 Either after our program, we can meet our panelists or meet them down at the data bar for more conversation. So we will be engaging with you with questions, short questions. Testing one. Okay, good evening. And thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street, San Francisco. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events. And I'm very pleased to welcome you to our program, Think and Drink, and tonight's topic, Trump's Impact on the Bay Area, Californians, and Federal Policies. Our program tonight is moderated by Kim May Cutler, with journalists Josh Harkinson, Liam Dillon, Joe Eskenazi, and Darwin Bond Graham. And we're very pleased to welcome you all tonight. Now for those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, we'd like to invite you to come on Wednesday at noon and take a free tour of our library and our beautiful Beaux Arts building. Also, consider becoming a member and attend most of our programs for free. The Mechanics Institute continues to be one of the most vital cultural and literary centers in the Bay Area, with ongoing author events, panels, our cinema-lit film series on Friday nights, book clubs, computer classes, writer's groups, chess classes, and tournaments, and more. So whether you're coming here to read, play chess, engage, or work, I think we have something for you all under one roof. Also, just FYI, we have fiber optic speed internet. Pretty good. Also, you can see all of our listings of events on our website at milibrary.org. And one other idea, if you'd like to join us at the Dot-a-Bar, which is in our retail space on the first floor, please do so, and members receive a 10% discount on drinks. And now I'd like to introduce our moderator, Kim May Cutler. Kim is a third generation San Franciscan. Oh, San Francisco Bay Arian. San Francisco Bay Arian, who has spent several years working as a technology journalist and has been published in places like Tech Crunch, San Francisco Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. She recently joined an early stage venture firm, Initialized Capital, and serves on the city's local homeless coordinating board. So please welcome Kim and our panelists. Panelists, please turn on your microphones. Yeah, I have this kind of surreal feeling overtaking me, and I just wanted to understand later on into the administration like what we're going to be the real kind of practical on the ground effects of the Trump administration on local and state government. And so I reached out to a lot of reporters whose work I read all the time and who I really respect. Darwin's from the East Bay Express. He's done some really exceptional work on covering the Oakland Police Department and some really great recent coverage on immigration courts and deportations. Gioscanizes, you've been covering San Francisco government for I don't even know how many. A long time. A long time. And then Liam is up in the Capitol for the Los Angeles Times and then we have Josh who has covered environmental policy and you spent the last year kind of studying the alt-right for Mother Jones. And so I just thought, you know, I love people who have, you know, all the on the ground coverage who are like going to all the like really long meetings that, you know, we don't necessarily have the time. I'm never in here, doesn't necessarily have the time to do. And who know all the kinds of dynamics of all the traditional players in the level of government that they cover. And so we've got Sacramento, we've got San Francisco, we've got Oakland and then we've also got Josh looking at some of the kind of congressional facts. So I just kind of want to start and open it up to just a couple of first initial thoughts. Like what, when you look at the level of government that you've covered for the last several years, are things, how are things different or how are things the same? And maybe I'll be able to start with Joe. How much time do you want me to take? Because I think if I speak at like Gilbert and Sullivan speed, I can get this done in five minutes and give you a good preamble of politics and government, which are different. And then kind of an overview. Five minutes is fine. I'm going to go really fast and this of course entitles everyone else to take five minutes and hopefully that's stimulating. So when you called, I hadn't, I had been away from city hall for a while and I hadn't, I hadn't, I had fallen behind. So I interviewed a lot of people. But essentially I feel like, you know, if anyone who studied World War II knows the period between September of 1939 and May 10th, 1940, when the church was called the Twilight War, it was humorously called Sitzkrieg. The French called it Drôle de Guerre, which is the strange war, funny war. What's notable is that it ended very abruptly on May 11th, 1941, war began. And right now we're in the Drôle de Guerre in San Francisco. There is certainly politics going on. Governmentally everyone's kind of preparing for what might happen. Now there's a huge caveat to that and that is if you are a powerless person, if you are an undocumented person, if you are a marginal person in society, these aren't theoretical effects and you are already feeling it. And I'm going to defer largely to Darwin on immigration because he's done spectacular work, but I'll just go right to that and say that many of you thought that we would get crushed right away because of the vindictive nature of the Trump government. And city officials I talked to were worried that ICE would raid the Chinese New Year's Parade. That didn't happen. However, there are things happening. Immigration attorneys tell me that there have been unsubtle changes in policies regarding prosecutorial discretion and amnesty cases. We have a 16-year-old unaccompanied minor and he comes across the border. You can say we want to try for amnesty and usually beforehand the prosecuting attorneys would say, okay, now to a fault they say no, they challenge it. So far the judges tend to rule in favor of the immigration attorneys. However, as many of you have seen, new judges are being sent here. Immigration attorneys I talked to say that certainly the implication is that these judges are being sent. They are not going to be as open-minded as some of the judges in San Francisco now. And this is to expedite deportations. Of course that hasn't happened yet. But the effects so far have been very real. Attorneys tell me that their clients go to work, come home and don't leave the house. That's what's happening. The good news I have for you is that the city feels very confident in its case against the executive order from the Trump administration which legal minds in the city have described in one word as poor. In terms of the lawyership involved, April 12th a week from today is when we have our day in court. However, there are a few things coming up. In mid-May, we're going to have the first bond issuance in the city. And if bond issuers feel that the city is at risk of being dinged, they will raise our interest rates. And that means more money goes to interest and less money goes to things the city wants to spend on. And also by mid-May, the mayor is going to have to decide on how much money to set aside in reserves in case we get lots of money taken away from us. And this sets up some very difficult decisions. If you don't put enough money in the reserves, you will be high and dry. If bad things happen, if you put too much, you run a multiple risk of not funding the city and also of sending the state the message that you have more money than you know what to do with and you won't get any from them. Just a short question because the sanctuary city is at risk. I mean that is in total about a billion dollars of risk to this particular city government. It's 1.2 billion dollars in recurring funds. It's 800 million dollars in one-time funds for things like the Central Subway and Doyle Drive and things like that. And to put in perspective how nasty this could be, we're being reimbursed later by the feds ostensibly for money that we've already spent. Did my mic just go out? Okay. So we're already spending the money. At issue is whether or not they're going to pay us for it. So we're already spending the money. And it's very clearly in Dennis Herrera's letter that we are not sure if we're going to get it. Now, certainly the human drama of immigration is worth all the attention it's getting. However, the real money money that we stood to lose was medical from ACA. That is 92% of the money that we stood to lose of the 1.2 billion is tied up in Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Sysney Families and food stamps. So these are not well-off people who are, you know, these are the people who really need money are going to be victimized. To put in perspective how big a bullet we temporarily dodged, 14% of San Franciscans gained healthcare through the ACA. You're talking about well over 130,000 people. And what's more, this would have affected every provider in the city. The ripple effect would have been huge. So certainly healthcare can be undermined from the inside without them just cutting it off. But that was a very, very big bullet that we dodged. As far as the money that we've saved up and for a rainy day, it really is for a rainy day. When I talk to people in the beam counting offices in the city, they say that this amount of money is, quote, not in contemplation of losing a significant amount of federal money. They're already underfunded as it is. And they are there in the event of a recession. And as far as pitting whether we're going to have a recession or not, the city's financial experts say it is an almost historical certainty. What's more, when I asked what