“San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed organized drug dealing, and then the organized retail-theft industry, which is driven by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-supply drug dealers. Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic, more entrepreneurial, if you will. I think it’s mostly just kind of self-organized crews of thieves who just drive around doing crimes: dipping, which is car break-ins, armed carjackings, home invasions …”
Leighton Woodhouse is an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a native of Berkeley, California. He has been documenting the “street addiction crisis” engulfing the Bay Area, and the political culture and policies fueling it.
“We don’t arrest people, and we certainly don’t send them to mandatory treatment. And what it means is that we’re just allowing the addiction to continue to consume them, because we haven’t forced them into sort-of that moment where they have to choose: Am I going to fight this addiction, or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison? It takes that kind of a choice to break through the fog of addiction, and we’re not giving people that opportunity anymore,” says Mr. Woodhouse.
Mr. Woodhouse is also the co-founder of the “Public” publication on Substack with Michael Shellenberger, and a key investigator of the Twitter Files. In this episode, we discuss the limits of free speech and dive into the Bay Area ideology of left-wing libertarianism.
Watch the video:
“Harm reduction has evolved into something much more—in my view—monstrous, where literally encouraging people to quit using drugs is seen as oppressive. It seems somehow, like ‘how dare you judge a drug user?’” says Mr. Woodhouse.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Leighton Woodhouse, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Leighton Woodhouse: Thanks for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: Over a year ago, you wrote a really thoughtful piece about marijuana being the new Oxycontin. Also, you view what has happened in the Bay Area as a nucleus for extreme progressivism. Let’s start with the reporting that you did on marijuana and how everything about it has changed in the present day.
Mr. Woodhouse: I grew up in Berkeley, California, where most people would suspect there’s a lot of marijuana. California is famous for having the best marijuana because of Humboldt County. Even back then, it was pretty potent. I'd say it was probably around 10 percent THC [Tetrahydrocannabinol] for the stuff from Humboldt County that was famously strong. That would be considered a very weak strain of marijuana today, because what is being produced now and that really came into its own after legalization in California is just a completely different drug than what I knew when I was a kid.
First of all, most of it is not the flower portion. It’s concentrated in products like edibles and even beverages. The way that they produce that stuff is they take the marijuana flower, they pulverize it, they put it in a tube, and they run chemicals like butane through it, which strips the THC out of the marijuana flower and distills it into a wax.
Then they can make it even more potent by putting it in a high-pressure oven and get it up to its highest potency, 95 percent approaching 100 percent THC. Most of the stuff they sell at dispensaries is probably somewhere in the 60 percent range, maybe up to 80 percent for the very strong stuff. Maybe you can get stuff as low as 30 percent. Any of those is considered high potency THC. Anything above 15 percent is high potency THC. This stuff is not the same drug that Cheech and Chong were smoking.
I learned about the medical effects of marijuana when I was writing the article and interviewing experts and researchers on it. When you get paranoid from marijuana, that is actually a symptom of psychosis. It’s a very low-level symptom of cannabis-induced psychosis. You may have had that experience where you smoked weed and got paranoid. I have definitely had that experience, and that’s why I don’t smoke weed. That’s how I experienced it when I was a teenager.
If you’ve had that experience smoking weed, that means that you are susceptible to having a full-blown psychotic episode if you do high-intensity cannabis. If you have a full-blown psychotic episode and you continue to use the drug you’re vulnerable to becoming schizophrenic. There’s a lot of cases of people who have had psychotic episodes where they’ve committed suicide. There are cases where people just chronically having these psychotic episodes have threatened the lives of others. Then the long-term danger is that you can become permanently schizophrenic from cannabis abuse.
I wrote that article and a lot of people accused me of reefer madness or of being a prude. I want to make it clear, I wasn’t writing about smoking a joint or even taking a bong trip and smoking flower. That doesn’t concern me and that stuff is irrelevant. I’m talking about this very, very high-potency THC made today that is totally unregulated and is legal. You can buy it at any dispensary. There are probably 15 dispensaries within three miles of here where you can buy these products.
Mr. Jekielek: When you mention Oxycontin, you’re really talking about addiction. That’s where you’re making that connection.
Mr. Woodhouse: There are a couple of comparisons. First of all, I want to be clear that this high-potency THC is an addictive substance. Everybody is used to the idea that marijuana is non-addictive or that it’s only psychologically addictive. This high-potency THC is addictive and people can go through withdrawal symptoms.
As a matter of fact, people tend to smoke or consume edibles because they think that it relieves their stress, when in fact the stress is induced by withdrawal. It’s a vicious cycle. People think that it’s medication, but it’s actually medication for the withdrawal that you’re experiencing from not taking the product. It is addictive.
The comparison to Oxycontin is really more about the marketing of the product and the way in which it has been propagandized as medicine. Just like Oxycontin, it is the cure for the pain and this chronic condition that we had ignored until now, but now we have a solution for it.
A lot of these states initially passed medicinal marijuana legislation before it became fully legal with recreational marijuana. You can still go and get a medical card from a doctor. It’s completely bogus. Literally, there’s a website called NuggMD where you can call them within five minutes. They don’t turn down anybody.
This is the only medicine where everybody can get it. You get a prescription to get as much as you want. You don’t have to refill it. You just have this card and basically the card is a discount card. You get a break from certain kinds of taxes.
This whole idea that it’s medicine is a total pretense. A lot of the corporations behind alcohol and pharmaceuticals have heavily invested in this industry. There is corporate backing and a corporatization of this addictive and dangerous drug. That’s where the comparison to Oxycontin comes into play.
Mr. Jekielek: Why are they investing in them so heavily? Are they looking for a new market?
