How the radical Left turned America's cities into “slums” | Michael Shellenberger interview

I can't walk through downtown San Francisco or downtown Los Angeles without seeing people doing drugs defecating in public. Hello and welcome to offscript. My name is Stephen Edgington. Why do so many people leave big

cities

? Some blame the pandemic, but is there something deeper going on here? To find out, I'm joined by American environmentalist Michael Schellenberger, whose recent book San Francisco explains why progressives ruined

cities

. Is there a phenomenon of people leaving big cities in the United States? There is definitely a phenomenon of people leaving big cities. There has also been a phenomenon of people leaving California in particular, however we have not seen it translate into lower housing prices, so to the extent that people are leaving it is not clear if they are selling their homes , so it may be a phenomenon where some people temporarily leave without selling, but unfortunately that means that there hasn't been the kind of economic consequence for city governments to reform their policies to keep their residents happy, for what California in particular and where these people go, I mean, people from California go. to all kinds of states, i mean, the most famous is texas, but people go to nevada, traditionally they've gone to texas, utah, california, sorry, uh, colorado, uh, washington, oregon, i mean, Actually, everywhere California has had net migration over the last few years and it accelerated under Kovid, but yes, I'm referring to the problems I described in San Francisco, which are mostly problems that had traditionally occurred in the progressive west coast, are now being seen in other cities across the United States as we grapple with our drugs. drug addiction and overdose crisis and is the pandemic accelerating these trends of people leaving big cities for other places? properties in the countryside and other places on the outskirts of London yeah sure I mean it's definitely happening we just haven't seen the fall in house prices I mean that's part of the problem I think in California There is a feeling among political leaders. elected officials and sometimes they say it out loud, which is basically where else are you going to go?

California is still such a desirable place. A spectacular geography. Incredible weather. People really want to live here. I really want to live here. And those of us who are fighting to improve this place one disadvantage that we have is that people politicians have this attitude that hey, you don't really know if you want to live here, uh, you don't really, you can't really vote with your feet, so that's been a big part of the problem, I think the other problem is that there's something called the curling effect which is named after a mayor of Boston, a terrible mayor who ousted a lot of the people he was unpopular with. and the result was that the people who were

left

behind were the ones who were increasingly in favor of them, so you end up having a kind of self-reinforcing vicious cycle and I think to some extent that has happened in California in in general and in San Francisco in particular.

I want to talk about san francisco in a moment why people leave cities like san francisco in general. Can you give people some reasons besides, say, housing prices or the pandemic? There seems to be something else going on here. I mean, I think it's hard for people who are not from here or who haven't spent any time on YouTube watching videos to understand how seriously chaotic and deteriorated the situation has become. You've started to see some people in New York complain about scenes that have become very common and familiar in San Francisco, but also in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, which is where there are what Europeans really call open drug scenes. which Americans have euphemistically referred to as homeless camps, which is actually a mischaracterization of what happens in these situations, these are groups of drug users who because of their addiction have lost contact with friends and family members no longer work live on the streets because they are saving their money to support their addiction these are people who are often sometimes traumatized sometimes they just became addicted because of the holidays too It's difficult but the addiction crisis in the United States has grown enormously.

He used to work for philanthropic organizations supported by George Soros, the well-known currency speculator and billionaire. He now he is a major philanthropist in the United States and has been for almost 30 years when I arrived. I have worked on drug decriminalization issues or what we call harm reduction issues in the 1990s in the year 2000 17 thousand people were dying in the United States from illicit drugs this year one hundred thousand people died from illicit drugs uh, overdoses Drug abuse and drug poisoning is the number one cause of death among people ages 18 to 45. We know that we can put that 100,000 into perspective, that's three times as many people as die in car accidents, that's five times as many people as die from homicides, so the drug crisis is really what it should be. be like the number one problem in some ways or at least it should be a level one problem, but it's been like a level three problem for reasons that we can talk about, but what's really at the core of what we call our homeless problem, but to a certain extent.

Our crime problem is driven by drug addiction and drug abuse, let's talk about San Francisco, this is the topic of your book, the main case study you use, why did you choose that city? Well, San Francisco, I mean, it's where I live, I mean, I live in Berkeley, which is about a 20-minute drive away, it's across the bay from San Francisco, so it's a city that I love. It's a city I moved to 30 years ago. I met my wife there. I've spent a lot of time in San Francisco. Widely considered the most beautiful city in the United States, it also punches above its weight in terms of cultural and political importance.

