Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. All right, let us turn our gaze to
the west, San Francisco. The Wall Street Journal with their
latest dispatch from the dystopian Bay area. Apparently they have
cracked the code now on combating homelessness. I know, I
was just as surprised as you because I I remember
when like dating myself here obviously, but I'm old enough
to remember when it was a national scandal that somebody
had developed an app to track all of the human
feces on the sidewalks in San Francisco. But apparently now
they've really turned a corner here. The paper recently observed
that since a twenty twenty four Supreme Court decision provided
cities with quote more power to penalize people for sleeping outside.
San Francisco has been among the most aggressive in wielding
this new power. It's a brand new power. People they yeah,
they got the power, and they were like, man, this
is the reason why we haven't been able to do
anything about this crazy homeless problem that we've got. In
the years since the city has arrested more than one
thousand people on illegal lodging charges. That is more than
ten times the number of similar arrests that the city
made in the year that preceded the court's ruling. And
that may sound like a lot, but Noah Rothman, a
National Review, points out that when you're starting from a
baseline that approaches zero, everything is pretty relative there. Okay,
so like, yes, it's a very large increase, but that's
because you weren't really doing anything for a very long
period before that. At one point last year, San Francisco
counted a staggering And I don't know if that, like
the number is staggering or if he's talking about the
individuals staggering around. I'm not sure, but eighty three hundred
homeless in one night. That was a one night count
in San Francisco. Eighty three hundred. That population vastly exceeds
the city's shelter capacity. City officials, and even the tone
of the Wall Street Journal's story make it sound like
San Francisco's hands were just tied before the Supreme Court
cast off these shackles. However, when you look at the data,
if you look at the statistics, and he provides a
very helpful graph, and I will endeavor to describe it
to you. It is you got a line across the bottom,
a horizontal line across the bottom, and those are the
years going back to twenty eighteen right through twenty twenty five, okay.
And then on the left side, going up vertically is
the number of illegal lodging citations and arrests per month. Okay.
And then there's like and then you got a bar graph,
the little chart with bar charts and stuff. Right, there's
a little vertical rising bars. So when you look at
the left side of the chart, in twenty eighteen through
twenty twenty, you see, I don't know, you're going somewhere
like anywhere from twenty to fifty of these citations or
arrests per month. And then right around say the first
quarter of twenty twenty, the number goes to zero. It's
like there, and then there is nothing else. There's like
a blip here, there's like one arrest, one citation here
or there on a monthly basis, basically for the let's
say one, two, three, four years. Yeah, so for four
years from twenty twenty through twenty twenty four, there's like nothing,
and then after twenty twenty four you start seeing or
at the beginning of twenty four you start seeing an increase.
Now it starts going up to about ten fifteen twenty
a month, and then halfway through the year it jumps
to more more than sixty, goes to over one hundred,
then one hundred twenty. So you got a chart if
you're just like stepping back and looking at it, you're
looking at a bar chart. On the left side, it's
a little bit lower, it's like some spikes here and there,
and then in the middle it's like this vast wasteland
of nothing, no activity. And then in the last year
it's like almost off the chart. Okay, all the bars
go all the way to the top of the chart.
So what does that indicate? Something happened? Because they were
doing some stuff. They were issuing some citations, right, they
were making some arrests from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty.
But then something occurred in twenty twenty. What one might
that have been? Could it have been the COVID pandemic?
Could it have been the martyrdom of Saint George Floyd.
What Rothman points out is that it indicates something happened
in the spring of twenty twenty which compelled San Francisco
to stop following the law. Then lo, this policy was
slowly abandoned at the outset of a presidential election year,
more than six months prior to the court's ruling. Right,
so twenty twenty they stopped enforcing the law, but then
six months before the election in twenty four you start
seeing enforcement of the law again. What happened, well, what
happened like in San Francisco. Like every dark blue municipality
in twenty twenty, San Francisco succumbed to a fatish progressive
hostility to law enforcement. City officials proceeded from the presumption
that police in quality of life crimes amounted to oppression,
and they just stopped doing it. Rothman goes on to
note in this piece at the National Review, you got
two paradigms. The notion The first is that the notion
that proactive policing is itself oppressive, and that vagrancy is
a condition that is imposed on the homeless. These two paradigms,
policing is oppressive and vagrancy is imposed, not chosen freely, right,
and therefore that it's a status that should render its
sufferers immune from prosecution. So these two ideas put San
Francisco in the position that it faced, and the Supreme
Court did not rescue San Franciscans from their unfortunate lot.
