Following my recent writings about ethics in media, I am accused of not supporting Dean Preston for office…Guilty!

I have been quite clear about that. He’s unethical and his behavior is disgusting and the opposite of the movement I poured my heart into at all costs for my entire life.

As I have been writing more about ethics in media lately, I am accused of not supporting Dean Preston for office…guilty! I have been quite clear and vocal about that for a while. The reason is that he, and those who surround him, are unethical to the extreme. In 2024, I am more terrified of Dean Preston’s rise than I am Donald Trump’s.

Dean Preston, and the wealthy tech and real estate interests around him and that he represents, are a source of rot that is infiltrating a movement that I worked on my entire life. He is destroying my life’s work while claiming to be the face of it, so no, I can not support him.

Even if I don’t support him, that doesn’t negate anything I said about him. Nothing I say in my writing about ethics is wrong. I am pretty sure I am quite clear in my piece where I talk about how ethics has nothing to do with partisanship. I challenge you to point out, where is the lie? It’s “I don’t support him because he is unethical” and not “I create reasons he is unethical because I don’t support him.” Get it straight.

I can’t even count the ways I have seen this man be unfit for office, but let’s just name a few. I might even update this if I think of others that I might have missed in my writings at 5 am in the morning for no pay on Valentine’s Day.

· He was largely behind an effort to falsely brand a man of color as a sexual predator to benefit his own career. That’s wrong. As someone who works on exonerations and was sexually assaulted myself, I have to speak out against this. He didn’t just unendorse Shahid Buttar. He ran a smear campaign against him using racist tropes. I have dedicated pages to writing on this, but what he did was everything I stand against. It sounds like someone else who falsely blamed immigrants for sexual assault recently…who was it???

· He was involved in a fake news website that did not disclose their affiliations with him, had fake reporters, and only served to promote himself. As someone who has worked on behalf of the top media literacy and journalism advocacy organizations in the country, I am more than concerned and disturbed. I am terrified at what he is doing and how he intends to destroy truth in our country, so people are not sure what to believe. This is worrying, especially when I have seen him lie to get into power. Not only that, but he is pitching media on stories accusing others of doing what he is actually doing.

· He’s a wealthy, white, male, cult leader trying to be the face of the movement I worked my life on. He’s a multi-millionaire, who invests in tech stocks, and he participates in and funds dark money organizations. He does all this while saying the opposite. He is a trust fund baby whose family made money from capitalism, and he is claiming to be a socialist. His in-laws are landlords, and he talks about how awful landlords are despite that being his source of income. He is simply not for the people that he claims to support. He is for his own class interests. That’s how he got his money that he spends trying to manipulate my movement. GTFOH. He talks a lot, but his actions are the opposite of what he says. I am disgusted. We do not need you here. Everything I have seen him do is to perpetuate issues that he can come in and save. He is a movement infiltrator, and he makes me sick. People are suffering because of him, and his lack of ethics, and it is not okay with me.

· He’s one of the dirtiest politicians I have ever seen in my life. And I spent a long time in Washington DC politics, arriving during Bush and Iraq War. I would count Dean as worse than Bush and Trump combined in terms of the effect he is having. Dean and his supporters often say racist and sexist things all while claiming to be the opposite. It’s hard to get people to speak out against him because he pays them all. Those he pays spend their time harassing me, who actually works on these issues all day every day. I am sickened and to see this man rise to power will be a huge mistake. I don’t care what kind of progressive values he claims to be for. What he SAYS he is for is what I support. What he does is NOT that. He’s a fraud like Donald Trump. His goon squad can harass me all they want, and they have been.

I am not going to sit here and allow Dean Preston do to the left what Donald Trump did to the right. If anyone wants to check my background on what I was doing during the Iraq War — it was PR for a documentary by Phil Donahue, who had just gotten fired from MSNBC for speaking out against the war. I didn’t enter this movement yesterday, unlike most of these people who spent their time in tech and other areas. I have never been a spin artist for the tech industry in my life, they have me confused with themselves.

It was through my anti-war work, nearly a decade prior, that allowed me to meet Bernie Sanders in the first place, and I was a fan ever since. Bernie seemed like the kind of guy who showed up on the issues I cared about, and none of the others were there. That’s why I joined the effort to get him elected, sending out my first press release about grassroots support of Bernie, on the launch of his candidacy in 2015. I have been doing all this work for a long time. I joined Buttar’s campaign days after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race because I saw it as a way to continue the same work.

In fact, when September 11, 2001 happened, I was literally in journalism class at the exact moment the planes hit. I often talk about how that moment shaped my entire class and our lifetime decisions. My boyfriend, at the time, went into the army. Some of my friends and classmates went to cover the war and built their entire career around it to make them successful today. I went into public interest public relations to advocate against it. It was life-defining moment, as well as so many other moments in my career field and life. So go all the way back because I have been the same for years.

I am NOT about to let Dean Preston do the same thing regarding Gaza as I saw people do about Iraq. I am not doing that. So, if you want my interests and motivations, that is it.

To suggest that I am more committed to petty BS politics and do not have a long career speaking on these issues is insane. It’s also sexist, but that is just how Chris always acts. They would like people to think I am some crazy woman obsessed with Shahid Buttar rather than the highly accomplished and moral woman that I have been throughout my entire career. There is nothing questionable in my background, and they know it. So they run lies.

