00:01:35.600San Francisco is a place that has no like affectionate working class mockery like the Windy City or like the Bears for Chicago or like the Big Apple for New York or, you know, everything is bigger.
00:01:51.320In Texas, all the Texas cities blend together for me.0.70
00:01:54.340Like San Francisco doesn't have any kind of like winking regional eccentricity that is beloved.
00:02:01.320it. It has regional eccentricities that stand in for all kinds of like pathologies of American
00:02:07.440culture. And we're going to dissect those today. Exactly. And so just to locate myself a little
00:02:13.060bit, I'm an academic, I'm a gay man, and I live in San Francisco. And one of the funny experiences
00:02:20.780that this confers on me thrice over is that other people seem to be experts in what my immediate
00:02:27.900world is like that bears no resemblance to what i see when i step out the door right there you0.68
00:02:33.460know how in academia you can't even like i said it yesterday it was fine you know how in the gay0.60
00:02:38.540community not the people i know you know how in san francisco you can't walk down the street0.83
00:02:43.560without someone shitting on your foot why are you so good at knowing my life this ability for
00:02:49.020other people to describe and to interpret your experience for you and you can't discount your0.93
00:02:53.480own expertise right like when you tell people like that's not my experience of san francisco at all0.85
00:02:57.360Like your wokeness is blinding you to the human poop.
00:03:01.640It's like, I assure you it does not, right?
00:03:04.420There is a tendency to kind of discount the experience and expertise, the lived expertise of people who are here and to kind of promote people who are like, I went to a gay pride march in San Francisco once.
00:03:18.400I went to Folsom Street Fair, the like physical embodiment of that Onion headline where Marilyn Monroe is now going door to door trying to shock people.
00:03:27.720Like Folsom Street Fair is like an entire festival for that impulse.
00:03:44.720I think what you're saying is San Francisco is not just a city. It is a symbol, right? It is a stand in for the American imagination on the right for the excesses of liberal governance and like libertine social mores that were mistakenly adopted in and following the 1960s.
00:04:06.72060s. And on the left, increasingly, it's a symbol for like the reactionary impulses of the tech
00:04:13.280industry. Yeah. And today we're really because we are a podcast about the right. We're mostly
00:04:17.800talking about how the right understands San Francisco. That's right. As a boogeyman. But
00:04:21.240I do think it's interesting that this is a place that across the political spectrum, everybody loves
00:04:24.980to hate. Yeah, exactly. It won't surprise anyone coming from a lefty podcast that we find one of
00:04:30.780these two narratives a lot more persuasive than the other. And I think we should do an episode
00:04:34.860at some point about San Francisco conservatism,
00:05:03.940And they're like, this is a place where I perceive myself to be in the political minority as a conservative and look at this evil excesses of the liberal culture that I am being driven to the right by and rebelling against and see myself as a bold truth teller in the face of.
00:05:20.200It's probably just because it's what they see, right? It's probably because they are on Valencia and getting panhandled while they go from bar to bar or, you know, trying to hail Waymo from their phone that they haven't looked up in 13 hours and getting bothered when they step in some garbage.
00:05:37.500That's partly because they're paying attention to it.
00:05:40.380But something I'm really interested in that you have brought up to my attention, and I
00:05:44.660guess I kind of knew before, but I hadn't really thought about it the same way, is that
00:05:47.940new San Francisco that is making the city into a stand-in for left-wing excesses is
00:05:53.320actually drawing on a long tradition of conservative thinking about San Francisco and about California
00:05:59.000as like a symbol of all the places America can go wrong and all the places where liberals
00:06:06.220Exactly. And one of the things that I think I hadn't realized until we started planning for this episode is that people who live in big cities always complain about that big city, right? New Yorkers are famous for being like, New York is dead and like, it's not as cool as it used to be, et cetera, et cetera.
00:06:22.060Everything was better, actually, when I was 25 and first moved to New York.
00:06:27.600It's like the way that people complain about gentrification. It's like, we moved here 20 years ago. Before there was a total hellhole. Sounds like you were gentrifiers 20 years ago.
00:06:35.080But the new Jennifer Friars, that's bad.
00:06:37.700But there's something more in the sense that we've elevated critiques of San Francisco.
00:06:42.900There's a certain clout that comes with coming to San Francisco, stepping off the plane and having a couple of observations.
00:06:49.480And some of these can be very, very good.
00:06:51.280Today, I think we're going to be grappling, for instance, with a couple of texts that I think are as texts really good.
00:06:56.000Like N plus one will sometimes run these articles where someone's like, I flew into San Francisco and this is what it was like.
00:07:01.320As somebody who moved to San Francisco two years ago in the spring of 2023, after a decade plus in New York, let me tell you, I stepped off the plane and I had some observations.
00:07:12.720There is a degree of genuine difference about the place and true regional distinctness from the rest of the U.S.
00:07:22.220There is visible presence of the tech industry.
00:07:24.460There is a set of cultural markers that have been left over from the 1960s new left hippie era that are now merging very interestingly and revealingly with that tech culture, right?
00:07:38.380It is indeed a place that makes manifest and obvious some trends in American culture that other places keep more subtextual.
00:07:47.860I think that's right. I mean, to give one example for people who haven't traveled here, let's assume you touched on an SFO and you don't take BART, but you rather take a cab or eventually probably a Waymo up to San Francisco via 101.
00:08:03.220Should we tell our listeners what a Waymo is for those of them who are not experts in the region?
00:08:48.820It's not going through a breakup while driving.
00:08:52.020I'm not, under no circumstances do you have to hand it to these guys.
00:08:54.940But I can just tell you that experientially when I'm riding around with River, I am happy to be next to them because I know they have a LIDAR on top of them.
00:09:05.060They know exactly where I am at all times.
00:09:07.000Yes, and they're taking many photos of you and like inputting it into your data.
