Ep 122 | Why the Radical Left Is DESTROYING Our Cities | Michael Shellenberger | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now.

Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

So a homeless person walks up to a progressive and says, I don't want to be homeless anymore.

And the progressive laughs condescendingly and says, well, you can't change yourself.

You have to change society.

Well, how do I do that?

Progressive laughs again and says, by defecating in the streets and buying heroin with all of the stuff you just stole from Walgreens.

Now, a progressive would tell me that we're not supposed to say homeless anymore.

It's too insensitive, so I apologize.

Acceptable alternatives include unhoused residents, people experiencing homelessness, individuals who are unhomed, those struggling with homelessness, and my personal fave, neighbors in need.

That's great, which makes it sound like all progressive neighborhoods, you know, are shared with homeless people.

Not probably good for their retail sales.

Today's guest.

knows progressives.

He knows their game.

He, not too long ago, worked side by side with them during his environmental work.

He was so good at it, in 2008, Time magazine named him Hero of the Environment.

In the 90s, he played a role in important policy change, and in 2018, he actually ran for governor of California as a Democrat.

He's not a Democrat anymore.

In fact, he's a villain to the left.

And why?

Well, because he still says homeless instead of unhoused resident.

Mostly the left doesn't like that he disagrees with their excess and their hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, his contributions to policy have done more for the environment than any of their climate change's real bumper stickers ever could.

As a journalist and as an author, he has mostly covered environmental issues, but the events of 2020

motivated him to write his latest book called San Francisco.

Why progressives ruin cities.

Now he's a guy who lived in San Francisco for over 30 years.

He lately says, I don't even, I barely recognize it.

We've all seen the sprawling homeless encampments, the sidewalks covered in feces and syringes.

But it's more than just San Francisco.

It's a problem now all over our country.

And the common denominator is not lack of funding.

It's not capitalism.

It's not housing prices.

It's not racism.

It's not the police.

The common denominator is progressive leftist leadership.

Leftist radicals who promote glamorous solutions instead of dealing with actual problems.

Just last week, another five Walgreen locations closed in San Francisco.

They closed in response to a constant state-condoned looting.

How do progressives respond?

It was Walgreens' fault.

Please welcome Michael Schellenberger.

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So Michael, for those on the right who may not

be so familiar with you, you are a fascinating guy

because you seem to be somebody who just searches for the truth and let the chips fall where they may, which is very rare today.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah,

I definitely come from the left.

I came from the radical left, but I'm also have always been evidence-based.

And so both in Apocalypse Never, which came out last year, and in San Francisco, I wanted to take a close look at

kind of where the left has gone wrong and what are the reasons for that, not just how it goes wrong.

So I just want to spend just a couple of minutes going into your past.

You were Noam Chomsky reading.

Would you have been one of the black flag guys?

Because I know you got involved with the environmental movement and you were on the radical side of that.

How would you describe that?

I mean, definitely

radical left.

I mean, I went and worked with the Sandinistas when I was still a teenager in high school.

Wow.

I worked on radical political movements in Latin America for many years.

I was always pretty committed to nonviolent political action.

So I was in Seattle when the black bloc started breaking windows at McDonald's, but I wasn't one of the people breaking windows.

You know, I was raised Christian, Congregationalist,

and so I've never

held the really anti-human, Malthusian values of many in the radical environmental movement.

And I always thought that there was something a bit odd about celebrating homelessness, which is something I discovered when I moved to San Francisco.

But I worked for George Soros-funded think tanks and organizations.

I advocated for drug decriminalization and needle exchange, which is the passing out of clean needles to drug addicts.

You know, some of that work I still support.

Other parts of it, I am skeptical of.

My understanding was always that we were going to help addicts to get drug treatment.

And what's happened instead is that we've basically just allowed open-air drug use,

open-air drug scenes, which we euphemistically call homeless encampments, and really the breakdown of public order, public safety in big progressive cities.

It's amazing to me because I'm actually for drug legalization the way Portugal did it.

Portugal did a great study on it and found the more they spend, the worse it gets.

If they legalize all of it and spend that money, really, I think it was even a fraction of that money on

drug rehabilitation.

Their problem was virtually solved.

And we're just approaching it the wrong way.

But I don't think anyone in this country, and I mean this on left and right, I don't know how many people are actually serious about solving a problem

compared to those who are just wanting power and keep us all divided.

Yeah, I mean, one of the in San Francisco, I describe going to Amsterdam, which is a very liberal city.

Marijuana is decriminalized,

prostitution is decriminalized.

I also interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program.

These are cities that do not have open-air drug scenes.

They do not have homeless people living on the streets.

I asked the head of Portugal's drug program, if you're using heroin in public in Lisbon, what would happen to you?

And he said you would be arrested.

You can't shoot heroin in public in Lisbon.

You can't camp in a tent in downtown Amsterdam.

So yes, it's decriminalized in the sense that if you get caught with a certain amount of drugs, they don't send you to prison.

However, if you have an addiction and you're displaying, you're engaged in behaviors that are clearly self-destructive or destructive to the people around you, you get brought before something called a commission for the dissuasion of addiction, which is just as terrifying as it sounds, in part because it includes, you know, both prosecutor, defense attorney, judges, social workers, but it also includes members of your family.

So the Portuguese put pressure on addicts to quit to get their lives together.

They understand that that's the alternative to prison.

