« Capitol Punishment: The film every American must see | Is Fredo Cuomo about to get whacked at CNN? »
November 30, 2021

The fall of San Francisco

By Monica Showalter

Leftists in San Francisco are in denial.

The San Francisco Chronicle is constantly putting out reports selectively parsing data to present a picture claiming there's no big crime issue in San Francisco. But it's starting to get bad now with mass looting after mass looting. Citizens are showing signs of getting angry. One hopes they can fix this before it can't be fixed.

At this point, it won't be easy. Embattled Soros-financed district attorney Chesa Boudin, is telling the press "not me" as smash-and-grab lootings of retailers in the city continue with low or no consequences.  "This is not a San Francisco specific problem.  It doesn't have anything to do with local policy," Boudin told KPIX, as if the problem didn't have a San Francisco pioneering nexus or that all of the affected cities happen to have district attorneys just like him.  For people who think there's a problem, see, it's all in their heads.  "If it feels that way then we've got work to do.  We want everyone to feel safe and to be safe in San Francisco, and until everybody is safe and feels safe our work is not done.  That's why I've been focused on proactive work."

Feels?  You see, you are only imagining things.  Chesa doesn't want you to be safe; he wants you to "feel" safe — never mind what actually happens.  Chesa's job as he sees it is to serve as chief therapist, not chief law enforcer, to relieve not criminals of their opportunities, but silly you of your delusions.

Outside all that parsing, San Francisco is starting to look like this:

Tandler, who appears to be a San Francisco community activist, and calls herself a moderate liberal, has a huge string of Twitter pictures showing just how bad it's gotten around Union Square, which is San Francisco's once-glittering high-end retail center.

There's more here:

Stores are being boarded up around the 19th-century Union Square shopping area, which are mostly beautiful old buildings, some of which could have actually been seen by famous city residents such as Mark Twain and William T. Sherman.  The boarded-up might include the city's single Frank Lloyd Wright building, just off Union Square on Maiden Lane, which houses a high-end Italian retailer on its bottom floor.  You know that both that building owner and the shop itself would want to protect those contents.

Max Mara, Harry Winston, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Hublot, Lacoste, Neiman Marcus, Yves St. Laurent, Fendi, Ferragamo, Gucci...all boarded up as if at war.  I used to shop at San Francisco's Gucci in the early 1980s because the sale-rack Guccis were affordable for a college student back then, and, being a college student at the University of San Francisco, the Preppy Handbook told me to.  Naturally, I worked at Brooks Brothers down the street at 201 Post Street.  Sigh.  It used to be elegant and engaging as an area.  Now it's got that Detroit-in-the-'80s look.

Anyone surprised that the crowds are staying away now?  Who wants to spend a thousand bucks for high-end retail wares in a war zone when there are nicer places one can go?

Imagine what trying to sell to Black Friday customers must have been like for the Louis Vuitton shop, which got mass-looted on Nov. 19, just before its anticipated Black Friday haul.  Who would go there?  Even if they went, what would the store have to sell?

It's not just the ambience issue, either; it's bona fide fears of violence.  During a mass looting event in next-door Oakland, a former San Francisco police officer who was working security at a store was shot dead by a looter over the weekend.  The mass-looting in San Francisco on Nov. 19, and the few arrests that followed, yielded two firearms recovered by police from the five arrested.  That's forty percent who were armed, and these were the slow, underachieving looters who actually got caught, not the faster ones who got away.  The city's police chief said the police were "confronting armed individuals" in these lootings.  The Chron, of course, called the whole thing a "wild weekend," omitting only the expected chaser "of fun."

