Dimitry Yakoushkin holds some intense views on housing policy, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Yakoushkin became a national figure over the weekend due to a confrontation he led (and filmed) where a mob confronted Scott Wiener, a CA State Senator and congressional candidate. The confrontation, which escalated and became physical, occurred at the San Francisco Trans Pride March last Friday. It ended with Wiener leaving, saying he felt too unsafe to remain at an event he has attended since its inception, 22 years ago.
The ostensible reason for Wiener’s harassment and ejection from the event were his positions on Israel. Wiener, who is Jewish, gay, and has a record of robust and unwavering support for the trans community, has called the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide, and pledged to vote against US military funding for Israel.
There are certainly people to Wiener’s left on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and so at first it was possible to imagine that heightened feelings around Israel/Palestine were what led to this incident. This becomes harder to believe after perusing Yakoushkin’s Twitter feed. The ringleader’s recent posts are dominated by crowing about his victory over Wiener, but scroll back even a few days and it’s easy to see that his top political priority has never been foreign genocide but local housing issues.
Yakoushkin’s posts are dominated by criticisms of “YIMBYs,” an acronym for Yes In My Backyard and describes people who favor loosening regulations on new commercial housing development.
Housing policy is a hotly contested area, but not one where animosity between the sides has often escalated to include violence. So what’s an anti-YIMBYcrusader like Yakoushkin to do? If such a person lacked all moral compunction, they might leverage the fact that Wiener is Jewish, combined with the intense anger and grief over the Israeli government’s genocidal actions towards the Palestinian people, and whip a crowd into a frenzy by linking a Jewish man with Israeli government actions.
This is what I believe Yakoushkin did, and I’ve got some pretty good evidence to support that: In a recent reply to someone questioning his harassment of Wiener on Twitter, Yakoushkin openly said that Wiener’s positions on Gaza were irrelevant.
When the ringleader of the harassment mob himself admits Wiener’s positions on Gaza aren’t relevant to whether he deserves harassment, we can discount any quibbling about Wiener’s actual positions on Israel/Palestine and whether they go far enough (for the record, I don’t believe a two state solution is still viable, which puts me to the left of Wiener).
This incident wasn’t about Israel, it was about Wiener’s Jewishness. That Jewishness is what allowed an angry crank to whip people into a mob and carry out his personal grudges at a Trans Pride March.
Obviously the person most responsible for doing so is Yakoushkin, but we need to reckon with the fact that Yakoushkin was able to incite an outpouring of rage against a Jewish man by mentioning Gaza. The only explanation for that is antisemitism. Enough attendees at the Trans Pride March were open to seeing a Jewish man as a proxy for Israel that Yakoushkin was able to whip them into a frenzy for his own purposes.
It can be difficult to warn the left about the danger of antisemitism in our movements because the far right, along with their allies among self-proclaimed centrists, have used dire warnings about left-wing antisemitism as a way to distract from actual neo-Nazism in the conservative base. Left-wing antisemitism still doesn’t come close to the feverish conspiracy theories that long ago entered the mainstream of right-wing discourse. A few people shouting at a rally aren’t comparable to antisemitic conspiracy theorists whispering in the ears of highly placed Republican officials in the Trump administration.
Still, it’s important to recognize that hatred doesn’t take over a movement all at once. It starts slowly. It starts by turning a blind eye to inconvenient hatreds on our side because the other side is so much worse, because the genocide in Gaza really is that bad, and because we’re afraid of playing in to right wing propaganda.
That hesitancy in the face of a moral duty to our Jewish friends and allies is exactly what allows this sick hatred to fester. Already, it’s festered to the point where an anti-YIMBY opportunist can call upon antisemitic impulses to direct harassment at a congressional candidate. That needs to be a wake up call. We can’t let this fester any further.
