San Franciscans have made a rightward pivot in their politics.
In fact, even the San Francisco Chronicle today declared that San Francisco
can no longer be a progressive city or considered one because of what went
down yesterday during the elections.
They have now responded to the very clear drug and homelessness crisis in their city
by bolstering police and requiring drug screenings for welfare recipients.
There are caveats to that.
We're going to get to all the details in just a moment, but this is seen
as a major victory for the current mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, who has
hitched her political future to a slate of conservative leaning ballot measures,
all of which, by the way, passed easily.
So voters approved all three of her measures on Tuesday,
including her proposal to screen and mandate addiction treatment
for people receiving county welfare.
Now they passed by incredibly large margins.
I'll tell you what the margins are in just a moment.
But first, let's get to the specificity of these proposals.
Breed's proposal requires all recipients of locally funded cash assistance
participate in a substance abuse treatment program if screening showed drug use.
Politico notes that the proposal reflects the depth of frustration
with a fentanyl crisis that has led to record overdoses, turned parts of downtown
into open air drug markets, and is correlated with an increase
in car break ins and other property crime.
And so I got to say, there wasn't enough, like, in-depth reporting on this measure,
because obviously this sounds like just a right wing policy.
Right wingers have been wanting to drug test welfare recipients for decades now.
And it's kind of weird to see a city like San Francisco do it.
But I have to say that the way they want to carry it out is kind of fascinating,
and I'm curious to see if it actually helps people
who are struggling with addiction.
So let's get to the other proposals, and then we'll come back to this,
because it's worth talking about how they're going to carry it out.
So besides the drug screening requirement, Mayor Breed proposed expanding police
officers authority to chase suspects and use drones and video surveillance.
She also joined pro-development yes, in my Backyard or Yimby advocates
to back waving a local tax.
It's about a 7% tax for developers who convert office buildings into housing.
After her proposed changes were bucked by the left leaning Board of Supervisors,
breed took them directly to voters.
So I actually want to stop and talk a little bit about the it's called
like a transition tax that would impact developers who want to transition
office buildings into housing.
So the whole point of doing away with that transition tax, which again, reports say
are about 7%, is to incentivize developers to transition those empty office buildings
into housing if it does, in fact incentivize them to do it.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, you have these buildings that are sitting empty.
Our way of working is very different now.
Many people don't go into the office if they don't have to.
And so we should do something with those properties.
And we should kill two birds with one stone by one, dealing with vacant
buildings and two dealing with a very obvious and brutal housing shortage.
So look, I usually don't like tax incentives, but in this particular case,
I do think it makes sense.
The biggest issue I have is some of the police surveillance
that they are sanctioning.
I do think that there are laws or were laws in San Francisco that ban
certain surveillance that made policing more difficult, but the use of facial
recognition technology is concerning because oftentimes they've been flawed and
they end up accusing the wrong individual of being the perpetrator or suspect.
So there could be some pretty serious flaws in that particular proposal
or ballot initiative, which, again, has passed.
We might have millions of people watching this show, but you can be
the difference maker because we just need 1% of our audience to be paid members,
and then this show can be around forever, so you can make that difference.
Click join now.
But nonetheless, the other ballot measures I think are pretty interesting.
So under proposition F, single adults without dependents on local welfare,
about 9000 people a year must be screened for illegal drug use
if they are found to be using drugs.
An addiction specialist and the recipient would agree on treatment options
that include residential care, meaning inpatient drug treatment,
a 12 step program, individual counseling and replacement medication.
So understand guys, this isn't oh, we drug test you and you.
Come out positive for whatever drug.
And so as a result, we're not going to give you welfare.
That's not how they're going to carry it out.
Essentially, they're going to use the drug test as a way of compelling that
individual to get the treatment and care that he or she needs
in order to potentially, get out of that addiction, get sober,
and maybe even live a better life.
But they don't even have to necessarily be sober.
It goes even further than I expected.
So there is no sobriety requirement, only that a person make a good faith
effort to participate in treatment if they want to receive cash assistance,
which maxes out at just over $700 a month.
So I'm curious to see how this is going to play out.
Obviously, there are some opponents on the left.
They feel that this is a right wing measure, and even though they feel
that way, and even though San Francisco has been synonymous with far left voters,
63% of people who voted in San Francisco favored that measure.
When it comes to the increased surveillance for policing,
that measure passed by 60%.
So, by the way, this isn't the first time that we have seen some backlash from left
wing voters in the city of San Francisco.
For instance, in 2022, in response to higher crime rates, San Francisco's voters
backed the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin and school board members
who were blamed for focusing on their political agenda or progressive causes,
as opposed to focusing on enhancing and improving the educational experience
of the students there.
Now, obviously, there are people on the far left and some progressives
who are really upset about this.
Critics attribute her move to the right meaning London mayor, mayor London
breed's move to the right to desperation amid dismal approval ratings and a growing
field of mayoral challengers.
They accuse her and groups like together San Francisco of trying to turn the city
of peace and love into a city catering to the interests of the wealthy.
I don't know how you can look at the streets of San Francisco and the
absolute devastation there, and think that that is the city of peace and love.
You have people shooting up lethal drugs on the sidewalks.
You have, you know, hundreds of people dying of drug overdoses on the streets
of San Francisco every year.