clan do you have in case we lose $1.2 billion, the answer was I know folks find it hard to believe, but we don't have one. It doesn't make sense to paralyze yourself with what to do if you lose $1.2 billion of your budget. So if you can't swim, there's a great objective in not falling off the boat. And that's what we're going to do on that. Now we shift from government to politics. These are two very different things. Politically, there was talk of unity and, you know, almost like a Prince Hal moment where, you know, the young wastrel Prince Hal becomes King Henry V and it's more nobility. Well, that's bullshit. Trump is a cudgel that can be used to beat people into thinking what you want them to think. And that comes on both the progressive side and the moderate side. You saw incredibly sharp elbows over the Jeff Adachi defense measure. We can go into that. The inclusionary housing debate now is every bit as political as you'd expect and it's absolutely tempered by the fact that many of the principles involved are running for mayor next year. Don't forget, we're going to elect the mayor next year. We're going to elect the governor next year. So this is a big deal. Now let's get to the overall, which ties into, I'm going to be very interested in what you have to say because some of it has to do with the state. When I talk to politicos here in the city, they point out that Alex Padilla recently released a report that says, far from flatlining to zero, which is normal after a presidential election, registration, voter registration is continuing. And that is not normal. And what's more, a consultant that I spoke with had just finished a statewide poll. You'll be interested in these results, I think. They went from the voter ID registrations. They knew what party people were in. And they asked them as if they didn't know what party are you in. They got the identical amount of Democrats they thought they would. The GOP was lower. So people were failing to say they were in the GOP. They were either ashamed or they didn't want to talk about it. What this means is that many of the 2018 seats could well be in play. It could mean that at least on a statewide level, there'll be even more Democratic hegemony. A couple of things to take away, and then I'll cede the floor. It's been my time. Something to keep in mind. A lot of Trump's just utter odiousness, his comic villainy, obscures from the fact that many of the things that are coming down upon us as a liberal city, and most cities are liberal, are things that any Republican would do. And they're things that the Republicans have been planning to do for a long time. So we wouldn't be having an immigration effect like this, but much of the other things would be happening regardless, whether it was President Kasich, President Cruz, President Rubio, et cetera. People are appalled at the defunding of HUD, but Jerry Brown defunded development. The opportunities to build affordable housing have been greatly curtailed in recent years. Finally, beings have already broken ground on profanity. Well-ranking city official assured me that San Francisco is in a unique position to be fucked, with regards to defunding because we are city county, and that means that you're going to take the full brunt when you lose Medicare funds, Medicaid funds, things like that, as opposed to places where it would be spread around through many different municipalities. This could mean that the Geary BRT is never going to be built. It could mean that when the Transbate Terminal opens up with an immediate operating deficit, the feds are not going to help us out. But let's again focus on the poorest and the most desperate who are going to suffer the most, already going to suffer the most, and perhaps almost fittingly the effect of the Trump administration is going to be to exacerbate the hallmark the city already has of being the most bifurcated place in all the United States, where you can buy your way out of the misery. But if you're not doing well, you're going to feel it very much indeed. So that's it. So with that, Darwin, no pressure at all. What do you want to know? I mean, as someone who's lived in San Francisco for a long time and more familiar with all the different factions work, but I'm curious, like, when you're watching Oakland's mayor and city council grapple with some of the same possible facts, the loss of Shanks University funding, what has changed and what hasn't changed? I think there's a lot of actual grandstanding in the East Bay. I think a lot of the politicians there see Trump as free points to score with their constituency. So everybody from the, you know, Richmond City Council and mayor to Oakland, to San Leandro and beyond, they're all trying to pass legislation right now against Trump, come out with these statements against Trump, against Trump's immigration policies. I don't know that there's a lot to it, substantively. But do you know if they're, I mean, making the same, not plans, because it's really hard to grapple with that level of risk. But I mean, the Sanctuary City risk to Oakland is something like, is it worth $200? It's a couple hundred million dollars, right? It's tens of millions. It would be like hundreds of millions over the next decade or so. And yeah, there is money at risk in Oakland, and that's a pretty big deal. My understanding of it, though, is that from, you know, lawyers who are looking at this stuff, is that the actual likelihood of losing all that money is really low because there has to be a nexus between the federal money that's coming into the city and the way that the city is supposedly disobeying the federal government's orders. So if the city or the county is saying, we're not going to participate in immigration enforcement and the federal government says, well, we're going to take your healthcare money away, from what I read in here, that might not stand up in court. And it fails the germane-ness test. Yeah. So, and I think in the East Bay, a lot of the elected officials there understand that. But what I see is just a lot of... I mean, I follow a lot of city council members on Facebook, and I see a lot of long Facebook rants about Trump. And as they should be concerned, because Trump's going to do a lot of horrible things to their constituency, but at the same time, there is an extent to which some of that is just gaining a lot of free points by saying something quite easy that everyone's going to agree with. Okay. Let's turn to Sacramento. What are the... When I've talked to friends who are working in the capital, and they've said, at least initially before each CA fell apart, the legislature really oriented around creating fast tracks on the two highest priorities for California with immigration and healthcare. So what have you seen change at the state level? Right. So really up until this past week, it was almost entirely dominated by Trump. Every conversation was about Trump in one way or the other. There was a resolution literally almost every day in either the Senate or the Assembly that was denouncing some aspect of Trump, and it was in a lot of ways crowding out any other discussion that people might be having. The only thing that's broken through is this past week, in fact, there might be a vote tomorrow on increasing the gas tax to pay for transportation repairs that's been on the docket for a number of years. But aside from that, everything has been Trump-related. And it's really fallen into four different categories. You mentioned immigration. I think there's been the most action on that. There are, I just counted, at least a half dozen bills that have been introduced that try to get at some of the immigration aspects from one way or the other. The most prominent past the Senate this week. It's now on the docket for the Assembly. It's Senate Bill 54. This is from the Senate Leader Kevin De Leon from Los Angeles which aims to make the whole state a sanctuary state. So that would allow or not allow any state or local, including down to school police, to participate in immigration actions in any way or use state resources to detain anyone for immigration actions. And so, again, a ton of bills on immigration. I can go into them more later if you'd like. Here, there's been a lot of wait and see. You know, the numbers there are so daunting. At one point, they were talking about a $24 billion hit to the state budget, which is just astronomical and almost impossible to plan for. And that was why the governor said, well, we shouldn't even plan for this because we wouldn't even know what to do, right? So when the health care, GOP health care bureau that failed is working its way through, the number was $6 billion. Increase over time. So that was the estimate that the governor put out. But there's been no action really there because, again, it's a bit of a wait and see and it's tough to understand exactly what you need to do until the details are actually released. The third area is climate change. There is a lot of back and forth over that. I think the most prominent issue is the state has a waiver from the Clean Air Act to allow it to adopt stricter vehicle mission standards in the rest of the country. And most alarmingly to folks here, it was during Scott Pruitt's confirmation hearing, our new Senator Kamala Harris asked him if he would continue that waiver, which is, generally speaking, been a bipartisan thing for a very long time. And he said, oh, I've got to think about that. And so that raised a ton of alarm in the state. And so the exact details of what that might do could be catastrophic to the state's climate change goals. But in the short term, at least, most folks believe that it would be very difficult for the