San Francisco vs. Miami

 Telegraph:

The question facing the public in the upcoming US Presidential race is: do they want all of America to become like San Francisco?

The city has become a political battleground, with three leading contenders for 2024 having visited in the last few days, namely Joe Biden, Ron DeSantis and Robert Kennedy Jnr.

Once an icon of American innovation, wealth and beauty, today the city is better known for its excessive liberalism. While shooting a documentary in San Francisco for The Telegraph, in the last few days I’ve witnessed hordes of homeless drug addicts roaming the streets.

Needles litter the pavements, around every corner junkies sit slumped in a daze or lie in the road, and there are almost no police in sight. It’s strange to think that one of America’s most iconic movie cops, the uncompromising Dirty Harry, was supposed to be a San Francisco Police Department officer.

A recent study by the University of California San Francisco found 50 per cent of America’s unsheltered population live in the state, despite California only making up 12 per cent of Americans. Officials estimate that last year 20,000 people experienced homelessness at some point in San Francisco.

The ultra-liberal politicians who run the city value virtue signalling over fighting crime or drug abuses.

Both Ron DeSantis and Robert F Kennedy Jnr, the populist Democrat candidate, have pointed out the scale of suffering in San Francisco in campaign videos standing by homeless encampments recording pieces to camera; the former blamed the chaos on leftist policies and the latter chose to focus on excessive funding devoted to foreign wars.

Meanwhile President Biden sat down with AI experts and researchers in the plush Fairmont hotel. It is highly likely Biden’s motorcade drove past a scene of devastation on his way to the hotel, which sits just a few blocks away from hotspots of lawlessness and tent cities.

If the ageing Biden does step aside from the 2024 race – after all he would be 86 at the end of his potential second term – the two most likely Democratic candidates are both from California.

Biden’s Vice President, Kamala Harris served as the District Attorney for San Francisco. Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California and a rising star in the Democratic party, was also elected in the now-infamous city, serving as its mayor from 2004 until 2011.

Newsom has been on the offensive this week, going head to head with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a combative interview. He described the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from California in the last few years to red states such as Texas and Florida as “anomalous”.

While California is the home of two Democratic presidential frontrunners (excluding Biden) Florida is the home of the two most-likely Republican nominees.

Florida represents the alternative vision of America. It has a long history of taking in refugees from failed socialist states: quite apart from Californians in recent times, Miami has always been popular with Cubans escaping from Castro. It really is the perfect counterbalance to San Francisco.

The city, which unusually for a major American conurbation has a Republican mayor, has successfully reinvented itself as a leader in cryptocurrency and tech investment. Miami may soon replace Silicon Valley as the place the world thinks of as an upcoming, exciting place on the forefront of technological innovation. Miami doesn’t have a significant homeless population. In fact the whole of Florida has just 25,000 homeless people, compared with California’s 172,000.
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Florida and Texas are two of the better-run states and they are the destinations of people leaving failed liberal states like California and New York. It is sad to see what liberals have done to once-great places like California and New York.  I used to have to go to San Francisco and New York City on business trips several years ago and they were interesting places before their demise into liberalism.  Miami and Houston are now growing destination cities.