America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Saturday, August 26, 2023
SAN FRANCISCO - WHERE TROIKA OF CORRUPTION FEINSTEIN, PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS ALONG WITH PELOSI'S COUSIN GAVIN NEWSOM BEGAN THEIR PATH OF DESTRUCTION
The statement comes amid a spike in crime in the Bay Area. In neighboring San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was forced to flee a speech on combating violent crime after someone threw a brick in the crowd.
Several big-name brands like Nordstrom and Saks OFF 5th and hotel chains have left the area due to concerns about public safety.
cut and paste youtube links
ONLY 8% OF THE POPULATION OF SAN FRANCISCO IS BLACK. THEY PERPETRATE 40% OF THE CRIMES.
SEVEN WALGREENS HAVE CLOSED DUE TO BLACK LOOTING.
San Fran patrol special officer rips Pelosi's inaction over BLACK crime surge: She doesn't care
CALIFORNIA: THE FAILED STATE. THE DEMOCRATS DREAM, 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS
San Francisco is like a failed state': Joe Rogan slams the 'next level' crime in the Golden Gate City — which is fast 'becoming a ghost town.' Is he right?
Bethan Moorcraft
'San Francisco is like a failed state': Joe Rogan slams the 'next level' crime in the Golden Gate City — which is fast 'becoming a ghost town.' Is he right?
Podcaster Joe Rogan has taken a shot at San Francisco, calling out the California city for its “next level” lawlessness and disorder.
In conversation with stand-up comedian and actor Gabriel Iglesias on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan said: “San Francisco is like a failed state.”
He agreed with Iglesias that crime in the city is “next level.”
“No one’s stopping anybody from doing anything,” Rogan added. “It’s crazy how quick San Francisco has [declined]. Everyone’s pulling out of there. Hotels are pulling out. Chains like Walgreens are pulling out.”
Businesses have been fleeing downtown San Francisco to the extent that “it’s becoming a ghost town,” according to Iglesias, who added: “And they’re not pumping the breaks on it.”
Now, the pair did make these comments from the comfort of Rogan’s podcast studio in Austin, Texas. But is San Francisco as bad as they make it out to be?
Retail crime
One type of crime that has apparently been on the rise in San Francisco is retail crime.
In a brazen example, CNN Senior National Correspondent Kyung Lah claimed to witness three thefts in 30 minutes while filming a television report on July 24 at the Walgreens in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood. News cameras captured at least one individual walking out of the pharmacy without paying for any items, at a store where many products are kept under lock and key.
Read more: Americans are spending a ridiculous $253/month more on groceries. But this simple hack can turn your stressful daily spending into a golden nest egg
In recent months, several retail giants — including Nordstrom, H&M, Marshall's, Gap, Banana Republic, Anthropologie and Office Depot — have announced they’re pulling out of some San Francisco locations. Crime levels were cited as playing a role in some of these decisions.
Rising concern over retail crime is not isolated to the Golden Gate City. According to a report from the National Retail Federation, a majority of retailers surveyed between 2020 and 2022 reported annual increases in organized retail crime activity at their stores.
To combat the problem, Home Depot CEO Ted Decker announced in June that the home improvement company would be “investing in more security guards” to protect the safety of its employees and customers. This decision sadly followed the deaths of two Home Depot employees during theft incidents.
‘A ghost town’
To call downtown San Francisco a “ghost town” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there are several factors playing into this perception.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the city’s tech-heavy workforce embraced remote work and its return to the office has been slow. According to real estate company Savills, San Francisco had one of the lowest office availability rates in the U.S. before the pandemic at 9.5%; however, vacancy is now 30%, a 30-year high.
This major drop in in-office workers has contributed to the diminishment of the city’s once-buzzing downtown core. Even hotels are cutting their losses and bidding farewell to the city.
John Chachas, the CEO of Gump’s, a 166-year-old department store in San Francisco, recently penned a chilling review of the current state of play.
“As we prepare for our 166th holiday season at 250 Post Street, we fear this may be our last,” Chacas wrote in an open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor London Breed, and the city’s Board of Supervisors, published as a paid advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“San Francisco now suffers from a ‘tyranny of the minority’ — behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many.
“The ramifications of COVID policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood. Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”
WHILE CA WAS IN MELTDOWN, THESE CREATURES WERE INSIDE TRADING, SUCKING BRIBES AND SIPHONING OFF BRIBES TO FAMILY MEMBERS.
A little while back, when chatting with my friend Eric Peters -- whose website offers visitors insights into automotive innovations, quality, and the pressures of politicians on consumers and manufacturers – I had a thought that seems to have been anticipated, in a manner of speaking, by someone on the west coast.
