NAME A DEMOCRAT PARTY-CONTROLLED CITY IN AMERICAN NOT IN MELTDOWN!
SAN FRANCISCO:
Block after block, you’ll see thousands of people who are barely alive. Some are alone; others are piled on top of one another, running into traffic, or standing slumped over, unconscious. They’ll be injecting or smoking heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in front of you, unaware or unfazed by your presence. Scabs cover their faces and bodies, limbs are swollen red and blue, often bloody and oozing pus. You’ll notice the garbage, rotting food, discarded drug detritus, and feces surrounding them. A shocking number are mere teenagers, but many are old or have aged well before their time.
The other primary reason for an exodus from the cities, especially the blue-run ones, is that they have become hideous and unsafe. Mobs that loot, homeless that live and defecate and shoot drugs on the street, violent gangs…who needs that? Schools stay closed, and when they’re open, are more dedicated to “equity” than learning.
The shifting human tide
We’re hyper-aware of the shifting mass of humans pouring over our border and finding their way into our lands. Immigration from below the border has swelled over the last 60 years, more than half of it legal. It’s not the first time, nor the first group, but rather a perpetual flow into the promised land by the have-nots who don’t seem capable of creating their own thriving societies, despite their potential to do so.
Over the centuries, we’ve had such influxes on repeat, from all quarters; most of us can be numbered among them. The Irish, over 8 million by 1860. Jews have perpetually found sanctuary in this country, starting in the 18th century, with an upswing after WWII. The Vietnamese after their war. We have always been a nation of immigrants including those unwillingly brought by the slave trade. Just about all of us know we’re better off here than wherever our ancestors originated.
Yet the “here” we have is changing in new ways. I’d like, for a moment, to veer from the incessant race preoccupation we’ve been bludgeoned with of late. I will however state that we are not an inherently racist society, despite the left’s unwavering dedication to that evil concept. Just looking at intermarriage statistics is a good antidote to such thinking.
Consider, instead, the shifting population within our country. We are, as a people, moving away from city life in droves. Houses in my suburban enclave sell as soon as they are brought to market, often for absurd amounts above the asking price.
I had a conversation with my doctor last week, as she’s leaving the practice. She told me I should quickly pick a new provider before all their slots are filled. That unlike here in the burbs, the city offices of their practice are practically empty. This is because workers who chose the convenience of having their health care provider near the office are no longer going to that office. Instead, they are opting for care nearer home.
Commuter-oriented mass transit is suffering, as well, a huge drop in revenue. City populations are also falling, for all the same reasons.
The other primary reason for an exodus from the cities, especially the blue-run ones, is that they have become hideous and unsafe. Mobs that loot, homeless that live and defecate and shoot drugs on the street, violent gangs…who needs that? Schools stay closed, and when they’re open, are more dedicated to “equity” than learning.
Being a city resident is as dangerous as I’d imagine riding into Tombstone must have been, in the mid-1800s. Our cities have become the wild west but without any handsome cowboys. They are failing, and on their way to becoming unsustainable as business taxes fall, the real estate loses value, and the sales tax revenues dwindle.
This population shift has mostly come about because of the pandemic forcing us to change our patterns of living. But as these patterns changed, so did the former norms of our lives. How we purchase goods shifted. Small businesses were destroyed by forced closure due to COVID restrictions, by looting, and by the ease of buying from the behemoth.
Only grocery shopping remains local, although “hero pay” has caused many grocery stores to close, further fueling the city exodus. I went into a department store a few weeks ago and was appalled by two things: First, the quality of goods was awful and clearly mass-produced in Chinese sweatshops. Second, the stock. In the women’s department, there were only XS and XL or XXL sizes. I’m told there are countless shipping containers awaiting offloading at ports that have been partially shut down by COVID. So instead, you buy online and get goods delivered to your doorstep.
The other day I watched three Amazon delivery trucks at once, try to navigate past one another on our narrow street, their progress further impeded by a garbage truck and the mail truck. Delivery cars were double-parked everywhere. Everything one could want is available for delivery. They’ve even made returning things that don’t fit easier. Since little that you want can be found on the store shelves, what choice do you have?