The alternative to prison should not be what we've done in San Francisco and other progressive cities, which is just to let people use drugs wherever.

and basically enter into really severe states of psychosis related to intense meth use, unabated meth and heroin use.

So, really, it's just gone, we just went too far.

It just became too radical, too, you know, you would call it some of a progressive libertarianism where the idea is that once you're declared a victim simply for being African-American or homeless or addicted to drugs or even mentally ill, then nothing is required of you and everything is given.

And we know that that's a terrible way to treat people suffering from what is basically a mental illness.

Yeah,

you know, it always gets slammed and conservatives always get slammed for this kind of idea.

But Ben Franklin, after spending time in London,

wrote to one of his friends and said, you know,

you are growing the system.

The best thing you can do is care for them, but make them uncomfortable in that situation.

So they want to get out.

They want to do something themselves.

And we do just the opposite.

It's more uncomfortable in America today to start your own business and go your own way than it is to sit at home, do nothing, collect from the government, or maybe do drugs in San Francisco while you're crapping in the streets.

Well, yeah, I mean, I document in San Francisco that we basically give cash.

welfare still in San Francisco, in San Francisco to people suffering drug addiction, which even the most progressive drug treatment advocates say is a terrible idea.

We give away free housing without any conditions.

This is completely bonkers.

And Republicans honestly went along with this under George W.

Bush.

We created something called a housing first policy, which is the federal policy.

And the idea is you just give people housing.

It was a very alluring, simplistic idea, but like a lot of simplistic ideas, turned out to have terrible consequences.

That's not what they do in civilized developed nations, whether in Europe or Asia or Japan, in Amsterdam.

if you want to get your own apartment,

you have to pass a sobriety test.

You have to make, or you have to make progress on your personal plan.

If you're suffering from mental illness, you need to take your psychiatric medications.

You know, if you, I watched social workers interact with a man with autism and he wasn't going to his work.

He wanted his own apartment and they were like, you got to show up for your job.

So there has to be this thing of reciprocity.

It's a very basic idea, which is that you don't get something for nothing.

There's carrots as a reward, but there's sticks that are consequences.

So what we need to do is move from a housing-first policy to a shelter-first policy.

Everybody should be sheltered and required to stay in shelters.

You can't sleep on the street.

It's not safe.

It's not hygienic.

And then if you want to get your own housing, you have to earn it.

There has to be some reward for it.

But the goal is independence for people.

It should not be constant dependence on the government.

We also just need to treat people.

Treatment first.

It's just not, if you're breaking the law, and I stress this part because people get confused about what I'm saying.

My view, and this is consistent with, I think, a more libertarian view, if you want to kill yourself using hard drugs in the privacy of your own apartment and you're not hurting anybody, I don't think that should be a priority for law enforcement to go hunt you down.

I think it's nuts.

I think it's bonkers that

one would use meth or fentanyl or heroin in your own home, but

that's not a priority for the public.

By contrast, if your addiction is leading you to live in a tent on the street and shoot heroin and smoke fentanyl in public and defecate in public spaces, you're breaking the law.

And we should enforce the law and require that you stay in a shelter, get treatment.

And if you don't want to do that, then you can go to jail.

But we have to enforce the laws in this country.

We have to enforce them, including in progressive cities.

But here's the problem.

There doesn't seem to be any actual

law anymore that people abide by or they, you'll pay a penalty if you don't have the right friends.

We are no longer a nation of laws.

We are a nation of men.

And that's really, really dangerous.

How do we get that back in place first?

Well, that's a great question.

And part of the reason I wrote San Francisco is I wanted to get to the bottom of how did we go from

trying to redress some of the sins of the past.

You know, we've had a terrible, obviously, history of racial discrimination.

You know, people have been oppressed and victimized in the past, but we went to this really bizarre extreme, which is this idea that whole groups of people can be categorized as victims.

That in itself has been racist.

The idea that all African Americans are victims is a terrible idea.

But even for people, but then

they start putting people in that category, including the mentally ill, the homeless,

people suffering from drug addiction.

You know, and in some cases, people are victims, but then you have to ask the question: is that the end of the story?

Victimization is a moment towards heroism.

And the heroes of San Francisco are actually recovery drug addicts.

They're totally inspiring people.

They've gone through 12-step, they've gone through recovery.

They're the most honest people I've ever met.

They're funny and interesting.

And so I tell their stories of recovery because I think that's such an inspiration for us.

But that's how we have to view people.

Stop viewing people as objects or as victims.

They're on a road to recovery and we need to help them on that road.

So, you know, one question I had is, is this victim ideology or victimology, is it as stupid as it seems?

Is it really that dumb?

And

the sad truth is it really is.

So my hope is, to answer your question, how do we solve this?

I think we have to drag this ideology into the sunlight.

I think when people see it for what it is, including liberals, they will say, this is just bizarre.

So where did it go wrong?

You should not treat anybody that way.

Where did it go wrong?

Because there are many of us that,

you know, you can still be compassionate and want to have people, you know, I grew up in an abusive family.

I'm an alcoholic.

My mother was an alcoholic.

Her bottom was suicide.

I could claim I was a victim, but it doesn't matter when I'm at the bottom of the barrel and I have a choice.

I'm either going to live or die.

And it is the moment of heroism when you say, I want to live and I want to live differently.

And you find the way to do that.

But we don't celebrate that.

And in fact, many Americans feel like we've been discouraged.

So let me just, let me play devil's advocate here.

