Episode 77: San Francisco

We're here in the once great city of San Francisco.

We came in here and we saw people defecating on the street.

We saw people using heroin.

We saw people smoking crack cocaine.

And you look around,

the city is not vibrant anymore.

It's really collapsed because of leftist policies.

And these policies have caused people to flee this area.

They don't prosecute criminals like they do in most parts parts of the country.

And the wreckage has really, really been sad to see.

And so I've seen so many businesses boarded up.

I've seen so much riffraff just running around.

And it just shows you these policies matter, leadership matters.

They are doing it wrong here.

No wonder why we've had so many people move from San Francisco to Florida over the last few years.

We got to stop this madness.

We need to restore sanity to this country.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Wearin Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrienne, today we are talking about our hometown.

That's right.

A little city in the western edge of the U.S.

that occupies a kind of big amount of psychic territory for the American right.

That's right.

San Francisco.

Old Frisco with the end of land sadness.

Yeah.

San Francisco is a place that has no like affectionate working class mockery, like the windy city or like the bears for Chicago or like the Big Apple for New York or, you know, everything is bigger.

In Texas, all the Texas cities blend together for me, but you know what I mean?

Like San Francisco doesn't have any kind of like winking regional eccentricity that is beloved.

It has regional eccentricities that stand in for all kinds of like pathologies of American culture.

And we're going to dissect those today.

Exactly.

And so just to locate myself a little bit, I'm an academic.

I'm a gay man and I live in San Francisco.

And one of the funny experiences that this confers on me thrice over is that other people seem to be experts in what my immediate world is like that bears no resemblance to what I see when I step out the door, right?

You know how in academia, you can't even like, I said it yesterday, it was fine.

You know how in the gay community,

not the people I know, you know how in San Francisco, you can't walk down the street without someone shitting on your foot.

Why are you so good at knowing my life?

This ability for other people to describe and to interpret your experience for you and to kind of discount your own expertise, right?

Like when you tell people like, that's not my experience of San Francisco at all, they're like,

right?

Like, like your wokeness is blinding you to the human poop it's like I assure you it does not right there is a tendency to kind of discount the experience and expertise the lived expertise of people who are here and to kind of promote people who are like I went to I went to a gay pride march in San Francisco once and let me tell you I went to Folsom Street Fair the like physical embodiment of that onion headline where Marilyn Monroe is now going door to door trying to shock people like Folsom Street Fair is like an entire festival for that impulse.

Yeah.

And people go there and then they're shocked that they see something that shocks them.

It is Marilyn Manson then.

It is Marilyn Manson Festival.

Yeah.

I'm sure he's probably there like right now.

Yeah.

Going door to door and they're like, sir, this is a gym.

I think what you're saying is San Francisco is not just a city.

It is a symbol, right?

It is a stand-in for the American imagination on the right for the excesses of liberal governance and like like libertine social mores that were mistakenly adopted in and following the 1960s.

And on the left, increasingly, it's a symbol for like the reactionary impulses of the tech industry.

And today we're really, because we are a podcast about the right, we're mostly talking about how the right understands San Francisco as a boogeyman.

But I do think it's interesting that this is a place that across the political spectrum, everybody loves to hate.

Yeah,

exactly.

It won't surprise anyone coming from a lefty podcast that we find one of these two narratives a lot more persuasive than the other.

And I think we should do an episode at some point about San Francisco conservatism, which I think will come through sort of in bits and bombs now.

Yeah.

I mean, it is the defining ideology of our era, San Francisco conservatism.

Exactly.

But for now, I think we're doing sort of San Francisco for people who don't live here or barely live here.

Does she even go here?

Partly why I think San Francisco has become such a symbol in the right-wing imagination in the 21st century is because all of those conservatives live here, right?

Yeah.

And they see it.

And they're like, this is a place where

I perceive myself to be in the political minority as a conservative and look at this evil excesses of the liberal culture that I am being driven to the right by and rebelling against and see myself as a bold truth teller in the face of.

It's partly just because it's what they see, right?

It's partly because they are on Valencia and getting panhandled while they go from bar to bar or, you know, trying to hail Waymo from their phone that they haven't looked up in 13 hours and getting bothered when they step in some garbage.

That's partly because they're paying attention to it.

But something I'm really interested in that you have brought up to my attention, and I guess I kind of knew before, but I hadn't really thought about it the same way, is that new San Francisco that is making the city into a stand-in for left-wing excesses is actually drawing on a long tradition of conservative thinking about San Francisco and about California as like a symbol of all the places America can go wrong and all the places where liberals can go too far.

Exactly.

And one of the things that I think I hadn't realized until we started planning for this episode is that people who live in big cities always complain about that big city, right?

New Yorkers are famous for being like, New York is dead and like, it's not as cool as it used to be, et cetera, et cetera.

Everything was better actually when I was 25 and first moved to New York.

It's like the way that people complain about gentrification.

It's like, we moved here 20 years ago.

Before, there was a total hellho.

Sounds like you were gentrifiers 20 years ago.

But the new gentrifiers, that's bad.

But there's something more in the sense that we've elevated critiques of San Francisco.

There's a certain clout that comes with coming to San Francisco, stepping off the plane and having a couple of observations, right?

And some of these can be very, very good.

Today, I think we're going to be grappling, for instance, with a couple of texts that I think are, as texts are really good.

Like N Plus One will sometimes run these articles where someone's like, I flew into San Francisco, this is what it was like.

As somebody who moved to San Francisco two years ago in the spring of 2023,

after a decade plus in New York, let me tell you, I stepped off the plane and I had some observations, right?

There is a degree of genuine difference about the place and true regional distinctness from the rest of the U.S.

There is visible presence of the tech industry.

There is a set of cultural markers that have been left over from the 1960s new left hippie era that are now merging very interestingly and revealingly with that tech culture, right?

It is indeed a place that makes manifest and obvious some trends in American culture that other places keep more subtextual.

I think that's right.

I mean, to give one example for people who haven't traveled here, let's assume you touched on an SFO and you don't take BART, but you rather take a cab or eventually probably a Waymo up to San Francisco via 101.

Should we tell our listeners what a Waymo is?

For those of them who are not experts in the region, Waymos are self-driving cars.

They are white small SUVs, I guess, that are covered in these conspicuous cameras, and there is nobody driving them.

And they can be hailed, I believe, as cabs, like an Uber with no driver.

Oh, you don't use Waymo?

Of course I don't use Waymo.

I'm terrified by those things.

Oh, no, I use Waymo.

You use Waymo?

Yeah, I mean, oh my God, you're a pod person.

Three or four times a year, I boycott all these things, but if I have to absolutely go somewhere, yeah, I'll use a Waymo, frankly.

Oh, it's creepy.

I don't like it.

I mean, as a biker in the city, I breathe a sigh of relief when I'm behind a machine.

I will say they go slower.

Yeah.

The machine is not on its phone.

Yeah.

It's not going through a breakup while driving.

I'm not, under no circumstances, do you have to hand it to these guys, but I can just tell you that experientially, when I'm riding around with River, I am am happy to be next to them because I know they have a LiDAR on top of them.

They know exactly where I am at all times.

Yes, and they're taking many photos of you and

like inputting it into your day.

But they're very predictable, right?

In the ways that unfortunately San Francisco drivers on the whole tend not to be.

But yeah, so let's say you're driving up 101 and one of the things you will encounter almost immediately are these bizarre billboards that are all about AI, all about like cloud computing.

And you're like, what the fuck is this?

And it took me forever to sort of place what exactly they were doing and this is where the kind of generalization of san francisco becomes so tricky because you could imagine like oh people in san francisco all care about this instead of having ads for chase bank they're gonna have ads for ai so everyone here cares about ai that's not the case they are really addressing only a very very small subset of not even Bay Area residents.

It seems what they're there for is for people who are being driven into the city for meetings about financing to kind of give people a sense of omnipresence.

It's really addressing probably like 40 or 50 people.

It's a little bit like how on some parts of Hollywood, they have billboards that are placed there to make one producer feel good about his movie.

Yeah, it's like the absolute froth on top of the city is the tech

elite who control just staggering amounts of capital.

And all of the advertising is geared towards them on the 101, like even the Bay Bridge.

It's just every single advertisement is made for this one tiny bit of consumers because nobody else is contracting an AI firm for their company, right?

It renders the rest of the city, at least in this way, like kind of superfluous, right?

