BIG LIES, San Diego Edition

Where is the immigrant crime wave? What would putting homeless humans “somewhere else” mean?

Democrats’ presidential campaign may have broken the GOP’s framing (Joe Biden is old and not doing enough on the economy), but they can’t free down ballot office seekers from the yokes of “everybody knows.”

American politics is not a courtroom, and facts don’t always matter when voters tend to filter what they hear and see through what they feel. 

Right wing rhetoric mostly seeks to cultivate a primordial drive for self-protection and our species ability to draw assumptions from whatever perceptions of reality are at hand. 

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El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells used “it stands to reason” when interviewed on Fox News, promoting his political party’s talking points about migrant crime. He’s taking a folksy approach in his race for Congress, hoping to mitigate perceptions of GOP partisans as unfeeling sadists seeking office for the purpose of repressing whatever “other” their constituents fear.

From KPBS reporting fact checking claims about migrant crime:

• “Bad things are going to happen,” Trump told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention last month. “That’s why, to keep families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

• It’s a centuries-old political narrative in the United States that has persisted because it works. More than half of all Americans believe that illegal immigration is linked to higher crime rates, according to a recent poll by Axios. 

The reality is that, after congressional Republicans have repeatedly blocked immigration reform and refused to fund law enforcement charged with protecting the border, President Biden took executive actions that have significantly reduced the influx of migrants coming into the U.S.

There is no crime wave related to immigration, not in San Diego or anywhere else, for that matter.. An overwhelming amount of evidence demonstrates foreign born residents are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. 

Both violent and property crime are down in San Diego, despite Border Patrol agents releasing thousands of migrants into the region. Not only is there no immigrant crime wave, there is no crime wave at all.

Candidate Bill Wells is peddling what I would call a BIG LIE. He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of replacing District 51’s Sara Jacobs in the House of Representatives, so he’s choosing to amplify a narrative tied to racism and xenophobia. 

You have to ask yourself, what kind of human being makes those kinds of choices? This seems like the kind of question being asked more often lately.

And has anybody called Bill Wells' persona weird?

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Another BIG LIE message reveals itself in former mayor Kevin Faulconer’s campaign for the County Board of Supervisors. (Sadly, falsehoods around homeless humans are a bi-partisan manifestation.)

Faulconer’s campaign seeks to blame incumbent Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer for escalating numbers of homeless people in San Diego. Never mind his own record (remember the HepatitisA outbreak?) as Mayor was hardly commendable; he’s telling voters that as one vote out of five on the board will “fix this.”

This weekend will mark the time frame of a storyline of a two part episode from the third season of Star Trek: Deep Space, originally aired in January, 1995.

The “Past Tense” story line is set in San Francisco, where homeless people have been herded into “sanctuary districts” and essentially forgotten. Long story short: the “Bell Riots” ensue and social change begins. 

From a BBC Culture post about the predictive nature of these episodes:

• In addition to the Sanctuary District storyline, there is a secondary plot involving San Francisco high society. When the subject of the Sanctuary Districts comes up at an exclusive party, one attendee is oblivious to their existence: "I thought they stopped doing that," she says. "Why would they?" another partygoer responds. "It's the only way to keep those people off the streets."

• 'Nothing ever changes'

• Deep Space Nine's vision of Sanctuary Districts has not come true. "We don't have these walled fortresses where we forcibly incarcerate homeless people," Pimpare explains. "But we do have all kinds of sanctioned encampments." For instance, in Las Cruces, New Mexico there is a designated area known as Camp Hope, where homeless people can pitch their tents and access running water and electricity. In San Diego, California there are "safe-sleeping sites"– sanctioned encampments opened in conjunction with the city's public camping ban.

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Super-Faulconer to Save the Day(?)

Now, imagine a future Kevin Faulconer who hypnotized the rest of the Supes to do his bidding. What would his solution be to placate the Point Loma residents upset with the City of San Diego’s safe-sleeping space for cars near Liberty Station? What would putting the homeless humans “somewhere else” mean?

There is a handy dandy solution for this imaginary San Diego: Send them to Sunbreak Ranch, an out-of-sight, out-of-mind proposal endorsed by Kevin Faulconer in February of this year. 

The citizen advocates for this group say they are motivated by the anarchy and chaos on the streets. While they would like people to believe their facility would be a voluntary and humane triage center for unhoused people, their “take back our city” reasoning reveals the truth.

Herein lies the problem with Sunbreak Ranch: after these volunteer attendees have been triaged, where do they go? What happens when some judge gives a defendant the choice between Sunbreak and the County Jail? Then maybe it’s not so voluntary. 

Roughly 300 people (net) are joining the ranks of the homeless in San Diego every month, and there are estimates of as many as 20,000 unhoused humans in the county. These kinds of numbers should make it obvious that not having a home is a bigger problem than a triage camp can handle.

If an unhoused person gets a job at McDonald’s, will they be able to afford a place to live? Not unless MickyD’s starts paying $47.67 an hour if looking for a place on their own.

The County Supervisors, the Mayor, and the Governor can’t realistically be expected to get “those people” off the street in the near future. Solving this problem is a bigger issue than any one politician can promise.

The TRUTH about homelessness is that it’s a societal problem that will take a societal effort. Unless a politician is campaigning on taking back some of the wealth expropriated by the nation’s wealthy in the trickle down era, they’re participating in perpetuating the BIG LIE. 

You can be sure Kevin Faulconer will have a big smile for the press as people are herded into buses for a destination where you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Hmmmm.. where have I heard that before….???

Coming Soon

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Wednesday News to Peruse

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The Post-Media Candidate: Kamala Harris's Direct-to-Voter Strategy by Parker Malloy at The Present Age

• The rise of the post-media politician, epitomized by Harris's strategy at the DNC, represents a major shift in political communication. While it's easy to criticize this as an evasion of accountability, it's also a natural evolution in response to a floundering traditional media landscape. The Harris campaign's pivot towards influencers and controlled messaging is as much an indictment of current journalistic practices as it is a savvy political strategy.

• This tension between politicians and the press isn't new, but the scale and nature of the current shift are unprecedented. Economic pressures on traditional media outlets, coupled with the rise of social media, have reshaped how political information is disseminated and consumed.

• As we move forward, the question isn't whether this trend will continue — it almost certainly will — but rather, how does society adapt to ensure that substantive policy discussions and genuine accountability don't get lost in the shuffle of viral moments and curated content? The challenge for voters, journalists, and politicians alike is to find a way to harness the authenticity and reach of new media while preserving the depth and scrutiny that democracy requires.

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Trump campaign staff had altercation with official at Arlington National Cemetery by Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman at NPR’s All Things Considered

• Two members of Donald Trump's campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.

• A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.

• When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.

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Column: The Ozempic revolution in weight-loss drugs exposes the weakest links in our healthcare system — drug pricing and insurance by Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

• The weight-loss drugs are by no means the most expensive on the market — that trophy belongs to certain cancer drugs and gene therapies, some of which clock in at several million dollars per treatment. But none of those serve a market anywhere near the potential size of weight-loss treatments.

• Unless the U.S. moves toward a single-payer healthcare system and starts to place limits on drug prices, it’s the manufacturers of the weight-loss drugs that will reap most of the benefits. Sales of Wegovy and Ozempic made Novo Nordisk the most valuable European company last year and helped drive an increase in profit at Lilly for the second quarter that ended June 30 by nearly 69% over the year-earlier period.

• To put it another way, America’s 20th century healthcare system is coming face to face with a spate of 21st century drugs. Something will have to give.