Sad Francisco

In June, Benjamin Champagne Song got a 100-year prison sentence for acting against the fascist bootlicking chuds otherwise known as ICE. More evidence US empire and its greed-sick, anti-human pedophile leaders shall be remembered as human stains by future generations. Champagne called from a Texas jail where they're being held in solitary confinement cell. We talked about emotional responses to op...

Brian Patrick (aka pano.dime) has amassed tons of followers doing something pretty simple: every day he posts a quote from our tech overlords revealing just how much these oligarchs loathe the rest of humanity. We debate who Silicon Valley's biggest villain is, and Brian reveals his most-slept-on tech CEO. Trigger warning: Sam Altman's voice. Brian on Instagram | Substack | TikTok | YouTube Panodi...

Psychic militancy is the practice of consciously bracing yourself against the war on your mind by entities like the CIA and FBI, which started propagandizing us a little under a century ago.  Lara Sheehi is host of the podcast Psychic Militancy and her new book is From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. We talk psyops; Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays (aka th...

Dina from the Oakland People's Arms Embargo makes an easy case for why the US has to stop supplying Israel with F-16 bomber parts (and other weapons of mass destruction) via hubs like the Oakland Airport, while corporations like FedEx profit off genocide. Trung co-hosts. Oakland People's Arms Embargo | IG Sign the Petition Palestinian Youth Movement How South African Solidarity Encampments Worked...

Trans historian Susan Stryker has been on the podcast to speak on the Compton's cafeteria riot and her documentary about the riot, Screaming Queens , and in March, she came on to speak about the third edition of Transgender History .  Susan's newest book Changing Gender is about gender, but also deals with considerations on how to live an ethical life in 2026; her acid trips in Joshua Tree and the...

What leads movement groups to dissolve? Three members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) San Francisco talk about the group's split following the Big Pharma-pilled 6th International AIDS Conference in 1990.  You'll get a history of the local chapter of ACT UP, which was the most notorious organization to come out of the time when HIV was a death sentence, but beyond ACT UP, I'm interested...

Another rabbit hole of an episode all about San Francisco's billionaire, Zionist, Levi's jeans-heir mayor and his clique. Mostly a bunch of bored billionaires who want to decide the future of San Francisco and if they get their way, the world. TW for electoralism. The Phoenix Project | Instagram | Twitter More Phoenix Project episodes Jeremy on TogetherSF, the now-defunct rightwing lobby group | J...

A decade ago, the Google bus was a hard-to-escape symbol of the housing unaffordability crisis in SF, as Manissa Maharawal describes in her new book, Anti-Eviction . Manissa works with the  Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and teaches anthropology at American University. Discussed: How politicians coddle the tech sociopaths, 9-9-6 , and burning piles of e-scooters. Manissa's site Anti-Eviction (code...

One of our tech overlords, Mark Zuckerberg recently published a manifesto in the Wall Street Journal describing why we should cheerlead him on his quest for infinite growth and profits.  Eddie Kim writes for the anti-generative AI outlet Gazetteer SF, and several of his recent pieces contend with why Marc Andreesen (venture capitalist, Andreesen Horowitz/a16z), Alex Karp (co-founder with Peter Thi...

What was the filmic movement called mumblecore? Jemma Decristo and dee(dee) c. ardan offer an abridged history of the post-college-centric genre that went mainstream in the early 2000s. One of few mumblecore movies with a Black director and Black leads is 2008's indie romance Medicine for Melancholy by Barry Jenkins, before he did Moonlight If Beale Street Could Talk, and the 2024 Lion King sequel...

In 2026, dead internet theory—the idea that most of the internet is bots and AI-generated content—is more reality than theory.  Matthew Lawson co-hosts Eating For Free—a podcast critiquing American culture and politics through the lens of pop culture—with Paper Magazine editor Joan Summers. In their series "It's All Bots, Girl," they've been reporting on the corporations and politicians (Benjamin...

The government is putting queers on lists and hunting undocumented people at the Home Depot parking lot. Have you ever felt so seen? Sad Francisco Surveillance State Correspondent Ian Firstenberg returns to talk about our current dystopia, but it's not all bad news: people are destroying FLOCK cameras with abandon, protests against data centers are getting bigger, and Garry Tan is freshly single....

THANK YOU to everyone who made it out to our biggest live show ever. The night ended up raising ~$5K for Bay2Gaza Mutual Aid , which will go directly to Gaza (Brooke shares details during the show). The episode was recorded at The Lab in the Mission on June 25, 2026, with music from DJ Parle G and help from a ton of volunteers. Brooke's performance focused on Cypress, a Jewish lesbian feminist who...

