Who Destroyed San Francisco and Why?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
Part One – August 25, 2023:
It should have been impossible to wreck San Francisco. It is the world’s most naturally beautiful city, with perhaps the most ideal bay, harbor, and ports of any coastal metropolis. San Francisco is America’s premier window on the East. It serves as the natural conduit of commercial and cultural exchanges with the rising wealth of Asia and its dynamic economies in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. During World War II, the Bay Area was the shipping point of supply to the Pacific Theater. The same role was true of the Korean and Vietnam wars and could be again if China were to invade Taiwan. The weather is mild year long. Mountains and shorelines are side-by-side. It is the gateway to the wine country of Napa, Mendocino, and Sonoma counties. A mere decade ago, San Francisco’s downtown commercial property was among the most coveted and high-priced in the nation. Prior generations had left behind once state-of-the-art clean and efficient mass transit. They built five majestic bridges across the 1,600 square mile sprawling bay and estuaries that connected the city and its environs to millions of suburbanites. The city has access to the state’s main freeways that head out eastward, northward, and southward. Our ancestors long ago solved San Francisco’s water problems by importing vast amounts of potable water in aqueducts from the distant Hetch Hetchy and California Water Project mountain reservoirs. Silicon Valley had slowly crept into San Francisco, suppling it with some of its trillions of dollars in market capitalization. Not long ago, some of the nation’s major corporations were based in the city itself, including Craigslist, the Gap, Levi Strauss, Lyft, PG&E, Charles Schwab, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber, and Wells Fargo. Two great universities—UC Berkeley and Stanford—bookended the city. Both from their top-ranked graduate and professional schools turned out yearly scores of Bay Area topflight engineers, computer scientists, doctors, lawyers, and business leaders. Four Bay Area California State University campuses—in San Francisco, Vallejo, Hayward, and San Jose—graduated thousands of teachers, nurses, business people, and vocational professionals. The Bay Area Community College Consortium claims 24 of the state’s best junior colleges in the greater Bay Area region. In other words, San Franciscans inherited one of the most successful, multi-tiered, private and public higher education systems in the nation. San Francisco was of course also famous for its role in sparking social change from the Haight-Ashbury/Winterland days to the Gay liberation movement to the Green/Sierra Club/Planet Earth days. At one time, the city’s cable cars, Golden Gate Park, Zoo, Palace of Fine Arts, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and Pier 39 drew in over 25 million tourists each year. Hollywood saw San Francisco as one of its favorite film sites. It is that majestic inheritance that an arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent current generation of San Franciscans destroyed. The present hubristic elite took their inherited wonderland and, in a decade, finally turned it into a moonscape. And it was such a dystopia that many who created it soon wanted no part of it, and so headed off to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho where they sought a pristine city to work their magic of destruction all over again. The current elite certainly did not deserve the beautiful and functional city that they inherited from far better generations—only in their utopian egotism systematically ruined it, rendering it now more unlivable than Detroit. Watch any on-site, live shots from films of the last seven decades, from the 1950s onward until the last decade—Vertigo (1958) to Bullitt (1968) to even Blue Jasmine (2013). And the incidental city shots reveal little trash on the streets. No blocks of empty windows appear on screen. Hordes are not seen living in filth on the sidewalks. Passersby seems normal and even well-dressed. Of course, film crews of those eras were not subject to serial smash-and-grab car break-ins, the swarming of stores, exempted and routine shoplifting, unpunished carjacking, and no-bail, same-day release of arrested violent offenders.
Part Two – August 29, 2023
Who were to blame for the San Francisco Inferno? Anarchistic leftwing state laws and ballot initiatives that green-lighted criminal activity? Grasping city, county, and state governments that both raised taxes to the nation’s highest levels and passed crushing regulations—and yet gave the taxpayers mediocre services in return? Radical and inept city attorneys who boasted about their new policies of nonenforcement of existing laws? A mayor and city council who bragged about defunding the police? A guilt-ridden Bay Area political, government, intellectual, and commercial elite who destroyed old customs and traditions, laws, protocols, and decencies, and then fled to their desert, Napa, Marin County, Lake Tahoe, or Pebble Beach tony getaways, to ensure they were never subject to the consequences of their own destructive ideology? Identity politics pressure groups who, for example, for a time had destroyed meritocratic Lowell High School? A narcissistic and atheistic culture of satisfying the appetites, deprecating the nuclear family, and ensuring a negative fertility rate that reflected the self-absorption of the single “emancipated” woman and cool metrosexual hipster? “Community activists” who screamed about “reparations” from a historically liberal state that never permitted slavery, and yet demanded billions owed to the black community without ever noting that young black males were currently committing violent city crimes at twenty and thirty times their city demographics—without a whimper from leaders who were so eager to denigrate, stereotype, collectivize, and demonize every other ethnic group except themselves? But who were the actual culpable who took paradise and rendered it purgatory? And why? First, there was a reign (2004–2022) of mediocre or sinister district attorneys—Kamala Harris, George Gascón, and Chesa Boudin—who collectively weaponized the city justice system by predicating the enforcement of laws on politics and ideology, on the theory of redistributive social justice. None were elected due to any prior record of successful prosecutions and professionalism. All ran for office on claims they either were blessed by the old-boy San Francisco liberal regime or spouted Marxist claptrap to entice an ignorant young cadre of voters. No matter: deterrence was lost. The criminal was assured his violent crimes were understandable, if in theory directed against the well-off and successful. The victimized poor were neglected, the victimized middle class began leaving, and the victimized rich used their security details and distant fourth homes as an easy escape. The homeless were romanticized as victims of the “system,” not as the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, and the criminal, who in the past were