SF Billionair Mayor Lurie & SF Building Trade ED Gonzalez Slander DSA & Help Zionists

SF Billioniare Mayor Daniel Lurie & SF Building Trade ED Rudy Gonzalez Slander DSA & Help Zionists Globally

Mayor Lurie turned the anti-Jewish rantings of a random street loon into a global indictment of San Francisco

The mayor’s inaccurate statement allowed gullible rubes and bad-faith trolls to bash this city as a hotbed of organized, political antisemitism

by JOE ESKENAZI
February 26, 2026, 12:59 pm

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.

The mayor who has made “Let’s Go, San Francisco” his mantra and improving this city’s reputation and curb appeal his raison d’être 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.

This didn’t need to happen. It really didn’t.

Yesterday, the mayor and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood held a press conference at a construction site adjacent to the Tenderloin, trumpeting a proposed tax break for sellers 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.

Following the event, Lurie took to the internet:

At an event this afternoon, a group of individuals that were chanting “tax the rich” began to shout “tax the Jews.” 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.

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—we’re better than that.

The problem here is that this didn’t happen. There was no “group” chanting antisemitic slogans; this turned out to be a single, uninvited and likely deranged woman who crashed the event.

Mission Local’s Joe Rivano Barros quickly and thoroughly quadruple-sourced this in a story published early this morning; the San Francisco Standard’s Gabriel Greschler obtained video that verified this: The strident antisemitic chanting originated from one random individual who wandered into a protest. What’s more, construction workers onsite told event organizers that they knew this woman from the neighborhood, describing her as abusive and “crazy.”

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 — What the hell was that all about? — would’ve cleared up everything. Second, Lurie erroneously attributed jarring antisemitic invective to “a group” that had organized a demonstration.

This was inaccurate. And most unfortunate: The “Let’s Go, San Francisco” mayor has allowed his city to be portrayed by bad-faith trolls and gullible rubes — worldwide, with many in positions of prominence and power — as a menacing and dangerous place and, worse, a hotbed of organized, political antisemitism.

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.

It’s a bad look and one that garnered headlines from New York to Jerusalem to all parts in-between, with outraged social media posts decrying Lurie’s depiction of the event emanating from politicians, candidates for office and millions of real and imaginary people on the internet.

All of this because of the uninvited outburst of a random and likely deranged person — a 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.

As of Thursday afternoon, Lurie’s 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.

Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness says that Lurie called her at 12:34 on Wednesday afternoon asking about the disturbance. She was not present — and is unclear why the mayor called her — but she informed him that the antisemitic shouting emanated from “a random individual” with no connection to any organized San Francisco group.

The mayor’s unfortunate statement, followed by radio silence, is poor form. His office has subsequently informed the Chronicle that it will not correct the mayor’s demonstrably incorrect statement. And the damage is done: The quip 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’s 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.

Following the antisemitic heckling, the San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council yesterday put out a statement that was even more inaccurate than the mayor’s, directly attributing the objectionable chanting to the Democratic Socialists of America. In an addendum on the Building Trades Instagram page six hours later, it belatedly acknowledged this was inaccurate.

Yet nobody said the simple words “I was wrong,” or “I shouldn’t have said that,” or “I’m sorry.” We’re living in different times, it would seem. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” is no longer a question with the gravitas it once held.

But, truth be told, nobody is hanging on the words of the Building & Construction Trades Council. The mayor of a major city, however — and one with a sizable online following and a predilection for online discourse — is 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.

To be frank, it all feels a bit like the half-bright, misplaced rage directed at San Francisco in the wake of the killing of tech executive Bob Lee. That crime was blamed on a random street crazy — and, by proxy, San Francisco itself. The city was portrayed as a dangerous and menacing place, despite record-low crime numbers.