Democratic icon Nancy Pelosi accuses millions of Americans of being foreign agents

Pelosi’s attack on dissent reveals the authoritarian nature of the Democratic Party

As soon as Nancy Pelosi accused supporters of a ceasefire in Gaza of being tools of Russia—or China, depending on who she’s responding to—I found myself suddenly tagged in a vast series of social media posts by people around the country.

[H]er recent comments did not surprise me in the least. I tried to warn voters and journalists when it could have made a difference. 

Many have long been frustrated with Pelosi’s policy record, or supported my campaigns  in 2018, 2020, or 2022 to replace her. Others discovered only recently that Pelosi is in fact a far cry from the figure depicted by major media sources who describe her as a champion of either women, San Francisco, or the Democratic Party.

A surprising number of voices urged me to run for Congress again. That is not going to happen, but I continue to pursue a legal challenge to the racism among journalists that enables the corporate Democratic Party’s corrupt machinations, and I also continue to write to inform the public. (Thanks for reading!)

This post responds to the outrage following Pelosi’s latest smears targeting critics of the bipartisan militarism that she has crucially enabled as a leader of the Democratic Party.

Can you hear me now?

When I ran for Congress to challenge Pelosi for the seat she has held for 37 years without ever debating an opponent even once, what originally motivated me was her consistent support for authoritarianism.

As Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and then Speaker of the House, she did more to build the contemporary mass surveillance state, and lend it bipartisan legitimacy—despite its continuing unconstitutionality—than nearly anyone in Washington. My first moment ever considering a congressional campaign was in January 2018, when she led Congress to re-authorize the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program for six years, without any debate over its efficacy or civil liberties violations.

That’s why her recent comments did not surprise me in the least. I tried to warn voters when it could have made a difference. 

On the one hand, I won more votes against Pelosi than any challenger she has ever faced by a wide margin. The 81,000 votes I received in November 2020 would be enough in many districts to win a congressional seat.

Ultimately, however, I discovered that journalists in San Francisco ultimately care more about ad hominem lies and smears than documented corruption, or Pelosi’s long record of hamstringing particular policy goals that have united San Francisco.

Pelosi wants to silence Madison’s music

Like every other Member of Congress, Nancy Pelosi swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Her latest comments suggest that she might not have ever read it.

The First Amendment includes protections for five distinct sets of expressive acts, each of which can be understood in relation to the democratic political process.

1. The rights to free exercise of religion and against the establishment of religion aim to guard freedom of conscience

2. Freedom of speech ensures the opportunity for self-expression

3. Freedom of assembly allows people to gather, among other things, to declare support for shared ideas

4. Freedom of the press is supposed to encourage a robust landscape of institutions to ensure transparency and public accountability

5. The right to petition the government for redress of grievances represents the culmination of the other rights enshrined in the First Amendment

NYU Law professor Burt Neuborne wrote a book, “Madison’s Music,” that explains how the distinct rights that the First Amendment protects together form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

One need not understand any novel constitutional theory, however, to recognize how a senior government official encouraging FBI investigations of lawful, constitutionally protected dissent represents a frontal assault on these rights, the Constitution that enshrines them, the democracy it was designed to guard, and the people it was meant to empower.

The FBI might have its hands full

By suggesting that the Federal Bureau of Investigations scrutinize protests urging a ceasefire, Pelosi in fact invited an investigation targeting a majority of Americans. In November, 68% of respondents to a poll conducted by Reuters agreed that “Israel should call a ceasefire.”

Last July, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its latest estimate of the country’s population: 334,914,895 Americans. To the extent the Reuters poll in November remains statistically significant (and that support for a ceasefire has not grown since then, as it certainly seems to have), it suggests that roughly 228 million Americans favor a ceasefire.

They might need to hire a few more agents.

[Note: My next post will focus on the FBI’s long history of suppressing dissent across the United States, and the Islamophobia and bias apparent in the Bureau’s most recent round of attacks on constitutional rights. Those are themes that I’ve raised many times over the past 20 years and will again, but I want to keep this post focused on Pelosi.]

Smearing critics is Pelosi’s stock and trade

Nancy Pelosi faced an electoral threat only once in her career, from the campaign that I built with the support of 30,000 concerned Americans across the country that won 81,000 votes from San Franciscans in November 2020 to remove her from Congress while at the time serving as Speaker of the House. The political pressure we mounted forced Pelosi into half a dozen policy concessions that ultimately passed the U.S. House of Representatives, including major reforms to labor, policing, and executive accountability that she had previously opposed.

The way she retained her seat was by ducking debates, as she always has. While many clamored for a debate when I ran (which was largely the point of the initial vision for my campaign in 2018), Pelosi was able to ignore them because a character assassination that began on my birthday silenced me and destroyed my campaign three months before the election. 

On the one hand, Pelosi herself said nothing about me at any point. Operatives loyal to her party, however, gained any number of opportunities from smearing me. Several won jobs in the Democratic Party and campaigns affiliated with it. Others won endorsements from Democratic Party governing bodies. Others won appointments to boards of organizations, to at least one of which Pelosi’s party paid thousands of dollars.

The ranks of loyal Democrats willing to promote racist lies outrageously included self-described Socialists and Progressives. Some of them are elected officeholders, such as Dean Preston in San Francisco and Lissette Espinoza-Garnica in Redwood City. Others seek elected office, like Jackie Fielder in San Francisco and Brandon Harami, the Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Oakland. Entire organizations in which I once held some hope also fell prey to the pattern, including the League of Pissed Off Voters, Dramatic Socialites of America, the San Francisco Berniecrats, and the Harvey Milk Democratic Club.

Some might perceive Pelosi as standing above the fray, since a corporate PR agent helped engineer the disinformation campaign that blocked my attempt to offer San Francisco an alternative in Washington. But Pelosi was the beneficiary of the smears, and the person at the top of the party that orchestrated them. Letting Pelosi off the hook for helping steer character assassination campaigns from the shadows is the equivalent of ignoring Henry Kissinger’s prolific crimes against humanity despite his decisions that killed more people than anyone since Hitler.

Many of the voices who misled the public in 2020 claim today to stand for Palestine, despite having done everything possible to ensure that their city remains represented by a shameless agent of militarism, rather than one of its most ardent and well-informed critics. Their hypocrisy offers evidence that the opportunism and irrationality embodied by Nancy Pelosi are not simply personal phenomena, but rather institutional and cultural ones that appear intractable.

One of the most ridiculous aspects of her latest smears is that Pelosi can’t figure out whether the foreign power funding domestic dissent is Russia, or instead, China. She referred to a ceasefire as Putin’s message on CNN, while telling Code Pink activists holding a peaceful demonstration at her house to go back to China. The sheer opportunism of a rhetorical strategy based on making it up as one goes along would be bad enough, even were it not a ruse to enable preventable war, death, and destruction for profit.

Paid subscribers can access a livestream on which I discussed these and other issues with host Jen Perelman from Jenerational Change. Like me, Jen worked for years as a public interest lawyer before running for Congress against a corporate Democrat. Today, like me, she speaks to the corruption of our political process from the standpoint of someone who tried to engage it in good faith.