Michael, you've been on this for a long time.

We feel like we've been on this for a long time.

And I don't talk about our politicians because they suck on the right.

But

where did it go wrong?

Where did you wake up?

And

why should we listen to you now?

And why should the people on the left listen to you?

Because you have this new revelation.

Yeah, I mean, and first of all, no one should take my word for anything.

I mean, just as with Apocalypse Never, San Francisco includes over 1,200 footnotes from the best available science.

It basically, this book, More Than Apocalypse Never, consists of many, many interviews with people that self-identify as liberals and progressives.

And they're the ones that offer the most devastating indictment of the mentality and the system.

I mean, Glenn, what your work has been so important in doing is drawing attention to this importance of mentality and of faith.

And those are two things that I feel like I got some clarity about, which is that, you know, for a lot of liberals who embrace self-help, we love, you know, I talk about one particular self-help,

really a founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, Viktor Frankl, Man Search for Meaning.

He survived the concentration camps under the Nazis because he got his mentality right.

He knew that he had to have a purpose, a goal, which was to be reunited with his wife and his parents and to write a book and to be an inspiration to the world.

Liberals love this book.

So my question was, why is it that liberals embrace self-help in their private lives, but then declare self-help to be blaming the victim?

That's what they call it when it comes to political life.

So you won't be surprised that terrible idea that asking people for some responsibility and accountability is the same as blaming the victim.

It comes out of the late 60s.

It's really a backlash to all the success that had been made in the United States by the radical left.

It's a completely toxic idea.

Accountability, reciprocity, responsibility, these are pillars of our civilization.

And so what's occurred is the radical left has basically been attacking the pillars of Western civilization.

I mean, you see it, every institution is under attack.

They started with psychiatric hospitals after World War II.

It also started, it also now is obviously including our universities, our police departments.

I described the attacks on the police, which if you really care about black lives, 30 times more African Americans are killed by civilians than by police in this country.

If you care about homicide, about saving black lives or all lives, you should be pro-police.

If you're worried about police violence, the worst way, the worst thing to do, if you care about police violence, is to cut the police force because you need police, you need sufficient police forces so they're not stressed and understrained.

So, I think there's what gives me hope is the response to this book has been incredibly positive, not just from conservatives, but also from liberals.

Good.

The radical left, as usual, it goes too far.

And so, you know, it's hard to find progressives in

San Francisco who think that things are fine, who think it's okay to have people with schizophrenia, people

that are attacking other people.

I mean, there's a lot of violence against women that is occurring in the inner, not just in the inner city, but in the downtowns of our greatest cities.

So I do think things have reached a tipping point, but I think that there's something that the progressives do need to deal with, which is that you do need some kind of faith.

You need some sort of belief and some higher power.

Otherwise, it descends into this really dogmatic religion that

they think is not a religion at all, but it really is a kind of San Francisco,

which is basically the idea that love is all you need, that compassion is all you need.

And we know that we also, people also need discipline, hard work structures, and some sense of personal responsibility.

You are, I mean, you are singing the gospel to a lot of people that watch me.

I'm thrilled to hear that there are a lot of people that have followed you, that they are starting to feel this way.

Because

we're in a place now where we're completely detached from reality, completely detached.

And we're being told to ignore what we actually see with our own eyes or what we experience at the supermarket or on the streets in

a city.

You know, like this, none of this makes sense.

You know, this

last weekend,

the White House saying inflation is good because it shows people are buying stuff and the economy is good.

No, we don't.

No, no, that's not, no, that's not.

But when it comes to, let's say, California, California just re-elected Gavin Newsom, and that seems to me, and maybe I'm reading it wrong, as let the status quo go because he starts doubling down on things now that he wasn't removed from office.

How do you see that?

Yeah, well, and just just to agree with you, I mean, we have seen, you know, California decriminalized three grams of hard drugs, including fentanyl.

And we, in the same legislation in 2014, we also decriminalized shoplifting $950 worth of goods.

So the Walgreens, our biggest drugstore chain, or one of our biggest drugstore chains, has been shutting down stores

in San Francisco.

And the radical left has been claiming that this is not a problem.

They've been saying, oh, there's no real problem at the Walgreens, basically denying this incredible reality.

Well, the reason is, is because, you know, for because one paradox or

apparent paradox is that progressives are concerned about victims, but then they're not concerned about the victims of theft.

They're not concerned about the African Americans being killed

by other African Americans.

They're only concerned about African Americans killed by police.

So why is that?

And the reason that I got at in San Francisco is that progressives are only concerned with victims of the quote-unquote system.

They're only concerned with victims of capitalism.

They're not concerned with victims of other people.

So that's the heart of the problem.

I think that is not a mainstream view, however.

Most Democrats reject that mentality.

That's a radical left view.

As for the last elections, you know,

my understanding, if you look at the polling data, is that most voters were still voting on COVID.

We have a very affluent,

pretty wealthy population in California now because of home prices went up so much.

People tend to be very,

you know, it's funny to use the word conservative on COVID.

They really are in favor of very restrictive measures.

And that was the main thing they were voting on.

You know, when we tested, we did many polls, but so have many other groups, testing the broad agenda that we're proposing, which is a shelter-first agenda, a shelter requirement, treatment-first,

housing-earned, as well as universal psychiatry, which we're calling CalPsych.

We find support for that agenda around 70 to 80 percent among registered voters in California.

