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Hello and welcome to another episode of TGIF. My name is Nellie Bowles, and I'm back again to siphon this week's news out of a gas tank. And here again is my co-host, the reporter and the host of Blocked and Reported podcast, Katie Herzog. Hello, Katie. Hi, Nellie. Always good to talk to my billionaire friends. Yeah.
You're a real jerk. I'll sell you one glass of water if you're really, really well behaved. Okay, so now let's get to the news. Pro-abortion supporters firebombed a pro-life Christian pregnancy center yesterday near Buffalo, New York. The center suffered significant damage with much of the interior of the building burned and destroyed. Pro-life centers around the country continue to be firebombed with
with very little media fanfare. Bro Life centers have been targeted in six other states and Washington, D.C. The January 6th committee keeps trying and very much failing to get people's attention. I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit. And, you know, I didn't want to be a part of it. And that's one of the reasons that went into me deciding to leave when I did.
But the big story, yet again, is inflation. We thought we could say it peaked last month. It did not. It was up 8.3% in April, 8.6% for the month of May. That matches the all-time high in this cycle. This week, inflation hit 8.6%.
the fastest annual pace increase in 40 years. American households are now paying $460 more every month to buy the same things they did last year. I understand Americans are anxious, and their anxious is a good reason. Long gone are the days when the Biden administration could call all this inflation, quote, transitory. Officially, this inflation is what the professionals call broad-based. That means it's everywhere. Gas prices are at all-time historic highs, up 50% from a year ago.
Rents are at all-time historic highs, with the national average hitting $2,000 a month. Grocery prices rose 12% in a year. Electricity prices are up. Airline prices are up. And what is down?
the stock market. The Dow Jones dropped more than 800 points a couple times during the day, ending down more than 900. Not only is the Dow off more than 2% right now, the S&P 500, which a lot of folks use as sort of a benchmark for their investments, now in a bear market, meaning that that index has fallen 20% from its recent high. Meanwhile, President Biden spoke this week to a federation of labor unions.
And here's what he said. Under my plan for the economy, we've made extraordinary progress. We've put America in a position to tackle a worldwide problem that's worse everywhere but here, inflation. This is not my fault. I'm doing everything in my power to blunt Putin's gas price hike. This is to be blamed on Putin and, of course, on Republicans. The problem is Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to
So stop my plans to bring down costs on ordinary families. That's why my plan is not finished and why the results aren't finished either. Elizabeth Warren has doubled down on her growing more absurd by the day claim. It's time to set the record straight. The stuff you hear in the news about price hikes at the grocery store or gas station is just plain wrong. Inflation is raging. Inflation is raging.
That the inflation has nothing to do with the huge amount of money the government flooded into the marketplace. No, no, no. This is a case of sudden-onset greed syndrome by American companies, who all decided en masse to jack up their prices because they could. But really, those things provide the perfect smokescreen for companies to hike their prices big time. And the American people?
they continue to not buy it. Eight in ten Americans say the economy's in bad shape, and consumer confidence today hit a new low. Meanwhile, the mainstream press would like you to know that things are actually great. Technically, the economy's doing pretty well right now. Did you know that? Because it's true.
More than 8 million new jobs have been created under Biden. More than 8 million. As the White House points out, the job market is the strongest today since the World War II era. And the Biden administration has seen the fastest decline in unemployment for any president. Any president. The reality is that the economy is doing fantastic. That's pretty significant. At least it normally would be. But you know, it's all about the vibes.
One common narrative across media and sort of blue checkmark Twitter folks is that complaints about 40-year high inflation for Americans are just those folks being confused. The economy feels off. We're also told, both by the Republicans and big segments of the media, that it is off. Data be damned. The argument from this group is that Americans are being flooded with miscarriages.
How do you deal with that level of misinformation? It's easy to say, oh, it's Republicans watching Fox. No, a plurality of Democrats think so too. Katie, you've been traveling around the country a lot over the past few months. You don't work a normal job. You're a professional podcaster. You just take road trips periodically as you please. Yeah.
