If you want to know what it is like where we are going, ask those who have already gotten there. The San Francisco Bay Area is the most liberal part of the country. There is no resistance there to the leftist agenda that is now being imposed nationwide. This agenda has not worked out well.

SF Gate reports on a poll of Bay Area voters:

A shocking 71% of respondents said the quality of life in the greater Bay Area is worse now compared to five years ago. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they are considering leaving in the next five years — including 53% of respondents who work in the tech sector.

Primary complaints include the high cost of housing, the high cost of living, homelessness, and crime — all areas that are unlikely to improve under liberal rule, as the Biden Administration has illustrated.

These same voters sent Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Congress. She is one of the key figures in charting the current course of the country. What has been done to her district, Democrats want to inflict throughout the land.

The main difference is that the whole country does not enjoy the vast wealth Silicon Valley generates, so Building Back Better will entail severe poverty.

On tips from Steve T and Mr. Freemarket.

Democrats’ foreign policy of bestowing our money upon our Taliban enemies to bribe them into possibly killing fewer Americans also has domestic applications. Starting next month, San Francisco will pay sociopaths to refrain from shooting people.

From the San Francisco Examiner:

San Francisco thinks it may have an answer for its rising gun violence problem: Paying people to not pull the trigger. …

The program, which will launch as a pilot in October, is called the Dream Keeper Fellowship. It’s San Francisco’s latest iteration of a guaranteed-income program that will provide high-risk individuals with $300 a month as a start.

In case $300/month isn’t enough,

Participants will be able to earn up to $200 more a month by hitting milestones in the program, such as landing a job interview, complying with probation or consistently meeting with a mentor.

As we have been learning in Afghanistan, putting liberals in positions of authority has consequences.

It’s being funded in part through the Dream Keeper Initiative, an effort from Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton to divert funding from law enforcement to the Black community.

Race riots bring more than fawning coverage from the media. They also bring cash. Just ask Patrisse Cullors.

“What we are talking about is saying we are going to invest resources in this 25-year-old who has eight previous arrests, who is on parole, who is a proud member of a neighborhood clique and who is not even seeking services,” [National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform Executive Director] Muhammad said.

Muhammad says this is “what you have to do in order to reduce gun violence.” Democrats have to pretend to be doing something to fight the skyrocketing crime they caused with their Black Lives Matter antipolice lunacy. They don’t yet have the political leverage to confiscate firearms from the law-abiding, although that is certainly on the horizon.

If they ever reverse course and start cracking down on violent criminals, it won’t be in San Francisco, where the DA is the openly pro-criminal Chesa Boudin, offspring of Weather Underground terrorists.

On a tip from Chris Neilson.

No wonder the feds are inflating our currency. Liberal governance is so expense, no matter how confiscatory the tax rates, more money will always be needed. In San Francisco, the city so liberal it sends Nancy Pelosi to Congress, new trash cans will cost $12,000 to $20,000 apiece.

Existing cans are regarded as hideous, are usually overflowing, and allow the derelicts that progressive policies have drawn to San Francisco in vast numbers to break into them to root for recyclables, in the process spreading trash all over for the rats to play in. Some recyclers find it convenient to pull out the bin and dump the whole mess on the sidewalk, which in San Francisco is often smeared with human waste anyway.

When mass-produced, the cost per can will drop to an estimated $2,000 to $3,000. Still, supervisors balked at the price to get there.

Nonetheless, a committee of the Board of Supervisors has agreed to a pilot program to test out the new cans. Since it took the bureaucrats in Public Works 3 years to come up with a prototype, they don’t want to delay any further.

The city worked with a designer on a custom trash can, hence the outlandish cost. The old cans cost $1,218 apiece back in 2018. Who knows what the next batch will cost in 2024 or so?

Speaking of cost,

Public Works is asking supervisors to approve spending $537,000 from $840,000 on reserve to cover design costs for 15 trash cans, 10 garbage carts with wheels that go inside the stationary can, management, some existing trash can models and contingency money for unknown costs.

They might have gone with a model already in use somewhere else and saved a fortune, but local taxpayers don’t mind being looted, or they already would have escaped the area.

No matter how much they spend, trash all over the place will continue to be a problem, for local cultural reasons. As Lower Haight resident Marian Chatfield-Taylor observes,

“You could ask Frank Lloyd Wright to design a trash can, but if you don’t care whether (your street) is clean or dirty, you won’t put it in the trash can.”

On a tip from R F.

