American Thought Leaders - Inside California’s Open-Air Drug Markets and Booming Retail-Theft Industry: Leighton Woodhouse

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

“San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed organized drug dealing, and then the organized retail-theft industry, which is driven by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-supply drug dealers. Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic, more entrepreneurial, if you will. I think it’s mostly just kind of self-organized crews of thieves who just drive around doing crimes: dipping, which is car break-ins, armed carjackings, home invasions …”Leighton Woodhouse is an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a native of Berkeley, California. He has been documenting the “street addiction crisis” engulfing the Bay Area, and the political culture and policies fueling it.“We don’t arrest people, and we certainly don’t send them to mandatory treatment. And what it means is that we’re just allowing the addiction to continue to consume them, because we haven’t forced them into sort-of that moment where they have to choose: Am I going to fight this addiction, or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison? It takes that kind of a choice to break through the fog of addiction, and we’re not giving people that opportunity anymore,” says Mr. Woodhouse.Mr. Woodhouse is also the co-founder of the “Public” publication on Substack with Michael Shellenberger, and a key investigator of the Twitter Files. In this episode, we discuss the limits of free speech and dive into the Bay Area ideology of left-wing libertarianism.“Harm reduction has evolved into something much more—in my view—monstrous, where literally encouraging people to quit using drugs is seen as oppressive. It seems somehow, like ‘how dare you judge a drug user?’” says Mr. Woodhouse.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed organized drug dealing and then the organized retail theft industry, which is driven by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-supplied drug dealers. Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic. I think it's mostly just kind of self-organized crews

of thieves who just drive around doing crimes. Car break-ins, armed carjackings, home invasions. Leighton Woodhouse is an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and native of Berkeley, California. He has been documenting the street addiction crisis engulfing the Bay Area and the political culture and policies fueling it. We don't arrest people,

and we certainly don't send them to mandatory treatment. What it means is that we're don't send them to mandatory treatment. What it means is that we're just allowing the addiction to continue to consume them because we haven't forced them into sort of that moment where they have to choose, am I going to fight this addiction or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison? This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek. Leighton Woodhouse, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. This has been a long time coming.

I guess over a year ago now, you wrote a really, really thoughtful piece about marijuana as possibly the new OxyContin. And this is what we've been wanting to talk about for a while. I want to talk as well about just what has happened in the Bay Area. And because you view it as a kind of nucleus for the sort of extreme progressivism, perhaps. I don't know. You'll tell me how you describe it. But let's start with this reporting that you did on marijuana and how everything about it has changed to the present day. Sure.

So I grew up in Berkeley, California, which as probably most people would suspect, there's a lot of marijuana in Berkeley. California is famous historically for having the best marijuana because of Humboldt County. And even back then, the stuff was pretty potent. I'd say probably around like 9% to 10% THC for the stuff that was famously strong from Humboldt County. That would be considered a very weak strain of marijuana today because the stuff that's being produced now and that really kind of came into its own after a legalization in California is just a completely

different drug than what I knew when I was a kid. First of all most of it is not flour it's concentrated in products like edibles and even beverages and and the way that they produce that stuff is they take they take the marijuana flower they pulverize it they put it in a, and they run chemicals like butane through it, which strips the THC out of the marijuana flower and distills it into a wax. And then they can make it even more potent by putting it in a high-pressure oven and get it up to, at its highest potency, 95% approaching 100% THC. Most of the stuff they sell at dispensaries is probably somewhere in the 60% range, maybe up to 80% for the very strong stuff. Maybe you can get stuff as low as 30%. Any of those is considered high potency THC. Anything above really 15% is high potency THC. So this stuff is not the same drug as, you know, Cheech and Chong were smoking. The medical effects of marijuana, when you get

paranoid from marijuana, that's actually, and this is something I learned when I was writing the article and interviewing experts and researchers on it, that's actually a symptom of psychosis. It's a very low levellevel symptom of cannabis-induced psychosis. And if you've ever had that experience where you smoked weed and get paranoid, which I have definitely had that experience. That's why I don't smoke weed. That's how I experienced it when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. If you've had that experience smoking weed,

then that means that you are susceptible to having a full-blown psychotic episode from if you do high-intensity cannabis. If you have a full-blown psychotic episode, what that means is that you're vulnerable if you continue to use the drug to becoming schizophrenic. So there's a lot of cases of people who have had psychotic episodes in which they've committed suicide while in a psychotic state in which they've threatened the lives of others. Cases in which people just completely were just chronically having these psychotic episodes. And then the long term danger is that you can become permanently schizophrenic from cannabis abuse. So, you know, a lot of people, I wrote that article, and a lot of people accused me of reefer madness or being, you know, a prude.

I want to make it clear. I wasn't writing about smoking a joint or even taking a bong rip, smoking flour. It doesn't concern me. That stuff is irrelevant. What I'm talking about is this very, very high-potency THC that they're making today, and that is totally unregulated and is legal. You can buy it at any dispensary, probably 15 dispensaries within three miles of here. You can buy these products. I was really tempted to say, yeah, I smoked, but I didn't inhale earlier. I'm not going to say that.

But when you mention OxyContin, you're really talking about something to do with addiction, right? That's where you're making that connection? Well, there's a couple of comparisons. So first of all, I want to be clear that this is an addictive substance, this high-potency THC. Everybody's used to the idea that marijuana is non-addictive or that it's only psychologically addictive. The high-potency THC is addictive. People go through withdrawal symptoms. As a matter of fact, people tend to smoke or consume edibles because they think that it relieves their stress when in fact the stress is induced by withdrawal. So it's sort of a vicious cycle. People think that it's medication. It's actually medication for the withdrawal that you're experiencing from not taking the product. So it is addictive, but really the comparison to OxyContin is more about the

marketing of the product and the way in which it has been sort of propagandized as medicine, just like OxyContin. The cure for pain, you know, this chronic condition that we'd ignored until now and now we have a solution for it. A lot of these states initially passed medicinal marijuana legislation before it became fully legal with recreational marijuana. You can still go and get a medical card from a doctor. It's like completely bogus. You know, you like there's there's literally there's like a website called NugMD where you can call them in within five minutes. They don't turn down anybody, right? This is the only medicine where everybody gets it you get a prescription to get as much as you want you don't have to refill it you just

have this card and basically the card is basically a discount card you get you you get a break from certain kind of taxes. This whole idea that it's medicine is a total pretense. A lot of these corporations behind alcohol, behind pharmaceuticals, have heavily invested in this industry. And so this corporate backing and the corporatization of this addictive and dangerous drug, that's sort of where the comparison to OxyContin comes into play. Why do you think they're investing so heavily in them? Are they looking for a new market? How, how do you see that? Yeah, I think it's the future.