What are the signs that you're seeing that this isn't just an imagined problem in Americans' minds? Well, where I see it besides the gas pump, which is obviously perhaps the most visible marker that something weird and bad is happening, is in restaurants, in food.
I had an $18 burrito the other day and it was just a normal burrito. And this was not in a city. This was in a small town in America. It was sort of shocking to me that somebody could wrap up some black beans and charge that much. But yes, this is something that obviously is happening. People can see it everywhere. I think besides gas,
the grocery store, rent. This is all so obvious and it feels like we're being gaslit when we were told that this isn't happening or that this isn't a big deal because it is obviously a huge deal. It doesn't matter how much wages are going up if you still can't afford groceries. Why do you have people like Mehdi Hassan, an MSNBC host,
saying that the American economy is actually doing great and this is just kind of misinformation and people being confused about how the economy works. You know, I mean, people like that, you can take certain metrics, right? If you look at the unemployment rate, things are, if that's all that you look at, the economy is doing fine. There aren't very many unemployed people right now. There's a labor shortage. Wages are up across different metrics. But if the cost of everything is up, it doesn't, you know, it's sort of a wash. Well,
The unemployment being low thing is really interesting because in a lot of ways it is great. People have to raise wages. Walmart doesn't have enough workers. They have to start paying people more. Yeah, Nellie, that's a good point. And I think this is an example of unintended consequences.
I am for people getting paid more. That is important. Minimum wage in this country has been too low for too long. I was for eviction moratoriums during the pandemic for a while. But of course, these things all have unintended consequences. And some of the unintended consequences are that
apples are expensive, bananas are expensive, gas is expensive, food is expensive, rent is expensive. And so I think that's something that people need to be more aware of and politicians need to recognize is that when they enact certain policies, there will be consequences that all of us will have to pay, even if on the surface they look good. Yeah, and I think we're all starting to see those consequences. Like, I...
I was excited about the COVID bailouts and all of that. Like, I think we did the right thing in a lot of ways then because we had to and we kept the economy from crashing. Yeah. And it's like we've all had too much ice cream. Now we're barfing it up. I'm going to listen to my story about a man named...
Poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed. Then one day he was shooting at some food. Up through the ground come a bubbling crew. Oh, that is... Okay, now let's drill down into gas prices. See what I did there? Drill down. Ha!
On the debate stage with Bernie Sanders back in the summer of 2020... Number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. Joe Biden said that if he were elected, there would be no more drilling. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends. Number one. And back then, many moderate Democrats and Republicans said, wait a minute, Joe Biden, this is sort of a zero-sum game.
This will lead to higher gas prices. And I kid you not, in response, the Washington Post ran a news article, not an op-ed, but an actual news item, calling the idea a, quote, dubious meme and saying it just wasn't true that gas prices would go up. Well, last year, Biden did shut down construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He halted drilling in a number of places around the country, just as he promised. And he did it again.
And as we've all seen, the Washington Post turned out to be the ones with the very dubious meme. And now Biden's attempting to reverse course. In an effort to lower gas prices, President Biden is responding to calls to boost U.S. oil production by reselling leases for drilling and public land. But the move breaks a campaign promise.
angering climate activists. His administration announced days ago that they would very much like the oil and gas industry to start drilling again. President Biden calling on U.S. oil companies to produce more gas and reduce prices. In a letter to seven oil companies, the president told them if they would, please work with the administration,
to boost supplies, lower the cost of refining, and thereby bring down prices at the pump. And they've put over 100,000 acres of public land up for lease to fossil fuel companies. So Katie, obviously there's a temptation to do the same thing with this that we've done with the Democrats' spending and say, hey guys, didn't you see this coming? How could you not have foreseen this?