Most of California's leaders over the past half century have come from San Francisco. I mean a tremendously disproportionate number, especially when you consider it. It has only a fraction of the population of Los Angeles, about a tenth of the population of Los Angeles, depending on how you count those two regions, but San Francisco is really the heart of American progressive liberalism and really what we would call the

radical

. Left and the subtitle of my book is why progressives ruin cities and the word progressive itself has a very interesting genealogy, but today the word is used as a synonym for liberals, often, but in reality it was also used by people on the

radical

left

and it is a word that has united people on the liberal and radical left and the result has been catastrophic and I say this as someone who comes from the left who used to be part of the radical left.

Now I consider myself liberal, not progressive, but basically San Francisco. It is truly the incubator for many of the truly terrible ideas that have been implemented and have resulted in the deterioration and destruction of some of our best cities, including but not limited to San Francisco. Can you walk us through some of the statistics from the last few years? shows what's happened in cities like San Francisco in terms of crime, drug use, homelessness, that kind of thing, sure, to give you an idea, just throughout California, California saw an increase in what we call homeless people. home by 30 percent, even as numbers declined elsewhere. of the united states at age 18 the word homelessness is really a propaganda word, it's not a very accurate word because the word ends up combining very different groups of people, it ends up combining people who are schizophrenic and who don't take their medications and need to be under some type of psychiatric care combines those people with people who are addicted to heroin, fentanyl or methamphetamine and who have lost connection with family and friends and are no longer working due to their addiction and then combines people who are just unlucky, so we have a different word that we sometimes use called unsheltered homeless, which are people who are not in shelters, those people overwhelmingly suffer from addiction and mental illness or both, so we just saw massive increases and those numbers that I even mentioned are pretty outdated at this point, it's probably more like a 50 increase in the homeless population in California, but to give you an idea, I mean you can't walk through downtown San Francisco or downtown Los Angeles without seeing people doing drugs and defecating publicly.

There really is tension everywhere in the inner city, but even in much of the city, for a long time this dysfunctional behavior was limited to a small number of poor, mostly African-American neighborhoods in our cities as the crisis Drug addiction worsened and more people arrived from all over the world. country, but also within these regions to live on the streets and support their addiction, those numbers grew so much that they were no longer contained in those neighborhoods and by that I mean, that's why I have a book deal about it, that's why it's a issue. of the national debate is because it really could no longer be contained and began to spread.

The problem began to spread throughout the city, so you see gigantic sums of money being spent on cleaning up the feces. We have port-a-potties all over the city, but it doesn't really matter because people often don't use them and open-air drug dealing is real. We have organized gangs that engage in turf wars. There are homicides. We've seen an overall increase in homicides of 30 percent between 2019 and 2020. an increase in all kinds of other crimes, property crimes, some of which are driven by addiction, like shoplifting from convenience stores and pharmacies , but we have also seen more organized crime, organized robberies and looting of department stores, we have seen many more car thefts. -ins so on the one hand you could say this is all a drug and crime problem but it's actually a governance issue where a lot of these cities have simply stopped doing what they had traditionally done to maintain law and order and I've stopped doing that actually and I argue it from a kind of ideological commitment to radical left politics towards a kind of political correctness or what we might call victim ideology or woke ideology, which is something which I know you've discussed a lot on this show, but basically the idea that there are some people in the world who are victims and they should be given everything and nothing and nothing, uh, required or requested in return when I was a kid, every few I went to San Francisco for years because I had family friends there and the city seemed absolutely wonderful to me.

We would visit Alcatraz and all these fantastic museums. I thought it would be absolutely brilliant. If I were to go to the city today, how likely would I be to encounter the problems you mentioned and would I recommend visiting San Francisco to people now. Well, I recommend visiting San Francisco. he has a sense of adventure, but his chances of encountering street addicts, people who live in tents on the street, are one hundred percent, I mean, it's inevitable. in fact, it's only gotten worse since the book came out, which is still shocking to me, even though I spent three years researching the book and two years writing it, the problem just kept getting worse and worse and that's the nature of it. about what happens when you don't treat addiction or mental illnesses and those are complicated mental illnesses, you know they are difficult illnesses to treat because the person suffering from them doesn't want treatment, often they just want to maintain their addictions, but yeah, I mean to you.

You see a large number of tents, a large number of people pushing shopping carts with all their belongings inside. You see a lot of public drug use. Lots of public drug trafficking. Part of what makes San Francisco has always been difficult to contain the drug trade. partly because it was in a downtown neighborhood called lomo, but even in Los Angeles, you see in the Skid Row neighborhood, which is also right next to downtown, you see incredibly large structures. I mean, I've been really impressed with how big it is. Tense structures have become, what you're talking about now, you know, on the one hand, a lot of them are just tents or backpacking tents, but now we're seeing very large structures with wood with people using propane tanks for cooking. barbecues, entire sidewalks. locked down, you're talking about, you know, 10-block radius areas in places like Los Angeles, which is by far the worst.