federal government to actually remove the waiver that the state already has. Going forward, if the state wants to meet its, again, very ambitious climate goals in 2030 and 2050, we probably will need to have a renewal. And then the last thing is, again, like I said at the beginning, echoing Darwin is just bluster. I mean, every day, every single statement, it's a legislator trying to one-up each other in my inbox about how much they hate this thing that Donald Trump did today. And because they want their quote in the story that I write or my colleague's write or someone writes, them to be the person that's against Donald Trump. And so there are a lot of bills, a bill that would not allow someone to be on the state ballot for president if they don't release their tax returns, or a bill that would put the border wall to a public vote in the state. None of these things have really any practical effect or impact, but it certainly makes the lawmakers feel good and their supporters feel good in raising them. Josh, I'm not going to ask you to answer for all of the federal level, because that's way too complicated. But in some of the areas that you cover, like climate policy, what are the changes that you've seen and what you cover and how different elected leaders and then interest groups work together since Trump has been, came into power? Yeah, you know, I actually used to cover climate a lot more than I do now, but you know, I think to just sort of put another layer on top of what these guys have been saying, I mean, what you're seeing on the local state and national level is that Democrats love to criticize Trump. Why? Because Trump unifies them and that is a lesson that was learned by the Tea Party and was why it was so successful because everybody hated Obama and so there are lots of divisions on the left and in the right. The Democratic Party is riven by the schism between the Clinton and Sanders camps and there are a lot of hard feelings there and so criticizing Trump as a way to sort of ignore that or overcome that and so I think that by doing that politicians are trying to sort of unite their base and in a sense it's a cop-out, but it also has been proven to be an effective strategy. So in terms of national action, it's going to be interesting to see how well-united Democrats are and here's an issue that relates to California. Look at infrastructure. California is voting tomorrow on this infrastructure planned by Jerry Brown's gas tax, which would be the largest increase in state history of the gas tax. It funds very much needed infrastructure in the state that's been long neglected. It mirrors the proposal by the House Minority Leader on the Transportation Committee in Washington who also has a gas tax plan to basically fund the infrastructure that Trump and Democrats agree is necessary. The Republicans though led by Ryan, Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House and a certain faction within the Trump administration headed by the Commerce Secretary, Billionaire, whoever's name is, they would instead use tax incentives which are highly problematic and would basically be a way, it would only work to fund something like a toll road where you have a revenue-generating project and a private developer could get tax breaks off the profits they would make. So it's not workable, but the problem is that Democrats aren't united enough to pass Brown's plan. It seems likely that it's going to fail. It may or may not fail tomorrow. California has a two-thirds threshold for passing tax increases, so it's very challenging. This is the genuine, this is what you were telling me, this is the real test of the first time that the Democrats have the super-majority in the state and what that actually means. It's a test of Democratic party unity and on some level, if Democrats can't pull it off here in California, then how are Democrats in Washington going to have a united front against the Republican approach? I think that there is an interrelationship between California politics and national politics that we haven't seen in a very long time. The rest of the country is looking to California to lead on so many issues, whether it's immigration, climate, economic justice, you name it. Brown is sort of looked to as a hero nationally, but he also has a lot of weight on his shoulders right now to perform. So I want to bring it back to what is probably California's primary issue, which is immigration. Darwin, you spent, what is it, several weeks in hearings, right? It's a long time. Months, or was it weeks or months? It was weeks. It was weeks. I mean, it was over many months. Yeah. So what was that like, what did you learn that you didn't expect to see in the court proceedings? And talk a little bit about how the rights in that system are fundamentally different from other parts of the justice system. Can I zoom out first and talk about? Yes, we do. So there's a, the way that deportations happen, right? There's this agency called Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's in the Department of Homeland Security. And deportation officers go out and find people who are illegally or unlawfully present in the United States, right? They may have come in to the United States legally. They are not citizens. And then their legal status to be here expires at some point. Deportation officers go out, find those people, issue a notice to appear to take them to immigration court. But the main interface actually by which the deportation officers find these people is local law enforcement. In the Bay Area, there's a lot of entanglement actually between local law enforcement and ICE, even though we consider ourselves the sanctuary jurisdictions. Here's some of the ways that local law enforcement are entangled and end up feeding the federal government these people into the immigration court. So you have every county jail in the Bay Area, right? It's run by the Sheriff's Department. And when a person is arrested and booked into jail, their fingerprints are taken. Their fingerprints then go instantly into a federal database that's run by the FBI. The FBI then instantly shares the person's fingerprints with ICE. ICE then runs the fingerprints in their biometric database, which is giant. And they can tell if that person is or is not a U.S. citizen. And then based on that, they'll narrow down the number of people who are arrested in any given day. Mind, you just arrested. Being arrested doesn't mean you're a bad person. It doesn't even mean you did anything wrong. You just got arrested, right? You haven't been convicted of anything. But this is one of the main ways that people are sucked into the immigration courts, is this interface between ICE and the local police. There's a bunch of other connections. There's these task forces where local police officers work really closely with ICE, with the Department of Homeland Security, with the FBI and other federal agencies that can enforce immigration law. San Francisco had an agreement with the FBI. I think it recently expired, right? The JTTF. Oakland currently has an agreement. Oakland just signed an agreement with ICE even though Oakland is a sanctuary city. It's sort of weird. It's controversial. There'll be hearings about it. Tonight, actually, there are some hearings about it at a commission in Oakland. But... Sorry, this is a little confusing, but basically the idea here is that ICE is... it's a big law enforcement agency, but it's not that big. They can't actually... They don't have enough officers to actually go out and find all the people who are unlawfully present in the United States. So they rely on local law enforcement, which is really actually giant for those people for them. And then people end up in the courts. So they get hit with a... it's called a notice to appear, and that person then has to appear in the court. Or that person say they were arrested or convicted of a serious crime. ICE will actually then detain them and put them in a jail. And in the Bay Area, one of those jails is the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Jail. They have a $6 million a year contract with ICE to house people about $200 at any given time. Yuba County, there's a jail down here Bakersfield. So then you go to court. And the thing about the courts is... the things I'll emphasize is... it matters a lot where you end up in immigration court, meaning jurisdiction-wise, you really want to go to court in San Francisco. You really don't want to go to court in Georgia. Because statistically speaking, if you go to court in San Francisco, all things being equal, your case will turn out a lot happier for you than if you end up in Georgia. And there's a lot of other jurisdictions like that. I think some parts of the Midwest, other parts of the South, parts of Texas, Arizona, they just have really bad courts. And then there's another level you really don't want to end up before the wrong judge. It's almost arbitrary, but if you look at the statistics in case outcomes, the judges in immigration courts, the rulings that they come to, do I have a couple minutes? Yeah, keep going. I'm riveted. You're riveted, right? I'll take a step back and just kind of explain how the court case works. So you get hit with a notice who appear as a person who the government says shouldn't be in America. You go to this court. What the court's purpose is, there's like a two-step process, and this is the only thing the judge actually cares about, are you removable? Like the judge wants to find out, are you removable? And if so, are you eligible for relief? It sounds very removable relief, what's that all about? But removable means, are you unlawfully present in the United States? And if you are, the government says you should be removed. There's several ways to be removed. Deportation is one way and it results in a deportation order. That's the harshest thing that can happen, because then if you're deported, you can't come back to the United States and I think it's 10 or 20 years. 