I think that there's a lot of people who might not drink a lot, who hear that marijuana is this natural product that's medicinal and that, you know, will help with their stress or their back pain. It's a whole new market of people who normally wouldn't partake in substances, legal substances that frequently. They're very open-minded to cannabis. So I think there's a couple of things. First of all, it's a way to access a new market.

And it's also just, it's the future. It was like inevitable. All these states were passing this. Of course, they're going to get into it and ride this train It's a lot of states have invest have legalized marijuana to revive their entire state's economies, right? This is like a way that these local governments and state governments see as as this revitalization of the local economy Bring back in agriculture and manufacturing

Whichever one category you want to put marijuana cultivation into, you know, new tax base. This is seen as this sort of panacea, not just in terms of health, but in terms of local and state and state economy. So this is a huge opportunity for these corporations. It makes me think of gambling, right? But it's sort of sold as something healthy. Yeah. There's been this sort of bait and switch around cannabis where the idea was that, first of all, there's this big black market, criminal black market of marijuana cultivation. The idea is that if you legalize it, then you're going to get rid of that criminal element, right? You've heard this argument a million times. And there was another argument that this is going to be this new tax base, as I just mentioned. Well, what's happening now is,

first of all, the black market for marijuana has not gone away. As a matter of fact, it's expanded. If you talk to people in Humboldt County, which is where traditionally the black market for marijuana was, the cartels are getting into marijuana cultivation in Humboldt County. And along with the cartels has come sex trafficking and all these other sort of criminal enterprises that come along with that cartels has come, sex trafficking, and all these other sort of criminal enterprises that come along with that criminal industry.

So the footprint for black market marijuana has actually expanded in the United States. A lot of what was happening across the border of Mexico has moved to this side of the border. And then the second thing is now these politicians are talking about cutting taxes for marijuana cultivation on the pretext that legal marijuana can't compete with black market marijuana. So we were promised that the criminal element would go away and that it would be this new

tax base. Now they're saying we should tax marijuana less because of the criminal element that has not gone anywhere. So it's this huge bait and switch. When I lived in Vancouver many, many, many moons ago, so to speak, people would say that the biggest cash crop in British Columbia was marijuana. I don't know if that was true. There's certainly a lot of marijuana growing that I was loosely aware of.

But is that really what's driving it? I think it's just business. It's just good old you know, good old fashioned American capitalism. But, you know, the stories that I was hearing about the consequence of this stuff, there's a guy who lives not far from here whose kid just had a psychotic break and just drove his car into the bay. There's another psychiatric social worker told me a story of a guy who climbed a 700-foot crane and was was he didn't jump thank God, but he was Thinking he was considering jumping off not because he was suicidal But because he thought that he was in the matrix and that if he jumped off he would just bounce right back

So this is like severe severe cases of psychosis and then just chronic depression, all these other sort of mental illnesses that come out of this abuse. I wish that we hadn't just gone for straight legalization. I understand the argument for decriminalization. I support decriminalizing marijuana. I don't think people should have been going to prison for five, six, seven years off of

a marijuana charge. I think that's ridiculous. But decriminalization and legalization are two different things. Decriminalization means you're no longer going to lock people up for a marijuana offense. Legalization means doors wide open, corporations can come right in, market it all they want. And that skip straight to legalization, I think was a huge mistake. And we couldn't have foretold, I suppose we could have foretold it, that it's driven a lot of the innovation that has made the substance much, much more dangerous and much more deadly and much more addictive. Fascinating. Well, I can't help but think that, you know, this ideology that emanating from here,

from Berkeley, you know, to some extent, from San Francisco, fits into this? Because there's this idea that why shouldn't everything, I'm not saying everything, but why shouldn't everything be legal? Yeah. I've written about this before. The Bay Area has a really unique sort of politics. People tend to think of the Bay Area as very liberal, very progressive, maybe even radically left-wing. And that's true. But that misses a big element of the politics here because it is also a very libertarian culture. So there's this left-wing libertarianism here, which accounts for the fact that we allow just open-air drug dealing without criminal enforcement.

We allow open-air drug use. We allow people who are addicted, severely addicted to drugs, to just go untreated, camp on the streets. You know, we don't, we just simply have stopped prosecuting crimes in Oakland. All this stuff comes, emanates from this sort of this left-wing ideology, yes, but more of a libertarian ideology that sees any sort of this left-wing ideology, yes, but more of a libertarian ideology that sees any sort of constraints or acts of coercion or even just institutional power as somehow wrong. And you just can't govern a society that way. Before we continue, and I really want to explore this, tell me a bit about yourself because you're from here. I mean, you've seen the changes basically from your childhood, right?

Yeah. I was born and raised in Berkeley on the tail end of the 60s. For me, obviously as a kid, the 60s felt like it was like 100 years ago. But now that in retrospect, I think about like how the classrooms all had, you know, doves with the olive branch in its mouth, like all the sort of the hold peace signs, all the holders were overs from the sixties were just all over our classrooms, um, just everywhere in Berkeley. It's not so much like that anymore in Berkeley. Um, but yeah, I grew up at the tail end of, of, of that generation and sort of that, that cohort that came through the Bay area. Um, and a lot of the of that libertarianism that I'm speaking of was

very much present in that time and in that era, the back to the land movement, the entire new left. The new left of the 60s was very much an individualist libertarian movement. You know, there's this speech that Mario Savio gave famously on the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley where he talks about, you know, the famous part is throwing his we have to throw our bodies on the on the wheels of the machine and stop it from moving and there's a moment before that which is not famous where he talks about the union workers in the hall in Sproul Hall behind him and he says to the crowd he says these members of the painters union are up there to they have not agreed with our request to stop their work while we do this occupation and then he starts going kind of going off on the unions but then he backs off and he says you know we

don't want to like blame the workers for the shortcomings of their union. And I found it really interesting because it was sort of expressive of this break that the left had made from the old left, the old sort of materialist Marxist left, which was very much embedded within the labor movement in the United States, the new left was a reaction to that, a reaction to the New Deal. You know, the New Deal was all about scaling up all these huge government institutions and these public works projects. And along with it, it was sort of the scaling up of mass politics. You know, the Port Huron statement that Tom Hayden wrote, you know, starts off saying we're the child, we're the children raised in relative privilege. And then it's just about how our generation is about self-fulfillment and self-affirmation and not being part of this big war machine and blah, blah, blah.

