Mayor Daniel Lurie is on the internet more than cats. Our avuncular mayor is usually notably anodyne and disciplined, and a stickler for message control. But on Wednesday, he showed shockingly poor online judgment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The mayor who has made \u201cLet\u2019s Go, San Francisco\u201d his mantra and improving this city\u2019s reputation and curb appeal his raison d\u2019\u00eatre has inflicted a ton of damage on San Francisco. Our mayor yesterday gave a free pass to useful idiots and bad-faith trolls to defame and undermine this city. All it took was one ill-advised click of a button.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
This didn\u2019t need to happen. It really didn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yesterday, the mayor and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood held a press conference<\/a> at a construction site adjacent to the Tenderloin, trumpeting a proposed tax break for buyers of properties of $10 million or more. Protesters from the Democratic Socialists of America were outside of the construction site; it was fenced off, and the fence was draped with an opaque orange covering so that neither side could see the other. This turned out to be significant.\u00a0<\/p>\n Following the event, Lurie took to the internet<\/a>:\u00a0<\/p>\n At an event this afternoon, a group of individuals that were chanting \u201ctax the rich\u201d began to shout \u201ctax the Jews.\u201d This was an event I put on with Supervisor Mahmood, labor leaders, and dozens of workers to announce a plan that creates more jobs for those workers and housing for San Franciscans.\u00a0<\/p>\n Suggesting that Jews are wealthy is a tired trope, and targeting our community at an event focused on creating economic opportunity for San Franciscans is decidedly antisemitic. I will never accept hate directed at the Jewish community or any community in our city. Those are not San Francisco values\u2014we\u2019re better than that.<\/p>\n The problem here is that this didn\u2019t happen. There was no \u201cgroup\u201d chanting antisemitic slogans; this turned out to be a single, uninvited and likely deranged woman who crashed the event.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mission Local\u2019s Joe Rivano Barros quickly and thoroughly quadruple-sourced this<\/a> in a story published early this morning; the San Francisco Standard\u2019s Gabriel Greschler obtained video<\/a> that verified this: The strident antisemitic chanting originated from one random individual who wandered into a protest. What\u2019s more, construction workers onsite told event organizers that they knew this woman from the neighborhood, describing her as abusive and \u201ccrazy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s some disagreement online over whether it was the group of protestors that was chanting \u201ctax the Jews\u201d or a singular person. The audio appears to show it was a singular person. https:\/\/t.co\/4wLugyZkvn<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler (@ggreschler) February 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n The mayor and others at the press conference could not see through the fence, and could not identify the source of the shouting. But Lurie went on to make two unfortunate decisions. First, he posted about this without any corroboration; everyone knows everyone in this town and one phone call \u2014\u00a0What the hell was that all about? \u2014\u00a0would\u2019ve cleared up everything. Second, Lurie erroneously attributed jarring antisemitic invective to \u201ca group\u201d that had organized a demonstration.\u00a0<\/p>\n This was inaccurate. And most unfortunate: The \u201cLet\u2019s Go, San Francisco\u201d mayor has allowed his city to be portrayed by bad-faith trolls and gullible rubes \u2014\u00a0worldwide, with many in positions of prominence and power \u2014 as a menacing and dangerous place and, worse, a hotbed of organized, political antisemitism.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is the key phrase here: A not-insignificant subsection of the internet was happy to pick up the ball Lurie tossed them and run with it by claiming that organized, political antisemitism is the inevitable outcome of leftist government in Democrat-run cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a bad look and one that garnered headlines from New York<\/a> to Jerusalem<\/a> to all parts in-between<\/a>, with outraged social media posts decrying Lurie\u2019s depiction of the event emanating from politicians, candidates for office and millions of real and imaginary people on the internet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n All of this because of the uninvited outburst of a random and likely deranged person \u2014\u00a0a person who was, subsequently, chased from the scene by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a group nobody is mistaking for the Green Berets.\u00a0<\/p>\n When a protest chant shifts from “tax the rich” to “tax the Jews,” there is no ambiguity \u2014 that is antisemitism.<\/p>\n Thank you, Mayor @DanielLurie<\/a>, for calling this out without hesitation. Equating Jewish identity with wealth is one of the most persistent and dangerous antisemitic\u2026 https:\/\/t.co\/0jIeJG7W47<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) February 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n As of Thursday afternoon<\/a>, Lurie\u2019s inaccurate tweet remains online and uncorrected, more than 21 hours after it was published. His office has not responded to multiple queries regarding whether he will recant or modify his erroneous and damaging statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is poor form. But the damage is done: The quip <\/a>about mistruths traveling around the world before the truth has had time to lace up its boots is often attributed to Jonathan Swift, though it could be even older. Regardless, it was true when mistruths were distributed via a Gutenberg-style press. It\u2019s even truer and more relevant now in our chaotic and diffracted internet era, when troll accounts, bad-faith partisan tabloids and the requisite gullible rubes amalgamate to spread bullshit through the ether at the speed of light.<\/p>\n Following the antisemitic heckling, the San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council yesterday put out a statement that was even more inaccurate than the mayor\u2019s, directly attributing the objectionable chanting to the Democratic Socialists of America. In an addendum on the Building Trades Instagram page six hours later, it subsequently acknowledged this was inaccurate.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet nobody said the simple words \u201cI was wrong,\u201d or \u201cI shouldn\u2019t have said that,\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u201d We\u2019re living in different times, it would seem. \u201cHave you no sense of decency, sir?<\/a>\u201d is no longer a question with the gravitas it once held.<\/p>\n But, truth be told, nobody is hanging on the words of the Building and Construction Trades Council. The mayor of a major city, however \u2014\u00a0and one with a sizable online following and a predilection for online discourse \u2014\u00a0is a different thing. Lurie amplified what appear to be the unhinged rantings of a random loon on the street. As a result, the eyes of the world turned to his city and perceived something sinister and organized and dangerous.\u00a0<\/p>\n To be frank, it all feels a bit like the half-bright, misplaced rage directed at San Francisco writ large in the wake of the killing of tech executive Bob Lee.<\/a> That crime was blamed on a random street crazy \u2014 and, by proxy San Francisco itself. The city was portrayed as a dangerous and menacing place, despite record-low crime numbers.\u00a0<\/p>\n As you may well know, a wealthy fellow tech worker who knew Lee <\/a>was subsequently found guilty of second-degree murder in his killing. This is not exactly an indictment of San Francisco writ large (and the killer lived in Emeryville).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, the actual activities of an apparent loon on the street are again being used to brand all of San Francisco as an unseemly and menacing place. Once again, it\u2019s bogus: There is no organized political antisemitism in San Francisco and antisemitism is not a path to political relevance here. Lurie, the son of a rabbi, is of course, Jewish. But as recently as 2022, a majority of the members of the Board of Supervisors were Jewish. Every reporter mentioned in this story is Jewish. It behooves no one to delegitimize the very real issue of antisemitism by conflating the random shoutings of a solitary troubled individual on the street with a broader, organized and relevant movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n That is a bitter own goal and deeply damaging. The people using this largely imaginary account of San Francisco antisemitism to denigrate this city are not going to change their worldviews based on accurate reporting. The painful truth is that \u201cHave you no sense of decency, sir?<\/a>\u201d is not only a question that no longer holds any gravitas \u2014\u00a0it is a question that no longer holds any relevance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t