The shifts we’ve seen seem as permanent as the end of harness shops and horse stables were. We won’t go back to how things were. Not for workers, who have proven off-site productivity is possible, and far prefer it. Not for employers, who are downsizing their office space accordingly. Not for residents, who are running the other way rapidly.
I wonder if we’re simply leaving the cities to the homeless and the migrants, to turn into endless slums where nobody is safe to walk. Soon, the proud leftist mayors will find they have nothing left to ruin. They’ll have succeeded in turning their cities into the kind of slums the migrants just escaped. Perhaps the new guys can show our own homeless how to live well in shantytown.
IMAGE: Empty city by Harry Gillen on Unsplash.
San Francisco’s Substance-Abuse Crisis
A hotels-for-homeless program does nothing to address the real problem: addiction.April 26, 2021The most important walk you can take in San Francisco is not to the grand Golden Gate bridge, down crooked Lombard Street, or to the brightly painted Victorians in Alamo Square. It’s to the city’s large and gritty sixth district, which contains the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. What you’ll find there will shatter any preconceived notions about homelessness you might have heard from activists, city departments, and elected officials. You’ll realize that San Francisco doesn’t have a homeless problem—it has a substance-abuse crisis. And Project Roomkey, California governor Gavin Newsom’s hotels-for-homeless plan that he’s touting as a model for the rest of the country, won’t help any more than a band-aid will cure a cancer patient.
Block after block, you’ll see thousands of people who are barely alive. Some are alone; others are piled on top of one another, running into traffic, or standing slumped over, unconscious. They’ll be injecting or smoking heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in front of you, unaware or unfazed by your presence. Scabs cover their faces and bodies, limbs are swollen red and blue, often bloody and oozing pus. You’ll notice the garbage, rotting food, discarded drug detritus, and feces surrounding them. A shocking number are mere teenagers, but many are old or have aged well before their time.
Your immediate reaction will probably be grief and horror. How can we treat our fellow human beings so cruelly, and how did we, as a society, allow things to get this bad? If we can’t admit these individuals into hospitals today, we should at least erect mobile hospitals to deliver critical medical, psychiatric, and addiction treatment before it’s too late.
Yet Newsom has declared that with programs like Project Roomkey, the United States can solve homelessness. To see the results of the program is to know what a bizarre claim this is. While a small portion of the unhoused are healthy enough to shift into and benefit from such housing, the vast majority are not—and their troubles won’t be alleviated by a hotel room.
San Francisco launched Project Roomkey last year, ostensibly as a way to thwart the spread of Covid-19. At last count, approximately 8,000 people live on San Francisco’s streets, and starting in April 2020, a few thousand were routed to leased “shelter-in-place” (SIP) hotels and motels. However, since so many were living outside as a direct result of substance use (or mental illnesses associated with or exacerbated by it), lethal drug activity flourished in and around the buildings.
Then came the body count. In 2020, San Francisco saw 713 fatal drug overdoses, mostly from fentanyl. Nearly three-quarters perished while isolated inside the hotel rooms and supportive housing provided by the city. Six died in the Hotel Whitcomb, a designated SIP hotel, in a single month.
The reason: Project Roomkey hotels offer no addiction-recovery treatment or mental health care. Nor is there a sobriety requirement. Residents do, however, get plenty of fresh needles, fentanyl foil, and other drug supplies, courtesy of the harm-reduction teams. As Dr. Hali Hammer of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health admitted in an April 2021 New York Times story on the city’s epidemic of drug fatalities, “What we as the public health department are responsible for is preventing death by giving people the resources they need to use safely.” The entire system erodes the desire and willpower to accept detox and rehab. It’s easier and less painful, at least in the short term, to use in a hotel.
Crime has also surged around the SIP motels and hotels, as people score from dealers just outside the lobbies. Shootings, robberies, and car break-ins have become commonplace, as have open-air drug use and sexual acts performed in broad daylight—an alarming change for neighborhoods like the Marina, which not long ago did not have a high population of unhoused, addicted people.
Now Project Roomkey is transitioning from leasing rooms in hotels and motels to purchasing buildings and converting them into permanent housing for unsheltered individuals. Funds are suddenly flowing for the program. FEMA offered partial funding, but earlier this year President Biden signed an executive order directing the federal government to reimburse program costs fully.