San Francisco is so small, so I think part of it is harder to get away from, but it's also spread all over Los Angeles. so the parksThey have a lot of tents and that's how it is and then the cities become dirty, so even when you clean them regularly, if there are a lot of people living on the street, they use the street as a bathroom, so the smell, the dirt, the lack of cleaning, a lot of garbage is produced by homeless people, you know, not only because they don't have regular garbage to use, but there is also a kind of hoarding where people openly deconstruct bicycles and what we call chop shops, they basically steal . bicycles and trying to sell them for spare parts, I think what's so surprising is that actually people on the street feel very comfortable at this point knowing that there will be no consequences for their behavior, so I've seen extraordinary scenes.

I mean there are scenes where people basically take up not only the entire sidewalk but large parts of the street with their belongings and their trash. I mean, I have pictures of people who are really taking up large amounts of space outside of businesses and and the city government and the police are basically unwilling or unable to do anything in part because we have these very progressive left-wing district attorneys who won't prosecute These crimes that they consider quality of life crimes that are less important than the supposed victims who perpetrate them, why? Do these people choose Los Angeles and San Francisco and cities like this to go live on the streets?

Is it because of the lack of consequences you talk about for the crimes they could commit, for example? Yeah, I mean, the main reason is that you know if you're suffering, I mean, there's all kinds of stories about it too, but people who are addicted to hard drugs know that there are certain cities that they can go to where they can get easy and cheap access to heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, just to give If you feel it, you can maintain your addiction to fentanyl and fentanyl, of course, is the opioid that has replaced heroin in San Francisco, not totally, but really has replaced heroin in San Francisco and other cities.

It is 50 times more powerful than heroin and significantly more dangerous. part of the reason we have so many people dying, but part of the reason is that it is very cheap because it is so concentrated that you can maintain your fentanyl addiction for as little as ten dollars a day in San Francisco right now, similarly you can maintain an addiction to methamphetamine for ten dollars a day and it is increasingly common that there is what we call polydrug use or people who use methamphetamine and fentanyl sometimes simultaneously but throughout the day and the result is mental illness and, often brain damage.

We know that these drugs used long term in the way they are used cause brain damage, cause serious mental illness including psychosis, so it is really out of control. There has definitely been a role for the weather. I mean, people point out that you know you can sleep for a year. -Traveled in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles because the climate is so mild, which is belied by the fact that places like Miami and other hot cities have banned public camping and outdoor drug use, they still have a problem, but it is significantly restricted, they require people to stay in homeless shelters even if they don't want to, many addicts don't want to sleep in shelters and understandably there are rules there, you are usually not allowed to inject drugs in the refuge it has.

To go out and do drugs, they put more pressure on you to reform your behavior, so it's definitely a consequence of the political environment that actually also comes from a libertarian cultural environment. I want to cite an article that interested me on this topic last year. year by Oliver Wiseman and refers to the impact that the lack of consequences for committing basic and simple crimes has on the people within these cities, which is why he says that in April, Sincere Williams, the baby of only nine months was declared dead in a San Francisco emergency room with signs of trauma on his body in January newlyweds Sharia Muscoya, 26, died while jogging in the morning when a drunk criminal in a stolen 4x4 ran a red light and hit him A few weeks earlier in broad daylight Hanukko Abe and Elizabeth Platt were killed in a hit-and-run by another criminal with a long rap sheet who was also driving a stolen car and high on methamphetamine.

In each of these cases, the perpetrator had recently been released by police, either on parole or for not pressing charges. Police had already arrested the man suspected of murdering Williams twice this year after incidents of domestic violence. the man who killed abe and platt had also been arrested for 73 felonies and 32 misdemeanors in san francisco alone can you talk about the impact that these policies have on the residents of these cities yeah i mean what you basically described is what we've seen - there is a broader movement, although it certainly started in San Francisco and has been happening in San Francisco for several decades and some of it is positive, but it is no longer there. too far away, I mean, in the United States that we had, we have very high levels of incarceration compared to the rest of the world.

