WHILE PELOSI, FEINSTEIN AND KAMALA HARRIS WERE GETTING RICH OFF OF ELECTED OFFICE, ROME WAS BURNING!
Almost Nobody Feels Safe on San Francisco Area Public Transit, Government Survey Finds
Only 17 percent of Bay Area residents feel safe on local public transit, and overwhelming majorities say crime and homelessness are out of control in the system, according to an official survey released this week.
The Bay Area Council commissioned the poll to understand why Bay Area Rapid Transit ridership remains woefully below its pre-pandemic numbers. Per the survey, the problem is less a rise in remote work than widespread concerns about safety and cleanliness. Forty-five percent of local residents cited those issues as the main reason they don't use BART, and 78 percent said they would ride more often if the trains and buses were cleaner and safer.
"As the BART goes, to some degree the Bay Area goes," Bay Area Council president Jim Wunderman said Tuesday in announcing the poll's findings. "So this is a serious situation."
The survey could undercut a push by California Democrats for a $5 billion bailout of the state's public transit, which faces an even steeper fiscal cliff. Advocates of the bailout, led by state senator Scott Wiener (D.) from San Francisco, have argued that public transit is essential for reducing carbon emissions and promoting "equity."
But the poll found that Bay Area residents express relatively little interest in lower fares or expanded service for BART. Instead, their top priorities are cleanliness, ejecting violators, adding more police, and improving lighting. Residents overwhelmingly say agency officials fail to adequately address criminal activity and violence, drinking and drug use, and homelessness. Seventy-three percent are worried about being the victims of crime when they ride BART.
Asked whether BART should focus on cleanliness, safety, and reliability or on helping the hundreds of homeless people in the system access support services, Bay Area residents support the former by more than two to one, according to the poll. That finding comes after San Francisco in the last fiscal year earmarked nearly $668 million for homeless programs and another $75 million for drug treatment services, only to see the problems intensify.
Theft Is Rampant at Downtown San Francisco Target: ‘At Least 10 Times a Day’
Every ten minutes, a downtown San Francisco Target worker will reportedly see a theft.
While multiple products, such as deodorant, are under lock and key at the Metreon mall Target and security guards in bright vests wander the store, thieves are not deterred, as first reported by the San Francisco Standard.
A worker said that thieves are taking food, nail polish, liquor bottles, and even aluminum foil, which they allegedly use to smoke fentanyl. San Francisco saw a 40 percent jump in overdose deaths from January through March of this year, according to a press release from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) office.
Photos show the lipstick supply completely depleted, which a Target employee said was stocked just the morning the photo was taken.
Last November, it was reported that Target had lost $400 million due to inventory loss, attributed mostly to organized retail crime.
“Retail crime is an urgent issue that is increasingly impacting the team and guests at Target and other retailers,” a Target spokesperson told the San Francisco Standard. “It’s an issue that affects all of us, limiting product availability, creating a less convenient shopping experience, and most importantly, putting our team and guests in harm’s way.”
But it is not just organized criminals stealing, a worker said they will regularly see people who appear homeless eating food in the stores.
“I understand; they need to eat,” the worker told San Francisco Standard.
At the beginning of May, Breitbart News reported that two Nordstrom stores will be leaving San Francisco by the end of the summer.
In an email to employees, the CEO cited that the changing “dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years, impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”
The San Francisco and Oakland areas were ranked the second most hard-hit in the country for theft in 2020 and 2021 after Los Angeles, according to a 2022 retail security survey by the National Retail Federation.
Watch: Products at Target Store SEALED Behind Glass in Crime-Ridden San Francisco
@srdreamtorch via Storyful
Nolte: New York Magazine Forced to Admit Democrat-Run San Francisco’s Doom Loop Is Real
A reporter for the far-left New York Magazine admits she set out to disprove all this “doom loop” talk about Democrat-run San Francisco.
Instead, she discovered Democrat-run San Francisco is in a doom loop:
A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the east-coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’ed, up 41 percent from last year.
Democrats have a monopoly on power in Frisco, and the results have been catastrophic especially downtown. It could not have been more than 15 years ago when my wife and I spent a few days in Frisco. What a gorgeous city it was, a jewel on the West Coast. We walked for miles, all over, everywhere, and never once felt uncomfortable or threatened.
