The Greenberg Brief: Breed’s Grand Trans Appointment

We just can’t stop the constant parade of controversy, can we? San Francisco’s mayor London Breed Thursday announced her making an appointment for the position of Executive Director of the “Office of Transgender Initiatives.”

Head-scratching aside, Breed finds this specific appointment to be of such importance, now, she had to put out a press release and gloat on social media. Clearly, this must be an election year.

So, what’s the problem?

First off, the individual Breed has appointed is a drag queen-turned trans politician, named Alpha Mulugeta a/k/a Honey Mahogany.  If you were following various San Francisco political races back in 2022, you’d recognize Mahogany for several notable reasons: Mahogany was then the chairperson of the San Francisco Democratic Party, the SF DCCC. The local party was quite radical then, and under Mahogany, they collectively were wildly supportive of disgraced and ousted former district attorney Chesa Boudin. The party opposed his recall. They opposed the recall of the three ousted SF public school commissioners. They were opposed to the appointing of now moderately successful DA Brooke Jenkins. They backed the farthest Left policies and candidates, including avowed socialists like Jane Kim and John Avalos, et al.

Second point: Looking back further, to 2020, Mahogany made several outrageous social media posts which thankfully have been archived: Mahogany not only wanted to defund the police (SFPD) but to also abolish the police, entirely.

With her grand act, London Breed has appointed a cop hater to a city agency.

Thirdly, city hall salary data is freely available. I found the past executive director of that Office of Transgender Initiatives, Pau Crego Walters, was compensated in his position to the tune of $194,000 annually. I will therefore assume Honey Mahogany, in that same role, will similarly be paid nearly $200,000 of taxpayers’ money, if not more.

This fiscal fact garnered even greater outrage on social media than Mahogany being a cop hater.

In such current precarious fiscal-peril times, it is clearly very poor judgment by Mayor Breed to be filling jobs featuring ridiculously high salaries which are not directly beneficial to the well-being of the city as a whole. We have a fiscal emergency with a budget shortfall projected to be $1 Billion next year.

Fourthly, Mayor Breed made another very concerning change with this appointment that is not so obvious to the casual observer, but I caught it immediately: Breed moved the Office of Transgender Initiatives out of the City Administrator’s office (it’s been there since 2017) and over to the SF HRC, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

The HRC is controversial in itself. Much scrutiny has been placed on the commission, especially over these last two years, as it is the umbrella agency which “hosts” the San Francisco Reparations Plan Committee. Investigations by savvy armchair journalists found the amount of taxpayers’ dollars funding the HRC have purposefully been suddenly increased by Mayor Breed, in her annual city hall budget. In 2018, the Human Rights Commission’s budget was $4.2 million.  She raised it to $19 million currently, raising eyebrows. Now we may know why.

In other words, a lot of money moves through this HRC on gray-area, constitution-violating race, gender and orientation issues and programs. While other city departments and agencies are being asked to slash spending due to budget deficit constraints, the HRC budget is actually spiking.

Back to Honey Mahogany: Condemnation was swift against Breed’s botched appointment announcement; it is in poor taste and highly suspicious. Will there be pressure to rescind the appointment? It would certainly be justified, and we need to pay close attention while this plays out.