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San Francisco's slide into hell under extreme violent leftism


 invite response                
2021 Apr 15, 9:51pm   158,951 views  1,037 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (61)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/04/19/chesa-boudins-dangerous-san-francisco/

‘Hey, where are you?” Hannah Ege texted her husband, Sheria Musyoka. He’d left on a morning jog and had been gone for an hour and a half. Hannah was home, taking care of their three-year-old son. She began to freak out. She called and texted and called again. He never answered.

Speeding and drunk — at just shy of eight in the morning — Jerry Lyons barreled through a red light at an intersection in a stolen Ford Explorer. Lyons struck and killed Musyoka, a 26-year-old Dartmouth grad who had moved to San Francisco only ten days earlier with his wife and their son. After clipping Musyoka, Lyons collided with another car, causing an eight-car pileup that sent several other people to the hospital.

The San Francisco police arrested Lyons on multiple charges that morning in February, but this was not the first time he’d been arrested for drunk driving in a stolen car. On December 3, he had been arrested for driving under the influence, driving a stolen vehicle, and driving without a license. Before that, he’d been released from prison after serving time for a grand-theft conviction; in fact, Lyons had been arrested at least seven times in the Bay Area since his release from prison, and his rap sheet goes back a decade. Still, San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, delayed pressing charges against Lyons until a toxicology report confirmed that he had been inebriated, which, more than a month and a half later in January, it did. Lyons then had 14 days to turn himself in to the DA’s office. On the 13th day, he killed Musyoka. While COVID-era difficulties might have accounted for the medical examiner’s slow speed in returning test results, a different DA could have chosen to move forward sooner — taking necessary precautions — and charged Lyons with a DUI based on observable factors alone, such as the results of Lyons’s field sobriety test, his erratic driving in a stolen vehicle, and close scrutiny of his behavior.

Hannah Ege expressed her grief and pain to a local TV news station, railing at the district attorney’s reluctance to lock up repeat offenders. Whom does she blame for her husband’s death? “The DA,” she said. “This freak accident was no freak accident. It was someone who was out in the public who should not have been out in public.”

The Lyons mayhem is not an isolated case in the city by the bay. On New Year’s Eve, a parolee on the run from a robbery — also in a stolen car — sped through a red light, striking and killing two women, 60-year-old Elizabeth Platt and 27-year-old Hanako Abe, who were in the crosswalk. The driver, Troy McAlister, had been released twice by the district attorney in the previous year: the first time because Boudin refuses to pursue three-strike cases, of which McAlister’s was one; the second — as recently as December 20, when the SFPD arrested McAlister for driving a stolen car — because Boudin kicked the case to the state parole officers, who did nothing.

Welcome to San Francisco’s latest idiocy, a new experiment in governance where everything is allowed but nothing is permitted. A paradox, you might say, but take a walk down Market Street, down that great avenue in a great city in a great nation, and note the desolation of the empty streets, the used needles tossed on the sidewalks, and the boarded-up windows on storefronts. Consider that, at various unpredictable times in the last year, it has been illegal — for the sake of public safety during COVID — to run a mom-and-pop corner shop or to serve food at sidewalk cafés. Reflect for a moment that, since time immemorial, it has been illegal to build any new housing, because of the most onerous and confusing zoning laws in the known universe. Mark Zuckerberg can apparently influence national elections by tweaking algorithms, but he is powerless before the planning commission when it comes to building apartments for his employees. The city has banned plastic straws, plastic bags, and McDonald’s Happy Meals with toys. And yet, all the while, drug dealers sell their wares — COVID or no COVID — openly and freely at all hours of the day and night, users shoot up or pop fentanyl in public and defecate on the street, robbers pillage cars and homes with the ease of Visigoth raiders, and the district attorney frees repeat offenders who go on to sow disorder, pain, devastation, and grief. A profound melancholy hangs in the air of this city, punctuated only by the shrieks of a junkie dreaming of demons or by the rat-tat-tat-bam of the occasional firework. (Or was that a gun?) ...

