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Michael Shellenberger

Victory! San Francisco Mayor Promises Crackdown on Drug Dealing & Crime

Published

4 years ago

19 minute read

London Breed says city must be “less tolerant of all the bulls**t that has destroyed our city,” and demands more money for cops

San Francisco Mayor London Breed announcing a police crackdown on crime and drug dealing

After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the Police,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed announced $120 million in cuts to the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. A spokesperson for the police officers’ union warned the cuts “could impact our ability to respond to emergencies,” but the police chief assured the public that the cuts “will not diminish our ability to provide essential services.”

Yesterday, Breed reversed herself in dramatic fashion, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money for the police to support a crackdown on crime, including open air drug dealing, car break-ins, and retail theft. The plan contains much of what the California Peace Coalition, which Environmental Progress and I cofounded last spring, has been demanding, including in a series of protests by parents of homeless addicts, parents of children killed by fentanyl, and recovering addicts.

San Francisco Mayor Breed and other San Francisco politicians have for years promised to crack down on drug dealing and crime, and things have only grown worse over, so skepticism is merited. Already, progressives in San Francisco have denounced Mayor Breed’s plan, which she announced with the support of just two members of the city’s 11 Board of Supervisors, and without the apparent support of the city’s District Attorney.

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But there’s good reason for hope. Breed’s plan lays out big goals and makes very specific promises, including more funding for police. There will be a recall election next June of San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin which many political experts believe will succeed. And the progressive Supervisor who represents the Tenderloin, the neighborhood with most of city’s open drug scene, is running for state assembly, creating a leadership vacuum and opportunity for Breed.

More importantly, Breed’s speech has the potential to change the conversation about crime. Breed explicitly embraced “tough love,” which is a very different philosophy from Woke victimology, which divides the world into victims and oppressors and demands that victims, a category that includes street addicts and criminals, only be given things, from cash and clean needles to their own apartment with butler service, and not be held accountable for their actions.

“I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances,” said Breed. “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law…Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference…. I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

Breed punctuated her emotional speech with an explicative. “It is time for the reign of criminals to end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when are more aggressive with law enforcement and less tolerant of all the bulls**t that has destroyed our city.”

Why is that? What explains Breed’s 180 degree reversal in less than 18 months? And what will determine whether she keeps her promise?

Murder, Looting, and Drug Deaths

The main reason for Breed’s turnabout is skyrocketing crime. A report released yesterday by San Francisco’s Public Policy Institute of California concluded that homicides increased in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, and San Francisco by 17% in 2021. Property crimes in those four cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021, reaching 25,000 total in October. Two-thirds of increase is due to larcenies, mainly car break-ins (by 21%) and vehicle thefts (by 10%).

PPIC stresses that property and violent crimes are lower than historic levels, but business leaders and residents have told me for two years that they often do not report many crimes. And the rate of arrest has declined significantly for many crimes. In 2019, 40% of all shoplifting reports resulted in arrest; in 2021, only 19% did. San Francisco’s progressive D.A. charged just 46% of theft arrests, a 16 point decline since he took office in 2020, and charged just 35% of petty theft arrests, a 23 point decline from two years ago.

In November, San Francisco was the first of several progressive cities hit by smash-and-grab mobs of thieves, sometimes as many as 80 in a group. Video from the San Francisco looting of Louis Vuitton shows criminals walking casually out of the store, goods in hand. In response, many of San Francisco’s luxury stores in its Union Square shopping district boarded up their windows, making the area resemble a blighted neighborhood in Detroit, and embarrassing city leaders.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s open drug scene contributed to three times more deaths from illicit drugs than covid last year, and has degraded the low-income historically black Tenderloin neighborhood. San Francisco could shut the open drug scene down like European cities did but has instead refused to mandate proven medical treatment to drug addicts. San Francisco’s progressive leaders have effectively been overseeing a radical social experiment, one that killed more African Americans last year alone than the entire Tuskegee syphilis experiment killed over 40 years.

Breed has been personally impacted by addiction and crime. Both Breed’s sister and brother struggled with addiction while growing up in public housing in San Francisco. Her sister died of a drug overdose and her brother is in prison for armed robbery. “I am not for playing games with my life when it comes to politics,” she told an interviewer. “I’ve been in that community, working in the trenches, dealing with the public safety issues, dealing with those things because my people are the ones getting left behind at the end of the day.”

