The Weekly Digest (September 21, 2025)

Written By Bill Jackson

Salutation

“Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” — Lewis Carroll

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

Temperature check

Overdose deaths are steady

Graffiti response is practically non-existent

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

Other events

Good enough for government work

Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee (regular meeting) — Thursday, September 25, 10am (agenda here)

  • The committee will hold a hearing on the state of traffic enforcement and street safety in the city with representatives from SFPD and MTA.

Downtown Revitalization and Economic Recovery District (regular meeting) — Tuesday, September 25, 130pm (agenda here)

  • The Board of the Downtown Revitalization and Economic Recovery Financing District — a special authority created to support office-to-housing conversions and breathe new life into our struggling downtown — will adopt the district’s bylaws and consider a resolution that directs the Controller and the Office of Economic & Workforce Development to prepare an official Financing Plan. This plan will determine how incremental property tax revenues are deployed to incentivize conversions and spur downtown recovery.

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

Joe Satriani’s “Always With Me, Always With You” — the song that launched a million awkward slow dances in middle school — dropped in 1987 while he was teaching guitar in Berkeley. Satriani can shred with the best of them, but this ballad is probably his most transcendent. Bonus points if you can identify the future starlet in the video who went uncredited as simply “Girl.” Joe Satriani, folks — fantastic at guitar, not so great at spotting talent.

What we’re reading

Not here for a long time or a good time

  • Supervisor Joel Engardio was decisively recalled by voters in San Francisco’s District 4 last week, marking the first time in city history that a supervisor has been removed from office by recall.

  • Almost 63% of voters approved the recall, which was sparked by strong local opposition to converting the Great Highway into Sunset Dunes park and closing the road to cars. Once the results are certified (expected by mid-October) Mayor Daniel Lurie will appoint an interim supervisor to represent District 4 until a special election in June 2026, when the district’s voters will choose who will represent their majority Asian American community and serve out the remainder of the term — which is only a few months after that.

  • The recall campaign made for strange bedfellows, uniting (a) moderates and conservatives rankled not only by Engardio’s Great Highway policies, but his failure to support Supervisor Matt Dorsey’s proposal to revoke sanctuary city protections for fentanyl dealers, with (b) progressive allies of former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, intending to seek revenge for Joel’s high profile role in the 2022 recalls of District Attorney Chesa Boudin and three members of the SFUSD Board of Education (see next section).

Is our children learning?

  • On Tuesday, the Briones Society will be hosting SFUSD Board of Education member Supryia Ray to discuss the state of affairs in San Francisco public schools. News flash: It’s not good. Only 54% of SFUSD students are “proficient” (re: demonstrate sufficient mastery of grade-level skills and knowledge to be on track for the next grade level) in English Language Arts and only 46% are proficient in math. The results are particularly grim for black and Hispanic students.

  • To its credit, the Board has made significant progress addressing the most dire challenges facing the district, including a chronic inability to pay its teachers or balance its books. Eighth grade algebra is on its way back, and — hey — the district is not committing outright fraud and lying to the public anymore. So, there’s that.

  • But, we shouldn’t just pick on SFUSD. Statewide, only 47 percent of students are proficient in ELA and only 36% in math. Nationwide, only 13 percent of eighth graders are proficient in US History and only 22 percent in civics. This means that four out of five 13-year-olds can’t answer basic questions like, “How many branches of government are there?” and “Who fought in the US Civil War?” If you think these lacunae are remedied once kids get to college, you’d be mistaken. A 2006 study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that seniors at our nation’s most elite institutions actually knew less than freshman.

  • There is reason for concern beyond just the economic welfare of three or four lost generations. Much of the intellectual and moral degradation present in today’s public discourse can be traced, in part, to our collective idiocy. Using that term may seem harsh, but it’s intentional — “idiot” is ancient Greek word originally used not to connote a lack of intelligence, but to mock citizens who did not take an interest in or contribute to public affairs.

  • What’s worse is that, over the past 50 years, the number of Americans holding college degrees has nearly quadrupled. The upshot of all the above is a sizable portion of the American populace that has been led to believe it deserves a certain level of status, wealth, and success, but fails to obtain these because it actually possesses little knowledge and few skills. In other words: Zohran Mamdani voters. Sociologists like Peter Turchin have made convincing arguments that these “surplus elites” are the source of social instability throughout history.

  • So, what’s to be done? Plenty, starting with actually teaching, rather than indoctrinating, students. There also need to be significant changes made to curriculum and classroom management. Decades of rigorous research and, more importantly, first-hand accounts from teachers show that the wavy gravy practices championed by elite ed school professors fail to produce results. What does? Things that fell out of fashion around the time that test scores started tanking: memorization and recitation of facts, phonics-based reading practice, banning phones from the classroom, high behavioral expectations, and holding students accountable.

  • In most cities, where middle and working class families are priced out of private education, the only places where the aforementioned practices are being implemented are charter schools. Too bad our Board of Education just killed one. Food for thought.

Hey man, nice shot

  • Community organizer and small business owner Manny Yekutiel, best known as the founder of the popular café “Manny’s” in the Mission, has announced his run for District 8 Supervisor.

  • His entry sets up what is expected to be one of the marquee races of 2026, with Yekutiel positioning himself as a progressive voice to represent the Castro, Noe Valley, and Glen Park.

Nerd alert

Recent academic studies of interest

Quick hits

This week in San Francisco history

On September 19, 1982, regular streetcar service along Market Street in San Francisco came to an end after 122 years. But then, 13 years later, streetcars returned to Market when the F-Market & Wharves line debuted for revenue. An iconic piece of San Francisco — part transit vehicle, part living history — it remains at the center of Muni’s Heritage Weekend, celebrated each year on the third weekend in September.

The great American library

“That’s gonna last until next year. Then you’ll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about — y’know — the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital forming effects of military mobilization.” Will Hunting’s opinion notwithstanding, Gordon Wood is today’s preeminent historian of the early American republic. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood shows how the revolution spanned not only the years 1775 to 1783, but decades before and since, and was as much a social and cultural upheaval as it was a political and military one. What’s more, the social and cultural changes were necessary precipitants for the political and military actions that followed. For example, until the late 1700s, in both England and America, contracts were seen as akin to the common law: memorializations of existing courses of dealing, power dynamics, and relationships. But in the emerging capitalist and mercantile society of the Colonies, people increasingly began to think of contracts as things bargained over. Once it became accepted that a contract was not necessarily a reflection of an underlying permanent truth, but an arrangement of convenience freely entered into, it also became possible to think that a contract — including the social one between a King and his subjects —  could be freely dissolved.

We’ve got jokes

A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven, where he meets God.

“Welcome, my son,” God says to the man. “You may ask me one question about anything in the universe, and the truth shall be yours.”

After a moment’s reflection, the man asks, “God, who killed JFK, really?”

“It was Lee Harvey Oswald,” God replies. “He acted alone.”

The conspiracy theorist puts his face in his hands, then looks up, tears streaming. “Oh, no. They’ve gotten to you, too!”

Palate cleanser

The rabbit hole is deep.

Bill Jackson
Next

The Weekly Digest (September 14, 2025)