Mr. Woodhouse: I think it’s the future. There are a lot of people who might not drink a lot. They hear that marijuana is this natural product that’s medicinal and that will help with their stress or their back pain. It’s a whole new market of people who normally wouldn’t partake in substances that frequently. They’re very open-minded to cannabis.
There’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s a way to access a new market. Also, it’s just the future, and it was inevitable. All these states are legalizing it. Of course, everyone is going to get into it and ride this train. A lot of states have legalized marijuana to revive their entire state’s economies.
These local governments and state governments see this as a revitalization of the local economy, bringing back agriculture and manufacturing, whichever category you want to put marijuana cultivation into. This is a new tax base. This is seen as a panacea, not just in terms of health, but in terms of local and state economies. This is a huge opportunity for these corporations.
Mr. Jekielek: This reminds me of gambling, but it’s sold as something healthy.
Mr. Woodhouse: There has been this bait-and-switch around cannabis. First of all, there was this idea of a criminal black market of marijuana cultivation. The idea is that if you legalize it, then you’re going to get rid of that criminal element. You’ve heard this argument a million times. There was another argument that this is going to be a new tax base, as I just mentioned.
What’s happening is that the black market for marijuana has not gone away. As a matter of fact, it has expanded. If you talk to people in Humboldt County, where traditionally the black market for marijuana was, the cartels are getting into marijuana cultivation in Humboldt County. Along with the cartels has come sex trafficking and all these other criminal enterprises that come along with that criminal industry.
The footprint for black market marijuana has actually expanded in the United States. A lot of what was happening across the border in Mexico has moved to this side of the border. Now, these politicians are talking about cutting taxes for marijuana cultivation on the pretext that legal marijuana can’t compete with black market marijuana.
We were promised the criminal element would go away and that it would be this new tax base. Now they’re saying we should tax marijuana less because the criminal element has not gone anywhere. This is a huge bait-and-switch.
Mr. Jekielek: When I lived in Vancouver, people would say that the biggest cash crop in British Columbia was marijuana. Is that what is driving this?
Mr. Woodhouse: I think it’s just business. It’s just good old-fashioned American capitalism. I was hearing stories about the consequences of this stuff. There’s a guy who lives not far from here whose kid just had a psychotic break and drove his car into the bay. A psychiatric social worker told me a story of a guy who climbed a 700-foot crane. He didn’t jump, thank God. He was considering jumping off, not because he was suicidal, but because he thought that he was in the matrix and that if he jumped off, he would just bounce right back.
These are severe cases of psychosis. Then there is chronic depression and all these other mental illnesses that come out of this abuse. I wish that we hadn’t gone for straight legalization. I understand the argument for decriminalization and I support decriminalizing marijuana. People should not have been going to prison for 5, 6, or 7 years on a marijuana charge, which I think is ridiculous.
Decriminalization and legalization are two different things. Decriminalization means you’re no longer going to lock people up for a marijuana offense. Legalization means the door is wide open. Corporations can come right in and market it all they want. Jumping straight to legalization was a huge mistake. We actually could have foretold that it would drive a lot of the innovation that has made the substance much more addictive, much more dangerous, and much more deadly.
Mr. Jekielek: The ideology emanating from Berkeley and from San Francisco is that all drugs should be legal.
Mr. Woodhouse: I’ve written about this before. The Bay Area has really unique politics. People tend to think of the Bay Area as very liberal, very progressive, maybe even radically Left-wing, and that’s true. That misses a big element of the politics here, because it is also very a libertarian culture.
There is this Left-wing libertarianism here, which accounts for the fact that we allow open-air drug dealing without criminal enforcement. We allow open-air drug use. We allow people who are severely addicted to drugs to go untreated and just camp out on the streets. We simply have stopped prosecuting crimes in Oakland.
Yes, all this stuff emanates from this progressive, Left-wing ideology. But it’s also more of a libertarian ideology that sees any constraints or acts of coercion or even institutional power as somehow wrong. You just can’t govern a society that way.
Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, please tell us about yourself, because you’re from the Bay area. You’ve seen how it has changed since your childhood.
Mr. Woodhouse: I was born and raised in Berkeley at the tail end of the 60s. For me, the 60s feels like it was like a hundred years ago. Now, in retrospect, I think about how the classrooms all had the doves with the olive branch and all the peace signs. All the holdovers from the 60s were all over our classrooms and just everywhere in Berkeley.
It’s not like that anymore in Berkeley. I grew up at the tail end of that generation that came through the Bay Area. A lot of that libertarianism, like the back-to-the-land movement and the entire new Left, was very much present during that era. The new Left of the 60s was very much an individualist, libertarian movement.
There is the speech that Mario Savio famously gave on the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley where he talks about how we have to throw our bodies on the wheels of the machine and stop it from moving. There’s a moment before that, which is not so famous, where he talks about the union workers in Sproul Hall behind him. He says to the crowd, “These members of the painter’s union are up there. They have not agreed with our request to stop their work while we do this occupation.” Then he starts going off on the unions.
Then he backs off and says, “We don’t want to blame the workers for the shortcomings of their union.” I found it really interesting because it was expressive of the break of the new Left from the old Left, that old materialist Marxist Left, which was very much embedded within the labor movement in the United States.
The new Left was a reaction to that, and a reaction to the New Deal. The New Deal was about scaling up all these huge government institutions and these public works projects, and along with it came the scaling up of mass politics. The Port Huron Statement that Tom Hayden wrote starts off saying, “We’re the children raised in relative privilege.”
It was about how our generation is about self-fulfillment and self-affirmation and not being part of this big war machine, and there’s a lot of noble sentiments in it. But it’s very much about declaring their independence from mass politics, from corporate culture, and from everything big and institutional and standardized and uniform.
