network state

Trump Targets San Francisco's Presidio

As expected, Donald Trump is targeting San Francisco's Presidio for dismantling. Is the Network State cult making its move to claim this public land for one of its proposed Fascist Cities?

Gil Duran

20 Feb 2025 — 6 min read

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The Point: As expected, Donald Trump is targeting San Francisco's Presidio for dismantling. Is the Network State cult making its move to claim this public land for one of its proposed Fascist Cities? Sure seems like it.

The Back Story: In January, the executive director and the head of policy for the Charter Cities Institute called on Donald Trump to seize San Francisco's Presidio, a national landmark, and turn it over to private hands for development. Here's what they wrote in an article for Palladium Magazine, a reactionary tech publication:

The Presidio is federal land located in the heart of San Francisco at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The 1500 acres are governed under a unique trust structure created by Congress after the Presidio’s closure as an active military base in the late 1980s. The Presidio Trust Act instructs how the area is to be operated, under a board of directors which includes the Secretary of the Interior and six members appointed by the President of the United States.

The existing trust structure could be reformed, and the board of directors reconstituted, to facilitate the development of the Presidio, or even just a portion of it, as a Freedom City which enjoys broad autonomy, a vastly improved regulatory environment, and preemption over extreme state and local restrictions on construction and emerging technologies. The urbanist embrace of incoming Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has demonstrated a deep understanding of the history and economic effects of restrictive land use and zoning policies, bodes well for his role in the development of a Presidio Freedom City.

The term "Freedom City" comes from Trump's 2024 campaign agenda, which called for the creation of 10 new corporate-controlled cities on federal land. This idea fits squarely with the Network State cult, which seeks to create new autonomous territories outside the jurisdiction of American democracy, law and regulation. The idea can be more accurately described as Fascist Cities, which is how I will refer to them.

As I wrote back in August:

The basic idea – creating sovereign company cities with different laws to help a chosen few escape the problems of wider society – is clearly the same as Trump's little freedom cities. He announced the plan for these new cities as part of a "quantum leap" plan that also includes flying cars. This seems like a clear nod to the "accelerationism" movement sweeping certain parts of tech.

Trump's inclusion of Network State ideas in his official campaign platform raises many questions: Who will live in these cities? How will they be governed? Who will profit most from their creation? How will they deal with fierce, bipartisan community resistance like that which derailed California Forever? Where is this "American frontier" of which Trump speaks? How did this strange and dystopian cult idea make its way into Trump's campaign platform?

Read the whole piece here:

Now comes the news that Trump is working to eliminate the Presidio Trust. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Presidio Trust, a federal agency charged with running and protecting the historic San Francisco park, should be “eliminated” because it is “unnecessary,” according to an executive order issued by the White House on Wednesday night.

The order calls for cutting all federal funding to the Presidio Trust that is not legally necessary.

Posted on the White House website under the heading “Commencing the Reduction of Federal Bureaucracy Ecexutive [sic] order,” the document lists four federal entities — the Presidio Trust, the Inter-American Foundation, the United States African Development Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace — as examples of federal “waste and abuse.”

Big coincidence, huh?

Hat Tip to Jenny Cohn, the independent journalist who has been keeping an eye on the situation and raising the alarm for months. Check out her revealing thread on BlueSky. In a nutshell, San Francisco's right-wing tech bros have been openly pining over the possibility of taking control over the Presidio, carving it out from the city of San Francisco, and converting it into one of their dystopian nightmare territories.

Analysis: Between Elon Musk's hostile takeover of the United States government and the plan to replace the Presidio with a tech-controlled fascist city, the whole Network State thing is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Last year, a Network State-aligned group tried and failed to establish a colony – "City Campus" – in Hayes Valley. Now they're back with a plan to destroy the beloved Presidio, and they apparently have Trump's backing.

Unfortunately, the mainstream press still has some kind of mental block against mentioning the Network State and its goals. As a longtime journalist, it's not clear to me why the public is being deprived of this relevant context. After all, I did not learn about the Network State from secret documents or leaked files. These guys have been openly plotting this stuff for years. They've even got a conference dedicated to the topic. It seems logical that journalists should inform their readers of relevant information – like, you know, the openly-stated plan to destroy the Presidio and build a privately-controlled city in our midst.

For a backgrounder on the Network State cult and its plans for San Francisco, read these two pieces from my New Republic series last year:

Last Word: The Network State cult has been obsessed with gaining political control of San Francisco. With Trump's win, that just got easier. As it turns out, they won't need City Hall to build their Network State on the Golden Gate. All they need to do is get the federal government – currently under the control of Elon Musk – to hand them control of the Presidio. What's next? Federalizing a large swath of Solano County and giving California Forever absolute permission to do as it pleases? Don't bet against it.