Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 509 | How a Former Soros Activist Is Taking On Toxic Progressivism | Guest: Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Today we're talking to author and journalist Michael Shellenberger, who has been drawing attention to the disaster zone that is San Francisco. Shellenberger wrote a book on the subject, "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," and explains how he was originally pushing for progressive policies until he saw their real-world effects. We discuss several problems plaguing the city, from homelessness to drugs to homicide. Shellenberger also details the history and destructive philosophy that led San Francisco to its current state. --- Timecodes: (0:00) Intro (9:08) Interview with Michael Shellenberger (57:03) Outro --- Today's Sponsors: Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider — they share your values & support organizations fighting for religious freedom, constitutional rights, sanctity of life, & our Veteran & First Responder heroes. Go to PatriotMobile.com/ALLIE or call 972-PATRIOT to get free activation with the offer code 'ALLIE'! Bambee changes HR from your biggest liability to your biggest strength - your dedicated HR manager is available by phone, email, or real-time chat! From onboarding to terminations, they customize your policies to fit your business. Go to Bambee.com/ALLIE & schedule your free HR audit today. Good Ranchers producer is 100% American — when you buy your steak & chicken from Good Ranchers, you're getting ethically-raised, sustainably-sourced meat - & you're also supporting American farms! Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & save 20% off each box of mouth-watering meats when you subscribe, plus save an additional $20 off & get free express shipping by using 'ALLIE' at checkout for one-time purchases. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in, conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. Hope everyone has had a wonderful week so far. Today we are talking to Michael Schellenberger.

He is the author of a new book San Francisco, where he is analyzing all of the big political problems that are happening in San Francisco right now that are causing a very beautiful. beautiful, once wonderful city to deteriorate. And we're going to look at the homelessness crisis in San Francisco, the public drug use and public defecation crisis that's happening there. Why progressive policies are actually enabling and exacerbating these issues rather than doing what they say that they intend to do, which is fix them. Michael Schellenberger is not just an author. He has been in progressive politics. He was a progressive activist for a very long. time. So he comes with a very unique perspective. And just to set us up, I want to talk about some of the

things that are going on in San Francisco. I mentioned public homelessness, which has increased. And it's not just homelessness. It's these homeless encampments that have spread throughout parts of San Francisco. We've always had homelessness. We've always had poverty. We've always had drug addiction and mental illness. But now all of these things have increased and they have converged into a really toxic environment and not just for people who are suffering from these things themselves, but also people who are being affected by these encampments in their neighborhoods. Unfortunately, as with every social justice policy, the people who are most affected are always going to be the most vulnerable. The Thomas Soul quote, two Thomas Soul quotes that are coming to

mind as we're talking about this subject. One is whenever you are presented with a progressive policy or progressive idea, for example, that we don't need to criminalize public defecation because somehow that is harming homeless people or we don't need to have any consequences for public drug use. This is in the name of equity. It's in the name of compassion. It's in the name of social justice. You always have to ask two questions about policies like that or any social justice progressive policy. The first question is at what cost? The second question is what hard data do you have? What hard data do you have that this is going to make life better?

What's the goal of this? Is this going to make life better for one or two people at the expense of everyone else? Well, that's not a very good tradeoff. And when you are a policymaker, then you have to think about those tradeoffs. Unfortunately, we've seen over the past year and a half with COVID policy that our politicians are not very good at making those tradeoffs. They make policies that have the intention of benefiting a small number of people at the expense of everyone else, always disproportionately the most vulnerable that comes with things like defunding the police as well. So we're going to talk about all of that today.

We're going to focus specifically on San Francisco, even though this is happening in every city that's run by progressive politicians in the country. That's why whenever there are people who say, oh, well, I'm a moderate. or, well, I'm, you know, I'm still a Democrat. I think democratic policies are going to do well. I'm a progressive. I think that implementing all of these progressive policies will finally make America more tolerant and more compassionate and we'll just be able to push for a better tomorrow. Well, the better tomorrow has arrived.

It's arrived in Houston, in Austin, in Denver, in D.C., in New York City, in Seattle, in Portland, in San Francisco, in L.A. It's arrived. And what does it look like? It looks like a demolished quality of life. It looks like a place where people don't want to live anymore unless you've got millions to millions of dollars to insulate you from the realities of the consequences, the terrible consequences of progressive policy.

So there are a couple of news stories that are coming out of San Francisco today. And one of them, of course, is just the constant reporting, surprisingly, in some ways, of course, with some of a liberal bent a little bit with the rise in homelessness in crime. But there's also this headline that I thought it was pertinent to my audience. And that is San Francisco temporarily closes in and out burger due to vaccine defiance. So in and out said that they refused to become the vaccination police for any government. In and out legal and business officer Arnie Winfinger said we fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business.

You know what's funny about this is that leftists were calling Ron DeSantis an authoritarian and Greg Abbott an authoritarian who said that no entity can force people to show proof of vaccination. And they were calling them authoritarians for saying the school districts can't force kids to wear masks. But they're okay with this form of authoritarianism, which is. is they are inflicting their views about masks and vaccinations on private business. Leftists are fine with that.

They're fine with that. And that's what I've realized about leftists is that when they say authoritarianism, really what they're talking about is policies that they don't like. They're totally fine with authoritarianism as long as it accomplishes what they view as progressive policies. And so go in and out. Good for in and out. We should be supporting in and out. I might support in and out on my way home.

