Kamala Harris' San Francisco is a dystopian nightmare. Is this what she has planned for America?
From 2004 until 2019, the responsibility to enforce law and order in San Francisco fell to District Attorney Kamala Harris and her protégé George Gascon. The result? By any estimation, it has been an ignominious disaster.
Even as you drive from the airport to downtown in this once great city, the sight that greets you off the highway is streets with empty storefronts -- like broken teeth, jagged and sad.
In the Tenderloin District it gets worse, far worse, and it isn’t getting any better, in fact, much the opposite. The last time I was in the City by the Bay was in 2021, and I struggled then to describe the craven brutality of the homelessness and drug addiction. Let me try again.
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Just off Union Square, I wandered down to the nice coffee house where I spent my mornings three years ago. It’s gone now. Boarded up. Out in front, addicts assembled under the amused eyes of security guards who seem to think this is normal.
Just up the block, the smell hit me first. It didn’t last time, but now, a fetid stench of human degradation that New Yorkers know only from an unfortunate subway car choice, simply hangs in the air. You can’t even smell the weed.
Dogs abound, barking in the midst of this misery. At least they know something is amiss. In tents, the poor forgotten of this city languish, selling drugs, not joints, not a bag of weed, but life-threatening heroin and fentanyl right out in the open.
The scale of human tragedy is laid bare by the proximity of wealth to squalor, of healthy and beautiful minds and bodies to squandered lives doped out and laid out beneath signs for Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co.
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The well-heeled set headed for the Apple Store seem to pretend it isn’t happening. But to an outsider, it is as clear as the summer sun.
You can’t buy beef jerky here. You can try, but at the Walgreens near my upscale hotel, the dehydrated travelers treat is behind lock and key. The customer service button might as well be connected to some remote outpost in Antarctica. After 5 minutes you just leave.
During COVID, I used the analogy of pointillist painting to describe the ever-encroaching rules. It's just a mask, it's just six feet, it’s just remote learning, each was a point on a canvas, but when you stepped back, you saw a picture of a prison. So, too, in San Francisco, the little horrors add up to a city of nightmares.
Anyone from any city in the northeast of our great country will say after five minutes that San Francisco is a dystopian disaster, but many of the people here, like frogs slowly boiling, think it's normal. Is this what Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the architects of this misery, has in mind for all of us?
Next week, at her convention, the hand-picked Democratic nominee -- whom nobody voted for -- will try to convince us that her record of failure is not her record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story.
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This is real. It is horrible. And no amount of well-off liberals posting photos next to the Golden Gate Bridge can truly hide the depravity of it all. And yeah, maybe the cops and the spaghetti strainer of a District Attorney's office wrought by Harris keep their wealthy enclaves safe, but everyone else is in dire straits.
No matter how big your britches get, you can’t hide from your hometown. There, people know you, they know your story, and the story of Kamala Harris and San Francisco is a warning bell that America needs to hear.
Not far from the Tenderloin I found a curious object; one of the finest street clocks in all America. At one point, it was insured by Lloyd's of London. You can view its gears and workings. It is a beautiful clock, reminiscent of the one that graces New York's Grand Central. It also doesn’t work.
The face of this storied clock is set to the advertiser’s time of 10:10, and twice a day it is right as the saying goes. But why is it broken? How much would it cost to make this piece of history tick again? Why isn’t anyone doing it?
These are all questions for the presumptive Democratic nominee, who takes no questions. But she cannot hide from San Francisco. This is her legacy. And like the broken clock, it just flat out doesn’t work.
David Marcus is a columnist living in West Virginia and the author of "Charade: The COVID Lies That Crushed A Nation."