San Francisco’s dark money criminal justice reform problem is not right or left, it’s white and grift

How wealthy white men like Dean Preston, posing as saviors, with no past interest or experience in making change on this subject, are just here to make money and get in power from perpetuating the problem

As a police and prison abolitionist and criminal justice reform advocate, I can’t help but notice there is a narrative forming about San Francisco and Oakland that seems to declare efforts to defund the police have led to an increase in crime that is now out of control. As a result, yesterday, voters are in favor of increased police funding and powers.

San Francisco and Oakland are now cited as an example of how “soft on crime” approaches don’t work. Yet, San Francisco and Oakland never defunded the police. In fact, the funding increased for police. Powers for police increased.

But why do people think the opposite happened? How is this the narrative?

In part, because disingenuous politicians, particularly Dean Preston is making national headlines talking about it. Now he spins narratives to pretend to be the victim of right-wing attacks to get re-elected while I watched them do everything possible to be performative rather than make actual change. In fact, I saw them in his movement actively smear the people who were actually working on this issue. Based on what I saw taking place over the last four years by interacting with them, I don’t think making progress on this issue was ever the goal or intention of any of these people aligned with them. Instead, putting money in wealthy people’s pockets and maintaining their power was the ultimate result. This created a narrative the efforts didn’t work, when they were never even intended to be tried. The same people behind Dean Preston were also involved in Chesa Boudin’s campaign, which I describe below.

How?

For a living, I teach people how to engage in media literacy to dissect articles to understand where stories are coming from and the agenda behind them. As we head into the primary election season, it becomes very clear following the debunking of recent PR spin this week claiming “right-wing” dark money is the problem. Three recent, very clearly planted, pieces appeared simultaneously in the New Republic, the Guardian, and Mission Local that were almost identical, suggesting that someone pitched this narrative to spin those “reporters,” who willingly went along with it.

We’ll get into Gil Duran, who wrote it up for the New Republic, Ali Winston who wrote it up for the Guardian, and Joe Rivano Barros who wrote it up for Mission Local, as we go on.

Sure enough, hours later, after these pieces came out, I got a fundraising email from Dean Preston celebrating the articles and calling on me to donate against the right-wing attacks against him. Looks like we found a likely culprit who would have an interest in planting this narrative.

Last night, Lee Fang wrote a great piece, “Inside the Far Left Billionaires’ Push to Maintain Control of San Francisco” exposing Preston as he calls it “throwing stones in a glass house” and lying that these are coming from the right wing at all. To be clear, the right wing is not involved here.

But it goes so much deeper than this. I have been doing this work for a long time, and there were a number of items I took note of here about where this narrative is coming from. When I saw the “reporters” who covered it and “editors” involved, I almost fainted because I had known their background for many years now.

Going back in history, since 2021, I had been pitching press about “dark money media,” a term which I was at that time claiming I had coined, following a disturbing trend I had observed especially while volunteering on the Shahid Buttar campaign. I was concerned that all these new media outlets and “journalists” were being created and not revealing who was behind them or how they were funded, and they were running a lot of misinformation.

As someone who works on media ethics issues as well, I was concerned that “dark money” media was emerging — taking the place of reporters during this time of layoffs. I argued it would have severe impacts on election disinformation. This was something I started observing since maybe 2016, while working on media for the Sanders campaign as a volunteer, but it was on steroids in 2020. Absolutely no one was taking interest in the San Francisco market in telling this story, and the story would often get killed at the last minute for no given reason when someone did take an interest. This is something I had never seen before in my twenty years working with reporters. But here is the thing, the people mentioned above are not, by definition, reporters. They are glorified public relations people, and it is hard for the general public to know the difference. That’s why I took painstaking efforts to point out terms and definitions in my past piece.

First, after screaming about dark money for years now, the timing the articles appeared around dark money was suspect as last week, when these stories were emerging, a woman named Julie Pitta announced, after getting fired for her poor ethics as a political columnist, she was starting a dark money news website to investigate dark money. What? Well, that caused immediate red flags in my mind. I wrote a very comprehensive post last week outlining all the issues there and how it is seemed very connected to Dean Preston and tech interests. I had been pitching the story for four years. Why was it just picked up now? And why was it spun to benefit Dean Preston rather than tell what was really happening, and as Lee Fang pointed out, tell the whole story rather than present a one-sided misrepresentation? The story about dark money that I had uncovered in the first place, and these very same people spent time burying, was being spun to be something else.

