Shellenberger joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss how the left’s “victim” ideology has harmed West Coast cities and what can be done to save those communities from complete ruin.
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Former Soros Activist Explains How Progressives Ruined San Francisco (dailysignal.com) . . ." One of the things, when you interview progressives still to this day, and I discovered this quite a bit in my research, they blame [Ronald] Reagan, first as governor in the 1960s and then as president, for the homeless crisis, even though progressives have controlled California for decades. Democrats have a supermajority in Congress. We spend more than any other state per capita on homelessness and mental illness, and we have the worst outcomes.
"So I wanted to write “San Fransicko” to both get to the bottom of what’s really going on and also figure out what the solutions are because, obviously, we’re dealing with a catastrophe. I mentioned drug overdose deaths rose from 17,000 to 70,000 by 2017. Last year, drug deaths were 93,000, which is almost three times as many people than die from car accidents and four times as many people as die from homicide. Clearly, we are in the midst of a massive drug crisis, and it felt like nobody was offering a particularly clear explanation of it or offering very good solutions.
"Allen: I love that curiosity and that drive to say, “OK, there’s obviously an issue here, and we actually need to find a solution.” You’re asking the hard questions. That’s something we really need more of. Now, Michael, for those who have not been to San Francisco, for those who are not too familiar maybe with the situation there, if you were to leave your house, cross the bay, and walk through the streets of San Francisco, give us a picture of what we would see.
"Shellenberger: Sure. San Francisco remains one of the most spectacularly beautiful cities in the world. Just driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, its skyline is stunning; three major bridges into San Francisco, incredible skyline, beautiful, surrounded by water, humpback whales not far from the coast.
"But as soon as you drive downtown, you see tents. You see what are euphemistically called homeless encampments, but they are more accurately described as open drug scenes. That’s the expression that’s used by European researchers. I point out that the Europeans dealt with this exact same problem in the 1980s in places like Zurich, Switzerland; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Lisbon, Portugal; Frankfurt, Germany.
"What you find is just these are people that are living on the street. They’re living on the street because … almost all of them, if not really all of them, are suffering from severe drug addiction, severe drug and alcohol addiction.
"In the 1980s, what we called homelessness—I point out in the book that homelessness is a propaganda word. It was designed to mislead people about what’s really going on. It was designed by progressives to mislead people into thinking that people live on the street because they can’t afford the rent. That’s not the case. The people on the street, we know, are there because of addiction and untreated mental illness." . . .