I don't need in and out, but I want in and out. And now I can kind of feel good about it. I can feel like I'm giving back just by eating hamburger and fries. And this actually does go with the things that we're talking about today because San Francisco, the state of California in general, but specifically San Francisco has been very strict about COVID rules, not just for private businesses, but just for private citizens with their mask mandates, with their vaccine passports. And of course, as we'll talk about with Michael, the mayor London breed, she was seen dancing in a club without her mask on, even though there's a mask mandate, even for vaccinated people. And her excuse was really incredible.

You know, she was asked by a reporter how she got away with this or why she feels good about breaking her own rules. And she said, you know, I don't know if you've ever been to the kind of concert that I was at, but I was feeling it. I was feeling it. And I was feeling the groove. And I'm not, you know, I'm just not going to wear a mask. Rules for thee and not for me. How people haven't realized over the past year and a half that the COVID restrictions that are being put in place and that are not followed by the people who are putting them in place

is not for public health. It's just beyond me. And then how you could look at the things we're going to talk about today, which is a public health crisis. The homelessness crisis is a public health crisis being exacerbated by the same people who are making your two-year-old wear a mask of daycare. Like, how do you see this is not about public health? How do you see that?

Maybe this episode will be a red pill for you. some people. I certainly hope so. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Michael Schellenberger. I'm the author of two books, one that just came out, San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruined Cities, and a book that came out last year called Apocalypse Never. why environmental alarmism hurts us all.

You are not some right winger that is trying to criticize progressivism in general. You come from a progressive background, correct? Yeah, I moved to San Francisco in 1993 to work on radical left causes, progressive causes. I've worked for charities that have been supported by George Soros. I've advocated for decriminalization of, of drugs, of alternative sentencing, focus more on rehabilitation rather than on punishment, and have been focused on environmental issues for the last 20 years. But when I stopped working on drug issues and criminal justice issues in the late 90s, my understanding was that we were trying

to move people into drug treatment, drug rehabilitation, and that's not what we ended up doing. We ended up basically just stopped, we just stopped enforcing a lot of laws. And that's why we ended up with so much chaos in California. And would you say that the problems that we're seeing today, the rising crime, the homeless encampments, you're saying that that kind of started way back in the late 90s? Yeah, I mean, basically over the last 20, 25 years, we have in California in general, but also in San Francisco in particular,

it's just stopped enforcing a lot of laws against people who we've categorized as victims. And that includes the untreated mentally ill, people suffering from severe drug addiction. And so what's led to what we call homelessness, which is really a propaganda word designed to confuse you about what's really going on, that's what's resulted in the chaos or what academics call the open drug scenes, the open drug markets, which are causing so much of the crime and homelessness. So let's talk about that, which you just mentioned, a little bit more, homelessness being kind of a euphemism for propaganda. I've never heard that before. Can you explain what you mean?

Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, the word homeless has been around for a long time, but it's really a misleading word. It was deliberately chosen by progressives in the 1980s to mislead people about what was going on. I mean, we were dealing with basically, you know, decades of untreated mental illness. After we shut down most of our psychiatric hospitals, many of the people were put on the street where they became homeless, addicted to hard drugs. We also suffered a crack epidemic in the 1980s. And we really did a misservice to people that were sick, that were mentally ill by referring to them as homeless because it suggested that the main problem was lack of housing when really it's a medical problem. So we're just dealing with people that need to be either in rehab or in psychiatric hospitals or giving some kind of psychiatric care. And the word homeless was really it used to basically, you know, justify heavy government subsidies for public housing, for subsidized housing. It was always part of a kind of socialist agenda to expand public housing, which in some cases, you know, may be appropriate. Like there may be a role for some of that. But what ended up happening is that we removed basically any requirements that people achieve absence or sobriety. in return for, you know, public services, public benefits, including housing.

When conservatives talk about this, I'm a conservative, we get accused of, I don't even think actually homeless is the turn that I hear. I think it's like houseless or there are even more politically correct terms that I hear now by progressives. I'm not even sure. I can't keep up with all of that. But they claim that we are shaming the homeless community. that we're victim blaming or that we're cruel because we say, you know,

these homeless encampments don't seem to be good for communities. They don't seem to be good for children who have to walk to school. And actually, it seems to be disproportionately affecting people who are impoverished, who are kind of forced to live amongst these encampments, which cause public health problems, obviously safety problems. I am accused or we're accused of lacking compassion. Can you talk about, kind of. of the ideology. What is behind that kind of thinking when it comes to progressives? How are they

believing that by allowing these encampments and allowing unfettered homelessness, that they are actually the ones kind of, I don't know, legislating in an empathetic way? It's really hard for me to understand that. Yeah, well, it's a great question. And I wrote San Francisco in part to be a really complete explanation, both of what is going on with people that are living on the street, also what explains rising homicide rates. The book also deals with crime, not just drugs and homelessness. And I really trace it back to the 1960s. You won't be surprised after we passed the Civil Rights Act at a national level in 1964. There was a growing concern around the, you know, around father absence, around the breakdown of families, particularly African-American

families. And the response from the radical left from people was that that is blamed. There's a famous book in 1970 that was called Blaming the Victim that came up with this idea that any requirement of reciprocity or accountability or personal responsibility in exchange even for support from taxpayers was itself a kind of oppression, was itself a kind of victimization. So you really have to unpack a lot of it. The basic idea is that there are whole groups of people in society that can be categorized as victims, which I think is a really terrible toxic idea. It's a racist idea to call every African American a victim. It's insulting. It's false. Similarly, people that are mentally ill or suffering from drug addiction.