Is that fair? Like, am I being too harsh on old Joe and his party? And are the rising gas prices something that no one could have predicted? I think it's much more complicated than just assigning blame to one old man or the other. We know it's one old man's fault. It's always an old man.
The idea of halting drilling on public lands, as somebody who is concerned about climate change but is also a conservationist in other ways, this is something that I supported. But of course, there are these unintended consequences. What I would like to see is longer-term thinking. Our politicians seem to only think...
until the next election. What they should be talking about, I think, is building more nuclear plants. Nuclear is very unpopular for lots of different reasons, but nuclear is actually efficient. It is expensive, yes, but it's efficient. It's unpopular because people are... Well, they're misinformed. People think that... They hear nuclear and they think...
Hiroshima. They also think of- They also don't want a lot of clean energy out there. They want the opposite. They want us to have to make our houses smaller and to- This is kind of my take on a lot of the environmentalist movement. The nuclear is too easy of an answer and allows things to just keep growing at even a more exponential rate instead of us all having to conserve and like-
use reusable totes to save the environment and things. Nuclear is like too easy. Well, sure, there are some people who are into degrowth who actually do want the economy to shrink. But I think there are also people, in part because of the environmental movement, who are under the impression that nuclear is more dangerous than it is. But if you look at the numbers...
Nuclear has killed way fewer people than the fossil fuel industry over time. It is way less destructive to the environment, even though we have had a couple of giant disastrous meltdowns. For the most part, nuclear is much safer. It's also very expensive. That's a problem.
but it's more reliable than things like wind and solar. But it is basically off the table. When we have the solution to the climate crisis and energy right here, the technology exists, and we are not building new plants. Bernie said when he was running, one of the reasons I didn't support Bernie was because he said that not only would he build no new nuclear plants, he was going to decommission the ones that already exist. You can't be an effective environmentalist and talk about decommissioning nuclear.
A lot of European countries have been pulling back from nuclear. And then with this war, they've all kind of either paused their pullback or announced that they're reversing course. Or they revert to coal because they're decommissioning nuclear. Which is insane. Like every day a coal plant is running, people are actually dying from that. It really shows you how fear takes over the brain, right? So...
There are these, you know, horrific, a couple of horrific accidents and people think that nuclear isn't safe. It's not true. All right. Enough about our crumbling economy. Let's talk about drag. Like a pretzel. Like a pretzel.
For those who aren't following the largely online discourse, drag queens have taken center stage in the culture war. What you are about to see is a full-on erotic drag queen show, complete with gyrations, tongue gymnastics, and a flashed g-string at a kids' public school talent show. Check this out. Because it turns out that some public schools around the country have hired drag queens to come and perform and talk with the students. ♪
Also, adding to that, it's Pride Month, and some parents are taking their kids to quote-unquote family-friendly drag shows at gay bars. This is the Drag the Kids to Pride event at Mr. and Mrs. in Dallas' Oaklawn neighborhood. Organizers promoted it as a family-friendly drag show where kids danced with the performers.
And videos have surfaced where some of these young kids are putting dollar bills into the underwear of grown men dressed as sexy, scandalous women. Of course, Libs of TikTok is a big player here, posting a video of a drag queen reportedly named, yes, Jizz, twerking on a stage in front of middle school kids. And shocker,
Parents don't love this. Tonight, there's drama over a drag show at Aikeny High School. It was a shock because nobody was notified. If they are watching a film that's maybe PG-13 rated or something like that, parents kind of have that option, you know, field trips, things like that. Parents are informed ahead of time. And while many, myself among them, are tempted to say...
Oh, it's just a handful of cases. It actually turns out this phenomenon is more widespread than you might think. And getting some funding behind it. The New York Post discovered that the city of New York has spent $200,000 on drag shows in city schools since 2018.
