Media coverage of drugs and crime is atrocious—help us fight the mainstream narrative.

Tuesday’s recall of reformist DA Chesa Boudin in San Francisco was a depressing culmination of the right-wing backlash again progress (yes the “liberals” in San Francisco who bought the absurd smears against Boudin are indeed right-wing and reactionary). Boudin, to be sure, was far from perfect. His PR was abysmal. And going forward, it might be wise for reformist DA’s to keep a lower profile so they don’t become targets.

Still. The millionaire and billionaire funded campaign against Boudin, also backed by real-estate developers and police unions, was a cynical Swift-boating. As Defector wrote, the campaign created its “own emotional reality.” It didn’t matter that crime actually went down under Boudin’s watch. The vibes were off.

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Recall advocates lied, and lied, and lied, pinning prosecutions on him that his predecessor, Suzie Loftus litigated, and claiming he’d disbanded a crime task force he hadn’t. The San Francisco Police Department, which has an 8 percent clearance rate for violent crime, sabotaged the DA’s office at every turn. Boudin was blamed for a whole mess of things—such as homelessness and public drug use—that had nothing to do with him: if you encountered an unhoused person defecating on the street on your way to work, well, that was somehow the district attorney’s fault, and not the city’s decades-in-the-making housing crisis or its small supply of public bathrooms.

Boudin became scapegoat for San Francisco’s social ills that long preceded his term in office. San Francisco was fucked up before Boudin was even born. In her 1967 essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion analyzed the “dark side” of Haight-Ashbury, cataloging transient drifters and homeless teenagers using heavy substances.

Didion’s portrait of Haight-Ashbury could easily be written about the Tenderloin today. Simply swap “heroin” with “fentanyl” or “methedrine” with “methamphetamine,” or “hippies” with the “homeless.”

“All the amphetamines, or “speed” — Benzedrine, Dexedrine, and particularly Methedrine (“crystal”) — were in common use. There was not only more tolerance of speed but there was a general agreement that heroin was now on the scene. Some attributed this to the presence of the Syndicate; others to a general deterioration of the scene, to the incursions of gangs and younger part-time, or “plastic,” hippies, who like the amphetamines and the illusions of action and power they give. Where Methedrine is in wide use, heroin tends to be available, because, I was told, “You can get awful damn high shooting crystal, and smack can be used to bring you down.”

All along, the recall was aided by national media. A nauseating bit of grave dancing came courtesy of Nellie Bowles in The Atlantic.

But I do need you to love San Francisco a little bit, like I do a lot, in order to hear the story of how my city fell apart—and how it just might be starting to pull itself back together.

Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality.

Bowles goes on to gripe about homelessness (which Boudin has literally nothing to do with) and open drug use (same). She depicts an ambient sense of danger, chaos and filth, and sage readers are supposed on nod along and cluck at a progressive experiment gone too far. Bowles’s take on San Francisco is simply a better written and slightly less caustic version of Michael Shellenberger.

Mainstream media failed to counter the misconceptions promoted by wealthy “liberal” propagandists like Bowles and the recall proponents, cementing a narrative that rising crime has killed the reformist experiment symbolized by progressives like Boudin.

It takes less than a minute to look up violent crime statistics in the FBI UCR database, to see that unlike most juristictions, violent crime actually fell in San Francisco during the pandemic. But you’d never know it if your main source of news is the New York Times, which gleefully framed Boudin’s defeat as a sign that Democrats should embrace a “tough-on-crime” posture, as though that wasn’t already the Democrats’s go-to position.

In short, the Boudin recall was a culmination of cynical tough-on-crime propaganda mindlessly parroted by “objective” news sources. An angry electorate could experience catharsis by voting Boudin out of office. San Francisco’s problems will not go away with Boudin’s ouster. But that doesn’t really matter to those who voted him out.

The same dynamic applies to issues across the justice system: bail reform, parole, probation, police funding, police accountability, responses to drug use. Crime and public disorder are visceral issues. As we saw with the recall, it’s frighteningly easy to hijack people’s legitimate fears and promote policies that not only fail to curb crime, but may actually make it worse long-term.

Unlike mainstream outlets, we offer evidence based on years of reporting on drugs and crime.

We’re working on developing special features for paid subscribers. Would you all be interested in watching us discuss “The dumbest thing that happened this week?”

We plan to post video interviews with drug and crime policy heavy weights: academics, journalists, scientists, harm reduction experts — aka people who also know what they’re talking about unlike the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other allegedly “prestige” outlets suckered by propaganda.

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Thank you for reading,

Tana and Zach