There's a lot of noble sentiments in it, but it's very much sort of declaring their independence from mass politics, from corporate culture, from everything big and institutional and standardized and uniform. And that was very much what Mario Savio's speech was about. So it was a very individualist and sort of and libertarian movement about like, you know, they were freeing themselves from the shackles of this machine and the system. And at the most radical exponent of it were the hippies who went and literally just went up to Northern California or New Mexico or the Hudson Valley and just started creating their own little utopias outside of the oversight of government and of the larger mainstream society.

It has this left-wing cast to it because it was the 60s. These were hippies. But it's really kind of like almost an Anrandian kind of, you could see this being a right-wing movement too. There have been right-wing movements that are similar to that. And so that libertarianism was very much part of that new left generation and their mobilization, and it's very much expressed in today's politics in the Bay Area. Well, so what's astonishing, right, given everything you just said, is how, you know, I don't know what you call today's progressive left.

Is it the new left still? But it seems to be all about institutional power and coercion and affecting power that way. There's a lot of contradictions within this movement and I can speak most clearly to California and specifically Northern California. There's a really amazing book I read, an old book called Albion Seed which is about the settlement of the United States in the colonial era by different waves of migrants from England and It describes the wave of the Puritans who came into New England and the Puritans had this idea of ordered liberty

The Puritans we think of them as very conservative because they were so strict and top-down hierarchical They're actually very liberal as well. And we can see that in the way that Massachusetts and New England has a very liberal political tradition. A lot of that emanates from the Puritans. Their idea was that people are inherently bad, or at least have the potential of being bad. And you need to corral them and control them to bring out the goodness in them and to suppress the bad, the sin in them. And the only way that you can do that is by through essentially top-down structures. And so you have this very top-down government which bestows upon individuals their rights.

They don't have them inherently. The government gives you the rights. They had these ridiculous laws and colonial Massachusetts around things that you had to do to just go fishing in a pond it's like ridiculous rules It was very much part of this ordered Liberty idea idea Then you had the Scotch-Irish who came into the Appalachians And they came from another part of England northern England, which has been a war zone for 500 years This is sort of the borderlands between Scotland and England

and on the other side, Northern Ireland. And their only experience of government through hundreds of years of history was at the point of a spear. They saw the government as a tyrannical force that came to suppress you because that was their experience of the English and the Scottish crown for 500 years.

So they settled into the Appalachians and they brought with them this very anti-government Libertarian culture and their idea was that we had natural rights We are born with our rights and government doesn't give us our rights government. We can only Respect our rights and if government intrudes upon our rights Then we have the the right to rebel against them by the turn of the 20th century The Puritans had migrated across the northern part of the United States through the Great Lakes region and the northern plains to the northwest and into this part of the country. The Appalachians had gone the opposite route, and they sort of merged.

And so even in Southern California, you don't see so much of the top-down thing it's liberal in southern california but but i've lived i lived in l.a for 12 years and you don't see what you see quite the specific mix that you see here so really like for me this became really clear during covid when you had in san francisco, open-air drug markets, people camping on the streets, people openly using drugs, no criminal enforcement in any of this. And at the same time, to walk into a bar or restaurant, you needed a vaccine passport,

you had to stand six feet from each other, wear a mask. And San Francisco is more intense than the rest of the country. It wasn't just the regulations from above. There was a very, very intense peer pressure. If pressure if you weren't I mean people were being shamed For not wearing a mask while walking on a trail in a regional park So it was sort of that confluence of this sort of authoritarian top-down imposition of these rules and regulations on People wall at the same time this completely libertarian do as you please we have no right to Tell you that you can't sleep on a sidewalk

in front of an elementary school smoking fentanyl attitude. And both of those are happening at the same time. That's kind of what got me wondering about what the hell this political culture is. But basically you're telling me that they took the worst of both traditions and merged them. It's less that anybody merged them as that they just kind of organically merged and created this specific confluence. But yeah, I mean, I think that if you look back in the 60s and a lot of the stuff you see through the filters of all these layers of nostalgia, there's a lot to admire in the 60s generation. And so I think you kind of see maybe the best of

that confluence in the 60s, although there was also a lot of horrible stuff happening in the 60s that we don't remember as vividly. But I mentioned this to you before, but there's now in San Francisco, like a lot of the stuff in the 60s, the open drug use, the open drug dealing, free love, which was in a lot of cases sex trafficking of drug addicted young girls. That stuff was, we look back on it with the nostalgia of the radical politics and the music and the art and all the great things about it because kind of the victors wrote the history. Now you see in San Francisco all the dark stuff, the politics are gone. I mean, there's a veneer of radical politics, but it's just imbecilic. But the radical revolutionary politics are kind of gone.

The art and the music is definitely gone. And you just have the open drug use, you have the sex trafficking, you have all the gross stuff of the 60s still there without any of the good parts. These open air drug markets became personal to me when a childhood friend of mine was killed in the crossfire of a drug deal gone bad in Toronto, Canada, in a residential neighborhood where there's one of these needle injection sites with harm reduction policies, which I can't help but think comes from this ideology that you're describing now. Would you agree that this bizarre model of these two sides is something that's somehow been exported across maybe even to other countries? For sure.