Urbanists will sometimes talk about like the big city and the little city, right?

The big city being the large industries or like the big movement of capital that happens physically in that territory.

So like in New York, it's finance.

In London, it's finance.

In New York, it's sometimes also real estate, right?

In San Francisco, it's tech.

And then there's the little city, which is the actual people who fucking live there, you know, like the neighborhoods, the working class population, the middle class population, the schools, the restaurants,

the like laundromats.

And little city is

irrelevant to, and I think often really kind of hated by the big city, at least in San Francisco, in this way that is really conspicuous.

It's really conspicuous how much the little city does not matter in the big city's conception of itself.

One tricky thing is that I think we have to give a history of a particular gaze cast upon San Francisco, but of course that gaze is in dialogue with what actually was happening.

And I thought one good place to start our story would be the 1906 earthquake.

Beginning at the beginning, why not go to the gold rush?

I mean, this was a colonial outpost basically into the point where, you know, gold was found in 1848 and everybody from the East Coast, all the Anglos, fled out here, because before that it was really the Boonies.

And they built a city off of the profits of the gold rush.

And that's when the city really developed as a port city.

And that is going to be pretty important, I think, for our story, in the sense that it was really about like large population exchanges taking place the way they always do through a port, right?

Like it's really a city built for change and built to represent itself to outsiders.

Like the whole part of the, you know, oh, all this stuff stuff can happen in San Francisco is a little bit of a like, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas kind of thing.

It's to some extent advertising.

It's saying, hey, why not come here, cut loose a little while, and then go back to Topeka or whatever, right?

That is part of the city's pitch.

And so in 1906, April 1906, we get the big earthquake, 7.9 magnitude.

There's a huge fire, as Maura mentioned.

About 80% of the city destroyed.

3,000 people died.

And this is sort of the first time we get kind of death and rebirth metaphors about San Francisco everywhere.

So that, I think that might be sort of the beginning where the world witnesses the agony of San Francisco and then witnesses its rebirth.

Not even in the sense that like people projected much onto it.

It just became like a good press story, right?

Like the rebirth of a dying city, the dying of a reborn city, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so ever since then, we've gotten like every 10 years, like, is it dead?

Is it alive?

Is it dead?

Is it alive?

It's like, okay, it's Frödinger, San Francisco.

Like, all I did was buy a carton of milk.

It's like, and apparently, in the meantime, the city either died or was reborn, right?

This idea that there's a copy to be made of San Francisco's crises, I think, starts with the earthquake, really.

Like at the same time, as a port city that draws in very distinct and very different populations, very, very early on, we get a kind of demographic anxiety or almost a eugenic kind of quality to the anxieties about San Francisco's decline and death.

So for instance, I had you look at a text from the American Mercury, San Francisco a Dying City by a certain Phil Hamilton, who I could find out nothing about.

Oh, right.

And I was like, wait, when is this from?

Is this from like the last year?

And you said.

1939.

Oh, my God.

Right.

And this is a gift to Moira.

Behind the fixed smile on its false face, San Francisco is a mighty sick city, says Mr.

Hamilton.

And here's his evidence.

Quote, throughout the United States, births annually exceed deaths in an approximate ratio of three to two.

But in San Francisco, deaths have exceeded births each year since 1928.

Birth rate decline.

Yeah.

Always coming for us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The best that the city health department can do in publishing population estimates is to refuse to admit an actual loss and officially set the population for the past four years at a stationary figure, 693,000.

Very funny to me because the very obvious thing is that people were migrating into the city.

Like you don't have to be born here to live here.

Most people, in fact, I think don't.

That's not the only way a population grows.

You know, is this by reproducing itself?

It also imports people.

Right.

There is a nativist logic behind this where like, you know, people who are from somewhere are the ones born there.

Yeah, transplants don't count, right?

Immigrants don't count.

Exactly.

If you're not of the place from the moment of your genesis, you're not really of it, right?

Exactly.

I think that's here.

Which is really something in a settler colonial country to to have such a persistent myth about, you know?

And this is what I'm driving at.

This is particularly inept for San Francisco.

Because with 1906, we also will get to the number one neighborhood.

Well, one of two neighborhoods that drives conservatives insane about San Francisco.

There's the Castro, sure.

with the naked dudes and the dildo shops and whatever.

Like, don't love that.

Big, big rainbow flag, really comically oversized rainbow flag.

So much rainbow flag.

I mean, we have like rainbow flag crosswalks now and whatever.

But the main one, the one that really drives them up the wall, is the Tenderloin.

Yep.

Can you describe the Tenderloin?

Because like I came here from New York and Philadelphia, two places that in again, in the conservative imagination, also are sort of quote-unquote failed cities.

And I was a little shocked by the Tenderloin.

Were you shocked by the Tenderloin?

The Tenderloin looked like what I had been told San Francisco looked like, right?

Like the Tenderloin as stand-in for the city as a whole.

And the Tenderloin is a part of downtown it's kind of near the big office building so theater district shopping district but it is a kind of lower rent place that has a bunch of homeless shelters a bunch of uh sros and a bunch of methadone clinics and so it has a very visible and very dense homeless population on the street and that is a result of deliberate planning by the city to move the homeless population into one neighborhood and to quarantine them there, right?

Sort of.

It goes even further back.

The origins of the tenderline as we know it today go back to the 1906 earthquake.

The reason why we have so many tenement homes and SROs, so single-room occupancies, so places where you rent a room, but you share a bathroom basically, was that these were built for the workers rebuilding the city after the 1906 earthquake.

A lot of single men.

There was an entertainment district close to there beforehand, but like, obviously, these people needed to be entertained.

They needed to be housed.

They needed to be entertained.

And so there was a kind of a burgeoning kind of, what do we want to call it?

Like red light scene, like strip clubs.

Prostitution, bars.

But also like theaters and music halls, like not all of it illicit, but just like this was where the jazz clubs were, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, there's a big market of men with probably a small amount of disposable income and free time on their hands, right?

Exactly.

And then because it was built so cheaply and really these SROs didn't turn people away, it also became a place of refuge for anyone else who might be discriminated against.

So it became heavily African-American, right?

Because you could always count on being able to get a room there.

It was big for immigrants who couldn't pass a background check later on.

It was big for the transgender community because it still could get discriminated against, obviously, but like it was far less likely.

Compton's cafeteria, the site of the big pro-gay and pro-trans rights riot, was in the tenderloin, right?

That's right.

Turk and Taylor.

Wow.

Gene Compton's Cafeteria, 1967.

If people want to check out Susan Stryker's Friend of the Pods, Screaming Queens, that's described there.

There's two things about it that I think really, really matter for our stories.

And one of them you already touched on, which is it is very, very close to the downtown kind of hotel district, meaning the part of San Francisco with the most visible homelessness is right next to where your Marriott is, which I think is on the whole not true of New York, right?

You really have to kind of get off at the wrong station as a tourist to be like, whoa, okay.

And in San Francisco, you make one wrong turn.

This is a pretty compressed city.

Like, boom, you're right in the middle of an open air market, right?

In some way, I, as a person who lives here in a different part of town, encounter it a whole lot less than like someone who is currently attending a, you know, chiropractors conference at the Moscone Center, you know?

Right.

In our day-to-day life as inhabitants of the San Francisco little city, I am not encountering homelessness in San Francisco in a proportion or visibility more than I am when I come back to visit New York.

It's roughly like proportionally the same.

The rest of the city in the tenderloin, it is very, very visible.

And you're right, that is something that the visitors of the big city or the patrons of the big city encounter like immediately upon exiting their hotel room.

The second thing about the tenderloin is part of why they built the SROs for the workers was because they just needed to put things up quickly.

you know, after 1906, like these were some of the first buildings that went up.

But the second thing is, of course, it was kind of a nudge, as people would say today, for these populations to move on, right?

Don't think this is your city, right?

The Tenderloin is the opposite of a red carpet.

It's saying, if you land here, you do not genuinely belong.

That's what the city elders sort of wanted to communicate to these people.

Now, the irony of all this is that like in the 120 years since the earthquake, almost every neighborhood in San Francisco has undergone greater changes since the Tenderloin.

Those populations have stayed there the longest.

That is a place that has retained its character more than just about any other part of the city, but it was built on this myth of transience and not belonging.

When you've got the first gay establishments there, you'd often get, you know, the San Francisco press being like citizens against degenerates, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's like, well, these people have been there longer than the citizens you're interviewing.