00:09:11.460But they're very predictable, right, in the way that unfortunately San Francisco drivers on the whole did not to be.
00:09:16.880But yeah, so let's say you're driving up 101.
00:09:18.900And one of the things you will encounter almost immediately are these bizarre billboards that are all about AI, all about like cloud computing.0.98
00:09:27.200And you're like, what the fuck is this?
00:09:29.240And it took me forever to sort of place what exactly they were doing.0.99
00:09:33.060And this is where the kind of generalization of San Francisco becomes so tricky, because you could imagine like, oh, people in San Francisco all care about this. Instead of having ads for Chase Bank, they're going to have ads for AI. So everyone here cares about AI. That's not the case. They are really addressing only a very, very small subset of not even Bay Area residents.
00:09:53.240It seems what they're there for is for people who are being driven into the city for meetings about financing to kind of give people a sense of omnipresence.
00:10:02.480It's really addressing probably like 40 or 50 people.
00:10:05.280It's a little bit like how on some parts of Hollywood, they have billboards that are placed there to make one producer feel good about his movie.
00:10:14.180Yeah, it's like the absolute froth on top of the city is the tech elite who control just staggering amounts of capital.
00:10:23.800And all of the advertising is geared towards them on the 101, like even the Bay Bridge.
00:10:29.940It's just every single advertisement is made for this one tiny bit of consumers because nobody else is contracting an AI firm for their company, right?
00:10:40.500It renders the rest of the city, at least in this way, like kind of superfluous, right?
00:10:45.280Urbanists will sometimes talk about like the big city and the little city, right?
00:10:48.140The big city being the large industries or like the big movement of capital that happens physically in that territory.
00:11:02.620And then there's the little city, which is the actual people who fucking live there, you know?
00:11:06.300The neighborhoods, the working class population, the middle class population, the schools, the restaurants, the laundromats.
00:11:15.180And Little City is irrelevant to and I think often really kind of hated by the big city, at least in San Francisco, in this way that is really conspicuous.
00:11:26.360It's really conspicuous how much the little city does not matter in the big city's conception of itself.
00:11:31.720One tricky thing is that I think we have to give a history of a particular gaze cast upon San Francisco, but of course that gaze is in dialogue with what actually was happening. And I thought one good place to start our story would be the 1906 earthquake.
00:11:47.420Beginning at the beginning, why not go to the Gold Rush?
00:11:49.980I mean, this was a colonial outpost basically into the point where, you know, gold was found in 1848.0.75
00:11:56.380And everybody from the East Coast, all the Anglos, fled out here because before that it was really the boonies.0.51
00:12:02.580And they built a city off of the profits of the Gold Rush.
00:12:05.780And that's when the city really developed as a port city.
00:12:08.220And that is going to be pretty important, I think, for our story in the sense that it was really about like large population exchanges taking place.
00:12:15.620It's the way they always do through a port, right?
00:12:17.880Like it's really a city built for change
00:12:21.940and built to represent itself to outsiders.
00:14:15.620Right. And, you know, this is a gift to Moira.
00:14:18.660Behind the fixed smile on its false face, San Francisco is a mighty sick city,0.92
00:14:22.420says Mr. Hamilton. And here's his evidence.0.86
00:14:25.140Quote, throughout the United States, births annually exceed deaths in an approximate ratio
00:14:29.200of three to two. But in San Francisco, deaths have exceeded births each year since 1928.
00:14:33.700Birth rate decline. It's always coming for us.
00:14:37.940Yeah. The best that the city health department can do in publishing population estimates is to refuse to admit an actual loss and officially set the population for the past four years at a stationary figure, 693,000.
00:14:51.880Very funny to me because the very obvious thing is that people were migrating into the city.
00:14:56.800Like you don't have to be born here to live here. Most people, in fact, I think don't.
00:15:00.900That's not the only way a population grows, you know, is this by reproducing itself, it also imports people, right?
00:15:07.460There is a nativist logic behind this where like, you know, people who are from somewhere are the ones born there.
00:16:08.140Because like I came here from New York and Philadelphia, two places that in, again, in the conservative imagination also are sort of quote unquote failed cities.
00:16:16.700And I was a little shocked by the tenderloin.
00:16:19.620The Tenderloin looked like what I had been told San Francisco looked like, right? Like the Tenderloin as stand-in for the city as a whole. And the Tenderloin is a part of downtown. It's kind of near the big office building, so it's theater district, shopping district.
00:16:36.380But it is a kind of lower rent place that has a bunch of homeless shelters, a bunch of SROs, and a bunch of methadone clinics.
00:16:47.100And so it has a very visible and very dense homeless population on the street.
00:16:51.620And that is a result of deliberate planning by the city to move the homeless population into one neighborhood and to quarantine them there, right?
00:17:01.220The origins of the Tenderloin as we know it today go back to the 1906 earthquake.
00:17:04.840The reason why we have so many tenement homes and SROs, so single room occupancy, so places where you rent a room but you share a bathroom, basically, was that these were built for the workers rebuilding the city after the 1906 earthquake.0.78
00:17:48.620And then because it was built so cheaply and really these SROs didn't turn people away, it also became a place of refuge for anyone else who might be discriminated against.
00:17:59.960So it became heavily African-American, right?
00:18:02.320Because you could always count on being able to get a room there.0.70
00:18:05.720It was big for immigrants who couldn't pass a background check later on.
00:18:09.740It was big for the transgender community because it still could get discriminated against, obviously, but like it was far less likely.
00:18:18.320Compton's Cafeteria, the site of the big pro-gay and pro-trans rights riot, was in the Tenderloin, right?
00:18:29.120People want to check out Susan Stryker's Friend of the Pods, Screaming Queens, that's described there.
00:18:34.240There's two things about it that I think really, really matter for our stories.
00:18:37.640And one of them you already touched on, which is it is very, very close to the downtown kind of hotel district.