I mean, harm reduction is very much a part of that sort of libertarian tradition in my view. It started from very good intentions. Harm reduction started sort of as an outgrowth of the HIV and AIDS crisis in the 80s. And the idea was, look, if you're a heroin user, we can't just shame you into quitting. If we're going to stop the transmission of HIV through needles, then we need to give you clean needles to continue to use,

but use safely. That was the idea. It was kind of a very practical approach to the problem. But now harm reduction has evolved into something much more, in my view, monstrous, where literally encouraging people to quit using drugs is seen as oppressive. It seems somehow like, how dare you judge a drug user? How dare you suggest that they be clean, let alone coerce them through things like

mandatory treatment? I mean, that's just completely off the table. That's considered practically fascist. So, you know, the idea with harm reduction now is just drug users have a right to use drugs and you have no standing to judge them for it. And lest one be tempted to agree with that, well, just consider the death count from that ideology in San Francisco. More people died in San Francisco over the pandemic of overdoses than of COVID-19. There are people who've used heroin for 30 years, for even longer than that. It's not good for you, but you can live a full life while using heroin, which is counterintuitive, but it happens. Nobody uses fentanyl for 30 years. Nobody uses fentanyl for more than three or four years. You're going to die within three or four years. So the harm reduction sort of approach to the

street addiction crisis is consigning people to death. I've called it sort of palliative care for a non-terminal illness. This is hospice for these addicts. And these people do not need to die. They can recover. Many people have before, but it takes coercion to do it. It takes forcing people to do it. I've explored this somewhat and everybody I've ever talked to who has made it out of this cycle had someone come in and do a very serious intervention and say, you're going to die unless you change. I'm going to help you, but you have to do your part. I mean, something like that.

Nobody got out by people letting them continue. It's even worse off if you're living in a tent in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. You've gone beyond the point where anybody in your life and your personal life is going to intervene. Your family probably doesn't know where you are anymore. You've lost all your friends. You've been kicked out of every house you've sort of freeloaded in. You have no more relationships from anybody before in your pre-addiction life anymore. This is sort of the typical scenario. Your only friends are other drug addicts at that point. Your friends, you know, these are just people you hang out with. They're not really your friends. They don't have your back. And I say this, by the way, after having, you know, interviewed many drug addicts about the scenario, so I'm not making this up.

At that point, there's only one intervention possible for you. I'm sorry to say that the only intervention is law enforcement. And I've talked to many former addicts whose lives were saved by being arrested. And that doesn't mean necessarily going to jail or prison. Jail, perhaps, for the pretrial period. But this is what drug courts are for this is what diversion is for Diversion into actual functioning treatment units that that keep you locked up and forced to get clean on a long-term basis We don't do that anymore in the Bay Area. We don't do it at all

We don't arrest people and we certainly don't send them to mandatory treatment and what it what it means is that we're just allowing the addiction to continue to consume them because we haven't forced them into sort of that moment where they have to choose, am I going to fight this addiction or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison? It takes that kind of a choice to break through the fog of addiction and we're not giving people that opportunity anymore. We hear a lot of things about San Francisco. You know, I'm staying in Mission Bay. Seems like a very nice neighborhood. I'm not seeing any of the things that I've heard, and frankly, that we've reported on from the area, right? From the general area. What I'm getting at is,

I want you to give me a picture of how things exist now in the Bay Area. Maybe we can start with Oakland, but really it's a bigger picture, right? Yeah. I don't like to use the term homelessness because I think that implies that the problem is that people don't have a home. First of all, a lot of the people who are living on the streets in San Francisco and Oakland do have a home. A lot of folks have parents who would welcome them back into their homes. They have beds to sleep on. They have loved ones who have doors open to them.

One guy, Tom Wolfe, who you may have met before, he was on the streets for six months or so in San Francisco. He literally had a home that he was paying a mortgage on or his wife at that point was paying a mortgage on, while he was sleeping in a doorway in the Tenderloin. The reason why people are sleeping on the streets in the Tenderloin is not because they don't have a home to go to. It's because if they relocate to some place that's not five minutes from a drug dealer, when the drug lets off and they start getting dope sick, they get very, very, very sick to the point that they want to die.

They need to be within walking distance of somebody who can resupply them to take that sickness away. That's why they're sleeping on the streets. So they could have a home open to them in Beverly Hills for all that matters. They need to be sleeping in the Tenderloin or in the south of the market somewhere in close proximity to a dealer. So it's a street addiction crisis. It's not a homelessness crisis.

You know, San Francisco has done a horrible job, clearly, evidently, dealing with this crisis. Now San Francisco's hands are tied, actually, because now we've reached a point where the political will actually for once is there in San Francisco to take pretty dramatic measures to make a change to this. Definitely the political will is there with a mayor, with a district attorney. But there's an injunction on the city of San Francisco now. It's been in place for the last 10 months or so. A federal judge is preventing San Francisco from enforcing its own anti-camping laws, its own anti-vagrancy laws until the city has enough shelter beds in place to house every homeless person in San Francisco, which is an insane standard. The city attorney estimates that

would cost about a third of the city's general budget to accommodate that. And even then, what happens then? At that point, you've got drug addicts from across the country know that if you go to San Francisco, not only will you not be arrested, not only are there drug dealers everywhere you can get drugs from, you can sleep on the street. There's tons of services to get food and shelter if you want it. But also, this is going to give you a free apartment or a free shelter, at least, a free bed for everybody who's living there, who's living on the streets, that's just going to bring more people. It's a magnet for more drug addicts. And I've interviewed a lot of these drug addicts. They're from Arkansas. They're from Alabama. They tend to be from red states. They tend to be from states that don't tolerate this stuff. And that's why they come to California.

It's not just the weather. It's also the permissibility. I mean, what is the panoply of laws that are kind of creating this general environment? Like, I mean, I guess what I'm trying to get at is how bad is it here? It's bad. Prop 47 was actually passed by the voters in, I believe, 2014. The California voters are responsible for that one. We own it. I think I voted for it.

I don't remember. It was a long time ago, but I believe I did because it sounded great on paper. It was like, you know, mass incarceration is a big problem. Why are we prosecuting these petty thefts? But what the unintended consequences of Prop 47 are that now shoplifting is effectively legal. And by the way, shoplifting, people have the wrong idea about what shoplifting is. So shoplifting is an industry. If you're a drug addict in San Francisco and you're living on the streets, you need to raise about probably 50 bucks, maybe 70 bucks a day to support your habit.

You've got to get that money from somewhere. The place you're going to get it is from petty crimes. There are layers of this industry. There are fences who operate in San Francisco who put out text messages to all the boosters who are drug addicts, the shoplifters, and they tell them what they're in the market for. They're like, I'm in the market for cough medicine and laundry detergent and frozen steaks.

