Glenn Moser is a writer, journalist, and environmentalist who has lived in San Francisco for over 30 years. He is the author of San Francisco: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which is a new book he wrote about the current state of the city.
00:00:30.100Acceptable alternatives include unhoused residents, people experiencing homelessness, individuals who are unhomed, those struggling with homelessness, and my personal fave, neighbors in need.
00:00:44.240That's great. Which makes it sound like all progressive neighborhoods, you know, are shared with homeless people.
00:00:49.520Not probably good for their retail sales.
00:00:53.000Today's guest knows progressives. He knows their game.
00:00:56.820He, not too long ago, worked side by side with them during his environmental work.
00:01:01.720He was so good at it. In 2008, Time magazine named him hero of the environment.
00:01:08.020In the 90s, he played a role in important policy change.
00:01:11.680And in 2018, he actually ran for governor of California as a Democrat.
00:01:16.420He's not a Democrat anymore. In fact, he's a villain to the left.
00:01:20.060And why? Well, because he still says homeless instead of unhoused resident.
00:01:27.120Mostly, the left doesn't like that he disagrees with their excess and their hypocrisy.
00:01:33.360Meanwhile, his contributions to policy have done more for the environment than any of their climate change's real bumper stickers ever could.
00:01:41.760As a journalist and as an author, he has mostly covered environmental issues.
00:01:46.560But the events of 2020 motivated him to write his latest book called San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
00:01:57.120Now, he's a guy who lived in San Francisco for over 30 years.
00:02:00.820He lately says, I don't even I barely recognize it.
00:02:04.000We've all seen the sprawling homeless encampments, the sidewalks covered in feces and syringes.
00:02:10.640But it's more than just San Francisco.
00:02:13.280It's a problem now all over our country.
00:02:16.340And the common denominator is not lack of funding.
00:02:19.880It's not capitalism. It's not housing prices.
00:10:27.620It's it's more uncomfortable in America today to start your own business and and go your own way than it is to sit at home,
00:10:36.440do nothing, collect from the government or maybe do drugs in San Francisco while you're crapping in the streets.
00:10:42.380Well, yeah, I mean, I document in San Francisco that we basically give cash welfare still in San Francisco in San Francisco to people suffering drug addiction,
00:10:54.340which even the most progressive drug treatment advocates say is a terrible idea.
00:10:59.560We give away free housing without any conditions.
00:12:20.940But the goal is independence for people.
00:12:22.700It should not be constant dependence on the government.
00:12:25.880We also just need to treat people treatment first.
00:12:29.500It's just not if you're breaking the law.
00:12:32.040And I stress this part because people get confused about what I'm saying.
00:12:35.720My view, and this is consistent with, I think, a more libertarian view.
00:12:39.420If you want to kill yourself using hard drugs and the privacy of your own apartment and you're not hurting anybody, I don't think that should be a priority for law enforcement to go hunt you down.
00:12:48.740I think it's bonkers that one would use meth or fentanyl or heroin in your own home.
00:12:54.840But that's not a priority for the public.
00:12:57.520By contrast, if your addiction is leading you to live in a tent on the street and shoot heroin and smoke fentanyl in public and defecate in public spaces, you're breaking the law.
00:13:08.120And we should enforce the law and require that you stay in a shelter, get treatment.
00:13:13.160And if you don't want to do that, then you can go to jail.
00:13:15.320But we have to enforce the laws in this country.
00:13:18.040We have to enforce them, including in progressive cities.
00:13:49.900And part of the reason I wrote San Francisco is I wanted to get to the bottom of how did we go from trying to redress some of the the sins of the past?
00:13:59.820You know, we've had a terrible, obviously, history of racial discrimination.
00:14:04.860You know, people have been oppressed and victimized in the past.
00:14:08.080But we went to this really bizarre extreme, which is this idea that whole groups of people can be categorized as victims.
00:14:23.580But then you then they start putting people in that category, including the mentally ill, the homeless, people suffering from drug addiction.
00:14:32.800You know, and in some cases people are victims.
00:14:34.360But then you have to ask the question, is that the end of the story?
00:14:37.380Victimization is a moment towards heroism.
00:14:40.620And the heroes of San Francisco are actually recovering drug addicts.
00:16:44.740Yeah, I mean, and first of all, no one should take my word for anything.