Of all the problems our schools have, of all the problems the students face, to spend $200,000 on drag shows, I completely get the frustration of people.
of parents who are reading that news. Yeah, I mean, why do kids in New York need to be seeing this in schools? It seems like New York City kids, they could see drag queens on any corner or any bar in their own homes. They should really be spending this money in places like Kansas where kids don't have access to drag. We need redistribution of drag queens. Equity, drag equity. Drag equity. No, it's true. I mean, the idea that New York City schools have spent $200,000 on drag shows, I...
I read this article like three times because I was convinced it was fake. It seems insane. I don't understand. Are they teaching? Are they janitors? Are they doing anything or are they just drag? They're just dragging. They're just being fun. They're just having a great time. Okay, solution. Let or make the teachers teach in drag, cut out the middleman, just spend the money on the teachers on the lessons and not the drag queens themselves. Well, I mean...
I don't understand, and maybe I'm just like really off from the culture right now, but I don't understand the need to make drag shows into a family-friendly, kid-friendly thing. Like to me, drag shows are sexy and fun, late night bar, like cool things. I don't want elementary school students in that setting with me.
And I don't get when that shifted. And it started with the story hours and all that. But where did this come from? Like, where did this shift come from? Yeah, I think you're right. It did come from the story hours, drag queen story hours. And frankly, that seems to me pretty innocuous or potentially pretty innocuous. I mean, drag is just sort of can be just sort of clownish with, you know, men dressed. It doesn't have to be sexual.
It doesn't have to be sexual, but we have seen events and Libs of TikTok has posted a lot of them where it does certainly cross the line into sexual. And this isn't just parents. Well, drag is better when it is a little sexual. Yeah. Yes. I think, yeah. I think drag is better when it's nowhere near me. But sure, some people enjoy it. I'm just not into the lip syncing. I find it dull.
But yes, my feeling about this is that drag can be innocuous. It can be clownish, but it can also be completely inappropriate. Schools are, I think, an inherently inappropriate place to have it. And if your drag act, if a woman, a female doing your drag act would be considered beyond the pale, then it shouldn't be acceptable when a man dressed like a woman does it either. But yes, I don't think that this is something that queer people and liberals should be pushing in part because...
Why? But also in part because there is real backlash here and the backlash is bleeding into homophobia in some cases. Yeah. This just seems like something that straight people are doing to sort of get themselves involved with gay culture. But like it didn't seem like there was a huge movement of drag queens who were like, we need to be in third grade classrooms doing our performance. Yeah.
Well, this has always been a debate about whether or not kids should be welcome at Pride. And I think it really does come down to parents. I don't think that adults should censor themselves during something like a Pride march just because kids are around. But I do think parents should think twice about taking their kids to events that just are not fundamentally for them. I mean, you grew up in San Francisco. I'm sure you saw plenty of drag on the streets. And I think it was good and healthy. And that's why you're gay. Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah, everyone should have the freedom to go to a drag show and bring their kids. And everyone should have the freedom to go to Pride and bring their kids. Of course. Like I plan on one day bringing my kids to Pride. 100%. There's a big difference though between that and using public funds and saying this is part of your school now. This is part of your class. Or this is part of like the public library curriculum now. Like I get it when people are like that seems like it crosses the line. In the same way a little bit that like
School prayer crosses a line. It also makes it, I think, kind of uncool. Like, drag used to be subversive, and now it's in the fucking library? Come on. Yes! It makes it so lame! Like, what are your kids gonna do to have fun later in life? They're not gonna do what they were doing. They're gonna get married and have children and be monogamous. That's how they're gonna rebel.
All right, we're going to take a quick ad break. And when we come back, some good news. And also, a quick chat about what happens when prosecutors in California decide not to prosecute. Don't go anywhere. Holly came from Miami, FLA. Hitchhiked her way across the USA. Plucked her eyebrows on the way. Shaved her legs and then he was a she. She says, hey, babe. Take a walk on the wild side.
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.
Okay, so now for some good news that starts with the bad news, which is we all know there's a housing crisis in America going on right now. It affects every major city, suburbs, small towns, all of us. And this and the fentanyl crisis around the country has added to a record number of people who are homeless right here in the wealthiest nation on earth. Anyone living in New York or L.A. or San Francisco or Portland has certainly seen this and seen the number of homeless on the streets rising.