They put out a text message on Instagram or Snapchat. People get it. And then they go and they boost those specific products. They usually go in with sort of a laundry list in mind, I mean a shopping list in mind, and they don't steal everything, they steal about what they need for their next fix, so they, you know, or for the day's fix,

so they'll steal maybe 60 bucks of merchandise, and they sell them to the fence. The fence then sells it usually to a higher level fence, and to a higher level fence above that, and at the top level, there are these wholesale fences that have, they're running this multi-million dollar industry. They sell the electronics to China and to Vietnam. The luxury products go to Russia. And, but most of it, the lion's share goes to retailers on amazon.com and on facebook marketplace um you know the the the the sort

of off-label little stores on amazon have a whole bunch of stuff insanely cheap that's stolen merchandise and so there's this it's a it's a big industry the prop 47 has just enabled that entire organized retail theft threat theft industry to thrive prop 47 47 also has legalized possession of what was sold as a small amount of drugs. But the cap on how much drugs you can carry is enough to be a full-time dealer. So essentially, there's no point in prosecuting drug dealers anymore because it's just a misdemeanor. So it makes no impact. It also brings no particular glory to a cop to just bust. I mean, the cops are after some level of sort of professional merit. And if you bust a big, if you do a big felony bust, that's a big deal. Misdemeanor doesn't matter. So what's happened is all these cities in California have just shut

down their narcotics units. In Richmond, California, which is a very violent, famously high crime city that just has no narcotics unit anymore. San Francisco, I think, has a handful of narcotics officers. So basically, drug dealing, and I'm not just talking about low-level drug dealing. I mean, pretty high-volume drug dealing has been effectively legalized in California. So we have these new types of drugs like fentanyl and this very high-potency THC, which causes psychotic breaks. I know because I've interviewed Ben Cort a while back about that. We have this bizarre, what do you call it, the retail theft industry that's developed. Drug dealing is legal, basically. What else? Well, in Oakland, there's a whole lot more.

Oakland's a different sort of beast than San Francisco. San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed organized drug dealing and then the organized retail theft industry, which is driven by the by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-based cartel, excuse me, cartel-supplied drug dealers. Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic, more entrepreneurial, if you will. I think it's mostly just kind of self-organized crews of thieves who just drive around doing crimes. Bipping, which is car break-ins, armed carjackings, home invasions.

And in Oakland, so first of all, we've got this district attorney, Pamela Price, who is like sort of the second coming of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. So she doesn't believe in essentially in prosecuting criminals. She does everything she can to reduce the sentence as low as possible. She doesn't do any sentencing enhancements as a matter of policy or rather for the deputy DAs to do sentencing enhancements as a matter of policy, or rather for the deputy DAs to do sentencing enhancements, you have to get the express approval of your superiors all the way up to Pamela Price, which means they almost never do it. And she doesn't prosecute juveniles as adults, even if they're committing heinous crimes like murder. And so the DA is part of the problem. And then the other part of the problem is the Oakland Police Force is so understaffed

that they literally just can't respond to 911 calls. I was on a, just getting your 911 call picked up, I called 911 about a week ago and it took five minutes for anybody to even pick up. I think the average is like 54 seconds, which is the second worst in the state because the dispatchers are understaffed. But then once you get your call through, the police force is something like 200 officers.

Well, depending on what you think the metric should be, they are up to 500 officers understaffed. And so they just can't get around to responding to any of these calls. You basically have to be in the process of getting murdered to be able to get the cops to respond to a call. And the criminals know this, of course. So like home invasions, sorry, you're not going to get a call from the cops. I mean, they might show up five days later and take a report. The police is incapable of responding to crimes

and the DA is unwilling to prosecute the crimes, which means it's just a free-for-all. Basically, if this is left unchecked, you're talking like full-on anarchy, basically. I mean, there are scenes in Oakland that look like anarchy already. You know, there's pirates in Oakland now on the marina. There's like, on the estuary,

there's people who now make a living going and raiding the boats on the marina. There's train robberies, not just in Oakland, but across the country, actually. But that's a thing that's back, you know, robbing trains for whatever freight they're carrying. But, you know, in broad daylight on Piedmont Avenue, which is in a nice part of town, a nice commercial corridor, it's constantly people are seeing car burglaries in broad daylight with like the same car just walks down. Bipping is the term again for car burglaries, just bipping, you know, five cars in a row, taking their time, like really casually just get out, smash, take the property,

pull up the next one, smash, take the property, pull up the next one, one after the other, after the other in broad daylight. People just film it. You know, there's people standing on the sidewalk filming it. There's armed robberies of people in broad daylight in Rockridge, which is a really nice part of town. There's been, you know, violent robberies. There's a woman who was knocked over and dragged by her hair across the street at like 3 o'clock in the afternoon with tons of people standing around. So it does actually, in some instances, it's not everywhere. It's not all the time. Well, it is everywhere, actually.

It is everywhere, but it's not all the time. But there are moments where it does start to look like there is just simply no law and order in Oakland, and you're just on your own. And a lot of people are getting guns. A lot of people, like now, since people do feel like they're on their own, own people are getting armed and i think this problem is going to get much worse at this rate because now you're going to have people committing crimes and getting shot for it and now you're going to have the oakland police department is going to have homicides on their hands as a consequence of this because people just aren't going to take this anymore there's already been gunfights in downtown oakland

in the in the middle of the day um in response to burglaries. So it's gotten pretty crazy. So in other words, these are gunfights that are not gang-related, but this is someone trying to protect their property, for example. Yes, there was a gunfight, I think, probably about five months ago in downtown Oakland in the middle of the afternoon, and it was exactly that case. Somebody saw their car being burglarized, and so they started shooting, and the guys started shooting back. There's been other gunfights where like one crew is robbing a

cannabis dispensary. There was a big gunfight where I'm not clear on if it was another crew of thieves that were fighting with them or if it was like the owners of the dispensary, but there's been a number of gunfights. There's also rolling gun battles on the freeways. So there's a famous case of this kid named Jasper Wu, two-year-old infant in his car seat in the back of his dad's car driving down the 880 freeway at like 6 in the afternoon, I think. Maybe it was even earlier. It was broad daylight. Rolling gun battle between two rival gangs. Kid gets shot in the head while sitting in his car seat. And I looked at this and this has happened like once a year in the Bay Area. Generally a

child getting killed in the crossfire of a rolling gun battle on a freeway in the middle of the day. That's insanity. It sounds like in San Francisco, you're saying there is some sort of political will to list some kind of change, maybe not across the whole spectrum of issues that you're describing, but some. And then there's even injunctions that prevent that. Right. I mean, how much of this is by design? You mean like a controlled demolition kind of thing? Yes, let's say.

