Nancy Pelosi Is Running For Her 19th Term In Congress - Her Challenger, Shahid Buttar, Has Something To Say About That
"We’re working to end her dynasty," says the left-wing Democratic challenger.
Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.
Shahid Buttar, a Bay Area activist and constitutional lawyer formerly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is again running against Nancy Pelosi for her seat in the House of Representatives and to represent San Francisco.
Buttar is going up against Pelosi for the third time, having received around 81,000 votes in the 2020 general election - more votes than any other Pelosi challenger since she assumed her seat in 1987. Pelosi is running for her 19th term in Congress this election cycle. If reelected she will serve 38 consecutive years.
The Buttar campaign has called out Pelosi for consistently ducking debates with challengers. She has not engaged in a debate in over 30 years. During the 2020 election cycle, Buttar chose to debate an empty chair after his campaign was blown off by the Pelosi campaign.
Buttar is betting that his third time against Pelosi will be the charm, hoping that lingering criticisms over her opposition to Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, and bans on congressional stock trading will be galvanizing for San Francisco voters. “You can be wealthy, you can be middle class, and you can be working class, or you can be destitute, and it doesn’t matter, you can still be outraged about the corruption of wealthy, intergenerational dynastic oligarchs gaming the markets and subverting congress to fill their pockets at the public’s expense,” Buttar said regarding stock trading by congress members and tax cuts for the rich passed with Democratic support, both of which have enormously benefited Pelosi and her family.
San Francisco is a very rich town, encompassing some of the highest-earning households in the country, and is overwhelmingly Democratic. Wealthy liberals, and even, increasingly, wealthy conservatives, tend to support the mainstream neoliberal policies and figures of the Democratic party, Pelosi in particular. She garners immense donations from Silicon Valley companies such as Google, and she rallied many voters around her “#Resistance” to Donald Trump.
Buttar thus faces an uphill battle in convincing well-to-do voters that his economic populism and anti-corruption ideas would be better for San Francisco. But he believes that as long as he can get his message out, the tide will turn. “I think even people who are wealthy in San Francisco tend to be empiricists…If the district has a chance to understand the history and the record [of Pelosi], even the wealthy people here are alarmed and the need for change is so desperate and so widely understood, that I’m quite confident San Francisco will make a better choice if the word gets out.”
In her time as a Democratic Party leader, Pelosi has raised close to a billion dollars for the Democrats. And because Pelosi is able to fundraise so much money for herself and the Democratic party, her institutional power remains entrenched and she holds it over any Democrats in congress, such as the progressive Squad members, who would dare to speak out against her or the party, or who would support progressive primary challengers against centrist Democrats. Pelosi uses her power in the House and in the Democratic party to keep people in line, because she can turn off the spigot of money and access to anyone who makes trouble.
She and her husband have also personally made tens of millions of dollars in the stock market, with most of her husband’s trades being made in the top 5 Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Apple. At the same time, Pelosi has had private conversations with the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, after the House introduced bipartisan bills targeting those very same Big Tech companies with antitrust legislation. The New York Times reported that Pelosi asked Apple’s CEO what changes needed to be made to the bills to avoid harming those companies, a question that flies in the face of what antitrust legislation is supposed to do: break up monopolies.
Pelosi, after pressure, has just recently shifted her stance on congressional stock trading, saying that she is now open to the several bipartisan bills that have been proposed which would ban the activity. Buttar is glad that the issue of congressional self-enrichment is finally being seriously talked about, and he thinks that the pressure from his campaign is essential to getting Pelosi to concede on certain policies, but he thinks the proposed stock trading bans don’t go far enough. “Overlooked in this long overdue discussion is any serious consideration of whether and how the policy makers – pardon me, the vulture capitalists masquerading as policy makers – are going to recoup the public and give back their ill-gotten gains. There hasn’t been any discussion of restitution,” Buttar said.
And so far, the proposed bills would still allow congress members to put their shares into a blind trust or into broad index fund accounts, but would ban individual stock trades by congress members and their families. Buttar is not sure that even that is a sufficient protection. “There is a pretense that if you invest in index funds as opposed to individual equities then you’re not necessarily legislating on behalf of particular industries, but you’re still legislating on behalf of industry,” he said. Buttar said that any property, be it stocks or real estate, can potentially present conflicts of interest for lawmakers, and therefore the less property owned by government servants the better.