10 years. And if you do, you can be put in prison for 20 years, right? There's other forms of removal. You can self-remove, voluntarily deport yourself. If you do that, then you can actually try to come back at some future point much sooner, but it's still very difficult. Then there's these forms of relief that you can be eligible for and now say then this is true for a lot of undocumented people. I mean, this is why a lot of people are undocumented. It's because they're running away from war, persecution. So there's various forms of relief are, you know, asylum and humanitarian asylum, convention on torture. So if you fear you will be tortured and if you can prove that to a court that you'll be tortured if you're sent back to this country that you left, then you can be eligible for relief and you can stay in the United States. But the courts, but my summary of it is they're quite arbitrary and it matters a lot where you are and who your judge is. I haven't seen much change yet in my observations under the Trump administration in the immigration courts because it would be hard for Trump to make it more Kafka-esque and horrible. Seriously. It already was terrible and it already was this process whereby a person gets swept up into the system. Of the cases that you witnessed, what were people typically arrested for or what were some of the outcome? You can come to the United States from hypothetical, you know. Guatemala, 20 years ago, never arrested, hard working, get married, have kids, get caught with marijuana and you get deported and you have no relief eligible because having marijuana is an aggravated felony under federal immigration law and I've seen that. I saw that several times in cases I looked at. People were literally being deported for having weed and it just seems so nuts given that it's totally legal in California. I want to open it up to both to the rest of the panel. So Oakland and San Francisco are technically sanctuary cities. SB54 theoretically make us... What does that actually mean in practice? So that means there would be no help that any local or state law enforcement again going down to school police could give to federal officials to detain, to arrest or another way it exists in immigration proceedings. And so it's interesting though as part of that there was originally an urgency clause attached to that measure which is a two-thirds super majority vote in order to get that passed and if an urgency clause or two-thirds happens on a measure like this it takes effect immediately which is one reason why they were trying to fast track it. Well, to get it through this sort of goes back to what you're saying about democratic unity. To get it through, De Leon made a number of amendments. One was to please the Sheriff's Association across the state which was opposed and I believe remains opposed to the bill would allow these task forces that you mentioned to continue explicitly as they're carved out for that so local law enforcement would be allowed to participate in these task forces that include ICE and also they would be allowed to notify ICE if they came into contact with someone who had been previously deported and had a violent felony record and so that would be one exception to the rule that it had and even with those changes De Leon changed the measure to a simple majority vote. Now what that does is that means the measure assuming it passes the assembly and is signed by the governor would not take effect until January 1st and so it doesn't really matter at what point during the legislative session this bill would pass at this point given that the IRC clause has been removed and that was done presumably given that there was a two-thirds vote that occurred in the Senate all Democrats voted for the bill this week. Presumably there was some holdouts in the assembly which again has one Democrat above what the super majority would be there. I see a recurring theme as I'm going to give you guys the bad news is that you can set policy with regard to sanctuary city but it's going to be very interesting if we do have sanctuary state and with each different iterations of sanctuary cities and cities across the state I was talking to the immigration attorney Bill Hing who was since I talked to him he became a police commissioner and he made it very clear that you can have a sanctuary city policy but quote a maverick police officer who picks up the phone and calls ICE will be applauded by ICE and may be chastised by the mayor and the board of supervisors but he won't be punished. It's quite a lot to say that you know that state and city law would prevent someone from enforcing federal law so if you have a random ringer police officer or sheriff he can undermine and carefully laid out sanctuary policy and that's going to be a problem. Let me jump in on that point too the state Supreme Court Chief Justice complained in her speech last week that hey ICE get out of our courtrooms we don't want your guys in our courtrooms taking people out on So they were standing outside the court they were standing outside the building and then detaining people right? and then the judge had no power over that right and so she said stop we want people to feel safe when they go into court and the response from Sessions and Kelly wrote a letter to her saying listen if you guys made our jobs easier for us then we wouldn't have to or didn't make our jobs so hard which you guys are doing then we wouldn't have to resort to things like that federal immigration laws they're going to enforce it however they want in the ways that they want the state can decide or cities can decide not to assist with that but there are likely going to be consequences to that also that people are also not going to be comfortable with we're succeeding right now in this and other cities because the feds are not competent if they were competent there are things they could do for example in California in this particular city in order to get on section 8 housing to be a citizen if somebody's immigration status doesn't quite match up it's funded out of the general fund could the feds track back the information of the grad who's being funded by the general fund and who isn't they could they could make things very difficult for us if they really wanted to put the screws to us they haven't so far because you know I think at this point in time I think it's pretty clear that this is these aren't super villains here you know this is being hard to run the government let alone to run the government in the vindictive way that many of us feared and so far at least you know so far only 60 odd 70 days in they have not yet been able to take advantage of all the things they could do but they could do that could they get the statistics for all of our municipal IDs many of which are people who are getting municipal IDs because they can't get a driver's license or couldn't get a driver's license at the time of the issue yes they could do that so that could be a problem for us there are just a few things I'd like to say about Sanctuary City's point that I've noticed in reading about this one is that statewide polls show that actually a majority of Californians are opposed to the state becoming a sanctuary state which I think is important to keep in mind and the other factor that's going to be really interesting is Jerry Brown has said in the past that he's kind of played a two-faced game where on the one hand he's said very confrontational things for a while up Trump we need to work with him and not unnecessarily antagonize him so it's going to be interesting to see whether he signs this bill assuming it does pass in the assembly so I think it's going to be also we're going to see debate I think more about are these policies effective and I did a story back during the Kate Steinle situation in San Francisco the woman who was killed and became sort of this cause like in the San Francisco cities looking at San Francisco's policies there's quite a good case to be made that San Francisco cities are in fact safer compared San Francisco to other cities of similar size lower crime rates since the San Francisco law was passed crimes fell there are police associations that support these laws I think all of that's going to come out more as this moves ahead one thing I'd love to hear because both of you have done a lot of coverage of local police departments you know when I've talked to nonprofits in the city that work with the immigrant and Latino community I mean one of the difficulties here is just the lack of clear information about what is or isn't doing and so like when you talk to people who are setting up hotlines they're getting rumors called in or if they're setting up they have lawyers on call it's a whole big effort to figure out what's real or what's not real and then even when you talk to elected officials they don't have good statistics on how widespread some of these reported rates are in the state of California what I mean how do you as reporters how can we figure out what they are aren't doing here how can local officials respond to that it's really hard to track ICE or it's a federal agency you can try to figure out if they had an operation last week they don't have to tell you you can FOIA their records good luck with that maybe 8 months later you'll get a letter of vaccine here's some stuff or here's not some stuff go away there was a spate of