Well, well. After spending months, if not years, ignoring the issue, Governor of California Gavin Newsom has offered the services of California’s National Guard and state police to San Francisco in order to assist in resolving the city’s disastrous drug problem:
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that San Francisco police and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins have been told to tap California Highway Patrol and National Guard resources to battle the city's drug crisis.
"Two truths can coexist at the same time: San Francisco’s violent crime rate is below comparably sized cities like Jacksonville and Fort Worth—and there is also more we must do to address public safety concerns, especially the fentanyl crisis," Newsom said.
This guy. Newsom has finally started to come under fire from establishment media for worrying too much about what goes on in Red states and cities and not enough about what’s going on in his own state. But even when he finally does decide to care about California issues, he can’t help but resist a dig at cities governed by the political opposition. I recently characterized Newsom as the political equivalent of a trust fund baby - someone who never takes responsibility for failure because, well, they never had to risk anything nor work for anything.
More:
The announcement directs the four agencies to figure out a path to work together to better deal with San Francisco's open-air drug dealing scene in the Tenderloin neighborhood and other areas of the city. The National Guard will identify specialist personnel and resources to support the analysis of drug trafficking operations, with a particular focus on disrupting and dismantling fentanyl trafficking rings.
Newsom has told CHP to find ways to assist San Francisco police, including through the assignment of CHP personnel and resources to assist cops in combating the fentanyl crisis through technical assistance, training and drug trafficking enforcement within key areas of the city.
"The CalGuard is seeing significant success supporting multiagency task forces interdicting fentanyl across our state," said Major Gen. Matthew P. Beevers of the California National Guard. "We expect to achieve the same success working with our partners in San Francisco."
I’m going to get to the point: don’t get too excited. This is hardly a “deployment” in the sense the California National Guard are going to keep the peace on the streets of San Francisco. That’s what everyone who supported the deployment of the National Guard was hoping for, but that’s not what this is. Instead, the CA NG will be playing an advisory role to SFPD and CHP, both of whom are still the primary entities responsible for policing the city. More important, in my view, is that they’re there to deal specifically with the drug problem, not the crime problem in its entirety, which Gov. Newsom clearly sees as a non-issue.
While an argument can be made in favor of focusing on a specific issue, the crisis of San Francisco doesn’t begin and end with drugs. It’s definitely a big part of the problem, but to focus only on it and to pretend like crime in general isn’t the defining issue makes it seem like the same old story: address the periphery of a crisis, without going after the heart of the crisis itself. Even when it comes to tackling the drug matter, this escalation of sorts seems to involve the lightest touch imaginable while still pretending to treat the situation with the seriousness that it deserve. This seems to have become the defining feature of American leadership: do everything except address the issue, because that might be racist, sexist, something-phobic, etc. Better to drive it off the cliff than to risk pissing the wrong people off.
Whatever the case, the National Guard deployment is a meaningless gesture because it’s coming at a time when the city couldn’t sink any lower than it has. If there’s any place in the country that can be described as “collapsed,” it’s San Francisco. The city has no life and is just “existing” at this point. How lifeless is it? Take a look:
https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1650458871494848513
31% of pre-pandemic cell phone activity. It may as well be a ghost town. Take a look - I’m not sure who’s living in the city these days aside from addicts, criminals, and homeless:
https://twitter.com/powellmarket415/status/1650945373874290688
This sort of thing is the day-to-day reality of San Francisco:
https://twitter.com/josephtylerkrug/status/1650884299149959169
I’m not going to post it here, because it’s honestly too depressing even for me, but there was a video from a week or two ago showing a homeless, likely drug-addicted, woman giving birth on a sidewalk. For something like that, I have no words. It’s not hyperbole to say that this is a humanitarian crisis in our own country, in a city once considered world-class. Now, it can’t even do better than most Third World cities. I’ve half-joked that the difference between the Third and Fourth World is that the former has figured out how to live with squalor in a civilized fashion.
