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Category: Trustworthiness

  • Eric Jones’s Healthcare Record: Employers 7, Patients 0; the good news is your boss saved money

    Wrong seat, wrong moment, CACD-04 Part VI

    By Judy Tipple

    His campaign biography says his father’s health struggles taught him “how critical affordable health care” is to working families (ericjones.us/meet-eric). It says he “built a firm that built businesses.” It lists Lyra Health as a company he helped make “accessible to millions.”

    Fair enough. Let’s look at the businesses.

    His job was healthcare

    Jones joined Dragoneer Investment Group in 2013 and became a partner 4 years later, where he remained until he resigned in July 2025. Not an employee. A partner. His sector title at the firm was “Partner – Healthcare, Fintech, Internet” (RocketReach profile; his LinkedIn will confirm). Healthcare was not a side interest. It was his book.

    So the question is simple. When Jones and Dragoneer put money into healthcare, who was the customer?

    Seven companies. Same answer.

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  • In CA04, which Eric Jones do you get?

    Wrong Seat, Wrong Moment – Part V

    By Judy Tipple

    Yesterday in Marysville, Eric Jones stood in front of 250 farmers at the Yuba-Sutter Farm Bureau forum and said this:

    “Let me make a simple statement: no more data centers in California.”

    He called for a national moratorium. He said members of Congress who don’t understand the technology shouldn’t be in the room for these decisions (Patch, Sept. 2, 2026).

    Strong stuff. The kind of line that gets applause in a room full of people watching data centers drink their water and eat their farmland, and farmland all over the country.

    Here’s the problem. It’s not what his campaign has been telling voters for months.

    Go to ericjones.us right now. His official AI platform page said something very different, until 2 days ago:

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  • Rep. Mike Thompson Participates in Debate With Eric Jones in Marysville Hosted by the Yuba Sutter Farm Bureau

    (From press release) Yesterday, Congressman Mike Thompson participated in a candidate forum with his opponent, Eric Jones, at the Yuba County Government Center in Marysville. The event was hosted by the Yuba Sutter Farm Bureau. Congressman Thompson, himself a small farmer that grows grapes, hay and olives, discussed a variety of issues facing the Yuba Sutter community in front of a crowd of 250 people. Congressman Thompson and Eric Jones debated for 45 minutes about issues facing Yuba and Sutter Counties and our agriculture community.

    “I was honored to be invited to participate in a debate by the Yuba Sutter Farm Bureau. I was proud to discuss my record of delivering for our ag community and strengthening our rural economies,” said Congressman Mike Thompson “Right now farmers are hurting with reckless and illegal tariffs and I am proud to have worked with the Administration to deliver $9 million dollars in relief to peach growers hit by the cannery closure and will continue to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars for our district for flood control projects.”

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  • Sept 10th Event: Working Together to Protect Our Neighbors

    (From press release) The City of Davis Police Accountability Commission invites the community to “Working Together to Protect Our Neighbors” on Thursday, September 10, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Center, 203 East 14th Street. Speakers will discuss local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement, practical family preparedness, and community safety. Live Spanish interpretation will be available.

  • Flip-flopping Eric Jones first casts himself as a progressive, but now endorses right-wing policies

    Jones is “ashamed” of supporting Prop 50 and endorses “sunsetting” of federal programs

    By Roberta Millstein

    Eric Jones, former partner of the venture capital firm Dragoneer Investment Group, seems to be shifting dramatically rightward in the wake of (or in order to gain?) the endorsement of Republican Ray Riehle, his former opponent in Jones’s attempt to become the congressional representative for California’s District 4.  What’s going on here?  There are several aspects, so let me unpack.

    First, I remind readers that Jones still has financial interests in Dragoneer and that his run for Congress is largely funded by 1) his own money, 2) by maximized direct donations from his former Dragoneer colleagues and other high tech executives, and 3) by a Super PAC that has so far funded only Jones, coming from some of the same sources as the direct donations.  Each of these three categories individually amounts to millions of dollars.  This is Silicon Valley, venture capitalist, AI/high tech, data-center-favoring money, not money that is looking to benefit citizens.  Details can be found here.

    As I noted in an earlier article, Jones has sought to present himself as a progressive, implying affiliations with Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders and touting his endorsement from Our Revolution (removed from two Our Revolution web pages and now mysteriously reappeared).  As I document in the same article, that appearance of being a progressive was always misleading, given his donation to a Republican candidate for governor — a member of the Bush family — and support of AI-driven health care, among other things.  But his mask seems to be slipping further.

    Generally, it is a sign of desperation when a candidate dramatically changes his stripes.  Does Jones think he can woo Republican voters?  Maybe so — after all, he founded an organization whose specific goal was to figure out what voters want (see previous links).  And did Jones craft a new platform to gain Riehle’s endorsement?  It’s hard to explain why else Jones would now say:

    “I supported Prop 50 as a response to the gerrymandering effort in Texas. But after speaking with thousands of voters at their doors, I am extremely disappointed — ashamed, even — of the way this was carried out in our own state.”

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  • Why an Unubstructed Delta Breeze Is Critical for California

    And how the proposed California Forever project threatens livability in Davis and other parts of the Central Valley

    By Dr. Glen Holstein

    Covering 18,000 square miles, California’s Central Valley is the largest nearly flat valley on earth.  It is almost entirely surrounded by mountains and consequently prone to very high temperatures since winds blowing downhill from mountains compress and heat air.  That is why Death Valley, completely surrounded by mountains, has average July temperatures higher than those of any month anywhere else on earth.  Its mean July temperature is 100.9 degrees F while the mean July temperature of Aswan deep in the Sahara Desert but not surrounded by mountains is 91.8 degrees F.  Death Valley even set the all-time scientifically accepted high temperature record of 134 degrees F in 1913.