Like, this is really kind of reversing who belongs.

Like, these people have seniority.

Like, the homeless population of the Tenderloin has seniority.

They've been there longer than I have.

Yeah.

Just about any of these tech assholes being like.

Who were, you know, born in 2000 or like, you know, just staggered out of Stanford up the two.

Or out of a South African diamond mine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think it pretends at temporary status when in fact it actually is extremely enduring, right?

And as you say, it's a deliberate policy to sort of pour populations into this area.

And then it is tradition to complain about the fact that this densest place in in the city with the largest number of people living at the edge of poverty somehow, you know, has people wandering the streets and not looking altogether happy, right?

It has fulfilled that function for a long, long time.

And the city, which votes overwhelmingly Democratic, conceives of itself as fairly liberal, whether or not that's justified is very much up for debate.

We can talk about the Californian ideology.

Yeah.

But, you know, it strikes me that this space where, where, you know, San Francisco sort of warehouses its surplus population that then becomes a sort of object of its shame and disavowal, right?

Like this insistence that this is not the real San Francisco or like these people are

lesser a part or not the part of San Francisco that San Francisco wants to be, can run up against not just these old style media narratives about the city as being a place of decay, right?

Or of like contradictions between the stagnance and decadence of liberal governance and the promise of technology.

But it's also a place where like, you know, in a new media ecosystem, all these tourists can then take out their phones and say, like, look at this spectacle that just disturbed me upon me, you know, staggering out of my Sheraton.

Yeah.

And will you, my followers all across the country, share now in my outrage at having to witness this?

Some of it is tourists sort of just pulling out their phones.

But honestly, walking in the tenderloin, I have encountered what I assume to be conservative influencers just filming themselves.

They appear to just arrive in San Francisco to film this stuff and then like leave.

It's just very, very noticeable.

Like you sometimes see these videos on Instagram or on TikTok where you're like, I know where that is.

And like, why would you end up there?

As a, like, we just arrived in San Francisco.

No, it's a destination.

I mean, if you want to see an unwashed, suffering person nodding off from heroin, there is a location

that you can like

go to and you are going to find it there.

I mean, you're not going to take a bus or the BART because you're an asshole, but like you could if you wanted to.

You can Waymo there.

You can take your driverless car right up to your spectacle of human suffering and you can broadcast that.

Yeah, your rented band rover or whatever.

We're in the car and we had some time to process our recent trip to San Francisco.

And we have both decided this is the worst city that we have ever been to.

We knew that homelessness was a problem.

we knew that crime was a problem.

But I think it's one thing to see it on the news, it's another thing to walk the streets and actually experience it for yourself.

And we just have a lot of thoughts.

We're like, oh, yeah, it's gonna be so beautiful, this historic city, you know.

And we were coming from the airport, and there's like encampments.

It's not one tent, it's not one homeless person, it's a bunch of these tents.

It's open drug use.

There is human feces in the middle of the street that we have to step over.

People are urinating in public.

There are needles everywhere.

And people are on some hard drugs, right?

Like it's meth, it's heroin, and it's very sad.

It's very sad to see it because I know that it's changed a lot.

I think that's really important.

We're not going to claim that like, oh, San Francisco is completely, unfairly maligned.

The tenderloin is kind of shocking initially and like should shock the conscience.

The only thing is it doesn't seem to shock the conscience in any of the ways that it should.

You know, a lot of San Francisco neighborhoods outside of the Tenderloin are very capable of change, but they partake in these funny kind of dynamics of respectability politics.

You know, the Castro becomes synonymous with being the gay district, when in fact, of course, the Tenderloin was the original gay district.

And the homeless population in San Francisco is overwhelmingly, it seems, LGBT.

A lot of people, a lot of street kids drift here because they are being kicked out by their families, because they don't feel comfortable where they live, right?

They don't come here because like liberals will give them handouts, whatever.

They come because at least they won't get, you know, murdered or whatever, right?

And yet there's often this sort of framing, like the LGBT community versus the homeless, you know, and it's like, no, these are members of the, many of them are members of that community.

Right.

There's some kind of like myth, and you see this in popular understandings of like feminism about like cis and straight women too, is that this like gender grievance or like politicized gender identity comes with a lot of money somehow, which like I only wish was true.

Like, where's my fucking check?

But like this idea that to be gay means to be a college educated person with a six-figure income is a weirdly persistent idea and it's just not accurate.

Exactly.

And so like the Castro basically becomes the respectable front.

Right, more or less of the LGBT community, whereas like the tenderloin just contains more of the actual community.

And the kinds of changes that we're talking about, so the Castro started out as a, I think, mostly Catholic, white, lower middle class area that sort of like then gets gentrified or, well, it's weird.

It gets upclassed by a bunch of gays moving in in a funny way.

Classic gentrification story.

The gays come and then your rent goes up.

I'm sorry.

It is true.

That is a very standard model.

Or sometimes they euphemize this as like the artists came.

Right.

By which they mean, you know.

Yes, Richard, Florida.

You can say homos, it's fine.

But in other cases, things undergo multiple changes, right?

Polk Gulch, for instance, which is sort of the northern end of the tenderloin, was like the first really recognized neighborhood in the city, then really becomes part of the tenderloin in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and then sort of gets re-techified in the 21st century.

In other cases, frankly, you also get communities in this city where respectability policies are being made impossible, right?

So you have Japantown.

which was thriving prior to 1941 and then miraculously stopped being thriving.

Yeah.

Well, because all of that population of that ethnic enclave was, in fact, interred.

Right.

Yeah.

Got deported, and a lot of them didn't get property back or were kind of compensated in these kind of like federal ways, right?

Like, which didn't come with like, here's your plot of land back, right?

It'll come with like some money, which is nice.

Thank you.

But that neighborhood is like, it still has a sort of nominal Japanese presence, but like it's a lot less.

And right next to it, the Western Edition was a thriving African-American-dominated, really middle to upper-middle-class area.

It was a Harlem of the West.

And it got raised and bulldozed for a bunch of quote-unquote urban renewal projects in the 60s and 70s, right?

And then a lot of those people either moved to the suburbs, or if they happened to be renters, they drifted to the tenderloin, right?

The tenderloin is being asked to absorb things that that happen in the changes that are wrought on these other neighborhoods.

That's just to say that like what you're looking at isn't old San Francisco versus these new arrivals.

Like technically in the sense of biographies, sure, right?

Like were many of these people born in the tenderloin?

Probably not.

But in terms of the character of the place, surprisingly constant, I would say.

Now, this other San Francisco that you get in the tenderloin is, of course, also directed towards tourism.

Sort of starting in the 1930s, you really start getting a San Francisco tourism that has to do with basically with vice stuff, right?

Like a little bit of exoticism, stepping outside of your comfort zone.

And if that comfort zone involves what they then called female impersonation or something like that, or male impersonation, then so be it, right?

Like it was okay now.

And then you'd go back to, I don't know, Portland and whatever.

And then this wasn't part of your world anymore.

And so the Sanderloin always also was.

the part of the city the city kept in order to sort of give itself this kind of frisson of danger and allure, while at the same time also very seriously policing it and honestly making the lives a living hell of many people who were in those thriving industries, right?

Who the city kind of depended on for its draw.

And so this idea of cleaning up the tenderloin, cleaning up the city is extremely old, but it's also extremely ambivalent, right?

Because these same people are like, well, everyone wants to come to San Francisco.

It's like, yeah, that might have to do with all that, by the way.

And then by the 1950s, you start getting organized resistance to all these dynamics.

That is to say that in the early 1960s, you get protests from, for instance, church leaders against police brutality in the tenderloin.

You get the Compton's Cafeteria Riot in the 60s.

Before that, you had the Mattachine Society operating out of North Beach, the first sort of homophile, male homophile organization.

They have the large-scale port workers, the dock workers' strike, right?

That was also in the 50s.

And this large, really kind of thriving, like Sheikhano labor organizing movement in and around San Francisco.

Exactly.

And so that sort of gets remarked on in the SF press, and especially the Chronicle, and especially some of its columnists, are really good.

It's really shocking for the 50s and 60s, like picking up on, like, hey, this is actually politically really important and like middle-class people need to know about this.

But it's funny because I think the global notice of it seems to have been pretty muted.

The global notice comes with the late 60s and the summer of love, right?

That's when, like, oh, San Francisco is being taken over by the nuts, right?

Basically becomes sort of the story.

