Step up when you can. Don’t run from the facts of the situation. Reality test proposals. If an idea sounds good but has proven that it doesn’t work, don’t just do more of the same. (This goes for politicans, too.) Seek solutions that actually fix things, rather than those which flatter your preconceived political posturing. If that means adjusting your views, well, that’s more likely to work than adjusting reality to conform to your views.

So many jackasses in my office live in the suburbs, commute in every day (by electric car, of course), and then back to San Mateo or Redwood City at night. They recite the patter by heart: “shucks, have a heart, be kind and compassionate to these poor, suffering people experiencing unhousedness” when I express disdain at having to step over piles of syringes and shit every single day, or call for any sort of political action to put an end to the same.

This is because they never had to deal with some guy on PCP punching himself in the face in front of their doorstep when they come home at night. They never had to steer their toddler away from the syringes hidden in the bushes at the playground, or hear their wife tell them about how that crazy filthy guy who gets roaring drunk and pisses on the wall of the Walgreen’s down the street every single day was screaming at her and threatening her for no reason, again. They don’t have to put up with any of that. They deal with the homeless in passing, for 15 or 20 minutes a day, while walking to the office from their car and back, and while going out to lunch. They vote to decriminalize shoplifting, and they vote for woke judges who routinely dismiss charges for poor oppressed homeless person doing anything short of murder, and they vote for politicians who promise to defund the police, because social justice.

This fleeting exposure to “the real world” is therapy for them. It makes them feel better about their liberal guilt complex to repeatedly telegraph self-awareness of their “white privileged” existence in the safe and sanitized suburbs, far from the dinge of the Mission or the Tenderloin. They must loudly squawk their virtuous egalitarian solidarity with these disenfranchised junkies and thugs and crackheads, these agencyless victims of capitalism, as they briefly pass by on their way to buy a $23 sandwich, which they then take back to the safety of their well-stocked tech office kitchen replete with free snacks and free beer and an armed security guard who keeps all that well out of their world. Then they return to sanitized suburban bubble at night, where they no doubt regale their spouse and friends with stories of how they virtuously gave that 120 pound person experiencing unhousedness $5 so he could go buy more crack. He didn’t even thank them for it!

For them, the City itself is a mere psychological prop, a rhetorical foil that allows them to tut-tut sadly, shake their heads knowingly, and mainly, to showcase their own grandiose egalitarian empathy for their fellow human beings, no matter their station in life — nothing more. Actually changing the horrid objective conditions of reality would tend to diminish their virtue, or at least their ability to signal it. They will talk a lot instead, occasionally give someone cash on the street, and of course they eagerly vote for any progressive politician who mirrors their own virtuous image sufficiently to produce identification.

Then there are the hipsters; so many cool young hipsters, who’ve just moved to San Francisco from some repressed small rural town or some wealthy conservative suburb for three or four years after college. They openly endorse the benefits of the ongoing decline of street conditions, because “it keeps the kind of people out who don’t like it.” This means they view “people getting stabbed on the sidewalk over $20 every other week” as an effective filter against people like their parents, whom they dislike for various potentially valid reasons (but they still accept the Venmo’ed cash allowance.)

This sort of posturing makes them feel cool and rebellious to live amidst squalor and violence; their stuffy old parents would hate it. They went to schools like MIT and Stanford (on Mama and Daddy’s dime.) They graduate, and get a cushy tech job and an apartment with four similar roommates in the Mission (inadvertently pricing out everyone who used to live there.) It’s cool, they can wear t-shirts to work and show up at noon! There’s ping pong and free beer in the office. The boss is totally cool with “mental health days” and there’s a nap / meditation room. After work, they get wasted at that gentrified former dive bar that now sells $16 beers to yuppie tech workers like them all night, but still has the old punk rock stickers on the wall, and hasn’t yet started cleaning the bathrooms, so they still smell appropriately divey, like stale beer and piss and vomit. Gross. Now we’re living in the real world! Mom and Dad would be disappointed, and Grandma would be apoplectic.