That was very much what Mario Savio’s speech was about. It was a very individualist and libertarian movement where they were freeing themselves from the shackles of this machine and the system. The most radical exponent of it were the hippies who literally went up to Northern California or New Mexico or the Hudson Valley and started creating their own little utopias outside of the oversight of government and the larger mainstream society.
It has this Left-wing cast to it because it was the 60s and these were hippies. But it’s really almost like an Ayn Rand kind of thing, and you could see this being a Right-wing movement too. There have been Right-wing movements that are similar to this. That libertarianism was very much part of that new Left generation during their mobilization, and it is very much expressed in today’s politics in the Bay Area.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you call today’s progressive Left? Is it still the new Left? They seem to be all about institutional power and coercion and affecting power by those means.
Mr. Woodhouse: There are a lot of contradictions within this movement. I can speak most clearly about California and specifically, Northern California. There’s a really amazing book I read, an old book called Albion Seed, which is about the settlement of the United States in the colonial era by different waves of migrants from England. It describes the wave of Puritans who came into New England.
The Puritans had this idea of ordered liberty. We usually think of the Puritans as very conservative because they were so strict and top-down and hierarchical, but they were actually very liberal as well. We can see that in how Massachusetts and New England have a very liberal political tradition. A lot of that comes from the Puritans.
Their idea was that people have the potential for being bad, and you need to corral them and control them to bring out the goodness in them and to suppress the bad and the sin in them. The only way that you can do that is essentially by top-down structures. You have this very top-down government which bestows rights upon the individuals. They don’t have them inherently, the government gives you these rights. They had these ridiculous laws in colonial Massachusetts around things that you had to do to just go fishing in a pond. It was very much part of this ordered liberty idea.
Then you had the Scotch-Irish who came into the Appalachians. They came from another part of England, Northern England, which has been a war zone for 500 years. It’s the borderland between Scotland and England, on the other side of Northern Ireland. Through hundreds of years of history, their only experience of government was at the point of a spear. They saw the government as a tyrannical force that came to suppress you, because that was their experience of the English and the Scottish crown for 500 years.
They settled into Appalachians and they brought with them this very anti-government, libertarian culture and this idea that they had natural rights. They said, “We are born with our rights and the government doesn’t give us our rights. Government can only respect our rights. If the government intrudes upon our rights, then we have the right to rebel against them.”
By the turn of the 20th century, the Puritans had migrated across the northern part of the United States through the Great Lakes region and the northern plains to the northwest and into this part of the country. The Appalachians had gone the southern route and the two groups merged here. Even in Southern California, you don’t see so much of the top-down thing. It’s very liberal in Southern California. I lived in LA for 12 years and you don’t see quite the specific mix that you see here.
This became really clear during Covid, where in San Francisco you had open-air drug markets, people camping on the streets, people openly using drugs, and no criminal enforcement for any of this. At the same time, to walk into a bar or a restaurant you needed a vaccine passport, you had to stand six feet from each other, and you had to wear a mask. In San Francisco, it was more intense than the rest of the country. It wasn’t just the regulations from above. There was very, very intense peer pressure.
People were being shamed for not wearing a mask while walking on a trail in a regional park. It was that confluence of this authoritarian top-down imposition of these rules and regulations on people. While at the same time, you have this completely libertarian, do-as-you-please attitude. They said, “We have no right to tell you that you can’t smoke fentanyl in front of an elementary school, or sleep on the sidewalk there.” Both of those attitudes are happening at the same time. That got me wondering about what the hell this political culture is about.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re telling me that they took the worst of both traditions and merged them.
Mr. Woodhouse: It’s not quite that anybody merged them, as that they just organically merged and created this specific confluence. If you look back to the 60s through all these layers of nostalgia, there’s a lot to admire in the 60s generation. You see maybe the best of that confluence in the 60s, although there was also a lot of horrible stuff happening in the 60s that we don’t remember as vividly. Now in San Francisco, just like in the 60s, there is the open drug use, the open drug dealing, and the free love, which in a lot of cases was the sex trafficking of drug-addicted young girls.
We look back on it with nostalgia for the radical politics and the music and the art and all the great things about it, because the victors wrote the history. Now in San Francisco, you see all the dark stuff, and the politics are gone. There is a veneer of radical politics, but it’s just imbecilic. The radical, revolutionary politics are gone. The art and the music are definitely gone. You just have the open drug use and the sex trafficking. All the gross stuff of the 60s is still there, without any of the good parts.
Mr. Jekielek: In Toronto, Canada, a childhood friend of mine was killed in the crossfire of a drug deal gone bad. It was in a residential neighborhood with one of these needle injection sites, created because of these harm reduction policies which came from this ideology that you’re describing now. Has this bizarre model been exported to other countries?
Mr. Woodhouse: For sure. In my view, harm reduction is very much a part of that libertarian tradition. It started with very good intentions as an outgrowth of the HIV and AIDS crisis in the 80s. The idea was, “If you’re a heroin user, we can’t just shame you into quitting. If we’re going to stop the transmission of HIV through needles, then we need to give you clean needles to use, but use them safely.” That was the idea and it was a practical approach to the problem.
Harm reduction has now evolved into something much more monstrous, where encouraging people to quit using drugs is seen as oppressive. They seem to ask, “How dare you judge a drug user? How dare you suggest that they be clean, let alone coerce them with things like mandatory treatment?” That’s just completely off the table, and that is practically considered to be fascist.
The idea with harm reduction now is that drug users have a right to use drugs and you have no standing to judge them for it. Lest one be tempted to agree with that, just consider the death count from this ideology in San Francisco. More people died in San Francisco during the pandemic of overdoses than of Covid-19. There are people who have used heroin for 30 years, and even longer than that. It’s not good for you, but you can live a full life while using heroin. That is counterintuitive, but it happens.