So I think there is a real opportunity for some fresh candidate next year to run against Gavin Newsome and win.

I don't know if it's a Republican because, you know, we have an open electoral system in California.

So it could be two Democrats.

It could be an Independent.

But I do think the people of California are ready for something that

is an alternative to the radical left.

You know, the interesting thing is, when I explain what San Francisco is doing to people, to a lot of just ordinary Democrats that I know, they absolutely reject it.

They say, I'm not in favor of defunding the police.

I'm not in favor of giving money to drug addicts.

And I'm not in favor of letting drug addicts sleep on the street, shoot drugs on the street, and defecate in public.

So I don't think that

reining in those excesses

is in any way a fringe idea.

I think it's actually quite popular.

But it seems as though it is,

I mean, it feels as though what's happening in California is now the

national

stance.

And, you know,

I hate to see the rest of the country go down that road, but we're enacting the same kinds of policies.

all over the country now.

Yeah, that's true.

I mean, I was just in New York City.

You know, New York traditionally had done a pretty good job of actually requiring people to be in shelters.

But I saw people, you know, on Sixth Avenue on a mattress with their salt, with their cell phones, sleeping out on the sidewalk, two police officers one block away staring at their at their phones like so many of us do.

When really

you need to do what I saw social workers that I shadowed in Amsterdam, Netherlands do, which is when we discovered someone trying to sleep on a park bench, you'd say, look, we have a bed for you in a shelter.

You can't sleep on the park bench.

It's not safe for you.

It's not safe for you.

It's not safe for anybody else.

New York used to do that.

I mean,

they did have, they knew who all the homeless were.

This is what was told to me.

We know who they are, and we know who refuses to go in

and who doesn't, but we have a bed for everybody.

But now apparently, we don't do that.

That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, you know, and I really get at the people in particular responsible for this.

And by the way, I'm a lifelong ACLU supporter, but unfortunately, and I support a lot of what ACLU has done in the past, but unfortunately ACLU has been a terrible bad actor in this situation.

I asked them, you know, when one of our, one of our grandparents, when they suffer from dementia, whether from Alzheimer's or some other cause, when they suffer from dementia, we don't let them wander around in the seat where they're in the city, where they're at risk to themselves or something bad could happen to them.

So why do we do that with people suffering from other forms of mental illness?

Why do we let people suffering from psychosis, whether from schizophrenia or extensive meth use?

Why do we let them wander around the city?

It's immoral.

It's not safe for them.

And in Amsterdam and in other civilized cities, they say to folks that with psychosis, they say you have to go stay in a shelter.

You will be able to see a psychiatrist.

This is for me

fundamental to the operation of cities and a civilization.

Glenn, honestly,

well, after I wrote San Francisco, I declared myself no longer a progressive.

I changed my party registration from Democrat to independent because I feel like I'm living in an immoral society.

And I don't mean for that to sound the way that I think it may sound to a lot of people, but I feel like I'm living under like apartheid in South Africa or in some system where I'm like, I feel wrong paying taxes to basically allow hundreds of people to die every year on the street.

For different reasons, I feel the same way.

I think the government is so disconnected now from morality on multiple subjects that

I don't know what I pay my taxes for anymore.

I don't recognize, you know, the one thing that I have always felt is that

the system

is

will correct itself when the people correct itself.

You know what I mean?

When the people are all going down one way, somebody like Martin Luther King appears and we do correct it and we start to move in a better way.

I don't see that now.

I don't see, well, I don't see a lot of people standing up, but I also don't see the self-correction on anything.

Policies that are clearly not working.

What we're doing down at the border is the most immoral thing I've ever seen.

Remember, I'm the guy who got in trouble with the right

because I brought food and things down to the people who had crossed the border under Obama.

And I said, look, you can disagree, but you have to see people as people.

You have to see the plight that they're in.

Right now, no one seems to be talking about the kids.

We lost 40,000 minors.

Well, do you think they're in healthy situations now?

We lost 40,000 of them in the last six months.

That is immoral.

It's immoral what's going on.

But it doesn't seem like it matters to people.

Why?

What happened?

Yeah, you're absolutely.

I totally, I totally agree.

We're losing our humanity, Glenn.

And that's the most severe thing that you could say about a people or a civilization or a culture.

That's what, you know, 17.

That's what happened

in Germany with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It's why he failed.

The Germans had lost their humanity, and no matter what he said to appeal to the humanity, that door was already closed.

We can't let that happen here, or we're going to make them look like rookies.

I mean, Glenn, to give you some numbers here, 93,000 people died last year from drug deaths or poisonings or overdoses.

That's a five-fold increase from the 17,000 people that died from drugs in the year 2000.

That's almost, that's almost three times as many people died of drugs last year as car accidents, almost five times as many as died of homicides during a normal year.

This is out of control.

I do have one quote at the end of San Francisco because even though the book is focused on why progressives ruin cities, I do offer a critique.

In fact, what I do is I quote conservatives making a critique of the right and why the right hasn't been able to offer a powerful alternative politically in progressive cities.

And I quote the late Patrick Moynihan, who is a very interesting figure, someone I really identify with in a lot of ways.

He was a Democrat, but he worked for Nixon, as you know, and raised concerns about the disintegration of the family.

And Moynihan said something really important.

He said, the central conservative truth is that culture determines the political life of a nation, but the central liberal truth is that politics can intervene in the cultural life and change the direction.

