The website is slick, sporting photos of smiling San Franciscans happily picking up trash from city streets. Among them are local celebrities, including San Francisco Giants icon Hunter Pence and two mayors, one past and one present: London Breed and Daniel Lurie, heir to a billion-dollar fortune and the man who used his nearly unlimited resources to drive Breed out of office.

A section of Refuse Refuse’s site is devoted to glowing profiles of Vincent Yuen, the group’s founder. Refuse/Refuse made its debut in a January 2022 article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Yuen received the star treatment from columnist Heather Knight, the unofficial spokeswoman for the city’s conservative interests.

What is often missing from Refuse Refuse articles is that Yuen, a former sales consultant, has simply publicized an existing program of the city’s Department of Public Works. Not long ago, the Refuse Refuse chief received a slap on the wrist after being caught charging volunteers for materials he receives for free from the city.

Curiously, Knight dropped the most startling piece of information late in that article. Refuse Refuse got seed funding from TogetherSF, a group the Chronicle columnist laughably calls “a civic engagement and volunteering group.” TogetherSF also lent a hand with coordinating its events. At no point does Knight mention TogetherSF’s founder, tech billionaire Michael Moritz or his political interests.

What’s troubling is that signing up for a Refuse Refuse trash pick-up required handing over an email address that then became the property of TogetherSF. Those addresses proved invaluable as TogetherSF launched a promised $17 million, multi-year campaign to move San Francisco rightward. That effort was detailed in a document leaked to the Phoenix Project last year.

Using Refuse Refuse’s trash pick-ups is a clever organizing tool. It is also a potential violation of the city’s strict campaign laws. Recently, the Phoenix Project filed a legal complaint, charging TogetherSF with operating illegally as an undeclared political committee. Now, it appears that Moritz has withdrawn his funding. The new organization, called Blueprint for a Better San Francisco and run by failed District 5 candidate and constant TikTok poster Scotty Jacobs, has become yet another political group under the umbrella of Jay Cheng’s Neighbors for a Better San Francisco.

Mission Local reporter Joe Eskanazi called Refuse Refuse a “good data mining” project. For TogetherSF, “It was a way to get the contact information for frustrated people who wanted to do something about the plight of this city, and then send them your messages about common sense politics and politicians,” Eskanazi wrote. 

TogetherSF was founded by Moritz and run by Kanishka Cheng, wife of Neighbor’s Jay Cheng and a former Breed staffer. One of its early projects was “That’s Fentalife!”, a tasteless ad campaign that made light of the city’s devastating drug epidemic. It spent about $300,000 to plaster the city with posters, making specious connections between homelessness, drug use and crime, to bully the San Francisco Board of Supervisors into increasing the Police Department’s already lavish $800 million budget.

TogetherSF spent an unprecedented $9.5 million on Proposition D, a ballot measure that concentrated unprecedented power in the city’s mayor at the expense of the Board of Supervisors and private citizens who sit on public commissions. It was handily defeated as was its candidate for mayor, Mark Farrell, who they sunk $5.4 million into with a law-and-order campaign for mayor while finishing a disappointing fourth. 

After the November 2024 rout, TogetherSF “merged” with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, the 800-pound gorilla of conservative San Francisco politics. Formed in 2020, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco has been the best funded and biggest spender of the city’s Astroturf groups. Backed by a mixture of real estate and tech money, it accounted for $1 in every $10 spent in San Francisco elections between 2020 and 2024, or $8.7 million of the $80.3 million spent during that period. Its founder, William Oberndorf, is a reliable backer of conservative candidates and causes, including that of charter schools, or as they call it “school choice.” 

Although it prefers to keep its activities in the shadows, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco is the funding engine for campaigns and other conservative political groups, such as Connected SF and Blueprint for a Better San Francisco. 

It’s unclear where that leaves Refuse Refuse. The countless email addresses harvested by TogetherSF are now the property of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. It appears that the Civic Joy Fund, funded by Daniel Lurie and Cryptobro Chris Larsen, and operated by political dilettante Manny Yekutiel, has become a sponsor. During the last two years, it received funding from Beautiful San Francisco and the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, which is to say, Mayor Lurie and his family, but there is no word on whether they will receive money from either organization in the upcoming year. After being slapped with two separate ethics violations, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco must tread carefully when it comes to mixing philanthropy and politics.

Refuse Refuse’s Vince Yuen likes to deny the political aims of his organization. He told Heather Knight: “Pick up trash, plant trees, love on each other, be kind. We’ve just got to keep doing the best we can with what we’ve got.” Until recently, “what we’ve got” included some of the most powerful backers of the Astroturf Network, using trash pick-ups as a means towards their conservative political ends.