The following is an excerpt from the new book, Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All.
One crisp autumn day in 2023, residents of San Francisco awoke to find their city transformed. Almost overnight, the city by the bay had become virtually unrecognizable. Street corners and plazas previously crowded with homeless encampments and open-air drug markets were clear, and the trash heaps, piles of feces, tainted needles, soiled mattresses, and ragged tents were gone. Storefront windows that had long been boarded shut now shone. All the crude graffiti, scummy debris, and filth were replaced with painted murals, brand-new flower boxes, and colorful new crosswalk markings. Freshly pressure-washed sidewalks — the forgotten pathways through the city — now gleamed.
After decades of failure and $24 billion squandered in the previous five years on statewide strategies aimed at ending homelessness, San Franciscans witnessed a bona fide miracle: their city (or at least the downtown) was golden once again. Perhaps most shocking of all, the homeless population had vanished, and no one seemed to know where they went. How could a problem that plagued authorities for decades be solved overnight?
The closer that residents looked, the more unsettling the answer became: large concrete barricades and steel fences had been erected downtown, and the formidable police presence could best be described as a “shock and awe” campaign. Stranger still were the cheering crowds waving giant Chinese flags on long poles while acrobats and Chinese dance troupes performed on the sidewalks. Hundreds of blood-red lanterns were strung above the streets.
And it was certainly ironic that the leader who unabashedly touted the cleanup of San Francisco that day, Gov. Gavin Newsom, was the very same career politician who had failed the city for so long. Chinese President Xi Jinping was there for the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit held at the St. Regis Hotel on Nov. 10, 2023. And Newsom was locked in, ready to prove he was a serious player on the global stage. His lucrative and long-standing business relationships with Chinese apparatchiks gave him an affinity for China that most politicians do not possess.
As Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s rocket-proof armored vehicle made its way through the freshly cleaned streets of San Francisco to the St. Regis Hotel, throngs of pro-Beijing activists heralded his arrival. As it happened, the activists were United Front operatives on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and had been bused in from their stations embedded across the United States. In Newsom’s California, the paid CCP foot soldiers assaulted American human rights activists protesting Xi’s arrival with impunity.
Critics mocked Newsom’s preparation for Xi, calling it a “convenient scurryfunge,” and likened it to frenzied teens rushing to clean up after a house party before the parents returned. Newsom admitted as much. “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town,’ that’s true,” he said, “because it’s true.”
So, the streets were sanitized, but where did all the criminals, drug addicts, illegal migrants, and homeless people go? Did the cleanup also magically lift them from their predicaments? Of course not. It turned out that, on Newsom’s orders, most of them were merely rounded up by police and herded, like cattle in a rotational grazing loop, to other parts of the city.
The transformation of San Francisco was so striking, not because of how sudden it was, but because of who Gavin Newsom is. For more than twenty years, Newsom claimed that he was trying to fix the problems of crime, drugs, and homelessness in San Francisco and across the state. And on his watch, those problems only got worse. Why? Because, under ordinary circumstances, Newsom cannot fix those problems. His ideology prevents him from doing what is necessary.
At his core, Newsom embodies the sinister progressive vision that has seeped outward from California and now threatens every American, whether they live in the cities, suburbs, or even remote rural locations. The progressive vision for America maintains that crime should be made legal; jails should be emptied; dangerous drugs should be freely available; borders should be opened; illegal aliens should be given amnesty and free health care and interest-free loans.
More than any current politician, Newsom has executed the progressive vision across his city and state with swiftness and precision. Every problem he encounters, Newsom addresses in typical performative progressive fashion: convene a commission, appoint a czar, hold a press conference, and ultimately, just throw more money at it. The result of his decades-long reign in California has been abject failure.
Compounding Newsom’s ruthless drive to enact the failed progressive vision is his boundless and selfish ambition. Despite his policy failures, he has amassed personal success, thus incentivizing his current course. For an unimaginative political creature who sprang from the loins of California’s corrupt Democratic establishment, Newsom’s first response to a problem has always been to trot out the progressive platitudes and boring bromides of the Left Coast elite. It’s pure reflex.
Newsom has learned that actually solving problems is not necessary for personal success in a one-party progressive state like California, where an endless geyser of bad policy spews forth schemes of extreme permissiveness and dysfunction. For Newsom’s political opponents desperate to tackle the perennial problems of crime, drugs, and homelessness, Newsom’s enforced leniencies are not just policy failures; they are existential crises as criminals inevitably gravitate toward his sanctuaries of lawlessness.
Progressives identify innumerable “root causes” for crime and homelessness, including some combination of economic factors, racism, predatory capitalism, mental illness, drug addiction, broken families, illegal immigration, climate change, or even all the above. Newsom’s solutions have nothing to do with the problems. In fact, progressive policies tend to mask the problems, at best, and more often make them worse.
Newsom and his Left Coast mentors did not only spawn the failed progressive vision for America. They also abetted the infiltration of America by the CCP, which is now waging unrestricted warfare against US citizens via fentanyl, TikTok, intellectual property theft, massive hacking enterprises, subversion in academia, social unrest, and other methods of what our adversaries in Beijing call “disintegration warfare.”
Jedd McFatter and Susan Crabtree are investigative journalists and authors of the new book, Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All.
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