San Francisco supervisor Dean Preston recently proposed a solution to the city's skyrocketing car theft on X: simply convince residents and tourists to never leave anything in their cars. Overnight, the post went viral, achieving national ire for so perfectly demonstrating the sclerotic, self-destructive local politics of the country. As of today, the post has been viewed over 4 million times, with just over 200 likes.

But who is this local politician, and what motivates him?

Currently, Dean Preston is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the eleven-seat legislative body responsible for drafting and approving local laws and overseeing the city’s budget. As the supervisor for District 5, a heterogeneous ensemble of neighborhoods that includes the Haight-Ashbury, Hayes Valley and, since a redistricting process last year, the Tenderloin, Preston represents almost 70,000 San Franciscans. In his four years in office, Preston has pushed for permanent eviction moratoriums, a ban on armed retail security guards, and a pandemic-era program placing homeless people in state-funded hotel rooms, where over 100 participants died, many from overdoses, and the city paid out almost $30 million in settlements to hotel owners claiming their properties had been trashed. He is also the city’s first openly democratic socialist supervisor in over 40 years, considered a “progressive champion” by his supporters, and “a cancer to the city” by his detractors.