I think that a lot of elected officials in the Bay Area are captive to, some of them are captive to really crazy ideologies. Others are simply captive to organized activist bases, and they are not responsive to regular people. To the extent that it's by design, there's certainly, you know, this sounds like a cliche to say, but it's just true. George Soros has been behind all these progressive DAs and the Drug Policy Alliance, which pushes a lot of these crazy policies,

these crazy harm reduction policies. So there has been definitely an organized push towards all this like radical decriminalization of everything. But I think that it's definitely isn't in the interests of elected officials to have this kind of mayhem in the streets because the day of reckoning is afoot for those folks, right? Like there's a certain point where even in far left, the far left Bay area, voters start to push back. It happened in San Francisco with the recall of Chesa Boudin and the recall

of three school board members before him. And the election of Brooke Jenkins, his successor, who's a much more traditional DA and the ouster of a couple of supervisors. And I believe it's happening in the East Bay now with a recall effort for Pamela Price, the DA here. So politically, it doesn't pay off for any elected officials to be pushing this stuff.

I think it's haplessness. I think it's cowardice. And I think it's intoxication to really crazy ideologies. You mentioned something, the politicians being captured by activist interests. In San Francisco, with the homelessness problem, there's a very sort of thick layer of homeless services organizations and homeless advocacy groups, which get city

contracts. And it's like a billion dollar industry. I've referred to it as sort of neoliberalism in disguise, because in the United States, we'd like to subcontract our government services. Even in California, we do this. But we subcontract it out to nonprofits. So it's not considered the same as subcontracting it out to a private corporation. I don't see much of a difference. These nonprofit organizations have the same interests as a corporation does. They're not seeking profit, but they do have responsibilities to meet their payroll, to pay rent. You know, they have all the mundane

needs of any organization with a professional staff. If you've worked for a nonprofit organization before, you know how much of the daily activity of the nonprofit, how much of that energy is consumed by the need to seek grants, seek government contracts to meet the next year's payroll. So these organizations have that same need and so there's a built-in interest not to fix the problem. I don't think that these people wake up in the morning and say how can we keep homelessness going, how do we keep this racket going. I don't think it's that crass, I don't think it's that crude. I think that these people really do think that what they're doing is making a difference.

But I think it's really easy if you're employed by an organization whose bottom line interests align with keeping the problem going. It's very easy to then adhere to an ideology, a political ideology, which justifies all of those decisions, which encourages all those decisions. So for example, an ideology that says it's wrong to arrest drug dealers and we shouldn't coerce anybody into care. And if you want to use drugs, that's your right. It's just a lifestyle choice. All of these things, it's like, well, there's a happy convenience that it keeps street addiction going and therefore keeps this industry thriving. And the more this industry thrives, the more government contracts it gets, not only do they have a sort of bottom line interest in it, but the more money they get, the more political capital they have, the more lobbying power they have to be able to get favored elected officials elected and to exert influence over those elected officials.

So that's what I mean about a lot of these politicians have become responsive to this activist lobby. It's really no different from politicians who are bought off by corporate interests in Congress. It's just a different organized special interest that has found a way to control these elected officials. A common theme that has come out from doing 900-odd American Thought Leaders interviews is there's a huge problem that emerges when people creating policy are insulated from the effects, for having to face the effects of that policy. Of course, politicians generally have to face the effects, at least after a while. But this is something a bit different. It's almost like the ineffectual nature of the policy

is actually kind of a benefit. Yeah, absolutely. Which I hadn't thought about. Yeah. I mean, it's a market, right? It's like, you know, the cynical way of describing a lot of these homeless services organizations that they're farming street addicts. I once wrote a piece that kind of compared it and this sounds this might sound deeply cynical. And if this is offensive to people of a religious persuasion, this is not my intent. But if you're a religion, if you're a church, you need to have a flock, right? You've got pastors and their job is pastoral care. They go out and they care for the sick and hapless masses.

I think that a lot of these activists, the ones who work for these organizations and do direct service to homeless people are comparable to that pastor doing sort of pastoral care. They are selfless in that regard, but they're also self-interested in that regard. They are altruists

because they're helping people in need, but they also need the person who they're helping. It's not just because it's their job. It's not that cheap and crass. It's more about their identity, the meaning that they derive in life This is their vocation. This is how they define themselves. I am somebody who goes onto the streets and tends to these sick needy Matt people

Without those people they are also nothing It's not just about the money or the the paying the bills and meeting the budgets of these nonprofit organizations It's also deeper and more spiritual than that the money or the paying the bills and meeting the budgets of these nonprofit organizations, it's also deeper and more spiritual than that. It's become the sort of the life's meaning and self-affirmation for a whole kind of tier, whole sort of personality type. This is sort of an inversion of, you know, like when I think of, you know, altruism, you know, you want to genuinely help somebody. This is sort of this false altruism you're talking about where you're actually helping yourself. It's sort of like Munchausen syndrome by proxy, right? You keep the person sick in order to continue to regard yourself as their savior and to get that attention and that kind of narcissistic supply.

So yeah, I think it's it's deeply selfish Honestly, I think that the people who call me people like me and people who agree with me You know call us names and who think that we're the ones who are being selfish because we just don't want to see poor people That's a common accusation. You just don't want to see that blight. First of all, nobody wants to see that blight Nobody wants to see somebody defecating on the street in front of a preschool Nobody wants to see that and one shouldn't be ashamed to admit that nor those activists don't want to see somebody defecating on the street in front of a preschool. Nobody wants to see that and one shouldn't be ashamed to admit that. Those activists don't want to see that. They just won't admit it. But the other thing is those who are calling for somewhat strict measures like mandatory

treatment want to clean up the problem in the city, but they also want to save the lives of these people on the streets. It is not an act of compassion to advocate for policies whose foreseeable consequence is people dying on the street. It's like we've relegated ourselves in some significant portion instead of, let's call it altruism in this example, right? A kind of performative altruism. As long as we look like we're doing something for the good of people, irrespective of whether it really is, that's enough. I've seen that replicated in many, many areas.

