Brave Ron DeSantis bravely dares to go to San Francisco.

This week, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis braved the mean streets of San Francisco to report on a humanitarian crisis unleashed by liberal governance.

“We saw people defecating. We saw people doing heroin. Smoking crack cocaine,” he whined, positioned in front of some graffiti, in a campaign video. “All kind of riff-raff running around,” he added. DeSantis lamented the decline of a once great city, felled by wrongheaded progressive policy. “We need to stop this madness. We need to bring sanity to this country.”

“It is a civilization in decay, due to Leftist policies!” he nasally whined at another event, clearly planning to milk his harrowing journey to … San Francisco … until the end of time.

Scaring old white people about cities is the main GOP playbook these days. It’s good messaging because it artfully parallels not only Fox News histrionics, but the content of mainstream news, including prestige outlets. The Atlantic probably doesn’t have too many DeSantis fans on staff. Yet the magazine published multiple stories about San Francisco’s decline ahead of Chesa Boudin’s recall. A ton of prestige publications, actually, did the “San Francisco in decline” stories, depicting a once stunning metropolis as a hellscape filled with drug-addled zombies. Nellie Bowles frequently described her home city with the tone of a war correspondent getting shelled in Somalia. “Witness. With your Own Eyes” she intoned in a post about the Civic Center, claiming the seat of local politics had been beset by an invasion of homeless drug addicts.

I decided to Bear Witness. What did I Bear Witness to with My Own Eyes, when I went to San Francisco to visit a friend?

Let’s see: the sunny deck at Zeitgeist, a great motorcycle dive bar. The Civic Center, perfectly fine, with just a couple of people who live outside, milling around. People frolicking in sunny parks. A nice brunch in the Castro with my best friend Andy. The best Mexican food in the Mission. The best Italian desserts in North Beach, with Andy and my other SF friend Kate. Kate’s labradoodle and her two young hellion sons were in attendance—the chaos unleashed by that combination is probably the most harrowing part of my San Francisco war dispatch.

One night Andy and I did karaoke in Chinatown(. OK that’s probably the most harrowing experience, at least for the audience , who were brutally tortured by my performance of “The Gambler.”) A homeless man who told me it had always been “this bad” for homeless people in the city and asked me to send a letter to Joe Biden from him, for help.

Yes, there’s a gnarly strain of meth that makes some people act scary, but they are pretty much easy to avoid. Fentanyl is terrible—for its users, not the general public.

Downtown is a ghost town. But that’s in large part because all of the tech kids work from home now. There are endless breathless stories about a Macy’s or Nordstrom’s closing downtown because of “crime and disorder” or whatever, with no one stopping to ask why in the world a 25-year-old working remotely would need to set foot at a physical Nordstrom’s. What, to get a sharp secretarial ensemble for Zoom?

After his visit to San Francisco, DeSantis sparred with California governor Gavin Newsom, in what’s bound to become the most annoying pissing contest of the election. Newson shot a video bragging about all of California’s economic achievements in response to DeSantis’s insults. DeSantis then went on Fox News to claim that people were “voting with their feet,” by leaving California for Florida.

Yes, please. Move to fucking Florida so that the cost of housing goes down in San Francisco and I can afford to move back to San Francisco!