Nobody uses fentanyl for 30 years. Nobody uses fentanyl for more than three or four years. You’re going to die within three or four years. The harm reduction approach to the street addiction crisis is consigning people to death. I’ve called it palliative care for a non-terminal illness. This is hospice for these addicts, but these people do not need to die. They can recover. Many people have recovered, but it takes coercion to do it, and it takes forcing people to do it.
Mr. Jekielek: Anyone who made it out of this cycle had someone come in and do a very serious intervention, saying, “You’re going to die unless you change. I’m going to help you, but you have to do your part.” Nobody got out of this addiction by people letting them continue.
Mr. Woodhouse: It’s even worse if you’re living in a tent in the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, and you’ve gone beyond the point where anybody in your personal life is going to intervene. Your family probably doesn’t know where you are anymore and you’ve lost all your friends. You’ve been kicked out of every house you’ve freeloaded in. You have no more relationships with anybody from your pre-addiction life anymore. This is the typical scenario.
At that point, your only friends are other drug addicts and these are just people you hang out with. They’re not really your friends and they don’t have your back. By the way, I say this after having interviewed many drug addicts about this scenario, so I’m not making this up. At that point, there’s only one intervention that is possible for you. I’m sorry to say that the only intervention is law enforcement.
I’ve talked to many former addicts whose lives were saved by being arrested. That doesn’t necessarily mean going to jail or prison, but perhaps you go to jail for the pretrial period. This is what drug courts are for and this is what diversion is for. Diversion means going into functioning treatment units that keep you locked up and force you to get clean on a long-term basis.
We don’t do that anymore in the Bay Area. We don’t do it at all. We don’t arrest people and we certainly don’t send them to mandatory treatment. That means we’re just allowing the addiction to continue and to consume them, because we haven’t forced them into that moment where they have to choose and ask, “Am I going to fight this addiction, or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison?” It takes that kind of a choice to break through the fog of addiction, and we’re not giving people that opportunity anymore.
Mr. Jekielek: We hear a lot of things about San Francisco. I’m staying in Mission Bay, which seems like a very nice neighborhood. I’m not seeing any of these things that I’ve heard about and that we’ve reported on from the area. Please give us a picture of how things exist now in the Bay Area, maybe starting with Oakland.
Mr. Woodhouse: I don’t like to use the term homelessness because I think that implies that the problem is that people don’t have a home. First of all, a lot of the people who are living on the streets in San Francisco and Oakland do have a home. A lot of folks have parents who would welcome them back into their homes. They have beds to sleep on. They have loved ones who have doors open for them.
One guy, Tom Wolf, was on the streets for six months or so in San Francisco. He literally had a home that he was paying a mortgage on, or at that point that his wife was paying a mortgage on, while he was sleeping in a doorway in the Tenderloin. The reason why people are sleeping on the streets in the Tenderloin is not because they don’t have a home to go to. It’s because if they relocate to some place that’s not five minutes from a drug dealer, when the drug lets off and they start getting dope sick, they get very, very, very sick to the point that they want to die.
They need to be within walking distance of somebody who can resupply them to take that sickness away. That’s why they’re sleeping on the streets. They can have a home open to them in Beverly Hills, for that matter. But they need to be sleeping in the Tenderloin or south of Market somewhere in close proximity to a dealer. It’s a street addiction crisis. It’s not a homelessness crisis.
San Francisco has clearly done a horrible job dealing with this crisis, but now San Francisco’s hands are tied. For once, we’ve reached a point where the political will is actually there in San Francisco to take dramatic measures to make a change. The political will is definitely there with the mayor and with the district attorney.
But there’s an injunction on the city of San Francisco now, and it’s been in place for the last 10 months or so. A federal judge is preventing San Francisco from enforcing its own anti-camping laws and its own anti-vagrancy laws until the city has enough shelter beds in place to house every homeless person in San Francisco, which is an insane standard. The city attorney estimates that it would cost about a third of the city’s general budget to accommodate that.
Then what will occur if that actually happens? At that point, you’ve got drug addicts from across the country who know that if you go to San Francisco, not only will you not be arrested, and not only are there drug dealers everywhere you can get drugs from, you can sleep on the street and there’s tons of services to get food and shelter if you want it. Also, the city is going to give you a free apartment, or at least free shelter. There will be a free bed for everyone who’s living on the streets.
That’s just going to bring in more people. It’s a magnet for more drug addicts. I’ve interviewed a lot of these drug addicts. They’re from Arkansas and Alabama, and they tend to be from red states. They tend to be from states that don’t tolerate this stuff, and that’s why they come to California. It’s not just the weather, it’s also the permissibility.
Mr. Jekielek: What are the laws that are creating this general environment? How bad is the situation?
Mr. Woodhouse: It’s bad. Proposition 47 was actually passed by the voters in 2014. California voters are responsible for that one. We own it, and I think I voted for it. I don’t remember, because it was a long time ago. I believe I voted for it because it sounded great on paper. It said, “Mass incarceration is a big problem. Why are we prosecuting these petty thefts?” The unintended consequence of Proposition 47 is that now shoplifting is effectively legal. By the way, people have the wrong idea about what shoplifting is.
Shoplifting is an industry. If you’re a drug addict in San Francisco and you’re living on the streets, you need to raise about 50 bucks, maybe 70 bucks a day to support your habit. You have to get that money from somewhere. The place you’re going to get is from petty crimes. There are layers to this industry. There are fences who operate in San Francisco who put out text messages to all the shoplifters, called boosters, who are drug addicts.
