Driving from the San Francisco airport into downtown, you are greeted by empty storefront after empty storefront.
In California, from 2004 to 2019, the responsibility to enforce the law and ensure order in the City by the Bay fell to District Attorney Kamala Harris and her protégé George Gascon. What has been the result? Well … by any assessment, it has been a disgraceful disaster.
In the Tenderloin District of SF, it gets far worse and isn’t improving; in fact, it’s the opposite. The abject brutality of drug addiction and homelessness is almost indescribable.
In front of what used to be upscale coffee shops, cafes, and stores, people with an addiction assemble under the watch of security guards who treat it as usual. The putrid smell of human waste hangs in the air.
In tents, the forgotten of the city waste away, selling hard drugs — no weed or hash here — but life-threatening or ending fentanyl and heroin out in the open.
The wealthy expose the scale of the tragedy, comparing the squandered lives to those of the poor, all beneath signs for Tiffany & Co. and Saks Fifth Avenue.
The well-off head to the Apple Store, pretending it isn’t happening. But to any outsider, it’s clear.
After only five minutes, anyone outside the city would say that San Francisco is a dystopian disaster zone. But many citizens who live in it on a daily basis believe it’s normal. Is this what Harris, one of the architects of the disaster, has imagined for all of us? At the Democratic convention next week, the anointed Democratic nominee — not voted for by anyone — will attempt to convince Americans that her record of failure isn’t actually her record. However, the chaos on the streets of San Francisco tells a different story.
It’s horrific and very real. No amount of wealthy liberals can hide the depravity of it. Maybe the most affluent neighborhoods are kept safe, but the rest of the city is in a dire predicament.
The story of San Francisco and Kamala Harris is a warning bell that the United States must hear. The vice president must answer the questions about what has happened in this formerly beautiful city — but she takes no questions. She cannot hide from San Francisco. This is her legacy, and she must own it.