We and I trace the history of this in San Francisco, but basically you know that we were probably incarcerated too much in the 1980s and 1990s, in response to significant amounts of violence, including drug-related violence, but not exclusively, there was a reaction against what I was a part of in the 1990s to look for alternatives to incarceration, many of which I think are really positive, including psychiatric drugs. rehabilitation that requires drug testing, electronic monitoring, and forms of probation and parole that would allow offenders to reintegrate into their families and communities and leave prison. The problems that have occurred have been that the prosecutors really are the radical left prosecutors.

I've just gone too far and, I mean, I personally feel cheated on a couple of things here, which is that there was supposed to be an understanding when I was working on this over 20 years ago, which was that there would be some other ways of accountability and requirements for people to take responsibility for the crimes they had committed in order to restore order to their lives, but the response of many prosecutors, including San Francisco, has been to basically let people go free without any consequences, without probation or parole, we know. that half of all people who get out of jail before trial commit new crimes, three-quarters of people arrested for violent crimes that are crimes that get out before trial commit new crimes, so there's been kind of a complete I think it's a pretty radical experiment to not charge people with even very serious crimes and not require that people get the psychiatric or addiction care that they need.

This problem is complicated by the fact that the United States does not have adequately functioning psychiatric or mental health care. We don't have universal health care in the system like we have in most developed economies, so that's a big part of the problem, but the left didn't pursue creating the kind of psychiatric and addiction care services that were required, they just They were basically one way. of white guilt, a liberal guilt because of historical racism and incarceration have just been letting people go free without any consequences, so you ask what is the effect on the residents, the effect is the fear of many people leaving, you know , families with children, huh.

You know, leave because it's not safe, people are turning to private security companies, which I consider an extremely sinister trend, especially when you consider the need to have functioning cities and a functioning civilization, you need to have universal security, for what the consequences. It has actually exacerbated existing trends of inequality and a erosion of social solidarity, which is necessary to have a functioning civilization and cities. One of the most interesting things about this topic is that money doesn't necessarily seem to equate to better outcomes, so money can be thrown at the problem and homelessness could continue to increase.

Can you describe to people what the progressive approach is from drugs to crime to homelessness and how that has worked in these American cities? Well, it's true, I mean, we've seen our homeless spending in San Francisco increase almost tenfold in the last decade, and yet during that time we saw a 30% increase in homelessness, so to some extent there is something called the magnet effect where when you offer people free housing, free services, even free needles that when they inject heroin you end up attracting addicts, this is a well-known phenomenon, although I think that Somehow the fact that the laws are not enforced and that drugs are cheap and plentiful is what I ultimately conclude is the main driver of people coming here, but I even spoke to a high-ranking official about homelessness very well positioned in San Francisco and this person told me that the situation got much worse after they increased their budgets and that there was actually a period where the budgets did not increase.

They were able to control the situation better, so spending money on this problem has made it significantly worse. It does not have to be this way. You know there are some parts of the psychiatric care system that are quite expensive, especially providing care to people. with psychiatric care in hospitals, but even rehab, especially if it's a proper 90-day rehab, which is what you need plus another three months of probation or some kind of halfway house, those things are expensive, they take money , but if you need to sort them, you can do so. If people break the law and it's because of their addiction or mental illness, then the proper approach is to offer them rehabilitation or psychiatric care as an alternative to prison, not optional, but we've made it completely optional, so there's been a a lot of money. spent on volunteer services that has basically been completely wasted money.

I was on the street a couple of weeks ago and there was a group of five people who were literally on the street, they had surrounded themselves with police barricades, they were near a heating vent to stay warm, but they were literally occupying part of the street right in front of them. from the city hall and you know there was feces around them a lot of garbage, there are a lot of used needles, one of the men we said, you know, the worker I was with, said the guys had to get up and clean themselves and the guy said I can't, my hip is broken, I mean he's literally on the street, his hip is broken, he's clearly in the last stages of a deep addiction.

A homeless outreach team stopped by and called the hot team. We told him this person needs care a week later that same person was still on the street and the reason is that in San Francisco the policy is that if someone says "well I don't want care" if they want to refuse care even if they're breaking the law because of this obesity towards the victims, alleged victims and also the idea that somehow they are representing their care accurately, they just left it there, so I mean, that kind of thing is pretty common, so you know , just to give a sense of we're so rich in san francisco in california, i mean, the levels of wealth here, i think it's probably fair to say that they are greater than any other city or region in human history, unless you count, maybe you know oil rich places like saudi arabia, united arab emirates, but we have a lot of billionaires, we spend more than any other state on mental health, we spend more on homelessness than any other state and we have A $31 billion surplus in California this year due to the tech boom. a lot of our taxes come from income, you have to remember that you know, mark zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook lives in San Francisco, the CEO of Twitter lives in San Francisco, so our biggest tech billionaires, not to mention many venture capitalists and many others you've never met.

