Charles Barkley is in the Basketball Hall of Fame, but he is going to be notably absent from the NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 16. That’s because the game is going to be played in San Francisco, and even though Barkley is now a generally consistent leftist after flirting with common sense and patriotism in his earlier years, he doesn’t want to spend even a minute in Nancy Pelosi’s city. Barkley is unwilling to play along with the left’s charade by affirming its claims that San Francisco is just as scenic and safe as it always was; he sees it for what it is and is unafraid to break out of the left’s lockstep and say so.
Fox News reported Saturday was speaking on TNT’s "Inside the NBA" about the Detroit Pistons' Cade Cunningham. "He’s going to make the All-Star Team," said the Hall of Famer, adding: "I’m not going. I’m not going to that rat-infested place out in San Francisco."
Barkley said much the same thing last year, referring to the undesirability of "being around a bunch of homeless crooks in San Francisco." WNBA player Candace Parker answered that by saying, "We love San Francisco," but Barkley stuck to his guns, responding: "No we don’t. You can’t even walk around down there." Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors, who play in San Francisco, came back "Yes, you can walk around," but Barkley shot back: "Yeah, with a bulletproof vest."
This time, Fox noted that as Parker and Green had done the previous year, one of Barkley’s colleagues (left unnamed for some reason) affirmed his leftist bona fides by disagreeing with Barkley’s accurate assessment and calling San Francisco "beautiful."
Barkley, however, was having none of it and declared: "San Francisco is not a beautiful city. Rats. Cats.” Cats? “Y’all are not gonna make me like San Francisco. No. Nope, nope, nope." If Republicans had been governing San Francisco for the last few decades and were responsible for its destruction, Barkley wouldn’t have had to dig in his heels and get defensive about disliking the city: the establishment media all over the country would be running breathless feature stories about how much the once-great city had deteriorated under Republican misrule.
Barkley was right, of course. San Francisco, with its steep hills and streetcars and glorious vistas, was once a gorgeous little jewel of a city, but that was a long time ago. Leftist politicians, including but by no means limited to Nancy Pelosi, made it Exhibit A of how far-left policies can destroy what was once a beautiful place to live. In the Paris of the West, people die of drug overdoses on the street virtually every day, and out-of-control theft is now dismissed as a “basic city experience.”
San Francisco’s Mayor Daniel Lurie has promised that San Francisco will once again become livable as he confronts "our drug and behavioral health crisis" and oversees the construction of "enough housing to turn around our affordability crisis." The problems he faces, however, don’t have any easy solution.
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Nancy Pelosi has been San Francisco’s representative in the House since 1987 when San Francisco was far less dirty and dangerous than it is now. The fact that she is now 84 years old and in her ten gazillionth term is an indication of San Francisco leftists’ taste for bad governance. San Francisco residents will cheerfully vote for a sinister corruptocrat who affirms the transgender madness over an honest and upright public servant who would set things right in the city, but who refuses to pretend that men can become women.
And so Charles Barkley is one hundred percent correct in his assessment of what San Francisco is like today, but no help is on its way. Like California as a whole, San Francisco is a one-party state, and that party destroyed the city, so it is not likely to start implementing policies that would rebuild it. The left will go down with the ship, remaining in San Francisco will everyone who is willing to admit reality flees. Ultimately, the only people left will be brigands and addicts, along with the leftist true believers, and the entire city will look as if it, rather than Los Angeles, had just been ravaged by fire. And even then, the remaining local leftists will find some way to blame it all on the Republicans.
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