00:16:50.320I mean, just as with Apocalypse Never, San Francisco includes over twelve hundred footnotes from the best available science.
00:16:56.440It's basically this book, more than Apocalypse Never, consists of many, many interviews with people that self-identify as liberals and progressives.
00:17:04.000And they're the ones that offer the most devastating indictment of the mentality and the system.
00:17:10.300I mean, Glenn, what your work has been so important in doing is drawing attention to this importance of mentality and of faith.
00:17:16.600And those are two things that I feel like I got some clarity about, which is that, you know, for a lot of liberals who embrace self-help, we love you know, I talk about one particular self-help, really a founder of cognitive behavioral therapy.
00:17:30.000Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Me, he survived the concentration camps under the Nazis because he got his mentality right.
00:17:37.500He knew that he had to have a purpose, a goal, which was to be reunited with his wife and his parents and to write a book and to be an inspiration for the world.
00:17:47.040So my question was, why is it that liberals embrace self-help in their private lives, but then declare self-help to be blaming the victim?
00:17:55.640That's what they call it when it comes to political life.
00:17:58.740So you won't be surprised that terrible idea that that asking people for some responsibility and accountability is the same as blaming the victim.
00:18:38.720It also now is obviously including our universities, our police departments.
00:18:42.880I described the attacks on the police, which if you really care about black lives, 30 times more African-Americans are killed by civilians than by police in this country.
00:18:52.180If you care about homicide or about saving black lives or all lives, you should be pro-police.
00:18:58.100If you're worried about police violence, the worst thing to do if you care about police violence is to cut the police force because you need police.
00:19:07.040You need sufficient police forces so they're not stressed and under strain.
00:19:11.140So I think there's what gives me hope is the response to this book has been incredibly positive, not just from conservatives, but also from liberals.
00:19:18.860The radical left, as usual, it goes too far.
00:19:21.900And so, you know, it's hard to find progressives in San Francisco who think that things are fine, who think it's okay to have people with schizophrenia, people, you know, that are attacking other people.
00:19:35.600I mean, there's a lot of violence against women that is occurring in not just an inner city, but in the downtowns of our greatest cities.
00:19:42.160So I do think things have reached a tipping point, but I think that there's something that the progressives do need to deal with, which is that you do need some kind of faith.
00:19:51.040You need some sort of belief and some higher power.
00:19:54.440Otherwise, it descends into this really dogmatic religion that they think is they think it's not a religion at all, but it really is a kind of San Francisco sickness, which is basically the idea that love is all you need, that compassion is all you need.
00:20:08.720And we know that we also, people also need discipline, hard work, structures, and some sense of personal responsibility.
00:20:16.400You are, I mean, you are singing the gospel to a lot of people that watch me.
00:20:24.440I'm thrilled to hear that there are a lot of people that have followed you, that they are starting to feel this way.
00:20:31.140Because we're in a place now where we're completely detached from reality, completely detached.
00:20:39.680And we're being told to ignore what we actually see with our own eyes or what we experience at the supermarket or on the streets in a city.
00:21:05.800But when it comes to, let's say, California, California just reelected Gavin Newsom.
00:21:13.020And that seems to me, and maybe I'm reading it wrong, as let the status quo go because he starts doubling down on things now that he wasn't removed from office.
00:21:28.700Yeah, well, and just to agree with you, I mean, we have seen, you know, California decriminalized three grams of hard drugs, including fentanyl.
00:21:37.360And we, in the same legislation in 2014, we also decriminalized shoplifting $950 worth of goods.
00:21:44.620So the Walgreens, our biggest drugstore chain or one of our biggest drugstore chains, has been shutting down stores in San Francisco.
00:21:51.840And the radical left has been claiming that this is not a problem.
00:21:55.700They've been saying, oh, there's no real problem at the Walgreens, basically denying this incredible reality.
00:22:01.240Well, the reason is, is because, you know, for because one paradox or a parent paradox is that progressives are concerned about victims, but then they're not concerned about the victims of theft.
00:22:14.220They're not concerned about the African-Americans being killed by other African-Americans.
00:22:19.640They're only concerned about African-Americans killed by police.
00:22:47.220As for the last elections, you know, my my understanding, if you look at the polling data, is that most voters were still voting on covid.