rumors like that a couple months ago Richmond Costco Walmart Oakland Foothill Oakland Fruitvale lots of ICE checkpoints everywhere and people were freaking out Oakland council member Abel Guyan started contacting the Oakland police department assistant chief and what's going on here is this true is ICE active community are there these checkpoints and the assistant chief dispelled those rumors but I remember this because this email chain got forwarded along to me and I remember this the assistant chief wrote but ICE is here they do operate in Oakland and they do arrest people and pick people up and we can't stop them from doing that and they do have operations but yeah there's I think the rumors are as damaging as the real thing in a way they prevent people from going out to school or going out to it's chilling it prevents people from doing what they want to do what they need to do to make a living send their kids to school to associate really I don't know arguably it's preventing people from associating exercising free speech and just being out in public I mean your constitutional rights undocumented people have constitutional rights too and yeah it's really chilling to see these rumors going around the Bay Area it's frightening so I want to move on to the other major issue affecting California was the healthcare AHDA and as you mentioned to put it in context like $24 billion in a hit to the California state budget that's a half of what the state spends on K-12 education every year it's unfathomable so where are we now are we just are we relieved that they're so incompetent that they couldn't get it through or what is the potential that could come back or what are people doing to prepare on that so as far as the big number hit not much but again I think it's important and because again as you said it's unfathomable the argument has been well let's just not let's just not throw out all the cuts that we're going to make or scare people that they're going to get thrown off the healthcare rolls if something happens particularly when there's no actual plan to react against right but there are the details of all this stuff matters and I wrote some notes on this because it's kind of complicated but essentially one area that I think still scares people in the immediate term is issues related to Planned Parenthood you know if through through so in the Republican plan there was language in there that said none of this money would be allowed to go to or none of these tax credits which would replace what the Medicaid subsidies were going to be could go towards plans that covered abortions right and so it just so happens that in California under state law essentially every plan is mandated to cover abortions right and so what was going to happen no one really knew and that was going to be a big big problem you know as part of that Kevin McCarthy who is from California is high ranking within the GOP caucus in Congress has asked Tom Price the HSS secretary to go through and see if they could undo an Obama era rule that was rolled out when when Obamacare was passed that dealt with this issue basically Obama saying this was not a problem right so McCarthy's asked for a review of that of that rule and or if you go through the budget process where Planned Parenthood is defunded and that passes that would sort of address the same thing and the state would not then be directly well it would be directly essentially directly funding Planned Parenthood through deciding whether to spend probably a few hundred million dollars to backfill some of the Medi-Cal recipients who would be not eligible for services and so you know exactly how those details are worked out and whenever bill there is or whatever budget resolution there is or whatever plan there is really matter to how the state is going to have to react to this and then there was also also shifting to another area earlier this week there was some guidance or an order from Jeff Sessions the DOJ about reviewing all of the various you know police agreements and consent degrees that were happening with you know PDs around the country you know Darwin you broke a huge story about the OPD last year what do you think that does to accountability for police officers in the East Bay it doesn't affect Oakland's consent decree because Oakland's is actually a negotiated settlement agreement it's a totally unique police reform oversight mechanism because it wasn't brought by the justice department it was brought by plaintiffs attorneys representing over a hundred African American men who had been who had had their rights violated by the the riders back in the 2000s so Jeff Sessions can't remove the negotiated settlement agreement that was trying to force the Oakland police department to reform itself but yeah virtually every other consent decree over a police department for reform could you give some context on how that works for the audience when when you can prove that there is what's called a pattern in practice of civil rights violations or other really severe problems in a police department this is not just like one or two bad apples kind of thing but that there's deeply structural problems in a police department the federal government will come in and take the essentially almost take the police department over all but and say you have to institute these reforms or will simply appoint a special receiver and they'll force you to do these things and that would be like the nuclear option because then the city would lose its budgetary authority over its police department but consent decrees are how America cleans up its police forces the DOJ comes in enters a consent decree with the local police department a couple years go by things are supposed to get cleaned up Jeff Sessions could undo all that he could cancel those and he said he wants to those sorts of reform measures the good news for you here in San Francisco is all those things were non-binding anyway so there was nothing to be held to other than the fact that the mayor said he wanted it and I'm sure that was a precondition of hiring chief Scott was that they wanted to do all these things on an individual level though I think it's pretty obvious that a message is being sent I wouldn't run to print with it being videoed here but you know I've heard rumors about cops talking in the locker room about like now I can do what I want you know and that happens that happens even here in San Francisco and so definitely that message was being sent we will get to audience questions that we have I want to touch on two more topics because there's so many that are affected by this administration so climate change is a big point of disagreement between the state of California and the federal administration and there were two areas kind of the primary areas I think that you mentioned Lee and we're the Clean Air Act waiver and then vehicle emissions could you talk about what the differences are in policies in states is what our leverage is sure so the Clean Air Act waiver is for us to enforce or be able to enforce stricter vehicle emissions standards than we would have otherwise there was another area that they just rolled back recently called the Clean Power Plan and so what that was were Obama era regulations in terms of phasing out coal and other energy sources like that and sparring renewable energy sources solar wind etc right and so the thing that there was a lot of bluster from California about how bad that is right but we were already on track under state legislation to meet the standards far beyond what the federal regulations were so they were mainly aimed at those federal regulations that were just rolled back mainly into states that were not as far as California in terms of addressing renewable energy sources in fact we were mandated to believe yeah half of our energy must be from renewable sources by 2030 under current law and there's a new proposal to push that to 100% by 2045 so again well ahead of what the rollback of the Clean Power Plan would be the serious one is this vehicle emissions issue which is again we have this waiver that we're allowed to have strict standards and the number one source of greenhouse gas pollution is from cars and trucks right and so that's why there's this major push to get electric cars on the road at an extremely fast rate that's why there's even a push to have greater densities within urban areas to keep people or have people to drive less to work that's all along the lines of meeting getting people off the road so that those pollution emissions don't contribute to our greenhouse gas problem and so that's where the shop administration ultimately could really play a large role that's again more of a long term thing the existing waiver we have now most people think we can't that they can't touch but as we apply maybe five years maybe ten years down the road for an additional waiver that's where some of the concern would come in so one of the last years I just want to touch on before you open up to general questions is around affordable housing a lot of low income housing the barriers funded through low income housing tax credits and with the expectation of corporate tax reform what's happened with a lot of different projects both in San Francisco and the South Bay and I'm less clear about the East Bay is that the financiers who normally buy these credits in order to finance low income housing now think that they'll be worth like much less on the dollar because they think that corporations won't be interested in buying these tax credits because they'll get their taxes cut and so that has jeopardized some of the financing for different projects in the Bay and that in turn affects the affordable