But Breed also had to be pushed. In May, I helped Jacqui Berlinn, a mother of a homeless fentanyl addict, organize the first-ever protest of open drug dealing in the Tenderloin, which generated national and local headlines and local TV coverage.

A few months later, Berlinn and I co-founded, with parents of children killed by fentanyl, recovering addicts, and community leaders, a new state-wide group, the California Peace Coalition, to demand the enforcement of laws against open drug dealing, mandatory treatment for addicts who break the law, and a state takeover of psychiatric and addiction care.

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Then, in early November, over 200 mostly poor and working class people in the Tenderloin protested a 161% increase in violence in the neighborhood between 2020 and 2021, and open drug dealing, in march on City Hall. Part of their motivation was a brutal attack on an 11-year-old girl while she was walking to school. The day before, a 61-year-old man was shot while sitting in a donut shop. Two weeks later, a half a dozen gunmen fired 30 and 40 rounds at each other, sending bystanders running in chaos.

Breed put their voices at the heart of her announcement. “Last week, I met with a group of families from the TL [Tenderloin],” she wrote. “I was told about drug dealers threatening grandmothers. About mid-day shootings near a park where a single mother brings her toddler after school. About assaults on the street…. We need to take back our Tenderloin.”

The response to Breed’s remarks from parents and residents was overwhelmingly positive. “I can’t express how happy this makes me,” tweeted Berlinn. Tom Wolff, a formerly homeless drug addict who is on the city’s Drug Dealing Task Force, said, “I’m really happy to hear the mayor take a tougher approach on this. We can’t arrest our way out of everything, but there needs to be some target specific enforcement.”

Michelle Tandler, a San Francisco native whose photos of boarded up Union Square stores went viral, said, “I’ve been observing Mayor Breed for many years now and have to say, I think this was her greatest speech to-date. Mayor Breed took a stand for what is right. I haven’t seen her this impassioned since her inauguration a few years back.”

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Seizing the Momentum

Breed’s speech puts pressure on progressive San Francisco supervisors and the District Attorney to shut down the open drug scene in the Tenderloin.

When he ran for office in 2018, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin called “open-air drug use and drug sales… technically victimless crimes.” When Boudin announced that he was not going to prosecute street-level drug dealers he said it was because they are “themselves [are] victims of human trafficking.”

But, after the looting of Louis Vuitton, Boudin struck a more tough-on-crime tone. “I’m outraged by the looting in Union Square last night” Boudin tweeted. “We are seeing similar crimes across the country. I have a simple message: don’t bring that noise to our City.”

But standing up for luxury stores is different from shutting down open drug scenes. “Boudin made a very strong statement after the [flash mob] theft of Louis Vuitton,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “But I want a DA who is the most worried about the poorest residents and less about Louis Vuitton.”

Other politicians are responding to the crime wave. California Attorney General Rob Bonta promised “more resources” for investigating retail theft. And the Mayor of Oakland, which will have record homicides this year, has demanded more funding for the police, and asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to finally implement technology that would allow police to read license plates on state highways to catch criminals.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said he viewed Breed’s announcement as vindication for what he has been advocating. “Californians are tolerant, but we don’t tolerate brazen crime and dangerous streets,” he said. ”It should not even be a question as to whether or not the open drug markets should be shut down — I’ve been saying for years: if you let people live and do drugs on the streets, you’re condemning them to die on the streets. I enforced this as Mayor of San Diego and it must be enforced throughout California.”

Former Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, a former Republican running for California Attorney General as an independent, praised Breed and used her announcement to attack Attorney General Bonta as soft-on-crime. “Bravo to London Breed,” Schubert tweeted, “and her commitment to cracking down on crime and open air drug usage. Breed has laid out common sense strategies that Rob Bonta clearly disagrees with. San Franciscans deserve better than an Attorney General who won’t listen to local officials about common sense public safety measures.”

Breed’s announcement come days after former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter attacked progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner for dismissing the city’s record high homicides, and several weeks after Seattle voters, of whom less than 10 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020, elected a Republican as the city’s State Attorney in response to rising crime. “I don’t think we can overestimate the influence of the city of Seattle voting 8% for Donald Trump one year ago and voting 55% for a Republican city attorney who had a law and order platform in this year’s election,” said Humphreys.