How did it come to this? On January 8, 2020, Mayor London Breed swore in Chesa Boudin as the new district attorney of San Francisco in front of a packed house at the Herbst Theater. Boudin won the election by a nose in a runoff, with oily promises to feel the pain of all parties to a crime, both victims and perpetrators. He made pledges to enact “restorative justice” and prison reform through “decarceration.” U.S. Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor recorded a congratulatory video message, which was played at the swearing-in ceremony for Boudin and the crowd. “Chesa, you have undertaken a remarkable challenge today,” the justice said. “The hope you reflect is a great beacon to many.”

The task before Boudin was already monumental. Before he assumed his office, San Francisco ranked No. 1 in the nation in property crime. On average, thieves broke 60 car windows per day, with impunity. In 2014, California voters approved Proposition 47, a reform measure that reduced many felonies to ticketed misdemeanors, such as theft of less than $950 and hard-drug possession. There were more drug addicts on the streets than there were students in the schools. Tent encampments of homeless people had sprouted in every nook and alley and under every highway overpass. Commuters faced a daily gauntlet in the form of an appalling humanitarian crisis in the streets.

But Boudin immediately refused to take any responsibility for these issues. Among his first acts was to fire seven veteran prosecutors who were not on board with his radical views. (Over 30 prosecutors have left during his tenure because they don’t want to work for him.) Next, Boudin abolished the cash-bail system, so offenders are able to walk free after arrest. He rarely brings a case to trial: Out of the 6,333 cases to land on his desk since taking office, he has gone to trial only 23 times. This is one-tenth the rate of his predecessor, George Gascón, who was hardly tough on crime. Since the killing of George Floyd, there has been a shortage of cops, as officers retire in record numbers. San Francisco has also moved to defund the police, with plans to shift $120 million in law-enforcement funding to restorative-justice programs, housing support, and a guaranteed-income pilot, among other ideas.

To where does Boudin’s “great beacon” point? Over the last year, there have been more deaths from drug overdoses in San Francisco than from COVID-19. Walgreens has closed ten of its drugstores in the city because its shelves were being pillaged freely by shoplifters. According to SFPD’s CompStat, compared with last year, arson has increased 52 percent, motor-vehicle theft is up 21 percent, and burglaries have seen a 59 percent increase. One largely Asian neighborhood, the Richmond district, has reported a 342 percent spike in burglaries this year compared with last. Admittedly, some numbers are down, such as those for larceny and robbery. But police attribute these declines to the pandemic, since there are fewer opportunities for would-be criminals to commit such crimes as people shelter in place. One neighborhood association sent a letter in February to Boudin and Mayor Breed, begging them to restore public safety. The association also posted it on the Internet. “Our neighborhood can’t wait another day,” they wrote. “Our homes are repeatedly broken into and robbed. Our merchants suffer unsustainable losses from theft and smashed windows. Employees are threatened with guns. Residents are robbed at gunpoint on our own streets. The sound of gunshots is no longer unusual.” ...

Now, what rough beast slouches its way towards San Francisco? With a district attorney who won’t prosecute crimes, how long will it be until an anxious Google engineer defends himself from being harassed by a madman? Will envious arsonists light the Salesforce Tower on fire as a jacked-up mob courses through the streets burning and looting the Painted Ladies?

A desperate sun struggles through the fog. There may be one ray of hope. The city has recently approved the effort to recall Chesa Boudin from office. Locals could begin downloading signature-gathering petitions on March 12. If 10 percent of registered voters sign the petition, all voters may get the chance to vote the bum out. But even if they do, it will remain tragic for Musyoka, Platt, Abe, and others like them that the day did not come soon enough.



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257   Patrick   2022 Apr 2, 5:57pm  

Pretty sure that's right downtown on the Embarcadero. Things like that didn't used to happen there.
258   HeadSet   2022 Apr 2, 6:32pm  

Patrick says
Pretty sure that's right downtown on the Embarcadero. Things like that didn't used to happen there.