You know, traditionally, the way we think about victimization is that it's part of the road to heroism. Like, you don't become a hero without overcoming oppression and victimization. And so there has been a shift. It's been gradual to some extent. It's also, I think, accelerated. You know, when I was a young lefty in the 80s and 90s, our heroes were people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. It was a story of overcoming oppression, very similar to the story of Exodus or, you know,

the stories in the Bible. But now it becomes like, now we're kind of celebrating victim status. We're actually making victims sacred. And it's just to kind of rata, it's just as dumb as it sounds, Ali, honestly. I wish I could say that there was more philosophical sophistication to it, but it's pretty dumb at bottom. It's very childlike, the idea that people should be treated like victims or like children. And that's where it all comes from. And so if you say, yeah, we should enforce laws against sleeping in public, people will say, how dare you blame the victim. You know, I also documented many times,

people said this to be directly, but I saw it with other people, the radical left who really call themselves advocates for the homeless, but it's just a pose. It's kind of an identity that they put on to suggest that their concerns are fundamentally with the people on the street and not with some other ideology. They would often say things like, oh, those kinds of questions you're asking, the things that you're saying cause violence against people, which is a horrible thing to suggest. It's completely false, by the way. It's not true. But it's a way to shut down any conversation that might lead to actually helping people rather than letting them live in continued squalor and suffering. Yeah. The phrase that we hear from people like AOC, and I'm sure a lot of progressives in San Francisco,

is that if you do pass any laws that inhibit someone so-called right to sleep on the street or to shoot up on the street, that is criminalizing poverty? Is this really about criminalizing poverty? Is poverty what's driving all of this? Yeah, it's another manipulation of the language. They say things like criminalizing homelessness, criminalizing poverty. You know, when I've started to just point out that that's propaganda, you know, you have to interrupt because what those words do is they hijack your brain and they manipulate your emotions. So obviously, that's not what's going on to suggest that the parks should be free to use

by everybody, that it should be safe for a mother and her kids, a mother pushing a stroller to walk safely through a park, that she has a right to do that. That's not criminalizing poverty. That's protecting public spaces. You know, similarly, intervening in the lives of addicts when they're breaking the law is humane. That's standard treatment of addiction. We've known that for 100 years. We have a whole television show called intervention. You know, I like a lot of other people. I love freedom. You know, I live in California because I love the freedom of it. There's a libertarian culture. I don't know anybody, certainly not me, that is advocating that you go and like chase. down addicts who are using killing themselves with fentanyl or meth and the privacy of their own homes.

Fine. If you want to do that, I don't, that's terrible, but I don't think the police should make that a priority. But you are not allowed to shoot heroin in public in any developed societies, not in Amsterdam, not in Frankfurt or Zurich or Lisbon, the cities where that did occur and they shut it down. I mean, I'm here in Washington, D.C. right now, and I just went and got a coffee at Starbucks, and there's three big tents right outside of Starbucks. Obviously, these are addicts. living on the street or they have some untreated mental illness, that's not okay to block sidewalks like that. They need to be told that they need to go and stay in the shelter or they'll be arrested. Yeah.

It's just that simple. And yeah, I think conservatives have been more honest about it. But I think there's also a lot of people that might consider themselves liberals or left of center like myself who just think it's absurd. You know, there's even a difference, I think, between the way people in New York, the way liberals in New York and Boston view this issue as opposed to people in San Francisco. I've noticed that in Boston, there's now an open drug scene on Massachusetts and Cass. It's a mass and cast. It's an open drug scene. The Boston Globe refers to it as a drug problem, whereas in San Francisco and Los Angeles, we create euphemisms and call it a homeless encampment, which makes it sound like it's some sort of camp out or some sort of peaceful gathering. Women are raped in homeless

encampments. You know, people are taking advantage of. Drug dealers run them and they enforce the law with machetes. So this romantic projection onto open drug scenes, it's pretty despicable, honestly. And I think it comes from a really dark ideological place. Yeah. You mentioned that you've always liked living in California because you like freedom, which is not really something that you hear a lot of people say that you live in California because you love freedom. And I'm guessing what you mean by that is not necessarily freedom from big government policy, which I don't think has been experienced. by Californians in a while, but more of kind of like the libertinism of, you know, live and let live,

like, you know, chill, no judgment, that kind of thing. That's what I think of when I think of California. That is something that people who have lived in California really like, kind of have prided themselves on being open-minded. But that libertinism has really shifted. Like, I don't think that you could consider liberals libertarian there anymore. They're extremely tolerant of all kinds of immorality, the kinds of what you're talking about, open drug use and things like that. But they're very harsh when it comes to regulations, when it comes to other kinds of public health restrictions, like mask mandates, even if everyone is vaccinated having to show, you know, vaccine passports or whatever, I think in San Francisco, even as London breed is dancing

and feeling the music in her own, you know, nightclub and not wearing a mask. And so it's strange. Like, leftism is so strange to me. It's so strict when it comes to some things and so tolerant when it comes to other things, when really to me it should be the exact opposite. I don't know. I guess I've already asked you this, but I want to know even more. I guess I'm asking you to psychoanalyze the far left progressives like London Breed,

like the DA there. I think his name is, is it Chase? Is it Boudine? Chesa Boudine. and why for them, and I guess the people that vote for them, like this is not a problem. How did we get to the place of being so strict on things like mask mandates because of public health and not caring at all about a public health crisis that has to do with homelessness? I really have a hard time comprehending it.

