Wisps of fog floated like ghosts through the cypress trees outside Peace United Church of Christ on a chilly November 10, 2014, evening. Several hundred of Santa Cruz’s “best” people strolled into the sanctuary to attend the book signing of former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta. Panetta’s book tour promoting the release of “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace” was hosted by Bookshop Santa Cruz, a pillar of the Central Coast’s liberal tradition.
Panetta’s media tour not only promoted his memoir; it was promoting an escalation in America’s terror wars. “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war,” Panetta told USA Today as his tour kicked off. Panetta said the focus would be on the Islamic State, and could also include military activity in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and beyond.
A banning of uncomfortable opinions by the bookstore started on the church lawns where the small group of protesters were coerced into standing out of sight on the sidewalk. Santa Cruz journalist Alex Darocy noted on Indybay that, “According to sources close to the New York Times, Panetta was advanced nearly $3 million to write “Worthy Fights.” Tickets for the Bookshop Santa Cruz event cost $39.20, which would reserve a seat for the talk by Panetta, and included a copy of his book.
After listening Panetta drone on for an hour praising what he claimed were his greatest achievements, he finally started to speak about the need for a wider war on terrorism. America had been too reserved and had to increase the violence, the killing, the suffering. The four of us who bought tickets stood up, revealing our hand-drawn white shirts and paper banner that read “Stand Up for Peace.” The four of us walked quietly before the stage and started to leave the venue. Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty-Protti frantically raced behind us, waving her arms, yelling “You’re banned for life!”
A few days later Casey asked to meet with me at Abbott Square. She rescinded her ban, realizing that I would be sharing the stage with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges at an event that Sunday, November 23, 2014, titled “Defending our Civil Liberties” at the Inner Light Ministries in Santa Cruz. Hedges would be speaking out against Obama’s signing into law the National Defense Authorization Act, which included the indefinite detention of Americans without charge, trial, or even a phone call to a lawyer or family.
“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director.
Bookshop Santa Cruz held another book signing for another war-supporting official on June 17, 2016. This time it was Senator Barbara Boxer and her memoir, “The Art of Tough: Fearlessly Facing Politics and Life,” at an event also held at Peace United Church of Christ. Boxer had just participated in the theft of Bernie Sanders’ victory at Nevada’s Democratic caucus that May. Several of us bought tickets and stood silently before the audience with photos of Boxer yelling at Sanders supporters during the convention. As we were heading for the exit Casey once again rushed behind us yelling “You’re banned from Bookshop Santa Cruz for life!”
The era of online deletion and censorship was emerging with COVID. The exacerbation of the system of techno-divide and control started to explode. When opposition to the genocide in Gaza took to social media, the censorship gloves were off. Israeli soldiers populated the offices of Silicon Valley companies like Meta and Google.
Billionaire Zionists screamed antisemitism at even the smallest act of support for an end to the slaughter. Witnessing the live-streaming of children’s skulls being blown off and fathers rushing through clouds of smoke, their child dangling in their arms, was madness. Student encampments rose up on campuses across the country. College presidents were being forced out for being too easy on peaceful pro-Palestinian protests. When Instagram banned the account of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) without notice or explanation in August 2024, people of compassion for Palestine took notice.
In a post on X, Columbia SJP said, “As the school year is just about to begin, Columbia SJP has been permanently banned from Instagram. Our account was permanently deleted with 124,000 followers at the same time as our backup account, and when we made a new page it was deleted within two days.”
The banning of books is wrong, and so is banning political speech online. Campaigns to rid our school libraries of sinful texts circulate through Bible Belt America. Casey’s husband, Michel Protti is the head of “online safety” at Meta, the owner of Instagram. Local activists organized a “Celebrating Censorship” protest outside Bookshop Santa Cruz’s annual Banned Books event at the store on September 23, 2024. We asked people to bring copies of their books that had been banned from Bookshop Santa Cruz and banners opposing the genocide in Gaza. Our posters and flyers denounced the silencing of Palestinians and their supporters by Michel Protti. Casey stole some of our posters, yelling that our announcement of the demonstration frightened her children. She also added that her husband “has more power at Meta than Mark Zuckerberg.”