The reason I posted my piece online in the first place was that ahead of the coverage about dark money, I just happened to send an email out to all the San Francisco political press about the dark money issue regarding Dean Preston and Julie Pitta. Immediately prior to his own piece running in the Guardian, I received a reply back from Ali Winston — telling me that what I sent was a joke and not to contact him again. I don’t find it funny. I don’t see anything that was a joke in what I wrote. You tell me if it is funny or where anything is inaccurate.

Winston claims to be reporting on policing and is currently covering the Pamela Price recall. As I note in my piece, he is funded by Google. Ironically, the story that I had been trying to pitch since 2021 had revolved around dark money media in a different way. In fact, it was about how I thought that a former public relations executive for Google had been spinning disinformation and paying multiple “nonprofit” media outlets including Mission Local and 48 Hills. He had been donating to them, but nowhere were they disclosing it when they quoted it. That man’s name is William Fitzgerald. I personally watched him infiltrate the Shahid Buttar campaign from the inside and manipulate media. I document the full story here, and I can provide more evidence where this came from.

As I mention in my piece, I find it ironic that someone like William left Google to become a progressive advocate, yet one of his first actions was to use “worker concerns” that I can clearly document as fake in an effort to smear the guy who was actually leading the conversation for decades on the subject against ending police surveillance in the tech industry— Shahid Buttar.

It gets so much deeper. The reporter who covered the dark money media from Mission Local was Joe Rivano Barros. He happened to be formerly employed by William Fitzgerald. I recognized that name immediately because when Akela Lacy at The Intercept was going back and forth with me, as I document in my past writing, about who left Buttar’s campaign due to sexism — Joe Rivano Barros and William Fitzgerald were the staff named, in addition to other men. Please note these are white men accusing a Muslim man of color as a sexist, and I, a woman who replaced them on the team, offered to be interviewed to say that was not what happened at all. Instead, Akela decided to attribute me to campaign data and ate up their lies. They easily spun and fed Akela lies, as I document, to make it look like a large number of people left Buttar’s campaign when it was really just one firm — William Fitzgerald’s firm. How Akela could have gotten duped so easily here and how men from Google mostly behind this ever passed the smell test in her mind is beyond me. The sources in her stories are incredibly questionable if she had simply done a Google search or even listened to any of the people who contacted her about it.

Akela’s, highly controversial, editor at the time was Betsy Reed, who now is Ali Winston’s editor who allowed his unchecked piece to run in The Guardian. In fact, it was the same time all this was happening that the founders quit The Intercept alleging they had become a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party establishment. Buttar had been waging the top campaign against the Democratic Party establishment at that moment. It is important to note that SKDK, the Democratic Party establishment public relations firm has represented Google.

Another person who was quoted in Akela’s piece smearing Buttar, based on lies from William Fitzgerald, was Sasha Perigo, who William Fitzgerald posted that he hired the next day. Unbelievable. But it gets deeper.

Shortly after that, William was hired to do work at The Appeal, a news outlet that covered the criminal justice system, when it just so happened that the publication started a shut down because of a worker uprising. Looked just like the one that happened with Buttar. The publication is now restarted funded by Google to cover the criminal justice system. As I had been telling press for a while, there is a very strong trend in former workers at The Appeal now covering criminal justice reform in the Bay Area under outlets like Oaklandside, which is funded by Google.

Ironically, I know that Gil Duran who wrote the piece for The New Republic was pitched to cover a story about dark money funding in the media when a TODCO executive was accused of rape, around the same time, by none other Sasha Perigo — the same woman mentioned a few months earlier that William Fitzgerald bragged about paying the day after she made accusations that Buttar was a sexist. Turns out that was only a short-term project. Sasha then went on to work for Dean Preston’s organization Tenants Together.

The person Sasha accused was in a relationship with a woman who was facing recall on the school board at the same time Chesa Boudin was being recalled and was considering a run for the seat on the Board of Supervisors himself, but his aspirations were destroyed after the accusations. I have said repeatedly that I believe Sasha, and she has repeatedly said that she did not want her story to interact with the schoolboard recall. However, I am noting all the facts here. The reason why I mention is that it was a reporter who independently pitched to cover the story on dark money media, and I had heard that Gil Duran was the one responsible for it not running. Very interesting that he is writing his own piece now, and it looks so different. He didn’t seem concerned about dark money media in the past.