It was plain old politics. Actually, that led to a backlash,
convincing former Mayor London Breed to abandon the lacks policies
over which she presided. That political evolution culminated in a
new mayor being elected, Daniel Lurie, who ran for office
on a platform that committed him to a crackdown on homelessness.
What do I keep saying? These things are a choice, people.
This stuff is a choice, whether it's crime, whether it's
letting criminals out of jail, giving them no cash bail,
or give them the cash bail and no bonds, and
all this like homelessness, how you respond to it? These
are all choices. San Francisco's elected leaders should actually be
taking some pride in their success here. They should not
be allowed to blame their belated assumption of civic responsibilities
on the Supreme Court or any other outside force. Right,
the city is at long last seeing to the interests
of its tax paying residents, and they deserve credit for that,
even if they would like you to think that they
don't deserve credit for that. They're claiming, oh, it was
the Supreme Court ruling that caused all this. It was
not you guys were able to issue these citations and
make arrest but you refused. It was only in the
run up to an election, and then a new mayor
who ran on a platform of cleaning up the homelessness,
who won, and now he's cleaning up homelessness. It is
a choice, all right. So you've heard me talk about
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five three three seventy six thirty seven Extension two O
seven for the details. Here's another story from San Francico,
John Sexton writing at howdair dot com, quoting a piece
from the San Francisco Chronicle at Times that last week
San Francisco Center, which is the city's largest mall, lost
another half dozen food joints in the food court. That
is never a good sign when you can't like when
you can't keep your food court full, that's not good.
This follows the closure of eight other stores in the
last few months. So the food court just lost Jamba Juice,
a sandwich shop called Izzy, and wukes Miha Coachinita Taco shop,
My Savory hot Dogs Mai Savory, not my savory hot dogs,
but may I my savory hot dogs anyway, fires of
Brazil Barbecue, as well as Blondie's Pizza all closed. Kitchen
equipment was gone from all the food stands and only
a handful of restaurants remained. Food traffic was anemic or sorry.
Foot traffic was anemic, with many areas seeing more yellow
suited security guards and store works than shoppers. Now, the
biggest news there to me was that they actually have
security guards at the mall. So anyway, well over half
of the mall, which spans one point five million square
feet of retail end offices, so half of that, more
than half of that space, is vacant Sexton Rights. At
this point, it is clear to everybody, including the remaining tenants,
that the mall is going to close for good, probably
any month.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Whatever comes next isn't clear. There's an architectural firm that
created some drawings of the space that's transformed into a
mixed use outdoor area. But that would mean you've got
to demolish most of the current building and start all
over again, and that would take years to do and
be prohibitively expensive. Other suggestions, which were floated two years
ago by the city's former mayor, have included turning the
space into a soccer stadium, but again, the cost and
time to build it would be significant. So I was thinking,
because you know me, I am all about solutions, right,
That's what we do here between noon and three. We
solve the world's problems. Pretty good track record of it,
i'd like to think. So I would suggest that you
turn the mall into the only permitted homeless camp and
open air drug market obviously, like just lean into this,
you know, and you create the one place everybody will
go there. They got shelter, I mean, they're not gonna
have anything else, but they're gonna have shelter, and I
guess there'll be some running water and such and yeah,
so I mean nobody else is using it at this point,
so might as well. There's a guy quoted in the
San Francisco Chronicle. His name is Mark Steiner. He's the
founding moderator of a Reddit forum that follows dead malls,
which look, everybody's got to have a hobby here. But
he said he could not think of any other shopping
center that died quite as fast as San Francisco Center.