It's such a great question. Yeah. I mean, when I say what I like about California, you know, I lived in Washington, D.C. for a year. and you know, you'd meet people and they kind of, there's a snobbery that I'm not crazy about where people would ask you like where you went to school. Right. You know, where'd you go to school? And they were always asking whether you went to a good school or not.

And I didn't like that. Whereas in the Bay Area, people want to, you traditionally would want to know, what are you doing? And there's a lot more respect for art for realism. But no, you're absolutely right. I mean, look, I think the big thing, and this is something that I've touched on both in Apocalypse and in San Francisco is that, you know, as people move away from traditional religions, whether Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism, they fill that spiritual void by creating new religions out of their politics. And so the new religion for the radical left has been

victim ideology or victimology. And it's just as dumb as it sounds. I mean, basically the idea is that there's some people that are victims, they're sacred to which everything should be given and nothing asked. So one question then is like, well, why is it that progressives care so much about African Americans killed by police, but they don't do much of anything. In fact, they defund the police, even though the police aren't necessarily to prevent 30 times more African Americans from being killed by civilians than by police, even more last year with the rising homicide rate. So why do progressives care about some victims and not others? And the short answer is that progressives care more or exclusively about victims of what they see as victims of the system.

So the police are viewed as part of the system. They're against the system. They think the system is bad. This comes from a very old romantic idea from Rousseau, which is that society corrupt individuals. Individuals are innocent. Conservatives have tended to have the opposite view, which is that society is needed to restrain bad instincts or bad behavior. And so it comes really out of a kind of extremism of that ideology. It's certainly, out something that most liberals do in their private life. They put stricter rules on their own kids, for example. They teach their kids not to be whiners or to have a positive mentality, although even that coddling culture has become worse and worse over the years. So yeah, I mean, there's a real authoritarianism that's been increasing on the left. And, you know, there's just not even an open discussion of these questions. Like I said, there's the, rather than discussing that these things progressives will just denounce the person as evil, and they'll suggest that even talking about it results in violence, even as they allow the violence of the open drug scenes to continue.

And it's just the difference between viewing the system as responsible for all bad things, whereas victims themselves, by definition, could not be victimizing other people. It's obviously wrong and dumb, but that is what's at bottom of it. It's just taken as a matter of faith. and it's enforced sort of socially and ideologically by ostracizing people who disagree. Yeah. Gosh, there's just so much. There's so much double think there. And you're talking about how if you say something about homelessness or policies that you want to put in place to change some of the things that are happening, you're accused of causing harm, of causing violence. At the same time,

we're told by the same ideologues that silence is violence. But if people say, well, here's actual violence happening in these homeless encampments, or here's actual. violence happening in some of the riots that we've seen over the past year and a half or here's actual violence happening by the activists, you know, who don't want a conservative's book to be sold in a bookstore in Portland or something like that. That's not violence. That is actually some kind of what they would probably refer to as repressive tolerance. That kind of action is actually necessary to create a more inclusive, intolerant society. And it is, it's very confusing.

I think some of it is supposed to be confusing. And do you think that's what that kind of mentality is truly what's motivating the mayor of San Francisco like London Breed or the prosecutor, Chase Boudin? Or do you think that there's, is there something else there? Like, why aren't they doing anything about the things that we're talking about? Why don't they care? Yeah, I mean, those are two different figures. I mean, the mayor of San Francisco had traditionally. been a moderate, you know, she would like to break up the open drug scenes. I'm pretty confident.

The district attorney, on the other hand, comes from the radical left. You know, his parents were famous terrorists. They actually killed, were involved in killing police officers and security guards in a robbery gone bad. Chase the Bodine's parents. Yeah, were a weather, part of the weather underground. Wow, I didn't know that. And he never renounced, he's never renounced either their ideology or their tactics. So those are two different people. But the mayor, has basically been, you know, cowed by the radical left. It's the same in most of these cities, Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, ostensibly moderate officials, but they were under severe pressure from the radical left. Look, we were in a

moral panic last year. After the George Floyd protests, the only way to describe that is as a moral panic, I was struck by how quickly the city councils in various cities felt the need to defund the police and not have any discussion about it, because the people that were advocating the defunding, we're saying that any discussion was immoral and suggested some, you know, lack of concern for the lives of African Americans. So I do think, yeah, we're in, you know, I think we're in a crisis period of the United States. There's a huge amount of chaos in the system. I think we're seeing this obviously accelerated by social media. I had an argument, sort of an argument, but really I do think a long-term trend towards really where wokeism or

victimology is an alternative religion. It's been fueled by social media, which ends up creating a lot of incentives for extremism. And then I also think that, you know, the United States is in a really bad way in many ways because we've really, our solidarity with each other has declined along with national identity. You know, we used to have a much stronger national identity when we were during the Cold War. I think that China is a totalitarian system. We should be deeply afraid of we should be competing with to spread, you know, really Western civilization and the values that we believe in and promote those with our allies abroad. Instead of we're letting China basically take over the world. So I think it's a very deeply scary time and we need to,

we've lost touch with the fact that we're, you know, we're all Americans and that we have a duty to help each other and support each other. There's a lot of people on the radical left, a lot of progressives that really just hate their fellow Americans. And it's really sad. I don't see any alternative to it beyond trying to find a new patriotism. What I would say to conservatives is that I think we need to, I think that we all need to rethink some of our prior assumptions. You know, one of the things I advocate in the book that I think is maybe the most liberal