The late 60s, so why did San Francisco become a magnet?

Because it does seem like there was a, there were like two processes of migration, right?

There was one in which a lot of mostly young, I imagine them as like pretty much overwhelmingly white people

came to San Francisco and specifically to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in a mix of what seemed like kind of vaguely political, particularly opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War, but like really a kind of like music and drug and like party scene.

And then they all moved out, right?

A lot of them sort of got on buses with their sister wives and they went off and they started communes in like the interior or other parts of the U.S.

Aaron Powell.

Well, just anecdotally, a lot of them also just bought a Victorian and are now annoyed about the homeless kids on their stoop.

Yeah, you know, that's the two pass for the hate Ashberry hippie, right?

I think there are a couple of of things happening in the late 60s.

So one is, so there had been just a lot of left-wing organizing.

The city did trend more liberal.

Also, look, we're talking about San Francisco here, but what we're really talking about is this like kind of triple urban area where you have San Francisco in constant conversation with Berkeley and San Jose, right?

Sure.

Well, and Oakland, I suppose, above all.

But in this case, I think it's the dialogue with the suburbs.

I think that the city had seen real waves of flight starting in the 50s.

To where, like, down to the peninsula, up to Marin.

First the peninsula, yeah.

I mean, Marin County is always difficult.

I mean, people could do it, but like you, that was already very fancy and exclusive.

Exactly.

Yeah.

There were attempts in the sort of early 60s to do gigantic developments in the Marin headlands, so on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Those came to naught.

And so basically, I think the majority of it was still the peninsula, and then later joined by what's called the East Bay.

So the area south of Oakland, including Oakland, really, but the suburbs there started between Oakland and San Jose.

And the overall overall development was that there was cheap housing to be had.

There was a kind of general permissiveness, it being, you know, this port city.

And it had, you know, already a thriving gay community, which had started after World War II, mostly people who'd gotten dishonorably discharged and did not care to go home and explain their dishonorable discharge.

And so they settled in their first port of disembarkation, I guess.

Right, because San Francisco, in addition to being a port town, is also a Navy town, right?

Exactly.

So this is partly a product of the affordability of urban life there.

Yeah.

But it's also partly a product of the sort of mystique of permissiveness and social freedom that had been enabled around and about the city by a place like the Tenderloin.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think that you're right, that a lot of kids were drawn here.

by the promise of free love, drugs, and rock and roll.

And like people who will help me dodge the the draft, right?

Like this is, here are a lot of other people also burning your draft cards.

Right, but I think there's something more going on, which is because the city was so visible, it became kind of a beacon to people fleeing, frankly, unsustainable living environments.

So I think the stories I hear from people who came here during the summer of love, they'll often couch it as like, well, I heard about freedom and free love and, you know, rock and roll.

And then like, and my dad was beating me every night.

It's like, well, okay.

So like, there are two ways of telling that story.

Sure, there's Jimi Hendrix.

Right, yeah, yeah.

You're running away from home.

Yeah.

They're running away from home, and this is the place they can run to where everybody else is running to.

And that kind of reaches a critical mass in the summer of 1968.

67.

67, I'm sorry.

So that is when we get a whole bunch of sort of media depictions of San Francisco, some of which are very laudatory and some not so much.

Exactly.

And this is where we might finally grapple with someone that I feel like is one of our white whales.

We've never dealt with her specifically on this.

Are you talking about Joan?

I'm talking about Joan.

We got to talk about Joan.

That twiggy bitch.

She is so mean.

I mean, she's an icon, right?

But you are referring to, I believe, it's the question of like reactionary art, right?

Because Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didian's title essay in her famous essay collection, is a like technically perfect

piece of sort of like impressionistic criticism, right?

She never actually makes an argument.

She never like states what she believes.

She shows what she believes through her selection of quotes, through her selection of like just the perfect noun, and through her just like withering judgment.

And it is a

refutation basically of like the entire counterculture and new left as morally bankrupt and ultimately like socially corrosive.

And she does it so elegantly.

and she's very, very talented and I think like actually evil.

Yeah, possibly.

Didion writes in this essay, San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up.

San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering, right?

So this is like San Francisco as for some people, the beacon and for her, the wound, the place where all the pathologies were showing up.

I think Didion's legacy is twofold.

One is there's something to be seen in San Francisco that tells us something about the United States.

And if I write about it, I'm kind of like Joan Didian.

I am the premier intellectual by showing up here and being like, huh, people are wearing stuff like this, you know?

Right.

She establishes a genre in the San Francisco as metaphor essay, right?

Which has been replicated.

I have to say, I haven't seen it done as well as she did it.

Yeah.

But like, it is a...

piece that will be published in, I don't know, like The New Yorker has done this a few times.

The Atlantic.

The New York Times likes it.

New York Times Magazine.

Like, this is a repeated genre that has its own conventions.

And I do think those conventions were established by Joan Didian.

Yeah.

Yeah.

San Francisco and the Ohio Diner.

We're like, get the fuck out.

You don't need to do another one of these.

One day we will fight them to the death and we will have to win.

No, I think we and the Ohio Diner people will probably agree with each other.

We're like, yeah, that's too many essays, man.

They'll be like, I've been in the Atlantic.

I've been in the Times.

Yeah.

Well, so according to Didian, I think that there are three sort of things that she teaches people on how to pay attention to San Francisco, right?

One thing about San Franciscans is they talk funny in a way that's important to render with sort of ironic detachment.

Like get a load of what these assholes are saying, right?

And then her essay is like 60% that, I would say.

They have weird rituals that are worth exploring in detail.

Right.

And then the other thing is they're not really San Franciscans.

They're actually from somewhere else.

They're actually from somewhere else.

Very conspicuous for Didian, who has all kinds of ideas about her own sense of belonging in California.

Yes.

Because she is a native.

Check out Where I Was From, yeah, like, which is very much about the real Californians versus the newbies.

Like, she is extremely territorial about this stuff.

The real Californians being the kind of blue-blooded Sacramento Republicans, as far as I can tell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But so I think Didian really established in the late 60s this long-running symbiotic relationship between young people NSF who, let's be clear, like obviously sit down with Joan Didian because like they like an audience.

They love performing for outsiders and the journalists, influencers, and whatever who draw on them.

There's like a kind of self-perpetuating self-regard of this kind of San Franciscan, right?

Who wants to perform for an audience of the rest of the country?

It's like, look at me.

We're talking about San Francisco, or we have been talking about San Francisco almost as a victim of its own tendency to be made into a symbol.

But this is also something that San Francisco's are doing on purpose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the one way we get talked about, right?

Yeah.

Well, it's like, I came here to be a part of the zeitgeist and now look at me being a part of the zeitgeist and please reproduce this in your essay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like if you move to Bushwick, but you don't start a artisanal chocolate company.

It's like, do you even exist?

Like you go to a bank to work?

I am so in the zeitgeist that I can tell you that those people have been priced out of Bushwick and now they're all living in kind of the far end of Ridgewood.

Right.

It's Queens now.

It's Ridgewood.

It's going to Glendale Middle Village.

We're going to have to update our references.

All right.

I mean, it's been 20 years since I've lived in New York.

I mean, for instance, I don't know if they're still around, but there used to be kind of tour buses going around San Francisco that were called the urban safari.

The idea that people are animals in a zoo is baked in and people sort of ironically accept it.

Right.

And there's a degree of like people trying to make a buck off of that idea.

Like you go to Hate Street, it's full of...

tourist shops that smell aggressively like patchouli, where they'll send you a tie-dye shirt with like a Grateful Dead Bear on it

and like a plastic bong.

You know, it has become a a simulacra of itself in the years since it was so aggressively documented this way.

Yeah.

But one should say also, again, like very small portions of the city, right?

Try to buy a plastic bong anywhere else in the city, people are like, what the fuck's wrong with you?

You haven't sold one of these in 20 years.

You know, these things tend to be concentrated and they tend to perform for outsiders who are envisioned, I think, as tourists.

And I think one of the tragedies of San Francisco really is that

it has turned its tourists into essayists, right?

That it's like, well, you haven't really scratched below the surface very much, but somehow it's acceptable to kind of have these drive-by,

huh, isn't this weird?

Whereas I feel like in other cities, it's more like, unless you've lived here for 20 years, you really can't understand it, which I think, frankly, our neighbors down in LA have been much better at, right?