There's no significant plan for stopping these organized lootings.  The city's plan thus far has been prophylactic measures unrelated to the root cause of the crime spree.  They've closed the square to car traffic, as if cars were the problem, given that the looters like to come in car caravans and block off some roads from cops to permit their own escapes.  In San Francisco, arrests for these mass lootings can be counted on one hand, with even the less-bad San Francisco Examiner getting called out for padding the numbers in this story correction.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, no stranger to San Francisco's retail scene, given that he ran some fancy restaurants there before his political career, has taken interest in the issue by redirecting the California Highway Patrol to act as mall cops in the various shopping places that have been affected by mass lootings.  Again, Band-Aid measures, not long-term solutions, given that the important highway-policing the CHP does is going to get neglected as a result, while the real reasons for the retail apocalypse go unaddressed.

The root of the problem is that district attorneys such as Chesa Boudin, who constantly let looters off to advance their Soros chaos agenda, have let the city go lawless.  The Chron and Boudin yak a lot about more prosecution percentages, but they fail to note that crimes are no longer being reported, and police are no longer scooping criminals off the streets.  Why waste time with that dirty, thankless job only to see the effort go to waste with a district attorney who's just going to let the bad guys out, based on the fact that many in this group are black?  Gangsta rap culture, which many black young people involved in these lootings are devoted to, glorifies looting.  Want low crime rates?  Just have the cops bust no one and the locals stop reporting crimes. 

"The stats are fictitious.  Nobody reports.  People are hunkering down," Tandler tweeted.

But pictures don't lie.  Now even the abundant crowds, in the past brimming with tourists with cash to spend, are staying away.  Black Friday in San Francisco's Union Square, among the boarded-up shops, appeared to be a bust.

Quote: 

"I don't feel safe anymore," said Jocelyn Quiroz. "We try not to go to San Francisco anymore because it doesn't make sense to go there right now."

Quiroz, who chose to shop on Monday at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, said she's more vigilant of her surroundings while shopping and picky about where she goes in the wake of the recent retail smash-and-grabs.

There's no end in sight to this, so the boarded-up shops are likely to continue so long as Boudin is on the job, which would be until June at the earliest, assuming the voters wake up and recall him.

San Francisco, in the meantime, can now adjust to its new normal.  And you can bet that more retailers will pull up stakes and move to some less looter-friendly place to do business.  They've already lost one Target store and a string of Walgreens.  (The Chron claims it's not really happening for the reasons it's obviously happening.)  As for the closing of the Target, the particular store seems to have been misidentified in an earlier report which has since been corrected, and SFGate attributed the whole thing to a plot by Jared Kushner.  Kid you not. 

San Francisco's mayor, meanwhile, has her own priorities:

This is gaslighting like nobody's business. 

The Chronicle's propaganda effort to boost Boudin, however, should continue through the coming months with denials about crime, claims about tough enforcement, and other nonsense that does not square with what people can see and experience with their own eyes.

There's no arguing that the city is in decline.  People move away from places with boarded-up shops, particularly if they've got money to do it.  If they are in San Francisco to start with, already paying its inflated taxes and costs of living, it's quite likely they will.  Already, a poll shows that nearly half of San Francisco's residents plan to move away.  That was in July.  One wonders what the percentage is now.

Let's not forget another sort of longstanding problem in that city: the disappearance of the city's black residents based on flight from the high costs of living in the city.  These are the working-class people, not the welfare class, who have been hit hardest by the city's wokester policies.  Heckuva job, leftists.  Speaking of "systemic racism"...

The pushback from the far left and its media allies in this city should probably not be surprising, given that the city has been steeped in leftism for four decades.  But the decline of the city seems to be coming suddenly now, and the city is getting joyless and ugly.  Even the buildings are taking on an ugly gray tone.  Those once joyfully colored Victorian houses and other buildings — they're all going to a defensive-mode battleship or tungsten gray.  "It's like a cemetery," a denizen told the Guardian. "With the left having no answers to the crimes that plague the city other than its great gaslightings, San Franciscans can now decide if they'd like to have their lovely city or see their city become the next Detroit, a cautionary tale to all other cities.

Image: Twitter screen shot.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com