The deep dive behind Dean Preston’s performative Gaza cease-fire resolution
This piece was originally published on January 21, 2024, but updated to reflect Nancy Pelosi’s comments on January 28, 2024 and a few other elements.
San Francisco is making national headlines for a controversial resolution, introduced by Board of Supervisors member Dean Preston, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza — taking attention away from the troubled city and directing it to events happening all the way across the world.
The AP cited criticism by Mayor London Breed that the Board was “veering into foreign policy in which its members have no legal authority or expertise. She said the debate over the resolution left the city “angrier, more divided and less safe.”
In addition to being out of purview and having only resulted in increased tensions where both Muslim and Jewish community members felt unsafe, the background on why this resolution is performative goes even deeper. Few know just in fact how much Islamophobia from Preston and Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco (DSA) played a role in the 2020 election to take us where we are today.
While Preston and his DSA supporters do not have the authority to do anything regarding Gaza, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi does. Congress has authority to approve funding for war, and Pelosi’s leadership could have ended this a while ago when Biden was requesting billions of dollars for aid in the aftermath of the October 7th attack.
Sanders proposed to freeze aid just this week, so it was possible for Pelosi to take a stand, if she wanted. But her decades of policy examples have shown she does not have the political will to do so and is not going to be influenced by any city resolution. On a State of the Union appearance on Sunday, January 28, 2024, Pelosi suggested an FBI probe into those calling for a ceasefire (something I spent my entire last month and Christmas and Hanukah holiday as a volunteer doing media relations around including while taking care of a very sick mother) suggesting we are tied to Russia. Just hours prior to Pelosi’s remarks, I had been sending out a press release about another state’s Democratic Party calling for a cease-fire, only to see Nancy Pelosi, empowered by Dean Preston, carrying on her usual shenanigans to not only do the opposite, but continue to smear Muslims in the media. CAIR has already condemned the “smear,” which I will address later on in the piece.
I would love it if my tax dollars went to provide healthcare for my sick mother, or maybe toward my student loans while I pay for her care, instead of an investigation into anti-war protesters like myself — who could not be more American. However, it doesn’t seem like that is ever going to be the case while Pelosi is in control.
For this exact reason, an anti-war activist and Muslim constitutional lawyer Shahid Buttar ran for office against Pelosi on this platform in the general election in 2020, performing better than any previous challenger. For the record, I was a volunteer media consultant on his campaign, which is how I know the below details.
Additionally, I spent 20 years working in DC media relations for progressive causes and got frustrated with what I saw in the Democratic Party leadership, which is how I ended up there challenging the establishment I once worked among in the first place. I have friends, and current colleagues, who worked on the Nancy Pelosi campaigns and are diehard supporters, but I risked it all when I said I have been working on cause related issues for decades, and while she talks a good game, I have never seen her do what she says.
Many of the people I grew up with in my career went on to serve in the Biden Administration at the highest levels. I always was more true to the cause than to seek power and loved to remain behind the scenes, and that is why I threw it all behind to advocate for Bernie Sanders at the very beginning when he got in the race, creating the mechanisms at the national level for the formation of many of the organizations like San Francisco Berniecrats. I started working with Buttar as a volunteer immediately after Sanders dropped out of the race in April 2020. Because of the way that California elections were set up where two people could run in the same party in the general, I saw it as the only strategic way to carry out Bernie’s platform on a national stage.
At any rate, even if Buttar had a longshot campaign, it was still putting political pressure to move Pelosi further to the left on half a dozen policy positions including this one. If he were still in the race today putting pressure on Pelosi or even in office, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are now today.
However, it was Preston (joined by Jackie Fielder) who led an Islamophobic effort to unravel Buttar’s campaign by signing a now admittedly false and debunked resolution from DSA accusing Buttar of sexual harassment and assault. DSA never apologized nor publicly acknowledged what they all now say in private, that the whole thing was made up to smear Buttar and open the pathway for someone else (like Preston himself or Jane Kim who has been widely rumored to run, and it just so happened that several promising men of color eligible for the seat were all smeared all at the same time by people tied to the former Kim campaign) to run against Pelosi in the future when she finally retired. Pelosi had the last laugh when she decided not to retire at all and remained in office. Jane Kim has her own troubling story of involvement here we can address on another day. It seemed Kim’s plans to follow Bernie to DC never panned out, and she would now have her eyes set on Pelosi’s seat too.
