Episode 25: Mike Shellenberger - CA Gubernatorial Candidate on Homelessness, Addiction, Crime, Inequality, and the California Dream in Peril

Published May 26, 2022, 5:48 PM

1:14 - Mass Shootings: The nation has been shaken over the past 2 weeks with 2 senseless mass murders committed by 2 disturbed and deranged young men - Payton Grendon in Buffalo, NY and Salvador Ramos in Uvalde, TX. No civilized society should have to encounter this. What can we do about them? Are we diagnosing the problem correctly? Can we gauge which solutions can or cannot work? Why is so much anger being directed at places other than the killers themselves? 


39:49 - Shellenberger: Nobody has diagnosed the problems plaguing the State of California better than Mike Shellenberger. This practical and solutions-oriented approach is gaining attention. He lays it all out for us around the difficult issues that the state is encountering - homelessness, addiction, crime, inequality, and a political class seemingly non-responsive to the state's problems. 

Calgary Audio Ladies and Gentlemen is made thousand and twenty two. I am Matt Bolinsky. This is your weekly dose sub sanity, the prevailing narrative, and so there was gonna be some heavy subject matter on this episode regardless. Today I am interviewing a gentleman named Mike Shellenberger. He is an activist author has become kind of the thorn in the side of the California political community, in particular Gavin Newsome, because he is running for governor and he's been very vocal and been getting a lot of media attention on Joe Rogan and a lot of other high, you know, high audience media programs talking about the problems that are festering here in California, the ones that are dark and unpleasant, like addiction, poverty, homelessness, crime, and how to deal with these issues. And so this is a discussion. Mike has probably the most constructive and insightful views of anyone who's running for office in this date of California on this stuff, and it's why he's gained some traction and and quite a big audience and some attention here. And so he and I get into all of those topics to fascinating discussion. He's a brilliant, incredibly well intentioned guy. I think you're going to really enjoy that chat um. But in terms of dark and deep and heavy issues, um, the thing that's on every everyone's mind in America. After the last couple of days, after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Salvador Ramos went into Robe Elementary School in val Day, Texas and murdered nineteen believe nineteen overall, seventeen of them children. I believe, a disgusting and deranged act of evil, and one that's weighing on all of us. And this is only about a week or so after a white supremacist, Peyton Gendron from rural New York, traveled three three hours to Buffalo, specifically because he knew it had a heavy African American population, and indiscriminately killed ten individuals at a grocery store, ranging in all ages from the young to old. Two despicable acts of evil that just leave us shaking our head at how does this happen in what would otherwise be a civilized country, the richest nation in the world, probably the most successful, most powerful sovereign nation ever to exist at least in modern times, and we have to deal with these horrendous acts, and and you just your left shaking your head. And of course there is a media firestorm in response to both of the all of these, and then everybody lines up on their side of the political aisle and starts posting on social media their owns, their defenses, their metaphors, why it's somebody else's fault, why it is the responsibility of this person, that person, or this group, and it becomes just a cauldron of hate and hostility and tension and divisiveness. And I man, I just sit there and I'm thinking, Okay, how can I add to the conversation here, What is a healthier way to respond to these situations? How do we work through these issues? How do we have a more constructive dialogue. So, specifically in response to the Ramos murdered yesterday, because one of these masks, this one did not have a racial tint to it, so the ones that don't have a racial tint seem to fire a lot of conversation around access to guns, and particularly because this was one in Texas where they're very loose gun laws, and from what it appears, this is an eighteen year old individual who is incredibly disturbed, who was able to pretty easily access a very deadly weapon, if not an a R fifteen, something that was very similar to and this is a semi automatic assault rifle that seems to be used in a lot of these mass shootings. I'll get to more of the commentary on that in a second. So I'm in kind of a unique position here because on the one hand, you know, I'm not a gun person. I don't own a gun, I don't plan on owning a gun, and I think that the a lot of the arguments made in justification for very lax or unconditional gun ownership, a lot of these metaphors are really off. But similarly, I do understand I do believe in the Second Amendment in principle, and understand I believe there's valid rational reasons and justifications for people to believe that they should have the right to own a gun um and that a lot of responsible, law abiding gun owners do not believe that they should be punished or have their rights to self defense kind of constricted because there are other people who perform bad acts. I do understand that absolutely, so I try to dive into it, and I'm thinking about, Okay, where where are we going right? Where are we going wrong in this conversation? How do we add to it? So I guess one of the things that catalyzes my interest in this topic and why I'd like to try to direct the conversation a more healthy manner is that I see so much anger being thrown all over the place, and very little of it is directed towards the deranged, sick, lunatic who murdered those kids. Isn't that who where our anger should be directed? And I understand that there's only so much that we can do to this individual. He's already dead, even if he was alive. There's only so much anger, so much hate, so much you know, vistriol release that we could that we could direct towards punishing this person. So it's like, okay, who where can we go punish other people? Where can we also get emotional satisfaction of blaming other people for this rerendous act that has caused so much pain and is just discussing on every level, And listen, I get it. I understand that those are gonna be that's going to be the visceral emotional reaction for a lot of people. But it looks like we're directing our anger and a lot of not constructive ways and directions and a lot of people who really don't deserve it. And so okay, So on the side of those who are more fiercely anti gun, they won they direct a ton of anger at anyone who opposes gun control measures and gun control laws and people who may be gun gun owners, or those who are more strident believers in the Second Amendment, and Republican politicians, not all of them, but most of them that are more fiercely pro gun. Okay, So we'll get to in a second where I think the pro gun lobby goes wrong, particularly when they're hiding behind the Second Amendment, when just throwing their arms up in the air and saying, hey, they're they're really you know, cannot be any restrictions, and they need to understand that the with the Second Amendment, which I do believe should be maintained, comes responsibility that you have the responsibility to continue to monitor your society and how guns are being used and accessed in them, and if there's a way to tweak it, to limit it, to modify it in a way that works out and you know, for the greater good to protect people. And if there are, for instance, there are more people who wish