I've heard about living and paying taxes in San Francisco and California and yet it seems like a slum, you know, I mean, it's really a pretty remarkable situation where so much wealth produces so much human misery and poverty and the irony is that all the purpose or assumption The purpose behind their policies is compassion and yet how can you think of something that is more or less compassionate instead of the current situation you are describing, how the policy makers took responsibility away from the individual to improve their lives and transferred it to the State or to society?

The blame for these problems is thatThey, as you mentioned before, could say that the problem is not, it is not drug addiction, but that they live, we live in a society dominated by white supremacy or racial injustice, whatever, and that is the problem . that we have to address not the problems that individuals face, yes, you have it exactly right. I think there are three important thinkers here on the radical left, the most important and most recent is Michel Foucault, the work of the French historian Foucault really demonized the institutions of civilization. demonized medical care demonized psychiatric care was part of a series of radical thinkers in the '60s who basically said that mental illness is a myth, that psychiatry is just a way to control people and marginalize deviance as a way of establishing what is rational and normal for everyone else, a disservice to people with serious mental illnesses, there are also, of course, marks, the idea that we live in a really unfair system called capitalism and that there is much more , there is a much better system we can create. radically different from the ones we have that would have much better results and it really goes back to jean jacques rousseau and the idea that society is to blame for inequality that suffers oppression and that the system has to be radically altered and I think part of that so the idea is that individuals are innocent and free of responsibility for their own outcomes, that all of us, the outcomes of our lives, are entirely determined by society, and so there's a kind of fatalism here that's really interesting. because on the one hand it seems like because I think conservatism has traditionally been more fatalistic, but there's a fatalism here that basically says as long as we have a capitalist system and they would go further and say racist and patriarchal and everything else woke up parts of the book religion.

As long as that system is in place, then you can expect suffering, so to some extent you see really twisted enabling and producing victims from an ideology that says the system should create victims because the system is evil capitalist and everything else. , can we trace these problems that you are describing throughout this

interview

and in your book back to the popularization of the ideas you just described? Yes, sure, I say that when you

interview

ed and I did, so San Francisco is really full of interviews with the people responsible for the current situation, everyone agreed, actually, almost everyone agreed to talk to me.

It includes so-called homeless advocates who are, in fact, advocates for open drug scenes, advocates for open drug use, advocates for addiction, for enabling. Addiction is rampant, I mean, it's pretty amazing when you consider that addiction is a mental illness, it's a disease, these are people who are basically demanding that the disease not be treated and it's partly because the disease is so different from other diseases. and that most people with diabetes don't say no, no, I want to keep my diabetes, but that's the case with addiction, people say no, no, I'd rather stay here living in my filth on the street than go to rehab and get off drugs, it's hard to imagine if you've never had one of those problems, but basically we have a group of people who are recovering addicts talking about how they were mentally ill and needed to be arrested, needed there to be interventions to deal with their addictions.

So yeah, I mean you can see Foucault Marx and Rousseau's idea that the system is responsible for everything. It's really an a priori assumption that if you see something bad in the world, if you see some misery in the world, that's the fault of the sexist system of racist capital and that's why you see progressives basically trying to dismantle all important institutions necessary for a functioning civilization or society. I'm working on an article right now about how progressives are basically attacking three important institutions: one is meritocracy the idea that standardized tests and other ways of measuring ability are immoral because the consequences of meritocratic testing uh is racial inequality in the schools we also see progressives attacking the policing of the criminal justice system in general, but even the idea that the police there is one of the things that is stated and it's obvious, maybe it's not obvious, but it's false, is that the Police don't prevent crime, so there's been an effort to defund the police, which contributed significantly to the increase in homicides in the United States and then, um, in an effort to get rid of reliable energy and reliable electricity and The interesting thing about this is that Europeans have suffered the most from the consequences of trying to power civilization entirely with climate-dependent renewable energy and we saw a significant disinvestment of funds in reliable sources of energy, whether it be oil and gas or nuclear energy, so what I'm seeing is really a concerted effort so when they and they say that the progressives, the radical left will say we want to dismantle these institutions, they take it very seriously and in some cases these are institutions that need some reform in the surveillance of psychiatry, even the supply of electricity, these are all things that deserve some reform, but that is not what is pursued, what is actually pursued is the destruction of those institutions without creating any viable alternative in their place. and all of that goes back to the ideologies that were built by foucault marx and rousseau who basically aimed to tear it down and there is a kind of socialism you know but the problem is that it's actually quite anti-statist and therefore what What I concluded in San Francisco is that this actually looks much more like left-libertarianism or anarchism because it basically seeks to destroy broader systems of governance that are required for a functioning nation state or city if its policies have failed as miserably as You said, why do they keep winning elections in these cities?