The Future of the Democratic Party blames the explosion in shoplifting that we have seen since the Ascension of Saint George of Fentanyl on starving people who “either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry.” There was no bread on display at Needless Markups, so they had to settle for pricey handbags:

Shoplifting can still lead to arrest even in California if you take more than $950 at a time. But as Democrats have proven by applying Broken Windows policy in reverse, if you allow some crime, you get a lot of crime.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Walgreens has been closing stores in San Francisco, where shoplifting has been effectively legalized and the district attorney is the offspring of cop-killing Weather Underground terrorists who sides with criminals against law enforcement. For anyone who doesn’t understand why San Francisco may soon be store-free, this video might be instructive:

What liberals have done to San Francisco, they are doing to the rest of the country.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Liberalism is why we can’t have nice things — or at the very least why they can’t be displayed for sale in California, except in locked cases.

From KPIX:

Nearly a dozen thieves working together swarmed into a Louis Vuitton store in Palo Alto, stealing more than $100,000 in handbags in the second such theft at the Stanford Shopping Center in three weeks, police said Wednesday.

The culprits were what are usually described as “youths” or “teens.”

Witnesses were only able to describe the suspects as males and females, possibly in their late teens or early twenties, all wearing face coverings, police said.

They didn’t even need weapons, civilization having essentially collapsed in the San Francisco Bay Area.

No doubt they were only stealing the fancy handbags so as to feed their starving families, as AOC has asserted regarding the tsunami of crime that began after the ascension of violent career criminal George Floyd into the liberal pantheon.

The five vehicles used in the getaway were a gray Lexus sedan, a gray Infinity SUV, a white Audi sedan, a black four-door Hyundai sedan, and a red two-door Honda sedan.

Despite our extravagantly generous welfare state, economic hardship requires them to keep stealing. No self-respecting crusader for justice and equity wants to be seen in a Hyundai or Honda. A certain lifestyle must be sustained.

On May 19, a similar theft happened at a different store at the Stanford Shopping Center, where a group of at least ten suspects stole more than $150,000 in handbags from Neiman Marcus, although police said the vehicles used in that incident were different than the one at the Louis Vuitton store.

The day before,

On May 18 in San Francisco, a group of thieves ransacked a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Union Square, making off with $90,000 in merchandise.

An organizer for Black Lives Matter has informed us that such activities are to be regarded not as theft but as “reparations” owed to those who are oppressed according to liberal doctrine.

Walgreens has been closing stores because it is effectively legal to shoplift in Democrat-dominated California. Thieves are expected to limit themselves to swiping less than $950 worth of merchandise at a time. However, if you allow any crime, you get a lot.

This was the insight behind the Broken Windows approach to police work that allowed Rudy Giuliani to clean up New York City, which has since slipped back into dysfunction thanks to liberal rule. The current War on Police and ever more lenient treatment of criminals puts Broken Windows into reverse by encouraging crime.

On tips from Steve T and Wiggins.

With the radical left in charge in Washington, we don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s coming next. We can just look to San Francisco. What happens there today will be national policy tomorrow. This is great news for people claiming to be artists, some of whom will be handed $1,000 per month in free money:

Starting sometime in May, 130 local artists in San Francisco — “whose artistic practice is rooted in a historically marginalized community” — will begin receiving the money, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced Thursday. The payments are scheduled to last for six months in total, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

“Rooted in a historically marginalized community” means that this guy likely does not qualify; he needs to also identify as nonwhite:

In nearby Oakland, you only get $500/month free money, but you don’t have to identify as an artist; you just have to be nonwhite. Whites get taxed to pay for it though.

In San Francisco,

The program, which was designed to provide support during the pandemic, is open to artists working in a number of different mediums — including music, dance, creative writing, visual art, performance art, installation, photography, theater, and film.

The ChiCom virus is winding down. But exploiting it as a pretext for wealth redistribution just got into high gear. Many temporary measures will be made permanent.

On a tip from Varla.

San Francisco is among the worst cities in the country for homelessness. It costs a fortune to create a crisis on this scale. When it comes to wasting other people’s money, no one beats San Francisco liberals, who are spending over $5,000 per month per tent to maintain villages of derelicts.

If you want more of something, you subsidize it. Via KTLA:

San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to feed and house people in tent villages as the city struggles with a swelling homeless population. …

The 262 tents currently house more than 300 people, with some vacancies. The villages also provide access to bathrooms, meals and 24-hour security…

The residents are not provided with butlers, although they ought to be, for $5,121 per month per tent. Most people pay much less for their mortgages.

These days, paying people $147 per day (based on 300 people) to be homeless is nothing:

The funding is only a fraction of the more than $300 million the city spends annually on homeless services, and the average cost per night is less than what the city pays under a program to shelter homeless people in hotels…

However, the tent city is more controversial, because it is not eligible for federal reimbursement. It is better to waste money belonging to people far away in other parts of the country, who won’t see what it is being spent on when they step in the consequences.

