Shut up about San Francisco! Bill Maher is the latest to fearmonger about crime in the city
Keep SF's name out of your mouth!
Last night, Bill Maher depicted the most beautiful city in America as a lawless Hellscape.
“San Francisco in the last few years has seen 11 Walgreens and 6 CVSs just give up and close because that town seems simply beyond law.”
“Which is heartbreaking because I like so many people love that city and I don’t think it’s corny to admit, yes, I left my heart in San Francisco,” he continued. “Also my wallet and iPhone.”
That’s not why the retail giants shuttered their stores. As Mayor London Breed pointed out, the city is blanketed with Walgreens and they were cannibalizing profits. Plus more people ordered stuff online in the pandemic.
But ragging on San Francisco is a favored past-time for a certain type of “contrarian” that likes to cluck at the horrors wrought by progressive policies. Maher’s diatribe is in the tradition of our great contemporary thinkers Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, the guy who wrote a book with the juvenile title “San Fransicko:”
In her introduction to Shellengerger’s piece on Weiss’s blog earlier this year, Nellie Bowles took the tone of a witness to genocide:
At this point all I can say is: go and see it.
…
Do not listen to the propaganda. Skip Golden Gate Park. Bring your friends downtown instead. Stand in UN Plaza and just watch. Use your eyes, those great weapons.
…
On a recent trip to visit a friend in San Francisco, I decided to take Bowles’ directive and use my eyes, those great weapons, to bear witness to atrocity (plus I heard Chesa Boudin was giving out free meth).
I made my way past the Full House park (Alamo Sq). The green meadows buzzed with tourists, runners, and very hyper dogs, while the painted ladies row houses and cityscape beyond them glistened blindingly.
The UN plaza was largely empty, like any municipal building in any city on a weekday mid-morning during the pandemic. I could have been in Tulsa. As I made my way to Market Street, which cuts all the way through downtown, I stumbled across a few people in tents and saw a few nodding off. One guy was screaming and lurching around, but everyone gave him a wide berth. I made my way to Powell Bart station, the heart of downtown. I mean, yes, there were some unsavory looking characters, but there was nothing particularly scary happening and I went to look around an Urban Outfitters, which was not being ransacked by shoplifters.
I continued down towards the Ferry building, stopping to talk to a very peaceful looking older man politely asking for change. “It’s always been bad,” he tells me, noting America’s lack of investment in services that help homeless people. He’d written a letter to Joe Biden about it. The President responded with a letter touting his infrastructure legislation. Another thing where the more things change the more they stay the same is the cops. “Oh yeah. All the time,” he says, when I ask him if he gets hassled by the police. “They make me move.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Substance to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.