thing is that you do need to have universal psychiatric care. And I found I did find some support for this idea on the center right. which is that, you know, people are suffering from addiction and mental illness. We can't have this thing where people don't have insurance. Like, they just need to get the care they need, particularly for people that are, I mean, they're out of the people that are literally out of their minds and psychotic states. So my hope is that with something like Cal Psych, which is basically a new way to centralize and make more efficient the provision of psychiatric and addiction care, that there would be

some common ground to bring us together around sort of a common vision. but it does need to be accompanied by enforcing the law and requiring some amount of personal responsibility. Well, there certainly seems to be a political realignment going on right now. There are in so many ways. We can cover all of the ways the left and the right, I think, have shifted over the past few years from the left and now loving the intelligence bureaucracy in this country to the right, really starting to champion some what I would call some populist ideas, even some center-left economic ideas. who really are kind of trying to stand up at this point for the working class. And part of it is talking about these issues, these homeless encampments, a lot of the progressive policies that intentionally are not disproportionately hurt pretty poor

working class Americans who just don't seem to have a whole lot of representation. As you're talking about these policies, I'm thinking about a million Thomas Soul quotes that I know. one of them when he talks about how progressive policies are always measured by their intentions and never by their results. And so we hear something like decriminalize poverty or allow homeless people to live in dignity or all of the different, you know, propagandizing euphemisms that we hear about this kind of thing or not wanting to criminalize, you know, addiction or something, which is certainly not something that you're calling for, criminalizing addiction. But we hear all of these things. And I think,

people just not along. No one wants to be called a bigot. No one certainly wants to be called some, you know, privileged, white, rich person who doesn't care about the poor. And that's basically what those dogmas are doing. That's what those maxims are doing. They're silencing people preemptively. They don't want to hear your arguments because the intention sounds good. And if you go against the intention of trying to help homeless people by allowing these encampments, then you're just seen as a bad person. Most people just they don't want. They don't want to pay the price of being called the bigot, especially somewhere like San Francisco, I imagine, where certainly you don't want to be seen as a conservative probably. You don't want to be seen as right wing.

You don't want to be seen as anti-empathy and compassion. But would you say there are Democrats in San Francisco and elsewhere who are starting to wake up and speak out about this kind of thing to say, okay, this is not a left or right issue. These progressive policies are not working. Yeah, I think so for sure. I mean, there's no, I mean, there's no doubt about it. I mean, it's definitely, you know, among Democrats and liberals on the East Coast, it's an easier sell for sure than in San Francisco, for example. But certainly in California, absolutely. I think you're already starting to see it. I mean, we just saw the mayor of San Francisco announced a crackdown on crime, even though there had been claims that crime had not been increasing. We just had Walgreens just announced it was closing. And there are a dozen stores because of the shoplifting and adversely chronicled our local newspaper and various Twitter. So on the shoplifting, just to just to pause right there for a second, on the shoplifting, is it true that basically shoplifting under a certain amount of money is not enough to get arrested? Is that the case in San Francisco right now? Yeah, that's right.

We passed a statewide ballot initiative in 2014 called Prop 47, which decriminalized. theft, including shoplifting of items below the $950. 62% of the public voted for it. They tried to do that in Dallas, Texas, too, actually. I'm sure, yeah. It's been part of the agenda. I mean, I mentioned, I may have mentioned that I, you know, worked for George Soros-funded think tanks in the late 90s.

This has been part of the progressive agenda. You know, again, I thought that the idea was that, you know, you arrest somebody trying to shoplift to, feed their addiction and you say that you give them the choice, the judge gives them a choice. You go, you can go to prison or you can go to rehab. That was my understanding of where we left it. But we just went in this really radical direction of just not making people even do the rehab. So, but we are seeing a response already from political officials. We are seeing the mayor now making stronger pronouncements. I think the other thing is just that people are grossly ignorant.

They've been misinformed. I mean, the voters have been victim. of propaganda really for 30 years, including around the manipulation of their feelings, of their empathy around homelessness. I mean, honestly, it was a bit of a fluke that I just happened to be in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, which is a very liberal country. I mean, you may know that marijuana is decriminalized, prostitution is decriminalized. Nobody would accuse Amsterdam of being a right-wing town. And yet there were no homeless people on the street. You could walk safely back to your hotel from the bar at 2 a.m. I was with my young female colleagues and they, the next morning, they were like angry that they couldn't have the same nice things that they

could have in San Francisco that they have in Amsterdam. And the Dutch are really humanistic about it. They do a really good job treating people with mental illness and drug addiction. So I just think there's some, to some extent, I have some faith that while there is a hardcore, let's say 20 to 30 percent of the population that is pretty radical, particularly in San Francisco, there is still a majority, 60, 70, 80 percent that want to see the open drug scenes shut down and want to see people that are mentally ill and addicted to hard drugs get the treatment that they need so that they stop being so destructive of themselves and of others. You know, you mentioned George Soros and working for some Soros-funded think tanks,

and he has been credited both by the New York Times and then, you know, conservative organizations, like the Heritage Foundation of really funding an overhaul of prosecutors or of, you know, local prosecutors. And so Chesa Boudin is one of those people that was funded. His campaign was funded by George Soros. And so I can't credit him with all of the disasters and the chaos that's going on right now, certainly. But his money is behind a lot of these changes.

that are leading to a lack of prosecution, an enabling of lawlessness, of homelessness, public drug use, and all of that. Do you ever look back at your time spent in those think tanks and think, did I kind of help create some of the problems that we're seeing right now? Yeah, I mean, one of my motivations for writing San Francisco was to figure out what, if anything, I got wrong and how so. and what I believe now. I mean, I advocated for the decriminalization of drugs.