00:22:55.160We have a much we have a very affluent, pretty wealthy population in California now because of home prices went up so much.
00:23:03.620People tend to be very, you know, it's funny to use the word conservative on covid.
00:23:09.100They really are in favor of very restrictive measures.
00:23:12.080And that was the main thing they were voting on.
00:23:15.120You know, when we tested, we did many polls, but so have many other groups testing the broad agenda that we're proposing, which is a shelter first agenda, a shelter requirement, treatment first, housing earned, as well as universal psychiatry, which we're calling Cal Psych.
00:23:31.080We find support for that agenda around 70 to 80 percent among registered voters in California.
00:23:37.920So I think there is a real opportunity for some fresh candidate next year to run against Gavin Newsom and win.
00:23:45.200I don't know if it's a Republican because, you know, we have an open electoral system in California.
00:23:53.160But I do think the people of California are ready for for something that is there's an alternative to the radical left.
00:23:59.640You know, the interesting thing is when I explain what San Francisco is doing to people, to a lot of just ordinary Democrats that I know, they absolutely reject it.
00:24:10.960They say, I'm not in favor of defunding the police.
00:24:13.420I'm not in favor of giving money to drug addicts.
00:24:16.160And I'm not in favor of letting drug addicts sleep on the street, shoot drugs on the street and defecate in public.
00:24:21.640So I don't think that that that that reigning in those excesses is is in any way a fringe idea.
00:25:00.940You know, New York traditionally had done a pretty good job of actually requiring people to be in shelters.
00:25:06.100But I saw people, you know, on 6th Avenue on a mattress with their cell with their cell phones sleeping out on the sidewalk to police officers, one block away, staring at their at their phones like so many of us do.
00:25:19.400When really you need to you need to do what I saw social workers that I shadowed in Amsterdam, Netherlands do, which is when we discovered someone trying to sleep on a park bench, you'd say, look, we have a bed for you in a shelter.
00:25:59.080I mean, you know, and I really get at the people in particular responsible for this.
00:26:03.040And by the way, I'm a lifelong ACLU supporter.
00:26:05.380But unfortunately, and I support a lot of what ACLU has done in the past.
00:26:09.320But unfortunately, ACLU has been a terrible bad actor in this situation.
00:26:12.940I asked them, you know, when one of our grandparents, when they suffer from dementia, whether from Alzheimer's or some other cause, when they suffer from dementia, we don't let them wander around in the seat where they're in the city where they're at risk to themselves or something bad could happen to them.
00:26:29.520So why do we do that with people suffering from other forms of mental illness?
00:26:33.540Why do we let people suffering from psychosis, whether from schizophrenia or extensive meth use?
00:26:38.960Why do we let them wander around the city?
00:26:44.100And in Amsterdam and other civilized cities, they say to folks that with psychosis, they say, you have to go stay in a shelter.
00:26:51.420You will be able to see a psychiatrist.
00:26:53.980This is, for me, fundamental to the operation of cities and a civilization.
00:27:00.880Glenn, honestly, well, after I wrote San Francisco, I declared myself no longer a progressive.
00:27:06.840I changed my party registration from Democrat to independent because I feel like I'm living in an immoral society.
00:27:13.900And I don't mean for that to sound the way that I think it may sound to a lot of people.
00:27:17.560But I feel like I'm living under, like, apartheid in South Africa or in some system where I'm like, I feel wrong paying taxes to basically allow hundreds of people to die every year on the street.
00:27:31.200I, for different reasons, I feel the same way.
00:27:34.220I think the government is so disconnected now from morality on multiple subjects that I don't I don't know what I pay my taxes for anymore.
00:27:46.160I don't I don't recognize, you know, the one thing that I have always felt is that the system is it will correct itself when the people correct itself.
00:28:01.980You know what I mean? When the people are all going down one way, somebody like Martin Luther King appears and we do correct it and we start to move in a better way.
00:28:15.040I don't see. Well, I don't see a lot of people standing up, but I also don't see the self-correction on anything.
00:28:20.600Policies that are clearly not working.
00:28:24.400What we're doing down at the border is the most immoral thing I've ever seen.
00:28:29.080Remember, I'm the guy who got in trouble with the right because I brought food and things down to the people who had crossed the border under Obama.
00:28:39.260And I said, look, you can disagree, but you have to see people as people.