So I do think that what you're pointing out is correct.

I mean, I see voices like yours, voices like Joe Rogan, whose podcast I did last week,

Jordan Peterson.

I do see it having a bit

courageous liberals like Barry Weiss, who used to be at the New York Times.

I do see people coming, moving from left to right a little bit more, Glenn Greenwald, for example, Matt Taibbi.

These are voices that I see really making a difference in the culture.

But I agree with you, we need some sort of new political formation, some sort of new political leadership that I think transcends a lot of those old left-right boundaries.

Because, you know, what I'm proposing is something that

is called, we call it CalPsych.

It's basically saying, you know, shocking idea that you need to treat people with mental illness, you need to treat people with addiction.

That really that's a moral issue, that this is not just a kind of technical question.

That should be something that appeals to both reasonable conservatives and reasonable liberals.

So

let me take it to

this question, because I think we agree on most of what you said.

I mean, you know, you pull up the hood, we're going to have disagreements on things, but I mean, the direction I think we agree on.

What I,

the conservative

has been wildly wrong because we didn't fear the corporation.

And that's because we never, I think, we never saw the corporation as getting that out of control.

Who should have listened to Eisenhower?

It's been out of control for a long time.

But now

it's more powerful than all nations on earth combined.

And we failed that.

The conservatives have been warning about an out-of-control government.

And I don't understand how

the left doesn't fear

that.

It's still power.

And

that one is even harder to stop because they're the police.

Who do you call when the government has gone bad?

You got nobody to call.

So

why is there this trust of the government?

You were saying, Cal Psych.

The first thing that went through my mind was, good heavens, do you remember all of the horrible things that used to happen in psychiatric hospitals back in the 50s and 60s and it stopped, thank God.

That was where my mind went.

And I don't understand how we can bridge that gap.

How come

we, many conservatives are going, holy cow, were we wrong on corporations?

How come the left doesn't see that on the government?

Yeah, well, that is such a great point.

And frankly, why doesn't the left see it on the power of corporations too, right?

We're seeing critical race theory take over corporations.

You know, I after I last year when my book Apocalypse Never Came Out, I was censored by Facebook.

Now, Facebook is censoring my friend Bjorn Lomborg and others for telling true facts about climate change and the environment.

So I share your concern.

You know, in San Francisco, I do describe the horrible treatment of mentally ill people.

I mean, before they were mistreated in hospitals, you know, people were chained into basements and in barns and horrible experiences.

After we deinstitutionalized and really the progressives shut down psychiatric hospitals with the consent of many conservatives,

mentally ill people were literally dumped on the street.

I mean, they were literally taken from hospitals and put on the street.

Many of them ended up in jails and prison.

The institution that has the most mentally ill people in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail.

I don't even want to describe the horrors that occur inside there, but literally it was trans-institutionalization.

We took people out of hospitals and put them in jails and prisons, so that was terrible.

In terms of the corporate influence, you're absolutely right.

Many people know that Gavin Newsom, our governor in California, was caught without a mask at a very

expensive fancy restaurants in the world, French Laundry.

But few people know that he was there with lobbyists for the California Medical Association.

and for some of our biggest healthcare companies.

My view is that there is a role for obviously private sector companies, but you have to have a system that is accountable.

And so, what CalPsych would do is it would say there has to be somebody in charge.

Nothing gets done in our society without a hierarchy.

It's why our military, we still rely on it, even with all the various problems that it's been having.

It still is a hierarchy, and you can count on things to be done.

So, we need some accountability in the system.

We need the head of CalPsych to report directly to the governor, and the CalPsych would then oversee private contracts, certainly, but it would be transparent.

There would be accountability.

Right now, it's completely opaque.

It's a Byzantine system.

There's two problems.

There's both overlapping services.

Sometimes people have two or three social workers.

And then there's fragmentation.

So people will get out of drug treatment, go back on the street, overdose, and die from drugs because there's no connectivity in the system.

So that's something fixing this system is something that is going to require, I think, a consensus between, like I said, I think forward-thinking conservatives, forward-thinking progressives, because

it'll be a mixed model.

It's going to have to involve the government.

It's going to have to involve the private sector.

And simply doing what I think a lot of Republicans have done, understandably, but also a fair number of liberals, which is to kind of point to this or that charity and imagining that they can deal with people in meth-induced psychosis or that they can deal with these big homeless encampments.

I think those days are long past.

And so the real opportunity for us in progressive cities and states like California and the San Francisco Bay Area is that it's just become chaos.

There's just too much violence on the street.

People are leaving.

People are being made unsafe.

We're having public health disasters.

So it's in those crises that I think creates an opportunity for new political leadership.

And why do you say that

private charities, I mean, I have a charity that basically, for the most part, what we do is we go find the best people on the ground closest to the problem and we just help fund them.

And

it's all just based on who's giving us the biggest bang for the buck.

Why do you say private charities couldn't do that?

Well, there's several reasons that I go through in some detail in San Francisco, but in short,

that's the model that we've had for the last 50 years is private charities that receive contracts from cities and counties.

And the first reason it hasn't worked is that we're dealing, when you're dealing with drug addicts and the mentally ill, you're dealing with a highly transient population.

Often they're moving around the state.

And

if you're someone who is arrested multiple times and finally sentenced or given the choice between prison and drug treatment, your drug treatment should probably not be anywhere close to where you were doing drugs because the drugs are a trigger.

