So long as crime remained in San Francisco’s low-income, historically black Tenderloin neighborhood, it was acceptable to San Fran’s far-left ruling elites, but when it erupted in the high-end stores the elites frequent, “the reign of criminals” had “to end.” The reaction to the looting of Louis Vuitton on Union Square reveals San Fran’s liberal elites are “Fair Weather Marxists” and hypocrites.
As we know from their contributions to liberal candidates’ campaign coffers and support for socialism, San Fran’s elites have an affinity for Marxist revolution, but apparently only for revolutionaries who rob, rape, maim, and kill each other in the low-income areas. When they dare enter the elite’s salons, that is another matter entirely; it’s where the liberals draw the line.
It is fine for those elites to ignore the mass homelessness, shooting galleries, and crime victimizing everyone in the Tenderloin, but once theft expands to Louis Vuitton’s Union Square store, hits Nordstrom’s in Walnut Creek, and hits other high-end stores in the area, that is an outrage warranting police countermeasures. Yesterday, San Fran’s liberals condemned the police, but today they screaming for police protection. What enormous, and shameless, hypocrisy!
On the heels of the organized smash and grab at Louis Vuitton where some 40 thieves ravaged and robbed the store, taking everything of value and depositing the loot in cars that formed a receiving line outside, San Fran Mayor London Breed, District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who represents San Fran) suddenly jettisoned their blasé, look the other way, stance to demand an immediate crack-down. Having spent a year not calling on law enforcement to end arson, vandalism, looting, assault, battery, and murder in BLM and Antifa riots, they suddenly discovered the necessity of law and order.
San Fran’s startling rise in crime is the entirely predictable consequence of Mayor Breed’s $120 million defunding of the police in 2020, Chesa Boudin’s refusal to prosecute and incarcerate criminals, and Nancy Pelosi’s heretofore willingness to condone or ignore crime springing from “transformational change” vandals (remember, “people will do what they do”).
Illicit drugs, murders, rapes, robberies, and property destruction of all kinds have raged in San Francisco for well over a year with little to no insistence on law enforcement from the ruling class. Rather, they have regularly condemned the police. They have called for “social justice” reforms in the form of coddling, housing, supplying tents, needles and drugs to, pumping massive welfare into, and refusing to incarcerate criminals from vagrants to murderers, resulting in a predictable crime explosion. They have done so to the ruination of a once beautiful city. So long as their primary political supporters in the city and nation were happy with the “transformational change” taking place, they were totally fine with the bedlam and ruination—that is, until the crime arrived at Louis Vuitton. As soon as the well-healed liberals who supported and financed the likes of Breed, Boudin, and Pelosi realized that Tenderloin dystopia might become their dystopia reaching their neighborhoods and haunts, it was no longer okay. Something had to be done. People had to be arrested, prosecuted, and punished.
Mayor Breed helped cause the lawlessness with her$120 million cutlast year in the police and sheriff’s departments’ budgets (and remained steadfast in that course until the smash and grab at Louis Vuitton). Following the LV robbery, she held apress conferenceon December 14, announcing a volte face:“It is time for the reign of criminals to end. And it comes to an end when are we more aggressive with law enforcement and less tolerant of all the bulls–t that has destroyed our city.” Suddenly, police are on patrol around the favored salons and are entering into the Tenderloin in search of crime and to clean up the drug dens. Suddenly instead of condemning the police, the ruling class is begging for their help.
District Attorney Boudin is also singing a different tune. Since he took office in 2020, Boudin released most of those arrested for thefts (charging only 46 percent of them). He explained that he had no intention of prosecuting vagrants and refused to prosecute “victimless” drug crimes, prostitutes, and shoplifters. Some 51 prosecutors have either left the DA’s office in disgust or been fired by Boudin since the start of his term. A Boudin recall petition is circulating with over 83,000 signatures. In a recent NBC interview, one of those who quit the DA’s office,Prosecutor Brooke Jenkins, summed Boudin up this way: “Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend.” She added, “the fact that killers may go free, just doesn’t sit well with me.”
Chesa appears to have had little difficulty fulfilling George Soros’s goals for him until the Louis Vuitton robbery. After that,Chesastated: “These brazen acts will not be tolerated in San Francisco.” Odd, he had tolerated them for two years, but now it was different, now the very ones who lavishly praised him and dumped money into his campaign coffers feared they would become victims.
And then there is Nancy Pelosi, no stranger to hypocrisy. She had kept mum about all those BLM and Antifa riots nationwide, even the BLM and Antifa assault on the White House when the Trumps occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, suggesting that we should come to expect arson, looting, assault, and battery so long as “transformational change” (i.e., socialism) was not adopted. She found property destruction, like the toppling of the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore, entirely unremarkable, famously stating, “people will do what they do.”
Yet, after the Louis Vuitton robbery, Pelosi felt obliged to sing an entirely different tune, in sync with her San Fran colleagues Breed and Boudin,statingon December 15: “It’s absolutely outrageous. Obviously, it cannot continue. But the fact [is] that there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where . . .and we cannot have that lawlessness become the norm . . . It must be stopped . . .” Pelosi knows perfectly well where the lawlessness comes from: the defunding of the police, elimination of cash bail, and refusal to charge, let alone prosecute, those arrested for criminal offenses. That is the reform position of her own party, dominated by the far left and supported in jurisdiction after jurisdiction by George Soros.
It seems fitting this time of year for the light of truth to shine into the corrupt enclaves of American Marxists. Suddenly besot by fear over what might happen to their favorite salons and even their homes, San Fran’s liberals are suddenly calling for law enforcement with great urgency. That, after years of ignoring the brutal impaling of the Tenderloin neighborhood by criminals of all sorts. We should not be fooled into thinking San Fran’s liberals have given up on Marxism. It remains the prescription they wish for the rest of the nation (just not for them personally).
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