Well, look at it now:
Since [the spying of 2019], Salesforce [the city’s largest employer] has laid off 9,000 employees and ditched nearly a million feet of office space. Meta has laid off 21,000 employees and ditched 435,000 feet of office space in San Francisco. Now, late one morning this dark spring, next to the Salesforce Tower, the Salesforce Transit Center — designed by César Pelli’s firm and opened in August 2018 to serve as the city’s main bus hub —was empty, as in truly vacant[.]
What caused this?
Democrats.
We will start with San Francisco’s anti-science lockdowns. First, everyone discovered they could work from home and then discovered how much they enjoyed it. Next, employers discovered they could save a fortune on rent by having everyone work from home.
The result?
Downtown is a ghost town, and when normal people move out, vagrants, junkies, and criminals move in.
When normal people move out, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops lose their customer base.
Add to this Joe Biden’s recession.
Add to this the Democrat’s war on cops.
Add to this the decriminalization of pretty much every crime, including violent crime.
“The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty,” admits NY Mag. “Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear.”
Get a load of this nugget: “[C]ell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.”
Well, durrrrrr… What did you think was going to happen?
How is that left-wing utopia working out for ya?
Jake Shields, a friend of the recently murdered CashApp founder Bob Lee, told NY Mag that this “was not just an office apocalypse. It was unmitigated, spiraling, homicidal doom.”
“You can do whatever you want. You can shit in the streets,” he said. “The logical next step is to start killing people.”
And nothing will improve because improvement requires policy changes and Democrats admitting their mistakes. Well, Democrats (as we see in almost every Democrat-run city) would prefer to see their cities implode rather than admit they are wrong.
And I am not just talking about elected Democrats; I am talking about the idiot voters who think they are owning the Trumptards as their cities turn into third-world garbage piles.
Let me tell you something… I do not care. If I could help San Francisco, I would, but I ca not. Everyone knows how to fix urban blight. It happened in the 80s and 90s. The blueprint is right there. But the fake media and Democrats have labeled that blueprint “racist.”
So what should I do, waste one moment’s sleep over something I can do nothing about?
Nope.
We “MAGATards” already live in the utopia leftists claim to want, and as far as I am concerned, the Democrats in these Democrat-run dumps have chosen to live like this, which is their right. It is your city. Feel free to destroy it—no skin off my nose.
Newsflash: you are in a doom loop because you voted for a doom loop.
And that is not my problem.
If you need me, I will be grilling steaks, mowing lawn, and porch-sitting over here.
Dummies.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Major Retailer to Close Flagship San Francisco Store After Less than a Year
Another major retailer is leaving downtown San Francisco — this time Coco Republic, an Australian furniture store that is leaving the iconic Union Square less than a year after opening a flagship location there.
The ongoing retail exodus from San Francisco follows years of worsening crime, drugs, and homelessness, plus a wave of “mass looting” events that have caused many other retail stores and chains to leave the city.
Other reasons include a decline in foot traffic in downtown San Francisco as a result of pandemic restrictions that caused many workers to shift to work-from-home, and many residents to relocate outside of the city.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday:
Coco Republic, an Australian furniture retailer that invested heavily in a San Francisco showroom off Union Square, abruptly announced Wednesday that it would be closing the store, less than a year after it opened on Stockton Street, across the street from Macy’s.
The reason given was safety of its shoppers, along with a significant drop in foot traffic that has not returned since the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, according to a statement released to The Chronicle.
“We invested extraordinary time and capital in our initial U.S. flagship store in Union Square,” said Anthony Spon-Smith, Coco Republic’s creative director and founder, who is based in Sydney. “Less than six months from opening, we could not be more disappointed to be shuttering this flagship location in our sister city, but ultimately, the safety and well-being of our customers and employees is our highest priority.”
Last week, Nordstrom closed two of its stores in downtown San Francisco, amid denials from liberal pundits like Franklin Leonard who doubted that rising crime could possibly be the reason for retailers to leave the area.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
ALL DEMS ARE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES
DEPRESSED. MEXIFORNIA IS WHAT HAPPENED. THE
DEATH OF MIDDLE AMERICA IS THE RESULT. THEIR
VISION IS 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS. HOW CLOSE ARE WE
NOW???