housing bond money that Santa Clara County and Alameda County raised it was 580 million in Alameda County and then almost a billion in Santa Clara County so that money if this tension continues into this corporate tax reform period or this tax reform period where you're supposed to change that this year that's going to mean all the money that we asked voters to pay for is not going to go as far as was originally anticipated so I was just wondering if you cover housing policy and if you're seeing that on the ground at all this is more your area yeah it's mine I can speak a little bit I know that there are and this is another area which is really interesting because Trump and the Congress didn't actually do anything yet they've just said hey we want to cut corporate tax rates and that spooked investors in these programs and so who knows what the corporate tax rate is ultimately going to be who knows if they can pull something like that off given their track record so far who knows but even with just the threat of action or the talk that they're doing they're real on the ground impacts I mean there was multi-million dollar funding gaps in projects in the Bay Area better than me but multi-million dollar funding gaps already because of this in projects in San Diego and in Los Angeles and so people are very very worried when I talked to an expert in this area he told me that this is the state's largest source of affordable housing money is this program and this is the equivalent of a quarter-billion dollar hit to that program again without anything actually happening that's the reality if investors are only willing to pay significant less for these credits and so at a time when state funding for low-income housing continues to drop this is sort of another kick in the teeth I think it's also worth pointing out that a quarter-billion dollars buys you one-eighth of the raiders at this point in time for the state that's not I mean God help us but for the state that's not a lot of money you know in this case with the needs that we have this doesn't help we were already in a bad spot as I mentioned in my over long preamble we lost a lot when redevelopment was curtailed at least the modern iteration of redevelopment not the film we're destroying iteration of redevelopment and again this would have happened under any republican administration and all of the housing plants that we're going forward with now are kind of grasping at crumbs here so it's it doesn't help let me briefly bring together the affordable housing conversation and the immigration conversation that there is an interesting story in city lab that I think just came out today that was saying that landlords are increasingly using eviction threats are increasingly using eviction threats to evict tenants so you know they're saying we're going to call ice on you unless you move out and so it's kind of this perfect storm in that regard you know for disadvantaged people hit both with a loss of affordable housing and a loss of tenant rights so last question any or all of you can jump on if you want I think I asked you a variation of this question when you're on the phone and I was like where with the sources that you talk to you know in the level government that you cover I mean where are they on the we are sliding towards authoritarian kleptocracy spectrum to the oh this administration is you know incompetence slash the machinery and the slowness of American government is doing what it has always done to people who are elected into power where would you characterize your assessment of you know the administration is far and then the level government you cover and how it's reacted to it I don't think people in government are as amazed as you are what we're seeing in the news and you know I think all of us have mentioned an iteration of what we could call blue meat for the for California I think that I think you've all mentioned I think everyone on the panel has mentioned that it politically behooves people here to be seen as against this administration regardless of what the retribution would be because that is what appeals to voters here and you know I think you know for marginally popular democratic mayors like ed lee or much more so bill de blazio this is Trump may eviscerate New York but bill de blazio is probably going to get re-elected in the landslide now I don't even know if he's going to get a competent person running against them as far as your question is to what they think is going on something that's going to be more and more of a problem for actually running San Francisco and running other cities is that there aren't people in seats in government right now it's going to be hard to do the things you need to do to get the check signed to get things happening when they aren't filling the damn positions and the people they are filling with are astoundingly unfit and incompetent you know from the world net daily guy and other things like that so you know if you've filled one tenth of the positions the people you fill it with are you know on par with you know just folks you pull out of the bus or you know you know try and get to go to like you know a show in Los Angeles to watch Colin Ferguson you know it's like you want to watch a show you know you want to work in health and human services you know is that kind of thing so sooner or later that's going to have an effect you know and it's going to be harder and harder for us to do things but I'd say you know knock on wood again it's very preliminary the shots haven't been fired yet but San Francisco and other big cities have a little bit more leverage than we thought because things run so poorly in Washington right now we have more leverage than we thought because the Senate is important and you know we do have ranking members there so we're doing better than we ought to be so far any other thoughts I'll weigh in I mean it's remarkable how much people vacillate between those two extremes in almost the same breath you have the speaker of the assembly also from LA Anthony Rendon who is actually not given to hyperbole very often he's much more low-key than Kevin de Leonis and he has said repeatedly that he is worried whether there will be even be elections in 2018 I mean he's said this repeatedly and again this is not a guy who says these sorts of things all the time right at the same time I mean when the health care bill failed man you could hear the cackles like my office across the street you could hear the cackles in the capitol from like these jokers can't do anything right they're going to get years they can't do a freaking thing and so like it's just this vacillation between the world is going to end and these guys are so incompetent they can't do anything and that's where everyone seems there's no real middle there when foreign affairs and competence can lead to the world in the future so the authoritarian kleptocracy beat is actually something I've covered quite a bit oh great I you know I spend a fair amount of time having beers with this guy named Curtis Jarvan oh wow I know who Curtis Jarvan is who is the inventor of an ideology known as neo reaction otherwise known as the dark enlightenment and he is probably America's preeminent anti-democratic activist or thinker probably more of a thinker than an activist and he lives in San Francisco he lives in San Francisco works in tech I did a story about alt-tech and I equated him and some other things I've written but you know he's actually I mean his whole thing is you know we need in ruler you know he's sort of a neo monarchist but within more of a sort of Peter Thiel technocratic way you know he wants like a CEO president and Trump would seemingly be like you know the perfect guy for that right he's a CEO he's a president but but he actually was quite unimpressed with Trump you know he thought he was sort of like a poor shadow of Hitler or Mussolini and you know really the thing is though that I mean I think he's right on some level in that you know a true authoritarian is somebody who is popular like you can't have like a 35% approval rating and also be ineffective authoritarian and Trump appeals to a certain nativist base but he really doesn't have the elites on his side yet in a way that it's gonna give him legs as an authoritarian now as to whether he's a kleptocrat that's a different question I think you know the lack of his tax returns you know all the shady business dealings in ways that he could potentially benefit from the presidency financially leave a lot of open questions there and you know we're not gonna know how bad it is until we know but you know things aren't looking good okay so let's open up to the audience alright so once again we'll take questions not comments and we yes we're in a brave new world folks let's go great thanks for coming great discussion guys and gal if the audience will oh hey Chris if you'll forgive going away from Trump and then maybe coming back for a second so I think is it Joe in the city t-shirt I apologize if you have your name wrong the 1.2 billion that is at stake that's like recurring funds that's every year you get that money in your budget percentage of the budget roughly would that be 1.2 billion out of 9.6 billion okay so I guess the question is in a city like this with uber and twitter and air bnb and sales force and what looks to be like an ocean of money flowing through the city to someone untutored like me how can it possibly be that budgets are as tight as they seem to be and that's my question thank you very much I think I think the quick answer is more money more problems you know we are we've never pulled in more money from the assessors office and by the way like people