00:18:45.420Meaning the part of San Francisco with the most visible homelessness is right next to where your Marriott is, which I think is on the whole not true of New York, right?
00:18:52.820You really have to kind of get off at the wrong station as a tourist.
00:20:08.660The Tenderloin is the opposite of a red carpet.
00:20:11.140It's saying, if you land here, you do not genuinely belong.
00:20:15.460That's what the city elder sort of wanted to communicate to these people.
00:20:18.200Now, the irony of all this is that like in the 120 years since the earthquake, almost every neighborhood in San Francisco has undergone greater changes to the Tenderloin.
00:20:27.380Those populations have stayed there the longest.
00:20:30.100That is a place that has retained its character more than just about any other part of the city.
00:20:35.520But it was built on this myth of transience and not belonging.0.57
00:20:39.280When you've got the first gay establishments there, you'd often get, you know, the San Francisco press being like citizens against degenerates, et cetera, et cetera.
00:20:46.820And it's like, well, these people have been there longer than the citizens you're interviewing.0.93
00:20:50.420Like, this is really kind of reversing who belongs.
00:20:55.020Like, the homeless population in the Tenderland has seniority.
00:20:57.900They've been there longer than I have, yeah.0.99
00:20:59.280Yeah, just about any of these tech assholes being like—0.91
00:21:03.360Who were, you know, born in 2000 or, like, you know, just staggered out of Stanford up the 280.0.99
00:21:09.460Or out of a South African diamond mine.0.75
00:21:10.840Yeah. So I think it pretends at temporary status when in fact it actually is extremely enduring. Right. And as you say, it's a deliberate policy to sort of pour populations into this area. And then it is tradition to complain about the fact that this densest place in the city with the largest number of people living at the edge of poverty somehow, you know, has people wandering the streets and not looking altogether happy. Right.
00:21:40.560It has fulfilled that function for a long, long time.
00:21:44.140And the city, which votes overwhelmingly democratic, conceives of itself as fairly liberal, whether or not that's justified is very much up for debate.
00:21:52.820We can talk about the Californian ideology.
00:21:55.820But, you know, it strikes me that this space where, you know, San Francisco sort of warehouses its surplus population that then becomes a sort of object of its shame and disavowal, right?
00:22:09.200Like this insistence that this is not the real San Francisco or like these people are lesser a part or not the part of San Francisco that San Francisco wants to be can run up against not just these old style media narratives about the city as being a place of decay, right, or of like contradictions between the stagnance and decadence of liberal governance and the promise of technology.
00:22:35.220But it's also a place where, like, you know, in a new media ecosystem, all these tourists can then take out their phones and say, like, look at this spectacle that just disturbed me upon me, you know, staggering out of my Sheraton.
00:22:49.500And will you, my followers all across the country, share now in my outrage at having to witness this?
00:22:56.580Some of it is tourists sort of just pulling out their phones, but honestly, walking in the Tenderloin, I have encountered what I've assumed to be conservative influencers just filming themselves.
00:23:06.160They appear to just arrive in San Francisco to film this stuff and then, like, leave.
00:23:20.680I mean, if you want to see an unwashed suffering person nodding off from heroin, there is a location that you can like go to and you are going to find it there.0.99
00:23:35.100I mean, you're not going to take a bus or the BART because you're an asshole, but like you could if you wanted to.0.99
00:23:40.560You can take your driverless car right up to your spectacle of human suffering and you can broadcast that.
00:23:45.660Yeah, your rented Land Rover or whatever.
00:23:47.580we're in the car and we had some time to process our recent trip to san francisco and we have both
00:23:53.940decided this is the worst city that we have ever been to we knew that homelessness was a problem
00:23:59.860we knew that crime was a problem but i think it's one thing to see it on the news it's another thing
00:24:05.340to walk the streets and actually experience it for yourself and we just have a lot of thoughts
00:24:10.500we're like oh yeah it's going to be so beautiful this historic city you know and we were coming
00:24:14.980from the airport and there's like encampments it's not one tent it's not one homeless person
00:24:19.840it's a bunch of these tents it's open drug use there is human feces in the middle of the street
00:24:26.400that we have to step over people are urinating in public there are needles everywhere and people
00:24:33.360are on some hard drugs right like it's meth it's heroin and it's very sad it's very sad to see it
00:24:39.760because i know that it's changed a lot i think that's really important we're not going to claim
00:24:43.740that like, oh, San Francisco is completely unfairly maligned. The Tenderloin is kind of
00:24:47.920shocking initially and like should shock the conscience. The only thing is it doesn't seem
00:24:53.000to shock the conscience in any of the ways that it should. You know, a lot of San Francisco
00:24:56.720neighborhoods outside of the Tenderloin are very capable of change, but they partake in these funny
00:25:01.860kind of dynamics of respectability politics. You know, the Castro becomes synonymous with being
00:25:07.660the gay district when in fact, of course, the Tenderloin was the original gay district and0.99
00:25:12.300the homeless population in san francisco is overwhelmingly it seems lgbt right a lot of
00:25:18.540people a lot of street kids drift here because they're being kicked out by their families because
00:25:24.120they don't feel comfortable where they live right they don't come here because like liberals will
00:25:28.800give them handouts whatever they come because at least they won't get you know murdered or whatever
00:25:33.560right and yet there's often this sort of framing like the lgbt community versus the homeless you
00:25:38.560And it's like, no, many of them are members of that community.
00:25:41.640Right. There's some kind of like myth. And you see this in popular understandings of like feminism about like cis and straight women, too, is that this like gender grievance or like politicized gender identity comes with a lot of money somehow.
00:25:59.000But, like, this idea that to be gay means to be a college-educated person with a six-figure income is a weirdly persistent idea, and it's just not accurate.0.99
00:26:10.700And so, like, the Castro basically becomes the respectable front, right, more or less, of the LGBT community, whereas, like, the Tenderloin just contains more of the actual community.