Well, that's a very important question, is where the book ends up going there, I mean, I look at why the book is the subtitle. why progressives ruin cities, but the last reason I give or explore is because conservatives and moderates let them and you know in San Francisco there is no conservative party, there are really no Republicans to speak of, but you still have a left. -right uh conflict between left-wing progressives and right-wing moderates and moderates neither the moderates in San Francisco nor the Republicans in California nor the Republicans at the national level have had much to say about these issues there has been a demand for law and order but there has not been There has been, for example, a conservative proposal for universal psychiatric care for drug rehabilitation.

I've interviewed many different conservatives and Republicans and there are some who know that there is an American think tank based in New York called the Manhattan Institute that advised Rudolph Giuliani. The Republican mayor of New York and others have advised other Republican mayors, but also more moderate Democratic mayors, and now they agree with some kind of universal psychiatric care, but universal health care has not been something that the Republicans have traditionally been in favor. they saw it as an unacceptable increase in the state. I think that's made conservatives unable to offer a realistic alternative to progressive government in California, and I think to some extent that's because of opposition to universal health care, but to some extent I think there's been unrest that's right.

With psychiatry and psychology in general, I think traditional conservatives had seen that therapy, for example, was something that was best done within the family or with the church and not something that required, you know, the public investment of the taxpayers. I've had a, you know, so you know we have a much more libertarian right in the United States than the right tends to be in other countries in the world, so I think the so-called right or the moderate or the conservative the opposition hasn't offered a serious plan for these issues and it still isn't, you know, it's still a rule.

The other thing is that the Republicans in the United States tend to be a very rural party, they tend to dominate the more rural states, they tend to be more country people in general, I mean, that's true for the right internationally as well. , but I think it's even more true here, so you know, where I end up, where I go in my book in San Francisco, I end up holding on. as a model to the Netherlands because in part I thought that San Franciscans would appreciate having a more liberal city as a model and the Netherlands does a very good job in terms of treating addictions and mental illness, but I have also pointed out that the ruling party In In the Netherlands right now there is a center-right party that came to power partly to deal with the outdoor drug scenes and outdoor drug addiction in Amsterdam in the late 80s and early 90s, which It was very similar to what we have in San Francisco. francisco and other liberal cities and point out that it really is a center left party that is fine with decriminalized marijuana, decriminalized sex work and completely comfortable with gays and lesbians, uh, being married, so it is a more progressive center right in The Netherlands and I think a more progressive center right like that would do very well in cities like San Francisco and in states like California, let's talk briefly about New York.

Recently we have seen statistics on crime. Crime has increased dramatically in recent years in New York City. Are these? progressive ideas spreading throughout the United States and other big cities around the world, they certainly are, although I think we are now starting to see a backlash against them. You know, I mentioned it before I worked for George Soros' foundation in the late 1990s, his job. has continued for the last 20 years and is incredibly effective in not only changing the conversation, but also in electing progressive district attorneys who have basically started acting like defense attorneys in terms of not prosecuting crimes and also contributing to demoralization. of the police, because the police get very frustrated if they make arrests and there are no consequences for the people they arrested and then those efforts have also spread around the world.

You know Scotland actually has one of the worst drug epidemics in the world. It is a much smaller country. Obviously a much smaller region, but it is suffering very serious levels of drug overdoses, also because it is in love with harm reduction. Similarly, we have seen so-called harm reduction efforts in Canada have disastrous consequences even though Canada has universal health care, so obviously universal psychiatric care. and health care is not enough if far-left liberal policies on drug use are applied, as in Canada and certainly in New York, in the last eight years under the government of Mayor Bill de Blasio significantly more addicts and sick people deteriorated unsheltered mental people who live on the streets living on the sidewalks without consequences it was only in new york and i saw people i saw someone sleeping on a mattress on the sidewalk i think it was on seventh avenue and there were like two police officers right there who did nothing and It's because they know.

There are no consequences if they arrest someone or tell them to move on. I think we've seen some backlash against that with the election of Eric Adams, a former police officer, as mayor of New York, elected as a moderate. Democrat, but it's not obvious what will be able to change because they also have a very progressive district attorney and I think we're in a very dynamic moment right now. I think there's a good chance that there's a significant backlash against these left-wing policies around drugs and crime in American cities, but the progressive movement is very powerful, it's very strong, it basically has a uniformity and conformity. almost entirely by journalists than in the mainstream.