Enbarcadero is just where the rental return lot is. Those rental cars are returns that were damaged wherever in town they drove around in.
259   Patrick   2022 Apr 2, 6:33pm  

I don't think that's a lot in the photo. That's the waterfront. I used to bike along there every day on the way to work.
260   Al_Sharpton_for_President   2022 Apr 3, 6:36am  

Patrick says
I think this is Westfield Mall in SF.
Where are the enterprising men's clothing salespersons?
261   Patrick   2022 Apr 12, 6:50am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/progressives-cities-accommodate-lawlessness-sacramento/?source=patrick.net


Ashoot-out in downtown Sacramento, California, at two in the morning on Sunday, April 3 left six people dead and injured at least twelve. It might or might not have been gang warfare. The facts are still unfolding.

One of the shooters, Smiley Martin, twenty-seven, was out of jail on early release against the advice of the Sacramento county district attorney. “He poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community,” authorities said, opposing Martin’s release from state prison.

“Inmate Martin has, for his entire adult life, displayed a pattern of criminal behavior,” wrote Deputy District Attorney Danielle Abildgaard. “His history indicates that he will pursue his own personal agenda regardless of the consequences and regulatory restraints placed upon him.” Martin “has no respect for others, for law enforcement or for the law. If he is released early, he will continue to break the law,” prosecutors concluded.

In spite of dire warnings, the Board of Parole Hearings released Martin in February 2022 on account of time-served formulas used by the state department of corrections and wider pressure for decarceration.

A few weeks before, it was Asaahdi Elijah Coleman, twenty-one, also a documented menace. He opened fire as passengers exited a Los Angeles-bound Greyhound bus during a scheduled stop in Oroville, California. Karin Dalton, forty-three, with her two teenage kids on the way to a “new life” in New Mexico, died at the scene. Coleman wounded four others, then ran off into the night. He was arrested, naked, inside a Walmart after getting into a fight, according to the Associated Press.

Coleman had a warrant for his arrest on a firearm possessions charge and a probation violation out of Alameda County as well as an undisclosed juvenile record. ...

While outlaws and bandits come in all colors, a striking number of them are young and black. ...

Low-lives and bad apples of all ages and colors are now aware that the heat is off, that police tread gingerly out of self-interest and legal self-protection. As long as outlaws feel resisting arrest and menacing police is a constitutional right — or at least works — municipal lawlessness will escalate. ...

But the right-wingers that so bedevil Biden are usually armed defensively, worrying about threats to their liberty or confiscation of their fetishized guns. They are don’t-tread-on-me, and my-home-is-my-castle, perhaps with a garage full of canned goods, awaiting doomsday. Second Amendment absolutists might be far-out or obnoxious, but they rarely shoot up a crowd at two in the morning or a busload of innocent strangers in a fit of paranoia. If they do, the incident is amplified in behalf of the gun-violence narrative.


Can Nancy Pelosi, kneeling in her kente cloth, Merrick Garland, or the Northern California district court begin to help set things right? Can elected and legal mighties even imagine the harvest of sadness that their evasions and fictions have brought upon the innocent? The Karin Daltons are little people, struggling and invisible, of no political use to blue-state Democrats. They are riding the Greyhound, not on a personal jet somewhere in the skies between Georgetown and Pacific Heights. One-day news stories, their shattered lives disappear into the hole of progressive narrative.

Functional Americans across the political spectrum see governments and courts at all levels accommodating lawlessness. This can’t go on, they say, or can it? They behold a society hardened by distrust and predation, in the hands of highly partisan forces actively rearranging morality, abolishing civic standards, and deforming childhood.

Americans of all backgrounds are seeking safety, trust and civic order. They are walling themselves off from crazies and marauders, or trying, moving to safe havens, maybe across town, but if need be, to other states and regions. This normative pursuit has begun and might be accelerating. It is why law and order will be a potent political charm and rallying cry in this year’s elections nationwide.
263   Patrick   2022 Apr 15, 9:29am  

https://t.me/greatreject/34028?source=patrick.net


The current state of Seattle - Car in flames while man exposes himself peeing on the sidewalk.
269   Patrick   2022 May 1, 1:19pm  

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-death-of-san-francisco?s=r&source=patrick.net


The death of San Francisco
There are no children here

Alex Berenson
Apr 28
1,103
284
San Francisco might be the most beautiful place in the world.