It seems techno-feudalism is a family affair for the Coonerty family. Casey’s brother is former county supervisor Ryan Coonerty and is currently running for mayor of Santa Cruz.
A 2012 Monterey Herald article titled “‘Predictive policing’ gets capital boost” reported that “Attorney Caleb Baskin and Councilman Ryan Coonerty have taken the experimental ‘predictive policing’ program used by the Santa Cruz Police Department and created software that they hope to sell to law enforcement agencies around the nation. The duo, who founded the co-working business NextSpace, say they’ve raised more than $1 million so far to fund their newest venture.”
The article continues, “The program has gained international media attention — and the attention of law enforcement agencies nationwide, many asking how they can get the program.”
“Based on such requests, Zach Friend helped coordinate a meeting between Mohler and Baskin and Coonerty to discuss the idea of creating a business.”
“Baskin, 36, and Coonerty, 38, say investors who’ve helped fund their venture include Plantronics CEO Ken Kannappan, former eBay executive Rob Chesnut, and Coonerty’s brother-in-law Michel Protti, a vice president at Yahoo.”
PredPol is based on an analytics model developed by a group of researchers, including mathematician George Mohler of Santa Clara University and Jeff Brantingham at UCLA’s Department of Anthropology.
The grooming of vice presidential candidate JD Vance by CIA asset Peter Thiel suggested the Trump administration was set to continue the authoritarian path the United States had taken for decades. While Biden and Harris were busy arming and funding the live-streamed genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party’s campaign strategy was to claim that Trump was our next dictator if that wasn’t already obvious enough. To push that point the “party” held a reading of Sinclair Lewis’s play “It Can’t Happen Here.” The local “Buzz Windrip”-type characters of Santa Cruz announced they would read the 1935 dystopian political play at Bookshop Santa Cruz, but interest was so great the bookstore moved the July 19 2024, campaign event to the 418 Project on River Street. Mayor Fred Keeley and Congressman Jimmy Panetta were among those set to read the play.
Local activists organized a protest outside the reading called the “IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING HERE - Santa Cruz and the theater of hypocrisy, carnage and suffering.” No one took credit for initiating the protest yet it drew a loud crowd of people opposed to Mayor Keeley’s cruel sweeps and criminalization of the homeless and to his and Panetta’s support for the Gaza genocide.
When I arrived to help Joe of India Joze set up our food table, a security guard gave me two envelopes. I left them in my vehicle when I returned to get more supplies. I started handing out the last of our flyers announcing the demonstration to those waiting to enter the venue. The security guard followed me around threatening to call the police if I didn’t leave the Galleria Mall property.
I opened the envelopes the next morning and to my surprise, one included The 418 Project’s executive director Laura Bishop’s letter stating that I was “persona non grata,” adding “person not welcome” until August 1, 2034. You read that right, a decade-long ban “at 155 River Street or any event held elsewhere by The 418 Project.” The second letter also banned me from the Galleria Mall, home of the Democratic Party’s offices for 10 years.
Wallace Baine reported on the event in Lookout Santa Cruz, “Several dozen protesters, armed with bullhorns, drums and flamethrower passions, ringed the theater, creating a din that the ‘actors’ inside had to nearly shout over. On top of that, a few protesters found their way into the audience and, at least five times, interrupted the play reading with loud denunciations aimed at the panelists.”
The tangled web of Silicon Valley techno-fascists walk freely in our vulture-capitalist-controlled seaside community. Ryan Coonerty is running to replace Zionist icon Fred Keeley’s four-year term as mayor of Santa Cruz. Coonerty works for San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.
An April 20, 2025 New York Times article by Soumya Karlamangla notes, “In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, a Democrat, recently called for arresting homeless people if they refused shelter three times.”
Karlamangla continues, “The goal of his new plan, he said, is to invest heavily in building more shelters in San Jose and to move homeless people who refuse housing into mental health treatment to help them onto a better path. But it is possible that those living on the streets could serve jail time.”