But Houston, Texas has actually made remarkable progress in getting the homeless off the street by giving folks housing. Houston used to be on the worst list for homeless for cities across the country, but in the last decade, it's turned around. 25,000 people off the streets, moved into permanent housing, not shelters.
apartments, and homes. It helps that it's easy to build in Houston, which keeps housing costs reasonable for everyone. Houston has the second lowest cost of living of the country's 20 biggest cities. Katie, you're a reporter in a place where homelessness has been a problem for a long time, and that problem just keeps getting worse and worse. What do you make of what they're doing in Houston, and why is Texas better at this than New York or California or Washington?
You know, it's interesting. I think that there's a pretty simple reason for this. And even though places like New York, California and Washington have injected billions and billions every year into solving the homelessness crisis, those are all places where you have very strict zoning laws. Houston, Texas has basically no zoning. And there are some real downsides to that.
But when it comes to building, which is the thing that you can do that will make housing affordable, you can do that in Houston in a way that you can't do it in California, Washington, or New York. It's really amazing that like in these cities that spend so much on homeless services and that talk so much of a big game on, you know, programs and ways to solve this and all of this, like where I'm living, LA, or like my hometown, San Francisco, or where you live,
It's amazing to me that they have so failed at this and that here you have a really different tact, which is just build more, make it easier, just deregulate a little bit. And all of a sudden you see this crisis start to get a lot better. They also had people out there and outreach people helping and all that. It's not like they didn't put any money into the outreach and the services, but it was much more of like a free market response to this.
Right. But you also have to acknowledge the downsides of having basically no zoning in a place like Houston. I don't want to live in a place that's just this sprawling metropolis that never ends, where they've
paved over all of the wetland areas and the wilderness areas. So there's these other quality of life issues. I like living around a place where there are lots of trees, but prioritizing trees over buildings means that you're going to have higher rent. So it's a trade-off. And I think there are a lot of good progressives in areas where
where I live around Seattle, who really like the idea of solving the homelessness crisis, but also really do not want to lose their views and their tree canopy. I am one of them. It's a conflict. You would be. I love my view. I don't want people to be homeless. I also don't want anyone to build in front of my house because I have a nice view. Are you coming out as a NIMBY right here on the podcast? I'm not a NIMBY.
I am a fimby. My backyard is fine. I don't have a view from the backyard. The front yard, however, I paid a premium for that. I want to keep it. Yeah. I guess I've gotten to be kind of a radical yimby lately. Let there be duplexes and triplexes and fourplexes anywhere you look. I want to build one in your backyard and in your front yard. I want to put one to your left, to your right. I want...
actually for your windows to only look out at my condos. Well, I also don't live in a city. In cities, I think it's a little bit different. But if you, like me, move out to the country because you want some space and you don't want to have neighbors, obviously you're going to run into resistance from people who want to keep the thing that they love the way that they love it. It's a problem. It is. Okay, next up is...
a bipartisan gun deal looks ready to go. Tonight, Democrats and Republicans doing what almost no one thought they could, reaching a deal on guns. Yeah, I know. Congress is famous for not getting things done. And the Democrats did just put up a bill they knew would fail as a sort of virtue signaling to their voters. But...
Truly, a group of bipartisan senators have surprised us all with a pretty reasonable compromise gun safety deal, which Senate Republicans and Democrats are getting behind. It's a compromise far short of what Democrats wanted, like an assault weapons ban. Still, President Biden saying it would be the most significant gun legislation to pass Congress in decades. It would put in place stronger background checks for 18 to 21 year olds looking to buy a gun.
encourage states to implement red flag laws, and strengthen protections for victims of domestic violence. It's just a framework with details missing. But 10 Republicans have signed on, enough to survive a filibuster and stand a real chance of becoming law. Even Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, a staunch gun rights advocate, issuing a statement supporting the negotiations. I see no reason not to celebrate now, right? Like, this is great.