It's a very weird and disturbing trend. Part of it is living, maybe to some extent, in a virtual world much more. You can lose track of that connection with reality. I was talking with Seneca Scott about this, right? Why is there this disconnect with the working class? Why does there seem to be a war on the working class almost right now? Well, I think because working class people have to face the consequences of their own actions regularly. And they don't, when they see a lot of this crazy policy, a lot

of this performative, let's call it altruism or something like that, they're annoyed and insulted and just think, look what these people are, crazy stuff these people are coming up. That's what we should all be thinking. Yeah. Right. A good example of that, which I imagine Seneca probably spoke to you about, is the Defund the Police movement, which we're in East Oakland right now. And here and to the east of here, the east of here is even more violent. But East Oakland is traditionally and famously a very high crime area. The council member for this district who ran for mayor ran on a platform of public safety and refunding the police. Actually, so did the current mayor, but that's because she made a complete about face.

She was one of the faces of the defund movement before she ran for mayor. The council person for the east of here, which is even more high crime, is also was opposed to cutting the Oakland police budget. The votes that were in favor of cutting the Oakland police budget all came from to the west of here, including the highest income and whitest neighborhoods. So the reality of crime is obviously much more immediate in East Oakland than it is in, for example, Rockridge and the Oakland Hills. And people understand that, you know, even I've interviewed violence interrupters and other folks who've told me that, like, you know, they were like, this one guy told me he was like, my neighbors, sure, they're kind of afraid of the cops, right?

If they see, I mean, the cops don't really do much policing around here, so I don't think anybody's that afraid of the police. That's another subject we can get into about the incentives for cops to even bother getting out of their car or ever interacting with civilians. It's just not there anymore. So I don't think people are getting hassled by the cops much at all anymore. But regardless, you know, I'm not going to pretend that if you're a black guy who lives in East Oakland, that you're not going to be somewhat anxious about a cop being around. So that anxiety is there, that sort of distrust is still there, but this guy was like, you know, his fear, if they're afraid of anything

pulling out of their driveways, it's like somebody who's gonna start something with them and get in a violent interaction, either just a straight-up criminal doing opportunistic crime or, you know, somebody who takes offense in some minor transgression and you get into sort of an honor culture battle, which results in violence and possibly a homicide. This is what people are afraid of living in these neighborhoods. So to your point, you know, it's like working class people have to deal with the real world as it is, and they're not calling for cutting the cops because that's insane.

And sort of more privileged people get these sort of morality points for subscribing to these crazy belief systems that have really deleterious effects in real life. Yeah, like luxury beliefs as they think Rob Henderson defined them. So you're painting a very dark picture here, Leighton. Where do you see this going right now? I mean, is there light somewhere coming from anywhere? I mean, the Bay Area is in a pretty bad state right now. Seneca's organization, Neighbors Together Oakland, is pushing back and they've been very effective with their pushback. There's also a recall effort against the DA, which has been very effective with their pushback. There's also a recall effort against the DA, which

has been very successful. They're still collecting signatures, so it's too early to say, but I think it's pretty clear that it's going to qualify and I expect that she will be recalled. Most people in their daily lives, they're not focused on politics, certainly not on local politics, until it starts actually affecting their lives. They call it when the people who want to be left alone get activated, that is supposed to be a tipping point. But is it? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it was in San Francisco. Again, the main thing standing in the way of San Francisco addressing its homelessness crisis is the judge's injunction. It's not the voters of San Francisco who have made it pretty clear in the last election

what the political will is among the electorate there. You know, the most liberal, San Francisco and Oakland being the most liberal cities in the country, arguably. In both of those cities, I think the pushback has been pretty fierce. And, you know, normal people in Oakland, people down the street from here, they're not like radical leftists, right? Even if they're straight Democratic voters, even if you ask them their policy preferences,

they would recite back to you some pretty liberal points of view on most of the sort of checkbox issues. They're not spending their day thinking about politics. They're spending their day thinking about, you know, their families, their jobs, and whatever their hobbies are. So they're normal people, and they have respond to normal things in a normal way, even in Oakland, right? Which is like, if you have a bunch of criminals running around, breaking into cars, robbing homes, you want more cops. It's not that complicated. So I think that there's a point where the activists start to become disempowered, where the activists' agenda starts to become politically risky, and start to become disempowered, where the activist's agenda starts to become politically risky and starts to become a political liability.

And I think we're rapidly reaching that point. So I have a lot of faith in just kind of normies. And I think that the more empowered normal people are, the better off our lives are. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit because whenever there's a good opportunity, I want to touch on free speech. And so there's the Westminster Declaration, which of course you and I have both signed. I want to talk about that because you were kind of in the room when some of this was being developed. Yeah. At the publication that I co-founded, Public, we've done a lot of coverage of what we call the censorship industrial complex, which is a sort of constellation of organizations, think tanks,

nonprofits, a lot of sort of departments on university campuses that have coalesced and that collaborate with government agencies to request or pressure, or some might argue coerce, tech companies, which have responded with varying degrees of willingness to go along with this. In some cases, they've been very happy to. In other cases, they've been more or less coerced into, censoring speech online. And this is a sort of industry that has, I think, grown, that has come into fruition since, I'd say, the election of Donald Trump is really kind of when it started. You could go back much further than that.

You could go back to the Patriot Act. But it's come into its own in the last few years, very much since the election of Donald Trump, and then accelerated during COVID. So there's sort of this panic around election disinformation and then around COVID information and misinformation, quote unquote, very much fueled the power of this complex. And so that's something that we've reported on quite a bit. We were part of reporting on the Twitter files, and it was what inspired the Westminster Declaration. What is the right level of speech? Because free speech, even under the First Amendment, isn't all protected. Right.

Right. I think the courts have been very clear about the limits of the First Amendment. And it's very, very expansive. It doesn't violate the Constitution. It's legally protected to say these things. It's legally protected, you know, famously for the neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors, ACLU siding with the neo-Nazis' right to free speech.

But this stuff is constitutionally protected. I don't have a problem with a private platform enforcing its own speech codes. The problem I have is when government agencies come in and start communicating with those platforms with a veiled threat behind them. When the FBI comes and has a meeting with you and says, we want you to do this, this, and the other thing, they can argue that that's purely voluntary. But anybody being visited by the FBI,

including a major corporation, doesn't receive the message quite that way. But then also when you have an administration which is threatening legal protections, Section 230 protections against these platforms, then there's a real threat standing behind the government's requests. So that is a backdoor around the First Amendment to where this censorship is coming from these government agencies, not just these private platforms. Well, it's really an outsourcing of the censorship that you're not allowed to do. And they've admitted as much.