Where like people writing pieces about LA have to be very careful because like, yeah, the Joan Didians and the Mike Davises of the world have gotten there or the Eve Babbitts of the world have gotten there well before.

Don't forget Eve.

Yeah.

It's all about Eve.

But they've also sort of carved out a different Los Angeles that is only visible to those who've like earned it through a degree of authenticity, right?

Exactly.

San Francisco lacks that mystique.

Yeah.

Like, have you ever seen the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself?

I actually haven't seen it.

I've been meaning to.

Oh, it's so good.

It's like three hours for our listeners.

It's three hours of just like clips from other movies in which LA functions as a backdrop and it's all about like how Hollywood appears to imagine architecture and urban space and how on the one hand, Los Angeles is supposed to stand in for every city, but then when it is itself, it turns out Hollywood kind of hates Los Angeles.

It's such a rich tapestry.

It's a movie that you watch and you're like, I'm going to start at the beginning because I got to see it again.

It's hard to imagine anybody making a film like that about San Francisco because everybody who comes to San Francisco is instrumentalizing it so much, right?

I think there's that.

It's a tool in my story as opposed to it's a place that is shaping and changing me.

Yeah.

I even think about the fact that like because of its sort of iconic visuals, like one of the things that Los Angeles Plays itself points out is that because LA is fairly featureless, or it's just so big that basically you can shoot it any which way and can stand in for different things, right?

Like I always smile at, I mean, this is not a Hollywood film, but like at Parks and Recreation where like Pawnee, Indiana is very recognizably like Los Angeles, yeah, like it's a lot, yeah.

And you're like, well, that's not Indiana sunlight to start with.

Everybody looks too happy and tan to be in Indiana.

Yeah, or like everyone's driving like Priuses in like 2012 or whatever, right?

Like it's very, very noticeable.

At the same time, I think because San Francisco is often reduced to these iconic shots, like your Bay Bridge, your Golden Gate Bridge, downtown, et cetera.

Trans-America building.

Trans-America building.

It really seems to

lend itself to shorthand.

So I was thinking about like one other thing, of course, that when people hear, oh, San Francisco is dying, is that they've seen it die on screen a million times yeah every time you have a disaster movie you got to have a shot of the golden gate bridge like ripped apart and i gotta be honest as someone who drives over it at least once a week It's hard not to think about the fact that you've watched a very photorealistic Godzilla go to town on that fucking thing, like not three years ago, right?

You're like driving across the Golden Gate Bridge once a week.

Alex Sonoma, what do you want?

I'm a San Francisco asshole.

Like, I enjoy,

maybe once a week might be overstating it, but I go hiking and then we're in headlands and I'm across the Golden Gate Bridge or like I'll go jog with my dog on Chrissy Beach and I'll like take a picture of it because it's so beautiful.

It's so beautiful.

But that's the thing.

San Francisco and disaster have sort of been shorthanded in the popular imagination.

And often that's about natural disasters, which, as you say, is totally fair.

Like we're due for one of those.

Like it's going to be a giant earthquake and or a wildfire.

You know, there was that tsunami warning that blew up all our phones a few months ago.

It's like, oh, the giant tsunami is heading for San Francisco.

And I was like, well, I guess I'm just going to die today.

And then it missed.

It wound up going to Eureka or something instead.

Like there's an element of physical danger that does lend the place a sort of sense of impermanence.

Yeah.

But disaster movies famously aren't just about natural disasters.

They're about civilization and culture responding to natural disaster, right?

It's the person who's selfish or disposable and the person who is noble and who saves the family dog and you're like oh that's so nice as like hundreds of thousands die around them right and so that's why i think the fact that this is a city that's been viewed through the eyes of disaster movies for such a long time and is then often described as a quote-unquote disaster referring to social factors is actually a really really scary combination people take a certain joy in our destruction what disaster movies are you thinking of particularly just to like ground our listeners a little in your like references so i mean we could start with the towering inferno which is based on the novel the tower which is supposed to be in manhattan but they moved to san francisco which starts with this gorgeous tracking shot of a helicopter flying over the golden gate bridge over the bay bridge and then into downtown san francisco but i mean just in the last 10 years i can think of off the top of my head there was that movie san andreas with the rock where the city is first destroyed by an earthquake and then there's a gigantic tsunami.

There was the Godzilla movie.

There is Pacific Rim.

There is Star Trek into Darkness, where I think the Enterprise crashes into a futuristic San Francisco, right?

But this goes on and on, right?

Christopher Walken almost blew it up in a view to a kill, but James Bond stopped him.

And then Ed Harris almost blows it up with Poison Gas and The Rock, right?

I think I would rather be killed by Christopher Walken than Ed Harris if I have a choice.

I think like also, obviously the most iconic or most famous San Francisco film is Vertigo, which is all about anxiety and sense of impending doom and wrongness.

Yeah.

So there is a real readiness to take joy in the destruction of San Francisco, right?

You don't check out disaster movies because you're genuinely terrified.

There's a queasy kind of enjoyment to it.

It's also a great city for car chases.

And if you think about, this is my own particular Bailey Wick, if you think about the fact that the number one thing in car chases are like pedestrians like squealing and screaming as they dart out of the way, there is something about feminized populations like being mowed down that like somehow has attached itself to the popular image of San Francisco, which may or may not have to do with the fact that the first thing you think of is gay men when you think of San Francisco.

Right.

I mean, in absolute fairness to these directors and cinematographers, it's also a city with a lot of iconic hills and twisty

hill lanes like Lombard Street, et cetera, that just make for a really beautiful shot.

But yes, and then also you have the woman clutching her handkerchief to her clavicle and squealing.

Yeah.

I mean, in The Rock, there's a scene where Sean Connery, who's been incarcerated for like dozens of years.

And Alcatraz are a fearsome, like little bastion of masculinity off of the coast of this very feminized city.

Well, he's no longer in Alcatraz because the Rockshare tourist attraction, you know, but

he's like in some kind of Super Max or whatever facility.

He's brought out because, you know, Ed Harris has taken over Alcatraz and is basically threatening to nuke the entire Bay Area with some poison gas or whatever.

And he escapes basically by using the fact that he needs a haircut.

And it starts this insane car chase, which is quite fun, where they really destroy a large percentage of San Francisco.

But right before that, there's a kind of a comedic beat where he is in the elevator with his hairdresser, who's aggressively gay-coated.

And the guy goes something like, I don't care whether you're like this brutal killer.

I don't care whether you just threw that gentleman off the balcony.

All I care about is, are you happy with your haircut?

Right.

And like,

like, it's a good bit, but it is also like

San Francisco's femininity used as comedic relief.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And similarly, I remember the James Bond chase, I think, like, starts partly in Chinatown.

If you think about Big Trouble in Little China, it kind of gets a lot of mileage out of that.

So it's about non-normative populations performing gender in funny ways.

And therefore, you can take mirth in.

the fact that they're not.

It's their destruction.

It sort of defangs what is also presented as their ominousness, right?

Like the darkness of San Francisco is about the fact that a lot of gay sex happens there.

Yeah, exactly.

And also, you know, the homelessness, the sense of menace and danger that is associated with the city, I think is like very closely linked to its gay reputation.

Exactly.

And that's before we get to AIDS, which we'll have to talk about later as well.

I do think the other thing that we should acknowledge is that in a very interesting way, Hollywood becomes fascinated with the destruction of San Francisco without actually addressing what's happening in San Francisco, which is fairly apocalyptic.

We don't want to sort of pretend like, oh, the hippies showed up, everything was fine and hunky-dory,

and then conservatives got worked up for no reason.

There would have been interesting and pretty troubling stories to tell about San Francisco in the late 70s.

Have you ever read David Talbot's The Season of the Witch?

Oh, people keep telling me to.

It is wild.

Really?

It's about the late 70s in San Francisco, where

truly

the city is just pummeled by one thing after the other.

Some of these things people are probably familiar with.

It may not be obvious to everyone how close in time they all happen.

So you have the Zodiac killer.

Oh, I was terrified.

I was that was here.

Yeah.

Wow.

They never found him.

Well, I mean, it's Ted Cruz, but otherwise.

Otherwise, what a mystery.

We just don't know.

And at the same time, the zebra killings, which I think attracted less attention.

I have never heard of those.

What are the zebra killings?

Oh, my God.

These were machete killings, including of a former mayor or mayoral candidate who I think did survive the attack.

Were they like targeted assassinations or were they random?

It was a black supremacist death cult of some kind.