Eric and I were chatting about the political push to mandate electric vehicles – “EVs,” which are both extremely expensive and highly deceptive when it comes to claims of environmental benefits and even “efficiency” – and how poorly EVs were selling, even as they had to be kept charged in the unsold state, sitting there on the lot, draining energy and cash. And I was struck by an inspiration.
I thought that, since Disney has run its “Adventure” vacations in places like the desert southwest of the U.S., and since Disney’s woke approach to its films and theme parks has seen profits decline, why not try a different kind of “Adventure Tour” that focuses on U.S. largess and waste? They could call it the Political Pork Tour, and go to almost any state, showing the misspent money, the resources that politicians snatched from people to shift into things those people would not have bought themselves, or bought at different levels over different timeframes.
Well, it turns out that, in the lovely, fecal-strewn city of San Francisco, someone kind of beat me to it.
It’s called the “Doom Loop Walking Tour” and it lets people enjoy a guided tour of the politically-created squalor they could encounter on their own if they walk the streets there at any time.
“A new, sold-out tour has emerged in San Francisco, promising to provide visitors a glimpse of the ‘urban decay’ that has taken hold of one of America’s wealthiest cities.
The ‘Doom Loop Walking tour’ promises an up close and personal view of ‘open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores’ that make up downtown San Francisco.
‘You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!’”
San Francisco long has had a gutter-level reputation for driving away entry-level jobs and low-priced market housing. One wonders if any of the people driven into poverty and homelessness can start their own endeavors as tour guides, or if the leftist government there might lock them down again or impose new licensing fees or new minimum wage mandates that, again, destroy this new, expanding field of opportunity – the opportunity to see how opportunities have been crushed by government.
If you detect a recursive, feedback loop, kind of thing happening here, you’re not alone.
And the creator of the tour seems to be with you.
Notes Clayson:
“The anonymous tour guide, a self-proclaimed ‘political junkie and opinionated loudmouth,’ is a ‘card-carrying City Commissioner’ and co-founder of one of the city’s largest neighborhood associations. The guide glibly declared the tour was created as a ‘result of his mental-health crisis’ after spending hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, ‘shouting into the opposite abyss.’”
And Clayson notes:
“Promising tourists they will find no better expert, the guide assures that patrons will discover the ‘policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader of housing crisis, addiction crisis, mental-health crisis, & unrepentant crime crisis.’
In neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Tenderloin District homelessness, drug abuse and crime reign supreme. There, drug users abuse substances out in the open, businesses use incense to cover up the stench of human excrement that litter the sidewalks and broken glass from car windows litter the streets, the Financial Times reported.”
All of which are things to which I can testify, after visiting the city years ago. Coming up from the subway at night near Mission Street, the first thing I detected was human fecal matter, all over the sidewalk.
Later, near the intersection of 16th Street and Mission, I got to enjoy the site of a homeless guy sleeping on the roof of a burned-out, windowless car – a guy being berated by a junkie transvestite wearing a sequin top that shimmered in the misty morning light with every angry breath the shemale expelled.
It is, by far, the ugliest, dirtiest, most unpleasant city I have visited, and it only has gotten worse since my visit.
“Shoplifting has become such an issue that grocery stores and drug stores have been forced to either shutter their stores or alter their operating hours to deal with the rising crime. One such Walgreens in the Richmond district is reportedly hit by shoplifters 15-20 times a day. To cope, Walgreens has been forced to put locks on their freezers, one of the hardest hit sections of the store.”
The way to improve it is to get the policy makers and welfare pushers and “regulators” out. It is imperative that people cut back the political interference in business and housing endeavors and allow freedom.
“’How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless (“cruel and inhuman”; “violation of multiple human rights”)?” the tour guide posited.
The 1.5-mile tour will take visitors from City Hall through the city’s Tenderloin district, Union Square and Mid-Market with all proceeds “donated to a non-profit that does not actively degrade its community.”
San Francisco is in an accelerated state of decay, and the powers in charge seem completely disinterested in recognizing the freedom needed to let people get jobs and good places to live.
Perhaps this tour will help wake up a few people, be they from the area, or from other cities, witnessing the effects of oppressive government restrictions on markets and insane government policies regarding property theft and criminality.
Exclusive—Victor Davis Hanson: California Is a Confederate Society with ‘Sick Fixation’ on Race
California is a neo-Confederate state with a “sick fixation” on ethnicity and race, historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson said in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
California’s hemorrhaging of residents to states with more freedom and prosperity is exacerbating the state’s social stratification in terms of wealth, Hanson stated. He said the state’s volume of illegal aliens further amplifies the wealth divide.
“The middle class has left,” he said. “About ten million people left California in the last 40 years, and we know where they went. They went to Nevada, Idaho, Texas, Florida, Tennessee. We have half of all the undocumented illegal aliens in the country. Twenty-seven percent of Californians were not born in United States, whether they’re legally [here], or residents, or citizens.”