If you’ve ever been here, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The bay, surrounded by hills on all sides. The bridges and container ships and ferries and cable cars. The brightly painted townhouses and crazily curving streets. The people are pretty too, wind-kissed women striding the streets.

So why does the city feel like it’s dying?

I’m not even talking about the homeless crisis on the streets around the Civic Center and the Castro and the Mission District. I spent the day walking the city’s northeastern quadrant, neighborhoods that so far have resisted the tent encampments and open-air drug markets and sidewalks littered with needles and human feces to the south.
270   RC2006   2022 May 1, 5:26pm  

Patrick says

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-death-of-san-francisco?s=r&source=patrick.net


The death of San Francisco
There are no children here

Alex Berenson
Apr 28
1,103
284
San Francisco might be the most beautiful place in the world.

If you’ve ever been here, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The bay, surrounded by hills on all sides. The bridges and container ships and ferries and cable cars. The brightly painted townhouses and crazily curving streets. The people are pretty too, wind-kissed women striding the streets.

So why does the city feel like it’s dying?

I’m not even talking about the homeless crisis on the streets around the Civic Center and the Castro and the Mission District. I spent the day walking the city’s northeastern quadrant, neighborhoods that so ...


All of the times I've been to SF over the decades I've never seen many kids walking with adults let alone playing. I thought there must be a lot of deviants and pedos around so any kids thwre were kept inside.
271   Patrick   2022 May 1, 10:55pm  

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-housing-first-nightmare?source=patrick.net


San Francisco’s medical examiner reported at least 1,300 overdose deaths citywide in the last two years, most commonly for illicit fentanyl combined with other drugs.


Holy shit, that's 1.78 per day. Far worse than Detroit's murder rate in terms of deaths.


This is Housing First policy in action. The idea behind it is as simple as it is misguided: Put people who were living outside or who are at risk of becoming homeless inside four walls. Then, voilà, you’ve solved the problem of homelessness. It’s not true, of course. More people arrive in San Francisco every day, most seeking the city’s cheap narcotics and easygoing attitude toward usage. They end up on the street until they can score subsidized housing.

Stuffing thousands of people who should be recovering in hospitals, mental-health facilities, and drug-treatment centers into free or low-cost apartments has been disastrous. The places in which they are housed are ruined; people get hurt, and some die. Neighborhoods fall into disorder. ...

The city’s solution: more of the same, but waste even more money. Instead of addressing the rotting SRO buildings, the administration is on a real-estate buying spree. With an influx of funding from Proposition C—a measure that taxed the city’s most profitable businesses with the intention of fixing homelessness—it is purchasing pristine new buildings in which to house needy people.

The apartments that Mayor London Breed has been proudly showing off, with gleaming kitchens, sparkling bathrooms, and clean bedrooms, are all destined for ruin. Soon these units will be in the same uninhabitable state as all the others. This is exactly what happened when the city gave people “shelter-in-place” rooms in the Mark Hopkins and similar luxury hotels during the height of the pandemic. The destruction was almost immediate. Fixtures were ripped from bathrooms, blood and feces stained the rugs, mattresses were set on fire, and people died of overdoses, often alone. ...

Abstinence isn’t valued. Harm-reduction activists make sure residents always have access to free needles, pipes, and foil, but never promote free recovery assistance such as Narcotics Anonymous.
272   RWSGFY   2022 May 1, 11:13pm  

Patrick says

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-housing-first-nightmare?source=patrick.net


San Francisco’s medical examiner reported at least 1,300 overdose deaths citywide in the last two years, most commonly for illicit fentanyl combined with other drugs.


Holy shit, that's 1.78 per day. Far worse than Detroit's murder rate in terms of deaths.


This is Housing First policy in action. The idea behind it is as simple as it is misguided: Put people who were living outside or who are at risk of becoming homeless inside four walls. Then, voilà, you’ve solved the problem of homelessness. It’s not true, of course. More people arrive in San Francisco every day, most seeking the city’s cheap narcotics and easygoing attitude toward usage. They end up on the street until they can score subsidi...


