San Fran chooses to clean up homeless; BB&B blows off CA (08-20-2025--Hour3)

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 want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your 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 Creative Video for almost a year. But did you know they also offer a game changing app for businesses that reward their teams with incentive trips. Well they do. It's called Incentive Trip Kit. If you want a business or work at one that offers these incentive trips, this is a must have. It maximizes the impact and value of these motivational trips. It's a super easy to use app built just for your group, with private messaging, shared photos, important trip documents, even a find the group locator just in case somebody gets separated. And when I say it's private, I mean it. No personal email, no phone numbers, no ads, no account sign ups. Everyone uses one shared login, so it's super easy, no hassles. During the trip, everybody can post their best photos and short video clips, and folks back at the office can even follow along. And then after the trip, incentive trip Kit turns those memories into a professional storytelling video you can use to motivate, inspire, and get people fired up for next year's trip. More fun, more memories, more ROI check it out now at incentive tripkit dot com or call Eric at eight eight eight 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. Now. 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. 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. Yeah, they also I think they also don't allow women to drive, right, isn't that? I mean I think that, Yeah, I guess. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. 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. 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. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getting in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the Mountain and Cabins of Ashville is your connection. 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Call or text A two eight, three, six, seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at cabins of Aashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. 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 compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot Ground, dot News slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. 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. To do. 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. All of that. 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 the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.