Hanson characterized California’s polarization based on wealth as resembling the Antebellum South’s racial segregation.
“That is the nexus: great wealth, great poverty. But the way I look at it is — they would not want to hear this — but just think of the old Confederacy or the Antebellum South — one party, Democratic — this is a one-party state. They had Big Cotton. We have Big Tech. Big Tech runs the whole state, just like Big Cotton [ran the Antebellum South].”
He continued, “The Old South, we had the plantationist class. [Today], these are the people that live in Woodside or Berkeley Hills or Palo Alto, then you had everybody else: black slaves, and you had the poor, what they called ‘white trash.'” There was no middle class. When I go to Stanford, I see all these wealthy kids there, and then I go along El Camino, everybody’s living in a trailer.”
“I go to the Apple or Google or Facebook campuses, and people are living in the streets that work there,” he added.
Contemporary racial agitation pushed by Big Tech’s management and the broader left is reminiscent of racial segregation in the Old South, Hanson said. He noted how today’s left-wing fetishization and commodification of imaginary victimhood based on ethnicity and race resemble the focus on racial designations within the Confederate States of America.
He remarked, “The other thing about the Old Confederacy, they were obsessed with race, and it was the one-drop rule. Everybody was trying to figure out, when a baby was born, what the precise percentages [were], and then they were a ranked society. When I get my email in the morning, it’s all about one thing: race — race, race, race, race, race. I turn on the television: ‘white privilege.'”
“Can Elizabeth Warren pass as a minority? Can Ward Churchill pass? Rachel Dolezal? It’s like African Americans in the South trying to pass as white people.”
He concluded, “It’s just a sick fixation on our superficial appearance. It’s a very Confederate society, California. It’s medieval, feudal. There is no middle class anymore.”
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
For the first time in its history, California lost a House seat. California Democrats are resorting to conspiracy theories about President Trump and the census, but these are the numbers they got after spending $187 million on outreach and after rigging the census to make sure illegal aliens would continue to participate. And those are far better numbers than California deserves.
The decline and fall is not a surprising development out here where moving trucks are a frequent sight and everyone knows a family that is moving.
I know three of them in under two years.
The population numbers only tell part of the story of a big state that is rapidly losing its future.
California’s fastest growing population is senior citizens. By 2030, every 1 in 3 Californians will be over the age of 50. The over 60 population will increase by 166 percent by 2060 going from 5.5 million to 13.5 million. Hotel California is rapidly becoming a retirement community.
By 2030, California will have a higher percentage elderly population than Florida.
In 1970, the median age of Californians was 27 years old. Jerry Brown became the state's youngest governor of the century. When he next ran for office, he became its oldest governor at the age of 72. California’s median age is now 38. And it’s only headed north from there.
By 2050, a third of LA will be over 65 and by 2060, the median age in LA will be 48.
California’s elderly population is increasing faster than any other age group. While the young population will remain flat, the middle aged population will only increase by a fifth, even as the elderly population more than doubles. These numbers paint a portrait of a state with no growth.
The state’s birth rate fell 10% just last year. A one month comparison actually showed a drop of 23%. While the pandemic suppressed birth rates, the numbers had been dropping in California long before anyone had ever heard of Wuhan. Two years ago it hit the lowest level in a century down to half of the state’s 1990 birth rate. In the last decade, California’s birth rate dropped twice as much as the national average defying its own demographic destiny.
The news is much worse than these numbers make it look.
States with a large older population are often more conservative, but that’s less likely to happen to California. The fastest growth among its older population isn’t among white people, but the large Hispanic population that fundamentally altered the state’s demographics and politics.
A generation of cheap labor is coming of age. Its members are a lot less likely to leave the state than white seniors. As a Calmatters fellow noted, “older Californians are actually more likely to be immigrants than younger Californians”. They’re also more likely to be lower income.
These estimates are just projections of the future. They show trend lines rather than the escalating consequences of a state that is becoming increasingly unlivable.
California’s golden years were fueled by new industries and cheap land. The land isn’t cheap and the industries are pricing themselves out of the youth population they used to attract. Millennials have been moving out of New York and California in large numbers, and heading to Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. Industries will be forced to follow their potential workforce.
Big Tech monopolies will still maintain their Bay Area enclaves for now, but older and more traditional tech firms are heading to Texas. Sleeping six to a room in a decrepit building converted into a dorm may be part of the price of admission in start-up culture, but even much of the tech industry is opting out of the hellscape of the talent rat race.
This exodus probably won’t have good political consequences for either California or Texas.
The middle class provides political and economic stability and it’s vanishing from the state at rapid rates. What’s replacing it is an itinerant hipster class drawn to Big Tech and the entertainment industry, driven by radical politics, but with no commitment to the state.
