As recently as a few years ago many would have identified San Francisco as the capital of liberal, or at least Democratic, America. The Vice-President was from the Bay Area and had gotten her start in elected office in San Francisco. One former mayor of San Francisco was the governor of California and an emerging national leader of the Democratic Party. Another former mayor was an aging, but groundbreaking, US Senator. The Speaker of the House and longtime leader of her party in that chamber was San Francisco’s congresswoman. This was still a time when people would, inaccurately, say things like a conservative in San Francisco was a radical in the rest of America.

Over the last few years, something began to change. In San Francisco, right-wing politics reemerged, initially in the form of self-styled feel-good civic groups sneaking conservative messaging into other fora-come for the garbage clean-up and the opportunity to mingle with other young singles, and stay for the right-wing spin about San Francisco. 

Over time this grew into violent threats by conservative donors, deliberate efforts to misrepresent San Francisco to the rest of the country, ham-fisted attempts to grab political power through poorly thought out initiatives like Proposition D in November 2024 and the ill-fated campaign of Mark Farrell for mayor in that same election.

In the last few months something has shifted. Since last November’s election, San Francisco’s role in national politics has begun to change dramatically. Instead of occupying its usual, if largely symbolic, role as a center of liberal politics, San Francisco has become a well-spring of MAGA political players. It turns out the toxic brew of extreme wealth and odd libertarian-populist politics that the tech sector seemed to be producing in and around San Francisco has a reach far beyond the city.

It is striking how many of the worst actors in this Trump administration have some kind of connection to San Francisco. The MAGA movement has many factions, but the most ascendant are what might be called the crypto-goniffs. This faction is distinct from the other MAGA factions not simply because of their association with tech and their generally nebbishy disposition, but because of their focus on massively looting the public coffers and their evangelism for a battery of alternatives to democracy that at first sound mostly strange, but that, upon closer reading, are quite concerning.

The crypto-goniffs embrace the angry white nationalism of the rest of the MAGA movement but elevate to a different level, believing not just that one group of Americans, white, straight and Christian, should have a higher level of citizenship than everybody else, but that a handful of individuals, specifically themselves, should have unlimited power and immunity due to their brilliance — in most cases because they designed a popular app.

The two most prominent one-time San Franciscans in this administration are Vice President J.D. Vance and Elon Musk. The latter has grabbed the mantle of leadership of the putsch from the elderly and addled President.

There are many others. Sam Altman, fresh from a stint on Mayor Daniel Lurie’s transition team, has publicly kissed the Trump ring. David Sacks, a longtime funder of reactionary causes in San Francisco and elsewhere, is now Trump’s AI and crypto czar. Garry Tan, in many respects the face of right-wing politics in San Francisco is shifting his attention to Washington. Vance’s erstwhile mentor Peter Thiel’s fingerprints are all over this administration.

Collectively these one-time San Franciscans are playing a major role in the dismantling of American democracy. Equally significantly, they are drawing on, and experimenting with, ideas for post-democratic America, from Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State to Marc Andreessen’s disturbing Kazcynskiesque ramblings about techno-optimism, that have roots, not just geographically in San Francisco, but in the political culture that has emerged in some quarters of that city over the last few years.

A year or eighteen months ago, anybody who sought to draw attention to the ascendant crypto-goniff right in San Francisco was dismissed as being alarmist while too many viewed the idea of any kind of right-wing politics in San Francisco as laughable. Today, those people, reports, articles and blogs should be understood not just as prescient but as warnings that were ignored at great cost. 

It is no longer quite so true that San Francisco is a test ground for these ideas because now Musk and his coterie of one-time San Franciscans have moved on and are applying their model for shifting wealth upwards and destroying their democracy on the national stage.

Nobody has chronicled the dark fascist corners of the San Francisco based tech world as tirelessly or powerfully as Gil Duran who, in a recent post stated simply “everything Elon Musk and his tech cronies are doing to our government is what Balaji Srinivasan spelled out in his network state cult manifestos – a tech CEO takeover of government, the purging of institutions, the rise of crypto corruption as a dominant economic force, the quest for new territory.” Duran is right and unfortunately the civic pride slogan that you see on stickers all around town “It All Starts Here SF,” now has a very different meaning.