"They died doing what they loved to do"
273   Patrick   2022 May 1, 11:22pm  

https://www.city-journal.org/behavioral-poverty?source=patrick.net


Second, many criminal offenders have no desire to engage in conventional, productive adult conduct. In our experience as criminal-justice practitioners, researchers, and clinicians, thousands of offenders have told us as much. All the rigors and responsibilities of adulthood—from paying rent and utilities to maintaining relationships—are fulfilled, free of charge, by the criminal-justice system. Conventional adults are horrified by the idea of imprisonment, but many offenders view jail as a refuge from the demands of life. And, given the Left’s efforts, incarceration is increasingly devoid of stigma. ...

nevitably, of course, some people do deviate from these values. Too often, the Left’s answer is to remove the negative consequences of these choices. The Left’s current enthusiasm for large-scale release of offenders from prison is a good example. Its wrongheadedness is made clear by the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ recidivism data and the utter failure of reentry efforts—to say nothing of the deteriorating conditions and rising crime rates in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, and others, in considerable part because of their political leaders’ unwillingness to apply consequences to everything from disorderly behavior and vagrancy to violent crime. Admittedly, changing behavior is difficult, but robbing people of the motive to change by removing consequences also removes accountability. That some are unaffected by negative consequences is not evidence that consequences don’t matter but that some individuals are immune to social sanctions.

“The vision of the Left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom—whether black or white—who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior,” economist and social thinker Thomas Sowell observed. Put more simply: behavior is what makes a society.
274   Patrick   2022 May 2, 10:13am  

https://nitter.net/libsoftiktok/status/1521141265789644806?source=patrick.net#m


Libs of TikTok
@libsoftiktok
2h
Another Walgreens in San Francisco is hit by looters. Walgreens already closed 5 locations in San Francisco due to theft.

May 2, 2022



275   Patrick   2022 May 2, 1:50pm  


Volunteer For The Recall Team

Do you want to volunteer with the Recall Committee? We are seeking volunteers to pass out new posters, stickers, talk to voters, and spread the enthusiasm for the June 7th, 2022 recall election.

PLEASE EMAIL: join@RecallChesaBoudin.org

- Chesa Recall Boudin Cmte HQ (office@recallchesaboudin.org )
278   Patrick   2022 May 7, 6:54pm  

https://patriotpost.us/articles/88126?source=patrick.net


MAY 5, 2022
Folks Flee California For Two Years Running
It’s a trend worth noting, and it may continue if cities there continue to be dystopian landscapes.
280   Eric Holder   2022 May 23, 10:35am  

Chesa is up for re-election this year.
282   Ceffer   2022 May 28, 2:56pm  

The KommieKunt chronic imposed failure mode of claiming that it's just a social construct that you 'can't turn chicken shit into chicken salad' enters Sisyphus mode.

Of course the printing press diploma is always there to save the day, and the government can always use more daft, imbecilic subversives and chair warmers lofted beyond their highest orders of incompetency on the altar of political correctness.
283   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2022 May 28, 4:46pm  

Patrick says
The death of San Francisco
There are no children here


its new culture. i know too many people who chase career and stay childless. and of course gays in SF a plenty which adds to statistic.

great replacement is partially organic. immigrants replace americans who don’t wish to procreate.
284   Patrick   2022 May 28, 5:13pm  

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6-3-most-in-nation-to-17199403.php


S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010
285   Patrick   2022 May 31, 9:28am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/californians-recall-progressive-prosecutor-chesa-boudin/

The contest that politicos will be watching is an up-or-down recall vote for San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin. It would be a major upset if he kept his job. He might be deposed in a landslide, as was San Francisco’s zany school board, or lose more narrowly. The results will help reveal progressive force at the polls come November.


https://spectatorworld.com/topic/charles-barkley-wants-to-wash-the-crime-out-of-san-francisco/
286   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2022 May 31, 8:34pm  

Patrick says

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6-3-most-in-nation-to-17199403.php


S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010



is that from tranny suicides?
287   Patrick   2022 May 31, 9:32pm  




Well duh.