This same hipster class wrecked New York City, before abandoning it in droves, and is busy wrecking its hubs in Portland and Seattle. Not to mention any other cities where it got a foothold.
It’s why California’s birth rate has declined twice as fast as the rest of the country.
California swapped a settled and more conservative population for a more itinerant population of millennial hipsters and immigrant laborers. The state lost its future even as the gross population numbers still looked good because there were still people even if they were becoming less likely to have children, buy homes, or do any of the things that a settled population actually does.
The short term fix looked good on the census, it looked good economically, but it had no future, and the state is slowly coming off the high and coming face to face with a bleak future.
California’s doom loop of radicals wrecking its cities and the state, enabled by the cheap labor imported to cater to their whims, is just getting started. As conservatives and the middle class flee the state, it becomes even more of a playground for urban elites, trashing rural counties, enabling crime, social dysfunction, and economic ruin that they expect to be immune from either because they’re walled off, expect to move on, or not to be alive when the social bill comes due.
Jerry Brown’s old California could outgrow and survive its worst follies, but the new California isn’t actually growing and is running out of the future it’s burning through at a rapid rate.
California Democrats are complaining that population growth has slowed because of President Trump’s immigration enforcement. But that hasn’t stopped immigrants from heading to other states. Their real problem is that younger immigrants and migrants are less interested in California because its economic potential and opportunities are running out like everything else.
The cost of living relative to the economic rewards are unappealing even to many illegal aliens. Those who do come are more likely to have plans for more profitable work in organized crime.
Meanwhile, poll numbers show that California Latinos have been turning on Governor Newsom over the lockdowns. The state’s new working class is on a collision course with the Democrats, and the Democrats are getting nervous because without constant migrant churn, new immigrants supplementing and displacing the old, their political hegemony might come apart.
The coalition between cheap labor and radical Democrats worked as long as there was work to go around. As California’s social stability collapses, its economic growth will go with it.
A reckoning is coming and a lost House seat is the least of it.
A scam works as long as everyone involved thinks they have something to gain. It falls apart when they wake up and realize that the Nigerian prince will never write them that check.
California Democrats have been writing checks post dated to the future. But there’s no future and the demographic checks are starting to bounce.
"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams,” a younger Jerry Brown would rhapsodize. But it turns out that California is not such a unique place after all. It’s a land of dreams, and dreams are not a good basis for policy. When leftists turn their dreams into reality, they wake up to discover they’re living a nightmare.
Rising crime and homelessness, unaffordable housing costs, exorbitant tax rates, and a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic are among the factors fueling the effort to oust Newsom, who was busted on severaloccasions for flouting the state's pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings.
California's leaders delude themselves about why their state is losing people
The 2020 Census results are a complete embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats.
Despite opening the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens, making the state the home to one out of four foreigners who break into the country without authorization, the state has made substandard gains in population over the last decade.
The population that the state did gain over the last decade was well below the 7.4% national average, according to the New York Times, and really bad compared to places like number-one Texas. As a result, the state is losing a congressional seat, for the first time in its 170-year history. It's happening despite the 6.1% gain because the number of congressional seats is capped at 435. Any state that gains a seat does so at the expense of another. Hello, California.
That's a significant reversal, because until now, California's story has always been about growth, with Census data often showing that its population had doubled.
Worse still, the population has gone negative, not merely substandard in growth, just in the past year. Residents are voting with their feet.
California's population declined by more than 182,000 people last year, marking the first time in the state's history that it has experienced a year-over-year loss.
State officials said Friday that California's population slid 0.46 percent to slightly under 39.5 million people between January 2020 and January 2021, the Associated Press reported.
Yet despite these embarrassing numbers, brought on by one-party leftist rule in California, state officials delude themselves that it's nothing to do with their policies. Breitbart notes:
State officials chalk off the declining population over the past year to a declining birth rate, reductions in international immigration, and deaths from the coronavirus.
In 2020 alone, 51,000 Californians died from the coronavirus.
Really? I just went to a farewell party last night in Lake Elsinore, California — a very multi-racial one, where nearly all of the attendees were black and Mexican. They were homeowners. Industrious immigrants. Entrepreneurs. Cops. Military people. The street they were on, in a very pretty, newish neighborhood of McMansions with big yards and swimming pools, was loaded with "For Sale" signs.
My friend, her husband, and their kids were pulling up stakes for South Carolina. They weren't the only ones planning on going
Reasons cited? Not just high housing costs — the party attendees already had their own homes, as Breitbart cited, quoting the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, who's now running in California's recall referendum to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.
They cited a feeling of non-representation in the one-party state run solely by Democrats. They felt shut out. They detested the state's ever rising taxes and ever falling services. They loathed the rising crime and the war on cops.