They tell everyone what they’re in the market for. They say, “I’m in the market for cough medicine and laundry detergent and frozen steaks.” They put out a text message on Instagram or Snapchat. People get the message, and then they go and they boost those specific products.
They usually go in with a shopping list in mind. They don’t steal everything, they steal just about what they need for their next fix. They'll steal maybe 60 bucks worth of merchandise and sell it to a fence. The fence usually sells it to a higher-level fence, and then there is a higher-level fence above him.
At the top level, there are these wholesale fences that are running this multi-million-dollar industry. They sell the electronics to China and Vietnam and the luxury products go to Russia. The lion’s share goes to those little off-label stores on Amazon, and to Facebook marketplace. That’s where you will find insanely cheap stuff. That’s stolen merchandise and it’s a big industry.
Proposition 47 has just enabled that entire organized retail theft industry to thrive. Proposition 47 also has legalized possession of what was sold as a small amount of drugs. The cap on how much drugs you can carry is now enough to be a full-time dealer. Essentially, there’s no point in prosecuting drug dealers anymore because it’s just a misdemeanor. It makes no impact and brings no particular glory to a cop to bust.
The cops are after some level of professional merit. If you do a big felony bust, that’s a big deal. A misdemeanor doesn’t matter. All these cities in California just shut down their narcotics units. Richmond, California, is a very violent, famously high-crime city that just has no narcotics unit anymore. San Francisco has a handful of narcotics officers. Drug dealing, and I’m not just talking about low-level drug dealing, pretty high-volume drug dealing has effectively been legalized in California.
Mr. Jekielek: We have these new types of drugs, like fentanyl and this high potency THC that cause psychotic breaks. We have this bizarre retail theft industry that has developed. Drug dealing is legal, basically. What else is there?
Mr. Woodhouse: In Oakland, there’s a whole lot more. Oakland is a different beast than San Francisco. San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed, organized drug dealing and the organized, retail theft industry, which is driven by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-supplied drug dealers.
Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic and more entrepreneurial, if you will. It’s mostly self-organized crews of thieves who just drive around doing crimes; bipping, which is car break-ins, armed car-jackings, and home invasions. First of all, we’ve got this District Attorney, Pamela Price, who is the second coming of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. Essentially, she doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals.
She does everything she can to reduce the sentence to the lowest one possible. As a matter of policy, she doesn’t do any sentencing enhancements. For the deputy DAs to do sentencing enhancements, you have to get the express approval of your superiors all the way up to Pamela Price, which means they almost never do it. She doesn’t prosecute juveniles as adults, even if they’re committing heinous crimes like murder.
The DA is part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the Oakland police force is so understaffed that they literally just can’t respond to 911 calls, or even pick up your 911 call. I called 911 about a week ago, and it took five minutes for anybody to even pick up. The average is like 54 seconds, which is the second worst in the state, because the dispatchers are understaffed.
Then once you get your call through, the police force is something like 200 officers. Depending upon what you think the metric should be, they’re understaffed by up to 500 officers. They just can’t get around to responding to any of these calls. You basically have to be in the process of getting murdered to be able to get the cops to respond to a call. The criminals know this, of course.
Sorry, but with home invasions, you’re not going to get a response from the cops. They might show up five days later and take a report. The police are incapable of responding to crimes, and the DA is unwilling to prosecute the crimes, which means it’s just a free-for-all.
Mr. Jekielek: If this is left unchecked, you’re talking about full-on anarchy.
Mr. Woodhouse: There are scenes in Oakland that already look like anarchy. There are pirates now on the marina in Oakland. On the estuary, there’s people who now make a living going in and raiding the boats on the marina. There are train robberies, not just in Oakland, but all across the country, actually. That’s a thing—robbing trains for whatever freight they’re carrying.
On Piedmont Avenue, which is in a nice part of town and a nice commercial corridor, people are constantly seeing car burglaries in broad daylight. The same car drives down the avenue, taking its time, casually bipping five cars in a row. Again, bipping is the term for car burglaries. They get out, smash, take the property, then pull up to the next one, smash, and take the property. Then they pull up to the next one and the next one and the next one, all in broad daylight. There are people standing on the sidewalk filming this. There are armed robberies of people in broad daylight in Rockridge, which is a really nice part of town.
There have been violent robberies. A woman was knocked over and dragged by her hair across the street at 3:00 in the afternoon with tons of people standing around. It is everywhere, actually. It is everywhere, but just not all the time.
There are moments where it does start to look like there is simply no law and order in Oakland, and you’re just on your own. A lot of people are getting guns, a lot of people. Since people do feel like that they’re on their own, people are getting armed. This problem is going to get much worse at this rate, because now the people committing the crimes are getting shot for it.
The Oakland Police Department is going to have homicides on their hands as a consequence of this, because people just aren’t going to take this anymore. There have already been gunfights in downtown Oakland in the middle of the day in response to car burglaries, so it’s gotten pretty crazy.
Mr. Jekielek: These are gunfights that are not gang-related, but this is someone trying to protect their property.
Mr. Woodhouse: Yes. There was a gunfight about five months ago in downtown Oakland in the middle of the afternoon, and that was exactly the case. Someone saw their car being burglarized, and so they started shooting and the guys started shooting back. There have been other gunfights where one crew is robbing a cannabis dispensary. I’m not clear if it was another crew of thieves that were fighting with them, or if it was the owners of the dispensary, but there have been a number of gunfights.
There are also rolling gun battles on the freeways. There’s that famous case of Jasper Wu, a two-year-old infant in his car seat in the back of his dad’s car, driving down the 880 freeway at 6:00 in the afternoon in broad daylight. There was a rolling gun battle between two rival gangs. The child gets shot in the head while sitting in his car seat. This has happened once a year in the Bay Area, where a child gets killed in the crossfire of a rolling gun battle on a freeway in the middle of the day. That’s insanity.