either institutionalized, incarcerated—or, if sane, drug-free, and without a warrant, given a free ride out of the city to a clean and humane camping space far from the crowded downtown. The larger cast of the culpable anarchists is enormous, whose policies, votes, appointments, and advocacies ensured the current chaos: the California leftwing supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, the overwhelmingly Democratic congressional delegations, the two perennially Democratic U.S. Senators, and the cadres of Democratic statewide office holders. Of course, in particular, we should blame the leftwing San Francisco mayors, particularly of the last thirty years who sowed the seeds of destruction long ago that were harvested by an even worse cast of characters presently on the scene. The last Republican mayor was George Christopher who left office nearly sixty years ago in 1964. His departure inaugurated the six-decade elite arrogance of “anything and everything” begun by Democrat John Shelly (1964–68). We should fault especially the most recent mayors—Willie Brown (1996–2004), Gavin Newsom (2004–11), Bill Lee (2011–17), and particularly London Breed (2018–). Under the last three, the city increasingly became filthy and rancid. The homeless population not only exploded but became emboldened by the fact they ruled the streets and faced no consequences for defecating, urinating, fornicating, injecting, harassing, and assaulting the innocent in broad daylight on the streets. Governor Gavin Newsom’s Covid-19 lockdown of the city and state was a near coup de grace to an already hemorrhaging city. Predictably, both he and arch-quarantinist Nancy Pelosi were caught brazenly breaking their own Draconian mask and shutdown rules—Newsom eating at the ritzy French Laundry maskless with a pack of special interest lobbyists, and Pelosi sneaking maskless into a salon to have her hair secretly done. The last California Republican governor was Rhino/liberal Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger who finished his gubernatorial term in 2011. California has not seen a true conservative Republican governor, however, in nearly a quarter century since the end of Pete Wilson’s term in 1999. In other words, bad mayors were empowered by bad legislators and bad governors—and ultimately bad voters—once millions who had voted for Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson had long since left the state.
Part Three – August 30, 2023
So what happened? In a word, too much astounding wealth and too much abject poverty created a medieval keep surrounded by a village of peasantry outside the high walls. California in general, and in particular the Bay Area, ushered in the greatest concentration of wealth in civilizational history, with some nine trillion dollars of market capitalization from Silicon Valley. An eight-billion-person world increasingly all had an iPhone or Mac and ran Google searches or Facebooked or Tweeted—and their money ended up from Union Square to Sunnyvale. As a consequence, twenty- to forty-somethings believed their astounding riches were proof of their astounding morality, genius, and deserved entitlement. Their utopian legacy was a bankrupt high-speed rail system that will take a half-century and $300 billion to travel quickly from Bakersfield to Merced. They gave us a fantasy world where the more a criminal steals, maims, and kills with impunity, the more the exempted lawbreaker will view such enlightened magnanimity by reciprocating with proper and civilized behavior. Green religion has all but destroyed the once-rich California timber, mining, and gas and oil industries and explains much of the strangulation of the middle class. Bay Area voters and legislators ensured that in times of drought millions of precious acre feet of water flowed out to sea rather than were stored in reservoirs or used to grow food for a hungry state. Only in California and only with the prompt of a Bay Area radical chic, would a state use $500 billion, in part from a “water bond” designed to increase water storage, to blow up four dams and reservoirs that provided clean hydroelectric power, stored precious water in times of drought, ensured flood control during dangerously wet years, and offered recreation to thousands of the despised middle class. On the opposite socio-economic scale came an influx of immigrants from south of the border and Asia. Over a fourth of the state’s current residents were not born in America. California hosted the largest number of unaudited and illegal aliens in the nation. It greeted them with the greatest sanctuary city and county protection racket in America. The state’s schools and culture indoctrinated the newcomers with the paradox that their escape from poverty, violence, racism, and corruption was ironically to a nation and state supposedly even worse than where they came. How odd that many of those who escaped violence and racism, and entered the U.S. illegally, arrived with demands on their hosts for previous bad treatment—on the prompt of the wealthy who had done so well in America. The result of all this chaos is that the state and especially the Bay Area has the greatest number of billionaires in the nation, the most numerous rich zip codes and congressional districts, the highest cost of living, the most expensive homes, gas, and power and food that are unaffordable—to accommodate the largest number of homeless people of any state, the greatest number of people who live under the poverty line, and the most numerous welfare recipients in the country. Translated into the streets of San Francisco that means laws, regulations, and rules do not apply to the underclass since the sheer extent of noncompliance and illegality makes statutes unenforceable. But in financial and psychological recompense, all this statutory cargo most certainly does apply to the middle class who are harried, talked down to, and despised by the elite as a way of squaring the circle of their impotence through harassing the innocent, given they are unable to regulate, tax, and sermonize to the underclass. Add the people, policies, and politicians up, and conclude that if one did not have a current San Francisco, California, one would have to invent it—given the present disaster is the logical and ultimate expression of the classical hubris of excessive pride and arrogance leading to a state of out of control behavior, culminating in nemesis, the inevitable divine retribution that brings warranted punishment for such haughty and arrogant egoists. The final, the surreal paradox? Gavin Newsom may well be the Democratic presidential nominee, edging easily out another San Francisco failure, Kamala Harris. Newsom may well run on the campaign pledge that he wants to replicate for the United States what he did to San Francisco and California. And he could win.
If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools. Plato
This post first appeared on America-Wake-Up | This Is A Library Of News Events Not Reported By The Main Stream Media Documenting & Connecting The Dots On How The Obama Marxist Liberal Agenda Is Destroying America, please read the originial post: here
