“Progressive Paradise”

Before and after pictures have laid bare the mass exodus of huge brands from the city of San Francisco.

The video, made up of Google Maps screen grabs, shows large chain stores like Target and CVS before and after they moved out of the city.

Hordes of brand names including the likes of Whole Food and Nordstrom have recently moved out of the California city amid widespread crime and plummeting footfall.

San Francisco's retail stores… before and after. pic.twitter.com/B7pdyY69cs

— Ben Kew 🏌️‍♂️ (@ben_kew) August 13, 2023

Urban progressives blast the unsafe cities that THEY created

The capital of the most powerful and prosperous country to ever grace Earth is an unpleasant — even unlivable — place to call home.

Over the past decade, Washington, DC, has transformed from a beautiful, bustling and vibrant metropolis into a city that often feels like a rip-off of Batman’s Gotham.

Between 2013 and 2019, DC recorded between 104 and 166 homicides per year.

Suffering years of misgovernance and growing squalor, San Franciscans give their city low marks. Are public officials listening?

A recent ranking by WalletHub shows that, out of 149 U.S. cities, San Francisco ranks at the bottom for management. We who live and work here are not surprised. San Francisco’s troubles are self-inflicted. In aggregate, Mayor London Breed and the majority of the city’s 11 district supervisors have made the decisions that got us here.

Last year, The Atlantic dubbed San Francisco a “failed city.”

Earlier this year, amid shuttering stores and a ballooning drug and homeless crisis, Elon Musk tweeted that the city feels “post-apocalyptic,” like a set piece for the zombie horror series, The Walking Dead. Writer Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the city “San Fran-sicko.”

A female Seattle cop has written a brutal exit letter upon retiring, where she blamed the police chief’s ‘failed leadership’ for letting criminals take over the city.

Lieutenant Jessica Taylor, who served in the Seattle Police Department for 23 years, handed in her notice – but instead of filling out a mandatory exit survey, she decided to write a long-winded letter addressed to the police chief.

In her own savage words, she told Chief Adrian Diaz why she made decision to retire in an ‘unfiltered, raw, and unapologetic’ 15-page rant.

Oregon’s decriminalization law has transformed large parts of Portland’s downtown into an open-air drug market.

Officer Daniel DiMatteo is a 24-year police veteran—ten years with the Chicago P.D., then 14 years and counting with the Portland Police Bureau. He’s worked on gang crime and gun violence. And now, he spends much of his time trying to deal with Portland’s drug crisis.

On the day I met him, in March 2023, DiMatteo was patrolling a stretch of downtown around Washington Center, a decommissioned shopping mall that has become a hot spot for drug use. Not long afterward, cops swept the area after it saw 11 overdoses in one night. But on this day, it was full of people, many of them homeless, most using drugs in broad daylight.

A San Francisco family-owned hardware store has lost a staggering $700,000 in a single year to ‘organized shoplifting’ as the city continues to battle rampant crime.

Dale Hardware’s owner Kyle Smith described the helpless situation in Fremont – and said his grandfather, who founded the shop in 1955, would ‘roll in his grave’ if he knew about the unbridled shoplifting.

The uncontrolled looting in San Francisco has occurred for a number of reasons – including the accelerating organized retail theft and increased homelessness.

I got my start in journalism writing for the scrappy local community newspapers in San Francisco (The North Mission News/New Mission News), so I have a soft spot for these papers, given their capacity to ask questions the big papers never ask, not take activists’ self-interested statements for answers, and report in minute detail what the mainstream papers never notice, or more likely, have too many conflicts of interest to “notice.”

San Francisco Safeway stores have installed security gates at self-checkout kiosks in an attempt to stop thieves.

Shoppers using the self-service lines at a number of Safeway stores in the Bay area now need to scan their receipts on an automated plastic gate before they can leave the store.

High levels of theft at Safeway stores and other retailers across San Francisco have prompted merchants to increase security measures.

Shocking new footage has shown zombified tranq addicts swaying on the sidewalk in Philadelphia – following presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s visit to the ‘warzone’ Democrat city.

Multiple spaced-out individuals were seen buckled over, with no control of their limbs, on the trash-filled corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues.

The Kensington neighborhood, ‘ground zero’ for the city’s drug epidemic, is often seen strewn with trash and addicts injecting drugs in the middle of the day.

Congress should exercise its powers and take over

If you had to pick the exact day when the young, affluent, and oblivious of Washington DC were forced to accept that they live in a failed city, 22 July 2021 would be as good a choice as any. That was the day when swell DC brunchers scurried out the doors of the fashionable French restaurant Le Diplomate near DuPont Circle as gunshots rang out in the streets. The incident was symbolic proof of something many Washington residents had long known but feared to articulate in public: that no matter who they were, where they were, or what time of day, they were no longer safe in their home city.

Rapper 50 Cent says LA is about to get outta control — thanks to so-called bail reform.

The hip-hop “Outta Control” icon took to Instagram to bemoan the ongoing crime crisis in the City of Angels — and said it’s about to get even worse after a judge recently reinstated a controversial no-bail policy there.

“LA is finished,” wrote the 48-year-old rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, on Thursday. “Watch how bad it gets out there. SMH [shaking my head].”