Pelosi has also been dismissive of Medicare For All - even though it is popular amongst her constituents. She says that the Affordable Care Act, a law that enormously benefits and entrenches private insurance companies and which Pelosi touts as part of her record of getting legislation passed, should instead be protected and expanded. This is even after over 900,000 Americans have died during the pandemic and many people lost their employer-based health insurance due to losing their jobs.
Buttar is indignant at Pelosi’s and the Democrats’ unwillingness to prioritize Medicare For All. “No other people in the world are incurring medical debt the way we are because in every other country health care is a right,” Buttar said. “The fact that we are denied basic human rights in this country by a bipartisan establishment that is more committed to relentless increases in the military budget than allowing people to get care and medicine when they need it in the middle of a damn pandemic where millions of people have died…The sheer audacity of that prioritization of spending on destruction at a time when millions of Americans are just trying to stay alive is, in my mind, simply delegitimating.”
In regards to the security state, in 2013, after whistleblower Edward Snowden brought forth revelations that the NSA is using a global surveillance system to intercept, collect, and store vast amounts of personal electronic communications, a sustained outcry from the public led to support in Congress for wresting away these surveillance authorities. Pelosi was opposed to these calls for reform and aggressively whipped Democrats away from a bipartisan bill that would have clawed back the NSA’s surveillance powers.
She did this again in 2018, under the Trump administration, a president who she claimed poses a unique threat to democracy. In congress, an amendment was presented by Justin Amash, a Republican, that would have required the FBI to attain a warrant before accessing information that the NSA has collected on people. Pelosi stood on the House floor and offered a defense of the Trump-endorsed bill without that reform amendment, thus extending the power of the FBI to spy on Americans without warrants. At the same time, Pelosi denounced the minimal warrant safeguards favored by many in her own party.
Ultimately, the reform amendment, proposed by a Republican, lost only by a narrow margin. Pelosi was at odds with a majority of Democrats in the House who voted in favor of the reforms, while she voted against the amendment. She therefore played a key role in extending the warrantless surveillance powers of the NSA, even under the Trump Administration, a president who she claimed she was #Resisting. Pelosi chose to vote against a bipartisan amendment that would have limited the ability of Trump’s FBI to access Americans’ private information.
“[Pelosi] expanded [Trump’s] surveillance authority. She supported every military budget expansion request that he proposed, the tax breaks for the wealthy under his administration,” Buttar said, “I see San Francisco represented in Washington ultimately by agents of Wall Street and the Pentagon rather than representatives of the visionary values that unite and have long united our city.”
A House Divided
Although Buttar is presenting the most serious electoral challenge to Pelosi, the progressive and leftist community of San Francisco is anything but unified in support of his campaign. Buttar’s 2020 campaign was rocked by two separate allegations: A claim by Elizabeth Croydon that she was sexually harassed by Buttar in 2003, and separate claims by certain members of Buttar’s former campaign staff that he contributed to a hostile work environment.
Buttar unequivocally denied the allegation of sexual harassment. Later, in a six-part posting on Medium, Jaqueline Anne Thompson reported her and others’ experiences with Croydon; they claimed she was known to be an erratic dissembler and had a history of making specious claims against people in the artist and activist community of Washington, D.C. where she was based.
The separate allegations of workplace hostility were detailed in a claim by Buttar’s former campaign manager, Jasper Wilde, in a post on Medium. Wilde called into question Buttar’s willingness to run a winning campaign and claimed that he was antagonistic to his team members along gendered lines, with his disagreements being disproportionately targeted at women staff.
Buttar has responded to these claims in multiple outlets. He was initially more measured in his response, such as on the Useful Idiots podcast where he primarily described the allegations as disagreements over campaign tactics, but he has since been more direct, characterizing the allegations as racist smears abetted by the media. “To smear me, all of the white journalists here in the city who published their stories had to silence an Afro-Latina whistleblower,” Buttar said, “She had inside information relevant to the journalists and the clubs that they actively suppressed, and when she brought it forward, she was harassed, she was hacked, she was threatened, and then she was smeared herself by some of the very same people.” Buttar is referring to Gloria Berry, an elected member of the San Francisco Democratic Party Central Committee who has written multiple countervailing accounts of Buttar’s 2020 campaign.