Probably the biggest reason so many cited for leaving was strong desire not to expose their multi-racial kids to wokester education and Critical Race Theory. They said they didn't want their kids to grow up to be victims full of hate for others. They very much liked that red states such as South Carolina and North Carolina and Texas and Florida are full of people who "have manners."
"You can breathe in a place like that," said one.
All of these things are realities of why Californians are fleeing. It's not COVID as they claim. It's not reduced legal immigration, well made up for by illegal immigration now.
It's wokester socialism and the high cost of living.
In South Carolina, my friend said everyone else they were meeting who was buying a home was from someplace else, and most were fleeing the horrors of their own one-party blue states. Yes, they intended to vote conservative, not liberal, as some areas have been seeing from earlier waves of leavers who made their way to places like Phoenix and Austin. It suggests that that this intense wave of people fleeing California are more values-motivated.
This ought to be a huge embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats. They've gotten every last thing they've wanted on the wokester wish list — illegals, goodies for illegals, wokester education, high taxes, greenie policies, rolling blackouts, high electrical bills brought on by greenie mandates, cultural supremacy, falling educational scores, non-stop lockdowns — and people don't want to live in it. They don't like the socialist paradise, and they're fleeing like Venezuelans.
Yet amazingly, they delude themselves that none of this is their fault.
As was said by Jack Nicolson in A Few Good Men, "you can't handle the truth."
They're losing huge chunks of their tax base as well as a congressional seat to human flight (they even lost billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to Texas), yet they still have no intention of trying to find out why. There's no light on; it's no wake-up call in those quarters.
Seems it's because they are counting on Joe Biden to take from the prospering red states and use them to bail out their socialist failure. Nobody's thinking of solving this by finding things to do that might just persuade people to stay. They don't care that people are fleeing. Yet they're the loudest voices out there talking about "sustainability" and "sustainable growth." Everyone can see that on the sustainability front, they fail, big time. Bearing only socialism, they are nothing but revolting leeches.
California Population Declined in 2020 as Thousands Fled Newsom-Boudin Axis of Terror
California's population fell by more than 182,000 in 2020, the state's first yearly population decline in recorded history, as thousands of residents fled the Democratic-controlled state.
The shocking exodus could be an issue for embattled governor Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), who will face a recall election later this year. Earlier this week, the California secretary of state announced recall proponents had collected enough valid signatures to trigger a gubernatorial recall, the first of its kind in nearly two decades.
Rising crime and homelessness, unaffordable housing costs, exorbitant tax rates, and a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic are among the factors fueling the effort to oust Newsom, who was busted on severaloccasions for flouting the state's pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings.
Residents have been fleeing California on a consistent basis over the last decade. According to a census data analysis, 6.1 million people left California for others states between 2010 and 2020, compared with 4.9 million who moved to California from other states during that same period. Last year's population decline suggests residents are increasingly fed up with the Democratic Party's stranglehold on the state's political system and with elected politicians' inability to address the numerous crises facing the state.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, exacerbated California's already out-of-control homelessness crisis. In 2019, California accounted for 12 percent of the nation's population overall and 25 percent of the nation's homeless population. The problem got even worse in 2020, when California's homeless population rose by 7 percent statewide, 13 percent in Los Angeles County, and as much as 25 percent in San Francisco.
California's largest cities have also experienced a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes in the first quarter of 2021, according to a recent study. Racially motivated attacks on Asian Americans increased 80 percent in Los Angeles and 140 percent in San Francisco compared with the first quarter of 2020.
Newsom is not the only Democrat in California to come under fire for failed leadership. Chesa Boudin, the radical left-wing district attorney of San Francisco, is facing two separate recall campaigns that have until Aug. 11 to collect the required amount of signatures. Boudin was recently the subject of a 60 Minutesprofile that was largely sympathetic to his controversial efforts to reform the criminal justice system by refusing to charge and imprison violent criminals.
Boudin, the son of left-wing terrorists who were convicted for their role in an armed robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead and several others severely wounded, worked as a translator for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez before being elected district attorney in 2019.
Boudin's efforts to crack down on law enforcement have not been especially well-received, even in deep blue San Francisco. Severalpeople were killed last year by repeat offenders who might have otherwise been in prison for past criminal acts. They were on the street because Boudin's office declined to file charges in the name of social justice.
In March, the radical district attorney dropped charges against a man who filmed a racially charged assault on an elderly Asian man and later uploaded a video of the violent attack on social media. The man was also suspected of violating his probation related to a battery charge.
Concerned citizens are fleeing the Newsom-Boudin axis of terror for good reasons. Those who stay are left with few viable options. One of them is to make history by electing Caitlyn Jenner the first trans governor in American history.
California's leaders delude themselves about why their state is losing people
The 2020 Census results are a complete embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats.
Despite opening the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens, making the state the home to one out of four foreigners who break into the country without authorization, the state has made substandard gains in population over the last decade.