00:26:23.680And the kinds of changes that we're talking about.
00:26:25.700So the Castro started out as a, I think, mostly Catholic, white, lower middle class area that sort of like then gets gentrified or, well, it's weird.0.98
00:26:33.400It gets upclassed by a bunch of gays moving in, in a funny way.0.89
00:26:53.020You can say homos, it's fine. But in other cases, things undergo multiple changes, right? Polk Gulch, for instance, which is sort of the northern end of the Tenderloin, was like the first really recognized gayborhood in the city, then really becomes part of the Tenderloin in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and then sort of gets re-techified in the 21st century.1.00
00:27:15.120In other cases, frankly, you also get communities in this city where respectability policies are being made impossible, right?
00:27:22.560So you have Japantown, which was thriving prior to 1941, and then miraculously stopped being thriving.0.95
00:27:29.520Yeah, well, because all of that population of that ethnic enclave was, in fact, interred.0.92
00:27:35.100Got deported, and a lot of them didn't get property back, or were kind of compensated in these kind of like federal ways, right? Like, which didn't come with like, here's your plot of land back, right? It'll come with like some money, which is nice, thank you. But that neighborhood is like, it still has a sort of nominal Japanese presence, but like, it's a lot less.
00:27:54.400And right next to it, the Western edition was a thriving African-American dominated, really middle to upper middle class area was a Harlem of the West. And it got raised and bulldozed for a bunch of quote unquote urban renewal projects in the 60s and 70s. Right.
00:28:10.740And then a lot of those people either moved to the suburbs or if they happened to be renters, they drifted to the Tenderloin, right?
00:28:16.560The Tenderloin is being asked to absorb things that happen in the changes that are wrought on these other neighborhoods.
00:28:25.480That's just to say that like what you're looking at isn't old San Francisco versus these new arrivals.
00:28:30.360Like technically in the sense of biographies, sure, right?
00:28:33.660Like were many of these people born in the Tenderloin?
00:28:36.780But in terms of the character of the place, surprisingly constant, I would say.
00:28:42.820Now, this other San Francisco that you get in the Tenderloin is, of course, also directed towards tourism.
00:28:49.800And sort of starting in the 1930s, you really start getting a San Francisco tourism that has to do with basically with vice stuff, right?
00:28:58.020Like a little bit of exoticism, stepping outside of your comfort zone.
00:29:01.500And if that comfort zone involves what they then call female impersonation or something like that, or male impersonation, then so be it, right? Like it was okay now. And then you'd go back to, I don't know, Portland and whatever. And then this wasn't part of your world anymore.
00:29:14.700And so the Tenderloin always also was the part of the city the city kept in order to sort of give itself this kind of frisson of danger and allure, while at the same time also very seriously policing it and honestly making the lives a living hell of many people who were in those thriving industries, right, who the city kind of depended on for its draw.
00:29:35.780And so this idea of cleaning up the Tenderloin, cleaning up the city is extremely old, but it's also extremely ambivalent, right?
00:29:42.180Because these same people are like, well, everyone wants to come to San Francisco.
00:29:44.760It's like, yeah, that might have to do with all that, by the way.
00:29:48.040And then by the 1950s, you start getting organized resistance to all these dynamics.
00:29:56.660That is to say that in the early 1960s, you get protests from, for instance, church leaders against police brutality in the Tenderloin.
00:30:04.120You get the Compton's Cafeteria, right, in the 60s.
00:30:07.440Before that, you had, you know, the Mattachine Society operating out of North Beach, the first sort of homophile, male homophile organization.
00:30:14.980They have the large scale port workers, the dock workers strike, right?
00:30:28.600And so that sort of gets remarked on in the SF press and especially the Chronicle and especially some of its columnists are really good.
00:30:36.400It's really shocking for the 50s and 60s, like picking up on like, hey, this is actually politically really important and like middle class people need to know about this.
00:30:43.340But it's funny because I think the global notice of it seems to have been pretty muted.
00:30:48.860The global notice comes with the late 60s in the summer of love, right?
00:30:53.580But that's when like, oh, San Francisco is being taken over by the nuts, right?
00:31:03.680So why did San Francisco become a magnet?
00:31:07.220Because it does seem like there was a, there were like two processes of migration, right?
00:31:11.860There was one in which a lot of mostly young, I imagine them as like pretty much overwhelmingly white people came to San Francisco and specifically to the Haight-Ashbury.
00:31:23.580neighborhood in a mix of what seemed like kind of vaguely political, particularly opposition
00:31:28.700to the draft and the Vietnam War, but like really a kind of like music and drug and like
00:32:06.760Also, like, we're talking about San Francisco here.
00:32:08.860But what we're really talking about is this, like, kind of triple urban area where we have San Francisco in constant conversation with Berkeley and San Jose, right?
00:34:04.060But I think there's something more going on, which is because the city was so visible, it became kind of a beacon to people fleeing, frankly, unsustainable living environments.
00:34:13.860So I think the stories I hear from people who came here during the summer of love, they'll often couch it as like, well, I heard about freedom and free love and, you know, rock and roll.
00:34:23.860And then like, and my dad was beating me every night.
00:34:26.080Well, OK, so like there are two ways of telling that story.
00:35:06.900I'm talking about Joan. We got to talk about Joan.
00:35:08.920That twiggy bitch. She is so mean.1.00
00:35:11.220I mean, she's an icon, right? But you are referring to, I believe, it's a question of like reactionary art, right? Because Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion's title essay in her famous essay collection is a like technically perfect piece of sort of like impressionistic criticism, right?
00:35:36.060She never, like, states what she believes.
00:35:37.840She shows what she believes through her selection of quotes, through her selection of, like, just the perfect noun, and through her just, like, withering judgment.
00:35:47.380And it is a refutation, basically, of, like, the entire counterculture and New Left as morally bankrupt and ultimately, like, socially corrosive.