We know that getting out of the open drug scene is necessary.

You may be familiar with a major study that was done of Vietnam, of American soldiers who became addicted to heroin in Vietnam.

When they came back to the United States, most of them were able to kick their addictions simply because there wasn't any heroin near them.

You go back to Kansas City or something from Vietnam, it's not easy to go find heroin, at least not in the 60s or early 70s.

Today, we don't, we have that problem where so much of our rehab is right there in the middle of the open drug scenes or the open drug market.

It's way too triggering for people.

What we need is a statewide solution so that you can actually do drug rehab or adult foster care or psychiatric help in cities outside of those big open drug scenes.

So that you may go to, if you're arrested in San Francisco or Los Angeles, you may end up getting drug treatment in places like Bakersfield or Fresno, where the rent is cheaper and you're not in the middle of so much chaos.

Can you, because you mentioned in the book, Michael Foucault,

an awful lot.

I think I'm pronouncing that right.

Foucault, Foucault,

Michel Foucault.

Yeah, thank you.

Sorry.

Foucault, yeah.

I know.

No, it's fine.

I know who who he is on the surface.

I know enough.

Not a likable guy, not a guy that you would want to hold up and say, hey,

he's our man.

But you return to this over and over in the book and saying

it's his influence all the way through.

Can you explain that?

Yeah, sure.

So this is a French historian.

His name is, yeah, it would be in English.

It would be Michael Foucault, but it's Michel because it's French, Michel Foucault.

And Foucault is maybe the most influential intellectual of the last 50 years.

He's taught in every major university in the United States.

He's a hero to most, many people on the left.

He was an

anarchist, meaning that Marxism and socialism were not radical enough for him.

He wanted even more libertarian form of Marxism.

And Foucault's big idea idea is that really mental illness is a myth.

That's just a way of stigmatizing people that are different.

That's a completely crazy idea.

We know mental illness is a thing.

My aunt suffered from schizophrenia.

It often manifests, that particular mental illness manifests when people are often in college.

It's a clear genetic environment interaction.

So the denial of it is really itself crazy.

He also condemned rehabilitation.

He condemned where we had gotward me going with prisons, which is to try to rehabilitate prisoners.

He viewed prisons and the criminal justice system in general, like many radical left people do, as basically a way that capitalism enforces its oppressive system on the people.

So he was a really toxic influence on the way people think, the way the radical left thinks.

His ideas helped to lead to basically emptying people out of mental hospitals without any support system for them whatsoever.

So again, help me understand the thinking because

I don't,

you have a hard time.

Let me put it this way.

Kennedy said in like 1961, an error only becomes a mistake when you refuse to correct it.

So there's all kinds of errors being made, but they're all being made into mistakes because you have the evidence this does not work.

And then you have to say, okay, now it's intentional.

Now you are intending to do these things.

What is the attraction to these guys and to this philosophy and the attraction to

just let it go on and on and on with data piling up saying it doesn't work?

That's what they so yeah, you have to the conclusion is that that's what they want.

They want it not to work.

So, you know, the motivation for Foucault and the radical left is that they hate the system.

They think the system is the capitalist democratic system that we have.

And frankly, even though France is more socialistic than we are, even the French system was too capitalist for them.

So they hate the system.

They think the system is responsible for creating victims.

They have in their minds this romantic utopia.

And this really goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century.

So these are all Marx in the 19th century.

So these are this radical tradition.

There's a utopia in the back of people's minds where there's a world that exists without any suffering or any inequality.

And the current system is viewed as evil because there is inequality.

It's a part of our societies.

And so it's coming from a really, it's coming from hatred.

You know, that's the emotion that it comes from.

I will say.

Wait, wait, wait.

How does it come from hatred?

Hatred of the system?

Hatred of inequality?

Hatred of what?

Yes.

So it would start, and I get into some of this at the end of San Francisco because I draw on some of the work of the psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

But basically, you know, it starts with sadness at the cruelty of the world.

It then becomes a kind of anger and a kind of, you know, dumb ideology that blames all the inequality and suffering of the world on something that we imagine to be a system.

It's based on a really dumb idea that there's some utopian alternative under which there would be none of the suffering or oppression.

And then it builds from there.

And so that you just get a kind of what I call victim ideology, which is a much broader ideology than Marxism, which was really focused on workers.

It gets to basically the idea that you can categorize people in the world, real people, you can categorize them as as victims or oppressors, and victims should be given everything with no accountability or responsibility, and oppressors should be punished, and things should be taken from them.

And so you end up with basically a denial of things in the real world.

I just got the most, the best email I've received so far after writing San Francisco was from a psychologist who worked with the mentally ill in San Francisco for many decades.

And he said, the so-called homeless advocates, again, this is just radical left activists who put themselves forward as defenders of the homeless.

He said they get up and they would basically defend the right of mentally ill, drug-addicted people to destroy themselves and destroy the system around them because they viewed it as

an FU to the system.

They viewed it as a way to stick the middle finger to the system, which they hated.

But in that sense, Glenn, it's so sinister because what the radical left is doing, so-called progressives are doing is that they're actually using people yeah they're using people as means to an end and the end is the destruction of western civilization that's why they keep attacking institutions that you need to have a civilization whether it's mental hospitals or police stations or jails and prisons or universities these are things that you need to have a functioning civilization or or quite honestly just the basic

understanding of mankind.

It is so destructive to say you're a victim and you can only

grow when I or my people take care of these people and get them out of your way.