Newsom and San Francisco officials are aware that Project Roomkey does nothing to heal homelessness because the absence of a home isn’t the real sickness. The self-described experts will continue to blame income inequality, lack of affordable housing, or class and racial disparities. They won’t admit—at least not publicly—that the problem is almost entirely driven by addiction.
Meantime, the tide of people coming into the city, drawn by easy access to cheap, potent narcotics, will continue unabated. Some may get a hotel room, but most will become fixtures on the streets. Few, if any, will get better. Based on current projections, more than 1,000 people will die from overdose in 2021. Their descent will be both agonizing and inhumane.
It doesn’t have to be this way in San Francisco, in California generally, or across the United States. Funds allocated to programs like Project Roomkey should go toward providing vital medical, psychological, and addiction treatment to those in desperate need. Go ahead. Call it a pipe dream.
Profiteers of Biden Administration’s Open Borders Policy
Malfeasance has it rewards.
It has been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
The border crisis endangers national security, public health and public safety, yet for the Biden administration, the border crisis that creates consternation for most Americans, incredibly, is viewed as a success story by Biden and the radicalized Democrat Party.
As you will see shortly, Biden immigration policies are also important to human traffickers, drug smugglers, terrorist groups and American companies that move the money of all of the above and, incredibly, even the “fees” and ransom money paid to the human traffickers by aliens’ family members.
As I noted in my recent article, Biden Amps Up The Immigration Delivery System, the Biden administration’s refusal to declare a border crisis is more than a matter of semantics.
Over the past several decades, globalists in both major political parties have come to see immigration as a delivery system rather than a law enforcement system that is dedicated to protecting America and Americans.
This immigration delivery system delivers a virtually unlimited supply of cheap exploitable workers (and not just the illegal aliens who perform economic bottom rung low-skilled, physically demanding menial jobs, but increasing numbers of highly skilled alien workers who are granted visas to work legally in the United States). This delivery system also delivers a nearly unlimited number of foreign tourists (hence the continually expanding Visa Waiver Program), a huge number of foreign students including students from adversarial nations such as China, and a virtually unlimited number of clients for immigration law firms. Indeed, there are a significant number of immigration lawyers in both political parties.
Comprehensive Immigration Reform was never intended to get the “aliens out of the shadows” but to motivate aliens to head for the waiting rooms of immigration law firms.
To actually get the aliens out of the shadows, our government would need more ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents). But the hiring of more ICE agents has never been considered by either political party. Such agents would not only arrest illegal aliens but would likely uncover crooked employers, crooked lawyers and interfere with the immigration delivery system.
These politicians know where “their bread is buttered” and understand that they must act to satisfy the demands of those who write the fat checks. Simply stated, the term “campaign contribution” is Orwellian Newspeak for the actual appropriate term: “Bribe.”
No administration, however, has had the unmitigated chutzpah and utter contempt for the safety of America and Americans to do what the Biden administration is now doing, making an obvious concerted effort to remove any and all deterrents against illegal immigration and essentially put control of America’s southern border under the de facto control of the drug cartels and human traffickers (often one and the same).
Biden Cripples Immigration Law Enforcement, his Executive Orders handcuff agents - and set law violators free.
In the past, the Border Patrol checked transportation facilities such as bus stations, train stations and airports to locate and arrest illegal aliens who evaded detection by the Border Patrol and were then heading to the interior of the United States.
Under Biden’s policies, however, the overwhelmed Border Patrol is now driving illegal aliens to bus terminals so that they can head for the interior of the United States!
Some of these aliens are not even being given immigration court dates because, as it now stands, the system is so overloaded that hearings for these aliens won’t be possible for years.
The failure to deter illegal immigration has encouraged a human tsunami of foreign nationals, from all over the world, including countries that sponsor terrorism, to head for the United States.
This has created a huge opportunity for the human traffickers and gangs to make unprecedented profits as more aliens seek their “services.”
On April 20, 2021 Vice reported, US Companies Are Helping Mexican Cartels Get Rich Kidnapping Migrants, noting that the wave of migration at the border is a boon for kidnappers, human smugglers, and the American businesses that handle their money.