In the end, shutting down the city’s open drug scenes is crucial to ending drug deaths and the chaos that plagues the city. “It is an entirely fixable problem,” said Humphreys, “as many cities have shown. There will still be drug use and addiction in San Francisco. But harm reduction requires closing down open air drug scenes. Every city in America has drug problems. They do not all have a drug scene like San Francisco.”

Humphreys emphasized, as did the authors of a study of how five European cities closed open drug scenes, that coordination between homeless service providers and police officers is crucial. The head of one of them, Urban Alchemy, Lena Miller, said, in response to Breed’s announcement, “We are relieved. The problem wasn’t created overnight and solving it will take time. But we very happy and looking forward to everyone coming off the sidelines to solve this.”

For Humphreys, citing the European model, “Harm reduction is not a fantasy about a drug-free society, which we’re never going to have. It’s trying to minimize the damage that drugs do. Closing down open drug markets is going to have huge gains for people, particularly in the Tenderloin, but more broadly in the city.”

Breed announcement may help change how Americans think about drugs. While it may not be possible to halt drug from coming into the U.S., it is possible to shut down open drug scenes, and mandate treatment for those who need it.

“The public is wanting some action here and she’s going to try to deliver it,” said Humphreys. “I think her announcement will resonate in some of these other cities, too, and give courage. I admire the mayor for taking a political risk on behalf of the least powerful people in the city.”

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Crime

“This is a total fucking disaster”

Published on July 8, 2025

By

Michael Shellenberger's avatar Michael Shellenberger and  Alex Gutentag's avatar Alex Gutentag

Congress must demand, and the Trump administration must provide, the Epstein Files and seek transparency and reform of the Intelligence Community

The idea that America is ruled by a secret government of deep state intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI is a right-wing conspiracy theory, the media has said for the last decade. Journalists at outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR have portrayed claims about a “deep state” as paranoid fabrications pushed by Donald Trump and his supporters to discredit legitimate government institutions. They insisted that accusations of political bias or covert influence by agencies like the CIA or FBI had no basis in fact and served only to inflame public distrust.

And yet over the same period, investigative reporting, including by the two of us, and official disclosures revealed that these agencies interfered in domestic politics in ways that aligned with that very narrative. The FBI launched a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign based on unverified opposition research. Dozens of former intelligence officials falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story bore the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation, just weeks before the 2020 election. The Department of Homeland Security, along with the FBI and other agencies, coordinated with social media platforms to suppress speech under the banner of combating “misinformation.” These actions, taken together, suggest not a shadowy cabal, but a real and expanding infrastructure of state-aligned influence aimed at shaping public perception and countering populist dissent, just as the so-called conspiracy theorists claimed.

The strongest argument against the existence of a secret government run by the deep state was the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. If agencies like the CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security truly exercised covert and unchecked control over American politics, it is difficult to explain how their most outspoken critic, and avowed enemy, returned to power. Trump did not merely criticize the intelligence community; he ran on a platform promising its reform. He vowed to purge partisan operatives, dismantle what he called politically weaponized agencies, and hold officials accountable for a pattern of lawless interference. And despite his direct confrontation with the national security establishment, Trump defeated Kamala Harris decisively, winning 312 electoral votes and a narrow popular vote majority.

But now the Trump administration is attempting to sweep the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal under the rug, with the Justice Department claiming that there is no client list and that no further disclosure is warranted, even though Attorney General Pam Bondi explicitly stated publicly that there were “tens of thousands of videos” which means the ability to identify the individuals involved in sex with minors, and that anyone in the Epstein files who tries to keep their name private has “no legal basis to do so.”

On April 28, 2025, in a candid off-the-record exchange caught on video, Bondi told a bystander, “There are tens of thousands of videos… and it’s all with little kids.” She later reiterated on May 7 that these were “videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”

Bondi’s comments directly contradicted the official stance of the administration, which has dismissed calls for a client list and slowed efforts to release the full contents of the Epstein files. Despite Trump’s campaign promises to dismantle the deep state and hold elites accountable, his administration now appears to be protecting the same intelligence and law enforcement networks it once condemned.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi (L) and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Kash Patel arrive for a press conference to announce the results of Operation Restore Justice on May 7, 2025 in Washington, DC. During the operation, 205 arrests were made nationwide in five days in a joint effort with federal, state, and local partners to arrest accused child sex abuse offenders and combat child exploitation. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Strong evidence suggests that Epstein was part of a sex blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies. Visitor logs show that William Burns, who served as CIA Director under President Biden, visited Epstein’s New York townhouse multiple times. The Wall Street Journal reported those visits in 2023 based on Epstein’s private calendar. In 2017, Alex Acosta, the Justice Department official who gave Epstein his 2008 plea deal, told Trump transition officials that he was told to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” The Justice Department later admitted that all eleven months of Acosta’s emails from that period had disappeared.