    But the Central Valley is not entirely surrounded by mountains.  They open up at the Golden Gate to permit a cooling air flow from the Pacific Ocean called the Delta Breeze to significantly lower summer temperatures in the center of the Central Valley but much less so in its northern part called the Sacramento Valley and its southern part called the San Joaquin Valley. 

    The Delta Breeze’s origin is the cold California Current flowing southward from Alaska.  Disturbance where it encounters obstructions like Point Reyes and the Monterey Peninsula causes upwelling from depths that cool coastal water even more.  

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  • Our Revolution seems to have quietly rescinded its endorsement of Eric Jones

    They should state their un-endorsement explicitly and explain their reasons for it

    By Roberta Millstein

    As I documented in a past article, Eric Jones is not a progressive.  Now it seems that Our Revolution, which Wikipedia calls “an American progressive political action organization founded as a continuation of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign,” has finally figured out the same thing.  Having previously endorsed Eric Jones in his run to unseat Mike Thompson in CA-04, Our Revolution seems to have quietly withdrawn that endorsement.

    I want to be clear: this is not a critique of Our Revolution. I consider myself to be a progressive and I generally support their mission. I contributed to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, voted for him twice, displayed the swag. But organizations can make mistakes.  So it is no surprise to me that they would withdraw their endorsement once that they had the complete picture of who Jones is.

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  • Eric Jones, Red-Boxing, & the AI Money Nobody’s Talking About

    And update to the series on the race for congress in California CD04 (Links below)

    By Judy Tipple

    [Reposted with permission of the author. See original at https://rosietheboomer.substack.com/p/eric-jones-red-boxing-and-the-ai]

    OK, I admit it… I’m a political nerd. Many years of campaigns, more FEC filings read than I’d like to admit. And I had never heard of “red-boxing” until a friend flagged it to me last week. Wait till you hear what it means — because once you see it, you can’t unsee it on every campaign website you visit.

    Before I get to that: credit where it’s due. Roberta Millstein at Davisite already dug up the core of Jones’s Dragoneer ties and his Super PAC connections. Read her full series here: Who is Eric Jones? A summary of the series. This piece adds a few new pieces to her picture.

    1. Red-Boxing: The website is talking to PACs, not to you

    Jones’s campaign site has a page — not in the main menu, you have to know where to look — that reads less like a pitch to voters and more like a memo to an ad-buyer. It tells you what you “need to see,” what you “need to hear,” on what timeline. That’s a known, legal-but-gray tactic called red-boxing: campaigns aren’t allowed to privately hand a Super PAC their ad copy, so instead they post it publicly and let the PAC “discover” it — no phone call required, no coordination on paper. It’s used by both parties nationwide, so it’s not unique to Jones. What is fair to point out: he’s built his brand on refusing PAC money, while his own site is doing PAC-facing work in plain sight. That is red-boxing.

    2. Follow the money, follow the name, follow the family

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  • Eileen’s Update

    No on Measure V Campaign Gratitude

    The No on Measure V campaign would like to express our sincere gratitude to the many Davis voters who voted to reject the Village Farms proposal for the many reasons we explained in our articles, literature, and online at our NoOnMeasureV.org website.

    It is unfortunate that this project divided the community, but ultimately, the majority of voters understood that the project was unacceptable due to its many impacts, including toxics, flooding potential, massive traffic, enormous infrastructure costs, habitat destruction along Channel A, as well as endangerment of the vernal pools and the endangered species of Vernal Pool Tadpole Shrimp, and especially due to the unaffordable market-rate housing and the seriously inadequate affordable housing plan. The housing proposed would have been unaffordable to parents of young kids and would not have yielded hundreds of kids, and the and the long timeline of at least 15+ years did not coincide with the School District timeline, so it would not have helped the schools.

    This issue is now behind us, and hopefully we can come together as a community and work on solutions instead of school closures. This process needs to start now, and the School Board needs to move forward and approve the formation of a parent-based subcommittee, as recommended by California Best Practices, to work on solutions with the School District to avoid school closures without delay.

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  • Did Eric Jones’ wealthy donors help him advance to the General Election by funding his lesser known Republican opponents?

    (From press release) In an explosive story in The Press Democrat Friday morning, it was confirmed that Eric Jones’ wealthy donors spent more than $100,000 to split the Republican vote and guarantee that Eric Jones would make the general election. 

    The donors in question, George Dixit (Dean) and Rishi Dixit, are a married couple from Santa Monica and were the only two donors to Mandy Gushar, John McKenzie, and Sharon Brown. Gushar, McKenzie, and Brown maintained no social media presence and hosted no publicly advertised events. Each candidate hired the same campaign treasurer and their biggest campaign expense was the filing fee to get on the ballot. 

    Rishi Dixit also started and funded a SuperPAC, California Leadership Fund, that raised $75,000 attacking Raymond Riehle, the leading Republican candidate, in a variety of mailers and text messages. Riehle was endorsed by six county Republican central committees and was not attacked by any other candidates – just Jones’ donors.   Eric Jones defeated Raymond Riehle by just 1.5%. McKeznie, Gushar, and Brown received 10.4% of the vote combined.

    “This is another example of Eric Jones and his wealthy venture capitalist donors trying to buy a seat in Congress,” said Mike Thompson for Congress Campaign Manager, Thomas Dowling “80 percent of voters rejected Eric Jones’ message and we look forward to sending Eric back home to San Francisco in November.”

    Congressman Thompson was the top vote getter, beating Eric Jones by 19 points.  Despite having nearly $11 million in support, Congressman Thompson goes into the general election leading Eric Jones by a 2:1 margin.

    Read the full story here and below:

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