to cause violence or terror to innocent individuals who are getting their hands listit ly on on guns, it is your responsibility to try to take some steps to prevent that. Right, So, the Second Amendment, I support it, but not unconditionally at all. It needs to be constantly monitored and tweaked. Um. Those who are anti gun and the way that they react to these shootings, I feel like they're missing their mark when they just go they direct so much anger and hate towards anyone who is an advocate for guns, owns guns, or simply reject certain legislation to restrict guns. I'm sorry, guys, at the end of the day, the people who deserve our hate, outrage, and vitriol for murdering innocent people are the people who murder innocent people. You cannot go and ascribe all that blame to other people who advocate for laws that, for the most part, overwhelmingly the people who uh utilize those laws do not go ahead and murder people. Right, I mean, I understand it, I get it. This is this is an emotional issue. You see these dead children. There's nothing more horrendous and disturbing on earth. But the evil doers, the villains in this scenario are not your fellow citizens. The villains are the people who go and murder innocent children. And that's when when we're looking at, when we're diagnosing this, when we're looking at what are the inputs that are causing this? And yes, once again and I'm gonna get to it, absolutely, I think some of the gun laws need to change. The and not just the gun laws, but the approach to firearms and guns overall, both legal legal on the legalization and access side, but also on the enforcement side, because there's a ton of illegal guns out there. But regardless of how many people have access to guns, we have to get back to the issue of why do so many people in our society, for some reason, want to take these guns into scenarios, into situations and murder dozens of innocent individuals and children and elderly people for no reason whatsoever. That needs to be looked into, that needs to be diagnosed, because it seems like everyone wants to compare our gun scenario to other countries, and I think it's very difficult because we have a unique gun heritage. And even beyond that, while we have by far the most guns on earth, if you look at other countries that might have a third as many guns as we are a fifth as many guns. We might have five times as many guns, but we have fifty to a hundred times as many mass shootings. Right, our society is producing an autumount of people that want to indiscriminately murder innocent people, and that needs to look at be looked into in terms of what are what are what is tearing at the at the societal fabric, what are the cultural inputs? What's going wrong in our society that's leading to people to get to this place, because ideally we have to stop them from getting to this place in the first place. Right, Um, so, how do we diagnose this problem? How do we see how do we figure out how to fix it by looking at it from a number of different angles, Because simply saying hey, we need to get rid of all guns, I'm sorry, that's not a practical consideration here. That's not in a country like America with two hundred million guns already in circulation, with a deep cultural heritage of gun ownership, and people understanding Listen, there's a lot of people. Hey, it is a valid concern. You are a rational observer. If you look at the amount of people who illegally have guns and criminals who have guns and do want to desire your own firearm to protect yourself against them, that's not in a rational concern. So the idea that we're going to be able to get rid of all guns or even a significant amount of guns, or implement a lot of the solutions that some other countries have implemented, I don't think that's realistic. So how do we still diagnose and still move this issue forward? Um? So, there's a general named German Lopez. He now writes for The New York Times. I've recently did some work for Vox. I've always found him to be pretty level headed. You know, he slants a little more liberal, but he's certainly I think he's certainly a sober and thoughtful commentator on these issues. You know, he looked into some studies on the impact of some of these around the edge UH gun laws, right, like background checks, the idea of licensing, and it shows that you know, background checks with this with this many guns already in circulation, UH, background checks only do so much because there's a lot of people whose backgrounds do not show up, uh in if you have to go and check their background, they don't have a felony on their record, they don't necessarily have anything on the record beyond and we're gonna get to what might go on their record, which maybe we need to start looking at in a minute. But the background checks may stop some of these, but they're only they're only going to be limited in their effectiveness at preventing additional gun violence. UM. More significant steps and restrictions on access to guns that don't prevent outright prevent ownership, they seem to be more impactful, such as licensing. I'm sorry, you look around and you're like, you need a license to operate a motor vehicle, You sure as hell need a license to go and fly a plane. Seems like with the gravity with the potential outcomes of owning a gun, whether it's yourself, whether whether a law abiding citizen who may or may not be able to handle a gun responsibly, or someone who's malicious and has bad motives in owning a gun, um, it seems like this is the type of thing that warrants some licensing and yeah, and you could go look at uh and you say, well, listen, we need how is the state? How can we trust the state and the government to properly monitor these types of things and not reject someone unnecessarily on faulty premises. Is um from gun ownership? You could, but you could say the same thing about cars. It's like, okay, if the government is not abusing its right to reject licensing of someone from motor vehicles or airplanes or other any or fucking heavy machinery or busses or god knows what, or all these other pieces of equipment that can be used for predominantly legitimate purposes but sometimes can be used for criminal purposes. I mean, the States seems to be doing an okay The state fox up a lot of other things, but it seems to be doing an okay job on making sure that you know, we strike a good balance between access to a certain available equipment machinery and tools and needing to be trained or at least go through a certain process to get access to those tools. Right, And if we required if you had to go through order to get a gun fire arm, if you had to go through a certain amount of training or go jump through a couple of hoops that in other than a couple of circumstances when someone needed a gun immediately for self protection, which is, let's be honest, it's not many of the cases. That's a very restricted minority of the cases where someone needs a firearm. I think you would catch it. Would this would capture a lot of people or prevent a lot of people who did want to commit evil, who did have malicious intentions, from being able to get access to a gun in time, in time in order to use that weapon for such evil intentions. Okay, but also, as German Lopez goes on, it's like, Man, we in thinking about the solution, you have to start from a premise acknowledging how many guns are already in circulation. Right, So people point to Australia, they point to Scotland and some other countries that essentially, in response to mass shootings, just implemented either buy back program or overtime made ownership elicit. And we're able to essentially eradicate the nation of guns. It said, Okay, you know nobody can have one, and we're going to be able to