That is the most

evil thing you can teach.

You have to teach people you can do anything.

And if you're just, you have to take the first step.

I can't take it for you.

You have to take it, but I'll be there.

And you got to stop blaming other people and just why, why are you in this situation?

Maybe it's bad luck.

Maybe you've done some bad choices.

But that's empowering.

And I look at the way the left talks about African Americans and talks about

homeless, people of color, the people on the border, Hispanics, and I think, my...

gosh it i mean who do you think you are mr white politician, telling all of these people

what they need to do, and what they need to do is for you to keep all of the bad guys away from them because you know what their life is like.

It's awful.

The people

in

Chicago that have lost their children from gunfire.

I honestly, I would feel like the father who was they tried to arrest and

sick the FBI on

at the

school board where his daughter was arrested.

And to cover what they had done, when he speaks out at the school board meeting, they make him into the villain.

And at some point, you just say, you know what?

I can't do it anymore.

I can't do it.

They are actually injuring while they're saying they're trying to help.

And they're doing it intentionally.

Yeah, you got it.

I think, look, I think most liberals, most progressives are,

they don't understand.

They're not sociopathic.

They're in the grip of a religion.

They're in the grip of believing themselves to be compassionate people.

But I do think there is a hardcore

leadership here that is sociopathic in its view of people as objects.

It's a dehumanizing ideology.

It's disempowering, as you point out.

It's absolutely power-hungry because it's looking to use people as objects in a power game.

It's looking to make people dependent on them and on the system that

they otherwise would condemn.

So

I did find many times in this work, there were moments that I found them chilling when I would be speaking to the architects of these policies and getting a sense of the ways in which they were really committed to the ideology and really didn't seem to care very much about the actual human lives that were being sacrificed.

Example.

But you're absolutely right.

What's that?

The example.

Oh.

Well, the biggest one, I mean, obviously this book is very concerned with drug addicts who are basically being enabled to die on the streets.

But I think you point to the other one.

I have three chapters in the book on homicides.

And we know that you can prevent homicides with police.

It's just not that complicated.

And we know also, by the way, we now have seen it in 2015 and in 2020, this thing where when you demonize the police, when you demand, when you cut the police, it has two effects.

The first effect is on the police themselves.

They withdraw from policing.

You know, policing is...

One of the things I interview the best criminologists in America, delightful people, totally clear about this.

Police know criminals.

Like the criminals and the police, it's just like in the the Hollywood movies.

You know, they have a relationship.

They know who the likely killers are, and they get up in their face.

They talk to them, they interact with them, they spend time with them.

And we know that that works to actually prevent, it doesn't seem rational, but it prevents potential killers from killing people.

So when the police pull back, that results in homicides.

And also, we know that when the criminals are emboldened, when they are told that the system is against them, that the system is racist, the system is out to get them, that the system is evil, they're more likely to commit homicide.

So, this is something that's called the Ferguson effect because after the Ferguson shooting and protests that led to Black Lives Matter protests in 2015, we saw an increase in homicides.

That was spectacularly confirmed in 2020, tragically confirmed in 2020.

We've now seen homicides rise 30% in the United States as a whole,

rose 50% or more.

60%,

it rose in Portland, it rose 30% in Oakland.

So we're sacrificing African Americans, and it's not just young men, it's also kids getting shot, it's people, there's bystanders being killed.

And so the radical left is sacrificing African Americans on the altar of a radical anti-police.

anti-civilization agenda.

It's absolutely depraved.

It's despicable.

I can't use strong enough words to denounce the anti-policing movement.

There's nothing progressive or liberal about it in the best senses of those terms.

It's totally radical.

Everybody, I came away from doing the research for San Francisco being like, everybody should be pro-police.

Like, police are just good.

The more police you have, the evidence is overwhelming.

The more police you have, the less crime you have.

And the less crime, it's not just that that's good in and of itself, but if you're worried about mass incarceration, as I am, I don't want a lot of people to go to prison that shouldn't go to prison.

But if you're worried about mass incarceration, then you you should be pro-police because police are what prevent crimes from occurring in the first place.

So let's talk about the end of the book.

You talk a little bit about the conservatives and what they can do and

also like to know what we've done wrong.

What is turning people like you off that we've got to stop doing?

Well, I think the first thing, and by the way, I interviewed the best conservative minds on this issue.

I interviewed Christopher Ruffo, who's now a celebrity because he's almost single-handedly taken down critical race theory.

Before Chris went after critical race theory, he was a brilliant journalist documenting the drug addiction crisis, the open drug scenes that we mislabel homelessness, which is a propaganda word.

I interviewed Chris Ruffo.

I interviewed scholars with the Manhattan Institute, which is a very thoughtful and important center-ready think tank in New York.

The first thing is just that I think Republicans and conservatives need to have an urban agenda.

You know, Giuliani is the major figure here.

So whatever you think of Giuliani today, Giuliani, obviously, as mayor of New York,

really

cleaned it up, shut down the open drug scenes, allowed for the redevelopment of

bad neighborhoods, of bad areas.

So there is a tradition here, but I think a lot of conservatives have kind of withdrawn.

You know, and even moderates, people just leave, they just check out, they kind of look down on cities.

And I get it, I live in the suburbs and I love the suburbs, but we need cities because cities are places of innovation.

It's often where people go in their 20s before they have a family or kids to do business.

They work really hard.