The population that the state did gain over the last decade was well below the 7.4% national average, according to the New York Times, and really bad compared to places like number-one Texas. As a result, the state is losing a congressional seat, for the first time in its 170-year history. It's happening despite the 6.1% gain because the number of congressional seats is capped at 435. Any state that gains a seat does so at the expense of another. Hello, California.
That's a significant reversal, because until now, California's story has always been about growth, with Census data often showing that its population had doubled.
Worse still, the population has gone negative, not merely substandard in growth, just in the past year. Residents are voting with their feet.
California's population declined by more than 182,000 people last year, marking the first time in the state's history that it has experienced a year-over-year loss.
State officials said Friday that California's population slid 0.46 percent to slightly under 39.5 million people between January 2020 and January 2021, the Associated Press reported.
Yet despite these embarrassing numbers, brought on by one-party leftist rule in California, state officials delude themselves that it's nothing to do with their policies. Breitbart notes:
State officials chalk off the declining population over the past year to a declining birth rate, reductions in international immigration, and deaths from the coronavirus.
In 2020 alone, 51,000 Californians died from the coronavirus.
Really? I just went to a farewell party last night in Lake Elsinore, California — a very multi-racial one, where nearly all of the attendees were black and Mexican. They were homeowners. Industrious immigrants. Entrepreneurs. Cops. Military people. The street they were on, in a very pretty, newish neighborhood of McMansions with big yards and swimming pools, was loaded with "For Sale" signs.
My friend, her husband, and their kids were pulling up stakes for South Carolina. They weren't the only ones planning on going
Reasons cited? Not just high housing costs — the party attendees already had their own homes, as Breitbart cited, quoting the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, who's now running in California's recall referendum to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.
They cited a feeling of non-representation in the one-party state run solely by Democrats. They felt shut out. They detested the state's ever rising taxes and ever falling services. They loathed the rising crime and the war on cops.
Probably the biggest reason so many cited for leaving was strong desire not to expose their multi-racial kids to wokester education and Critical Race Theory. They said they didn't want their kids to grow up to be victims full of hate for others. They very much liked that red states such as South Carolina and North Carolina and Texas and Florida are full of people who "have manners."
"You can breathe in a place like that," said one.
All of these things are realities of why Californians are fleeing. It's not COVID as they claim. It's not reduced legal immigration, well made up for by illegal immigration now.
It's wokester socialism and the high cost of living.
In South Carolina, my friend said everyone else they were meeting who was buying a home was from someplace else, and most were fleeing the horrors of their own one-party blue states. Yes, they intended to vote conservative, not liberal, as some areas have been seeing from earlier waves of leavers who made their way to places like Phoenix and Austin. It suggests that that this intense wave of people fleeing California are more values-motivated.
This ought to be a huge embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats. They've gotten every last thing they've wanted on the wokester wish list — illegals, goodies for illegals, wokester education, high taxes, greenie policies, rolling blackouts, high electrical bills brought on by greenie mandates, cultural supremacy, falling educational scores, non-stop lockdowns — and people don't want to live in it. They don't like the socialist paradise, and they're fleeing like Venezuelans.
Yet amazingly, they delude themselves that none of this is their fault.
As was said by Jack Nicolson in A Few Good Men, "you can't handle the truth."
They're losing huge chunks of their tax base as well as a congressional seat to human flight (they even lost billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to Texas), yet they still have no intention of trying to find out why. There's no light on; it's no wake-up call in those quarters.
Seems it's because they are counting on Joe Biden to take from the prospering red states and use them to bail out their socialist failure. Nobody's thinking of solving this by finding things to do that might just persuade people to stay. They don't care that people are fleeing. Yet they're the loudest voices out there talking about "sustainability" and "sustainable growth." Everyone can see that on the sustainability front, they fail, big time. Bearing only socialism, they are nothing but revolting leeches.
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News.
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE.
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
“You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!”
That’s the advertising hook for the city’s newest walking tour, and it worked — tickets sold out, weeks in advance. The guide remains anonymous, and the big reveal is set for next Saturday, but what we do know is that he is a San Francisco native, a “political junkie,” and a “card-carrying City Commissioner” and he’s ready to pull back the curtain on the “policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader” in every civic crisis imaginable.
Also from the promotional teaser:
How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless (“cruel and inhuman”; “violation of multiple human rights”)?
The tour is an easy 1.5 miles, and participants will have a chance to see the “open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores.”
We might be tempted to immediately assume the mystery tour guide is a conservative, given his sardonic stunt over the undeniable causality between leftism and societal rot, but I’m not so sure. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d wager that he is actually a leftist himself (a circumstantial speculation, of course).
First off, this man is evidently well-versed in the “rules” of Saul Alinsky, given his strategy of ridicule, a tool that Alinksy touted as “man’s most potent weapon.”