These tech hipsters thus extend their college days for a few years with roommates and partying, then they grow up and leave town. While they’re here, they vote for Dean Preston and Gordon Mar, and they vote to decriminalize shoplifting, and they vote to defund the police. Then, they get married, they get a down payment (which they could never afford even with a tech salary) from Mom and Dad as a wedding present, and they move back to Marin, leaving behind the detritus of their poor political positions and decisions for everyone else to deal with. But Stanford is still pumping out eager young comp sci grads; a new generation of hipsters arrives, and the cycle repeats, intensifies, all over again.

Meanwhile, the City crashes and burns. San Francisco, the most beautiful city in the world, has been sacrificed to their hubris and arrogance, on the altar of “look at me, I’m such a moral and self-aware person.” It lies bleeding before us.

Everyone living outside of California does the same, of course. Everyone looks at all this and laughs or shakes their head sadly, but ultimately they say, “not my problem, doesn’t affect me any”…. Yeah, well, just wait till Gavin Newsom is president.

One thing, and only one thing, will save downtown San Francisco: enforcement of existing laws. The very word has long been a dirty, despised thing among progressives. “Enforcement doesn’t work” is recited reflexively at the mere mention of the word, accompanied by arched eyebrows and a benevolently condescending smirk, the wise and properly Berkeley educated thinker who knows better enlightening this brute ignorant savage who really believes that police can actually reduce crime by physically stopping criminals from committing crime, then locking them up in jail so they can’t do it again.

Yet empirical evidence proves otherwise: enforcement does the trick. From Manhattan to Moscow, Singapore to Shanghai, Tokyo to Taipei, safe cities do manage to suppress bad behavior and poor street conditions through robust police enforcement, every day — and in cities with far worse income disparities than anything in the United States. The question is not whether enforcement works; that is a matter of fact which is beyond dispute. Visit any of those cities, and see for yourself. The only question is why we are not doing it in San Francisco.

The oft repeated trope rote among the pseudointelligentsia at this point morphs into something along the lines of, “Oh, the police don’t care, they’re lazy, they never even show up.” I found this to be categorically false. I have (unfortunately) had to call 911 many times while living in the city. The police invariably showed up within 10 minutes, and always did their best to resolve the incident. Their hands were usually tied by City Hall policy that directs them to ignore homeless people at all costs until they actually engage in physical violence — whether they are leaving syringes in the playground, openly shoplifting from Walgreen’s every day at the same time, shitting explosively on the sidewalk, or screaming drunken threats at women who are smaller than them.

The police do what they can, which sometimes means moving someone along. When they do make an arrest, the District Attorney usually refuses to prosecute. In either case, the same person is back doing the same thing in the same spot a few hours later. This is not a solution.

All we really need to fix San Francisco is consistent and fair enforcement of existing law. Have a severe mental illness and can’t take care of yourself? We’ll put you somewhere where you’re taken care of, in a mental hospital (another dirty word for progressives), instead of compassionately leaving you to languish sleeping in a gutter covered in your own vomit. Selling fentanyl or crack openly on the corner? Go to jail. Threatening to stab random people because they walked along “your” sidewalk? Go to jail. Pulling your pants down and taking a dump in a doorway? Go to jail. Heck, San Francisco voters approved via referendum a “sit-lie ordinance” when the Board of Supervisors was too cowardly to take that on, making it illegal to live on the sidewalk — let’s enforce it! The police are willing and able to go to work. They need firm backing from the DA and City Hall to make it stick, by applying real penalties to criminals rather than a revolving door of dropped charges and ignored fines.

How much of a chance does San Francisco have? Not much, but not zero, either. Manhattan in the 70s and 80s was just as bad. Rudy Giuliani went through like a Roto-Rooter and cleaned it out. Despite his later treasonous transgressions, it is indisputable that he turned New York City around — through a program of nothing more radical than “rigorously enforcing the existing law” — when nobody thought that could be done.