It is important to note that Perigo had worked for Google in the past too. The world is very small.In fact, most of these people come out of Google or have some connection in some way, shape or form. They like to try to act like they have been long time activists, but none of their backgrounds tell that story.

Beyond that, as I mentioned in my last piece defining journalist, Gil Duran is not one. He’s a public relations person for formerly with former Governor Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein. He worked on the opinion side of some publications, but it is important to note that he is not political journalist. He’s a spin doctor — he is what one would find if asked to look up an image of California public relations spin. Calling him a journalist is scary from a media literacy standpoint because people need to be able to identify the difference — at all levels.

At any rate, Lee Fang goes on to cover how Tim Redmond at 48 Hills, former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who now leads the Working Families Party California affiliate, and Democratic Socialists of America all received funding from TODCO. He goes even deeper into the dark money ties to the press in that area than I even knew existed. Tim Redmond writes a lot of opinion content that people believe is journalism, but by definition, it’s not. It’s also not very easy to see when reading the stories who he gets paid from to do it.

But let’s just name a few more of William Fitzgerald’s clients which include Cat Brooks, (no relation) leader of the Anti-Police Terror Project, and Pamela Price, the current District Attorney, who is likely facing a recall in Oakland. Pamela Price makes one tragic public relations mistake after another, even at one point drawing the attention and criticism of ACLU after she banned a reporter from a press conference. I volunteered to help Price for free and was excluded. I was also an early donor to her campaign. It’s hard to know exactly how long William Fitzgerald has been involved here, but I can tell you there are a team of white men around her, and I don’t think it is coincidental that she keeps making so many PR mistakes. It’s almost like it is on purpose.

It’s not the first time I have seen this happen because I saw many of the same people who support Price involved with Chesa Boudin. They were so bad at what they were doing, it’s like they did not want to win, as I document in past pieces. One of those people is Julie Pitta mentioned above who spent so much time occupying the Chesa meetings with talk about who was stealing signs, to prevent progress on changing the media narrative, when it was revealed on video it was her who was stealing signs. Now she is investing dark money in media by creating a dark money group. Come on. How are people not noticing this? Not only that, but as I documented in my past post, Pitta has been a long time Silicon Valley ghostwriter. These people are presented like long time noble activists when they are tech aligned.

Lee Fang documents in his piece that Cat Brooks, who often misrepresents herself as a journalist on KPFA, (something I find very troubling) gets her funding from the billionaire-funded group that works to defund and abolish police departments in the Bay Area. Yet, that does not seem to be consistent what she is really doing. In fact, she is a prime example of dark money media. Cat Brooks is, by definition, not a journalist, and she doesn’t abide by traditional journalism ethics. She is an activist who is working on a cause and taking a lot of money to do it. This is key to know from a media literacy standpoint.

Not only that, but Brooks gets funded by Dean Preston as well. When Cat Brooks had Dean Preston come on her show on KPFA radio to talk about this issue, his financial support to her group was not disclosed during the interview. As I mentioned in previous writing, that’s dark money, which is an oxymoron for journalism. It creates the appearance that Dean Preston paid her for his interview, and that is super unethical.

In Lee Fang’s reporting, there is a video of Cat Brooks listening to exactly how to take dark money for her support. The same practice is the one that these progressives claim to be outraged over last week — calling it Gray money when Grow SF did it. So where is the outrage over Dean Preston and Cat Brooks? If this tactic is right wing, does that make Dean Preston and Cat Brooks the right wing? How can they be so outraged about this in the media, when they are the ones doing it?

The whole thing seems like a bunch a wealthy white men throwing money at things to grow their stock portfolios, and some opportunists taking money from them to be performative but actually do nothing.

As Lee Fang previously reported:

“After college, Preston made his way to San Francisco, marrying into a family that owns several rental apartment buildings. In 2017, along with his brother Alan Preston, “an experienced DEI trainer and facilitator” living in Seattle, Dean Preston founded the Arch Community Fund. The family seeded the fund with millions of dollars worth of corporate stock from Microsoft, Starbucks, Intel, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly, among other blue chip investments, a move that allows the charitable family fund to reap capital gains without paying any tax.”

As I document here, this is not what I support. It is not the right wing holding up the progress on criminal justice reform. It’s opportunists like Dean Preston who came in to assault the movement. As I cover here, Preston is doing performative actions, while actively holding up progress in the grand scheme. As I pointed out in past pieces, I saw the Democratic Party PR firm work with AIPAC to smear progressive challenges who support criminal justice reform and against the war. They kept calling it right wing. The biggest problem facing our movement is not the right wing. It’s those with money like Dean Preston, who are secretly paying to keep the problem going, all while saying the opposite and getting national press attention making wild claims.

