The Weekly Digest (September 14, 2025)

Written By Bill Jackson

Salutation

“If you ever want to renew your love of America, spend three days in the UK.” — Charlie Kirk

Happy Sunday, Brionies — Here’s what you need to know about local politics this week and beyond:

Temperature check

Downtown foot traffic is up, but driven more by shoppers than workers

Muni recovery is stalling

Department of spurious correlations

The most important thing you can do this week

The most important thing you can do this week is the most important thing you can do every week. First, click here to confirm that you are registered to vote and that your voter registration info is correct. In particular, confirm that you are registered with the correct party! If you’re not registered at all, register online here. If your info is not correct, update your registration online here. Second, ask just one friend whom you know is dissatisfied with the decades of one-party rule in San Francisco to register (or re-register) as a Republican, using the links above as appropriate. You don’t need to register dozens of people! If everyone reading this digest registers just one new Republican each week (or even each month) we’ll have thousands more voters pulling San Francisco back to the center by the end of the year.

Happenings around town

Briones Society events

  • Briones 101 — Thursday, September 18, 5-530pm, online

    • What is the Briones Society? What is our mission and what are our core principles? And where the heck does the name “Briones” come from? Join us for a half-hour Zoom meeting to learn the answers to these questions and more.

  • Briones Conversations: Under the Hood at San Francisco Unified — Tuesday, September 23, 6-8pm, location provided after RSVP

    • Join SFUSD School Board Member Supryia Ray and Briones co-founder Bill Jackson for a candid discussion on the district’s ethnic studies debate, budget and payroll crises, and approach to charter schools. What will it take for SFUSD to deliver on the promise of quality education?

  • Briones Conversations: Taming the Bloated San Francisco Budget — Wednesday, October 15, 530-730pm, location provided after RSVP

    • San Francisco’s $15.9 billion budget has grown more than 67 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis over the past 15 years while the city’s population has barely budged. Join budget expert David Mace and other guests for a discussion about how conservatives and moderates can build a coalition to rein in spending and restore fiscal discipline.

  • Briones Conversations: Frank Lavin, author of Inside the Reagan White House (rescheduled) — Thursday, November 20, 6-8pm, location provided after RSVP

Other events

Good enough for government work

Rules Committee (regular meeting) — Monday, September 15, 10am (agenda here)

  • Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman is taking a hatchet to some red tape, proposing amendments to the Campaign and Governmental Conduct Code to remove the requirement that campaign consultants register with the Ethics Commission.

  • Now, you’d be justified if your initial reaction is to ask, “Hey, is this a case of City Hall protecting cronies from ethics oversight?!?” But the answer is, “(maybe) not.” This seems more about removing onerous, not-very-useful bureaucracy from the political process. Just read the current list of required disclosures set forth here — most of this information is filed away in a sub-basement below 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place and never looked upon by human eyes again.

  • In any case, under Mandelman’s proposal, disclosures must still be made, but by candidates and clients working with consultants rather than the consultants themselves.

Board of Supervisors (regular meeting) — Tuesday, September 16, 2pm (agenda here)

  • Last week we started to tally how much San Francisco is taking in and doling out from litigation settlements under City Attorney David Chiu. This week’s counts are in. San Francisco has, in the current fiscal year:

    • Paid approximately $7.7 million; and

    • Received $0 — though the large infusion of approximately $19.9 million from three suits brought on behalf of the City is still pending (and expected to be finalized on Tuesday).

  • In other business before the Board, the mayor is sponsoring an amendment to the Building Code to remove a number of requirements under the Slope and Seismic Hazard Zone Protection Act that subjected projects to yet another layer of “additional review for structural integrity and effect on hillside or slope stability.” Not to be too cavalier about it, but it’s pretty refreshing to see the deletion of nearly eight pages of regulation. All of this is in line with Mayor Lurie’s PermitSF initiative, which aims to make the permitting process “customer-centric, fast, predictable, transparent and unified.”

Action items

  • Election Day for the Joel Engardio recall is this Tuesday, September 16! To contribute to or volunteer for the recall campaign during this critical GOTV period, visit www.recallengardio2025.com.

  • Both the Briones Society and the SFGOP have endorsed a “no” position on Governor Newsom’s gerrymandering scheme (aka Proposition 50), scheduled for a vote this November. Want to help get the word out to others? Sign up here to volunteer for lit drops and other mobilization opportunities with the SFGOP!

Musical interlude

Mark Kozelek and Anthony Koutsos moved to San Francisco in 1989 and formed Red House Painters, arguably the most important band in the development of the 90’s “indie folk” sound, later popularized by Elliott Smith, the Beta Band, and Fleet Foxes, among many others. San Francisco — the once and future town for artists.

What we’re reading

Whence and whither

  • The assassination of Charlie Kirk yield predictable reactions from the most ghoulish elements of American society, including celebrations of his death from those on the woke Left and antisemitic conspiracy theories from those on the woke Right. But they’ve also sparked an important discussion among serious conservatives and Republicans around what the future of our movement should look like. Additionally, many sincere voices on the Left, perhaps now chastened against dismissing all those on the other side of the political aisle as a “basket of deplorables,” are finally starting to take a genuine interest in who Republicans are and what they believe.