Jasper Wilde did not respond to multiple requests for comment before publication.
Buttar is currently suing the San Francisco Chronicle for defamation over their reporting of the sexual harassment allegation and the toxic workplace allegations. “In suing the Chronicle, I’m ultimately aiming to vindicate, not our campaign and not me or my reputation, what I’m aiming to vindicate there is the right of the public to have elections that are not being skewed by racist fabrications indulged by newspapers of record,” Buttar said. “This is an election integrity and press ethics lawsuit, ultimately.”
The Chair of the San Francisco Berniecrats, Brandon Harami, who motioned to rescind the club’s endorsement of Buttar, which ultimately only downgraded its endorsement to a “recommendation,” recently defended his position in an article, saying:
We voted by a slim majority to recommend rescinding Shahid’s endorsement on the basis that he operated a toxic work environment. I motioned for this recommendation as I made my decision that evening to trust the 7 staffers who quit…He and his supporters have made claims that our actions were rooted in white supremacy, and that we helped spread false information that he committed sexual assault, despite us being very clear that we were only holding him accountable for his behavior towards staff.
This kind of dispiriting infighting amongst progressives and leftists is not unique. In the 2021 New York City mayoral race, the progressive Scott Stringer, who campaigned on affordable housing for all, was accused of sexual harassment, thus dropping him in the polls. The next closest progressive, Dianne Morales, who supported defunding of the police, saw her campaign derailed by staff members who, alleging a toxic work environment, attempted to unionize. Morales responded with firings. A staff Twitter account emphasized the race and gender of those who were fired, saying, “Black women were harmed, pass it on.” Morales happens to be Afro-Latina.
Ultimately, the conservative Democrat Eric Adams, who was previously a member of the Republican Party, won the mayoral race.
In a 2020 Massachusetts congressional race, the progressive candidate Alex Morse, who was taking on the entrenched, three-decade centrist incumbent Richard Neal, saw his promising challenge rocked by a concerted effort on the part of Democratic Party operatives to entrap and paint the 31-year-old Morse as a predator looking to date students at UMass. The Intercept published an email addressed to a local reporter that read:
Alex Morse has a bad habit of using his position as a popular politician in Western Mass to hook up with college kids at UMass 10+ years younger than him. It’s creepy and the power dynamics are terrible: most of the people he tries to hook up with look up to him and are involved in activism or other political work with him.
The Intercept reported Morse’s response, writing:
Morse readily admitted to having used dating apps like Tinder and Grindr to find dates and notes that makes him no different than any other young gay man in America. “I won’t apologize for being gay and using gay dating apps and going on dates with other adult men,” Morse has said. “I won’t apologize for being human.”
After the allegations were made public, local Sunrise Movement chapters pulled their support for Morse. But once The Intercept had documented that the sexual misconduct claims were thin and part of an effort to undermine Morse, the chapter reinstated their support of his campaign.
Ultimately, Neal won reelection, spending $5.3 million against the insurgent Morse.
Also in 2020, Aaron Coleman, a troubled 19-year-old progressive candidate who defeated a 7-term corporatist incumbent in the Democratic primary for a seat in the Kansas State Legislature by running on Medicare For All, legalizing cannabis, and full reproductive rights, saw his campaign gain national attention with revelations that he engaged in severe bullying of female classmates during middle school. Coleman ultimately won the seat, but has since been battered by credible accounts of continuing verbal and physical harassment.
The left prides itself on being more humanist and having the good and proper morals compared to the deplorable conservatives and even establishment liberals; all the yard signs make explicit that they believe in science, that love is love, that no human is illegal, etc., etc.
But what the left is not good at — at least since the end of World War II with the ascendency of the fanatical anti-communism that broke apart the radical forces of the labor movement — is achieving and holding on to power. It is no secret that the Western nations have been shifting steadily rightward in their subservience to corporatism, capital, and privatization. That is what the Affordable Care Act embodies. That is what our military spending embodies. That is what our trade deals, such as NAFTA, embody. That is what our tax system embodies. A fundamental aspect of fascism is a wedding of corporate interests and state power. That is exactly what we have in the United States now, and it is getting worse.