Secondly, he writes this:
You will find no better expert. Your guide is an urban policy professional… overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m…. He has spent hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss. (This event is the result of his own mental-health crisis.)
When he says he’s an “urban policy professional” I can only assume he has some sort of academic background in the field; not typically (if ever) a route taken by principled conservatives. It’s also safe to assume that this man has been in government a long time because a) it would be unusual for a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate to receive commissioned appointment with a half a billion dollar budget; and b) how could anyone drive themselves to the point of a “mental-health crisis” over government being hopelessly incapable of solving social issues? The government’s literal modus operandi is to leave everything it touches worse off — more intervention always equals more problems — every conservative knows that!
The man in question almost reminds me of the highly-distinguished Thomas Sowell, who at one point was a left-wing Marxist. As a young man, he saw gaping wealth disparities in Manhattan, and when he stumbled upon the writings of Karl Marx, Sowell said they “seemed to make sense.”
But then… Sowell took a summer internship at the federal Department of Labor, and very quickly learned that “the government is not simply the personification of the general will” but rather “the government institutions have their own institutional interests.” Soon thereafter, Sowell abandoned Marxism and became a limited government conservative; his conversion story can be watched here:
Anyone who can work in government, see the problems with government firsthand, then “spend hundreds of hours” on a fool’s errand like trying to get the government to be more efficient can only be a leftist.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required
Walgreens Closes Five Bay Area Stores amid BLACK Shoplifting Surge
The ongoing shoplifting surge has forced Walgreens to close five more San Francisco stores as local law enforcement continues to do next to nothing to curtail the problem.
In a statement to SF Gate, Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso confirmed “organized retail crime” has strangled San Francisco stores.
“Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco, and we are not immune to that,” Caruso said. “Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average.”
“During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment,” he added.
Asha Safai, San Francisco Board of Supervisor for District 11 admitted to feeling “devastated” over the closure a Walgreens store that has “been a staple for seniors, families and children for decades.”
“I am completely devastated by this news – this Walgreens is less than a mile from seven schools and has been a staple for seniors, families and children for decades. This closure will significantly impact this community,” he tweeted.
Safai told SFGate that the shoplifting had crippled the store’s bottom-line and endangered the staff and customers to an unhealthy degree.
“This is a sad day for San Francisco,” Safai said. “We can’t continue to let these anchor institutions close that so many people rely on.”
Shoplifting has skyrocketed in San Francisco recently, likely a result of Proposition 47, which dictates stealing would not be a felony in California if the item stolen did not exceed $950.
The damage has been felt across a range of business outlets.
In May of this year, The San Francisco News described the situation as being “out of control,” noting that 17 Walgreens have had to close in the past five years due to rampant shoplifting in the city.
17 Walgreen locations in San Francisco have closed their doors within the last five years according to a report from the SF Chronicle. Ten of these closures transpired from 2019 to this year with the last Walgreens store to close its door as of this writing, back on March 17. The cause of the closures is due to rampant shoplifting and looting that has transpired at Walgreen locations in the city believed to be perpetuated by an organized crime ring.
On Thursday, May 13 a hearing was held by the Board of Supervisors with retailers, the SFPD, the district attorney’s office, and probation departments. Brendan Dugan, director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations, believes that San Francisco is at the center of organized retail crime. He brought up a state bust in the Bay Area from last year in which $8 million in stolen merchandise was confiscated from five suspects. The merchandise came from CVS, Target and Walgreens stores from all across San Francisco.
The lack of enforcement made shoplifters so nonchalant and casual they would often steal in broad daylight while awestruck customers documented the crime on their iPhones, allowing for some viral internet moments.
A prominent Safeway supermarket in the Castro district of San Francisco is limiting its hours due to rampant shoplifting, the latest example of a retail store closing or limiting its operations in the left-liberal city due to out-of-control petty crime.
Shoppers at the Safeway in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood will see a noticeable change to the store: It now closes at 9 p.m. due to what one supervisor described as “out of control” shoplifting.
Once open 24 hours a day, the Safeway store on Market and Church streets now has the earliest closing hours of all the Pleasanton-based supermarket chain’s San Francisco storefronts, most of which stay open until midnight.
…
[San Francisco Supervisor Rafael] Mandelman said theft at the Safeway at 2020 Market Street has been “out of control” and recently met with Safeway representatives “to better understand the issues at this store.” He said he also planned to meet with the San Francisco Police Department and the office of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin “to see what is currently being done to deter theft at Safeway, and to figure out a plan to do better.”
Earlier this year, Walgreens closed 17 stores in the city due to shoplifting, which skyrocketed after California voters passed Proposition 47, a ballot initiative aimed at criminal justice reform, which reclassified thefts up to $950 as misdemeanors. As a result, such thefts are rarely prosecuted.