“‘Homelessness can’t be a choice,’ Mr. Mahan said. ‘Government has a responsibility to build shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a responsibility to use it.’”
Mahan’s city is using AI to aid in removing the homeless from sight. An April 7, 2024, Mercury News story reported, “Across the country, cities have begun experimenting with artificial intelligence to map potholes, reduce traffic and fight wildfires. In San Jose, officials are now harnessing the rapidly evolving technology with another goal in mind: detecting homeless encampments.”
The article goes on to say, “Three times since December, a white city-owned Toyota sedan affixed with a half-dozen small cameras has cruised through South San Jose to collect footage of parked cars and RVs. The images were then fed into different AI systems developed by four private companies to determine whether people were living inside the vehicles.”
“The open-ended pilot program, thought to be the first of its kind nationwide, may soon also seek to identify tent encampments and could one day expand to a permanent fleet of vehicles that crisscross the city.”
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale donated the legal limit of $78,400 to Mahan’s California gubernatorial campaign. Joe Lonsdale also started a nationwide campaign to criminalize the homeless.
The Cicero Institute was founded in 2021 by billionaire Bay Area tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, whose data mining products have been used by the CIA, the U.S. immigration agency, and local police departments. He derides a “homeless industrial complex,” accusing advocates of prolonging the problem so they can keep their jobs. Grassroots organizations like Food Not Bombs and the National Union of the Homeless also accuse the homeless industrial complex of ignoring the needs of those who cannot afford housing while raking in millions of dollars, but they do not support the cruel policies of Joe Lonsdale and his “solutions” of incarceration and conservatorship.
The Cicero Institute website’s section on homelessness says, “States should ban unauthorized street camping.”
It continues, “More people than ever are experiencing unsheltered homelessness in America, and this population faces many serious challenges including addiction and severe mental health issues. Predictably, crime in and around street encampments is disproportionately high. Despite the problems associated with allowing homeless encampments to fester, many cities and states have refused to take serious action. To maintain order in our cities, we must hold all citizens, including the homeless, accountable to the rule of law. Removing homeless individuals from unsanctioned camps and placing them in shelters offers them the services they need while reducing crime.”
The Cicero Institute website reports one of its success stories, “This morning (March 2024) in Miami Beach, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 / SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities. HB 1365 will ban street camping and upend how Florida provides treatment and help to the homeless — and holds providers and cities accountable for failure.”
In early April 2024, the movement against the homeless had another victory in Lonsdale’s nationwide campaign to make it a crime to be homeless in all 50 states.
Kentucky bill HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act,” passed. The 78-page bill criminalizes homelessness and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in unlawful camping. Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to dispossess them, they can shoot the homeless person.
House Bill 5 would ban street encampments in most public areas except those that public officials designate. Those designated areas must also include basic sanitation services like hand-washing stations and bathrooms. The penalty is a violation for the first offense and a Class B misdemeanor for the second offense.
While Mayor Matt Mahan adopted many of Joe Lonsdale’s policies, his homeless “solutions” might not be as wonderful as his campaign for governor claims.
His much-praised Taylor Street Navigation Hub, San Jose’s only sanctioned tent homeless encampment is scheduled to close by next January, a few months after it opened. The safe sleeping site, which is managed by nonprofit HomeFirst, took four months to construct, $2.6 million to build and $2.4 million a year to operate. The 56-tent Taylor Street camp sits on a dismal fenced-in asphalt lot.
San Jose is also sweeping the encampment dubbed “The Jungle” as it did in the mid-2010s, but Mayor Matt Mahan said this time is different.
On May 22, 2026, Spectrum News quoted the mayor. “By giving people dignity, we can restore the natural habitat and make it cleaner and safer for everyone,” Mahan said. “I’m proud of the progress made in San Jose. It’s a model for the rest of the state.”
The article continues, “‘In San Jose, we’re steadily reducing unsheltered homelessness by creating alternatives and holding them accountable,’ Mahan claims.”
“Mahan, who is running for California governor, said he wants to implement this strategy statewide to reduce unsheltered homelessness. Those experiencing encampment sweeps, though, said not everything goes smoothly.”