forget the assessors office you know Carmen Chu quietly doing you know very confident that pulls in like 40 percent of your general fund so you're bringing in that money don't forget though we have 4,000 more city employees than we did four years ago and our pension obligation would have put us deeply in the hole regardless of whether Trump was president or if we reanimated federal Franklin Roosevelt so I mean I think you know not to be too flip about it but there's the old expression of work expands to meet time so also when you have lots of money you tend to put it into things you know very rarely the cities you know with people with needs say we're just going to sit on this money we do have rainy day funds you can thank us for that but they're eight and a half percent you're supposed to be ten percent and even still if we get any kinds of cuts of the sort that you know the feds are threatening that's a child's experiment so you know we're dealing with huge budgets and I can you know I'll wrap this up quickly but part of that is that we don't have redevelopment anymore the city is actually paying for a lot of this stuff as opposed to it coming from the state that's why the budget now is literally twice what it was the general fund is five billion dollars now as opposed to 2.6 or something like that in that's doubling that's incredible but are we twice as well-governed? No but you know it's a separate discussion in and of itself suffice to say all of the extra money that we're making through private industry is not going into the money bin and a lot of it is going to pay for things that were deferred so that's a partial answer to the question we're not in the surplus now and it looks like we'll have some belt tightening in the next few years regardless of what happens to the extent that we're not a monolithic state or city even though we're very democratic and to the extent that Democrats have been characterized as being mainly for immigrants illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants and to the extent that we're characterized as being for bathrooms for transgender people and that's our big issue what can we do since it's so easy to brand stand about Trump what can we do to get Democrats to address other issues I'll take a stab at that you know I think that it's not about addressing I mean I think your question is not so much that these things aren't important but that you want the other issues to be addressed I mean I guess you need to know what other issues you think are important are we talking more about economic issues for instance or you know what yeah I mean I think there are important economic issues that are getting ignored and the hysteria that surrounds a lot of these other hot button political issues I think that would be one example of it I mean the infrastructure thing is not a sexy subject you know it's gotten it's been covered pretty well by the LA Times and other California papers I think but that's hugely important to the state but you know unless you peg it to Trump the page views on those stories which we see we all see are going to be way lower so you know this is sort of what you know Bernie Sanders was saying during his primary you know trying to get people to run for local offices I think you know part of that is also just that's in bolts of politics you know and I think though that you know you look at that election that just happened to replace Haveria and Southern California that got an open congressional seat turnout was incredibly low was the turnout last night? it was 9% or something like that it was a little higher but also it'll roll in and be but it's certainly below 20 there was the mayoral election and that was 11% but they all knew this about where things are and the Sanders candidates last night I don't think the returns were in yet there were two candidates who were serving the Sanders camp they each got like 5% which is terrible and so where's the grassroots activism he's the candidate who has his whole message he's supposed to be about economics but there's not a ground game yet and maybe it's just because those guys are young there's a disjoint between how much everybody says they care about Trump and how much people are actually involved in the dirty and boring work of politics question in the back thank you very much for being here so I have a perhaps maybe like a really naive question but the broader question is what is your opinion on the role or the balance between the markets and policy and I'll give you two examples where I think that really plays out so you guys were talking a little bit about the Clean Air Act and how California's several decades ahead of the game on climate change policies whereas the rest of the country is lagging and in the past couple of months Trump has said all of these things on Twitter and elsewhere about how he's planning to dismantle climate change progress and yet two days ago we just saw that Tesla motors just surpassed Ford which has been literally there 100 years apart in their founding Ford was founded in 1903 Tesla in 2003 Tesla has surpassed Ford in valuation even though they're like selling fewer cars and all that stuff and so just curious what you guys think about that and what's the role of the private sector in driving some of these kind of like policy related initiatives Uber is also another big one that's driving kind of like on demand labor which could affect immigration prison policy and things like that and yeah how much of it is policy how much of it is just capital markets you know I wrote a long story about Tesla a few years ago about the irony it was sort of the central premise was that there was an irony that Elon Musk succeeded at Tesla through subsidies federal subsidies yet he claims I mean he's basically a libertarian you know he's French with Peter Thiel you know he's part of that whole like PayPal mafia group you know he's constantly talking about libertarian stuff and he actually tweeted at one point that he was against subsidies but in favor of a carbon tax and so the story was about actually how no you do need subsidies for a company like Tesla to succeed but I think your point though is that you know you need a Tesla to be out there at least waiting on some level for policies that are going to move us in the right direction and sometimes you know they do a good job of that and other times they don't but you know I do think though that you know looking at the big three automakers and there's just the incredible hypocrisy of how they have done 180 degree about face and are now lobbying Trump to do away with you know fuel efficiency rules that were put in place right after taxpayers bailed them out during the depth of the recession and the Obama administration went to bat for them you know it's just a huge stab in the back really for so many people who would support them and so I think that it sort of like actually shows the weakness of their business model ultimately I mean you know they stake their fortune on selling SUVs again now that gas is cheap but it's not a good long term strategy they have such a short term view of profit and you know what I have to give Tesla credit for is looking at profit from a long term and ultimately you know shareholders have rewarded him for that if we could govern the same way that Elon governs Tesla we might be in better shape not that I want to see you president though good question here in the back thank you for being here I was a little bit concerned by multiple comments that there's no backup plan if federal funding is withdrawn because it's just such a big problem that we're too afraid to even think about it and I was curious if anyone was thinking about a backup plan is there a city-wide level in San Francisco thoughts about increasing an income tax maybe to this gentleman's question about there seems to be a lot of money in the state and have you heard anything about it? Yes, first of all that's not a capitulation I think that they also think that the chance of all of the money is extremely remote I think that when folks in the city's lila apparatus tell me that the quality of lawyership and draftsmanship on the executive order is poor you and I might use other words I don't know if any of you read the city attorney's brief but winning on any one of many points would preserve the city's status quo for now and there were many points and the arguments were very good so I think that they think that they've got a really good go at that as far as undermining healthcare that's different you can't recover from losing 92% of your health and human services funds you cannot do it so it's something to almost not plan for you have to be proactive and again stave off that eventuality what was the second part of your question? there are but the thing is that's problematic about the millionaires tax is that millionaires can move to Marin and I believe that several of the other plans were the city attorney told them weren't legal so it's Phil Ting's plan to allow cities to have city taxes here in California again I don't know it seems like a surefire loser to me very few people want to come out and say I want to have more taxes am I going to then get more when I pay more money? that's how most people think most San Franciscoans are paying a premium to live here they don't want to pay more to the city they don't trust to administer the funds very well it's interesting I raised my eyebrows when I saw Katie Tang who is Phil's constituent but that seems like a loser to me I think some context there to add is in the state of California there have been so many propositions that have been passed over the last 40 years that restrain the ability of