The Stanford Internet Observatory has described its purpose as filling a gap, a legal gap that the government cannot fill. The government can't do this stuff. So they step into the breach to be able to do this for the government. That is unconstitutional. And I think it's going to be struck down by the Supreme Court in the Missouri v. Biden case. Why do you think the Supreme Court in the meantime, while it's looking at all this, has allowed for the censorship to continue or these actions that may constitute censorship to continue?

Well, so far, the courts have sided very much with my point of view. In Missouri v. Biden, this court case came down at the district court level, which was just withering, and referred to it as one of the... Orwellian. Yeah, Orwellian, and one of the most important First Amendment cases, I think maybe is the most important First Amendment case in American history. The appellate court largely sided, it was a mixed case, but largely sided with that point of view, although it made this exemption for Assisa, which was a mistake. And I think that'll probably be undone at the Supreme Court level. Whatever you may say about the Supreme Court, they are very pro-free speech, and I think that they will rule as such. Why is this Westminster declaration important in your mind? Why now? What is its purpose, really?

Well, the United States has a First Amendment, but other countries don't have that. In Europe, for example, with their Digital Services Act, we're seeing some pretty scary clampdowns on digital free speech. So we have a shield that other countries don't have. Now whether that shield will be enough, I hope it will. As I said, I think the Supreme Court will probably side with the First Amendment in this case. And so we wanted to bring together folks from all over the world who are facing these kinds

of attacks against their speech rights to draft a statement in opposition to it and to sign a statement in opposition to it. So that was kind of the animating spirit behind it was that everybody in the world should have free speech. In Canada, there's a lot of questions coming actually from a lot of angles right now. Many people aren't even fully aware of it. And this is the thing that I find so disturbing about, I use this term often, so my viewers will be familiar with it, but there's a manufacturing of perceived consensus happening through these systems.

And we're very susceptible to that as human beings, when we think everybody around us kind of believes something to be true or takes a certain moral position. I've noticed that I'm susceptible to it when I think that. That is the case, even though I might resist it, but I'm still being drawn that way. So it's something beyond censorship that we're talking about in this new age of social media and internet technology. There's a more organic element to it, which is troubling. A lot of the debate behind quote-unquote cancel culture was about this. It's a much more complicated debate than other arguments around free speech. Because,

you know, as I said before, if somebody says something abominable, I'm okay with certain measures that are outside of the government to silence people's speech, such as counter speech, but in some cases, such as not employing somebody, which in which, you know, one person's valid response to abominable speech is another person's cancel culture. And this stuff gets kind of, we're never going to agree on where the where to draw the line. But I think the troubling thing about so called cancel culture, sort of writ large, is that there does seem to be a will, sort of an appetite for making it very uncomfortable for people to express particular political views. And those political views can switch. Like, you know, it's been sort of a, traditionally, or for the last few years, it's been conservative speech that's been sort of

silenced by the left-wing masses. There have been, you know, cases of the government censoring the speech of far-left groups recently. But that sort of organic appetite that's coming up from the population is kind of a cultural switch, which I find very disturbing, because I'm afraid that folks who are young now, and there's been polls that have shown much less support for free speech among young people than older people. And I don't know if they're going to grow up and become adults and start to change their views or if they'll carry this with them. And if they do, we have a real problem on our hands. Well, and not only that, but also on like incredible invasions of privacy. I remember seeing a poll.

I can't remember the details now, but some astonishing number of young people would accept a camera in their home. Really, you would do that because you have that much trust. Yeah, the whole obsession with being safe and having safe spaces, and I don't want to sound like a culture warrior, but the entitlement to being safe and comfortable has always been, in varying contexts,

a condition that is conducive to authoritarianism. Every authoritarian government justifies know, justifies. That's the reason. Yeah, national security, keeping people, you know, some invisible enemy within the population that you need to empower these dictators to protect you from. So I do see sort of that in that vulnerable narcissism I've heard referred to as before in that sort of personality trait, which is I think being encouraged and which is becoming

endemic within our institutions. There is sort of that soft conditioning for the rise of an authoritarian regime. I don't think that it's around the corner. It may be fairly far off, but it's kind of looming in a way that I find very alarming. So Leighton, as we finish up, I think back through what we just talked about, it's pretty grim. How do you keep yourself going in this climate? And where do you find your inspiration? I mean, it might sound cliche to say this, but I have a three-year-old son and another one on the way. And I think that having a family grounds you. In one sense, it makes you worry more for the future for obvious reasons. In another sense, it kind of

orders your priorities, where you're like, I don't have to look out for the whole world. I don't have to even think about the whole world. I just need to think about this, this dude and how to take care of him, how to make him happy day to day. So I think that that helps a lot. And then drinking, i'm just kidding um but uh but and i think also just um i i find a lot of you know as i've said before i find a lot of reasons for optimism like this ideology and this kind of mode of governance is held together by you know bubble gum and duct tape like it's it's um it's imposed by a small faction of highly over-ated, in some cases, in many cases, activist types with some pretty out there ideologies who have an outsized influence on our politics.

That's a precarious position for the elite to be in. But also backed by pretty heavy dollars. Backed by pretty heavy dollars. But I also think that we thought that when Citizens United happened, the idea, you know, we were going to lose our democracy. I don't see that big of a change. I haven't tracked it too closely, but like the sky didn't fall. You know, in a lot of these cases where corporate money is supposed to

transform the landscape of our politics, it just hasn't happened. And it's because money isn't everything. You know, George Soros has been trying to push through his drug policies for decades, and now it's working, but it's taken decades for it to happen. So I don't think that money is everything. Thankfully, we still have a functioning democracy for now. And functioning democracies have to be responsive to just ordinary people. And I think ordinary people tune in when things get to a point where these political issues are no longer abstract and they're actually affecting their day-to-day lives. And I can say locally in terms of crime, that is how everybody feels now. And so it's time for

change and that change is afoot. Well, Leighton Woodhouse, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for joining Leighton Woodhouse and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.