In Oakland, it was chain of incompetence from Sheng Thao that drove the increased police presence, which it is sometimes hard to tell if someone meant it or not, that led to the Governor stepping in to order more police to the area. Was that always the plan? As people leading the efforts to recall them have pointed out, while police is increasing, Cat Brooks has remained largely silent. It has long been in question as to if Sheng Thao ever wanted to defund the police or not. I previously noted in this piece that she ran on defunding them, and I fixed it, because I was a bit misled by social media discussion around her campaign. An article in New York Times said she wanted to expand them.

But what is the point here? Is it defunding the police and more progressive DAs or is it getting money from the wealthy and tech executives while police increases and DAs are recalled. Are we moving backward rather than forward?

What is going on in the election now?

Originally, I started writing in the first place about all of this because I saw Dean Preston smear a Muslim man using racism, with the help of DSA, San Francisco Berniecrats, and William Fitzgerald, in the past. His opponent is Bilal Mahmood, another Muslim man. I simply wanted to document it, so that we didn’t have the same thing happen again. I also wanted to observe some similar things in this piece where I see the performative actions of Preston.

Good thing I did, because just today I see this article, that Bilal Mahmood filed an ethics complaint against himself because he alleges that a political consultant on his campaign made some ethical errors. I didn’t think anything of it when I first read the original coverage about this. Yet, today’s article, once again, I nearly fainted at seeing the same names — particularly Matthew Pancia, Preston volunteer, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and social media bully, filed a complain against Mahmood.

As I said regarding the Buttar campaign, I saw the same people from Democratic Socialists of America come in and try to infiltrate from the inside to make him look unethical. Pancia particularly spent years bullying me on social media when he thought I was going to run for the spot. Pancia regularly deletes his tweets, but he goes by @the_good_matty on twitter. I screenshot and recorded all my interactions with him for future context in case he deletes them.

However, back in August, when I floated I might run against Dean Preston, I started getting threatening text messages from an anonymous number following a deep in the weeds direct exchange with Pancia, just after I directly gave him my phone number in hopes we could have a genuine polite conversation. I could not even understand why so many people spend so many hours attacking me online — when I politically agree with them! Spend time on something else like the people who are actively trying to take down our movement.

You can see some of the texts here and others were so profane that I could not even post them. Matt Pancia says he did not send me these texts, so I have to take him at his word. I have no idea where they came from to be honest. I can say that Matt Pancia deletes his tweets and spent a lot of time bullying me online.

Yet, these text messages only got worse with time whenever I would post something negative about Dean Preston online, including one that called me C**T and B**CH multiple times and told me that they wished my family would die. It clearly based on the discussions seemed very related to me speaking out against Dean Preston.

It also started happening again immediately after I attended a Unitarian Church service in September when Dean was present and spoke up then. Almost immediately after I spoke negative about Dean Preston, the texts rolled in. No one claims to know where they come from, but they always came after these exchanges with Democratic Socialists of America, particularly Matt Pancia. Given his quote in the news article above, you can see that he loves to swear.

Meanwhile, Dean Preston’s quote in the Standard article is laughable given everything I documented above about him:

“My opponent doesn’t seem to take ethics rules or truth very seriously,” Preston said. “That’s already quite clear just weeks into his campaign.”

According the piece:

An audit later found that Preston’s 2016 campaign could not provide receipts or invoices for almost $13,000 in expenditures and was “non-compliant with state and city campaign finance laws.

Did my worst fears come true and these same people smeared Mahmood in the same fashion as Buttar? It is something to keep an eye on as we go along. I do know one thing, any time I speak out, I will get attacked. The people surrounding Dean are anything but genuine.

Excuse any typos. I am one busy woman not getting paid for any of this. I am just really concerned by what I observed, and it keeps getting worse. I feel like I have a civic duty to document it. I also sometimes edit my posts as I go along after publishing and see a way to say something that is more accurate or clear or think of a point I left out. Doing the best I can to get things correct, so if something is wrong or I make a mistake, please tell me (202) 351–1757 or patricia@matchmapmedia.com. I will correct it. So far, no one has told me that my posts are not accurate yet. I am not intending to make inaccurate statements ever. I am just documenting what happened and showing where I do not know certain details.