Here is an important excerpt from the Vice report:
VICE World News reviewed 40 ransom payments made through money transfers in eight different kidnapping cases from 2014 through January of this year. Virtually all of the money flowed through U.S. companies, mostly through Western Union and MoneyGram but also Walmart and lesser-known companies like Ria. By our rough estimate, criminal organizations in Mexico have made around $800 million on migrant kidnappings alone over the past decade, and money-transfer companies received a cut on nearly every transaction through fees and exchange rates. American corporations are profiting from kidnappings.
Bad as this is, let us remember that those who engage in human trafficking and drug smuggling are violent criminals, many of whom are working in conjunction with terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terror organization that is under the control of Iran. Human trafficking and drug smuggling not only provide huge financial rewards for these criminal and terrorist organizations but provide terror organizations with the ability to move sleeper agents into the United States.
Consider some experts from my 2019 article, Jihad At The Border:
On April 30, 2019 the Justice Department issued a press release, Jordanian National Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Bring Aliens into the United States, which noted that in 2017 the smuggler smuggled aliens from Yemen, a “Special Interest Country” into the United States without inspection from Monterrey, Mexico to Piedras Negras in Texas.
As I reported in a previous article, on January 29, 2019 the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a hearing on Worldwide Threats that was predicated the "World-Wide Threat Assessment," that was issued by Daniel Coats, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community. Additional witness included the heads of the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
The threat assessment warned about the dangers posed by transnational gangs such as MS-13 and went on to report:
TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME
Global transnational criminal organizations and networks will threaten US interests and allies by trafficking drugs, exerting malign influence in weak states, threatening critical infrastructure, orchestrating human trafficking, and undermining legitimate economic activity.
Drug Trafficking
The foreign drug threat will pose continued risks to US public health and safety and will present a range of threats to US national security interests in the coming year. Violent Mexican traffickers, such as members of the Sinaloa Cartel and New Generation Jalisco Cartel, remain key to the movement of illicit drugs to the United States, including heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and cannabis from Mexico, as well as cocaine from Colombia. Chinese synthetic drug suppliers dominate US-bound movements of so- called designer drugs, including synthetic marijuana, and probably ship the majority of US fentanyl, when adjusted for purity.
On April 17, 2018 the House Committee on Homeland Security, Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee, conducted a hearing on the topic, "State Sponsors Of Terrorism: An Examination Of Iran’s Global Terrorism Network.”
The prepared testimony of one of the witnesses, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, included this alarming excerpt:
In recent years, Hezbollah’s Latin American networks have also increasingly cooperated with violent drug cartels and criminal syndicates, often with the assistance of local corrupt political elites….
This toxic crime-terror nexus is fueling both the rising threat of global jihadism and the collapse of law and order across Latin America that is helping drive drugs and people northward into the United States. It is sustaining Hezbollah’s growing financial needs. It is helping Iran and Hezbollah consolidate a local constituency in multiple countries across Latin America. It is thus facilitating their efforts to build safe havens for terrorists and a continent-wide terror infrastructure that they could use to strike U.S. targets.
Biden and his cohorts have discovered that indeed, “Crime does pay” and the cost is not only measured in money but in human suffering and even the loss of human lives.
Photo: Associated Press
Another Violent Weekend Hits Jim Kenney’s Philly as Murders Surge
Mayor Jim Kenney’s (D) Philadelphia is witnessing another violent weekend while murders have surged 33 percent from this point last year.
CBS Philly reports multiple people wounded from stabbings and/or shootings so far this weekend.
One of the most recent incidents — occurring around 1 a.m. Sunday — left a man in “a man in his 20’s…hanging on to life” after being shot numerous times. He was in “the 1600 block of W. Loudon Street in Logan” when the shooting occurred.
On Saturday, three men were injured in a mid-afternoon shooting along “the 2100 block of West Dauphin Street.” One of the men, a 20-year-old, was shot in the head and is in critical condition.
6 ABC quoted Mark Clark, a North Philadelphia resident who heard the shooting, saying, “I was in the house, and I heard boom, boom, boom.”
Another nearby resident, James Jackson, said, “I was sitting in bed, and I heard some loud noise.”
He added, “I heard the gunfight going on, and I, unfortunately, I just prayed to God it wasn’t nobody I know.”
There have been 169 murders in Kenney’s Philadelphia so far this year. That represents a 33 percent increase over the number of murders at this same point in time last year.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
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