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
8 Californians who left for Texas share thoughts 1 year later
Richard Wolff | ELITES BLEED the MASSES DRY.... you mean like a pack of parasite lawyers???
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g7RuxYiSPc&t=2s
How California Destroyed its Middle Class (A Cautionary Tale) | Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r0m4UCPKHw&t=112s
The Bay Area is sinking into the abyss
Last month, Whole Foods shut down a year-old flagship store it had opened in downtown San Francisco. Two weeks later, word broke that Nordstrom, the Seattle-based, high-end retailer that had a major presence in downtown San Francisco was shutting down both its Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack stores. Today, news broke that T-Mobile is pulling out, too. It’s a retail exodus that is obviously bad for San Francisco. Significantly, it turns out that other Bay Area downtowns are imploding, as well.
The Whole Foods store shut down because the crime plaguing it was unsustainable, in terms of profits and worker safety. The same held true for the Nordstrom pullout:
“We’ve spent more than 35 years serving customers in downtown San Francisco, building relationships with them and investing in the local community,” Nordstrom told impacted employees.
“But as many of you know, the dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years, impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), owner of the Westfield Mall where one of the Nordstrom stores is closing, slammed the current conditions in the city and said retailers are leaving in droves because of unsafe conditions that have dragged on, despite the company pleading with city officials to take action.
The latest major retailer to join the downtown San Francisco exodus is T-Mobile, which had a 17,000-square-foot store in Union Square, the heart of downtown San Francisco’s hotel and real estate district. T-Mobile hasn’t said why it decided to close the store, other than a “reshaped…retail strategy,” but it’s easy to guess that crime played a part.
After all, to stay afloat in San Francisco, a Target store had to put everything behind glass:
San Francisco is drowning in crime and filth, thanks to a city determined to give free rein to criminals, the drug addicted, and the homeless (and yes, those are often overlapping classes). None of this was helped by the fact that San Francisco embraced the lockdowns, so workers were sent home, where many discovered the joys of what I call the bunny-slipper commute: No more fighting traffic, riding filthy and dangerous public transportation, or spending your days locked in a vertical sardine can.
San Francisco’s office vacancy rate is almost 35% and expected to climb—and that’s the official rate, reflecting unleased property. It does not reflect property that is still under lease but without any workers inside. Last month, a downtown high rise in a formerly premium location sold for 75% off the original asking price. I doubt that building low-income housing in those vacant properties will help much.
Image: San Francisco at peak vacancy in 2021. YouTube screen grab.
A fascinating report from the Bay Area News Group says that it’s not just San Francisco that’s in deep trouble. In fact, all regional downtowns are suffering:
Police data may show otherwise — violent crime has actually fallen in San Francisco in recent years, though property crimes have spiked. And unlike most of the rest of the Bay Area, the city’s homeless population dipped slightly in 2022, according to the latest count. Still, there’s no doubt that San Francisco’s downtown is in crisis.
It’s not the only one. All three of the Bay Area’s largest cities are staring down huge setbacks to their efforts to revitalize urban cores hollowed out by a once-in-a-generation pandemic.
Last month, the Oakland A’s announced the team was decamping for Las Vegas, throwing into flux the city’s plans to redevelop Howard Terminal at the Port of Oakland. The team is leaving behind a $12 billion proposal for a gleaming waterfront stadium with new housing and retail at the site. In San Jose, Google recently announced it was reassessing the timeline for its sprawling Downtown West project, which city officials hope will add homes, shopping and office space for thousands of workers.
Incidentally, my guess is that crime and homelessness are down in San Francisco because, to mangle Willie Sutton’s alleged statement about robbing banks, criminals and the homeless go where the money is. Without workers in downtown San Francisco, why bother?
On the one hand, this decline couldn’t happen to more deserving cities, all of which self-immolated on a pyre of Black Lives Matter de-policing and decarceration and Fauci-esque lockdowns. On the other hand, as a San Francisco native, and someone who knew the other downtowns, too, I feel sad.
It’s like attending the funeral of a once glamorous friend who, because of an addiction to drink, drugs, and bad men, ended up dying on the street with a needle in her arm. It’s not just her death that’s sad; the loss of her potential is sad, too. Petula Clark’s “Downtown” hit song, which I, as a child, thought was about San Francisco, seems like an elegy, not a promise.