This failure to follow through seriously undermines Trump’s explicit commitments to reform and shine light on the deep state. This is not just about Epstein. The Trump administration has not been particularly transparent about much else. The CIA, to its credit, released an internal evaluation last week admitting it had erred in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment by claiming that Russia “aspired to” help elect Trump. But it stood by the overall assessment, signaling the agency’s reluctance to admit fault, its continued defensiveness in the face of mounting evidence, and its impunity. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has disclosed a limited amount of information about intelligence community abuses during the pandemic, including the targeting of COVID vaccine dissenters as potential violent extremists. But beyond that, the Trump administration has released very little, even on issues where transparency would appear to be in its political interest. The administration has kept classified large volumes of material related to COVID origins, the FBI’s role in Russiagate, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and unidentified anomalous phenomena.

It is thus hard not to conclude that the intelligence community continues to operate in violation of the constitutional system of checks and balances by evading meaningful congressional oversight. The Constitution grants Congress the power and responsibility to oversee the executive branch, including intelligence agencies, through budgetary control, public hearings, and access to classified information. And yet the intelligence community is withholding and heavily redacting documents, delaying responses to lawful inquiries, and using national security classifications to avoid scrutiny.

This persistent obstruction undermines the legislative branch’s ability to hold agencies accountable and distorts the balance of power the framers designed. When unelected intelligence officials can withhold information not only from the public but from elected representatives, constitutional oversight becomes a formality rather than a functioning safeguard.

Few independent journalists have done more than we have to defend Donald Trump and the MAGA movement against the weaponization of the intelligence community and deep state agencies. Over the past two and a half years, we have published hundreds of investigative articles and testified before Congress about unconstitutional abuses of power by the CIA, FBI, DHS, and their proxies. We exposed efforts to censor Trump and his supporters through a sprawling Censorship Industrial Complex, documented the manipulation of the justice system to prosecute Trump on politicized grounds, and revealed how U.S. and foreign agencies coordinated mass surveillance of speech. We defended Trump from false and malicious claims, showed that his administration obeyed court orders, and disproved the narrative that he violated democratic norms more than Democrats. We were the first to report new evidence that President Obama’s CIA Director ordered spying on Trump campaign officials to justify surveillance and interfere in the 2016 election. After Trump’s reelection, we published investigations revealing abuses of power by USAID and the Department of Education. We editorialized in support of his lawful executive orders ending DEI and gender-affirming procedures for minors. We exposed the CIA and USAID’s role in supporting the 2019 impeachment effort and their connection to the Russia collusion hoax. In all this, we have consistently made the case that Trump’s victory was not just political, it was moral.

Given all we have done to expose the Censorship Industrial Complex and intelligence community abuses of power, Public’s readers rightly expect us to follow through on these concerns, no matter who holds office. We did not spend years documenting unconstitutional secrecy, surveillance, and coercion only to remain silent when the administration we defended begins to mirror the behavior we condemned. Our commitment is not to any one leader or party, but to the Constitution, to civil liberties, and to the principle that no government, Democratic or Republican, should be allowed to rule through secrecy, coercion, or fear.

To prove it is not simply the latest custodian of the deep state, the Trump administration must release the Epstein videos and related evidence, fully expose the scope of the sex trafficking and apparent IC blackmail operation, and ensure that every perpetrator, regardless of power or position, is held accountable under the law. It must also release the long-withheld files on COVID origins, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, January 6, unidentified aerial phenomena, and other topics. Even if these files do not reveal any “smoking guns,” the public has a right to full transparency. Only through this transparency can the credibility of the intelligence community be restored.

Congress must step up as well. Legislative leaders must hold public hearings on each of these issues, issue subpoenas if necessary, and demand full executive branch compliance with oversight. The Constitution grants Congress, not the intelligence agencies, the power to check secrecy, correct abuse, and uphold the rule of law.