The crime spike began under former district attorney George Gascón, who is now district attorney for Los Angeles County, and has continued under Chesa Boudin, who now faces a likely recall election.
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 recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
To most readers of this column, the question is absurd. The reason is not because the question is, in fact, absurd; it is because most readers of this column are conservative, and many are religious.
Am I implying that most leftists do not believe stealing is wrong?
Yes, I am.
As incredible as this assertion is to just about all religious people and virtually all conservatives, most leftists do not believe stealing is wrong. Since I always draw a distinction between those on the Left and liberals, let me add that I suspect most liberals think stealing is wrong. But it almost doesn't matter because they vote for people who do not think it is.
One proof is the passage of Proposition 47, a California ballot initiative passed in 2014, under which theft of less than $950 in goods is treated as a nonviolent misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. As a result, in Democrat-run California cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, retail theft has soared.
Walgreens stores in San Francisco are racking up four times the average amount of theft in Walgreens stores across the country; spending on security guards in San Francisco is 35 times more than the chain's average in other cities. Walgreens has been forced to close 22 stores in the city since 2016.
As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Safeway located in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood ... was a longstanding, 24-hour fixture in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. But as of last week, the store's hours have been cut back to 6 a.m. to 9 p.m ... A Safeway spokesperson (said) that the cutbacks are 'due to an increasing amount of theft at the store.'"
Further proof that the Left doesn't consider theft wrong — at least when committed by a person of color — was an interview broadcast on NPR last year with the author of a book titled "In Defense of Looting." The NPR interviewer threw only softball questions to the author.
In the last election, Los Angeles voters elected San Francisco's previous district attorney, George Gascon, as Los Angeles's district attorney. It was Los Angeles's way of declaring that stealing is not wrong. And it is worth noting that it is not only racial minorities and the poor who make these elections possible; it is also prosperous whites. The Los Angeles DA is a wealthy white, and he was supported by a white billionaire, George Soros.
It is hard to believe that millions of Americans do not deem stealing from stores morally wrong, so let's try to explain how this has come about.
Reason No. 1 is moral relativism. For as long as there has been a Left, it has rejected moral absolutes. As the great British historian, Paul Johnson, pointed out a half-century ago in his magnum opus, "Modern Times," the secular world applied the relativism of the natural sciences to morality.
Reason No. 2 is the reason for reason number one: the collapse of the Judeo-Christian value system and the accompanying abandonment of, and often disdain for, biblical ethics. Biblical morality posits moral absolutes — meaning that stealing is wrong for everyone, certainly people of every color. Yes, one can offer a biblical defense of a starving man stealing food for his starving family. But that is hardly what is happening in San Francisco and other American cities.
Reason No. 3 is Marxist morality. From Marx to the present, Marxism has divided the world not between right and wrong, but between economic classes. Therefore, it is morally acceptable for members of the poorer classes to steal from members of the more affluent classes. This notion has made its way into young people's minds for decades. About 30 years ago, I spoke to students from four Cleveland high schools. I asked them to raise their hand if they would steal something they really wanted from a department store if they were certain they would not get caught. Nearly all the students raised their hands. When I asked some of them to justify their reasoning, they all said the same thing: they wouldn't steal from a mom-and-pop store, but they would steal from a department store. It is OK to steal from "the rich."
Reason No. 4 is leftists' view of nonwhites, especially blacks, a view that conservatives have never shared. Leftists truly believe that blacks are intellectually and morally inferior to whites. The evidence? They do not believe blacks should be held to the same intellectual and moral standards to which leftists hold whites. Leftists do not defend whites who steal, and they hold whites to higher intellectual standards. Leftists do not argue for lowering math standards for whites, only for blacks.
The bottom line is the Left is immoral. That is why it defends stealing.
Oakland NAACP Calls for 'State of Emergency' Over Crime
The Oakland NAACP released a statement Thursday calling for state and local elected leaders to declare a "state of emergency" as a result of increasing violent crime in the California city.
The statement, written by Oakland NAACP president Cynthia Adams and Bishop Bob Jackson of Acts Full Gospel Church, blasted soft-on-crime local officials as well as left-wing activism for the surge in crime.
"Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals," Adams and Jackson wrote.
Adams and Jackson also said that African Americans were disproportionately affected by crime and criticized misguided attempts to alleviate racism by refusing to prosecute violent offenders.
"There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime," the statement read.
Adams and Jackson called on city and state officials to devote additional resources, including police officers, to resolve the problem:
"We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis."
The statement comes amid a spike in crime in the Bay Area. In neighboring San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was forced to flee a speech on combating violent crime after someone threw a brick in the crowd.
Several big-name brands like Nordstrom and Saks OFF 5th and hotel chains have left the area due to concerns about public safety.
Andrew Stiles • May 8, 2021 5:00 am
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