabilities. Tan, the Y Combinator CEO, has pushed for business policies favorable to crypto, artificial intelligence and autonomous cars.

New Republic: The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of a Right-Wing San Francisco:

A rogue's gallery of big tech edgelords and their reactionary hangers-on have a plan to remake the city in their own weirdo image. [...]

Tan's more recent drunk tweets also backfired pretty badly. As it turns out, assassination talk gets taken rather seriously in the city where Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered in 1978. Within days, Tan's targets began receiving death threats in their mailboxes. "I don't give a fuck," Tan had declared during his tweetstorm. But he soon changed course, deleting his alcohol-fueled rage posts and hiring a crisis P.R. firm to help with damage control as the negative headlines erupted. A mandatory show of contrition was seemingly ordered: "I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision," he said in a statement.

It was a terrible first impression to make on voters, most of whom had probably never heard of their city's new self-anointed political king until he became so flamboyantly unhinged and flew off the handle. [...]

Tan and fellow tech barons have promised to invest up to $15 million in local races. Tech-funded front groups are rallying support for a slate of anti-progressive candidates who promise swift action to solve crime, homelessness, and drug addiction. They frame their politics as "moderate," but the terms "reactionary" and "right-wing" often fit better. Their policy wish list reads like a Republican platform: more police funding (along with a repeal of police reform and criminal justice reform); a return to the "war on drugs" (with an emphasis on jailing homeless drug users); a rejection of harm reduction strategies like overdose prevention (in a city where 806 people died of overdoses last year); and the billionaire-funded expansion of mass video surveillance. [...]

If Tan's vision aligns with Musk's, then he's clearly not trying to incubate a centrist revolution. No, this is a decidedly extreme brand of politics, though it's not exactly innovative. Tech bros like Tan think they are reinventing whole systems, conjuring terms like "effective accelerationism" to describe their philosophy. But the ancient Greeks already put a name to their core ideas over 2,000 years ago. For example, there's plutocracy, or rule by the wealthy, and autocracy, rule by dictatorship.

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