On a tip from Brian Brandt. Hat tip: Hot Air.

If it is true that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, there could now be a conservative among the San Francisco media.

Via KPIX:

A KPIX 5 reporter investigating a series of auto break-ins around Twin Peaks in San Francisco was robbed of his camera at gunpoint Wednesday. …

Don Ford … was preparing to interview nearby homeowners when a white luxury sedan with four men inside pulled up.

Luxury sedan? That couldn’t be right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells us that the crime wave of the past year is only a matter of impoverished oppressed people stealing bread so that they don’t starve.

“The car came up here while we were about to do an interview, three guys jumped out,” said Ford. “One had a gun and put in my face and said, ‘We’re taking the camera.’”

No degree of lawlessness surprises the residents of cities controlled by leftists:

“I was worried that this is what’s gonna happen, because as thieves get more and more brazen, they do more and more brazenly things. I’m not making that up. We just had that experience today,” a neighbor who asked not to be identified told KPIX 5.

Any large city is likely to see more crime in the wake of the Black Lives Matter–driven campaign to marginalize police. San Francisco has the added disadvantage of being located in California, whose rulers are so pro-criminal that they have decriminalized shoplifting. At the local level, the district attorney is Chesa Boudin, offspring of Weather Underground cop-killing terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. He was raised by Obama mentors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn while his parents festered in prison. The platform that got him elected could be summarized as “F*** the police!”

On a tip from Don M.

This might help wash that last post out of readers’ eyes. Liz Wheeler notes that it is now forbidden to kiss your date in the moonbat dystopia San Francisco (where anal sex with strangers has been encouraged since coronavirus hit). She asks, how many would have tolerated this insane level of arbitrary tyranny a year ago?

Sharia law is libertarian compared to COVID-19 restrictions in jurisdictions run by liberals. Imagine the oppression they will inflict if the ChiComs manage to cook up a virus that is a more serious risk to the general population.

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Lacking from the ChiCom virus response in jurisdictions run by Democrats is a sense of perspective. They could get some from liberalism’s capital city:

A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far.

That makes recreational drugs almost four times as deadly as coronavirus. Yet while authorities drive countless businesses into bankruptcy in the name of the virus, they also pass out free needles, encouraging drug use.

Many people overdosed in low-income apartment buildings and in city-funded hotel rooms for the homeless. Others died on sidewalks, in alleyways and parks around the city.

Democrats care about the poor. That is, they care about making them more abundant, and then harvesting their votes. Enabling the junky lifestyle supports the agenda, but alleviating the exploitable plight of the miserable is the last thing they want to do.

Elsewhere in California,

Other areas of the state have seen a spike in drug use and overdoses amid lockdowns, including in Los Angeles County. In 2013 in the county, fentanyl accounted for 3% of drug-related deaths. At the start of 2020, 42% of drug deaths were fentanyl-related in the area, and that number jumped to 51% when lockdowns were enacted in March.

Like COVID-19 and much of the money in the bloated bank accounts of the Biden family, a large percentage of fentanyl comes from communist China. It is smuggled in across the underdefended Mexican border.

Nationwide, the lockdowns are driving up drug use and suicide among teenagers. It’s almost as if the point of the lockdowns is not to save lives after all.

On tips from ABC of the ANC, DCGere, and Varla.

The San Francisco Bay Area was the nexus of the free speech movement. But that was back in the 1960s, when free speech was seen as helping leftists in their quest to take over America. They have largely succeeded; the left-wing insurgents are now the establishment, and we are one election away from them consolidating what might amount to total power.

Revolutionaries serve no purpose when the revolution is over. That’s why they often end up in front of firing squads. Free speech serves no purpose either. That’s why free speech rallies in the Bay Area now end up like this:

A free speech rally was shut down in San Francisco on Saturday after counter-protesters became violent. The situation became so dangerous for conservatives that police needed to escort them to their cars for their own safety from an angry mob.

No wonder the liberal mob hates the police so much. Always spoiling the fun.

A “Free Speech Rally Against Twitter and Big Tech” was planned for Saturday at the Federal Building at U.N. Plaza, which is near Twitter’s headquarters.

The point was to protest Twitter’s politically motivated suppression of information related to the bombshell story of international corruption involving Joe Biden and his bagman Hunter.

Unlike many of the Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots that have destroyed countless businesses across the country, Team Save America had a permit for the rally. But this permission came from the City of San Francisco, not the radical mob that controls the streets on the Left Coast.