The opportunism played right into the hands of the Democratic establishment and ensured continued leadership that supported the war. The resolution Preston introduced now on Gaza has no power, but supporting Buttar, on the other hand, would have gone a long way toward addressing the issue. In the meantime, the resolution is an example of Preston dressing for the job he wants, not the job he has. Preston wants the power to do something about Gaza, but actually taking action, not so much.
I see the same people who smeared Buttar, who ran to change the system, with #FreePalestine in their twitter profiles, marching in the street, making performative hats, writing pointless articles and online petitions, passing resolutions — none of this is going to make any change. Based on Pelosi’s remarks on television, clearly it hasn’t. They know it. They failed to show up when it actually mattered. All the performative actions are a distraction while the war machine carries on and Pelosi calls for an FBI investigation — most likely targeting our Muslim Americans. Meanwhile, I did not see them doing anything to put pressure on those who had power to make a change when Buttar ran for office or now. Voting out those dedicated to funding war would be the only way to create a cease-fire.
In fact, those who smeared Buttar as well as those who catered to Islamophobia to believe it without taking any time to observe the facts were actively supporting the establishment that they claim to oppose. Their only contribution to this situation was to move us backward by targeting the only person in the last 35 years who did the work to hold Pelosi accountable for her remarks.
This is not the first time Preston has avoided leadership and accountability on this issue. Some will notice that Preston’s last tweet was on October 7, 2023. If that date sounds familiar, it’s the day that Hamas attacked Israel. The events that surrounded put Preston in a bit of a bind as his Jewish supporters were directly at odds with his leadership in the DSA, who had come under fire for their statement. Instead of responding to this political problem, he spun a narrative to duck out and blame it on Elon Musk. In an online spat in September, Elon Musk said Preston should go to prison in response to one of his positions. Preston claimed he left twitter as a result and used it as a fundraising platform.
To be clear, Preston is a Jewish man whose father and grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and whose great grandmother was killed in a concentration camp. Antisemitism of any sort should be condemned. However, Preston did not leave Twitter because of Elon Musk. The timeline shows that not to be the case. He left because he was not bold enough to address this issue and call out the DSA’s repeated attempts to create chaos in favor of doing anything productive. The gap in what Preston says he cares about versus what he does about it seems to consistently be wide. The same is true with DSA. It seems that many of these people involved in DSA do not care as much about anything regarding the war as they do an opportunity to be hateful to a minority group on any given day. The Democratic establishment has learned this and used them as a tool to manipulate.
To me, multi-millionaire Preston, claiming to be for the working people, constantly comes across as a left-wing version of Donald Trump when it comes to spinning narratives. While Trump is propped up by organizations like the Heritage Foundation running owned news platforms, an even less ethical nor professional version of this approach came when Preston worked with DSA to create his own unidentified fake news website to promote himself in the 2020 election. It is worth noting that that the fake news website was launched the same month that Buttar was smeared by the same people spreading fake news and election disinformation. The first article does not appear to be written by a real person. Even the Heritage Foundation has better ethics to at least identify who they are and not claiming to be an unbiased news source.
DSA claims to be operating a nonprofit news website that just happens to only write articles favoring Dean Preston. That is true in the same way that Heritage Foundation is operating a nonprofit news website that just happens to favor Donald Trump. They are the same exact thing. Most of the nonprofit news coming out of San Francisco is biased propaganda from a corporate or political source. It is not a pure source of news and something that needs to be considered when consuming news. Nonprofit is just a tax status, and it has become a vehicle for biased sources to manipulate public information. These are PR people and not journalists. That is fine, but they need to at least identify that way.
I can get into the the difference between nonprofit 501c3 and 501c4 status another day. However, I would like to point out that Heritage Foundation, AIPAC, and DSA are all the same 501c4 type of nonprofit. But you don’t need me to explain the issue, David Sirota does a just fine job here. If we would have a problem with AIPAC creating a secret news outlet, then we should have a problem with DSA creating one. Failure to speak out when my side does it would be hypocrisy. We can get into David Sirota another day.
The American public needs a stronger sense of media literacy to know what they are consuming. I have seen the most election disinformation coming from nonprofit news sources especially The Intercept, which seems to more and more cater to the Democratic Party, which I will describe below. I started my career at NPR, which is a nonprofit news source. Even they have not done a good job in reporting on this issue. Sadly, the Congressional reporter wrote that no one was challenging Pelosi in the election when Buttar was challenging her, which was a blatant lie. It is the job of the press to cover the options. It was not for lack of trying because I have receipts of dozens of emails I sent her to meet with Pelosi’s election challenger or to cover any of the events we are doing. Often people will think that bias comes from ad dollars, but after 20 years in this career, I know it usually comes from unethical PR people.