These are not matters of political convenience but constitutional obligation. The American people have the right to know what their government has done in their name and against their rights. If the Trump administration fails to act, it will confirm the fear that even the most populist and combative president can be captured or neutralized by the very system he vowed to dismantle. And it will lose much of the legitimacy it gained by surviving and overcoming the lawfare, censorship, and weaponization of the deep state against it.

Many within the Trump administration acknowledge this and note that this is hardly the end of the Epstein affair.

“This is a total fucking disaster,” someone within the Intelligence Community told us this afternoon, as we were going to press with this editorial.

After we pointed out that the Attorney General said one thing and now the Justice Department, FBI Director, and Deputy FBI Director are all saying the opposite, the person said, “I hope you ask these questions. These are the questions that need to be asked. We’re in a time when information flows more freely. If people think that this is going to go away — I don’t see how it can.”

Nor, we would add, should it.

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Catherine Herridge

FBI imposed Hunter Biden laptop ‘gag order’ after employee accidentally confirmed authenticity: report

Published on April 6, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Two independent journalists found that the FBI could have set the record straight by confirming the laptop was real and the subject of an ongoing criminal probe. Instead, FBI leadership allowed the false narrative about the laptop to gain momentum.

In a shocking report published on X, independent journalists Catherine Herridge and Michael Shellenberger revealed that an FBI agent accidentally confirmed to Twitter (now known as “X”) that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real less than three weeks before the 2020 election.

“For the first time, and with a change of administration, the FBI has now turned over to GOP House investigators the internal chat messages that show Bureau leadership actively silenced its employees,” Herridge and Shellenberger wrote on X.

“The FBI, which had a special task force to counter foreign election interference, could have set the record straight by confirming the laptop was real and the subject of an ongoing criminal probe,” the journalists explained. “Instead, FBI leadership allowed the false narrative about the laptop to gain momentum.”

“In 2024, an FBI official admitted to House investigators that an FBI employee had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Twitter on a conference call the morning of October 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published a story about it,” Shellenberger wrote.

“I recall that when the question came up, an intelligence analyst assigned to the Criminal Investigative Division said something to the effect of, ‘Yes, the laptop is real,’” testified the then-Russia Unit Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in a closed-door transcribed interview,” according to Herridge and Shellenberger. “I believe it was an (Office of General Counsel) attorney assigned to the (Foreign Influence Task Force) stepped in and said, ‘We will not comment further on this topic.’”

They recounted this exchange:

An individual whose name is blacked out, tells Elvis M. Chan, the San Francisco-based FBI special agent tasked with interacting with social media companies, there was a “gag order” on discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In a separate exchange, Chan is told “official response no commen(t).”

In the chat, the FBI officials showed awareness that the laptop may have contained evidence of criminal activity.

Asked Chan, “actually what kind of case is the laptop thing? corruption? campaign financing?”

Another FBI employee responds, “CLOSE HOLD —” after which the response is redacted.

To which Chan responds, “oh crap,” appearing to underscore the serious nature of the probe, which included felony tax charges. Chan adds, “ok. It ends here.”

In the same conversation, Chan is asked if “anyone discussing that NYPost article on the Biden’s?”  Chan responds, “yes we are. c d confirmed an active investigation. No further comment.”  “C D” is likely shorthand for the FBI’s Criminal Division.

Said another FBI employee, whose name was redacted by the Bureau, “please do not discuss biden matter.”

It’s now common knowledge that national security agencies — including the FBI and CIA, Big Tech, and much of corporate media — colluded in suppressing truth and manufacturing lies in order to drag their preferred candidate, Joe Biden, across the finish line in the 2020 presidential election.

Incriminating evidence discovered on the laptop that Hunter Biden had long ago abandoned at a computer repair shop — reported on in two devastating pieces by the New York Post at the time — was ignored by mainstream media, fraudulently dismissed by former national intelligence officials, and essentially made inaccessible to the public by Big Tech social media sites Twitter and Facebook.

The computer contained emails showing that then-Vice President Biden had come under the influence of bad actors in Ukraine and Communist China and had used his powerful position in the Obama administration to pressure government Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the energy firm, Burisma, which was paying the younger Biden $50,000 per month to sit on its board of directors.

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