00:28:44.460You have to see the plight that they're in right now.
00:28:49.220No one seems to be talking about the kids.
00:29:36.640And no matter what he said to appeal to the humanity, that door was already closed.
00:29:42.760We can't let that happen here or we're going to make them look like rookies.
00:29:48.740I mean, Glenn, to give you some numbers here, 93,000 people died last year from drug deaths or poisonings or overdoses.
00:29:57.280That's a five-fold increase from the 17,000 people that died from drugs in the year 2000.
00:30:03.600That's almost three times as many people died of drugs last year as car accidents, almost five times as many as that of homicides during a normal year.
00:30:13.280I do have one quote at the end of San Francisco because even though the book is focused on why progressives ruin cities, I do offer a critique.
00:30:21.400In fact, what I do is I quote conservatives making a critique of the right and why the right hasn't been able to offer a powerful alternative politically in progressive cities.
00:30:31.600And I quote the late Patrick Moynihan, who is a very interesting figure, someone I really identify with in a lot of ways.
00:30:38.440He was a Democrat, but he worked for Nixon, as you know, and raised concerns about the disintegration of the family.
00:30:45.860And Moynihan said something really important.
00:30:47.280He said, the central conservative truth is that culture determines the political life of a nation.
00:30:53.060But the central liberal truth is that politics can intervene in the cultural life and change the direction.
00:30:59.740So I do think that what you're pointing out is correct.
00:31:03.060I mean, I see voices like yours, voices like Joe Rogan, whose podcast I did last week, Jordan Peterson.
00:31:10.240I do see it having a very courageous liberals like Barry Weiss, who used to be at The New York Times.
00:31:15.400Yes, I do see are people coming moving from left to right a little bit more Glenn Greenwald, for example, Matt Taibbi.
00:31:21.620These are voices that I see really making a difference in the culture.
00:31:25.360But I agree with you. We need some sort of new political formation, some sort of new political leadership that I think transcends a lot of those old left right boundaries, because, you know, what I'm proposing is something that, you know, is called we call it cal psych.
00:31:39.840It's basically saying, you know, shocking idea that you need to treat people with mental illness.
00:31:44.920You need to treat people with addiction.
00:31:46.680That really, that's a moral issue, that this is not just a kind of technical question.
00:31:51.440That should be something that appeals to both reasonable conservatives and reasonable liberals.
00:31:56.340So let me, let me take it to, to this question, because I think we agree on most of what you said.
00:32:06.440I mean, you know, you pull up the hood, we're going to have disagreements on things, but I mean, the direction I think we agree on.
00:32:12.060Um, what I, the conservative, uh, has been wildly wrong because we didn't fear the corporation.
00:32:24.400And that's because we never, I think we never saw the corporation as getting that out of control.
00:32:31.800We should have listened to Eisenhower.
00:32:33.480It's been out of control for a long time, but now it's more powerful than all nations on earth combined.
00:32:40.820Um, and we failed that the, the conservatives have been warning about an out of control government.
00:32:50.600Um, and I don't understand how, um, how the left doesn't fear that it's still power.
00:33:01.060And, and that one is even harder to stop because they're the police.
00:33:07.320Who do you call when the government has gone bad?
00:57:50.840Children should be involved in keeping the classroom clean.
00:57:53.500You know, one of the things that I noticed in Japan is that the kids were heavily involved in maintaining the classrooms and doing physical labor.
00:59:20.680But getting the ability to go into those forests and just clean the underbrush, only take things that are dead, you'd never get the permission to do that.
00:59:30.460You'd never get the permission to do that.
00:59:33.840Well, I – well, let's disagree on that part of it.
00:59:37.280I have – I'm a bit more – I keep some of my idealism – I like to think of myself as a practical idealist or as an idealistic pragmatist.
00:59:46.880I do think that the public wants it, and yes, the radical left doesn't want it.
00:59:52.760But we're still talking about 70 to 80 percent of the public that support all of these things, including some kind of work requirement, including an abstinence requirement.
01:00:02.580If you're going to get your own apartment at the taxpayer subsidy, you should have to earn it through abstinence, through making progress on your personal plan, which in every case has to include work.
01:00:12.340This is something that the Dutch and the Portuguese are very clear about.
01:00:15.580Work is essential to building up our character and our self-esteem and a big part of recovery from addiction.