One crisp autumn day in 2023, residents of San Francisco awoke to find their city transformed. Almost overnight, the city by the bay had become virtually unrecognizable. Street corners and plazas previously crowded with homeless encampments and open-air drug markets were clear, and the trash heaps, piles of feces, tainted needles, soiled mattresses, and ragged tents were gone. Storefront windows that had long been boarded shut now shone. All the crude graffiti, scummy debris, and filth were replaced with painted murals, brand-new flower boxes, and colorful new crosswalk markings. Freshly pressure-washed sidewalks — the forgotten pathways through the city — now gleamed.
After decades of failure and $24 billion squandered in the previous five years on statewide strategies aimed at ending homelessness, San Franciscans witnessed a bona fide miracle: their city (or at least the downtown) was golden once again. Perhaps most shocking of all, the homeless population had vanished, and no one seemed to know where they went. How could a problem that plagued authorities for decades be solved overnight?
The closer that residents looked, the more unsettling the answer became: large concrete barricades and steel fences had been erected downtown, and the formidable police presence could best be described as a “shock and awe” campaign. Stranger still were the cheering crowds waving giant Chinese flags on long poles while acrobats and Chinese dance troupes performed on the sidewalks. Hundreds of blood-red lanterns were strung above the streets.
And it was certainly ironic that the leader who unabashedly touted the cleanup of San Francisco that day, Gov. Gavin Newsom, was the very same career politician who had failed the city for so long. Chinese President Xi Jinping was there for the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit held at the St. Regis Hotel on Nov. 10, 2023. And Newsom was locked in, ready to prove he was a serious player on the global stage. His lucrative and long-standing business relationships with Chinese apparatchiks gave him an affinity for China that most politicians do not possess.
As Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s rocket-proof armored vehicle made its way through the freshly cleaned streets of San Francisco to the St. Regis Hotel, throngs of pro-Beijing activists heralded his arrival. As it happened, the activists were United Front operatives on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and had been bused in from their stations embedded across the United States. In Newsom’s California, the paid CCP foot soldiers assaulted American human rights activists protesting Xi’s arrival with impunity. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