I advocated for the distribution of clean needles. You know, where I came out on it was that, you know, I don't think, I think it should be against the law to use drugs publicly. It should be against the law. I should continue to be against the law of camp publicly, defecate publicly. You should be arrested for those crimes as you are in European cities. And then when you're brought before the judge, I think the judge should have the ability to offer an alternative sentence, but it's an alternative sentence. It's not no sentence. And that was how I

understood it in the late 90s is that if you were arrested for those crimes and brought before a judge and you clearly were suffering from drug addiction or untreated mental illness or both, you would be getting this alternative sentencing, and that is not what happened. Similarly, with needle exchange, if you're getting clean needles, you should be offered drug treatment and rehab. That's not happening. If you're given you know, we should be requiring shelter. In other words, you have to sleep in a shelter. You can't sleep on the street or you get arrested, but those are your choices. Shelter should be universal. We should have shelter for anybody that needs it. It should be basic. It should not be luxurious, but it should be safe and clean. But then housing, meaning, you know, the thing that a lot of people want is they want their own room, understandably. But housing should be earned. And this is how they do it in Europe. This is how they do it in Asia is that you don't just get your own apartment in downtown San Francisco because you clean. to be homeless, you have to earn it. It's a reward for abstinence or making progress on your personal plans, such as having a job. So, yeah, it's restoring carrots and sticks. It's restoring

some incentives for personal behavioral change. To some extent, I think my views changed more on the environment than they did on these issues of drugs and homelessness. Though I will say, I think one thing that I have changed my views on is I do believe in greater restriction, really of all drugs, including alcohol, which is actually a pretty dangerous drug. And so I used to kind of scoff at the restrictions that we put on alcohol consumption, including, you know, be able to buy it in grocery stores or buy it on Sunday, and there's some counties that are dry. I've really come to appreciate those restrictions.

I worry about the ways in which the society, including people that are maybe more center-right, of things like psychedelic drugs, things like marijuana. it's true that nobody dies of an overdose of marijuana. It's much safer in that sense than alcohol. But all drugs can be abused. And we should, I think, be really careful with how these drugs are getting out there. And that's the other reason I think you need to have some universal psychiatric care. I think a lot of people that are using drugs heavily, including alcohol, are just self-medicating.

And they may have better lives if they had access to an antidepressant or just or to therapy or just really exercising. more regularly for me anyway, exercise is important to mental health. So I just think we're doing a really poor job in the United States right now of taking care of people's mental health. Yeah. And that's been a big reason for, you know, we had 93,000 people die of illicit drugs last year. That's a five times increase from the 17,000 that died in the year 2000. So clearly something's deeply broken. And there's a lot of things we need to do. But I definitely think restoring carrots and having universal psychiatric care and much greater care over how we deal with these really intoxicating and addictive substances is required.

Yeah. You know, I often say that politics, or I don't often say this, a lot of people often say this, but I repeat it that politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from cult, from religion. Whatever we worship affects our culture, culture, then affects politics. But policies do have the ability to change culture. Like if you look at something, for example, like gay marriage, before a Bergerfell, the majority of Americans were not for gay marriage. After a Bergerfell happened, it very precipitously changed. Support for gay marriage changed very quickly. And yes, part of that was culture, obviously media representation, things like that. But I think the Supreme Court decision actually had an effect, at least over time, on people's mindset about it.

And I think that that can be true as well when it comes to policy surrounding homeless people or whatever you want to call it, the accurate terminology for that. I don't think that we have to wait for the very destructive culture that I think has been created, especially in progressive cities, that any type of law enforcement is some form of oppression, any type of incentivizing that you're talking about, the carrot and stick, the carrot and stick strategy, that that is somehow a form of harm, even just everything on the left, that it seeks to destigmatize and that it seeks to normalize in the name of compassion and empathy, I think, has just created a very destructive and lawless culture in which people who are most vulnerable really suffer.

Like, it's poor people that suffer from that. The rich people in San Francisco, I love San Francisco, by the way. It's my husband and my favorite city. We love visiting San Francisco. It's beautiful. But the rich people are not the ones who are most affected by this. It's the working class people. It's the poor people who no longer can be safe.

Same thing when it comes to defunding the police. Same thing when it comes to any progressive policy that sounds really good, but costs most of society a whole lot. And I guess I have hope, I guess, that people are waking up to that. And it sounds like you do too. My question is, do you consider yourself a conservative now? And do you think that it takes people becoming a conservative to wake up to some of the detrimental effects of the progressive policies that we're talking about? Yeah, sure. I agree with everything you say.

And there's a great quote from the late Senator Patrick Moynihan where he said, you know, culture, the central conservative insight is that culture determines the fate of a nation, but the central liberal insight is that politics can intervene in that culture. And I really believe that. I do think we need a new political formation. It may be a third party. It may be a different realignment of the political parties. I struggle with labels.

