On Wednesday, the Rose Pak Asian American Club sharply criticized an AI-generated image depicting District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan and her fellow congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti in the style of socialist realist propaganda.
The person who posted it was Marie Hurabiell, who is running against them in the June primary.
The post featured Chan and Chakrabarti as heroes of a socialist revolution with a raised fist (Chan) and Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag (Chakrabarti). As if to drive the very obvious point home, the image features text reading “SOCIALISM IS THE WAY,” “down with capitalism,” “strength through solidarity,” and “Connie Chan and Saikat Chakrabarti lead the revolution!”
The Rose Pak Asian American Club shared the image in an Instagram statement condemning the post, which it said targeted the only two Asian American candidates in the race to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress.
“This type of messaging relies on fear-based, Cold War-era stereotypes. It is meant to distract from the issues that matter to voters — affordability, cost of living, and economic stability,” the group wrote. “Language meant to divide and distract has no place in our political discourse.”
“Candidates cannot ask for our community’s support and then promote harmful rhetoric targeting Asian Americans — or any community,” the statement concluded.
The club also published a screenshot of the original post on Instagram, with the poster’s name and profile picture redacted. However, a reverse image search by Gazetteer discovered that the image was published on X by Hurabiell on April 19 and retweeted by Republican influencer Mike Netter, a failed Gavin Newsom recaller and current state senate candidate who has some 109,000 followers on X.
The post has since been deleted, but the image search result remains online.
Jeremy Lee, president of Rose Pak Asian American Club, confirmed it was shared by Hurabiell. Lee told Gazetteer that the group blacked out the identity of the poster to avoid raising her “name recognition.”
This is not the first time that Red Scare-type propaganda has been used by centrist and conservative figures in San Francisco to portray progressive candidates in a negative light.
In the lead-up to the 2022 recall of former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for example, a group led by venture capitalist David Sacks funded election materials depicting Boudin as a Mao Zedong-like figure, surrounded by illustrations of drug users, tent encampments, and the words “TAKE BACK SAN FRANCISCO” and “RECALL CHESA BOUDIN.” Sacks now serves as President Donald Trump’s “AI czar.”
Other political figures around the country have also been targeted with similar tactics, such as the New York Post cover depicting Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a cartoon character holding a hammer and sickle aloft. (The paper is now selling merch featuring the image.)
Despite her recent pivot from Republican to the Democratic Party, Hurabiell has a history of posting reactionary commentary on social media, including criticizing trans athlete activism, calling fellow congressional candidate Scott Wiener “anti-woman” for authoring legislation to protect trans women in prison, defending far-right content creators like Nick Shirley whose videos prompted the federal invasion of Minnesota, and stating her opposition to “illegal immigration”: “I believe in our laws and sovereignty,” she wrote in February on X.
Hurabiell’s group, ConnectedSF, hosted Mayor Daniel Lurie in November. Hurabiell, when reached by phone, told Gazetteer that she “takes full responsibility” for the post but added that a member of her staff had published it.