It’s often hard to tell if my former “friends and colleagues” are disingenuous or just so committed to their own political nonsense that they project it on to me. I say colleagues because while we worked directly together on the Buttar campaign together, Chris Cook in the photo above was getting paid, and I was not because I refused. Everything I did was volunteer. Yet, a few ethical issues remain for Chris. He was getting paid on the Buttar campaign while representing himself as a journalist. He has also now called people who got paid on the Buttar campaign grifters. Phew.

If it was a grift, a lot of these people made money on it including Chris himself. I don’t think he returned the money. None of them did. Since Chris and I worked so closely together, he called to tell me that he was quitting before he called Shahid. I describe the call as racist because I had a long conversation with him about what believe women meant when he had wanted to jump to false conclusions about Buttar. I told him that the accusations against Shahid didn’t seem to make sense. It turns out they were false and everyone admits it now, but Chris doesn’t want to admit that he went with the story at first, likely giving in to peer pressure. When he could not convince me of his thoughts, he pivoted to Shahid pays himself $100,000 from campaign funds (not exactly true, because the way that funds are taken over time it is not always equal, it was far less). I said, as a donor, I certainly hope so. I believe in people getting paid for their time, and I don’t have any problem with that. I know what it costs to live in San Francisco, and people running for office should not live in poverty to do it. It turns out that now $105,000 is considered poverty level in San Francisco.

They do not have problems with any of this stuff or they would be consistent in calling it out when the white people around them do it. But I mean…what just happened? This man just called me concerned about sexual assault and then pivoted to I am mad that a brown man is getting paid money. I left that call sickened.

Did I just show up on the Buttar campaign dedicated to these issues, offering to work for free, from nowhere? Nope. They are thinking of the Google PR spin guy William Fitzgerald, who showed up with no experience before me, but he was there to make money and smear people.

In fact, if I were not spending most of my time traveling to take care of some sick family members located in different locations right now, I would probably be throwing my own hat in the race to run against Dean Preston and call out these frauds, as I have been saying for a few years. Not because I want the power. I don’t care about that. It’s because I am disgusted to watch them destroy my movement.

So it is going to be a long election season, because these people are not going to guilt nor bully me into shutting up — and they certainly have tried. I am surprised that they admit they know me now because for a while the talking point was that no one knew who I was, and that I was a Russian bot. I am just a crazy woman no one knows who showed up talking about all this and knowing all the details about everybody. They block me because they know I know, and they can’t refute it. It was odd because I spent a lot of time in meetings with these people. We were friends. I mailed a lot of them chocolate in the past — ironically because I was a volunteer, and they were all paid. Some people don’t have professional manners anymore. I just happen to be someone who is not afraid to speak up here and call them all out. I have very little risk, and even still I don’t care. I am still doing it. I have to do what is right, or I couldn’t sleep at night.

But while they know who I am. They apparently don’t know me or pretend not to know me. There is not a single person who can deny my commitment to the issues I spent my life on. I would like to see someone try. My core values are committed to media ethics and making the world a better place, especially for those who have less power. There is not one single thing in my background that suggests differently, especially the older I got and the more I found my own voice.

Unfortunately, I often have a hard time convincing people of this. Because most people project their own commitment to power and money on to me. I do not care about those things. I am not rich. I do not own a home. I have no money and do not want it. I am not fighting you for it. I am not competing with you. I will have two cents in my bank account and still call it out. My entire background and mission in life is to lessen human suffering while getting by myself. The photo in my profile picture is me at the United Nations hosting a climate change press event in 2007. That’s what I care about. I spend most of my time working on climate change and anti-war protests and teaching people about media literacy. Most people are not like me. I get that. It’s why I am so hard to understand. But there is no reason to project their own values on to me.

I don’t care about elections and endorsements. I don’t care about winning and losing. I care about what I morally think is right. I can not sit here and say nothing. These people are disgusting. No need to question my motives or spread rumors. I am telling you and showing you exactly who I am. I have been consistently the same for decades. To call me a conservative or tech aligned is hilarious when my entire life suggests the opposite. I think you have me confused with Dean Preston and Google PR spin guy William Fitzgerald, and frankly most of Dean’s staff. I am the woman who has actually been doing the work behind the scenes that Preston has been loudly saying he was doing while actually not.

Despite the fact that people would like to brand me as a crazy woman obsessed with Buttar, I am a pretty busy person working on many causes right now. I wish I didn’t have to deal with this infiltrator, but here we are. I could just move on, as they constantly beg me to do. But that is not who I am. I speak out when I see injustice, especially when it has the potential to make such devastating damage. I spend my days making so much progress on real social issues that these social media bullies could only dream about doing the work that I am actually doing. It is sometimes even more wild to watch when these phony progressives tweet out items from organizations I work with, taking credit for my work without being involved in at all, and they don’t even know I wrote it. Meanwhile, they are attacking me as the problem on social media. I just do most of my advocacy behind the scenes, and I happened to go public about Buttar because I thought it was so wrong — not to draw attention to myself. If I wanted that, I would have done it a long time ago. In fact, I tried not to be public in this regard, but I have no other choice but to use my voice.

I am writing at 5 am for no pay on Valentines Day with typos. That’s how disgusted I am by what is happening, at the hand of Dean Preston, to create national narrative against what I have been working on my entire life. He is a bad apple, and he is ruining all progress. We don’t need these infiltrators who ultimately benefit the tech industry, war, and real estate interests.