Yeah, I agree with you. I think this is good. And it's so rare to see some bipartisan consensus that it's, I'm sort of shocked a little bit. We'll see if this actually happens. I think it's important for people to realize that this might not do a whole lot to put a huge dent in the overall homicide rate or the overall suicide rate. But any progress on this issue is, I think, something to celebrate.
Let's call the whole thing off.
♪ Yes, you like potato ♪ ♪ And I like potato ♪ ♪ You like tomato ♪ All right, Katie, finally. Last week, San Francisco, my hometown, which I love very much, despite its many, many problems these days, had a recall election. His supporters hoped Chesa Boudin would usher in a reimagining of public safety and criminal justice reform. He promised to stop prosecuting some nonviolent crimes and instead send defendants to classes and job training.
But three years later, the city's top prosecutor has been tested by a pandemic and a spike in some crimes. This San Francisco bike store has been under attack lately. They actually pulled the gates out with a truck completely into the street. And Jason Gomez says something has to be done about all the break-ins. We need it to change now, like sooner than later. After having your car broke into eight times in the last few
A few years, it gets a little ridiculous. Stories like his are why San Francisco's progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, is facing a recall tonight. It was an election that brought together a diverse array of voters from the handful of San Francisco Republicans, the very small portion of San Francisco Republicans.
To moderate Democrats, to disappointed progressives, the energy was actually led in a lot of ways by the city's Asian-American community. As San Francisco struggles with homelessness, hate crimes and violence, homicides and assaults up 11 percent so far this year. Brooke Jenkins, a former prosecutor in Boudin's office, supports the recall, calling Boudin soft on crime.
Most voters didn't understand that when he said that he was going to work to end mass incarceration, that that simply meant all consequence for crime went out of the door. And so the most radical experiment in progressive prosecution —
Voters choosing to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. After two and a half years in office, Chesa Boudin is out. I read about the broader backlash this week. And Katie, I wanted to ask you, I mean, do you think that there's really a broad-based backlash against progressive prosecutions? Or is it just this sort of unique thing that happened in San Francisco? Well.
Well, it hasn't just happened in San Francisco. It also happened in Seattle last November. Voters had a choice in the primary between a defund the police, open the prisons, a public defender who basically told the cops to go fuck themselves on Twitter, and a Republican.
And the city of Seattle, the voters of Seattle, actually chose a Republican for the city attorney position because the defund the police candidate was just that unpopular. The race was actually closer than expected. But I think the same thing has happened there where people see an increase in petty crime, an increase in open air drug use, an increase in homelessness. And even if there are, like everything's, multiple reasons for this, COVID being a part of it, the drug crisis being another part of it, rising rents being a part of it, lots of reasons for this.
The voters still punished the progressives when it came down to it. So this is not just happening in San Francisco. It's happening in other places as well. I think in some of these cases, if folks change their rhetoric to match the changing moment, that could save them in a way. Like, I think Chesa could have...
in office, if he had even acknowledged some of the truth to the pain that the average San Franciscan was feeling and to the sense of sadness the average San Franciscan felt walking around downtown and seeing open-air drug use and seeing people just brazenly dealing drugs and walking into Walgreens and grabbing stuff, like that's upsetting to the population. And so I think if even the rhetoric had changed dramatically
And he just said, yeah, this is a mess and we care and we're worried about that. He could have maybe held his spot. I think in some ways there's a group that's gotten their blinders on and can't even be empathetic to anyone who disagrees with them. Yeah, I've experienced this as well watching the discourse in Seattle. There's this idea that if you don't want the public parks to turn into homeless encampments, then you somehow are anti-homeless or you're a bigot somehow. Yeah.