If you encourage violent crime by refusing to prosecute, there will be more violent crime.

Chesa Boudin is to blame in San Francisco's case.
288   Patrick   2022 Jun 7, 9:41pm  

Ha! It looks like pro-crime SF district attorney Chesa Boudin will indeed be recalled by a 2:1 margin.

He was backed by arch-villain George Soros, but it wasn't enough.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10894581/George-Soross-groups-spent-40-million-elect-75-progressive-prosecutors-decade.html
289   Ceffer   2022 Jun 7, 10:35pm  

Patrick says

Ha! It looks like pro-crime SF district attorney Chesa Boudin will indeed be recalled by a 2:1 margin.

Is that all? I was hoping for a lamp post hanging with some baseball bat pinata action, then a cannibal barbecue for the homeless.
291   HeadSet   2022 Jun 8, 11:07am  

Ceffer says


I was hoping for a lamp post hanging with some baseball bat pinata action, then a cannibal barbecue for the homeless.

It is still early....
292   Ceffer   2022 Jun 8, 11:54am  

Patrick says

Woot! Looks like democracy has worked, a little bit.

The stanching of money from Ukraine laundering means they don't have the assets they used to to turn our own money against us to destroy us. Even Monkey Pox is weak sauce. Remember the massive campaign for Covid fraud that started exactly the day after Trump's second impeachment failed?

I they can't launder our tax money through Ukraine, and they don't have the Ukrainian crime assets to use for subversion against us, they have to be far more selective about the way they disperse their printing press monies in politics.
293   RC2006   2022 Jun 8, 1:06pm  

Ceffer says

Remember the massive campaign for Covid fraud that started exactly the day after Trump's second impeachment failed?

I started seeing covid pop up in China on liveleak right after Epstein hanging.
294   EBGuy   2022 Jun 8, 1:21pm  

Patrick says

Ha! It looks like pro-crime SF district attorney Chesa Boudin will indeed be recalled by a 2:1 margin.

He was backed by arch-villain George Soros, but it wasn't enough.

Sorry to be a bit pedantic, but as a point of fact Boudin wasn't a Soros candidate. Not exactly sure why, but he may have been too radical even for Soros. His agenda was definitely similar, though. You'll note he wasn't featured in the article you linked. At one point I spent a substantial amount of time looking at his donor list (from when he was elected) and didn't find Soros ties. The most interesting donation was from a cofounder of Instagram, who listed his occupation as "unemployed". Perhaps Chesa can now join him as unemployed as well.
295   Patrick   2022 Jun 10, 12:26pm  

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2022/06/10/chronicle-downtown-san-francisco-near-collapse-worse-than-it-looks/


The Chronicle reported: “The downtown area, the city’s primary economic driver, is teetering on the edge, facing challenges greater than previously known, new data shows. The wounds suffered by the economic core are deep, and city officials have yet to come up with a plan to make the fundamental changes that some economists and business leaders argue could make the area thrive again.” Office vacancy is up nearly 300%; convention attendance in the city is down nearly 90%.

That account matches statistics on office vacancy. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that office attendance in San Francisco is down 52% from what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. ...

The left-wing Atlantic published a chilling essay this week by San Francisco native Nellie Bowles about how the town became a “failed city,” one in which Good Samaritans cannot even call an ambulance for an injured homeless person without being confronted by “advocates” who urge the patient not to go to the hospital.

“[T]he reality,” Bowles wrote, “is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.”

While voters have awakened to the reality of left-wing governance, the verdict is that it will take more than one recall to solve the city’s problems.
296   Patrick   2022 Jun 12, 10:01pm  

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/


How San Francisco Became A Failed City

... Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.

n a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches. ...

I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results. ...

To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up. ...

San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID. ...

During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.

But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell. ...

A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration of the rank and file: “Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18 months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.” ...

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy. ...

For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”


Yes. Yes, it is entirely the fault of "progressives" and they should be ashamed to show their faces anywhere.

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