Mr. Jekielek: In San Francisco, there is some political will to make some kind of change, but there are injunctions that prevent it from happening. How much of that is by design?
Mr. Woodhouse: Do you mean like a controlled demolition?
Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
Mr. Woodhouse: A lot of elected officials in the Bay Area are captive. Some of them are captive to really crazy ideologies. Others are simply captive to organized activist bases, and they are not responsive to regular people. It may sound like a cliche to say that it’s by design, but it’s true.
George Soros has been behind all these progressive DAs and the Drug Policy Alliance, which pushes a lot of these crazy harm reduction policies. There has definitely been an organized push towards all this radical decriminalization of everything. It definitely isn’t in the interests of elected officials to have this kind of mayhem in the streets. The day of reckoning is near for those folks.
There’s a certain point where even the far-Left Bay Area voters start to push back. It happened in San Francisco with the recall of Chesa Boudin and the recall of three school board members before him. There was the election of Brooke Jenkins, his successor, who’s a much more traditional DA and the ouster of a couple of supervisors.
It’s happening in the East Bay now with a recall effort for Pamela Price, the DA here. Politically, it doesn’t pay off for any elected officials to be pushing this stuff. It’s haplessness, it’s cowardice, and it’s an intoxication with really crazy ideologies.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the politicians being captured by activist interests.
Mr. Woodhouse: With the homelessness problem in San Francisco, there’s a very thick layer of homeless services organizations and homeless advocacy groups which get city contracts. It’s a billion-dollar industry. I’ve referred to it as neoliberalism in disguise. In the United States, we like to subcontract our government services. Even in California we do this. We subcontract it out to nonprofits, so it’s not considered the same as subcontracting out to a private corporation. But I don’t see much of a difference.
These nonprofit organizations have the same interests as a corporation does. They’re not seeking profit, but they do have responsibilities to meet their payroll and to pay rent. They have all the mundane needs of any organization with a professional staff. If you’ve worked for a nonprofit organization before, you know how much of the daily activity and energy is consumed by the need to seek grants and to seek government contracts to meet the next year’s payroll.
These organizations have that same need. There’s a built-in interest not to fix the problem. I don’t think that these people wake up in the morning and say, ‘How can we keep homelessness going? How do we keep this racket going?” I don’t think it’s that crass. I don’t think it’s that crude.
These people really do think that what they’re doing is making a difference. If you’re employed by an organization whose bottom-line interests align with keeping the problem going, it’s very easy to then adhere to a political ideology that justifies all of those decisions and that encourages all of those decisions. An example would be an ideology that says, “It’s wrong to arrest drug dealers and we shouldn’t coerce anybody into care. If you want to use drugs, that’s your right. It’s just a lifestyle choice.”
That’s a happy convenience that just keeps street addiction going and therefore, keeps this industry thriving. The more this industry thrives, the more government contracts it gets. Not only do they have a bottom-line interest in it, but the more money they get, the more political capital they have. Then they have more lobbying power to be able to get favored officials elected and to exert influence over those elected officials.
That’s what I mean about a lot of these politicians who become responsive to this activist lobby. It’s really no different from politicians who are bought off by corporate interests in Congress. It’s just a different organized special interest that has found a way to control these elected officials.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a huge problem that emerges when people creating policy are insulated from the effects of that policy. Politicians generally have to face these effects after a while. But this is something different. It’s almost like the ineffectual nature of the policy is actually a benefit.
Mr. Woodhouse: Absolutely. It’s a market. The cynical way of describing a lot of these homeless services organizations is that they’re farming street addicts. I once wrote a piece on this. This might sound deeply cynical, and if this is offensive to people of a religious persuasion, this is not my intent. If you’re a religion and if you’re a church, then you need to have a flock.
You’ve got pastors and their job is pastoral care. They go out and care for the sick and hapless masses. These activists, the ones who work for these organizations that do direct service to homeless people, are comparable to that pastor doing pastoral care. They are selfless in that regard, but they’re also self-interested in that regard.
They are altruists because they’re helping people in need, but they also need the person who they’re helping. It’s not just because it’s their job. It’s not that cheap and crass. It’s more about their identity and the meaning that they derive in life. This is their vocation.
This is how they define themselves. They say, “I am somebody who goes onto the streets and tends to these sick, needy people.” Without those people, they are also nothing. It’s not just about the money or the paying the bills and meeting the budgets of these nonprofit organizations. It’s also deeper and more spiritual than that. It has become the life’s meaning and self-affirmation for a whole personality type.
Mr. Jekielek: With altruism, you genuinely want to help somebody. This is this false altruism where you’re actually helping yourself.
Mr. Woodhouse: It’s like Munchausen syndrome by proxy. You keep the person sick in order to continue to regard yourself as their savior and to get that attention and that kind of narcissistic supply. It’s deeply selfish, honestly. There are people who call us names and think that we’re the ones who are being selfish. A common accusation is that we don’t want to see poor people. We just don’t want to see their plight.
First of all, nobody wants to see that plight. Nobody wants to see somebody defecating on the street in front of a preschool. Nobody wants to see that, and one shouldn’t be ashamed to admit that. Those activists don’t want to see that, but they just won’t admit it.
Those who are calling for somewhat strict measures, like mandatory treatment, want to clean up the problem in the city. They also want to save the lives of these people on the streets. It is not an act of compassion to advocate for policies whose foreseeable consequence is people dying on the street.