00:36:05.620Didion writes in this essay, San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up.
00:36:10.440San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering, right?
00:36:13.360So this is, like, San Francisco as, for some people, the beacon, and for her, the wound, the place where all the pathologies were showing up.
00:37:25.040Well, so according to Didion, I think that there's three sort of things that she teaches people on how to pay attention to San Francisco, right?
00:37:31.960One thing about San Franciscans is they talk funny in a way that's important to render with sort of ironic detachment.0.98
00:37:37.760Like, get a load of what these assholes are saying, right?0.98
00:37:40.820And then her essay is like 60% that, I would say.0.99
00:37:43.900They have weird rituals that are worth exploring in detail, right?
00:37:47.400And then the other thing is they're not really San Franciscans.
00:38:14.660Yeah. But so I think Didion really established in the late 60s this long running symbiotic relationship between young people and SF who, let's be clear, like obviously sit down with Joan Didion because like they like an audience.
00:38:28.220They love performing for outsiders and the journalists, influencers and whatever who draw on them.
00:38:33.880There's like a kind of self perpetuating self-regard of this kind of San Franciscan, right, who wants to perform for an audience of the rest of the country.
00:38:44.020We're talking about San Francisco, or we have been talking about San Francisco, almost as a victim of its own tendency to be made into a symbol.
00:38:50.440But this is also something that San Francisco's are doing on purpose.
00:38:54.280I mean, it's the one way we get talked about, right?
00:38:57.780Well, it's like I came here to be a part of the zeitgeist and now look at me being a part of the zeitgeist and please reproduce this in your essay.
00:39:27.200I mean, it's been 20 years since I've lived in New York.
00:39:30.160I mean, for instance, I don't know if they're still around, but there used to be kind of tour buses going around San Francisco that were called the urban safari.
00:39:37.440The idea that people are animals in a zoo is baked in and people sort of ironically accept it.
00:39:42.660Right. And there's a degree of like people trying to make a buck off of that idea.
00:39:47.580Like you go to Haight Street, it's full of tourist shops that smell aggressively like patchouli where they'll send you a tie-dye shirt with like a Grateful Dead bear on it.
00:39:58.840You know, it has become a simulacra of itself in the years since it was so aggressively documented this way.
00:40:06.460Yeah. But one should say also, again, like very small portions of the city, right? Try to buy a plastic bong anywhere else in the city. People are like, what the fuck's wrong with you? We haven't sold one of these in 20 years. You know, these things tend to be concentrated and they tend to perform for outsiders who are envisioned, I think, as tourists.
00:40:21.720And I think one of the tragedies of San Francisco really is that it has turned its tourists into essayists, right?
00:40:28.280That it's like, well, you haven't really scratched below the surface very much, but somehow it's acceptable to kind of have these drive-by, huh, isn't this weird?
00:40:38.080Whereas I feel like in other cities, it's more like, well, unless you've lived here for 20 years, you really can't understand it.
00:40:43.200Which I think, frankly, our neighbors down in L.A. have been much better at, right?
00:40:48.460Where, like, people writing pieces about L.A. have to be very careful because, like, yeah, the Joan Didions and the Mike Davises of the world have gotten there or the Eve Babitzes of the world have gotten there well before them.
00:41:00.600But they've also sort of carved out a different Los Angeles that is only visible to those who've, like, earned it through a degree of authenticity, right?
00:41:42.260It's a movie that you watch and you're like, I'm going to start at the beginning because I got to see it again.
00:41:47.080It's hard to imagine anybody making a film like that about San Francisco because everybody who comes to San Francisco is instrumentalizing it so much, right?
00:42:25.140And you're like, well, that's not Indiana sunlight to start with.
00:42:27.420everybody looks too happy and tan to be in indiana yeah or like everyone's driving like
00:42:34.560priuses in like 2012 or whatever right like it's it's very very noticeable at the same time
00:42:39.220i think because san francisco is often reduced to these iconic shots
00:42:43.760like your bay bridge your golden gate bridge downtown etc trans america building trans america
00:42:49.180building it really seems to lend itself to shorthand so i was thinking about like one
00:42:55.700other thing, of course, that when people hear, oh, San Francisco is dying, is that they've seen
00:43:00.020it die on screen a million times. Every time you have a disaster movie, you got to have a shot of
00:43:05.620the Golden Gate Bridge like ripped apart. And I got to be honest, as someone who drives over at
00:43:09.220least once a week, it's hard not to think about the fact that you've watched a very photorealistic0.98
00:43:15.100Godzilla go to town on that fucking thing like not three years ago, right?0.97
00:43:18.380How are you driving across the Golden Gate Bridge once a week?0.99
00:43:20.740I like Sonoma. What do you want? I'm a San Francisco asshole. Like, I enjoy this. I'm trying. Maybe once a week might be overstating it.
00:43:28.360I go hiking in the Marin Headlands and that's when I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. Or, like, I'll go jog with my dog on Chrissy Beach and I'll, like, take a picture of it because it's so beautiful.
00:43:37.980It's so beautiful. But that's the thing. San Francisco and disaster have sort of been shorthanded in the popular imagination. And often that's about natural disasters, which, as you say, is totally fair. Like, we're due for one of those.
00:43:50.480Like, it's going to be a giant earthquake and or a wildfire. You know, there was that tsunami warning that blew up all our phones a few months ago. It's like, oh, the giant tsunami is heading for San Francisco. And I was like, well, I guess I'm just going to die today. And then it missed. It wound up going to Eureka or something instead.
00:44:09.220Yeah. Like there's an element of physical danger that does lend the place a sort of sense of impermanence.
00:44:15.320Yeah. But disaster movies famously aren't just about natural disasters.
00:44:19.640They're about civilization and culture responding to natural disaster.