I mean, part of the reason I wrote, you know, two 400-page books, is that I wanted to sort of say, here's what I think. And you can call it a lot of different things. I mean, there's definitely some things that I believe that I think progressives would call conservatives. I think families are important. I think enforcing the laws are important. I think we should not tear down institutions but really try to reform them. But these are the things I believe that are probably considered more liberal. I support, as I mentioned, universal psychiatric care. I think gay marriage is a wonderful. a bit of progress. I, you know, I'm basically more liberal in my habits and in my, you know, I swear decriminalization of marijuana, fine with needle exchange. But again, I do think there has to be carrots and sticks. So I do, I hope that I think people will read both Apocalypse Never in San Francisco and kind of walk away being like, this is not easy to categorize. I don't want to sound too fuzzy or something, but I do think that there needs to be some balancing here of liberal and conservative tactics. I mean, one of the problems, you know, one of the reason that people

become street addicts is that inside the families themselves, there's a really confusing relationship to drugs. We're often what you'll see is parents having a liberal attitude towards drugs at first, being like, well, he's just experimenting or he on his own has to decide whether he's going to quit or not. And then when the addiction spirals out of control, just kicking their kids out of their house, understandably. I mean, I've had friends that are addicts and became street addicts for that reason. But I think we need to get better at imposing discipline earlier in the process, both in the family, but also in the society so that we don't have to resort to more draconian means later, whether that be, you know, eviction or prison. Yeah. You know, I think that conservatives, at least

in my estimation. I am very squarely conservative. Now I'm with you when it comes to a lot of the political labels. But I think that conservatives have more of an appetite for solutions that may be politically considered center-left than it seems like, at least from my vantage point, people on the left have for social positions that may be considered on the right. Because I don't think the right is going to compromise on some social things. Like I don't think that you're going to see a large swath of conservatives say, yeah, man can become a woman and vice versa. You're probably not going to see a lot of conservatives say, you know, that abortion through nine months is awesome. But I do think that conservatives are more welcoming, one of heterodox people with whom we disagree

in a lot of things, but can link arms on other things. They're all of a sudden considered right wing, like Joe Rogan, who is not right wing. He's now considered right wing by the left. I see actually conservatives as being a lot more open. to some of the solutions that you're talking about, and just in general, with linking arms with people that we disagree with on other things than people on the left are. Do you see that too,

and do you hope that it changes for some of our friends on the left, that they will kind of, I don't know, meet us in the middle at least on some things. Oh, yeah, for sure. Of course I'm finding that. I mean, look at whose podcasts I'm doing. I've been invited on Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson

and talking to you, talking to Glenn Beck, Tim Poole. And it's been a total pleasure and exciting. And the disagreements themselves have been interesting and it hasn't threatened the relationship. Whereas, yeah, like, I mean, I'm not being invited to go on progressive TV shows or radio shows. It's disappointing, but I'm also kind of over it. Yeah. You know, I'm old enough now that I have, you know, you kind of understand that there's just things that are outside your control. What I'm excited about in California is trying to build a

movement of, and this is what we're doing, you know, parents that are of kids that are, that were killed by fentanyl parents who have kids that are addicted and would like to see their kids arrested and required to go into drug treatment. Community leaders who are sick of the disaster on the streets, you know, these are groups of people that are very liberal and very conservative, but we share a common agenda. And so there is, I feel optimistic. in the sense that I don't think America is done as a civilization. It just doesn't feel like we're done yet. Yeah.

I mean, because some days, I don't know. No, I mean, me too. I mean, my book ends with a meditation on whether this is it,

guys, like is America just over? And I don't think so. And I think that's because, you know, it's still just the greatest country on earth. I mean, where else are you going to go,

live in China, where you have to have social credit scores or, you know, Europe, it's just, you know, you go to Europe, it's like visiting a museum. It's beautiful,

but it's old. And it's not innovative and it's not where the excitement's at. So, you know, United States and I think California still have a huge amount of potential as places of innovation and entrepreneurialism and social change in positive directions. I do think it's going to require new politics. And, you know, one thing that's happening in California is just that it's now that it's a one-party system. It means that I do think Republicans in California are more open to having a somewhat different

agenda then has been the Republican agenda in the past. Yeah. You know, people get super overwhelmed when we talk about these big issues that seem to run so deep, especially in places like California. I think people had a little glimmer of hope when there was a recall. But, but then I think what really confuses people and burdens people is when it seems like everyone's waking off, then you read a story about Walgreens. Like you said, they've had to close down five more stores because they're just losing business, shoplifting, all of that. they donated $50,000 to Gavin Newsom, who is part of this whole problem. He may have not started the problem, but he certainly hasn't helped it. And it just, I think, the alternative to what you're saying

is, well, it doesn't seem like the company's care. It doesn't seem like the people in charge really care if a so-called moderate ends up cowtowing to the far left. So what can the average person do to help wake people up and hopefully help make some positive change? Yeah, I mean, we definitely need new leadership. I mean, you know, the candidates that we had running in the recall were not folks that were striking the right chord with moderate voters. You know, we, you know, most voters, I think, voted on coronavirus. And that's definitely an issue where conservatives and liberals tend to disagree. I tend to be more alarmist about coronavirus than most of my conservative friends. so that's probably an area of difference, although I do think the mask mandates for kids, for example, has gone way too far. But I do think there's a place for more moderation there. It was also a recall.

