Greenberg: San Francisco’s Contribution to Reckless Rhetoric

San Francisco’s reckless-mouthed political leaders Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Scott Wiener, David Chiu (and a gaggle of others) have long positioned themselves as the moral bulkhead, a wall against “right-wing extremism.” Yet, beneath this facade of virtue lies a troubling pattern of incendiary rhetoric that mirrors the very divisiveness they decry. By wielding words as weapons—demonizing opponents as fascists, nazis, bigots, white supremacists or even existential threats to humanity—these elected officials escalate polarization.

Major national issues such as immigration enforcement, transgender rights and the local support/opposition to the Hamas war, play out daily on social media and in print and televised news reports.

Their verbiage, often laced with violent metaphors and unsubstantiated smears, has real-world consequences, fueling threats and eroding the civil discourse they claim to champion. These leaders’ rhetoric is not an isolated flaw but a systemic one, where they seek to prioritize partisan theater.

California State Senator Scott Wiener, a prominent left-wing voice on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and housing, has long wielded inflammatory language against political foes. He is a dangerous provocateur. His relentless labeling of opponents as nazis, fascists, or white nationalists not only poisons public discourse but also trivializes the horrors of actual genocide and authoritarianism. By refusing to dial back this tactic, he is not just irresponsible—it’s a direct threat to democratic civility.

Wiener’s X/Twitter feed overflows with examples. He accuses President Donald Trump of following a “fascist playbook” after Trump’s remarks on political violence. In August, he branded Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller a “fascist” for critiquing California policies, reducing complex debate to slurs. That same month, Wiener invoked nazi history to slam U.S. human rights reports on free speech while decrying Trump’s university funding cuts (due to antisemitic campus riots) as “fascist crap.” July saw a barrage: Wiener called Trump’s immigration enforcement a “white nationalist police state,” and ICE raids “fascist violence,” while he likened Supreme Court decisions to facilitating “fascist consolidation” and Trump’s media attacks to a “fascist assault.” This is Wiener’s default mode, applied to policies and people.

This approach is dangerously counterproductive. By conflating routine disagreements with Third Reich’s atrocities, Wiener cheapens historic terms that evoke the murder of six million Jews. It fosters a worldview where respectful discourse vanishes, opponents become subhuman monsters, and compromise seems impossible.

Wiener attributes death threats against him to figures like Charlie Kirk, whom he branded a “scum-bucket grifter” peddling “homophobic misinformation.” His warnings allege “alarmingly blatant attempts to eliminate… transgender people” in his mind justify trans sanctuary expansions, but they veer into conspiratorial territory, while equating his critics with 1930s collaborators.

Nancy Pelosi, the controversial San Francisco matriarch and former House Speaker, embodies this duplicity most starkly. For years, Pelosi has berated Republican “inciteful rhetoric” as a direct catalyst for violence, invoking the 1978 assassination of gay Supervisor Harvey Milk to warn that words like “fight like hell” lead to peril. Following the 2022 hammer attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, she rightly decried demonization as a threat to lives.

Yet, mere days after activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Pelosi defended leftist rhetoric with chilling nonchalance: “…we cannot take responsibility for the minds that are out there and how they hear it.” This purposeful evasion, amid a surge in political violence, reeks of selective accountability. This is unbelievable hypocrisy, as there are over 50 documented instances of Democratic inflammatory speech preceding physical attacks. Pelosi’s own history—comparing Trump-era policies to fascism and labeling GOP bans on transgender care an “assault on civil rights”—employs dehumanizing tropes that stoke fear.

Governor Gavin Newsom takes this hypocrisy to theatrical extremes through his social media trolling. Once a polished progressive, Newsom has now devolved into a digital provocateur, mocking Trump and MAGA policies amid vows to “fight fire with fire”, boosting his national profile. He’s unhinged and childish; a governor mimicking the bombast he once criticized. Newsom frames red-state transgender bans as Confederate-style defiance, declaring California a refuge for “criminal aliens.” When Newsom split with Democrats over trans athlete bills in March 2025, calling trans participation “deeply unfair” and breaking years of California’s LGBTQ+ advocacy, the break exposed intra-party fractures his trolling exacerbates. Newsom’s antics inflame internet toxicity, proving that when progressives descend to the gutter, they drag vulnerable communities down with them.

District 5 City Supervisor (City councilman) Bilal Mahmood, when campaigning for office, attacked Elon Musk and his influence on Twitter.  The trickle-down effect reaches to the micro-level in elected office governance.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu exemplifies this cadre’s rhetorical overreach, cloaking aggressive legal stances in absolutist moralism that borders on demagoguery. He was at one time a member of the World Economic Forum.

Chiu has championed transgender protections, authoring laws like AB 711 (2019) to reflect students’ chosen names on records and AB 1184 (2021) safeguarding confidentiality for gender-affirming care. In 2025, amid Trump’s executive orders erasing transgender health data, Chiu led lawsuits, signing onto actions by Doctors for America to block federal overreach and vowing to defend SF’s sanctuary status against funding cuts. Yet, his rhetoric—declaring the administration “illegally asserting power it does not have, as courts already determined during the first Trump Administration”—employs hyperbolic accusations of illegitimacy that equate opponents with authoritarianism.

Chiu’s claims that San Francisco’s sanctuary policies enhance safety but cracking down on illegal immigration endangers it, is a stance deserving mockery as “you can’t make this up.” During his January 2025 inauguration at GLIDE (praised by Wiener for defending LGBTQ+ rights), Chiu’s office was lauded for blocking abortion subpoenas, but his broader narrative frames federal actions as “existential assaults,” mirroring Pelosi’s civil rights hyperbole. This escalatory tone, tying trans sanctuary to battles over birthright citizenship and immigrant voting, risks alienating allies and inviting backlash, as seen in funding threats to SF’s programs. Chiu’s words fuel a partisan inferno.

San Francisco produces a conga-line of controversial characters. Recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin; Hamas-supporting agitator and previous city councilman/supervisor Dean Preston (a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist); the now-retired Reverend Amos Brown; and let’s not forget Kamala Harris as she refers to Trump as fascist on CNN.  There’s no shortage of damning anecdotal and actual evidence. Let’s hope the voters of the city continue pushback and relegate them to pariahs.