The media in the United States is incredibly one-sided in its coverage of this. In my interactions with some of the journalists I discovered that many of them do not know or pretend not to understand the difference between arresting someone and imprisoning many. addicts should be arrested and mentally ill people should be arrested when they break the law, that doesn't mean they should go to prison for 20 years, but when it is explained that in places like Portugal and the Netherlands, which are considered models for places like San Francisco and other progressive cities, when I point out that, in fact, drug users who use drugs publicly are arrested in Amsterdam and Lisbon, the response I've received from all the journalists has been good, but that's not true. sending drug addicts to prison, so there is a kind of deliberate misunderstanding, I think, or misinformation on the part of journalists,a lot of democrats and progressives really don't have a very nuanced view of this, they don't really understand that you can order drug rehab and that it works, a lot of mythologies have been promoted, including, you know, I think Vice, the media company has been a major purveyor of misinformation on many of these questions, so you have a lot of things that are really very you.

Traditionally we have a very polarized environment where people think their only two options are to send people to prison for 20 years or do nothing and part of what I have tried to do with San Francisco and with our writing and our advocacy has been In some ways it shows that there are actually many other things that can be done, including coercive measures that are not the same as putting people in prison and throwing away the key and, as you mentioned before, any attempt to be tougher on the crime, for example, is simply painted as part of a white supremacist or racist system that disproportionately affects African Americans.

The other thing I want to talk about is defunding the police movement, how effective it has been in cities like New York and other places, well, it's very interesting. I've been writing a lot about how in some ways the progressive criminal justice agenda is falling apart and really what fell apart was the defunding of the police, so you know this to remind everyone who knows that we had a spectacular murder of an African -American George Floyd who was caught on video by a police officer in Minneapolis last year and immediately sparked massive black lives matter protests, many of those protests demanding defunding the police, which in practical terms meant diverting money from police departments to other social networks. services there were certainly some people who also went even further and advocated for the abolition of the police and really the abolition of jails and prisons, but the defunding the police agenda was actually very popular in liberal and progressive cities, as well that we saw many cities san francisco los angeles austin New York taking on Oakland taking steps to defund the police, including mayoral announcements and city council announcements, yet those same city governments quickly backtracked after homicides increased, in Part of it was partly a response to really two things, the first is a kind of withdrawal of the police. officers in traditional policing roles, including those that have been shown to reduce violence and homicides, which often involves just a lot of engagement with community members, a lot of interaction with potential criminals.

You know it's important to remember that good police officers and good policing know people. who are at high risk of committing crimes, including homicide, and being in their face having a positive relationship with them and their families just walking around being engaged those things really matter there is a lot of evidence to show that they matter even though that often is denied by On the radical left we know that policing is important, but there is also good evidence that the mindset of potential criminals changes during anti-police protests and in response to viral videos showing police brutality and We believe that influences in the decisions criminals make, particularly around homicides.

Homicide is a very emotional crime. It's not the people who commit them, they usually don't think about them, but in a sense we see an increase in homicides. and crimes committed by people who don't believe in the system or who think the system is broken or corrupt or inherently racist or run in a racist way, so this is a real problem if you're a progressive or liberal communicating that all the time. system is racist, broken and unfair, you are basically providing a justification for people to commit crimes now, as soon as you say this, the response is good, what about the real problems?

This is the idea then that we should not raise concerns about There are real problems in policing and of course the answer is that we should not always try to improve policing, but it is worth noting that police violence, including murder of civilians by police, has decreased significantly, I think it has decreased more than 30 percent in the last 30 years. We have made significant improvements, of course, that is no reason to stop, we must continue to make improvements, but the contingent requirement of improving policing is more police, not fewer, so if you are concerned about police violence, you should pay them back.

The police should want to increase funding for the police. A new study came out that actually showed that the United States is relatively under-policed ​​compared to European countries. This may sound surprising because I think we see that there is a sense that the American police are particularly present. in high crime neighborhoods, but it's not the case per capita and there are other things that progressives said well, we want to see social workers, therapists and psychologists responding to mental health calls. You know, someone calls the police and says there's some crazy guy. yelling and breaking car windows with a crowbar or threatening someone or someone on the street instead of psychosis, ninety percent of those calls can be violent, so when you interview the social workers who respond to those calls, many of them will tell you that they want to be with a police officer because those are dangerous calls, so you know, one of the things that has been happening in recent weeks is that progressives have been misleading the public and others and saying that defunding the police never happened well.