00:44:23.760Right. It's the person who's selfish or disposable and the person who is noble and who saves the family dog.
00:44:31.520And you're like, oh, that's so nice as like hundreds of thousands die around them.
00:44:35.340Right. And so that's why I think the fact that this is a city that's been viewed through the eyes of disaster movies for such a long time and is then often described as a quote unquote disaster, referring to social factors, is actually a really, really scary combination.
00:44:49.780People take a certain joy in our destruction.
00:44:53.460What disaster movies are you thinking of particularly? Just like ground our listeners a little in your like references.
00:44:58.120So, I mean, we could start with the towering Inferno, which is based on the novel The Tower, which is supposed to be in Manhattan, but they move it to San Francisco, which starts with this gorgeous tracking shot of a helicopter flying over the Golden Gate Bridge, over the Bay Bridge, and then into downtown San Francisco.
00:45:12.520But I mean, just in the last 10 years, I can think of off the top of my head, there was that movie San Andreas with the rock where the city is first destroyed by an earthquake.
00:48:35.020And also, you know, the homelessness, the sense of menace and danger that is associated with the city, I think is like very closely linked to its gay reputation.0.99
00:48:44.100Exactly. And that's before we get to AIDS, which we'll have to talk about later as well.0.60
00:48:48.540I do think the other thing that we should acknowledge is that in a very interesting way, Hollywood becomes fascinated with the destruction of San Francisco without actually addressing what's happening in San Francisco, which is fairly apocalyptic.
00:49:05.920We don't want to sort of pretend like, oh, the hippies showed up, everything was fine and hunky-dory, and then conservatives got worked up for no reason.
00:49:13.120there would have been interesting and pretty troubling stories to tell about San Francisco
00:49:17.300in the late 70s. Have you ever read David Talbot's The Season of the Witch?
00:51:32.560A former SFPD member and firefighter, Dan White, he had just been removed from the Board of Supervisors at his request, but then had wanted to un-request that.
00:51:43.620Moscone didn't want to do that, and so he killed the mayor and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
00:51:49.640Killed Harvey Milk basically because he got in the way.
00:51:51.720Yeah. Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, right, gets murdered.0.94
00:51:59.560the San Francisco Police Department radio
00:52:01.700starts singing O'Danny Boy in celebration,
00:52:05.500most likely of the mayor rather than of him.
00:52:59.880And there's a long tradition of people being given outsized attention just for these kind of Dan White style complaints about like, you know, they took over our Catholic school and turned it into a gay dance club or whatever, right?
00:53:20.040So I think that's pretty important, right?
00:53:21.420That, like, when you get to Elon Musk tweeting about downtown is a zombie apocalypse or whatever, like, this is a long-standing tradition of the wealthy in San Francisco complaining about kind of very incremental, very, frankly, timid attempts at social justice reform and just completely flipping out.
00:53:43.680But they're being really a microphone for that.
00:53:47.080People are very ready for stories about how San Francisco liberals went too far, how the hippies are crazy, how democratic governance is a disaster, right?
00:53:56.240And if someone thinks that this is a thing of the 80s or, you know, only Elon Musk does this, I would refer you to the work of one Nellie Bowles, who exactly went on this trajectory, right?
00:54:08.840Extremely old San Francisco money and California money.
00:54:11.860And now the wife and I think the mother of the child, a friend of the show, Bari Weiss.
00:54:15.500Yeah. Shout out to Bari. Her writing about San Francisco starts complaining about the tech industry, where she's not wrong on some of the points, but it is very much like these newcomers, this new money is transforming my city. And you're like, well, but you represent the old money. I'm not sure I really want to take your word for it there. It's like, yeah, we used to have class. I was like, all right, cool. And then it becomes kind of like about wokeness sort of taking over the San Francisco public school district where you're like, Nellie Bowles was never going to send her kid to a San Francisco public school.
00:54:42.260Nellie Bowles has never set foot in a San Francisco public school.
00:55:11.220I would say that the media generally don't make it a San Francisco problem because there was a funny way in which both the merchants of moral panics and AIDS activists tried to deprovincialize AIDS, to say this can happen to anyone.
00:55:24.340So in some funny way, it was always, it's not just in San Francisco.
00:55:27.960But, of course, early reporting on the plague always had that requisite shot of San Francisco.
00:55:34.220And a bunch of men crossing 18th Street, yeah.
00:55:36.440Exactly. Like two men holding hands. I mean, I was, I would have been five or six in my earliest memories of AIDS coverage. Like the idea that two men holding hands might have something to do with dying from disease was very much ingrained in my young brain, which did not take any therapy to work through. Thank you very much.
00:55:54.100Yeah, so this idea of San Francisco, men holding hands, men dying of AIDS, like just visually.
00:55:59.660And this is not any fault of like 60 Minutes or whatever.
00:56:02.680Like they had to use shorthands and they did want to say like this is particularly among gay men.
00:56:07.440This is their B-roll and they wanted to signal that it was a gay thing.
00:56:10.360And one has to say part of why San Francisco I think was so visible was that the stigma around AIDS appears to have been just much weaker here.
00:56:20.920Gay men and lesbians had made real strides in city governance.
00:56:24.560And therefore, our general hospital was set up very early on.
00:56:28.400There was just a lot of lesbian women in the medical profession who really were there from the beginning.
00:56:34.320And so that we can't, there can be no stigmatization.
00:56:37.600Like gay people have been a proportionally large part of the San Francisco, which is a fairly small population.
00:56:42.660In terms of American cities, it's not the biggest, right?
00:56:45.080And they have been proportionally larger for a long time.
00:56:47.220Whereas in some place like New York, there were a lot of much larger other interests, like the Catholic Church, like these conservative white ethnic groups who were very eager to throw institutional weight around to make sure these people got shunted out.
00:57:02.160Yeah, which then meant, I think, that a gay man in San Francisco who was ill might be more willing to agree to speak with 60 Minutes than in some other cities, right?
