Peter Gleeson: Woke, delusional Labor lefties and Greens activists hellbent on changing how we live
Good folk of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane take note – woke, delusional Labor lefties and Greens activists are hellbent on changing the way we live, writes Peter Gleeson.
Peter Gleeson
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Back in the 1970s, a cop show called the Streets of San Francisco, starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, graced our TV screens.
It centred on two cops hunting down the bad guys, filmed on location in San Francisco, with the opening credits and theme song showcasing a vibrant, modern, cosmopolitan city full of life and vigour.
It made you want to go there, the city by the bay, home of the 49ers NFL team, even just to have a some duck in Chinatown.
Not anymore. San Francisco is dying, a modern-day tragedy, a city on its knees because left-wing “progressives’’ have turned it into a crime-ridden, drug-addled dive.
Anybody with any brains is deserting the city, heading to Texas, Montana and Florida, to escape the madness.
It’s a salutary lesson for Australians. Embrace the Greens-Labor unity ticket at your peril. Consider today your warning about the follies of an Albanese-Bandt government.
In a new book titled San Fran Sicko, author Michael Shellenberger explores the catastrophic policy failings that have transformed San Francisco from one of the most beautiful and liveable cities in the world to a magnet for bums and bludgers.
He points to the burgeoning number of homeless people and the link with drugs. Walking down the streets of San Francisco now means dodging excrement and discarded syringes, and avoiding half naked people screaming at demons.
The problem, of course, is not that people make bad choices. To the contrary, he says, they are attracted to San Francisco like a moth to the flame.
The problem, he says, is the way politicians in San Francisco enable such behaviour. Shellenberger talks of the generous cash payments that the city council provides to homeless people, much more than other cities.
People come to San Francisco for the cheap drugs and the big cash handouts. Then there’s low-cost housing. The city provides cheap housing, top-level housing to addicts.
Shellenberger conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the homeless and the drug addicts and he starkly concludes that it is their choice to live that way. Drug addicts have never had it so good.
He says there is a strong libertarian streak in the political elite who like to refer to addicts as “victims’’.
Then there’s crime. The Mayor, London Breed, took the view that police were more part of the problem than a solution and property crimes have been decriminalised.
Many officers have left the force and departed the city after the council effectively defunded the police service.
It means the once bustling downtown section of the city – where the TV show was filmed – is now a magnet for crime, with boarded up stores, abandoned cars, broken lives.
The only businesses are drugs and prostitution. It is a city being abandoned, suffering slow motion suicide.
Shellenberger argues San Francisco is a lesson to “progressive’’ policymakers that their madness doesn’t work.
With San Francisco a city of 3.3 million, the good folk of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane need to take note.
This could be your city in 10 years. Woke, delusional Labor lefties and Greens activists are hellbent on changing the way we live. It’s the sickest form of Socialism.
If San Francisco is any guide, it’s not going to end well. Even Karl Malden and Michael Douglas would have their work cut out now.