They are right that cities decided not to defund the police after crime and homicides increased in 2020, but it is really misleading because demands to defund the police found a response from policymakers in many cities in defund the police. police that were later repealed, but that those efforts to defund the police, anti-police protests and decisions to cut police budgets resulted in significant police resignations, retirements, demoralization and that had a major impact according to most criminologists and anyone who has a sense Common sense here had a huge impact on what police officers have been doing in recent years.

How have progressives reacted to your book, if at all? Are they just doubling down on their policies at this point or is that it? There's been some change in places like San Francisco, well, it's been a very interesting response to the book, as you can imagine, and this is the second book I've read in two years, my first book last year on the environment, which It was also a critique of Basically, the left was ignored, well, it was attacked, but then it wasn't reviewed in the New York Times, which is our most influential newspaper. San Francisco was profiled in the New York Times, was brutally attacked stating that I didn't interview any homeless people. people, which is absurd, interviewed hundreds and told their stories, but then the Times came out at the end of the year and made it an Editor's Choice.

I gave it an Editor's Choice, uh, designation that suggested that someone there maybe thought the review was unfair. I got emails from progressives and liberals telling me that at first they didn't want to read the book or that they were reading it basically to attack me and then they realized that the book isn't actually a conservative book, I mean, it's a book. liberal in the sense that I advocate for universal psychiatric care, for example, and I advocate for a very compassionate approach, although I also recognize the need for law enforcement, so people have been changing, but the biggest change is by far. has been the mayor of san francisco um book by the way san francisco has not been reviewed by the local newspaper has been reviewed uh by uh the economist your newspaper the telegrafo reviewed it has been reviewed by the second largest Spanish newspaper um the one of the newspapers major Danes reviewed by the New York Times, but the local San Francisco newspaper did not review it or discuss it or profile me even though I have been the subject of San Francisco Chronicles newspaper coverage for over 20 years, but The mayor of San Francisco two weeks ago came out and announced a major crackdown on open-air drug use, drug trafficking and so-called homelessness.

I think my book contributed significantly to creating the environment in which she felt the need to respond and issue and really demand a role for law enforcement, so we are in an extremely dynamic moment. I mean, I'm working on an article now about what we can do to save San Francisco. You know, part of the problem is that the traditional leaders of dynamic cities like San Francisco think that they are what we would call the bourgeoisie or the new industrial class of capitalists and entrepreneurs. Well, that's the high-tech sector and unlike the Carnegies or the Rockefellers, you know. last centuries, these are people who are very mobile, you know, there is a sociological term, you know, we say that there are people somewhere and anywhere, somewhere, people are stuck in the place where they live, they have to do their I work in a particular place anywhere where people can have a laptop and work anywhere in the world, so I think part of the problem is that there is not a lot of loyalty to San Francisco from the San Franciscan elites, so one would hope to see the technological class, the capitalist class really step up. to the plate they run candidates for elections they fund think tanks and media initiatives to really fight dogmatism and that hasn't really happened, I mean, it's happening to some extent, but it's not really happening at the level in the what would be expected I see it happening and that's a real problem because I think it's a broader problem that we see, which is kind of this idea that you know there's not a lot of loyalty to either the city, the state or the country, you can live anywhere you have cryptocurrencies. which makes you even less loyal to your nation and that's why there is a feeling, I think, on the part of a lot of rich people who are in a position to change the situation in San Francisco, of why bother, you know my life is fine, I can leave my kids in private schools I can live in another part of the world I can move to Austin, Texas or wherever, so I think this decline in solidarity that I think the nationalist right has been responding to has been a real obstacle to get the kind of changes that we want to see, you know, said san francisco, i think the other problem is that it has become a national embarrassment, it has become the punchline to jokes, it has become a kind of symbol of the government failures of the democratic parties, so I was just observing you.

I know a segment on Fox News last night that I thought was going to be about the homeless in San Francisco, but it was just used as some kind of prop as a symbol of how terrible Democrats are at governing, so I think There is an answer to what is happening within the Democratic Party according to some of the party's senior strategists and leaders who think that San Francisco's representation of American progressivism and liberalism is actually undermining the Democratic Party's brand and that it is you must do something about it. but it's an extremely dynamic situation, you know, there's just not yet a consensus in San Francisco for the mayor to do the kinds of things that she and I think the people around her know she needs to do to get the situation under control. thank you

michael

for joining us, it was really interesting and there is a lot to think about, i think for other cities in the world, not just in the United States, thanks steven, it's great to be with you