THE NEXT MEXICAN INVASION IS AT HAND:
"Mexican president candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for mass immigration to the United States, declaring it a "human right". We will defend all the (Mexican) invaders in the American," Obrador said, adding that immigrants "must leave their towns and find a life, job, welfare, and free medical in the United States."
OPEN BORDERS = GIVE YOUR JOB TO AN ILLEGAL WHO WILL WORK CHEAPER IS PART OF THE DEMOCRATS' DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA AND THE RISE OF GLOBALISM
Our young people have been and are being radicalized and propagandized daily. Supporting all this are the Democrats of today, and their DSA allies. They are a united front committed to transforming and gutting America from the inside out. Destroy the middle class, render impotent parental rights, isolate the church as a spewer of hate and intolerance, render ineffective the rule of law, demean the history and the Constitution of these United States. In concert with global elites, the media elite, and the toxic leftist bilge that is constantly oozing from their seats of power, they are doing just that.
From the L Word to Cultural Marxism
During the 1988 presidential campaign, then vice-president George H.W. Bush labelled his counterpart Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts in pejorative fashion with the ‘L’ word, or ‘liberal.’ To be deemed a liberal during that era to many meant you would be perceived as being outside the mainstream, and one who was indecisive or deemed weak in foreign affairs, especially with the Soviet Union, and not a strong supporter of the military. You were most likely to support strict gun control, be seen as soft on crime, and support abortion, as Dukakis did. So negative was the connotation that most politicians of the era ran away from the moniker, with many describing themselves instead as centrists, as Bill Clinton did in 1992.
In the same fashion, throughout the 20th century in the United States, to be labelled a ‘Socialist’ would have been political suicide and would virtually automatically preclude such a candidate from winning any national office. That was the case until 2007, when Bernie Sanders won the Senate seat in Vermont as an avowed ‘Socialist.’ Sanders was not taken all that seriously by the majority in the early years of his service. However, in the democratic primaries of both the 2016 and 2020, it became plain to see that the label ‘Socialist’ was no longer considered derogatory to many Americans given the strength of his grassroots support. His voter base in both primaries revealed that much of his support were young people, aged 18-30, becoming strong contributors to his success.
Today, some sixteen years after Sanders’ election to the Senate, we have five members of Congress and over 150 state legislature officeholders nationally who describe their political delineation as that of ‘Democrat-Socialist,’ which is not a classic political party -- yet. Most contemporary democrats of any stripe do not appear to reflect the democrats of previous generations. Not too many democrats of today are espousing “Ask not what your country can do for you,” and likely advocate the opposite. But adding the term ‘Socialist’ to Democrat is not simply a play on words. It is arranged that way to soften the impact of the term ‘Socialist.’ The reality is, they are Socialists, plain and simple. From the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) website, under the page ‘What is Democratic-Socialism?’ The first line reads: ‘Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit.’ What tripe does that sound like? Further on it states: ‘We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.’ One can only wonder what that really means.
Back to the Sanders surprise showing in 2016, and to a lesser extent in 2020. How did that happen? As mentioned, the lion’s share of his voters were young, 18-30. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan ran for reelection against Sen. Walter Mondale. According to 
the Roper Center at Cornell, this same age group that voted so strongly for Sanders in democratic primaries thirty-plus years later voted 61% for Reagan in the 18-24 bracket, and 57% in the 25-30 bracket. Those numbers reflect all voters in that age group, Democrat, Republican, and independents. These Baby Boomers voted decisively for the conservative, and were a part of a landslide, as Reagan garnered a full 59% of the electorate that year. It begs the question, what changed? Many Boomers had gone to universities and colleges and earned degrees. Many had seen and were aware of the protests and demonstrations of the 60s and 70s that were front page news as they grew up. Even though radicals were the drivers of the protest scene in that era, they were a minority when it came to the overall population.
