The new Clint Reilly Examiner continues to add fresh, new voices from the 1990s, as the Chronicle’s former get-off-my-lawn shooer C.W. Nevius has a weekly column in that paper.
We thought San Francisco had seen the last of sports columnist-turned Karen-at-large C.W. Nevius when he quit the Chronicle in 2016, along with a number of veteran reporters and writers, and it looked like he’d just ride off into the sunset with a Substack. But he did pop up briefly here to moderate a District 6 supervisor debate in 2018, and has been sports writer for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat the last four years. And now out of left field, he’s back in the San Francisco newspaper scene, as C.W. Nevius now has a weekly column in the SF Examiner.
Pleased, proud and pleasantly surprised to be asked to write a once a week column for the new and improved Examiner. My first: On sand dabs, City Hall, safe sites and why I call SF home - The San Francisco Examiner https://t.co/rNpaXkAAbb
— C.W. Nevius (@cwnevius) October 7, 2021
“I am thrilled, and pleasantly surprised, to have been asked to write a once-a-week column for the new, improved San Francisco Examiner,” he writes in his Examiner debut. “It should be available online on Wednesday and in the newspaper on Sunday,” he says in the column entitled “On sand dabs, City Hall, safe sites and why I call SF home.”
Wait… does he call SF Home? Last we knew he’d moved up north, and he has been writing for Santa Rosa's paper (his most recent piece was published Wednesday). Who knows, maybe he’s moved back. Or maybe he just “calls it home,” not unlike his stint in Walnut Creek before he moved to the city in 2010, so perhaps he’ll act as sort of a locally sourced Tucker Carlson whose bit is complaining about San Francisco while not actually living here.
But Nevius’s well-known disdain for homelessness and progressive policymakers has given this website a great amount of blog fodder. There was the time he skipped on paying his Muni fare, and even though he got off with just a warning, he still got his fare inspector in trouble. He gave outsize attention to complaining about nudists, street protests and drinking in Dolores Park. If this hire is meant as a poke in the Chronicle’s eye, it would be more effective if Clint Reilly’s new Examiner had hired, you know, a current Chronicle writer. But if this hire is meant as an attempt to out-Heather Knight even Heather Knight herself, then they couldn’t have picked a better writer.
Well, at least they noticed . . . https://t.co/IwgtP92Xta
— C.W. Nevius (@cwnevius) October 14, 2016
To be fair, Nevius would be considered a liberal columnist in any other town, yet in San Francisco his politics got him labeled as an unltraconservative. He’s generally a good sport about this, as when he retweeted an article I wrote about his retirement, which was titled “Farewell and Fuck You, C.W. Nevius.” And he has written eloquently about raising two LGBTQ children. But he will more often complain that San Francisco is a consequence-free zone, probably using grandfatherly vernacular like “knuckleheads” and “boneheads.”
And probably people will read it, some agreeing. Others will probably read it just so they can hate upon it. And we will probably read it just so we can write our Jesus, there goes Nevius again blog posts.
Image: David Allen for The Marsh
