“Nordstrom Leaves Downtown San Francisco Joining Big City Retail Exodus.”

That was a recent headline from the Washington Post … and the story of what is happening in San Francisco and cities like it should have our attention, because they are not alone.

What we are looking at here is the genuine potential of failed cities in the United States of America. There is an entire collection of big problems in San Francisco … and the bills are all coming due right now.

The most immediate driving issue here is crime—with theft having a double effect: scaring away paying customers and eating away at narrow retail margins. 

Under the very, very liberal, politically progressive government and under the rule of those progressivist ideas, they basically made it impossible to put up any significant limitations upon crime in San Francisco. 

The result: San Francisco is becoming more and more unlivable and ungovernable. The government is not working … 

… and, again, just remember this, San Francisco is not alone.

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Since when does even C-SPAN fail to cover an event involving an official Congressional press conference? Last week, the House Oversight Committee presented its preliminary findings from its corruption probe of the Bidens’ business connections. They have identified 20 or more limited liability corporations used by the Bidens to filter millions of dollars of payments from foreign sources—one of which has been known for years as a front for Beijing’s intelligence services. 

And yet, the national media didn’t bother to cover it live, with the singular exception of Fox News. Most outlets ignored it entirely. The few that did shrugged off the issues as potential influence peddling; the New York Times even reported that the committee had exonerated Biden and his family.

Jonathan Turley sarcastically called the news blackout ‘Pulitzer worthy,’ referencing both the awards given to news outlets for amplifying the Russia collusion hoax. 

The elite outlets of American journalism have degraded to a progressive protection racket, willing to sacrifice any claim to credibility to keep people from asking questions about Biden Inc. 

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Not long ago, Gavin Newsom started a tour to attack the policies of red state governors. But perhaps he’d be better advised to tend to his own state’s business before he goes meddling.

Just this weekend, Newsom announced California’s budget deficit will be $9 billion dollars higher than the twenty-two-and-a-half-billion dollar deficit he announced earlier this year.

This bad news comes on the back of the state’s $32 billion dollars in pandemic era unemployment insurance fraud. And California has defaulted on $18.6 billion dollars in federal loans it borrowed to address the state’s unemployment fund deficit. Now its businesses are on the hook.

Newsom has his eye on The White House. But he’d clearly be failing up. Given his spotty record at home, if he keeps on telling other governors how to do their jobs, the blowback won’t be pretty.

Things aren’t so golden in the Golden State.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned not to live by lies. He wrote: the only way a tyranny can exist is by lies.  If we don’t reject lies, he warned, we walk down the road that leads to tyranny. Today, we aren’t walking, we’re running, practically living in a world saturated by lies.  

We are lied to about the border, we are lied to about Covid, we are lied to about the Biden family’s business dealings, we are lied to, it seems, about almost everything.

And the one thing we rely on to prevent this is the media. James Madison argued the free press was “a great bulwark of liberty,” in order to keep our government honest.  Bulwark—meaning wall of defense.

But we don’t have that anymore. The wall has been breached.  We have a media so complicit in ideological rigidity that it no longer serves us, it serves the government—the exact opposite of the reason for the First Amendment. 

Solzhenitsyn pleaded with us not to be complicit.

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America is experiencing what our Surgeon General has called an “Epidemic of Loneliness.” 

“This is a widespread social problem,” he writes, “that should have our national attention.”

He’s right, of course.

What we’re looking at, though, is something that a secular state really can’t confront on honest terms. What we’re seeing is a somewhat inevitable consequence once some massive processes of reshaping the culture is set loose.

I found it very interesting that the AP reporter on this got right to the heart of the matter. Amanda Seitz writes:

“Research shows that Americans, who have become less engaged with worship houses, community organizations and even their own family members of recent decades, have steadily reported an increase in feelings of loneliness. The number of single households has also doubled over the last 60 years.” 

What does that tell us? Well, it tells us this: Solving the loneliness problem will take effort. It will take investment in socialization, and it’s going to have to start with marriage, then children, then broader kinship structures.

We do have a loneliness problem, and we have made ourselves part of the problem.

Are we willing to do what is necessary to solve it?

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At what point does law and order break down to the point where people feel they have no choice but to take matters into their own hands? That question has become acute in New York after the death of a mentally ill felon on the subway who routinely threatened passengers. It has become chronic in other urban centers in America as well—with progressive politicians and prosecutors refusing to charge or incarcerate those who commit crime repeatedly. 

We’ve seen this movie before—literally. In the 1970s when lax enforcement policies helped stoke record levels of crime, Death Wish and Dirty Harry attempted to provide a satirical look at the demand for law and order and public safety as warnings about fascism. Instead, the protagonists became iconic as people who imposed private justice when public institutions failed.
The social compact—where we accept the rule of law and public order while foregoing private justice—has been shredded by progressives in the last three years … with predictable results.

Expect to see more.

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It sounds like a joke—except that it’s not funny.

The Navy is now using an active-duty drag queen as its “digital ambassador” in an effort to attract recruits.

But it’s hard to understand the Navy’s approach. Our new, woke armed forces don’t seem to hold much appeal for those who have traditionally served. During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent, and all three branches project recruiting shortfalls this year.

So the Navy’s decision to double down on woke signals one of two things: Either leaders are so buried in the Beltway Bubble they don’t realize how unpopular the woke agenda is with regular Americans. Or there’s an actual strategy to recruit only from one side of the political spectrum. Or: Perhaps both these things are true.

Either way, it bespeaks a massive failure of leadership. And signals a crisis in military readiness that is deeply worrisome.

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The Biden administration is letting the border policy of Title 42 expire this week.  Be prepared for more border chaos.  Title 42 was a temporary band-aid that staunched some of the record flow we have already been seeing.  We should expect matters to get worse.

Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week, “I do not want to understate the severity of the challenge that we expect to encounter.”  Note his passive voice—as if he’s powerless to do anything.  For the official in charge of the border to essentially declare pre-emptive surrender should be grounds for resignation, if not impeachment. But this administration’s modus operandi has been to ignore this problem for nearly two and a half years.

A sovereign country cannot maintain itself without secure borders. We are at a crisis point. President Biden, Secretary Mayorkas and this administration need to act like it.

… and the voters need to hold our elected officials accountable.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission recently sent a letter to Chevron denying the company's request to exclude a request from a shareholder for a vote from other shareholders which asked the company to study the risks of giving up the production of fossil fuels. 

Green activists routinely try to cajole oil companies into trying to guess the effects of fossil fuel usage on the weather decades into the future. But one shareholder, the financial advisor David Bahnsen is asking the more relevant question. What would happen to our investment value if Chevron got out of the oil business? 

It's high time that people who are actually investing their own money get into the game which up until now has been dominated by activists. Exxon also will have a similar proposal on their ballot. It’s their chance to speak up and defend what they do every day: power the world. 

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Unelected federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. control too much of our lives. Part of the reason is because of the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision. Nearly 40 years ago the court ruled that courts should defer to the federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws, as long as their interpretations were reasonable. As a result, bureaucrats amassed A LOT of power.

But that may be about to change. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. And the Chevron doctrine of deference to federal agencies is at issue.

Justices including Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have been critical of the doctrine.  And Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson has recused herself, probably because she participated in the oral argument for the case as a D.C. Circuit judge.

The case will be heard in the fall. And it looks like a welcome check on bureaucratic power may be coming.

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