And for the most part, voters, just we don't really like recalls because, you know, you just elected the guy a few years earlier. So I think we have a big chance to make some change next year. But again, I do think it's going to require different leadership. Yeah. I think that the thing that can wake a lot of people up is seeing just the hypocrisy. and the apathy that comes from a lot of the leaders. Like you talked about those COVID restrictions,

you know, a lot of people are where you are. They're on board. They want to follow the rules. It's not the rules so much that bother a lot of people. It's the lack of adherence to the rules by the people who set the rules for everyone else, like London Breed, like Gavin Newsome. When you see Gavin Newsome dining at the French laundry,

when you hear London Breed say, well, I wasn't following the mask mandate because I was, you know, feeling the groove at a club, that is the let them eat cake stuff that makes people really mad. When you hear it in Saki, you know, the press secretary say, oh, supply chain problems, the tragedy of the delayed treadmill. That's what she reduces it to. That's my hope, that that kind of thing that I want people to realize that the state doesn't care about you and that most of the people we've put in charge really don't care about the issues that they say they do and they're actually exacerbating the problem.

I hope so, too. It was infuriating. My daughter is 15. She has to wear a mask at school and to see the mayor of San Francisco out there partying it up and then making excuses for it. But even though she's the one that imposed the mask mandate on indoor, it's pretty upsetting. So I hope that is one of the things that triggers people. Although I do, I think that the main issue is just that we have to offer a positive program for dealing with the biggest problem in the state. And it's not going to be enough to point out the hypocrisy. I think we need to offer a really. positive agenda. Yep, yep. And, you know, this is not just San Francisco. You mentioned this a little bit earlier. This is happening in Houston, in, you know, the heart of Dallas. It's happening in Austin. It's happening in Denver. It's in D.C. It's in Boston. It's in New York. It's in Chicago. It's in Portland. It's in Seattle. Every city that is run, not just by Democrats, but we're talking about left-wing progressive ideologues, where their policies have actually been able to take root. Life has become worse. It's become worse. That's just an objective fact. And hopefully people are waking up to that. And I think you are playing a big role in that.

Thankfully, tell everyone where they can follow you and get your book. Thank you. Yeah. Please, I hope folks do consider buying San Francisco, why progressives your own cities. You can get it on Amazon. Hopefully, it's your local bookseller. While you're there by Apocalypse Never, why environmental arms and it hurts us all. The two books really do to go together. They're a defense of the pillars of Western civilization, which I view as being under attack and threatened and also a case for kind of rebooting our civilization with some new institutions, some new ideas. And yet, they can follow me on Twitter, Schellenberger, and then MD.

I'm not a doctor, but those are my initials. Schellenberger, MD, at Schoenberger, on Twitter. Or I'm also on Facebook, Michael Schallenberger. Well, thank you so much. I also hope people go out and buy your book. We'll include the links to those. We'll include the links to those in the description of this. this podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I learned a lot from him. He's really interesting. Definitely go out and buy his book and just keep in mind, keep in mind that progressive policies, progressive ideas, progressive dogma, that sounds good, that sounds compassionate, whether it's about abortion, whether it's about transgenderism, whether it's about homelessness, poverty, education, always ask at what cost and what hard data do you have. Always ask the person who is putting forth a line or an idea or a policy proposal that sounds really good, that sounds really compassionate, that sounds like, oh, if you're against that, then you're a bigot or you're a bad person or you hate poor people or whatever. Rather than giving in to that and saying, oh, you know, I'm compassionate, so I support you.

ask yourself, what facts do you have to back up the idea that this is actually going to help? And what cost is this going to put on the rest of society? This sounds like maybe it's meant to be compassionate for one group of people. But what about what about everyone else? The same is true when it comes to illegal immigration. Oh, we have to be so compassionate by letting out everyone in who wants to come in. At what cost of the country? At what cost of the people at the border?

At what cost to people who are being trafficked? And really, at what cost to the migrants in the countries that they're coming from? As Thomas Soul says, what is typically called social justice should actually be called anti-social justice since the thing that is precisely ignored is the cost to society. That is so true. That's why I don't believe social justice is just. It never is. Request for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Soul. If this episode didn't red pill you, then Thomas Soul definitely will. All right. One more thing I wanted to say. So we've been talking about, we've had a lot of, you know, fun, fun moments on Instagram this week where we've talked about this millennial problem issue, syndrome, whatever you want to call it,

that we have. And maybe it's not just millennials, but I do think it's mostly generational and then, you know, part personality and things like that where we have this paralysis when it comes to doing small things. And there was actually a BuzzFeed article on this a couple of years ago. They called it errant paralysis. So we can do other things. You know, the big things we can, you know, go to medical school, we can get married, we can have kids, we can do the big obligations and responsibilities that we have. But when it comes to like sending packages back that we, that we need to return or going to the post office or listening to a voicemail and calling people back reading like a long personal email it's very very scary to us so i want to hear from you like

tell me your personal stories about your paralysis surrounding you know small things whether it's like oh you've had boxes in the back of your trunk that you have meant to donate to goodwill for the past six months i want to hear like the craziest ones like how long have you been putting off that one task that you have meant to do and i want to hear like the most menial task that you're meant to do and i want to hear like the most menial tasks and the longest someone has waited and procrastinated to do that thing. And tell me your thinking behind it. Why have you put off doing that thing? And I'll give you our phone number so you can leave a quick voicemail telling me this and I'll play a few of them maybe next week.

682-503-1369. 682-503-1369 call. Leave us a voicemail. Also tomorrow, I am going to be announcing finally the winner. The giveaway that we announced at our 500th episode, you'll get lots of good stuff. So I'll announce that tomorrow. So make sure that you tune in. We will see you guys then.

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives. and we don't offer false comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers

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