enforce that to a level that innocent people are not going to have a rational concern that criminals are going to have access to guns and thus it's not going to be rational for them to do it's we are going to make it safe for them not to have guns. Right, So Australia seems to have been able to do it well, Scotland was able to do it. But this is a matter of scale, guys. Uh, we have eleven times as many people and sometimes like I guess, like sixty times as much land mass as Australia to go on a gun confiscation program or to take two hundred million guns off the street, I mean, I gotta be honest, I just don't see it happening. I don't think that's something that's that's realistic. I do. I'm totally in favor of of implementing buy back programs to incentivize people to voluntarily give up their guns, right absolutely, I'm I'm for the bullshit that we spend money on if we wanted to, don't dedicate a significant amount of budgetary funds to incentivize and buy back guns to reduce the amount of guns in circulation. I am totally in favor of that. Then you look get Scott at Scotland when they decided to outright ban handguns and fire personal firearms. You know how many guns they had to take off the streets, a hundred and sixty thousand. It's just not comparable like trying to implement the solution in America. I don't see it possible. So what is possible? This guy, Salvador Ramos, on his eighteenth birthday, went and purchased over the count essentially with no friction and no barrier whatsoever. He went and purchased some pretty harmful guns, some stuff that could do some real damage. I mean, I think it's even a lot of conservatives and people who are far more pro gun than I am looking around and sand wait a second, this is pretty ridiculous that someone who's society does not even trust to drink, uh legally drink or buy alcohol, is able to attain a weapon of this lethality. That's got to change, guys, we can't. We You gotta for rifles that really don't have any utility beyond hunting or you know, maybe you could call it personal protection, but I don't know, I don't I don't see much of a distinction between a handgun and a an assault rifle for personal protection if there is an intruder in your home, for instance. I mean, man, I don't know, it seems like there there needs to be a distinction that It seems like there's gotta be I mean, either a waiting period or an age limit, or some sort of light training and licensing program to go get your hands on on an assault rifle, right. I mean, some people make a valid point that, hey, it just sounds scarier and in in reality, there's not a big leap in lethality between a gun in a semi semi automatic rifle, and I think, yeah, yeah, it the the distinction between the two is sometimes sometimes exaggerated, But I don't know. There seems to be an odd and morbid habit of these a R fifteens and assault rifles being used in these mass shootings, particularly with schools. You gotta look at that. You can't ignore that, you can't just pretend that that doesn't exist. Right, So there's I think implementing some rules and regulations making it more difficult to legally purchase those types of guns, not making it impossible, But you gotta there needs to be some more friction in the process of getting it. I think makes all the sense in the world. Now, the question is how much of the problem is that going to solve or it could at least made it more difficult for this one individual to commit this crime. But man, there are a lot of crimes. California has these restrictions. This is something that the anti gun people need to wrestle with, is that there are jurisdictions that have more restrictive gun laws, but they don't seem they still seem to be quite violent zones. Right. This is the state of California, this is Los Angeles, this is Chicago. Incredibly restricted gun laws and they're not able to get the guns off the street. And that's a big problem. And this is an article that was tweeted out by Zai gilani Use, another great commentator on issue on all issues, but particularly those around gun violence, crime and criminality and criminal justice. And the Chicago police collects something like ten thousand illegal guns a year and it barely puts a dent in the gun violence problem. Like, it is just insane how many guns are floating out there, and not just one people were able to purchase legally. There's an entire industry, I mean, we America and this is a distinguishing feature. We have an organized crime and that's not just the mafia, that's not just good fellows. It's also these inner city gangs. We have a gang culture, and we have gangs operating in the United States to an extent far more significant than any just about any other Western country, depending on whether you count Mexico and some of the other South American countries are Central American countries. Okay, these are organizations that have entire apparatus is set up to access and circulate guns illegally and use them, once again, from malicious purposes. We can't ignore that. So if you think that this is just going to get solved by making it more difficult for people to to legally in voluntarily get access to a gun, it's only going to make a small dent. We've got to work on enforcement, enforcing the lawn, preventing bad actors and criminals from getting access to guns, both for one of the reason that they're going to use them in two. Once again, you have to look at whether or not it is rational. Is a person rational for wanting to have a gun for personal protection? So, as I said before, I'm not a gun person. I don't have a gun. There's a ton of people that I know in southern California, Los Angeles who are never gunning. People either never owned a gun, but if God and a gun over the last two or three years, in response, based it, once again based on rational observations. They rationally observed the riots and the civil unrest in two thousand twenty. They rationally observed the increase in crime, the tears of the social fabric, and the greater threats to their safety in the city of Los Angeles over the last two years, and in response, they went and got a gun. That is not an invalid or irrational thing to do, right, So, the better that we're able with, the better that we're able to maintain social fabric and public safety overall, the less incentive there is for people to go on voluntarily purchase a gun, because the best way to get guns off the street or to reduce American gun culture is for people to voluntarily do it. It's what happened with cigarettes, and just to caveat that's not a one to one metaphor, But cigarettes got solved, not by outlying cigarettes and not even by increasing the price. The cigarette problem and lung cancer problem got solved quite a bit, or at least reduced significantly by everybody can but people be convinced to voluntarily stop smoking cigarettes. That's what put the major net in that issue. I know, we want you know, guns are a different subject because there's something that really kind of operates at the edge of law enforcement and you know, the kind of edge between legal activity and illegal activity and activity that harms others. So it is a different topic. But the more that we can get people and create the conditions for them to voluntarily not want to go get guns, the better. Then what are the other factors? What are the other inputs beyond simply the amount of guns in circulation and people having access to guns? Right, because yeah, America has the most guns, it's not even close, right, But if you look at some other countries, as I said before, they have fractional amounts of gun ownership. There's still other countries that have quite a few guns. Our neighbors to the north, Canada, they have a lot of guns that think they fluctuate