So why the vast difference in political leanings 1984 to 2016? I think we can credit Marxist thinkers Antonio Gramsci and Rudi Dutschke, with their quest to undermine Western culture with the “Long March Through the Institutions” and replace them with Marxist ideals as playing a significant role. The difference was that instead of promoting failed Soviet-style economic Marxism, this new rendition would be Cultural Marxism, that is, a thrust to radically change culture by focusing on the allegedly oppressed classes, while at the same time undermining America’s institutions. By the late 1980s, this plan was in full swing in academia. New York Times writer Felicity Berringer pointed to this in an article “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in U.S. Colleges” written October 25, 1989. She wrote, “As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders. It could be considered a success story for the students of class struggle, who were once regarded as subversives.”
John Ellis, professor at the University of Santa Cruz during this same period wrote in his 2020 book The Breakdown of Higher Education, “Radical politics was a rising force on the campuses, and we were trying to draw attention to the dangers in what was happening while there was still some chance of arresting it. But it’s now clear that we failed to stop the slide, because the political radicals on campus never had any interest in what we had to say. Their purposes were not ours. We were interested in the quality of higher education, but what they cared about was getting control of the campuses so they could use them to promote their political ideology, one so unpopular with the general public that it could not have been advanced in any other way.”
The bitter truth is that the ‘Long March’ worked! It took time, but now we face this massive challenge of how to root it out of our federal, state, and local governments, along with our military, universities, media, school boards, etc. Our young people have been and are being radicalized and propagandized daily. Supporting all this are the Democrats of today, and their DSA allies. They are a united front committed to transforming and gutting America from the inside out. Destroy the middle class, render impotent parental rights, isolate the church as a spewer of hate and intolerance, render ineffective the rule of law, demean the history and the Constitution of these United States. In concert with global elites, the media elite, and the toxic leftist bilge that is constantly oozing from their seats of power, they are doing just that.
Abraham Lincoln spoke of this potential of self-inflicted catastrophe when he said: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
Which will it be? Life or death? What’s next for America?
(Quotations for this article derived from the work of Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Gorka of the Heritage Foundation.)
Rich Chiero is a writer and a historian deeply concerned with conditions in the United States and the West in general. He can be reached at: rachiero@gmail.com
Image: Eclusette
WHO RUNS THE NATION? THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THEIR BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS…. or George Soros, their paymaster?
“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/01/democrat-party-billionaires-for-open.html
How California Destroyed its Middle Class (A Cautionary Tale) | Victor Davis Hanson
IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA
MEX OCCUPATION:
Your neighborhood will be next to fall to LA RAZA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/10/america-la-raza-mexicos-wide-open.html
Actor Scott Baio Leaving California After 45 Years: ‘It’s Not a Safe Place Anymore’
Scott Baio has had enough of California. The actor is so sick of its left-wing politics, and the crime, the homelessness, the lawlessness, and the grim future it holds, after 45 years he is taking his family with him and leaving.
The 62-year-old and long time resident of Los Angeles announced his intentions Wednesday on social media.
He tweeted: “After 45 years, I’m making my way to finally ‘exit stage right’ from California.”
His declaration included a quote from a report on KTLA5 that read, “The most recent survey conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority found approximately 69,000 people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County and 41,000 in the city in 2022.”
He further tweeted that homelessness “brings down property value. Also no consequences for crime that is rampant, making things higher in price and it’s just not a safe place anymore. [ImFree].”
Homelessness and crime rates have motivated other celebrities to leave the Golden State over the past few years.
Stars like Katy Perry, Matthew McConaughey, and podcaster Joe Rogan previously said L.A. was no longer the place they wanted to bring up a family.
This is not the first time Baio, son of Italian migrants who was born and raised in New York City, has called attention to the state of the nation in general and California in particular.
He was seen at the #WalkAway ‘Rescue America’ rally in 2020 calling for change.
Scott Baio is seen attending the #WalkAway ‘Rescue America’ rally in Beverly Garden Park on August 08, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (fupp/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
On that occasion he joined hundreds of Americans who marched from West Hollywood to Beverly Hills to show their love for the country, as Breitbart News reported.
The Walk Away Campaign organized the event to “show the radical left that they do not own America’s streets and that our country is filled with kind, loving, big-hearted Americans of every race, religion, background, and creed,” its website read.
Baio was happy to take to social media to show his support and his political backing for Donald Trump.
The Happy Days star also addressed the crowd and said he loved America and wanted to save it because “I love that we’re a God-fearing nation. I love that we’re a law-abiding nation. I love our traditional values.”
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