At any rate, Preston’s resolution and his supporters’ actions online remind me of when the Mayor of DC painted Black Lives Matter in yellow letters on the street in the aftermath of George Floyd instead of taking any action to create meaningful policy change. Just like putting #BLM in the social media profiles, now #FreePalestine has become a similar escape route to avoid engaging in any meaningful observation for how their own actions contribute to the problem.
Buttar has long claimed that Preston’s actions were Islamophobic, and this is what he meant. The ultimate policy objectives that Preston claimed to share were in fact undermined by his own actions in 2020. Preston went on to pass performative resolutions today paying lip service to values he has already abandoned. Unfortunately, few people understand or want to willingly observe how this is the case. The above is a prime example.
However, when Buttar put out a press statement noticing the hypocrisy, reporters like Eoin Higgins chalked it up to Buttar being bitter about losing. Buttar is not running anymore, so that criticism is pointless. It is no longer about that. It is now about how the Democratic establishment utilizes racism and Islamophobia as a wedge against making progress and reporters let it happen by being just as Islamophobic themselves.
Attempts to call out the main problem and barriers to more Muslim members of Congress getting into office in the first place are the reason why we are here. The reason why Rashida Tlaib is censured is because there are not enough diverse members to support her. What is right is overtaken by what is white — time and time again. The failure to recognize it is part of the white supremacy system that perpetuates Islamophobia and antisemitism. Identity is one part, but this goes far beyond identity and into systems that have been this way for years. We are never going to make progress if we keep perpetuating this same type of action. Buttar, himself, has always been irrelevant in regards to the systemic outcome.
Personally, I decided to continue to shine light on this story, because, sadly, as I had feared, this will continue to happen. Currently, there is another Muslim anti-war activist, Pervez Agwan, running against an establishment Democrat in Texas. While I am one to believe women, I can say that what happened in his case looks almost word for word playbook of what happened to Buttar. Although I know that what happened with Buttar originated with white men and not women, as I describe below. These instances are worth observing and documenting in history to avoid repeating.
Agwan has observed that AIPAC might be behind his accusation, which seems far-fetched to many. Yet, for me, having been involved in this work for a while, it seems right on par to what I observed happen in other campaigns I was supporting. Ryan Grim at The Intercept has been one to cover the role of AIPAC in smearing progressive candidates running against establishment Democratic candidates in the past, including in a recent book he has been running around touting. Yet, he fails to make critical observations when it comes to race and power dynamics in relation to the Democratic Party, especially on Islamophobia.
Often, people like to refer to AIPAC as right wing. But it is more a part of our status quo in Washington. I observed a very direct correlation between the PR firm that represents the Democratic Party, SKDK, being hired to do PR for the establishment opponents just before their progressive challenger gets smeared by AIPAC, which SKDK represents as well. Agwan’s opponent is highly tied to SKDK, it seems. Going through the candidates attacked by AIPAC over the last few years, one can see their many of their opponents were working directly with the Democratic PR firm SKDK. This is not right wing.
It also just so happens that SKDK is currently running a media relations effort to “combat disinformation about Israel on the war,” according to the linked piece by Axios. The piece relies heavily on quotes from Josh Isay, executive director of the 10/7 project, who happened to work for SKDK, and just also happened to work on PR on behalf of Netanyahu, according to Politico. I just said indeed said that the same people did PR for Netanyahu and the leaders of Democratic Party, and they are in the White House now, and they are running an effort to do PR around Israel.
Just like Buttar, DSA was involved in selling narrative against Agwan. Through their Islamophobia that rears its head over and over again within the organization, DSA is carrying out the work that ultimately benefits AIPAC and the Democratic establishment. And it is the people who today claim to support a #FreePalestine who participated in the Islamophobic rush to accuse this man of wrongdoing. I do not know Agwan or if he is guilty or not, but I do know that his story and Buttar’s look oddly similar. I speak out now because it would have been really helpful for someone to make the same correlation of their own experiences when Buttar was facing the same situation.
An odd comparison that I noticed were bot networks attacking Bernie Sanders, Buttar, Agwan’s accusers, and Tara Reade, who had accused Joe Biden of assault. In fact, Sally Albright was the first to retweet the false allegations against Buttar, almost instantly after they were made. What do those all have in common?