  • Though we err towards exclusively local coverage in this Digest, we think these are both important discussions to highlight in a city where it’s far too easy for Democrats to barricade themselves in blue bubbles.

  • In regards to the former question, we recommend this important piece by Chris Rufo in City Journal. Though it was published the day before Kirk’s assassination, it has become — if anything — even more crucial and relevant to our moment in the days since.

  • In regards to both questions (the first, because you cannot make an informed decision about where you’re going without knowing where you’ve been; the second, for obvious reasons) we recommend Matthew Continetti’s profile of Frank Meyer in The Free Press.

  • A consistent theme you’ll find in any good history of the GOP (or the Democratic Party, for that matter) is that it’s a mistake to search for philosophical coherence in political parties, which exist primarily to organize and mobilize a sufficient number of votes to get favored candidates elected. That makes for strange bedfellows, more as a rule than as an exception. Consider how many different iterations of “Republican” there have been over time:

    • The GOP began as an abolitionist party, then evolved into an alliance between Union Army veterans, on the one hand, agitating for massive government spending on military pensions, and northern capitalist interests, on the other, who did not have a problem with big government so long as regulation was limited, labor unions were disempowered, and the domestic sociopolitical environment was stable enough for business to thrive.

    • This Republican Party was comfortable with liberal social, sexual, and cultural mores, so long as this did not stray into radicalism. At its zenith, it was Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover’s “return to normalcy” party.

    • The Great Depression and the New Deal almost completely swept away conservative sentiment in America. It survived as burning embers in a handful of institutions like the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Chamber of Commerce. During the pre-war period, conservative voices in the wilderness included those whom we’d now call libertarians, like Albert Jay Nock, Henry Hazlitt, and Friedrich Hayek; “traditionalists” like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk, and figures further afield like L. Brent Bozell and Hans-Hermann Hoppe; and anti-communists and nascent “neoconservatives” like Whitaker Chambers, Irving Kristol, and James Burnham.

    • It was also during this time that the GOP was identifiably a hyper-isolationist party under Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Americans realized that international threats could threaten them, too, the isolationists were discredited and the party was set on an interventionist course that arguably peaked with President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda.”

    • It was only in the post-war period that the “fusionist” conservatism that dominated GOP politics until the election of Donald Trump (and remains the single largest philosophical constituency in the party) started gaining steam. Fusionism, conceptuailzed and promoted by Meyer, Harry Jaffa, and William F. Buckley at National Review, married libertarians, traditionalists, and neoconservatives together in a coalition that emphasized (a) political freedom in support of (b) ethical virtue against the threat of (c) Soviet communism.

    • Fusionism’s victory was sealed with Senator Barry Goldwater’s defeat of Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican presidential primary. In an oft-cited and possibly apocryphal anecdote, when it became obvious to everyone that the moderate Rockefeller was going to lose to the rock-ribbed Goldwater, the former was approached by a supporter urging him to “summon that fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension known as the Eastern Establishment.” Rockefeller replied, “You are looking at it, buddy; I am all that is left.”

    • Ronald Reagan was fusionism personified. And while the GOP continues to evolve, with some now deriding the program that Reagan set out in his landmark 1977 Speech “The New Republican Party,” it’s worth remembering that this program resulted in 20 years of Republican control of the White House over the course of three decades, as well as the first Republican majorities in Congress since 1955.

  • Have we whet your appetite? Interested in learning more about who Republicans are, who they have been, and who they might become? The best places to start include Continetti’s own The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, and Michael Malice’s The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics.

Nerd alert

Recent academic studies of interest

Quick hits

Remembering Charlie

The rest

This week in San Francisco history

In the early hours of September 14, 1961, San Francisco police raided the Tay-Bush Inn, an all-night café located at Bush and Taylor in Lower Nob Hill. At the time, it was one of the few establishments where gay men could openly socialize. The raid resulted in the arrest of 103 mostly white, middle-class gay men, making it the largest gay bar raid in the city’s history. The event is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in San Francisco’s LGBT rights movement.

The great American library

“Men cannot be threatened into the kind of fight they will have to put up to win. They will have to be led. By you, Joshuway, by you.” This week, we’re recommending The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. In the wake of the political violence that marred our republic last Wednesday, too many voices have too quickly resorted to calls for division, retribution, and even civil war. That they do this in the name of Charlie Kirk dishonors the memory of a man whose core, plainspoken message to America was, “When people stop talking to one another, that’s when violence begins.” Perhaps, then, this week is as good as any to revisit the last time Americans made war upon one another — and to remind us of the consequences. Over 345 blood-soaked pages, Shaara dramatizes the horrors that the uncontrollable storm of war unleashes upon all in its path, hero and villain and innocent bystander alike, told through eyes of Union Colonel (and later Maine Governor) Joshua Chamberlain and Confederate General Robert E. Lee during the Battle of Gettysburg.

We’ve got jokes

A man walks onto the campus of Harvard University and asks a student, “Where’s the bathroom at?” The student looks at him haughtily and replies, “Here at Harvard, we’re taught not to end a sentence with a preposition,” then turns away. The man reflects on this for a moment, then says, “You’re right. So: Where’s the bathroom at, asshole?”

Palate cleanser

Don’t let the bad drown out the good.

Bill Jackson
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The Weekly Digest (September 7, 2025)