governments to raise funding unless you have a two thirds majority vote and so taxes are really because you need the super majority and then on top of that you need to charge individual income tax here that's the area of the state and you'd have to change state law in order to charge income tax here they're working on that but I don't see it happening I think Jerry Brown would veto it and I think here in the city it would not fly under Mayor Lee can it kind of sense it there really quickly so it's interesting sort of how complex all this interplay is going to be so say for instance they achieve their goals on healthcare okay well on that circumstance whatever the deal corporate tax reform I will bet all the money I have that some group in California will run a ballot measure to recapture all the gains that high income earners got from a lower federal tax and given California's recent history in wanting to soak the rich on a statewide level it would be surprising to me if that looked like that didn't pass so could you argue that that money would go towards backfilling Medi-Cal I'm sure you could and so how all these things ultimately end up on so many different levels that's just going to be the way this interplay but is that a question in the back you wanted to answer really quickly because you've got a bunch of political reporters up here I think the answers are really wonky if you had catastrophic cuts at that level whether it be healthcare services or being just taken away I don't see the legislature the controller, the mayor being the people who have the relevant backup plan people would be in the streets there would be serious social disruption I would think that would just be my guess as to what would happen but I mean if you're talking about gutting Medicare and Medicaid it depends people that are hurt are often times San Francisco is like I said a very bifurcated city and awful lot of terrible things happen to 4 people at general hospital every day so it will test everyone's ability to be a nearer to human pain if that happens I've been surprised at how pliant we've been about many things I mean if you look at the Reagan administration when it came into power homelessness was not a wide, it was not a very visible issue in the media or in the streets of American cities until literally the early 1980s and then there was a lot of changes to low income housing policy and anti-poverty policy and lo and behold lots of homeless people started appearing in San Francisco and now people believe that it's a permanent phenomenon but it wasn't a permanent phenomenon in the history of the city it's a structural problem that came about as a result of that interplay between local and federal and state policies and no one structurally did anything about it I mean people did but it obviously has mostly kept it at the kind of same level for the last generation but now it's become a feature of the city that just wasn't there before if the Trump administration fundamentally changed policies in a way you would see a new structural problem emerge and if people learn to normalize that then it would become a thing that would become normalized for the next generation of Californians so this question is about the alt-right I specifically was curious about Josh from Mother Jones thoughts on this from my perspective I've been involved in campaigns and I see Donald Trump as doing a really good job at locking down the vote in 2020 maybe even 2018 with trying to stop trying to at least frame things to those swing states trying to frame it as if he's not going to be moving as if he's stopping jobs from going to places like Mexico on the other hand I see deportation and a lot of key states like Arizona, Florida where there's a Latino super majority it seems like it's going to compromise those votes so I'm wondering in terms of just campaign strategy here in San Francisco and also as a Democrat I don't want to see that happen but I think sometimes we can be insular from what you've seen what do you think the odds are based on the media based on what Latinos are seeing in those swing states that that Republicans will win in both 2018 and 2020 so you mean winning on some kind of nativist anti-immigrant upswing and voters in the same way Trump won this time around that's a good question I think it's going to largely depend upon a lot of things that happen between now and then I mean there's an argument that a lot of this nativism isn't at root sort of economically motivated because people tend to focus more on their inherent identity than their perceived identity their success in their careers when times are hard and if the economy approves that sentiment might diminish of course that would also bolster Trump in other ways but I think Democrats also just have to make a case that this is wrong and they need to organize their diverse base to vote in two years from now if they do that then I mean it was a pretty close election I think they could win even if the xenophobia nativism strains of the Trump coalition remain strong question here last question what are your thoughts on the positive and negative role of social media and what comes before us in the state and local levels you mean how social media relates to the local budgets or just social media in general how things come up okay wait I'm confused with the second part of the question social positive and negative role positive and negative role of media comes up for us to consider a political sphere I think it's almost entirely negative I you know I spend too much time on Twitter and it's all wasted time and I know I'll look back at some time in the future that my son's much bigger and I'm not healthy etc and I'll think back and I've wasted a shit ton of time and I think what's worse is that there's an incredible opportunity for malevolent behavior and it's been weaponized and it didn't take much so I I don't think there's ever a healthy and day of American politics and I don't think that there was ever a good old days there's always been something wrong but I would say that social media allows really wretched behavior on a widespread level and if you're an awful person and you're just the awful person that your friends and family have to deal with and now you can annoy people in Kansas and Canada and across the round and you know so you can it can be a truly wretched development and you know it's something that has to be dealt with now because people more than ever are deciding you're coming in on an even par with genuinely dishonest people and partisans when you're a disinterested newspaper reporter disinterested you know is a much mistaken word it means you're on the level so that's very difficult it's very very difficult I would say that it's mostly bad we have a question from Facebook oh nice there you go Trump's proposing eliminating NEA and NEH what impact do you think this would have on California I don't know or do you know I'd say it's much worse elsewhere I'd say it's much worse in places that are more removed I'd say that far from being a thing for coastal elites often times these federal funds carry with them matching state funds and this is how you get art troops in the Midwest and this is how you get this sort of thing around the country so it's damaging to the people that voted for Trump in mass in California you're going to be alright you know you're going to find things to do if you are lucky enough to have leisure time to find artistic endeavors they will be here in this part of the country they may not be when you get to other places and now there will be fewer of them that's true but we did my paper did a story on that a couple weeks back and you know I think we found a dozen or so East Bay arts nonprofits that would lose the majority of their budget if NEA funding is pulled last question last question here I was curious you were talking about a lot of tough talk of the state and city level against Trump and I was wondering how soft or how hard is that resistance once the federal dollars start to dry up on issues like immigration or climate will it just evaporate that resistance will they hold a line I can speak from the state's perspective I think again that context is dependent if there's one thing that Jerry Brown well there's two things Jerry Brown cares about one is nuclear war the other is climate change and so if there are actions on climate change that threaten that we were going to see a very very very strong reaction from him on that with respect immigration Kevin De Leon I mean that's his primary issue that he's been going and so I think you know it is context dependent and I think it's interesting that different leaders within the state have sort of different kind of red line standards of things that they don't want to see crossed so I think it will be firm on those issues that are very important to the people who are most in power and I want to end on a positive note in relation to that I mean one of the more poetic things about the California resistance is you know a generation ago the state passed prop 187 to withhold public services from undocumented immigrants and now 20 some odd years later the leadership of the California state legislator are all Latinos and they have come in power in part because of the reaction to you know that anti-immigrant legislation a generation ago so anyway thank you so much for coming thank you Kim and panelists and also if you would like to be inspired come and join us for a program with our California poet laureate Dana Joya who was head of the NEA and you can continue that conversation with him when he's here on April 19th thank you and then after this with the data bar right yeah downstairs data bar