between like I think the seventh and most guns in the in the in the world, but there's no shortage of guns in Canada. They have drastically less gun violence and drastically less mass shooters. School shootings are unheard of, and yet in America we're on our twenty seven this year and it's only May. So it can't just be guns, right, There's got to be something other. There's something else going on. Michael Tracy described it as cultural pathologies. He mentions in Bowling for Columbine, the seminal film about gun violence in American advocating for gun control, Michael Moore puzzles over why there's so many more shootings in the US versus Canada, which have comparable rates of gun ownership. Comparable is overstating it. The US has about three or four times is high gun ownership, but Canada still has a lot. He concludes. The issue isn't guns per se, but unique American cultural pathologies. Is this still an allowable theory, unique American cultural pathologies? Why do we have so much violence? Right? Why do we have so many people, as I said before, who wish to go into a school and murder innocent children. Okay, that's a question that we have to ask ourselves. It can't just be about God funk. These politicians who you know, who allow people to buy these firearms over the counter, because here's the thing. Yeah, there's deaffinitely a chance there's a good chance that it may slow down or inhibit people from not being able to buy it legally. It's sure as hell seems to that it will not stop them all. It's not going to stop all the pucks from getting getting past the goalie on that lots of people are able who want to are this deliberate and want to get these guns illegally are able to, Okay, so why do they want to go and get them? And man, where do we even begin on trying to diagnose this problem? But you look at these two individuals this week with salvod Or Ramos and last week with Peyton Gendron, and I mean, these are just textbook people who seem to have fallen through the cracks. You look at them, You look at there's red flags all over the place. These are you look at the face. I saw some pictures of Peyton Gendron and you can look at the snarl on his face and you're like, this is a disturbed individual. This is a hateful, resentful person who's stewing in their own misery and looking to lash out everything about salvad or ramos, he's cutting himself, he's acting in anti social, strange ways, he's saying strange things to women, and with aggressive behaved ivir at his workplace. Completely a loner. These are not happy people. These are not people who have any sense of meaning community or or connected to society in any way, shape or form. And this seems to be a more prevalent problem in the United States than it is other places. So Democratic Senator Chris Murphy went to the Senate floor in response to the Rainbow shooting. He was trying to dismiss the notion or the discussion around mental health, because it seems like, on the one hand, people are saying, hey, it's not a gun problem, it's a mental health prob there's not a gun issue, that's a mental health issue, And on the other side you've got people like Murphy k being completely dismissive of that. So, first off, I think the comment these statement this is not about guns. I think that in and of itself is pretty ridiculous. It's definitely about guns, it's just not just about guns. So Senator Murphy said, spare me the bullshit of mental illness. We're not an outlier on mental illness. We're an outlier on firearms, um, Senator Murphy, with all due respect, spare me your bullshit. Imagine thinking that the United States is not an outlier on mental illness. This nation is drowning in existential angst, anxiety, to oppression, addiction, and it's sprouting up and it's manifesting itself in these ways. This is the manifestation of that. Beyond these mass shootings, do you know the notion of deaths of despair? People who are dying from substance abuse, from alcohol or drug abuse, from overdoses, and from suicide. Those numbers have skyrocketed this century, in particular in the two thousand Tents. You've got to see the graphs on this stuff. Recently, this country is becoming an incredibly unhappy country. And if you look to segment, you could say, Okay, at the top of the heat, people are more free than ever, people have are living better lives than ever. But one thing that we've seen of modern American particularly the digital age, is that things skew high and things skew low. People at the bottom of society are really falling through the cracks. Man. That's why we're seeing so much suicide. That's why we're seeing so much depression and anxiety over medication. And you can't ignore that this is manifesting itself in some way with these deranged individuals who become demons and turn to evil and participate in evil acts. Trying to ignore that we have a proble of culture and the social fabric is also ridiculous. It's just as ridiculous as the gun advocates ignoring that. Hey, the fact that we have so many guns is to a certain extent leading to some people to be able to commit acts of terror and absolute horror. So where can we look to that for once again, more tangible solutions. I know I've been waxing a lot about you know, who's blaming who and why. I think certain people blaming others are wrong. Okay, so tangibly, what can we do to solve this um more specifically? Yes, I don't listen. Some people, some gun gun owners, make the argument to me that there isn't that much of a distinction between handguns and these assault rifles, that anything short of an automatic has the same degree of lethality. I don't know, it seems I see there's another argument trying and there isn't once again a morbid consistency to these mass shootings being done by assault rifles as opposed to handguns, although handguns do seem to be at play in other circumstances. I think we do need to take some steps. I'm I'm pro licensing need a license to drive a car. I don't see why you don't need a license to have a handgun as you do in certain certain places, or some sort of licensing or requirement system or monitoring system. Okay, beyond that, one thing that's been banded about a red flag laws that if someone, if a family member, acquaintance, or observer, can identify that a that a person carries a particularly high degree of risk, that has shown signs that they wish to cause harm to others, but not indiscriminately, that that person can be kind of put on it, marked as a red flag, and prevented from gun ownership under certain monitoring for a certain amount of time. These laws obviously need to be crafted very specifically and need to be adjudicated, like the state needs to be adjudicate so that you're not impinging on people's rights and that you're not identifying people who do not pose a threat as posing a threat and preventing them from taking steps to defend themselves. Right, but you know, I think about, Okay, where else in the American legal system do we have something similar in terms of a temporary restraining order? You can get a temporary restraining order against someone we know you don't. It does not require that a person be found guilty by a jury of their peers. That there is a system in place for people to make claims as to immediate threats against them and have the courts step in to prevent the other people who do pose a threat from engaging in certain behavior they'd otherwise be able to engage in. So, okay, are there parallels there that we can make use of? Um? Can we implement a system similar to the t r O system, to the temporary restraining orders for you know, for red flag laws so that people who because guys, you're looking at these people, I mean based on one the Gendrin kids Internet behavior and just it