He said, even in cities that have been hit hard economically,
the retail usually hangs on longer than this. For a
property this size in a major market, it's pretty unprecedented
in my experience. As the mall emptied out, some of
the tenants who stayed privately reported increased concerns about shoplifting
and violent incidents from homeless people who wandered inside. You'll
recall American Eagle. This was way before this was in
twenty twenty three, so way before they started doing the
Nazi eugenic ads with Sidney Sweeney. American Eagle sued the
mall operator, complaining of select and safety problems, and then
it closed its location the following year. And now word
about bed baff and Beyond and they're saying no beyond.
If Beyond is in California, I will give you details
in a moment. First, let's get stand on. Hello, Stan,
welcome to the program.
Speaker 2: Okay, So, based on everything you're talking about about all
of the companies, the people moving because of safety, and
what Donald Trump is doing to Washington, DC, I tried
to look up the opposite and look, go, okay, we'll
all the safety cities in the world, and I found
this about basically Abu Dhavi and UAE so here. But
then you go down to the bottom of the list
and there's this thing that says factors contributing to safety,
and the UAE's reputation for safety is attributed to several factors,
including stringent immigration policies, regular police patrols, and a robust
emergency response system.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they also I think they also don't allow women
to drive, right, isn't that?
Speaker 2: I mean I think that, Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2: But the thing about it is if you if you
choose to have undocumented people living in your country, and
you defund the police and the and the emergency response system,
you're not going to have safety correct, and people will
flee and they will move. And so when you say
it's a choice, these cities are choosing to fix it.
So that normal. Everyday people live in unsafe conditions. Correct,
it's a choice they're making. Correct.
Speaker 1: And the people who keep electing them based on virtue
signaling suicidal empathy, they they are making that choice too.
They're there. They are voting for the form of their
own destruction. Yes, yep, yeah, Stan, I appreciate the call, sir.
All right, take care. It's you may recall Bedbath and beyond.
They went into bankruptcy protection. Remember that. I don't remember
how long ago it's been within like, I don't know,
within the last two years or so. And I did
not know this, but apparently the guy who took it
over is Marcus Lamonis. Do you know who that is?
He is the CEO of Camping World, and he was
the guy who did the profit on CNBC. He would
go in and help revitalize small businesses and it was
a TV show ran for I don't know five or
six seasons. I enjoyed it. It was very good. So
he's the CEO and he laid the SmackDown on California.
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So uh, I will full disclosure. Christy and I we
loved watching the profit. The earlier seasons were the best.
And he had this thing, Marcus Lamonish, the CEO of
Camping World, and he had this deal this saying this phrase,
like he would go in, he would look at the
business and he said, like he's all, it was a people,
product and process I think is what it was. And
they were small businesses and they were struggling, and he
would come in and he would get a complete, you know,
read on what the business is doing, and then he
would offer them a check and he would structure them
a deal where he said, like, I'm going to give
you this check for you know, ten percent of your business,
fifty percent of your business, whatever it is. But I'm
a one hundred percent in charge. That was what he
always said. And then he would go in there and
he would just lay waste to the inefficiencies, right, he
would focus them on the things that are working, discard
the things that aren't working, do a better brand management,
like all these different things. And he focused a lot on.
He did a lot of restaurants. He did a big
restaurant in South Carolina, I want to say it was
right off of I ninety five, and he hung up
this massive American flag. And he has done this at
Camping World locations too. And remember he got into trouble
with one of the locations here in the Charlotte area
because the town council was like, you can't fly that
American flag. It's too big, and he was like, well,
you can find me. I'm going to keep it up.
And then they got into this big whizzing match over it,
and eventually I think the town caved. That's his thing, though,
he's because he's he was adopted. He was born in Lebanon,
but he was adopted by I want to say it
was a Greek fan in America. And his I think
his father owned like a car dealership down in Florida
or something. And so he's, you know, entrepreneur, a business guy,
and like really focused on small businesses, really loves business. Now.
