For Jackie Fielder, who just announced her bid for a seat in the California State Senate, cutting to the root of the problems facing her state and country requires following the money: “Just look up specific companies and see the campaigns they’re financing. Then see which bills those elected officials either push through or water down through the legislative sessions in any given year.”

Fielder is a young, twenty-five-year-old queer woman of color who is part of a wave of progressive and radical political activists who are running insurgent campaigns.

She is running against an incumbent, Scott Wiener, with impeccable liberal credentials in a city whose elected leadership prides itself on being impeccably liberal. The problem is that, at best, this political machine has made only incremental improvements or enacted stop-gap measures; at worse, it has continued an ongoing capitalist feeding frenzy that has destroyed much of what made the San Francisco Bay Area a place of cultural vibrancy and political possibility.