San Francisco's business establishment has a decade-long habit of finding political foils in Dolores Park — and Mission Local columnist Joe Eskenazi argues, in a piece published July 7, that this year's Trans March handed them a particularly good one.

Writing ten days after State Sen. Scott Wiener was ejected from the Trans March on June 26 by a small group of marchers citing his Israel stance, Eskenazi contends the deepest exploitation of the incident isn't in Wiener's fundraising texts. It's in the hands of what he calls San Francisco's "ascendant moneyed interests," who have seized on the footage to sell a "cartoon San Francisco" paralyzed by radical chaos — and use that cartoon to justify a familiar policy wish list: more mayoral power, more tax relief for business, more incarceration.

At least one marcher on June 26 used language Eskenazi calls "unambiguously antisemitic" — invoking Wiener's "Israeli masters" and "Zionist handlers." A separate airport encounter allegedly produced a reference to the senator's "tainted bloodline." Eskenazi does not minimize any of it.

But he draws a firm line between isolated acts of bigotry and a city-defining political movement. Radical factions have been ejecting mainstream politicians from the Trans March for at least a decade, he notes: Mayor Daniel Lurie was removed last year; Mayor Ed Lee and Sen. Mark Leno were shown out a decade before that. The June 26 footage is, in his accounting, the same recurring script.

Wiener himself emerged from it politically stronger. The confrontation became a CNN segment and a fundraising bonanza — a capitalization Eskenazi acknowledges while noting the episode "did feel a bit like a soccer player rolling about on the pitch and clutching his knee." The people who drove Wiener out, he writes, "only made him stronger."

Where the column lands hardest is on the question of who else benefits. "It benefits this city's powers-that-be to present a cadre of fringe figures as some kind of viable political movement and set themselves in opposition," Eskenazi writes. "At this point, it's practically political muscle memory."

The voter data he cites cuts directly against the "radical San Francisco" premise. San Franciscans last month rejected a tax on billionaires. In 2024, 57 percent of voters in a city with a supermajority of renters opposed a statewide measure to expand rent control, per figures cited in the column. The city's mayors have run in an unbroken pro-business line from Frank Jordan in 1992 through Lurie today; under San Francisco's strong-mayor system, roughly 99.8 percent of the city budget is allocated before the Board of Supervisors touches it, Eskenazi writes.

"Angry militants may have the heckler's veto in Dolores Park," he concludes, "but there is zero political constituency for radicalism in San Francisco — anti-Israel or otherwise."

The Dissent reported last week that Lurie — who declared the Trans March confrontation "antisemitic" — is simultaneously the official who proposed slashing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city's LGBTQ+ youth services budget during Pride Month. It was Lurie, not the hecklers at Dolores Park, who held the pen on that line item. Eskenazi's column supplies the framework: when San Francisco's establishment wants to win a policy argument, it has learned to let the loudmouths open the debate.