00:57:12.480There were some anti-discrimination ordinances, etc., etc.
00:57:15.800So basically, you can sort of imagine why San Francisco tended to overproduce images of this crisis, and it was easily accessible, and you knew where to go as a 60 Minutes producer. So I think that this connection is really, really important. And it is the moment when I think the Christian right really sort of starts getting fixated on what they then call San Francisco values, right?
00:57:37.680What are San Francisco values? Like overpriced housing, a latte that'll cost you $7.
00:57:45.660And sodomy. Right? I mean, it's got to be.0.97
00:57:50.020Beautiful weather, like just gorgeous jasmine smells, Victorian houses that you can't afford.
00:58:05.760Yeah. Come on. I mean, they're saying it like it's a bad thing. It's like, should this room be teal? Also sodomy? But yeah, the idea that San Francisco values is about this, like the bad side of permissiveness, right? It's over permissive. So it takes hold, I think, in the 80s. Although, of course, as a friend of the show, Anita Bryant made clear, right? Like she also was like fixated on San Francisco.
00:58:29.800At the same time, her defeats in California come from the entire state and really L.A. County kind of wallops her.0.65
00:58:36.780Was it a repeal of a gay civil rights ordinance that she was trying to?0.53
00:58:49.440And really it was L.A. County, I think, that really delivered against that and basically that we were not kick out gay teachers.
00:58:55.240But still, Briggs kept debating Harvey Milk, who was a San Francisco supervisor.
00:58:59.800So the fixation goes further back, but I think with AIDS, you really start getting that.
00:59:03.480And so this kind of let's report on the doings of gay people in these places in order to kind of gin up lives of TikTok-style outrage really starts with AIDS or gets intensified with AIDS and sort of becomes a standard trope of conservative discourses about morality.0.57
00:59:22.040And then, of course, San Francisco or certain San Franciscans kind of run with it.0.80
00:59:26.980Are you familiar with the phrase, whether you like it or not?
01:00:13.780That guy has wanted to be president since he was like in diapers.
01:00:17.680And he has been drawing attention to himself in the most conspicuous ways possible.
01:00:22.520And at the time, in I believe 2004, the way he chose to do that redounded to the benefit of the gay community.
01:00:29.080He made a big public spectacle of performing gay marriages at City Hall until there was an injunction stopping him, I think, like 24 hours later.
01:00:37.840In a shocking twist, Gavin Newsom did not bring lasting change, but a brief political stunt that mostly benefited a constituency of one, Gavin Newsom, for which he's now throwing LGBT people under the bus.
01:01:16.320We hear you love podcasts, you dick.0.98
01:01:18.800I want to hear everything about Kimberly Guilfoyle, who we used to date, remember?0.99
01:01:22.000Oh, God, yeah. Mrs. Donald Trump Jr.0.95
01:01:25.900Actually, I think they broke up. I think that's what I heard. And she got like demoted because she wasn't sleeping with the president's son anymore.
01:01:32.860R.I.P. Anyway, so sad that she's dead. Let's move on.
01:01:36.940Yeah. Basically, the idea that like San Francisco has values that it looks to export becomes, I think, extremely entangled with the LGBT community.
01:01:45.620That is to say, the idea that children would be able to see coverage of a gay pride parade and would therefore like be like, huh, maybe I should experiment with people of the same gender or whatever was like very much this kind of contagion logic that the Christian right employed in sort of demonizing San Francisco.
01:02:04.680It wasn't just these are people who are different from us and who like different things.0.99
01:02:10.080And, you know, we go to church and they go to brunch like it's a big fucking country.0.95
01:02:14.180No, it was like, oh, no, they're exporting this.0.98
01:02:16.540And with Gavin Newsom, with the gay marriage fight, basically that that appeared to be kind of like borne out.0.90
01:02:22.480Like, really, San Franciscans were like, well, no, yeah, I mean, it wouldn't make sense for you to adopt this, too, by the way.0.51
01:02:28.320There's a way in which, like, the right uses this, like, contagion and, like, cross-alization accusation to make it, like, a moral trespass in itself for you to have your own values, right?
01:02:39.780Like, you think other people should live the way you do.
01:02:42.880And it's like, well, yes, I actually do, in fact, think that my life is valuable and that my choices are good ones.
01:02:56.020And that's its own, like, it's a weird inverse of, like, just, like, a basic ability to make value judgments becomes, like, a character flaw when it's on the left.
01:03:06.180But then there's also a sense in which this, like, it's contagious, it's going to spread.
01:03:11.400That strikes me as very conspicuous coming on the heels of the AIDS crisis, which is not so far in the background in 2004.
01:03:18.600You know, we're talking about the first aphasis treatment for AIDS only came out in 1996, right?
01:08:20.060The idea that Twitter was venting kind of San Francisco social justice ideology into the broader world is, I mean, it's a fascinating version of history, man.0.89
01:08:30.200And given that, like, Twitter was at the time very busy creating the conditions at mid-market and in the tenderloin that then produced the very crisis that Elon Musk is bemoaning here, it's pretty fucking rich, right?
01:08:44.640These people are obsessed with homelessness that, frankly, they, to some extent, caused.
01:08:49.760There was a very sad case, but, like, kind of interesting case a couple of years ago.
01:08:55.240Do you remember the murder of Bob Lee?
01:08:58.680In 2023, one of the co-founders of the app Cash, which if people recall, it's a little bit like Venmo, was stabbed to death in downtown San Francisco.0.78
01:09:09.660And immediately you got Elon Musk and all these other tech right wingers and really tech CEOs in general, like crowing about like these mentally ill homeless people are running rampant.0.50
01:09:19.800And like, this was only a matter of time before it happened.
01:09:21.660I hold, you know, social justice San Francisco responsible for exactly the Schellenberger argument, right?