Cool, okay.

Yeah, we have a techno-futurist murder cult in San Francisco right now, you know.

That's right.

Although apparently they're branching out.

Oh, yeah.

And they're mostly Berkeley-based.

Like, they got priced out.

We priced out our murder.

We priced out our murder.

You can't even run a cult out of San Francisco anymore.

The days of Jonestown and the zebra killings are over.

This is my San Francisco good old days nostalgia in the time of Joe Diddy.

And I'm like, we used to have real murder cults, and now we just have these fakers.

Anyway, what else happened in the 70s?

Yeah, well, the other one you already mentioned, Jim Jones was running parts of the city and then decamped to Guyana with a thousand of his followers.

And, you know, the Jonestown massacre ensued.

This is the age of cults and charismatic male leaders, particularly around the Bay Area.

And Jonestown happened a week before, I believe, the Muscone milk shootings.

Is that right?

Really?

Okay, so yeah, then the assassination of Harvey Milk.

And Mayor Musconi.

Both Mayor Muscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk

have been shot and killed.

The suspect

is Supervisor Dan White.

A former SFPD member and firefighter, Dan White, he had just been removed from the Board of Supervisors at his request, but then had wanted to unrequest that.

Moscone didn't want to do that, and so he killed the mayor and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

Killed Harvey Milk, basically, because he got in the way.

Yeah.

Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, right, gets murdered.

The San Francisco Police Department radio starts singing Oh, Danny Boy in celebration, most likely of the mayor rather than of him, but like,

yeah, not great.

Are you telling me that cops are supporting extrajudicial killings of politicians they don't like?

I've never heard of such a thing.

It is weird.

I mean, it gives you a sense like there is a self-perceived old school San Francisco.

And in Dan White's speeches before the assassination, you can very clearly tell that these new arrivals have brought these weird values onto our shores and we have had enough.

The San Francisco backlash is almost as potent, almost as effective in the media as the kind of San Francisco counterculture.

And that is really, really important.

You often get these articles where people are like, I used to be a San Francisco liberal and then someone shot on my stoop or whatever, right?

Like that's bullshit.

Yeah.

And San Francisco's excesses transformed me into a conservative.

Yes.

And it's not really true.

San Francisco hasn't homegrown conservatism.

Yeah.

And there's a long tradition of people being given outsize attention just for these kind of Dan White-style complaints about like, you know, they took over our Catholic school and turned it into a gay dance club or whatever.

Right.

Like many such cases.

That happens all over the city.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think that's pretty important, right?

That like when you get to Elon Musk tweeting about downtown is a zombie apocalypse or whatever, like this is a long standing tradition of the wealthy in San Francisco complaining about kind of

very incremental, very, frankly, timid attempts at social justice reform and just completely flipping out, but they're being really a microphone for that.

People are like, say more.

People are very ready for stories about how San Francisco liberals went too far, how the hippies are crazy, how democratic governance is a disaster, right?

Yeah.

And if someone thinks that this is a thing of the 80s or, you know, only Elon Musk does this, I would refer you to the work of one Nellie Bowles who exactly went on this trajectory, right?

Oh, my God.

Extremely old San Francisco money and California money.

And now the wife, and I think the mother of the child of friend of the show, Barry Weiss.

Yeah.

Shout out to Bari.

Her writing about San Francisco starts complaining about the tech industry, where she's not wrong on some of the points, but it is very much like these newcomers, this new money is transforming my city.

And you're like, well, but you represent the old money.

I'm not sure.

I really want to take your word for it there.

It's like, yeah, we used to have class.

It's like, all right, cool.

And then it becomes kind of like about wokeness sort of taking over the San Francisco public school district, where you're like, Nellie Bowles was never going to send her kid to a San Francisco public school.

Nellie Bowles has never set foot in a San Francisco public school.

Like, Nellie Bowles probably couldn't find one.

Well, to paint it maybe as a summer project in order to get into college or whatever.

But so I'm wondering how this like wealthy, homegrown anti-left resentment in San Francisco combined with sort of broader American appetites for stories about a San Francisco crisis or San Francisco destruction.

How did that work when we reached the AIDS crisis?

Yeah, so it's interesting, right?

I would say that the media generally don't make it a San Francisco problem because there was a funny way in which both the merchants of moral panics and AIDS activists tried to deprovincialize AIDS to say this can happen to anyone.

So in some funny way, it was always, it's not just in San Francisco.

But of course, early reporting on the plague always had that like requisite shot of San Francisco.

And a bunch of men crossing 18th Street, yeah.

Exactly.

Like two men holding hands.

I mean, I was, I would have been five or six in my earliest memories of AIDS coverage, like the idea that two men holding hands might have something to do with dying from disease was very much ingrained in my young brain, which did not take any therapy to work through.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, so this idea of San Francisco, men holding hands, men dying of AIDS, like just visually.

And this is not any fault of like 60 minutes or whatever.

Like they had to use shorthands, and they did want to say, like, this is particularly among gay men.

This is their B-roll, and they wanted to signal that it was a gay thing.

Yeah.

And one has to say, part of why San Francisco, I think, was so visible was that the stigma around AIDS appears to have been just much.

weaker here.

Gay men and lesbians had made real strides in city governance.

And therefore, our general hospital was set up very early on.

There was just a lot of lesbian women in the medical profession who really were there from the beginning.

And so that we can't, there can be no stigmatization.

Like gay people have been a proportionally large part of San Francisco, which is a fairly small population.

Oh, yeah.

In terms of American cities, it's not the biggest, right?

And they have been proportionally larger for a long time.

Whereas in some place like New York,

there were a lot of much larger other interests, like the Catholic Church, like these conservative white ethnic groups,

who were very eager to throw institutional weight around to make sure these people got shunted out.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, which then meant, I think, that a gay man in San Francisco who was ill might be more willing to agree to speak with 60 Minutes than in some other cities, right?

There were some anti-discrimination ordinances, et cetera, et cetera.

So basically, you can sort of imagine why San Francisco tended to overproduce images of this crisis.

And it was easily accessible, and you knew where to go as a 60 Minutes producer.

So I think that this connection is really, really important.

And it is the moment when I think these Christian right really sort of starts getting fixated on what it then calls San Francisco values, right?

What are San Francisco values?

Like overpriced housing, a latte that'll cost you $7,

a...

And sodomy.

Right?

I mean, it's got to be.

Beautiful weather, like just gorgeous jasmine smells, Victorian houses that you can't afford.

Yeah.

And sodomy, yeah.

Yeah.

And which to commit sodomy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm just going going to refurbish this beautiful house for my sodomy.

Isn't that the dream a dream?

Yeah.

Come on.

I mean, I mean, they're saying it like it's a bad thing.

It's like, should this room be teal?

Also sodomy?

But yeah, the idea that San Francisco values is about this like the bad side of permissiveness, right?

It's over-permissive sort of takes hold, I think, in the 80s.

Although, of course, as friend of the show Anita Bryant made clear, right, like she also was like fixated on San Francisco.

At the same time, her defeats in California come from the entire state.

And really LA County kind of wallops her.

Was it a repeal of a gay civil rights ordinance that she was trying to?

No, it was the Briggs initiative.

The civil rights ordinance was over in Florida.

It was the Briggs Initiative, Proposition 6, I think, which was basically about gay teachers.

Right.

And really, it was LA County, I think, that really delivered against that.

And basically that we would not kick out gay teachers.

But still, Briggs kept debating Harvey Milk, who was a San Francisco supervisor.

So the fixation goes further back, but I think with AIDS, you really start getting that.

And so this kind of, let's report on the doings of gay people in these places in order to kind of gin up lips of TikTok style outrage really starts with AIDS or gets intensified with AIDS and sort of becomes a standard trope of conservative discourses about morality.

And then, of course, San Francisco or certain San Franciscans kind of run with it.

Are you familiar with the phrase, whether you like it or not?

Heard it.

This might be too old for you.

When I was younger, this was in a lot of political ads.

This door's wide open now.

It's gonna happen,

whether you like it or not.

Four judges ignored 4 million voters and imposed same-sex marriage on California.

It's no longer about tolerance.

Acceptance of gay marriage is now mandatory.

That changes a lot of things.

People sued over personal beliefs.

Churches could lose their tax exemption.

Gay marriage taught in public schools.

We don't have to accept this.

Whether you like it or not.

Yes, on eight.