seems about how he acts and everyone saw the red flags with Ramos, and these are people who should have been reported and while they may have not done anything that would have warranted them being arrested or detained, put on some sort of list that would have prevented them from from accessing guns, that would have legally prevented them from obtaining these guns. Things that are more functional as to school shootings, like security guards to school security. This is a tough one man, because it makes it makes sense in theory. Well, he, let me take a step back. It's terrible to think that we might need that the cost benefit might work out that it would make more sense for their for us to need full blown security at elementary schools. Okay, to know that we live in that type of society. A lot of people try to equate us to Israel, where Israel has all the security around schools, in public shopping centers and malls and things like that. Well, yeah, Israel's a five country of six million people surrounded by three million people and a number of hostile sovereign nations that want it dead and wiped off the map, and his experienced decades of terrorism due to those factors. America does not have the same set of conditions with its external its neighbors, and external enemies surrounding it. Right, the thought that our children would have to be subjected to that type of to that type of environment, despite the simply based on in internal actors, on internal bad guys as opposed to form external bad guys. I mean, that's kind of a sickening and sobering thought, right, But okay, from a purely tangible perspective, is the mitigation of harm worth it? Um? Some studies seem to show that a lot of the schools that do have armed guards and securities it hasn't really prevented a lot of violence. And it's tough to look at that because you're like, wait a second, do they have more security in the first place, because they're more dangerous neighborhoods in the first place. And from a couple of studies that I've looked at, even controlling for that, it doesn't seem to have solved the problem um yesterday. And this is something that we're still trying to see figure out. The facts on the facts on around the Ramos shooting is apparently Ramos encountered there was a guard at the school. Ramos encountered that guard, and I keep on hearing various rumors thrown about about what happened, that Ramos took out the guard, that Ramos had body armor, the gods shot him that the guards shot Ramos, the body armor protected him and the outgunned the security guard. I don't know, there's a lot of strange, strange factors voting around about that when we're I have to see gather more facts on that one. But UM, listen, I how whatever solves the problem I'm in favor of. I think to sit around and kind of lambass people for not wanting security guards at their schools, I think is off Like you should not criticize parents for not wanting their kids to have to be an environment that has this aura of danger hovering over it at all times. Um. And so I think some people who are pro gun or gun advocates really are off base when they, you know, try to criticize people who don't, who are off put by that solution. Counterpoint being listen, if it works, it works, and if there is a way if we can, uh, if we can equip schools with security and protection that would prevent these types of things from happening, that would be a net plus. It needs to be continually studied, and so what's the assessment there. I don't know. It's toughly we got twenty seven of these school shootings already by by May it we might need a bigger program. We m need a nationwide program for school security. States might need to attack this for school security at a higher level. It's something that we need to look into. In the case of mental health, it's both. It's not just mental health, because mental health is something that is diagnosable and treatable. Right. It's about someone has already become miserable or pathological or anti social and has problems and needs to get treated. It's also about preventing people from getting to that place in the first place. And sometimes that's not present preventable um in a lot of cases, in terms of chemical imbalances and things of that nature. But once again, you've got to look at the trajectory. We seem to be having more of these incidents than we used to have, right, So it's not obviously there's more people being born genetically with these chemical chemical imbalances, No, they're needs there. There are social inputs that go into why we are seeing more people at the bottom wrongs of society who wish to do harm to others, And you need to start looking at what are the other common threads, What are the other common threads going through these all these mass shootings and school shootings, A lot of them are a breakdown in the nuclear family. A lot of these shooters had no farther figure in their life Ramos yesterday, the Parkland shooter you can see. I think there was a study done by the Heritage Foundation about seventy of school shooters had either a broken family or simply did not have a father. I know it's not possible. I know that you know, the the accepting alternative modalities of family, that there's going that not every marriage is gonna work out and we're not gonna be able to live in this leave it to beaver nuclear family, mom, dad, housewife, you know, two and a half kids in a white picket fense society. But you cannot deny that that is, at its core, a healthier modality for society to operate. The more widespread that is, the less we're going to have these people fall through the cracks and turn to this type of behavior. So yeah, I think we need to reevaluate how we're looking at those values and to stop demonizing these values like the nuclear family, just because they were traditional and just because some people think that they're outdated. Another interesting one that people bring up a lot is video games in particular, because you know, some of these killers Ramos yesterday are very into these first person shooter call of duty video games. This is another tough one because you look at it, the prevalence of these video games expanded exponentially in the nineties and two thousands, while gun violence was going down, right, the murder rate in American City, the murder rate in America overall plummeted in the nineties and the two thousands. Of justin there was no video games in the sixties, no video games in the seventies, not much in the eighties, and definitely nothing with multiplayer shooting in the eighties. So as these as these games started to sprout up, you all said they coincided with a drop in the murder rate. However, in specific instances and selective instances, they do seem to have been a motivating factor. So it seems to be a broader issue of kids who have no meaning, who aren't socialized, getting sucked into these digital these digital universes, and never coming out and being subject to loss, exposed to lots of toxic stuff that goes not just for video games, that goes for you know, not creating be essentially not creating human connection and learning how to you know, operate and connect with others because you're you're they're so focused on the digital sphere um to the types of pressures and the bullying that goes on with kids. Being able to communicate through digital means in everybody's life, everybody having a public persona. I mean, god, it's got to be really it is. It is a fraud and difficult environment for children and for raising children. But that's another that's another avenue we need to look into and like, all right, we are producing a lot more unhealthy citizens. Why are we doing so? We need to be we we need to give people the tools and the knowledge to help god, you know, both children and parents to process the digital spear and operating the digital world more healthily. So in some people, when I posted a lot of this stuff on my Instagram, a lot of people thought, you know that I understand some of them thought that I was giving a cop out and throwing my hands have been saying, hey, there's just you know, because these gun laws aren't going to solve everything, that means we shouldn't do anything. And no, that is not what I'm saying. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying because this is a multi pronged problem, it requires a multi pronged solution. And that's simply in the response of just land basting and directing all our hate and outrage as to those who believe, you know, who believe many in good faith in the right to bear arms and gun ownership, that we're missing the mark, and that yes, that is one some common sense gun laws and in creating some more restrictions and requirements around gun ownership and access legally to guns is one piece of a multi pronged solution. And that if we think that's going to solve all our problems, and that you know this, that that we're going to be able to really move the ball forward just by defeating our enemies on the political battlefield of gun control, I mean that that's a fallacy. That's off. It needs to be law enforcement focused on illegal guns so law abiding citizens feel more comfortable and are not inspired to go and get guns as many people had have been over the last three years. It is being able to identify people who are showing disturbing, threatening behavior, and either one if it does rise to the level that they need to be incarcerated or detained to find you know, to to make sure to be able to do that, or to put them on a list where otherwise if they would be able to purchase a gun, they are not able to purchase a gun. We seem to be having an epidemic and misery and and despair, not just for people who go ahead and take it out on others, but overall. I mean, these are things we have to stay abreast of. As the social fabric phrase, how do we build back the social fabric? How do we look at what the causality is not just for people who go in and commit mass murder, but also people who are dying from drug and alcohol addiction, dying committing suicide. These things do have some common threads, right, and that we need to be able to address those. Does the cost benefit workout where we need to implement more security nationwide or statewide at elementary schools? Um Hey, I don't want to believe that we are under the same circumstances as Israel, but if the threat is that great, then maybe we need a solution that matches it. Are these things creating safer schools are they going to prevent. Do we need a national project to securitize schools? I hope we don't, but it needs to be looked into. I hope that people don't think I'm callous because I'm trying to direct the conversation in more practical manner. I understand the sight of these innocent children being shot dead two days before they were supposed to be let out for some break. It is heart wrenching. It is disgusting. Uh, there's not really words to describe how horrible these things are, and I understand why that sparks a lot of people's emotions. However, we can't ignore that when these things happen, a conversation starts, and this conversation needs to be healthier. It can't just be once again, I go back to I see a ton of outrage and hatred, and so little of it is directed towards the person who actually committed the crime. So much of it is directed towards fellow citizens and people yelling at each other, yelling into a void. So I think it is absolutely I think it is a worthy cause, a worthy exercise to try to make this a healthier and more well rounded conversation. And hopefully that will start driving us to some solutions. UM. One more topic, as relates specifically to the Payton Gendron murder. This was outright. You know, there are some circumstances where they try to impute white supremacy to the causality of the murder. There's no question this murder was racially motivated. He says that he's specifically targeted people because of the color of their skin. So what could I say? That's a difficult topic. I hope I did it justice. I'm I'm recording this on somewhat short notice. I feel like it was a topic that needed to be addressed. I tried to talk about it on social media. I imagine that a number of people did appreciate my my attempt to try to thread the needle on a difficult issue. I'm sure a lot of other people think I'm talking nonsense and I'm full of shit, and I'm either one ignorance or two trying to evade what I know to be the truth. UM, I don't know. Give me your input. UM, do you have ideas on this? Both can both in terms of tangible ideas on how to solve this or am I screwing up on the interpretation of it. Am I actually hurting the discourse as opposed to helping it? I hope I'm helping it, um. And I definitely think that where this goes in terms of just like I said before, all this anger and hatred for some reason not directed towards the killers, and directed towards your fellow Americans. I gotta be honest. I don't think that's right. I don't think this is healthy. I don't think this is helping things, um. So So let me know your input, um on this topic. I do not claim to have even close to all the answers, So anyone who's got better ideas, please please please, I encourage you to throw them out there, try to contribute. If I'm not the one who's making the discourse more more healthy, hopefully you can. I know that a lot of people are gunshy about talking about and shoes this controversial, but we can't be afraid of this stuff, guys. This is why our conversations have veered so far off course, because people inform people of good faith don't want to They don't want the headaches, they don't want the trouble of discussing these issues. So I do encourage people to step up and discuss these in a good faith manner and we can try to process them. And we've through these issues to get so shift into a guy who does have answers to problems, not this problem specifically, but a lot of related ones. Nobody is more informed than Michael Shellenberg. If you're looking for tangible, constructive solutions to the problems that are plaguing in California in terms of homelessness, crime, addiction, poverty, inequality, and the decline and quality of left that we are experiencing. Nobody has taken a more clinical approach than Mike Sellenberger. We get into all, we get into these problems and his proposed solutions and his cam paining for governor coming up in just a moment, and we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break, Ladies and gentlemen, I am Matt Bolinsky in this is the prevailing narrative. I'm here today with activist, author and candidate for governor of California running as an independent, Mike Schellenberger. As a youth, Mike was a self proclaimed nineties radical exploring the world of advocacy and public policy, typically focusing on progressive causes such as criminal justice, addiction, poverty, and homelessness. Then, Mike seemed to reach the public consciousness more broadly in the two thousand tens as a conturing and voice on environmentalism, advocating for nuclear energy in particular. Over the last few years, Mike has expanded his public presence, becoming allowed but perhaps the most constructive agitator, highlighting the misgovernance in the state of California. His best selling book San Francico documents how misguided progressivism has led to exploding crime, addiction, inequality, and waste in the state. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me so from your back background, you clearly have a wide variety of interests. What led you to turn your focus recently towards progressive mismanagement in California? Well, I've actually been, you know, I've California is new since I actually ran for governor in I didn't have any support, so it didn't really go anywhere and I didn't really do much campaigning. But at the time, I was trying to save our last nuclear plant, which is called Diablo Canyon, and I realized if I was known for a governor that I needed to understand. What else was going on in the state at the time was sort of this big movement to add more housing through something called the YMB movement, the yes in our in my backyard. And so I got really into housing and the need for more housing, and then I just started looking. I just kept peeling the onion and looking at more and more of our problems in California. And when you started, uh, peeling that onion, is just amazing how much there is there. And so I wrote a report called California in Danger, and then that was eighteen. I actually wrote an article called Number one in Poverty. California isn't the most progressive state, It's the most racist. One that described California as Elysium or as sort of us the movie Elysium where the you know, all the rich people go up to the satellite and then like Matt Damon is on Earth being irradiated. And I haven't seen that one, but it seems to the the way I put it as I can just recall a couple of times walking through this progressive, utopian wonderland in Venice, California, where you've got yoga studios, meditation studios, and like Chris three dollar crystal shops, and you're kind of walking over homeless people bleeding puss in the street and order to get to them on Rose Avenue. So I imagine that's a lot of parallels between that and Elysium. Yeah, exactly. And so so you I remember because that was when I first noticed you. You seem to be very much focused on the nuclear energy issue you ran for governor, and then all of a sudden, over the next couple of years, I saw you commenting far more broadly on on topics related to California. So that was kind of the vector you ran kind of based on focused on one single issue, and then in trying to expand your viability for governor for some sort of position, you started taking a look and you're like, oh my god, you look underneath the hood here and it's a it's a disaster. Yeah, that's trade, and of course there's other things going on. I then I wrote this one piece that I I sort of I kind of like a lot of people. I thought, well, homelessness is a problem of housing. It's in the name, you know. At the same time, I always knew that everybody was on drugs and mentally ill. Because I just I lived in San Francisco. I lived in the Mission District. I worked right across the street from an open drug scene that was a heroine scene in the late ninety nineties, and there was always it always took me like homelessness. Advocacy always struck me as a little off, like it wasn't kind of it didn't seem progressive in some in some way I couldn't quite put my finger on. And then that, you know, So then fast forward, I get to the race is obviously over. I'm back to nuclear advocacy. I'm in the Netherlands. I'm about to I'm testifying, meeting with a member of parliament who brought me to the Netherlands because she was a climate she was working on climate change and everybody was all renewables focused, and so she just googled around and found found me. So I she brought me to Netherlands, and then in the car ride back from delf to Amsterdam, she goes, you know, you might be interested in my husband. He works on drug policy, and I was like, yeah, like what I was like? And she'saidving drug policy and homelessness, and I was like, well, what is as Like, have you ever been to San Francisco? And these are very cosmopolitan people, so they were like, of course, you know, and I was like, what is going on in San Francisco? And he just goes, look, mate, you know it's you gotta have carrots and sticks when dealing with a difficult population like the homeless. You gotta have some reward for good behavior and some consequence for bad behavior. And I was like, right, of course. And then but then it kind of went asleep for a little bit. And then I wrote a column for Forbes in the fall of twenty nineteen where I said I basically called for a state of emergency by the governor to take action on homelessness. And then I had a bunch of people that were like, hey, dude, this is not just about housing. It's also about drugs and mental illness. And so then I wrote a follow up column. At that point, my Forbes editors were like, you can't write any more columns on on. You're supposed to be an energy columnist, and so I was like, Okay, for me to get standing on this issue, I need to write a book. And so I was working on a book about the environment that came out in Apocalypse never became a best seller. When you write a bestseller, you gotta write a follow u a book. That's kind of the deal. And so it was obvious to me that that book would be San Francico. And and so that's the that was there, that that's the book I ended up doing, And that ends up being about crime, drugs, and homelessness and so pretty much all the main issues that inform quality of life that has clearly been on the descent in California, which has sparked the first net outflow and migration from the state of California recorded history two years in a row, just by happenstance, the last two years. UM. And so the message, one of the messages I always try to impart to my audience who's very focused on these issues, is that these problems, these things you see around them. What for instance, that what I just described in Venice with you know, the homeless population population there, or all of a sudden where um people are afraid to where their watches out to lunch and all these smash and grab robberies and stick up during the day. Is that these things don't just happen as some chaotic mixture of of stimuli. These are the inevitable results of certain policies implemented by politicians and those in power. And that's what you've been Uh, you've done an amazing job and explaining that in particular as to the homeless policy. Uh, and the way you term it as how housing first for shelter first, housing earned, is that California politicians for in recent years at least, have been so focused on housing first that literally, as long as we can build housing, that's going to solve the homeless problem, because all the people on the street just need a place to live. Not leaving aside from the fact that they are absolutely terrible at actually building this housing and it never seemed to build the housing that we continue to fund. But if you could explain the the functional failures of the policies of housing and the approach of housing first that has led to our current conditions, Yeah, sure, so, I mean, you know, so the first thing is you walk around San Francisco. I just was there a few hours ago. Um, there's a lot of people on the sidewalks. Some are intense, some are wrapped in blankets, many are dirty, they appear to be sick. They sometimes appear to be sort of sleeping or half awake. They might be slumped over. Basically, everybody's on drugs. They're mostly smoking meth amphetamine and fentonel. So the first thing you realize is that this word homeless is describing drug users. In other words, there's all sorts of variety and diversity among the people on the street. Some are white, some are black Latino Asians. Some appear to be to come from money, some appear to be poor, some people appear to be mentally ill. Some people just appear to be high. And it turns out the more you learn, some people actually have homes, some people have apartments nearby. Some people are from out of town, some people