Mr. Jekielek: We have relegated ourselves to a performative altruism. As long as we look like we’re doing something for the good of people, irrespective of whether it really is, that’s enough. I’ve seen that replicated in many areas, and it’s a disturbing trend. To some extent, maybe part of it is from living in a virtual world where you can lose track of reality.
I asked Seneca Scott, “Why is there this disconnect with the working class? Why does there seem to be a war on the working class right now?” It is because working class people have to face the consequences of their own actions regularly. When they see these crazy policies and this performative altruism, they’re annoyed and insulted. They think, “Look at what crazy stuff these people are coming up with.” That’s what we should all be thinking.
Mr. Woodhouse: A good example of that is the defund-the-police movement. We’re in East Oakland right now and it is traditionally and famously a very high-crime area. The council member for this district who ran for mayor ran on a platform of public safety and actually refunding the police. The current mayor did as well, but that’s because she made a complete about-face. She was one of the faces of the defund-the-police movement before she ran for mayor.
The council person east of here, which is an even more high crime area, was also opposed to cutting the Oakland police budget. The votes that were in favor of cutting the Oakland police budget all came from to the west of here, including the highest income and whitest neighborhoods. The reality of crime is obviously much more immediate in East Oakland than it is in Rockridge and the Oakland Hills.
I’ve interviewed violence interrupters and other folks who’ve told me about this. One guy told me, “My neighbors, sure, they’re afraid of the cops, but the cops don’t really do much policing around here. I don’t think anybody is that afraid of the police.”
That’s another subject we can get into about the incentives for cops to even bother getting out of their car whenever they’re interacting with civilians. The incentive is just not there anymore. I don’t think people are getting hassled by the cops much at all anymore. Regardless, I’m not going to pretend that if you’re a black guy who lives in East Oakland that you’re not going to be somewhat anxious about a cop being around. That anxiety is still there and that distrust is still there.
This guy was afraid of anyone pulling into his driveway. It’s like somebody might start something with them and get into a violent interaction. It could be a straight-up criminal doing an opportunistic crime, or somebody who takes offense at some minor transgression, and you get into an honor culture battle, which results in violence and possibly a homicide. This is what people are afraid of living in these neighborhoods.
To your point, working class people have to deal with the real world as it is. They’re not calling for defunding the cops because that’s insane. More privileged people get these morality points for subscribing to these crazy belief systems that have really deleterious effects in real life.
Mr. Jekielek: Luxury beliefs, as Rob Henderson defined them. You’re painting a very dark picture here, Leighton. Where do you see this going right now? Is there light coming from anywhere?
Mr. Woodhouse: The Bay Area is in a pretty bad state right now. Seneca Scott’s organization, Neighbors Together Oakland, is pushing back and they’ve been very effective with their pushback. There’s also a recall effort against the DA, which has been very successful. They are still collecting signatures, so it’s too early to say. It’s pretty clear that it’s going to qualify, and I expect that she will be recalled. Most people are not focused on politics in their daily lives, and certainly not on local politics, until it starts actually affecting their lives.
Mr. Jekielek: When the people who want to be left alone get activated, that is supposed to be a tipping point, but is it really?
Mr. Woodhouse: I think it is. Again, the main thing standing in the way of San Francisco addressing its homelessness crisis is a judge’s injunction, it’s not the voters of San Francisco. They made it pretty clear in the last election what the political will is among the electorate there. In San Francisco and Oakland, arguably the most liberal cities in the country, the pushback has been pretty fierce.
Normal people in Oakland, people down the street from here, are not radical leftists. If they’re straight Democratic voters and you ask them their policy preferences, they would recite back to you some pretty liberal points of view on most of the checkbox issues, but they’re not spending their day thinking about politics.
They’re spending their day thinking about their families, their jobs, and whatever their hobbies are. They’re normal people, and they respond to things in a normal way. Even in Oakland, if you have a bunch of criminals running around breaking into cars and robbing homes, you want more cops. It’s not that complicated.
There’s a point where the activist starts to become disempowered. The activist’s agenda starts to become politically risky, and starts to become a political liability. We’re rapidly reaching that point. I have a lot of faith in the normies. The more empowered normal people are, the better off our lives will be.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s switch gears to the Westminster Declaration, which both you and I signed. You were in the room when this declaration was being developed.
Mr. Woodhouse: At the publication that I co-founded, Public, we’ve done a lot of coverage of what we call the censorship industrial complex. It is a constellation of organizations, think tanks, nonprofits, and departments on university campuses that have coalesced. They collaborate with government agencies to request or pressure or coerce tech companies, who have responded in varying degrees of willingness to go along with this. In some cases, they’ve been very happy to go along with this. In other cases, they’ve been more or less coerced into censoring speech online.
This is an industry that has come to fruition since the election of Donald Trump. That’s really when it started. You could go back much further than that to the Patriot Act. It’s come into its own in the last few years, very much since the election of Donald Trump, and then it accelerated during Covid.
This panic around election disinformation and then around Covid information and “misinformation” very much fueled the power of this complex. That’s something that we’ve reported on quite a bit. We were a part of the reporting on the Twitter files, and it was what inspired the Westminster Declaration.
Mr. Jekielek: What is the right level of free speech? Because free speech, even under the First Amendment, isn’t all protected.
Mr. Woodhouse: The courts have been very clear about the limits of the First Amendment, and it’s very, very expansive. It doesn’t violate the country, it’s just legally protected to say certain things. It’s legally protected famously for the Neo-Nazis to March through Skokie, Illinois, a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors, with the ACLU siding with the Neo-Nazis’ right to free speech. This stuff is constitutionally protected.
I don’t have a problem with a private platform enforcing its own speech codes. The problem I have is when government agencies come in and start communicating with those platforms with a veiled threat behind them. The FBI comes in and has a meeting with you and says, “We want you to do this, that, and the other thing,” and they can argue that it’s purely voluntary. Anybody being visited by the FBI, including a major corporation, doesn’t receive the message quite that way.