Gavin Newsom saying, whether you like it or not, when he was San Francisco mayor, he took the step of performing gay marriages basically to that guy has wanted to be president since he was like

in diapers and he has been drawing attention to himself in the most conspicuous ways possible.

And at the time, in I believe 2004,

the way he chose to do that redounded to the benefit of the gay community.

He made a big public spectacle of performing gay marriages at City Hall until there was an injunction stopping him, I think, like 24 hours later.

It was a brief publicity stunt.

Yeah.

In a shocking twist, Gavin Newsom did not bring lasting change, but a brief political stunt that mostly benefited a constituency of one, Gavin Newsom,

for which he's now throwing LGBT people under the bus.

So thanks for nothing, Gavin.

Yeah, fuck that guy.

I hope he's never president.

Well, he's not going to be.

Come on.

I don't know.

He's a haircut.

That's mostly, I think Democrats will run somebody like that.

Yeah.

Some anti-woke white guy.

But he's been anti-woke for two minutes.

Yeah, because he's chasing the polls, which the Democrats love.

Well, the polls seem to be woker than him at this point.

So I don't know.

I really don't know what this guy's doing.

Anyway, call us, Gavin, if you have any answer for us.

Gavin, come on the show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We hear you love podcasts.

You dig it.

I want to hear everything about Kimberly Guilfoyle, who he used to date, remember?

Oh, God, yeah.

Mrs.

Donald Trump Jr.

Actually, I think they broke up.

I think that's what I heard.

And she got like demoted because she wasn't sleeping with her president's son anymore.

Oh, well, that's hard.

RIP.

Anyway,

so sad that she's dead.

Let's move on.

Yeah.

Basically, the idea that like San Francisco has values that it looks to export becomes, I think, extremely entangled with the LGBT community.

That is to say, the idea that children would be able to see coverage of a gay pride parade and would therefore be like, huh, maybe I should experiment with people of the same gender or whatever was like very much this kind of contagion logic that the Christian right employed in sort of demonizing San Francisco.

It wasn't this, these are people who are different from us and who like different things.

And, you know, we go to church and they go to brunch, like it's a big fucking country.

No, it was like, oh, no, they're exporting this.

And with Gavin Newsom, with the gay marriage fight, basically, that appeared to be kind of like borne out.

That like really San Franciscans were like, well, no, yeah, I mean, it would make sense for you to adopt this too, by the way.

There's a way in which like the right uses this like contagion and like proselytization accusation to make it like a moral trespass in itself for you to have your own values, right?

Like you think other people should live the way you do.

And it's like, well, yes, I actually do in fact think that my life is.

valuable and that my choices are good ones.

That's why I made them.

It's like, I actually don't think the world would be worse if more people lived like I did.

That is why you live that way.

And that's, and that's its own, like, it's a weird inverse of like just the, like a basic ability to make value judgments becomes like a character flaw when it's on the left.

But then there's also a sense in which this, like, it's contagious, it's going to spread.

That strikes me as very conspicuous coming on the heels of the AIDS

crisis, which is not so far in the background in 2004.

You know, we're talking about the first

efficient treatment for AIDS only.

came out in 1996, right?

So it's like less than a decade ago.

Exactly.

And I think that it is so important that like, on the one hand, the existence of San Francisco appears to them a signal, right?

Like to be a San Franciscan is to spread San Francisco values, right?

Even though frankly, we are a fairly insular city in the end.

Not that interested in other people.

We're far away.

It's five hours on I-5 just to get to LA.

It's a schleppe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, for you to believe in those values is itself wrong.

You know, us believing in our values is good.

You believing in your values.

Like either it's just virtue signaling or it's a sign that we've caught the woke mind virus, right?

And again, we're with virality here, right?

It's always about something spreading, right?

Elon Musk, who uses the woke mind virus, uses zombie apocalypse, right?

Both things that famously happen via viral spread.

So San Francisco is infectious.

And just to give you a sense of how that can work, I thought I'd briefly look at Michael Schellenberger's book, San Francisco from 2021.

I remember this.

Yeah.

And I should say, we're not going to cover this too much because...

if books could kill guys should do this one, have they?

They have.

Oh,

very good.

Okay.

Everybody tune into that.

But I'm just interested in one thing, which is how Schellenberger sort of takes San Francisco to be this harbinger of take your pick.

Like progressivism, social justice, liberalism, victimology, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Michel Foucault, weirdly enough.

Did he even come here?

No, I mean, he came to Berkeley a couple of times, but like...

He would not cross the bay to San Francisco.

Well, I mean, no, for a good sex club, I'm sure he would have.

But the problem is is it's made to be the stand-in for things that like none of the people he's actually talking about would like ever refer to i just want to give you a sense of like the kind of weird contagion logic that seems to be happening here because he's trying to say like a lot of things are going wrong in san francisco which like sure not the things that you think but whatever but here's a passage where he talks about how these values spread how this wrong-headed progressive ideology this victimology spreads That was then, since the beginning of the new century, moderate Democrats have seen their power decline against progressive progressive Democrats in San Francisco and around the country.

Even when moderates are in charge, progressives have exercised their powers in other ways.

Progressive members of the Seattle City Council, Los Angeles City Council, and San Francisco Board of Supervisors and other political officials, often with the significant support from non-profit activists funded by local governments, have attacked mayors as uncaring.

Growing progressive power culminated in the election of Chesa Boudin in 2019, the Seattle Capitol Hill Occupy protests of 2020, and demands that the homeless, mentally ill, and substance abusers be immune from prosecution in 2021.

Now, here it comes.

It's true that moderate Democrats control the executive branches of the local, state, and federal government, but they have little to speak of as an agenda beyond being less radical than the radical left.

They're losing power, which you can see by the fact that they hold all the power.

Yeah, I was like, where are these progressive Democrats in San Francisco city government?

I would like to hear from them.

Well, he names one, Chesa Boudin, who got recalled a year later.

Partly because he was the object of a nationwide moral panic over progressive prosecutors, right?

Exactly.

And a bunch of this is also just lies, by the way.

Demands that the homeless, mentally ill, and substance abusers be immune from prosecution is a reference to the fact that California, and especially San Francisco, brought some of its charging standards in line with national trends.

That is to say, they changed where a drug possession becomes a misdemeanor, that kind of thing.

They are being persecuted differently.

They are not, in fact, immune from prosecution.

Right.

This was the infamous thing about how California was now going to allow shoplifting.

Turns out Texas has a higher limit on shoplifting charges.

You have to set it at some point, right?

You have to say, here's how we're going to prosecute, depending on what you took.

Every prosecutor in the world has to make that determination.

California hadn't adjusted it for a long, long time.

We're like, this feels out of step.

Let's update it.

Well, here we are, right?

Like Michael Schellenberger is ready to be like,

San francisco's going to the dogs man decline of civilization they're letting the criminals run the whole town yeah here for instance is a twitter user called gorklon rust from 2022 gorklon rust who is at something else the handle is at elon musk yeah so this is elon musk 2022 it has been really bad far left san francisco berkeley views have been propagated to the world via twitter i'm sure this comes as no surprise to anyone watching closely twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field.

No more thumb on the scale, right?

Certainly no political thumb on the scale in the Twitter under Elon Musk.

I don't see

Nazis or people saying that women are property every time I log on at all.

Well, I mean, I don't log on anymore, so that's how level the playing field is.

I'm not playing.

I took my ball and I went home.

The idea that Twitter was venting kind of San Francisco social justice ideology into the broader world is, I mean, it's a fascinating version of history, man.

Given that, like, Twitter was at the time very busy creating the conditions at mid-market and in the tenderloin that then produced the very crisis that Elon Musk is bemoaning here.

It's pretty fucking rich, right?

These people are obsessed with homelessness that, frankly, they, to some extent, caused.

There was a very sad case, but like kind of interesting case a couple of years ago.

Do you remember the murder of Bob Lee?

No, I missed this one.

In 2023, one of the co-founders of the app Cash, which if people recall, it's a little bit like Venmo, was stabbed to death in downtown San Francisco.

And immediately you got Elon Musk and all these other tech right-wingers and really tech CEOs in general, like crowing about like these mentally ill, homeless people are running rampant.

And like, this was only a matter of time before it happened.

I hold, you know, social justice San Francisco responsible for exactly the Schellenberger argument, right?

It was really, really fascinating to see how quickly they moved from crime in San Francisco to homelessness in San Francisco.