Still, the Regime insists the problem rests with us. It’s our fault for noticing and how dare we? In a perfect example of how there’s no depth we can succumb to that the Regime won’t attempt to explain away, the LA Times (since when does Los Angeles care about San Francisco’s reputation, anyway?) wrote a piece blaming the Bay City’s problems on… the far-right.
Journalist Leighton Woodhouse notes the piece doesn’t refute the fact that yes, the situation in the city is dire:
https://twitter.com/lwoodhouse/status/1650177961952440322
Again, it’s not that San Francisco’s actually better off than it appears. It’s not. But the activists, the media, and the politicians are more incensed over the fact Americans dared to notice the obvious. Of course, the sensible response is to try to fix that percetion, which is probably why Gov. Newsom has called both state police and the National Guard to get involved. But again, it’s not enough. Maybe that’s just it, too - if they treated the situation in the city with the seriousness required, they’d be confessing that yes, the dastardly far-right were correct all along, and they can’t have that, can they? Better to let the city collapse than to admit the “bigots” were right!
Now, one thing to watch out for is to see if the CA NG’s role increases over time. There’s a term in military circles called “mission creep” - a phenomenon where the military’s involvement expands, almost naturally, as a simple consequence of being drawn deeper into the crisis in which they were originally intended to play a limited role. I find it difficult to believe the deployment of the CHP and National Guard is going to make much of a dent, because the scale and scope of the problem is so large. They’re past the point of busting individual drug dealers, encouraging addicts to find treatment, and trying to get the homeless out of public spaces. There’s just too many of them. Ideally, you’d round these people up and incarcerate them if necessary, but for obvious reasons, this wouldn’t go over well. Or would it?
California is a majority Democrat state that allows someone like Gavin Newsom retain power, despite doing little else aside from living off the taxpayer. We live in an era where partisanship rules the day, and Newsom possesses virtually unlimited political capital. That’s an oversimplification, surely, but it’s a fact Newsom can get away with doing things a Republican governor likely would never get away with, because Newsom is “on-side.”
The way President Joe Biden has continued many of Donald Trump’s policies shows that being in the correct party is the greatest enabler and the same principle applies to Newsom. If he decided to go down the road of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, play the heavy hand and clean up the streets of San Francisco, he’d receive criticism from some quarters, but most would follow along, because everyone sees the need to clean up the city. Besides, what are the mostly Democratic California voters to do, vote Republican because Newsom chose to be tough on crime? Overnight, “law and order” would cease to be an “allergy” for the Left, as Senator Marco Rubio recently put it.
But Newsom nor any government official answers to the public. Instead, they answer to special interests and the people who keep them in power. I don’t think Newsom nor San Francisco Mayor London Breed like the fact the city is in such horrid shape, but when the voters will vote for you no matter how bad things get and there exist powerful and often wealthy entities giving you incentives for managing the crisis instead of resolving it, what do you think they’re going to do?
I hate comparing someone useful like a doctor or a plumber to government officials, but if the one thing they all have in common is that they exist because something needs to be fixed. If there was nothing left to fix, they might end up outliving their usefulness. That’s another over-simplification on my part, but the point is that the presence of crisis serves a dual-purpose - a cudgel against the political opposition and a way to justify your continued existence and more of your money. This is how politicians stay in power and, worse, what breeds authoritarians. Never believe someone who says that a figure, like El Salvador’s Bukele, who uses power to solve society’s problems, is a more dangerous autocrat than someone like Biden or Newsom, who hold immense power, yet does nothing to provide a livable society, using that power instead to enrich themselves, reward their friends, and punish their enemies.
I’ve strayed far from the original intent of this post, so let me conclude by saying: wait and see. San Franciscans shouldn’t be so quick to thank Gavin Newsom for so half-heartedly choosing to finally tackle the crisis. This is a starting point, not an end state and my prognosis is that this won’t do much to fix the problem. It will, however, manage it to an extent and make Newsom seem, in the eyes of his supporters, to be an effective leader.
This sort of approach keeps people like him in power, despite their failures. Why dispense with a winning strategy?
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
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