People, normal people want to be, they move to these cities for a reason. They live in these cities for a reason and they want to be able to take their kids to things like parks. There's a school in Seattle where the school wasn't able to use the playground because the playground had turned into a homeless encampment. These are things that people see and they hate. It affects their everyday lives.
And this attitude that some leftist commentators have, and it sounds like Chessa Boudin had as well, is though this is sort of, there's nothing to see here. Violent crime rates are down, therefore there's nothing to see here. Well, people can see what's going on, and they want their cities to be nice, comfortable, livable places. Yeah, the argument is basically, don't believe your lying eyes. Right. Look here, it's not real. What you're seeing on the sidewalk is not real. And I want to be very clear about...
about what happened tonight. The right-wing billionaires
Out spent us three to one. It's sad because I actually agree with a lot of the progressive reforms that folks like Boudin have been advocating for. Like a lot of this stuff makes sense if it's done in a reasonable way and if it's done in a compassionate way that takes into account that, yes, a criminal can be a victim in a lot of ways, but you can't then forget that the person they're robbing or the person they've killed is a victim as well.
And like, that's really what did chase in in the end, because he had people from his own office quitting and becoming whistleblowers saying, I worked on the homicide unit. He wouldn't let me do my job. He wouldn't let me do my job as a prosecutor prosecuting crimes. And I couldn't divide it. Or he had people quitting from the, there's a victim services group within the office. And they were then fired.
becoming whistleblowers and saying he's not taking into account victims. The only victim he sees is the criminal.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't want to see people going to prison for small amounts of drugs. That's not a good use of public resources. And frankly, it probably won't help most of them. But there have to be some other mechanisms to clean up the cities and to help people get their lives together. I, for one, would like to see much, much easier access to things like Suboxone. We know that there is a drug crisis in many of these American cities. And when you make it difficult to get
the medication that helped people get off of these drugs, then you just shouldn't put barriers in the way of people who are trying to get clean. I know, but in some of these cities, like in San Francisco, it almost feels like the homeless services workers are
it almost seems like their goal isn't to get people off drugs. Like their goal is just sort of make it more pleasant, but it's like there's no requirements to try to get clean. There's no, it seems like they don't. It's like it's a, it's like a human right. Yes. Like in San Francisco, you had a lot of the advocacy was coming from the mothers of young people on the streets who were addicted to fentanyl. And the moms started organizing and started speaking out and saying, please, please,
arrest my son. Please sober him up. Don't just let him keep using. Like arrest his dealer, arrest him, arrest someone. Like he'll kill himself. But there was this, the city sort of interpreted it as like crazy right-wing moms, like wanting terrible carceral justice. And it was like, well, no, it's a pretty reasonable thing for that mom to want that. And
The reaction in San Francisco to both Chesa and the school board has given me more hope in the Democratic Party than I've had in the last two years. I think you're totally right. It's showing the return of the moderates, which most people are. Most people in America, even liberals, are not – they don't want the police defunded. They don't want the prisons open. They don't want drag queens in their schools. They are normal people.
Everyday people. Most people are also not crazy right-wingers, although there's certainly a certain number of them. And when these people show up and vote, their voices are heard. And I think we've seen that in these cities. I think there are reasons to be hopeful. We'll see if changing policies and different enforcement mechanisms actually improve these, improve what's going on in these cities. That remains to be seen. ♪
The problem of rising crime and how we police and how we reverse the rise in crime is going to be front and center as we get closer and closer to the midterms. I think basically it's going to be inflation and it's going to be crime. And we will be back to talk about it again and again, week after week. And for now, thank you so much, Katie. Thank you, Nellie. Friday to her sister, Missouri.
Everyone, please go listen to Blocked and Reported. You can find it at blockedandreported.org or at pornhub.com slash blockedandreported because I love to reuse my jokes. You'll hear that one four or five more times. Thank you all for listening. This has been TGIF. It's a podcast inspired by my weekly news roundup that I publish on Common Sense. Go sign up and get it every Friday. Have a great weekend.
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