And we should say, as Michael and Peter on If Books Could Kill point out, these are leaps that are each in their own way, very, very questionable.

That is to say, yes, you see a lot of visible poverty in San Francisco.

Not all these people are homeless.

I have people sleeping rough sometimes here in my neighborhood.

They have homes.

They live with parents who sometimes periodically kick them out.

When they're doing really badly, when their mental illness is really going down a slope, their mom will be like, I can't handle you in here.

And then they sleep rough.

Are they unhoused?

Well, that's definitionally difficult.

They have a house they can go back to.

They're just not there all the time.

Likewise, a lot of quote-unquote homeless people in the Bay Area live in cars.

That's not something that gets captured here.

When you look at the raw numbers, which are staggeringly high, a lot of those people do live in cars, meaning they're not the people you encounter in the tenderloin.

And then crime appears to be really small criminal enterprises.

It's people enforcing drug debts.

That's a lot of crime.

Yeah.

Or violent crime.

Yeah.

And so basically, that's not coextensive.

These are people who often don't live in San Francisco, or if they live in San Francisco, live in a house, right?

Yeah.

So the overlaps between these exist, but they're not necessarily substantial.

And the way we leap from one to the other to the other is really, really questionable.

But the murder of Bob Lee very, very clearly showed that in the

tech investor, VC and CEO class, like that link is basically axiomatic.

They assume that crime is homeless, is visible mental illness, right?

And that's exactly the theory of the case they appear to be having, you know, around this.

Crime is not their own insider trading.

Crime is not none of the securities fraud that they are conducting in their crypto businesses.

Crime is something associated with the people whose presence on the street.

in great states of poverty and visible distress are enacting.

Yeah.

And Bob Lee, in the end, turned out to be the victim of an IT consultant with whose sister he had done lines of Coke at one of San Francisco's premier apartment buildings.

No homeless person was involved in this crime.

It was people within the tech industry, an interpersonal conflict aggravated by drug use, but not fentanyl or whatever people are taking in the tenderloin, but by good old-fashioned Peruvian marching powder, right?

Yeah.

It's not to say that this wasn't a tragedy, but it is to say that like it really showed that the

tech barons who own, own, frankly, more and more of our means of communication and our public media are purveyors of these very distortive myths about how the doom loop in San Francisco comes about.

And it has everything to do with the fact that they don't like seeing certain things on their way to their limo.

It has very little to do with an accurate understanding of how the city works, its history, and who these people are that they keep going on about.

You know, if you actually wanted to reduce the homeless population in San Francisco, something you could do is build more shelter beds.

Yeah.

And you could also change housing policy to make housing more affordable here, both of which are things that these tech guys will vehemently and expensively campaign against any local politician who tries to do, right?

Yeah.

So there's a way in which they're not uncomfortable with the conditions that create homelessness.

They're uncomfortable with what the sight of homeless people makes them feel, which is some combination of like disgust and shame.

Yeah, exactly.

There's something unpleasant and embarrassing about seeing this.

You realize you are part of a problem and this person is in deep distress because of a system that you did much better in.

And benefit from.

Yeah, no, there is a moral injury in living in San Francisco and being exposed to this much suffering on the street.

I just think the moral injury on the homeless people's side is somewhat greater.

You know, it's like, and when you compare who is suffering more at the hands of San Francisco's homelessness problem, I think the homeless are the people

suffering.

And I am shocked at how often I am am alone in that understanding.

The number of times people say homelessness problem and you realize when they go on speaking, oh, you mean the fact that you have to see them.

It's not the fact that they don't have a home.

It's that you have to see them not having a home.

That's the problem here.

It's really staggering.

And this is like a rare moment when we can sort of leave behind the right and talk about conservative tendencies within people who think of themselves as progressive, as liberals, et cetera, et cetera.

Because I think it's worse.

It's not just that the tech founders fail to see that it is their gain that is creating these people's pain.

But there's this wonderful passage in Mike Davis's City of Courts, where he talks about, I think, the city of Riverside.

And he points out that basically the city of Riverside, which I think emerged from this vast private landholding, would carve out subdivisions only at such a pace that lots and houses would always increase in value.

Now, that is a really interesting thing to think about in the context of San Francisco, I think, in the sense that we are a, you know, redwood-built Victorian version of that.

That is to say, when people buy houses in San Francisco, that is going to be the majority of their wealth in that one object.

That object better go fucking up in value.

Otherwise, their plans for their retirement are shot, right?

We have no more pensions in this country.

Your 401k goes up and down according to the whims of a possibly senile 79-year-old one way or the other.

So this house better be worth more.

Well, how does something become worth more and more and more if you already bought it for, I don't know, $2.5 million?

Well, it has to be scarce, right?

Right.

And so in some way, the same people who are like, oh, I'm worried about my property values and I'm worried about this homeless person there.

It's like, well, yes, that person is homeless because of your property value going up, right?

If the city were to really build, it might gently deflate the bubble that is San Francisco real estate.

And it would, let's be blunt, destroy a whole lot of wealth on this little peninsula, on the tip of the peninsula here.

And I think that on some level, people realize that.

I don't want to minimize.

I'm not saying like LOL, look at these asshole homeowners.

Like I would understand that it would be pretty upsetting to have spent the majority of your saving on something and then be like, if I now move, I will only get half of my money for this.

That'd be horrible at that level of cost.

But at the same time, I think it does create the kind of structural conservatism that you see here, where like people seem insistent on calling out homelessness as a problem, but don't seem to want to acknowledge that remedying that problem will likely force them to rethink their own plans for their own future, right?

You know, I think you're articulating the roots of San Francisco's central paradox, right?

Which is what is kind of the model for the ways I think San Francisco is miniature of the nation as a whole, which is it is a place that for a long time was

very permissive in terms of orientation, in terms of lifestyle, often in terms of drug use, right?

And very, very intolerant of poverty.

Yeah.

That is like the central contradiction.

Like what we tolerate, this tolerant, permissive city of a lot of freedom comes with this very big exception and catch, which is that you have to be able to pay your own way in a place of continuously rising costs.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think of how transhistoric that is.

I do think that, you know, a lot of the 60s and 70s are explained by the fact that things just didn't cost that much.

And that, I don't know, if you read Michelle T's work on sort of, you know, the Valencia Street scene in the 90s, these are just people who kind of, they take jobs, it seems to mostly be able to use the mimeograph after hours to make their zine or whatever.

The Castro is a good example for this.

It's often sort of presented as undergoing this massive gentrification.

The vast majority of people in the Castro, I would say, probably rent rather than own.

And part of it is just that people have roommates, lots of roommates, which again, for a bunch of gay men, men, not that big a deal, right?

Like they can hold off on having families if they want them at all.

So part of the Casper story is a story about, well, we don't have the same costs as other people, right?

We can defray these.

We can pay more in rent because I'm not paying anything for daycare, right?

Exactly.

Or I'm paying for a room in an apartment that someone got rent controlled like 20 years ago, and we just can't let them know that that person died a long time ago, right?

Yeah, or it's like it's his roommate's boyfriend's buddy who's now living there, but somebody else long gone is on the lease.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so I do think that like it's not as simple as like, you can't have wealth.

I mean, like a lot of the reaction of people like Dan White was against a kind of bourgeoisification of the LGBT community that suddenly he had to respect these people.

I think there's a lot of this California stuff where like it is a deeply mobile society, but at the same time, like with Joan Didian, it's more obsessed than it cares to admit with people knowing their place.

And I think that it is not as simple as like, oh, pay your own way.

They're also going to be mad if you pay your own way and you're the wrong kind of person.

That upsets the Nellie Bowles of the world as well.

There is a tendency there, I think, to substitute a...

supposedly neutral capitalist economy for a racial gender and sexuality hierarchy to pretend that those two are the same thing but they're not right like ultimately you're using money as a proxy for understanding the world in moral terms.

This really makes me want to do a second episode on San Francisco Conservatives.

Yeah, we got to do it.

Because I think they're everywhere

running the country.

And I had so much fun with you, Adrian.

Thank you for recording with me on a Saturday.

And thank you to our wonderful listeners for tuning in to this epic on San Francisco.

Well, from the city by the bay, I bid you adieu.

Oh, subscribe to our Patreon.

Oh, yeah.

Subscribe to our Patreon.

Patreon.

Patreon.

Headquartered, probably in San Francisco.

Who knows?

Thanks, everyone.

Embed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lyle.

Our title music is by Katie Lyle.