Attending this current iteration of the left-wing is an adherence to dead-end identity politics and the primacy of immutable traits such as gender, sexual orientation, and race, over and above shared ideology and solidarity across these traits. At its best, these kind of politics can open up much needed democratic and public space for people who are and have been oppressed by the systems of capitalism. The writer Natasha Lennard defends this kind of political language, saying: “Anti-racist, anti-capitalist struggle requires expansive collective work, collaboration, and togetherness, in which new ideas, terms, slogans, frameworks, and modes of relating and identifying can emerge.”
At it’s worst, the primacy of identity politics can assuage many people when the empire creates a more diverse empire; when the oppressors become a more diverse set of oppressors. As Cornel West wrote, “If the boot is on our neck, does it make any difference what color the foot is in the boot?”
Not only are the values and language of identity politics at odds with building broad working-class support that incorporates those who find such language to be alien, off-putting, and elitist, those political values and language also open up very convenient doors for age-old divide and conquer tactics that pull the rug out from many promising leftist candidates. Buttar was attacked for being misogynist. Buttar attacks his attackers by saying they are racists for calling him, a son of Pakistani immigrants, a misogynist. The attackers attack back by saying he doesn’t properly respect the LGBTQ community. Buttar responds by saying that his attackers silenced an Afro-Latina woman. Alex Morse was accused of transgressing “power dynamics” because he was looking for dates. Dianne Morales fired black women. And so on. It is a veritable pissing contest of aggrievement.
And meanwhile, the crypt keeper Nancy Pelosi is still in office, smiling, eating ice cream, making millions.
The left needs to be serious about its analyses of power and on what hills it wants to die on. Anyone who presents a credible challenge to the status quo and who can’t be bought or sold will inevitably be attacked, either credibly or with smears. The ruling elites and those who represent them will always go to great lengths to preserve their interests, even to the point of undemocratically sabotaging popular progressive candidates. That is why many people are outright abandoning the two ruling parties and even electoralism altogether, and instead shifting their focus to mutual aid and to building mass, worker-led, working-class movements that can exert outside pressure on the systems of power.
Kshama Sawant, the socialist Seattle City Councilmember who has defeated Amazon-sponsored recall campaigns against her, owes much of her success to that kind of working-class organizing. She is a firm believer that the Democratic Party is an irredeemable institution and that hope for leftist policies lies in third-parties and in labor organizing. “Kshama Sawant is my political idol,” Buttar said during our interview, “I’m frankly amazed at the influence she’s had as a local official who has made the Fight for $15/hr a national cause célèbre. She’s frankly shamed everyone in congress for not showing up for work for the preceding decade.”
Buttar is running in San Francisco as a Democrat. While he said that ideally he would rather run as a Green Party candidate, he believes that his campaign and the pressure it puts on Pelosi can only work if he runs within the Democratic Party:
The only path to city wide office in SF at the moment is through the Democratic party. And I am openly hostile to the party leadership. I am openly antagonistic. I have, not only no love for it, but I describe it in public as corrupt. So, you can think of my relationship to the Democratic Party as sort of like, the same role that the CIA has to democracy. They talk about democracy a lot but they’re engaged in destroying it everywhere they can get…The Democratic Party as it’s currently constituted is something that absolutely needs to be burned to the ground. And that’s why I’m running against the leadership and calling out [Pelosi’s] corruption. Because it’s not just her, either, it’s an institutional corruption that infects the party’s policy making and it impacts our communities. And it has already had devastating effects on the present, let alone the future. And the future, I don’t think, can sustain much more.
Buttar faces Pelosi in the Primaries this June. He will likely place second, facing her again in the General election in November.
Perhaps the left in San Francisco and more broadly will be able to settle on a unified set of priorities, tactics, and on where it draws the line in the sand. If not, it will continue to be a powerless, vestigial organ of its former militant self in the body politic.
To watch or listen to my full interview with Shahid Buttar, go here:
I know that is useless to engage any type of attention cause the American Democratic process its broken and in the end Pelosi will win, but anyhow my dear respects to all of you.