He also had some choice words for Trump and Trump
supporters back in I think twenty fifteen or so. That
was very disappointing. But he seems his fever, his TDS
fever seems to have broken a while ago. So look,
I don't hold that against him. I think he's done
a lot of really good work for a lot of businesses,
a lot of small businesses, over the years. And apparently
I did not know this, but apparently he has come
in to help save and bring back Bedbath and Beyond,
which went bankrupt. So he put out a statement today.
Well I'll read the statement in a moment. Here's what
he tweeted. With the statement, he said, we will not
open retail stores in California. This is not about politics,
it's about reality. In fact, by the way, Marcus Lamonis,
I believe ran for Congress back in maybe like the
nineties or something. He didn't win, but and he ran
as a Democrat down in Florida. So this is hardly
some right winger. Okay, it's not about politics, it's about reality.
California's system makes it nearly impossible for businesses to succeed,
and I won't put our company, our employees, or our
customers in that position. And so here is the statement.
I don't know what precipitated this, what prompted him to
put the statement out, but he says we will not
open or operate retail stores in California. This decision is
not about politics, it's about reality. California has created one
of the most over regulated, expensive and risky environments for
businesses in America. It's a system that makes it harder
to employ people, harder to keep doors open, and harder
to deliver value to customers. The result higher taxes, higher fees,
higher wages that many businesses simply cannot sustain, and endless
regulations that strangle growth even when the state announces a
budget surplus. It's built on the backs of ordinary citizens
who are paying too much and businesses who are squeezed
until they break. At Bedbath and Beyond, our responsibility is
to our customers and our shareholders. We will not participate
in a system that undermines both. Instead, we are investing
in a California strategy that works twenty four to forty
eight hour delivery and in many cases, same day service.
Californians will continue to get the products they love through
Bedbathenbeyond dot Com, but without the inflated costs created by
an unsustainable model. We're taking a stand because it's time
for common sense. Businesses deserve the chance to succeed. Employees
deserve that oh sorry, employees deserve jobs that last, and
customers deserve fair prices. California system delivers the opposite. That's
why Bedbath and Beyond will serve California customers directly through
Bedbathanbeyond dot com, on our terms and with their best
interests at heart. Okay, So that was the statement from
Marcus lamonas he is the executive chairman of Bedbath and Beyond.
So I'm not sure if you're aware of this, well
you should because I mentioned it earlier in the program.
But the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, he has apparently
employed some punks to run his Twitter account where he's
been trolling Donald Trump, pretending to be Donald Trump, like,
you know, typing in all caps. You heard Jim Comey
reference it as well. He thinks it's all hilarious, you know.
And so these people are the kids that are running
this account. Their echo chamber is telling them that they're
doing fine. Just tweet through it, you know. And the
right in the maga world is just like, dude, you're
not Donald Trump. Nobody can be Donald Trump. Have you
learned nothing in the last ten years? There's only one
Donald Trump. So they saw this statement and they put
out a tweet in response, three words bleep you by.
That was their response to a business leader, a well
known public figure, Marcus Lamonis. At that right, the guy
knows how to get media coverage. And your response, as
I mean, when you're the governor of the state. Yes,
you're supposed to be the chief executive in all of that,
which he doesn't do very well, but you're also supposed
to be sort of like the head cheerleader for the state.
You know, you're supposed to help bring businesses to the state,
attract and retain them, economic development stuff, and you're your
little daycare comms shop just told this guy blape you by, Like,
I don't think I don't think that's the best thing
to say, particularly given the data we have of the
people and businesses that are fleeing your state already. We
want you anyway. You did it to Hollywood. You drove
Hollywood out right. They're filming in Bulgaria, right, they can't
make it a go there. They deleted that post instead,
they put up another one. After their bankruptcy and closure
of every store. Like most Americans, we thought Bedbeth and
Beyond no longer existed. We wish them well in their
efforts to become relevant again as they try to open
a second store. This guy took over the company and
is trying to bring it out of bankruptcy with an overhaul,
like he's trying to save a business and a brand
and jobs. And by the way, he says, they've got
stores in every state. Just tweet through at kids. You're
doing fine, all right, if you're listening to this show.