Also, when you have an administration which is threatening Section 230 protections against these platforms, then there’s a real threat standing behind the government’s request. That is a back door around the First Amendment and it’s how this censorship is coming from these government agencies, not just these private platforms.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s really an outsourcing of censorship that the government is not allowed to do.
Mr. Woodhouse: They’ve admitted as much. The Stanford Internet Observatory has described its purpose as filling a legal gap that the government cannot fill. The government can’t do this stuff, so they step into the breach to be able to do this for the government. That is unconstitutional, and I think it’s going to be struck down by the Supreme Court in the Missouri v. Biden case.
Mr. Jekielek: In the meantime, while the Supreme Court is looking at all this, why has it allowed these actions that may be censorship to continue?
Mr. Woodhouse: So far, the courts have sided very much with my point of view. In Missouri v. Biden, this court case came down at the district court level, which was just withering. It referred to it as one of the most important First Amendment cases in American history. It was a mixed case, but it largely sided with that point of view, although it made this exemption for CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], which was a mistake. That will probably be undone at the Supreme Court level. Whatever you may say about the Supreme Court, they are very pro-free speech, and I think that they will rule as such.
Mr. Jekielek: Why is this Westminster Declaration important? What is its purpose, really?
Mr. Woodhouse: The United States has a First Amendment, but other countries don’t have that. In Europe, with their Digital Services Act, we’re seeing some pretty scary clampdowns on digital free speech. We have a shield that other countries don’t have. I hope that shield will be enough.
As I said, the Supreme Court will probably side with the First Amendment in this case. We wanted to bring folks together from all over the world who are facing these kinds of attacks against their speech rights in order to draft a statement in opposition to it, and to sign a statement in opposition to it. That was the animating spirit behind it—everybody in the world should have free speech.
Mr. Jekielek: In Canada, there are a lot of questions right now, and many people aren’t fully aware of them. There’s a manufacturing of perceived consensus happening through these systems. As human beings we’re very susceptible when we think everybody around us believes something to be true or takes a certain moral position. It’s something in addition to censorship in this new age of social media and internet technology.
Mr. Woodhouse: There’s a more organic element to it, which is troubling. A lot of the debate behind “cancel culture” was about this. It’s a much more complicated debate than other arguments around free speech. Because as I said before, if somebody says something abominable, I’m okay with certain measures that are outside of the government to silence people’s speech, such as counter-speech and not employing somebody where one person’s valid response to abominable speech is another person’s cancel culture.
We’re never going to agree on where to draw the line. The troubling thing about so-called cancel culture writ large, is that there does seem to be an appetite for making it very uncomfortable for people to express particular political views.
Political views can switch. For the last few years, it has been conservative speech that’s been silenced by the Left-wing masses. There have been cases of the government censoring the speech of far-Left groups recently. That organic appetite that’s coming up from the population is a cultural switch, which I find very disturbing.
There have been polls that have shown much less support for free speech among young people than older people. I don’t know if they’re going to grow up and become adults and start to change their views or if they'll carry this with them. If they do, we will have a real problem on our hands.
Mr. Jekielek: Not only with that, but also with invasions of privacy. I remember seeing a poll where an astonishing number of young people would accept a camera in their home. Really, you would do that, because you have that much trust?
Mr. Woodhouse: I don’t want to sound like a culture warrior, but the entitlement to being safe and comfortable has always been, in varying contexts, a condition that is conducive to authoritarianism, and which every authoritarian government justifies. It is all about national security and empowering these dictators to protect you from some invisible enemy within the population.
I do see that in the vulnerable narcissism which is being encouraged and which is becoming endemic within our institutions. There is that soft conditioning for the rise of an authoritarian regime. I don’t think that it’s just around the corner. It may be fairly far off, but it’s looming in a way that I find very alarming.
Mr. Jekielek: Leighton, as we finish up, what we just talked about is pretty grim. How do you keep yourself going in this climate and where do you find your inspiration?
Mr. Woodhouse: It might sound like a cliche to say this, but I have a three-year-old son and another one on the way. Having a family grounds you. In one sense, it makes you worry more for the future for obvious reasons. In another sense, it orders your priorities where you don’t have to look out for the whole world. You don’t have to even think about the whole world. You just need to think about this child, how to take care of them, and how to make them happy day-to-day. I think that helps a lot.
As I’ve said before, I find a lot of reasons for optimism. This ideology and this mode of governance is held together by bubblegum and duct tape. It’s imposed by a small faction of highly overeducated, activist types with some pretty out there ideologies who have an out-sized influence on our politics. That’s a precarious position for the elite to be in.
Mr. Jekielek: They are backed by some pretty heavy dollars.
Mr. Woodhouse: They are backed by pretty heavy dollars. We thought that when Citizens United happened, we were going to lose our democracy. I don’t see that big of a change, but I haven’t tracked it too closely. The sky didn’t fall in a lot of these cases where corporate money is supposed to transform the landscape of our politics. It just hasn’t happened, because money isn’t everything.
George Soros has been trying to push through his drug policies for decades. Now, they are working, but it has taken decades for it to happen. I don’t think that money is everything. Thankfully, we still have a functioning democracy for now.
Functioning democracies have to be responsive to ordinary people. Ordinary people tune in when things get to a point where these political issues are no longer abstract, and they’re actually affecting their day-to-day lives. In terms of crime, that is how everybody feels now. It’s time for change, and that change is afoot.
Mr. Jekielek: Leighton Woodhouse, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Woodhouse: Thank you so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Leighton Woodhouse me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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