We thought something like this was at play when Buttar was among the earliest to be smeared in this fashion, long before the others. Proving what happened, on the other hand, was a bit of a harder challenge because this was a new tactic, and Grim’s colleague Akela Lacy was the one to be duped by sophisticated democratic public relations operatives pitching her a fabricated DSA resolution. Someone sent her an unofficial, fabricated, DSA resolution and she covered it as though final. As the one who answered Lacy’s request for an interview with Shahid, less than five minutes after she sent it, I was there while Lacy was spun and confused entirely by a former Google Executive named William Fitzgerald to believe rumors about Buttar that could easily be verified as untrue with any sort of thought.
I was on the phone when Lacy and Grim interviewed Buttar. Reporters need to do a better job of researching who is sending them information in the world of disinformation and war. The story continues to be online with inaccuracies today including where I live, an entirely irrelevant part of the piece.
Fitzgerald had gained trust by pitching Glenn Greenwald when he was at Google regarding Edward Snowden, but I watched him feed Akela Lacy easily verified lies about the Buttar campaign to benefit the Democratic Party. Fitzgerald himself worked as a PR guy for Google, which benefits from the surveillance of people, in the past spinning narratives. He left Google and has been branding himself as someone who reversed his image and now runs a public interest PR firm on behalf of workers. Buttar was one of his first clients coming out of Google. Undoubtedly, from what I saw, as someone who legitimately has been doing public interest PR on behalf of workers for decades and not just the last few years, he was running an infiltrated effort to smear the leading advocate against Google’s surveillance program, Shahid Buttar. I can trace exactly how it was done. He even bragged about paying the local nonprofit “media,” which were really just biased bloggers, as described above. Many of them are funded by almost entirely by Google. At any rate, Fitzgerald has bragged a lot about all the things he did supposedly against Google while working for them as a PR guy, and yet Google has not done anything to take action against him. I am not buying it.
In the meantime, the coverage on Buttar happened at the same time the Black Lives Matter activities in DC. Lacy failed to show up to our press event in June of 2020 about what BLM candidates running for Congress would do if elected, offering policy solutions, but jumped on the performative story about false accusations of a Muslim man in July. These are instances of how racism controls our journalistic reporting. Lacy will sign letters about the reporting in Gaza and how it needs to change, not observing her own role in rushing to judgment on accusations about a Muslim man played in the coverage and how differently it would look if her own reporting were not responsible.
How Lacy was duped to cover this is a whole story in itself told in this linked post because it is getting long. I spoke on the phone with Grim, the editor of the piece, about how PR consultants had pitched Lacy disinformation, and he giggled. I don’t find it funny. Now he has apparently written a book on the subject of how AIPAC interfered in the elections. To be clear, I think the Democratic Party was behind these attacks on candidates challenging the anti-war establishment.
The situation happened with Buttar and The Intercept just days before the founders of The Intercept quit alleging Democratic Party interference at The Intercept. I cc’d the founders in my correspondence with Lacy, and she wrote me a note back warning me not to do that again. Given my experience, I would believe what the founders alleged. They updated the piece in a frenzy to do better after called out in the New York Times, but they still got it wrong.
I think the more we put our notes together in the progressive field, the more we will realize what is happening. In the meantime, war will be the casualty of racism in these times. More correlation needs to be made about how instances of Islamophobia have severe consequences when it comes to these subjects. Just as some of the most racist white moderates had #BLM in their profile, some of the most Islamophobic white moderates have #FreePalestine in their profile now.
For me this has never been about an election. I volunteered endless hours, and got paid nothing, by choice, for the work I have done on campaigns and causes like this one. This has been about how I watched unethical behavior from the Democratic Party, journalists, public relations people, and many of the civil rights organizations that I spoke out on behalf of for years. Some of these people I used to call friends. Some of them used to be clients. I specifically left some clients behind because they did not stand up and do the right thing when this happened.
Groups like CAIR who condemned Pelosi did everything they could to get her into office by not speaking out against the smear of the Muslim man running against her. They catered to power, and they got nothing.
I saw white men take ownership of the metoo movement and have the audacity to shout believe women at me when they were the ones who the lies about a man of color and sexual assault originated from — I don’t even think there is a more perfect example of mansplaining or racism. Buttar’ s political career might be over, but all of the people involved in this piece, they are still carrying on. This is about them not Buttar.
With a straight face in 2024 these people will tell me to come out and vote for them after our leader just said that we should have an FBI probe into the people protesting against a war — the very ideal that America was founded on. The same groups will rally around the Democratic Party. They must have lost their minds. I can’t stand for this at all.