You know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too. And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app and it's a website, and it combines news
from around the world in one place, so you can
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ground News a few months ago and more recently chose
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me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. So here's the thing. Steven Miller points this out.
He's a writer at The Spectator. Gavin Newsom is counting
on being elected president based on his personality alone, and
that is the strategy behind the weird online press account
because he is weird. That is Gavin Newsom. These kids
keep doing what they're doing because he thinks this is
a good idea. This is who he is, This is
his personality, and that's all you got to run on
because he can run on a record. My gosh, I mean,
Ron DeSantis gut him like a fish during that debate
when they were going over the Florida versus California records.
So that's why this stuff seems so weird. Let me
go to the text line regarding this hour's topics.
Speaker 2: To do.
Speaker 1: Anonymous person says, regarding my brilliant idea to turn the
San Francisco Center mall one and a half million square feet.
The mall is probably going to be closing in a
couple months because all the businesses are leaving it because
of all the crime and homelessness. And I said, just
turn it into like the only missible homeless encampment. You
just have everybody gathered there. And this is a very
good idea. You could bathe in the mall fountain. That's
a that's a very good point. In fact, what we
could also do now that I'm thinking about it, is
we could stock much like it's a it's taking a
play out of the Zoron Mamdani playbook, you know, where
he's like, oh, we'll just have government run grocery stores,
because who doesn't love a good breadline. So let's, uh,
let's take that idea and we'll stock stores with you know, uh,
large flat screen TVs, jewelry, right, just stuff that looters
like to loot, you know, Like we just make a
looting store and then you could go in, like you
can bust down the front door, you can steal a
bunch of stuff, and then the government will come in
and replenish the supply and then just let people keep,
you know, stealing stuff out of those stores in the mall.
There won't really be any they're not real stores, right.
You could have like some some big walls, you know
where like they wall up the stores like a part
in our mess. We're under construction here we grow again
or something. But instead of putting those signs up, you
just allow people to tag at like free Palestine and
kill all the Jews stuff like that, you know that
they're very fond of doing, or ice, defund the police
and defund ice, abolish ice.
Speaker 2: All of that.
Speaker 1: Just like it would be just sort of like a
one stop shop for the leftists, right they can get
all of their aggression out, and then it protects the
rest of the city for the people who aren't insane,
if there are any left in San Francisco. Here's another
anonymous person look at the story of the White Plains
Galleria mall in New York, where Westchester County would drop
off the homeless at six am every morning, and ultimately
one of them decided to cut the throat of a
woman walking to her car in the garage. Probably twenty
nine twenty ten timeframe. The mall just closed last year.
Scott says, the CEO of Camping World bought Gander Mountain
and reopened some stores as Gander out Doors, and then
he said Trump supporters weren't welcome, and so we didn't
go until the stor's closing sales and then we picked
their bones. Right, So that was what I remember Marcus
Lamona's making the comments about Trump's supporters back then. That
was several years ago. I have not heard him say
anything else about Trump's supporter since, so I'm thinking he
learned his lesson, but I don't know. Oh, and then
there's Yes, there's this story too. I did see this story. Well,
hang on, before I get to that story. Maybe Gavin
should profess his love for Taylor Swift as Jim call
Me did. Then they can have a public fight over
who she means more to I've been to more shows. Okay,
I did see the story. Yes, the web Space telescope
has spotted a new tiny moon orbiting Uranus. It appears
to be six miles wide. This tiny moon does which honestly,
nobody should be really surprised by a moon around Uranus.
That's where the moon is right. Come on, scientists think
that this little moon was able to hide out for
so long, even eluding the Voyager two spacecraft during its flyby,
which occurred about forty years ago. Because it's small and
it's faintness, I don't know what. I guess you can't
really see it so well. But also Uranus has twenty
eight known moons, so this is now the twenty ninth
known moon, which is interesting because I kind of feel
like you would know it if you saw moon. All right,
that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
for listening. I could not do the show without your
support and the support of the businesses that advertise on
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dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening,
and don't break anything while I'm gone.