San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie stood alongside city officials and more than a dozen construction workers in hard hats Wednesday afternoon minutes after announcing a proposed new tax cut for multi-million dollar real estate deals. That’s when the woman started shouting.
“Tax the Israel! Tax the Israel!” shouted the woman, a passer-by who had wandered into a democratic socialist-lead protest against the tax cut and modified the group’s “Tax the rich!” chant.
She then started bellowing: “Tax the Jews! Tax the Jews!”
Her chants are clearly audible to officials at the press conference, according to video taken from the event, which was held inside a construction site at 1111 Sutter St. in Lower Nob Hill on the cusp of the Tenderloin. The press conference, held by Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, was fenced off from the protesters, and the site’s chain-link fence was obscured by an orange scrim. Protesters said they could not see the presser’s attendees, and vice-versa.
It is unclear if Lurie reacted in the moment but, about three hours later, his team put out a statement: “At an event this afternoon, a group of individuals that were chanting ‘tax the rich’ began to shout ‘tax the Jews,’” Lurie wrote. “Suggesting that Jews are wealthy is a tired trope, and targeting our community at an event focused on creating economic opportunity for San Franciscans is decidedly antisemitic.”
It escaped containment. Gov. Gavin Newsom, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, Rep. Eric Swalwell, Sen. Scott Wiener, and dozens of others issued their own condemnations of antisemitism. The New York Post headlined blared “Vile antisemitic chant breaks out at San Francisco press conference.” A CNN reporter, like many others, repeated Lurie’s line that “a group of people” participated in the chants. Lurie’s spokesperson said he had “never experienced something like this until today.” Even David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former advisor, weighed in about the “echoes of another, very dark time.”
By early Thursday morning, a little after noon in Israel, the Jerusalem Post’s homepage carried the piece, “‘Tax the Jews’ replaces ‘tax the rich’ chants at San Francisco event, mayor says.” The Times of Israel followed with its own article.
Thousands of real and imaginary people on social media denounced San Francisco as a hotbed of antisemitism, which was portrayed as the natural course for left-wing politics.
But the account from Lurie was inaccurate, four participants of the protest said — and their version of events is corroborated by the on-site video. It was not a group chant. It was a lone woman, allegedly known to the construction workers in the area as abrasive and apparently mentally ill, who ambled up and chanted on her own.
The protesters, who are with the Democratic Socialists of America, told her to stop, they said.
“At some point, some woman comes over, I think she lives across the street, and started talking to me about, ‘Hey what’s this about?’” said Matthew Pancia, the treasurer for DSA San Francisco.
Pancia, who is Jewish, said he gave her his spiel and she joined in. “Then two minutes in, she starts saying weird shit,” he said. “She started saying ‘Tax Israel,’ ‘Tax the Jews,’ and immediately I was like ‘No, no, no, not that one, don’t say that — I’m a Jew, I don’t think you should say that.’”
Pancia said she paused and then “she started saying it again.”
“There were multiple attempts to speak with her, and then there was an attempt by us to drown her out by repeating the ‘Tax the Rich’ chant,” said Christin Evans, another participant. At one point, Evans said she told the woman: “That’s not why we’re here.”
Video posted by the account StopAntisemitism shows the woman wandering about, alone, outside the press conference, shouting “Cancel Israel!” and “Shame on Jews!” The DSA members confirmed it was the same woman.
“We didn’t really have a way to stop her, so we just started chanting over her and eventually she just rambled on,” added Marc Dantona, another protester. Jennifer Bolen, co-chair of DSA San Francisco, said that when she walked up to the woman to tell her to leave, “she blew up at me, threw her hands up, I stepped back, and then she left.”
The episode lasted perhaps five to 10 minutes, the participants said.
The mayor’s office did not reply to questions asking whether Lurie would retract or modify his version of events.
The San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, which was also at the press conference, has done so. It issued its own initial statement in line with Lurie’s but, six and a half hours later, acknowledged it was incorrect.
Building Trades at 3 p.m. on Wednesday claimed that “individuals identifying themselves with the Democratic Socialists of America disrupted the event with antisemitic chants.”
In a 9:30 p.m. “update,” it clarified that “We have been in touch with members of DSA San Francisco, who have reiterated their condemnation of the antisemitic remarks made by an individual who was not part of their protest nor a member of their organization.”
As of today, the union’s admittedly erroneous statement is still posted online.
Woman was purportedly known to construction workers
Pancia and Dantona spoke to construction workers outside the fence, who recognized the woman. “They were like, ‘We know her, this lady comes out and just yells shit at us,’” Pancia said. A worker told Dantona: “Oh yeah, that lady, she’s around — she’s a crazy person.”
For seasoned protesters in a city with its share of troubled people on the street, the unhinged comments were not as surprising as the mayor’s response — and the resultant international amplification of the shoutings of a random passer-by.
“We get it, we’re in the TL, people are out,” said Pancia. “As an organizer, I mean, it’s almost at every community rally or protest … there’s going to be someone coming to say something,” added Bolen. “Everyone does the same thing: You de-escalate, they lose steam, and they walk away. That’s what we did here.”
But, Bolen said, it was “a little reckless” of Lurie to issue the statement he did. “It makes the city less safe to create this story that a group of people were engaging in an antisemitic protest when it was a single woman who did not seem to have all her facilities.”
Lurie’s team did not reach out to DSA, she said, and DSA in fact had issued a statement two hours before the mayor’s saying that a lone “non-member joined the crowd and spouted disgusting antisemitic remarks.”
Pancia called the reaction a “very cynical, obnoxious weaponization of a random person” and said that, “as a Jew,” he found the “boy-who-cried-wolf antisemitism” from Lurie to be “offensive” and “gross.”
“Think of Frank Chu — it’s the same thing,” added Dantona, referencing San Francisco’s famed former eccentric who was for years a ubiquitous presence at demonstrations and large events, carrying signs warning against the “12 galaxies” and alien mind control.
Associating the many hundreds of demonstrations that Chu crashed over the years with the views of the paranoid conspiracy theorist would be as unfair as what happened Wednesday, he said.
“If somebody thinks about it and takes a picture of Frank Chu and says, ‘These are the crazy leftists in San Francisco,’ that’s what this is,” he said. “It’s like if we rewind 25 years and Frank Chu is there with his sign and Fox News says ‘look at these liberals.’ It’s an opportunity, and they’re on top of it.”
As of Wednesday evening, DSA organizers said no one from Lurie’s team had reached out to check on the veracity of the mayor’s broadly distributed claims.