San Fransicko Why Progressives Ruin Cities

I couldn't understand. We say we're so compassionate. We think we're more compassionate than other people in other states. But this is cruelty.

When the book came out, I was criticized. The New York Times, of course, they didn't like my book. And they claimed I had not interviewed any homeless people, which was hilarious.

They give cash, $600, $650 a month in cash to people if they're homeless, including if they're coming from out of state.

I wanted to understand why that was. That's why I wrote San Francisco.

I first visited California when I was 15...And we saw mentally ill people on the streets, you know, the first wave of homelessness in the 80s was a combination of releasing people out of mental hospitals without proper care in the community, combined with the crack epidemic.

I think we're at a moment of peak climate hysteria, peak climate nihilism, where basically the concerns around climate change, some of which I hold, by the way, I think climate change is real and we should do something about.

It's just created a kind of derangement syndrome among many people on the left where they think that somehow you just get technologies by banning this or that technology and wishing a new technology to existence place. It doesn't work like that.

It's a kind of mania that we're experiencing right now. I think we're about to have a really abrupt wake up call this winter when we see just how deadly many of these policies have become.

I think the first thing is that, you know, recognizes that we're in an energy crisis. We need to produce significantly more oil and gas in order to power, in order to provide energy to our allies in Europe and Asia.

The United States has enough natural gas to both provide for ourselves and for Europe for a thousand years.

And it's sicko. I should say that's the name of his book.

But now he's out with a brand new book called San Francisco. So good about how progressives are ruining big cities across the U.S. by not only tolerating, but actually enabling homelessness, drug dealing and crime.

Joining me now, Michael Schellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress and author of the new book, San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities Out Tomorrow.

It's called San Francisco. Why progressives ruin cities?

I've been doing some reading Michael Schellenberger, who wrote this very interesting new book on San Francisco.

He's very pro actually legalizing drugs.

Mike Schellenberger's San Francisco is worth reading if you're from the Bay Area a long time like I've been because it ain't good

I wrote an essay called Why I Am Not a Progressive.

I have two books out. One last year, one this year, Apocalypse Never and San Francisco were, you know, I wrote them in part because I just wanted to sort of articulate what I believe, you know, based on reading the evidence and what my views are because I think labels are so inadequate.

I felt like I'm living in like apartheid South Africa or something. I just feel like I'm living in a place that's not moral and and I feel really bad and angry about that.

When I would raise the problems with them, including the fact that the vast majority of people living on the streets are addicted to hard drugs or suffering mental illness, they would say to me it sounds like you just want to arrest everybody. And so I wrote San Francisco in part to say, here's what I want to do. You know, here's what I think the plan is.

I felt the need to write San Francisco because I think when my progressive soccer buddies read it and you kind of lay out where is this ideology coming from? And you realize that, yeah, it's really that stupid. Like, it's like, you know, you get to the bottom of it. You're like, wow, that dumb. Are you like, I thought it maybe would be more sophisticated, but it's just that stupid at bottom. There's no there there.

part four of my interview with Michael Schellenberger who wrote a great book San Francisco how progressives destroy cities and indeed they do is up right now