It's a social environment.

It's very important for entrepreneurialism and innovation.

So the first thing is just to care about cities and have an agenda for cities.

I think the second thing is we've got to get beyond

this dumb libertarianism.

I'm a big advocate, as you know, Glenn, of free markets.

In Apocalypse Never, I defend markets as important for sending the price signal for resource scarcity.

They promote innovation.

So I think markets are of huge importance.

But there's some things for which there's no market.

There's no market for treating people with schizophrenia.

You just have to treat them.

You know, my aunt had schizophrenia, and she had a pretty darn good life for somebody with that particular mental illness, which is a pretty devastating mental illness.

There's just not, this is not, so a person with schizophrenia is not the same thing as somebody who's a 25-year-old who just got addicted to heroin.

They need two separate things.

But so I think we have to get beyond the idea that there's a libertarian or a free market solution to some of these mental illnesses.

They're going to be covered by, at least the hard, the severe mental illnesses are going to be covered by taxpayers.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't require things of people because even people with pretty serious mental illnesses can do things.

In fact, they want to do things.

They want their lives to have purpose and meaning and value.

But again, that's not something that is obviously is going to be a market provision.

There's going to be a role for government there.

So it means that the role for government should be smart.

It shouldn't just be what we're doing now.

What we're doing now in progressive cities is, as I've been describing, just giving people things with no obligation.

And so I think the main thing conservatives can do is come in here and focus back on the basics.

You need carrots and sticks.

When I asked the main character in my book, who's a social worker in the Netherlands, who was responsible for helping to shut down the open drug scenes, the open drug markets.

He says, you need carrots and sticks.

The social workers and the police should work together.

You know, if you, if one of the things that the progressives have done that they went too far on is they wouldn't have send social workers by themselves without a police officer to respond to to calls around somebody with mental illness in a state of psychosis often.

But often those 90% of those situations are potentially dangerous.

So you really need police with social workers together.

It seems obvious, but that is a radical idea for progressives.

And I think in the past, conservatives just haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it.

So, I think we need to get back to basics:

carrots and sticks, police and social workers, break up the open-air drug scenes, shelter first, treatment first, housing earned.

That's the success sequence that we need for the cities.

I have to tell you,

I think

a lot of conservatives would be for that that if you included work fare, that there was, you have to

take responsibility.

If, you know, if you need a place to stay, great.

The minute you start running it down, you're out.

You know, that you've got to take care of things.

You have to earn your way.

And if that was part of it, I mean, because.

How many people,

how many kids have become suicidal because they've been at home for the last two years?

They haven't had anything to do.

And, you know, you sit around and do nothing.

It destroys.

There is something about hard work.

You know, even

for me, I go out and I work on a fence or I actually do physical labor.

It's invigorating.

compared to even just mental behavior, but when you or labor, but when you have neither mental labor or physical labor, you just waste away.

You waste away and there's no self-esteem.

Absolutely.

100% agree.

100% agree.

We all need physical labor.

I mean,

this is obvious.

I mean, and so, yes,

it's bad for people.

It's bad for self-esteem to be given things that you did not earn.

We know this.

It's also true for raising children.

Children should be involved in keeping the classroom clean.

You know, one of the things that I noticed in Japan is that the kids were heavily involved in maintaining the classrooms and doing physical labor.

Same thing for homeless shelters.

Same thing for the, you know, I saw mentally ill people, they want to have a purpose too.

Everybody does.

Maybe they can't, they can't, you know, not everybody has to be a computer programmer.

But everybody should be involved in keeping where they live clean.

Everybody should be involved in keeping where they live clean and orderly.

You know, one of the most beautiful books I've ever written on homelessness was written about guys that maintained their drug habit.

They were all addicts, but they did it by collecting aluminum cans and bottles.

They would describe how it gave them a high that was much more lasting and much deeper than the high they got from drugs.

There's no reason that we should not be doing that for everybody who is getting care

at the taxpayer dime.

And Glenn, I would even go further.

I think maybe you've introduced this idea into the culture.

which is this idea of national service.

I just, I see what happens in Israel.

I think one of the reasons Israelis get such good training is that they do, they are required to do some kind of national service.

Glenn, in California, we have a lot of forests that have been badly managed and maintained.

No.

We should have some kind of service for you.

Of course, all blamed on climate change.

The real issue is that we haven't maintained our forests.

There's plenty of work for young people to do.

Right.

But

getting the ability to go into those forests and just clean the underbrush, only take things that are dead.

You'd never get the permission to to do that.

You'd never get the permission to do that.

Well,

let's disagree on that part of it.

I'm a bit more,

I keep some of my idealism.

I like to think of myself as a practical idealist or as an idealistic pragmatist.

I do think that the public wants it.

And yes, the radical left doesn't want it.

But we're still talking about

70 to 80% of the public that support all of these things, including some kind of work requirement, including an abstinence requirement.

If you're going to get your own apartment at the taxpayer subsidy, you should have to earn it through abstinence, through making progress on your personal plan, which in every case has to include work.

This is something that the Dutch and the Portuguese are very clear about.

Work is essential to building up our character and our self-esteem, and a big part of recovery from addiction.

Well, music to my ears, Michael, thank you so much.

Um, we'll talk again.

The name of the book is San Francisco.

I know that

I've learned a ton.

I can't wait to read it myself.

Thank you so much, Michael.

Thanks for having me, Gwen.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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