A few dozen supporters showed up for Saturday’s decidedly unironic “March for Billionaires” protest, which was evenly matched by several members of the press and a group of activists one-upping the sympathizers with a satirical “March for Trillionaires” rally.

As Mission Local reports, a small contingent of billionaire supporters, who claim they’re not actually billionaires themselves, held a “March for Billionaires” protest at Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights Saturday morning. Naturally, the event drew a crowd of onlookers, including several journalists and about a dozen animated protestors dressed in formal wear, proclaiming they were taking part in a “March for Trillioinaires,” per Broke-Ass Stuart on Instagram.

As SFist reported earlier this week, many assumed the original march was some sort of joke, but the organizers confirmed their intention was to spread awareness about their grievances against the billionaire tax. Per the LA Times, the pro-billionaire crowd thinks Californians should be grateful for the billionaires who hoard their fortunes here.

“We must not judge billionaires as a class but by their individual merits,” said organizer Derik Kauffman Saturday, per the Times. “There are good billionaires and bad billionaires, just like there are good people and bad people. California is extraordinarily lucky that this is where people come to start companies and build fortunes and we should do our best to keep it that way.”

As the Chronicle reports, about a dozen nearby counter-protestors dressed to the nines — including a Mr. Monopoly lookalike and a couple nicknamed “Oli Garch” and “Trilly O’Naire,” per the Times, held signs with messages such as “Let them eat cake” and “Defund the poor,” per the Chronicle. Per Broke-Ass Stuart, one participant sported a chef’s hat and bushy mustache while hoisting a stuffed “Chef Bourgeoisie” puppet into the air.

Meanwhile, the pro-billionaire participants boasted signs with messages, such as, “We *heart* you Jeffrey Bezos,” per Mission Local, and “Gains from trade,” per the Chronicle.

“I would say we were horrified that they’ve been talking about taxing billionaires to pay for Medicaid, to pay for hunger prevention, to pay for kids’ education. That is not a good use of my money,” quipped a counter-protestor, per the Chronicle. “You want to know a good use of my money? I’ve got this other island I’m looking at.”

Per Mission Local, a pro-billionaire protestor named Annie provided some choice quotes, including the notion that journalists should be eliminated.

“It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” said Annie, per Mission Local. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”

And of course, the poors are “just jealous.” “People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” said Annie, per Mission Local. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”

Artist Razelle Swimmer, the counter-protestor who brought the Chef Bourgeoisie puppet, pointed out the absurdity of the pro-billionaire stance to the Chronicle. “There are people literally on the streets that don’t have anything to eat in the place where we’re ending this march,” said Swimmer, referring to the Civic Center area.

“It’s sad,” Swimmer said, per the Chronicle. “They represent a group of Americans who still believe in this concept that if you just pull yourself hard enough by your bootstraps, you’ll have $8 billion.”

Image: Our Revolution/Threads

Previously: A ‘Pro-Billionaire’ March and Rally Is Coming to SF Saturday, and Apparently This Is Not a Joke

Found over at Page and Divisadero, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark uses antiquated means of finding a lost pair of eyeglasses. (The phone number handwritten on the ad matches the business card posted at the bottom, which was confirmed as Newmark's.)

Oh, the irony!

Anyway, they're brown Okio glasses with turquoise undertones and a heavy prescription. Have you seen these specs? Shoot us an email, or check out the CL ad, and we'll connect you accordingly.

Recently spotted on BART was this track bike with an ersatz disc rear wheel. Mismatched wheels have long been a staple of fixie style, particularly when one of the wheels is an expensive piece of racing hardware (extra points for juxtaposing the expensive and the cheap).

Yet this track star thumbs his nose at the prevailing convention, choosing not a $500 racing disc wheel, but electing instead to cover a regular wheel with paper -- and not stopping there, to cover the paper with graffiti-style art. And thus the fixie enters its ironic phase.

In other words, the two sides of San Francisco fixie culture -- a surly DIY aesthetic and the fetishism of conspicuous consumption -- have now bit each other in the ass: homage and mockery can no longer be distinguished.

Or can they? As Fredric Jameson put it in one of the longest questions ever written in English:

The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the “new expressionism”; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and “popular” styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture... the list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?

Photo: Adam Polakoff

P.S. Yes, rajbot, we smell you, ridin' on your scraper bike.