https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/california-apocalypto/#slide-1
California, as some of the Democratic primary candidates bragged last year, is the progressive model of the future: a once-innovative rich state that is now a civilization in near ruins. The nation should watch us this election year and learn of its possible future.
After one of the primary debates in late 2019, I drove to San Francisco. On checking into the hotel, I was reminded (off the record) by the officious hotel doorman of the city’s Third World protocols:
1) Do not park your car on the street, because it most surely will have its windows smashed and its contents stolen, and the police will either not respond if called or the city would not prosecute the criminal if arrested.
2) Check the soles of your shoes before entering the hotel lobby to ensure that human feces or needle remnants are not stuck to the bottoms.
3) Do not offer food/money/“help” if walking along nearby homeless corridors, given the uncertain and possibly violent reaction that such outreach might incur.
As he warned me, I kept thinking of scenes in the Hitchcock films of a 1950s San Francisco with streets that were clean and safe, with people polite and mannered. No doubt that world is written off now as racist and exploitive by the morally superior San Francisco of the woke, who 60 years later have created their own wasteland and called it civilization. Once-successful civilizations implode not only from moral laxity, debt, inflation, and luxury, but also from a sort of psychological stasis by which the bureaucracy would rather die in place as it is than change and survive.
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
August 25, 2020 6:30 AM
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