San Francisco politics has descended into fan fiction
You’d assume that, as a restaurant critic, I wouldn’t hear a lot from readers about metropolis politics. However you’d be shocked. In response to what would possibly seem to be a traditional overview of a San Francisco restaurant, I usually get missives from individuals who remorse not with the ability to go as a result of they’re scared of the town that I stay and work in. I’ve overheard Palo Alto, Los Gatos and Walnut Creek diners decry former District Lawyer Chesa Boudin for doing the whole lot wanting personally breaking into homes with a crowbar. God forbid anybody brings up Oakland — it would as effectively be a bombed-out gap within the floor so far as these fantasies go.
Is there a starker, extra dramatic picture than French bulldogs gobbling up a lot meth-laced fecal matter that they begin jonesing for the drug themselves?
It’s too unhealthy that it’s a lie, as poo delusion originator {and professional} ex-San Franciscan Michelle Tandler admitted to San Francisco Examiner columnist Gil Duran: “Engagement is the objective.”
This line of considering appears to be all over the place within the metropolis nowadays. It’s much less about goal actuality and extra about vibes. The visibility of homelessness isn’t in regards to the Reagan-era slashing of mental health funding or the housing disaster, however about soft-hearted progressives being soft on crime.
Swap San Francisco for one thing else — let’s say, “The Lord of the Rings” — and this tendency can be what followers name a “head canon.” It’s the apply of studying into a piece, often a fictional one, to give you a story that matches a given worldview or need. For example, though (spoiler alert) the hobbits Frodo and Sam don’t kiss within the textual content, some queer “Rings” followers would possibly assemble a relationship out of tiny moments within the books to edify their need for it to be seen in a narrative they love.
Head canon is the stone soup of textual studying: a recipe cobbled from the crafter’s deep, existential starvation.
Distinction this with the thought of the canon, a time period as soon as completely utilized in reference to concepts and practices supported by spiritual texts. In discussing the Bible or “The Lord of the Rings,” readers use canon as a mutually agreed-upon ground for theorizing and evaluation.
Head canon debates, however, can lead to poisonous, conspiracy-level conflicts.
In some ways, I see all of the slavering about hellhole San Francisco to be one other type of this fan fiction.
It’s grow to be a longtime sport amongst conservatives — like Tucker Carlson, billionaire enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel and Florida Gov. (and presidential hopeful) Ron DeSantis — to make use of San Francisco as a rhetorical punching bag: a dramatic illustration of leftism gone amok and an argument for conservatism because the remedy. Vote purple or your city will grow to be the subsequent San Francisco.
The town’s woes are a supposed warning that liberal insurance policies don’t work and that solely right-wing law-and-order politics will save us. In fact, based on national data compiled by center-left assume tank Third Approach, San Francisco’s 2020 murder fee was simply half that of Bakersfield, a stronghold of Republicanism and tough-on-crime insurance policies. In Jacksonville, Fla., in the meantime, a San Francisco-size metropolis, the murder fee underneath its Republican mayor has truly increased by 28% throughout his seven-year tenure. Jacksonville had 128 extra homicides in 2020 than San Francisco.
In a speech given on the Nationwide Conservatism Convention in Miami on Sept. 11, Thiel, a significant donor to right-wing causes and candidates, truly criticized the GOP for leaning too onerous onto what he called “nihilistic negation” or the sensational form of rhetoric that San Francisco’s detractors enjoy. As a substitute of speaking about what progressive cities are doing incorrect, let’s discuss what the GOP can supply, he instructed.
Maybe unsurprisingly, the convention concluded with DeSantis rallying the group with rhetoric in regards to the “woke thoughts virus” infecting his political enemies.
Disproving lies takes rather more work than making them up.
There will probably be extra nihilistic negation to come back, together with right here in San Francisco. The top canon of city pessimism comes too simply on social media. And it’ll certainly solely worsen on Elon Musk’s Twitter, which the billionaire guarantees will probably be a principally unmoderated “free speech” zone.
Nor will this mindset cease with rhetoric, because the latest assault of Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband of their Pacific Heights house reveals. The suspect within the assault, David DePape, maintained a number of blogs that have been consumed with extreme right-wing conspiracy theories — about “satanic pedophile” communists, the Holocaust and the destruction of white society by an elite authorities cabal led by antifa and progressives.
In a piece for the New York Post that was circulated extensively amongst conservative commentators, Michael Shellenberger, writer of “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruins Cities,” used the incident to put blame on “psychotic homeless folks” and the “drug-induced psychosis gripping the West Coast.” And in a single Fox Information phase, host Jesse Watters blamed the assault on an alleged crime wave, portray an image of a metropolis the place “persons are being hit with hammers day by day.”
That’s the pinnacle canon speaking.
Regardless of the way it’s utilized in political discourse, San Francisco is an actual place — not progressive Mount Doom. This election day, and actually, day by day, it behooves us to tune out those that need and even want it to be a hopeless pit.
Soleil Ho (they/them) is a critic at The San Francisco Chronicle.
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