Before the 1 p.m. free speech rally kicked off, hundreds of counter-protesters assembled in the area, including a group of black-clad individuals wielding shields. Demonstrators were holding signs that read, “Smash Fascism” and “Nazi Trump F*** Off.”

These “demonstrators” were Antifa stormtroopers. The latter slogan references a song by a local band, “Nazi Punks F*** Off” by the Dead Kennedys.

The main organizer, Philip Anderson, was attacked and punched while he was walking to the stage to deliver his speech. The counter-protesters threw bottles at Anderson while he was on stage. Anderson announced the rally was canceled.

“Too bad it got canceled, that’s what happens when you lose free speech, this is what our country has turned into,” Anderson told the crowd.

It is only a preview of what our country will turn into if Democrats are rewarded for this behavior by winning the election.

Anderson shared a photo that shows his bloody mouth with his front tooth knocked out and another hanging loosely with the caption: “Antifa attacked me for no reason.”

On the contrary, the reason was that Anderson represents resistance. Leftists do not tolerate opposition. Those who reject their demented ideology are “fascists” who must be destroyed — ironically through classic fascist tactics.

Anderson also posted a video from a hospital bed. “I have a question for you, Joe Biden. You said that Antifa is just an idea. This is what they did to me,” Anderson said with a front tooth missing. “I’m at the hospital right now … because of Antifa. Do you still think, after seeing this, that they’re just an idea?”

Too bad there is zero chance of Biden coming within earshot of a reporter who would ask that same question — not that he wouldn’t just sneer at the question anyway.

Six people were injured by the mostly peaceful brownshirts. As usual, no arrests were made, and the mainstream media will have little if anything to say about the incident.

Philip Anderson is black. Imagine the fireworks if Trump supporters knocked the teeth out of a black guy for trying to say something they didn’t want people to hear. There would be no other story in the news from now until election day. But dog bites man stories don’t attract much interest, especially since they don’t support the Narrative.

On a tip from Rapinhoe.

Race-based social engineering suffered a setback with the fall of the Third Reich. Now it is making a comeback. San Francisco will pay blacks and Pacific Islanders $1,000 per month to have babies. Disfavored racial groups like whites and Asians are on their own.

This is on the level:

Mayor London Breed on Monday introduced the Abundant Birth Project, which will give a basic income supplement to 150 Black and Pacific Islander women during pregnancy. They’ll get $1,000 a month through their pregnancy and for the first six months postpartum, “with a goal of eventually providing a supplement for up to two years post-pregnancy,” the mayor announced.

Breed explicitly confirms that the incentives are “rooted in racial justice” — i.e., in the vindictive anti-Caucasian cultural Marxist ideology that is increasingly also anti-Asian.

Looks like they named Breed right, considering her predilection for racially oriented breeding.

By encouraging black women to give birth outside of wedlock, Breed is helping to keep her fellow blacks down, even as she makes them more numerous. There is no more reliable predictor of failure than growing up in a single-parent household.

Surprise surprise; Yahoo shut off the comments on this article. The information gatekeepers wouldn’t want anyone mitigating their heavy spin in favor of the Abundant Birth Project by pointing out that it is racist to the last extreme, and racism is supposed to be wrong.

On a tip from Mr. Freemarket.

Socialism is based on coercion, capitalism on enlightened self-interest. The main lesson learned from the Cold War is that a socialist system cannot compete with a capitalist system. However, in a mixed economy, coercion can provide government-run businesses with advantages over the private sector. COVID-19 has enabled an orgy of coercion. This makes it hard for privately owned gyms to compete with gyms owned by the city of San Francisco:

For months, the city of San Francisco health order has prevented local gyms from opening its doors, but some city-owned gyms have been back open for months and are allowing city employees to use them, crushing private gym owners.

Per a decree from Mayor London Breed, private gyms are forbidden from opening at least through the end of September. However, police officers, judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and paralegals can work out in municipal gyms. These gyms are special, making them as safe from coronavirus as the maskless Nancy Pelosi while getting her hair done.

Daniele Rabkin, who has struggled desperately to keep her gym Crossfit Golden Gate alive through the increasingly absurd lockdowns, cannot believe the arrogance:

“Even though they’re getting exposed, there are no repercussions, no ramifications? It’s shocking,” she said.

Shocking maybe, but not surprising. Single-party rule means extreme arrogance on the part of the rulers. Chicago is one example, California another. If Democrats manage to impose single-party rule nationwide by jiggering the system (enabling industrial scale voter fraud, abolishing the Electoral College, making DC and Puerto Rico into states, etc) and by flooding the country with unassimilable numbers of needy immigrants, the USA as a whole will be a third.

On a tip from Mr. Freemarket.