01:09:27.000It was really, really fascinating to see how quickly they moved from crime in San Francisco to homelessness in San Francisco.
01:09:35.000And we should say, as Michael and Peter on If Books Could Kill point out, these are leaps that are each in their own way very, very questionable.
01:09:43.200That is to say, yes, you see a lot of visible poverty in San Francisco.
01:09:52.160They live with parents who sometimes periodically kick them out.
01:09:54.840When they're doing really badly, when their mental illness is really going down a slope, their mom will be like, I can't handle you in here.
01:10:08.980Likewise, a lot of quote unquote homeless people in the Bay Area live in cars.
01:10:14.080That's not something that gets captured here.
01:10:16.040When you look at the raw numbers, which are staggeringly high, a lot of those people do live in cars, meaning they're not the people you encounter in the Tenderloin.
01:10:23.180And then crime appears to be really small criminal enterprises.
01:10:40.900So the overlaps between these exist, but they're not necessarily substantial.
01:10:44.700And the way we leap from one to the other to the other is really, really questionable.
01:10:48.240But the murder of Bob Lee very, very clearly showed that in the tech investor VC and CEO class, like that link is basically axiomatic.
01:11:01.100They assume that crime is homeless, is visible mental illness, right?
01:11:06.840And that's exactly the theory of the case they appear to be having, you know, around this.
01:11:11.060Crime is not their own insider trading. Crime is not none of the securities fraud that they are conducting in their crypto businesses.
01:11:18.940Crime is something associated with the people whose presence on the street in great states of poverty and visible distress are enacting.
01:11:27.920And Bob Lee, in the end, turned out to be the victim of an IT consultant with whose sister he had done lines of coke at one of San Francisco's premier apartment buildings.
01:11:38.080No homeless person was involved in this crime. It was people within the tech industry, an interpersonal conflict aggravated by drug use, but not fentanyl or whatever people are taking in the tenderloin, but by good old fashioned Peruvian marching powder, right?
01:11:52.780Yeah. It's not to say that this wasn't a tragedy, but it is to say that like it really showed that the, you know, tech barons who own, frankly, more and more of our means of communication and our public media are purveyors of these very distortive myths about how the doom loop in San Francisco comes about.
01:12:13.020And it has everything to do with the fact that they don't like seeing certain things on their way to their limo.
01:12:17.720It has very little to do with an accurate understanding of how the city works, its history, and who these people are that they keep going on about.
01:12:26.440You know, if you actually wanted to reduce the homeless population in San Francisco, something you could do is build more shelter beds.
01:12:33.660And you could also change housing policy to make housing more affordable here, both of which are things that these tech guys will vehemently and expensively campaign against any local politician who tries to do, right?
01:13:09.680Yeah, no, there is a moral injury in living in San Francisco and being exposed to this much suffering on the street.
01:13:15.980I just think the moral injury on the homeless people's side is somewhat greater.
01:13:19.620You know, it's like when you compare who is suffering more at the hands of San Francisco's, you know, homelessness problem, I think the homeless are the people suffering.
01:13:27.800And I am shocked at how often I am alone in that understanding.
01:13:32.440The number of times people say homelessness problem and you realize when they go on speaking,
01:13:37.080oh, you mean the fact that you have to see them.
01:13:40.060It's not the fact that they don't have a home.
01:13:42.440It's that you have to see them not having a home.
01:16:38.600That is like the central contradiction. Like what we tolerate, this tolerant,
01:16:42.360permissive city of a lot of freedom comes with this very big exception and catch, which is that
01:16:49.740you have to be able to pay your own way in a place of continuously rising costs.
01:16:54.260Yeah. I'm trying to think of how transhistoric that is. I do think that, you know, a lot of0.67
01:16:59.080the 60s and 70s are explained by the fact that things just didn't cost that much. And that,
01:17:03.040I don't know if you read Michelle T's work on sort of, you know, the Valencia Street scene in
01:17:07.080the 90s. These are just people who kind of, they take jobs, it seems to mostly be able to use the
01:17:12.920mimeograph after hours to make their zine or whatever. The Castro is a good example for this.
01:17:17.580It's often sort of presented as undergoing this massive gentrification. The vast majority of
01:17:21.500people in the Castro, I would say, probably rent rather than own. And part of it is just that
01:17:26.340people have roommates, lots of roommates, which again, for a bunch of gay men, not that big a deal,0.54
01:17:31.460right? Like they can hold off on having families if they want them at all. So part of the Castro1.00
01:17:36.580story is a story about, well, we don't have the same costs as other people, right? We can defray
01:17:42.040these. We can pay more in rent because I'm not paying anything for daycare, right? Exactly. Or
01:17:46.320I'm paying for a room in an apartment that someone got rent controlled like 20 years ago,
01:17:50.820and we just can't let them know that that person died a long time ago, right?
01:17:55.760Yeah. Or it's like, it's his roommate's boyfriend's buddy who's now living there,
01:18:01.920but somebody else long gone is on the lease. Yeah.
01:18:04.300Exactly. And so I do think that like, it's not as simple as like, you can't have wealth. I mean, like a lot of the reaction of people like Dan White was against a kind of bourgeoisification of the LGBT community that suddenly he had to respect these people. I think there's a lot of this California stuff where like, it is a deeply mobile society. But at the same time, like with Joan Didion, it's more obsessed than it cares to admit with people knowing their place.
01:18:30.400And I think that it is not as simple as like, oh, pay your own way. They're also going to be mad if you pay your own way and you're the wrong kind of person. That upsets the Nellie Bowles of the world as well. There is a tendency there, I think, to substitute a supposedly neutral capitalist economy for a racial gender and sexuality hierarchy to pretend that those two are the same thing, but they're not, right?
01:18:56.860Like, ultimately, you're using money as a proxy for understanding the world in moral terms.
01:19:03.460This really makes me want to do a second episode on San Francisco conservatives.