A lot has been happening in the lives of three of this podcast's longtime foes: District Attorney Brooke Jenkins; cafe owner and wannabe supervisor Manny Yekutiel; and the state Senator running for Nancy Pelosi's soon-to-be vacant seat in Congress, Scott Wiener.  Guests: Balto from Frisco Voices and Joshua Reyes, who's been doing court support and security for some of the people experiencing the w...

May 1979: queer protesters set cop cars ablaze in San Francisco's Civic Center, in response to cop-turned-politician Dan White's relatively light sentence for the assassination of gay politician Harvey Milk and the Mayor, George Moscone. Four people who were there describe the riots, and the related police riots where cops stormed the lesbian bar Peg's Place in the Richmond, and the Elephant Walk,...

Max Blue is one of San Francisco's few remaining art critics in legacy media (see: his column in SF Examiner); he also contributes regularly to Hyperallergic.  Max gives the best brief introduction of the big art movements San Francisco is most well known for, and names names including:  BXP, the company that benefited from the Vaillancourt fountain's removal)  CIA Operation Mockingbird, the US go...

Brutal honesty is all we have for Boots Riley's overstuffed filmic ode to shoplifters and maybe communism,  I Love Boosters. Topics discussed include: The Coup's early work Betrayal by union leaders Megan Ellison, the alleged black sheep of the Zionist Ellison dynasty Tax credits they give you to film a movie set in the Bay in Georgia The Leaning Tower of Millennium A vow for the next episode to f...

A monologue revisiting a Truthout piece I wrote back in 2014 for this solo episode and stroll down memory lane featuring a Gay Shame action, crying in eviction court, and one of eviction lawyer Daniel Bornstein's boring-ass webinars where he explains the tricks of his trade. Daniel (who runs Bornstein Law—formerly known as Bornstein & Bornstein) is a white guy who's used his adopted Black kids as...

Ian covers local oligarchs and the surveillance state for 48Hills and The Phoenix Project. We talk about FLOCK adding microphones to their camera network, state repression after the anti-cop protests of summer 2020, and how crypto oligarch Chris Larsen bought off the Trump regime. Ian in 48Hills: "Flock keeps spying on us all, and state and local officials aren't protecting us": https://48hills.or...

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) started as a civil rights organization for Jewish people in the US. It's now a pro-Israel group that spies on Leftist organizations and defends Elon Musk when he does a white power salute. Emmaia Gelman's new book The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State details the history of the Zionist group that influences everything from the history written into America...

Two Wasian Americans and one classic, everyday Asian American, all millennials, try to make sense of East Asian American discourses in the zeitgeist of the past six months. Recorded shortly before the cursed Wasian meetups in SF and NY. 1. CS graduation rates fall off a cliff. For a particular class of Asian Americans, computer science degrees were a step in the direction of the American Dream. No...

dee(dee) and Jemma return to dissect another vintage film set in the Bay. Did Hollywood predict Sam Altman would meet his husband in Peter Thiel's hot tub? Seeking an answer in " Electric Dreams " (1984), an extremely 1980s rom-com in which a young architect working out of the Transamerica Pyramid programs an early PC into a Frankenstein-ian monster. Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder: Together in Ele...

Until Land Back, there's land trusts. Kyle Smeallie from the San Francisco Community Land Trust on removing land from the speculative market and the clutches of real estate industrialists. San Francisco Community Land Trust https://sfclt.org/ Proud Stutter (Maya's podcast) https://www.proudstutter.org/ Episode: Abolish Rent with Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal https://www.patreon.com/posts/ab...

May Day 2026, QUEER & TRANS NON/WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE for a tour of some historically significant sites in the Mission, detailed on this episode. All hookers, loiterers, shoplifters, street sellers, truants, 1099 queens, gig workers, students, time theft recidivists, hustlers, welfare fags, & SSDI dykes are encourage to attend. May 1 at 7pm, 16th BART Plaza in San Francisco Gay Shame  https:/...

Prince Shakur is an anarchist political educator with a book dealing with how he was politicized (When They Tell You To Be Good), a big library of video essays on YouTube, and a Black anarchist podcasts he co-hosts called The Dugout. Prince's site https://www.princeshakur.com/ The Dugout's site https://www.thedugoutpodcast.com/ On YouTube: How To Be A (Better) Organizer in 2026 https://www.youtube...