“‘I don’t believe anything these people say,’ Martin Nava, a homeless resident of “The Jungle,” said.”
“Nava told Spectrum News that he has been homeless off and on for years. He said city workers tried to connect him to a shelter before sweeping his tent from the Jungle, but said no one followed up with him.”
“‘People’s lives are at stake, and look now. I haven’t heard from them, not even a phone call,’ Nava said.”
“Maria Vargas, another Jungle resident, said the same issue happened to her.”
“‘I’m upset about it, and I was hoping for a little tiny home,’ Vargas said. ‘What does that say to the people who were left behind? They’re not giving me housing.’”
“When Vargas and Nava were first interviewed in April, the two were searching for a new encampment to call home.”
The San Jose Spotlight’s Brandon Pho writes in a February 11, 2026, article, “Billionaires and tech moguls are spending mountains of cash to catapult San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to the front of the race for California governor.”
Pho continues, “Recent campaign finance reports show Mahan has raised more than $2 million, though he has touted raising a total of $7 million so far on social media. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan are among the Silicon Valley elite who maxed out their legally allowed contributions — $78,400 each — into Mahan’s governor campaign in January.”
Santa Cruz mayoral hopeful Ryan Coonerty works for Mahan. The San Jose mayor’s website has a page about his employee:
“Ryan Coonerty serves as the Senior Intergovernmental Affairs Advisor to Mayor Mahan. Prior to this role, he served as a two-time Mayor and County Supervisor in Santa Cruz, California. He lectures on law and government at UC Santa Cruz and the Panetta Institute for Public Policy at CSU Monterey Bay. He is the co-host of ‘An Honorable Profession’ podcast and is a former fellow at the Aspen Institute and the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.”
Jesse Kathan’s February 15, 2026, report in the Santa Cruz Local writes, “Another potentially contentious aspect of Coonerty’s goal for clean streets is his intention to take a harder stance on street homelessness and tent camps.”
“‘I believe that we need to offer people an opportunity for shelter, or treatment, or a bus ticket home,’ he said. If they don’t accept one of those options, Coonerty wants to use recent changes to state law that can route more people into voluntary or involuntary mental health treatment.”
“That includes CARE courts, a voluntary legal process for people with severe mental illness unable to meet their own needs, and expanded conservatorship laws that allow more institutionalization of people with severe mental illness and substance use disorders.”
“‘We cannot have people living in our streets and parks,’ Coonerty said.”
Lookout Santa Cruz reported, “The California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) is investigating Santa Cruz mayoral candidate Ryan Coonerty for allegedly failing to file his Form 700s, or statements of economic interests, associated with his advisor role at the City of San Jose Mayor’s Office.”
The complaint was filed by Santa Cruz resident David Moore. He said, “I am concerned about government surveillance, and I’m concerned that if Ryan Coonerty gets in a position of authority in Santa Cruz again, that he might bring back either [automated license-plate readers] or whatever the next government surveillance that’s going to come along.”
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb reports that predictive policing software is being used in the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Ryan Coonerty’s software appears to have migrated to his friends at Palantir Technologies. This software was likely used to target the Starobelsk Professional College in Lugansk, Russia and the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran. If true, the most deadly family in Santa Cruz owns Bookshop Santa Cruz.
While his sister Casey is banning people who object to the parade of warmonger monsters she hosts at her bookstore and her husband is banning social media accounts opposed to genocide and war, it looks like, if elected, Ryan Coonerty will be banning people who cannot afford to pay some of America’s highest rents for life, even if they were born and raised in our community.
It looks like Santa Cruz’s most deadly family seeks to ban those they deem unworthy for life from the streets of California to the children of Gaza. “Banned FROM life for the “useless eaters” is really their goal.
Keith McHenry - PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 - 1-800-884-1136
SOUP STREET - A memoir by Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
Wow Keith, powerful writing. I can’t say that I agree with everything, but the freedom of speech, gathering and protest should never be compromised. The same goes for fighting homelessness and the Palestine genocide. Thank you for all that you do
"predictive policing" means pre-crime, you do not have to commit a crime when just thinking about it is grounds for "enforcement"