This requires immediate and radical policy change. Every day that passes makes it harder to pull San Francisco back from the brink. We must eject the do-nothing corrupt status quo politicians now. Defund Jennifer Friedenbach and the poverty pimps at Coalition on Homelessness who “advocate” for an open air insane asylum / hard drug bazaar becoming a permanent fixture on our sidewalks. Cancel the far-left “progressives” altogether, restore rational common sense to its rightful place at the center of our political discourse, and bring in a Batman — or a Batwoman — who has the will to powerwash away the layers of filth and shit, to restore San Francisco to what it once was and will be again.

Preston is an example of the worst kind of person in San Francisco today: someone born into privilege and luxury, given everything he could possibly need or want in life by his parents, who then uses his free time to try to make sure nobody else will ever be able to succeed in the future — all while spewing endless hot air about “social justice.” He is the ultimate limousine liberal: a trust fund baby who hates America and capitalism, who wants to punish those of us not lucky enough to inherit millions from our parents.

Preston is a self described 'activist.' The word activist means someone who tries to change things by getting involved. But instead of being active and getting involved, Preston does the opposite: he sits around all day long creating regulations that strangle small businesses and filing frivolous lawsuits against mom-and-pop landlords, costing them tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. He makes their lives miserable while contributing absolutely nothing positive to society himself.

As Supervisor, Dean Preston has done nothing except vote against every single thing that would help the city, like building more housing fast, adequately funding the police force, and sending criminals to jail. He is a vocal Chesa Boudin fanboy who actually wants to abolish both the police and all prisons. How’s defunding the police working out for ya, San Francisco?

All Preston cares about is giving away your hard earned money to enable more bums to live on the street. More entitlements, more handouts. And what has this gotten us? More crime, more filth, more drugs, more shitting on the sidewalks, more aggressive panhandlers harassing you everywhere you go. Since he took office in 2019, the number of tents on the streets has exploded, crime has skyrocketed, and the city has become less livable than ever before. We cannot let this man win reelection if we value our way of life.

• Preston’s Housing Graveyard details Preston’s excuses and prevarications around housing.

• The YIMBYs say Preston has personally blocked the construction of housing for 28,000 people.

• GrowSF’s Dump Dean Preston gives you 30 reasons why. Donate to their “Dump Dean PAC” and make it happen! Any amount helps.

BART hardly ever prosecutes fare evasion now. We need more fare evasion enforcement, not even less. When these freeloading criminals evade fares, they force BART to raise fares for all riders. If you want to know why your ticket costs $30 each way, look no further than the guy next to you sneaking onto the train without buying a ticket. And if you think the system is broken because the trains don’t run, remember that BART can't afford to maintain even what it has now because of the massive losses caused by fare evasion.

And then there’s the idea that prosecution of fare evasion is somehow unfairly targeted towards minorities. This is nonsense. The only people being targeted here are thieves, those who break the law by stealing. There is nothing inherently criminal about being black, but there is certainly something criminal about jumping over the barriers to steal a ride. To suggest otherwise is to engage in race-baiting and victim blaming. Minority communities need to stop making excuses for their own members when they commit crimes, and start encouraging personal responsibility instead.

Who benefits? Criminals benefit! Repeat offenders who would normally face consequences for their actions under existing state law get off scot free thanks to this terrible bill. We cannot allow our elected officials to pander to criminals and reward bad behavior. Our streets are already unsafe due to drug addicts and homelessness. We cannot tolerate more criminals robbing innocents of their hard earned cash and property.

The only reason we can imagine for supporting such an awful proposal is sheer political cowardice combined with cynical opportunism. Elected officials like AB 819 sponsor Isaac Bryan are terrified of appearing tough on crime, and desperate to burnish their anti-racist credentials by attacking phantasm non-problems to score cheap political points at re-election time. Then they have the resume to get a cushy job working three hours a week writing reports saying “more reports are needed” at some “everything is racist” non-profit later on.

Instead of standing up for what is right, Bryan and his allies are willing to sacrifice public safety in order to win votes from soft-on-crime voters. It is a sad day indeed when our representatives care more about virtue signaling on non-problems to the radical left than doing what is best for the majority of their constituents.

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