Scott Wiener has attended the San Francisco Trans March every year since it was first organized in 2004. Twenty-two years of showing up. On Friday night, June 26, 2026, he was on his way to the Trans March Shabbat — a queer Jewish religious service cosponsored by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, Base Bay Area, Or Shalom Jewish Community, and Keshet, to be held right there in the open in Dolores Park before the march, free and open to all — when a group of people swarmed around him, shrieked at him, made threatening physical contact and savagely drove him out of the park and away from the Shabbat event and the march.
For the first time in 22 years, Scott Wiener did not end up marching in the S.F. Trans March after all.
The man who filmed it posted it on X with the caption: “Scott Wiener showed up to the trans march and for the first time we kicked his ass out.” So far, the video has 6 million views.
Mazel tov, I guess.
Here is what I want to say to the six million people who have watched that video: you weren’t watching a protest. You were watching an instructional video. And the audience for that training wasn’t Scott Wiener.
It was you.
One key lesson it was intended to teach was the underlying logic of exemplary intimidation, which is not all that subtle once you learn how to see it.
Exemplary intimidation means you don’t need to threaten every Jew in San Francisco. You just need to pick someone with enough prominence to achieve traction on social media.
In this case, the trainers chose the most visible gay Jewish elected official in the city — a 22-year ally of the trans community. They showed, here’s what you do: you surround him, you mob him, you film the humiliation and the bystander effect, and then you broadcast it as a trophy.
The message radiates outward to every less-prominent Jew in San Francisco who might be thinking about showing up somewhere.
And that message was: Don’t you dare show up as an out Jew.
I’ve written before in these pages that antisemitism is less like a virus and more like a fungal superbug — opportunistic, networked, and invisible … until it isn’t. What happened in Dolores Park on Friday night was a fruiting body. Something had been growing there for a while.
“They made statements about my ‘Israeli handlers,'” Wiener said in his statement the next morning. Not his positions. His handlers. That dual-loyalty trope is so old it has its own archaeological record, and here it was, in 2026, being deployed against a man wearing a yarmulke on his way to Shabbat services at a Pride event he had attended without interruption for over two decades.
Scott Wiener described what happened to him as harassment. Mayor Lurie called it antisemitic. Both are correct. But I want to add a third descriptor here: pedagogical. Somebody was teaching a lesson Friday night in Dolores Park. The question is whether the rest of us in our city were paying attention.
The lesson has two parts, and they were delivered simultaneously.
The first part was aimed at San Francisco’s Jews. Wiener was not targeted despite his 22-year record of showing up for the trans community but because of it — because expelling someone with that record sends a maximally clarifying message. If your history of solidarity can’t protect you, nothing can. If you are Jewish, you now know that your continued presence in progressive spaces is contingent on a permission that can be revoked at any moment by whoever has the largest crowd and the loudest voice. The only guaranteed safe move is to stay home.
The second part was for everyone else who was watching — and with six million views, that’s a lot of everyone else. The lesson was proof of concept: this is what works. A coordinated mob, a phone camera, and the willingness to make physical contact is all it takes to drive a Jewish elected official out of a public space at dusk. The technology of exclusion is now documented, tested, and available for replication.
Teaching exemplary intimidation means you don’t need to threaten every Jew in San Francisco. You just need to target the most visible gay Jewish elected official in the city: you surround him, you mob him, you film the humiliation and the bystander effect, and then you broadcast it on social media as a trophy.
Dimitry Yakoushkin, who filmed the encounter and posted it with his triumphal caption, claimed afterward that the confrontation was spontaneous — that he was walking home, saw Wiener from a distance, and got out his camera. Maybe. But spontaneous or not, the broadcast was entirely deliberate. He knew exactly what he was doing when he captioned it “for the first time we kicked his ass out.” You don’t accidentally frame a humiliation as a trophy.
And here’s is the thing about tactics: They don’t stay restricted to their inventors. “Surround, film, expel, broadcast” is an established methodology now. It’s been tested against synagogues in New York, against Jewish students on college and public school campuses, and now against a queer Jewish elected official at a Pride Shabbat in his own city. The geography changes. The playbook doesn’t.
The gay and trans community has built enormous political standing on its bedrock moral claim: we know what it feels like to be surrounded, outnumbered, told we don’t belong here, and driven from spaces where we had every right to be. That standing is not infinite. It does not automatically replenish. And it cannot survive being spent on expelling a Jewish man from a Jewish religious service — regardless of his politics, regardless of anyone’s feelings about Gaza, regardless of how many middle fingers make it into the frame.
What got established in Dolores Park on Friday night is a principle, and principles cut across all directions. “You don’t belong here because of who you are and what your people are accused of supporting” is a sentence that has been aimed at gay and trans people for the entire history of the movement. It did not become more legitimate by changing the noun.
Scott Wiener was careful in his statement the next morning. He pointed out that he has no objection to disagreements, to opposition, to protest. All of that, he said, is core to democracy. What crossed the line was “cornering me, touching me, or trying to physically bully me out of a public event.”
That’s a scalpel, not a cudgel. And it’s worth sitting with, because it’s the most precise thing anyone said about Friday night.
There is a long and honorable tradition of making politicians uncomfortable in public. Wiener knows this. He’s been in San Francisco politics long enough to have been uncomfortable in public many, many times. He’s not asking to be insulated from opposition. He is drawing a line between speech and physical intimidation — between protest and a coordinated effort to make a public space physically unsafe for a Jewish person attending a Jewish religious service.
That line is not complicated. It’s the same line that gets drawn when a gay bar is surrounded by people who’ve decided that what happens inside it is an affront to their values. It’s the same line that gets drawn when drag queen story hour gets disrupted by people who’ve decided that those performers don’t belong in a public library. The mechanism is identical. The targets differ.
If you believe the line matters in one case, then you have to believe it matters in all of them. If you don’t — if you think the line only applies when the people you agree with are on the safe side of it — then you don’t actually believe in the line. You believe in domination.
As I’ve said before many times, the best defense against antisemitism is a healthy social fabric of connection. Friday night in Dolores Park, some people decided to do the opposite — to rip at the fabric, to test how much could be pulled loose before anyone objected. Mayor Lurie objected. Good.
But the people who need to object most loudly are not mayors. They are not members of the Board of Supervisors. They are not even Scott’s political opponent in his upcoming election.
The people who need to object most loudly are the members of our communities where this hateful teaching happened — the trans activists, the progressive organizers, and the ordinary citizens who have built our city’s political identity around the principle that every human being deserves to move through public space without being cornered, menaced, physically injured, or driven out by a toxic mob.
At a deep level, everyone here knows exactly what was demonstrated in Dolores Park on Friday night.
The question is whether they’re willing to speak out against it.