In fact, why don't we get to some of those numbers?
Let's go to graphic seven.
A record 806 people died from drug overdoses in the city last year.
Retailers continue to leave downtown by the dozens.
And just last week, Macy's announced it will close
its iconic store in Union Square.
I just think that if you're not living in San Francisco or if you haven't
seen what's actually going down in San Francisco and you're, you know,
you're just enjoying your steady, your steady drip of progressive news
that never gives you the reality of what's happening on the ground.
You should maybe dig in a little bit more before you start making claims
about how this is wrong.
This is like some fascistic regime that's trying to punish innocent people.
They're trying to help people.
What we have seen in San Francisco and cities like it for years now
is failed policies that should have been recalibrated.
And luckily now we're seeing them get recalibrated.
I'm just a little worried that things might go too far to the right
or get too conservative.
But here's the problem if you're a progressive
and you're also concerned about it, ask yourself, have you been denying
the reality of crime, overdose deaths, and the absolute devastation on our streets?
And if you've been keeping your head in the sand, what did you expect to happen?
Did you think local communities and voters were just going to live with it
and deal with it, or was the pendulum going to swing in the other direction?
The pendulum has swung, and for the progressive lawmakers who decided to keep
their head in the sand, they created that vacuum that allowed for policies that they
don't agree with to be crafted and passed.
That is what happened in San Francisco.
But anyway, the other thing I just want to address is let's go back to graphic five.
Let's put it back up.
Critics attribute Mayor London Breed's move to the right to desperation
amid dismal approval ratings.
That's it. That's all I wanted to read.
So she saw that she was unpopular as she continued supporting policies
that were unpopular.
And then she decided, hey, maybe I should listen to the voters
and reconsider these policies and instead support policies that they want.
Isn't that what we want politicians to do or do we want politicians to ignore
the community they represent and instead listen to ideologues who want to live in
a fantasy world where everyone is happy?
With hundreds of people dying of overdose deaths in their city each year.
It's like ridiculous criticism anyway.
But the final thing that I'll say is that it's really important for us
to just acknowledge what people in our communities are concerned about,
and especially when it comes to elected lawmakers like these are people
who are supposed to represent individuals, represent what the what the people want
and help make their lives better.
And for far too long, we've just been dealing with this political system
that seems to ignore voters.
And that used to be far more indicative of the right wing, and I'm really sad
to see it happen on the left.
I get it, we have our own political biases and our own, you know, ideologies,
and some of us might be ideologues, but you kind of have to put that aside.
Once you see your preferred policies failing,
it doesn't mean that you're a bad person.
It doesn't mean you're dumb or you're always wrong.
It just means that you wanted to try something out.
You thought it would work. It didn't work.
And that's okay. Let's let's tweak it a little bit.
Let's obviously regroup and do what's right, because at the end
of the day, our ego and our own ideology really doesn't matter.
Our tribe doesn't really matter.
What matters is making lives better for people, not worse.
And I really hate the fact that increasingly,
people think of progressivism as something that makes life worse for people.
I saw this coming from a mile away.
It's now happening, and the backlash isn't just in San Francisco.
You're seeing it in other parts of the country as well, including Washington, DC.
Their high crime rates has led to the passage of some new laws that,
you know, are obviously going to, also upset progressives focus on more policing.
Axios reports that the DC Council
approved a bill Tuesday after, a 25 year
high in homicides occurred in Washington,
DC. So this is a bill that the mayor, Muriel Bowser, had proposed last fall.
And it's pretty sweeping.
It's referred to as a sweeping public safety bill.
The bill passed with near unanimous approval.
Ward eight Councilmember Trayon white voted present.
That was the only person who didn't vote yes.
It creates a new crime for organized retail theft
and revives a 90s era Anti-loitering law creating drug free zones.
It also revises the definition of an officer chokehold, a change sought
by the police union, along with the new permission for cops to view body cam
footage before writing incident reports.
There's more.
Another provision gives judges more power to jail suspects charged
with violent crimes until their trial.
Minors can be held longer until their trial.
You guys like in that vacuum, denial doesn't work.
Continuing to make excuses for failed policies doesn't work.
People don't care about you or what your ideology is.
They care about living in safe, clean communities
where they and their families can thrive.
And when that's not happening, that's when the backlash comes.
By the way, there's now an effort to recall a DC council member
by the name of Charles Allen.
I'll tell you why.
As a member of the DC Council's Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, Allen
was instrumental in cutting $15 million from the police budget in 2020, money that
he said would be reinvested into community programs across the district, and wrote
an overhaul of the city's criminal code that reduced mandatory minimum sentences
for some violent offenses, which was ultimately blocked by Congress and
repudiated by President Biden last year.
And, what has it been like on the ground in DC?
Homicide spiked 35% in 2023 compared to the previous year,
and that's according to data.
While robberies rose by 67%, Washington had 958 carjackings
or attempted carjackings last year, and separately averaged nearly 19 motor
vehicle thefts a day over the same period, an 82% jump from the previous year.
People don't want to live this way again. People want to feel safe.
They don't want to worry about their property being stolen, and they don't want
to worry about carjackings and homicides.
So we'll see what happens to Council Member Allen.
But again, I can't reiterate this enough.
When your voters are saying they're concerned about something, maybe take what
they're saying seriously and recalibrate.
That's all.