are local. But they all have one thing in common, which is that they're all on drugs. And so what you realize is that what's really going on is that it's an open drug scene. That's the right word for what what we have in San Francisco, what we have at People's Park in Berkeley, what we have next to many highways, what skid row in Los Angeles is what you have in downtown Sacramento. So we call homeless encampments what Europeans called open drug scenes, and open drug scenes are open air drug markets where the drug users the buyers are so either sick with addiction and or wanting to party with each other, and also in just so such a hurry to use their drugs that they end up using the drugs right where the open air drug market is, and that forms an open air drug scene. And traditionally you would have them, and this is true all over the world near train stations, near bus depots. The one that I was near in the night late nineteen nineties, sorry early mid early to mid nineteen nineties was around sixteenth Street bart stop in San Francisco, and it was a heroine scene. So that's the right way to think about it. Because the word homelessness, it turns out as a propaganda word that was used by the radical left. Two first kind of make the street addicts be more sympathetic, but also as a way to advocate for more subsidized housing. Now there is a rule for subsidized housing, but before you get to that, you just first have to have some clarity about what we're dealing with here, which is essentially an addiction problem. And uh, and a drug dealing problem. And so when you you know, when I was in the Netherlands and I ended up going back and shadowing this this person who was a social worker is actually a nurse, and saw what they did and learn about more what they did. What you discover is that all these cities, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfort, Vienna, Zurich had open drug scenes and they shut them down through a combination of police and social workers. They offer people method on today we have some box in which is better? Or do you offer them clean needles? You might offer them a place to stay, but you did not let people stay outside in the open drug scenes. You did not allow the open air drug dealing. So just for listeners who are in a hurry and you want to cut to the chase, that's what I am proposing, is that we just do what the Europeans did, shut down the open air drug scene. Require people, you know, I mean, make shelter available people something I said. I mean they said you're gonna make people stay in shelter. Well, no, I'm not gonna make anybody stay in shelter. You can go stay with your friends and family that you've probably alienated in your addiction, or you can move somewhere else, or you can go camp in a legal camping place, but you can't camp there on the sidewalk next to the bart train or next to the subway, because that's public space and it's not safe for you, it's not say for anybody else. And so one of the points that you make is that we in the US seem to have an a version or at least the progressives in California, you have an adversion to any sort of police presence or involvement or law enforcement involvement in this whatsoever. And then in Europe, and this is something that you've described on your appearances on Joe Rogan, is that the progressives always want to look to the model or reference the model of Europe because it's always had more libertine drug laws and views towards drug use. However, they're distorting the actual policies there because they're only taking one piece of it. They're only taking the carrot and not the stick piece. And that listen in that a combination of law enforcement and social work, uh is they don't have any aversion to that. And here the the homeless advocates in the progressive groups any involvement of law enforcement or notion that there should be the threat or potential consequence of incarceration is just so anathema to them. They don't include that, and that's what continues to perpetuate the problem. You got it, you said it, you said it beautifully, you said thank you, my friend. Um, So specifically in terms of housing first, where are we failing? Specifically because this is something that dragged that draws back to Gavin Newsom's career, and heke Gavin Newsom continues in every which way, shape or form to deflect from any blame from any problem going on in California. Right, Um, in this one in particular, what you could say that the homeless population was growing quite a bit before he took office in two thousand nineteen. After his win in two thousand and eighteen, his policies of inconsistent even as mayor of San Francisco, where he he essentially focused on building single unit, a single unit housing for all homeless, and that essentially no solution could impede that, or there couldn't be any other incremental solution until that was that was in place. Right. I could maybe describe a little bit about his history as to faulty housing policy for the homeless. Yeah, sure, so, I mean it really starts in the late nineties when he gets up. So he gets appointed. You know, his dad worked for the Getty oil fortune and was very well connected in California politicis. His father was the main fundraiser for Jerry Brown, who was the governor before for Gavin Newsom. His aunt is Nancy Pelosi. So the Getty Brown Pelosi families are all very a single large uh mafia of families so speak. And so Gavin gets appointed to this kind of police role, and then he gets on the Board of Supervisors, and then he wants to run for mayor, and he to dress homelessness, which is a big issue already in the late nineties early two thousand's. He says, I'm gonna um reduce general assistance cash welfare for people because it's encouraging homelessness. People are coming to San Francisco to be homeless, and instead we're going to care for people. The care will be what we call permanent supportive housing or housing first housing. So that's basically what happened they did. They did end up restoring a bunch of the cash welfare later if you just if you could show that you were working at a nonprofit, for example. But the standards have just diluted over time, so now we see people report being you know, getting the roughly seven hundred dollar cash welfare per month payment without doing much of anything and then just living on the street. If you accept a room in what's called a single resident occupancy hotel, which is these old, dilapidated working class hotels in the Tenderloin district and South Market, if you accepted that, then you would um, you would get a lower amount of cash. So I mean, but the basic picture is that they're giving away free housing without conditions. And this is a bad idea for a lot of different reasons, but one of which is that we know that if you're an addict, that one way that that really you have to hit bottom before you'll quit, and so the worst thing to do is to enable addiction. And this is a very deeply painful thing for family members. I have three friends from high school that became a homeless drug addicts. Two are dead. I watched two of the three basically get cut off from their family because they were stealing, lying, borrowing, cheating from them to support their drug habit, and then you if you go and then become homeless, then you're suddenly a problem of the whole society and you're breaking laws, you're stealing, you're doing you're having behavioral disorders in order to maintain your addiction. To then just go give that person a house is a problem because then it means that they then can continue to use drugs without consequence, destroying themselves, ripping off taxpayers at this point, since it's not in the taxpayer's interest to subsidize illness. What we know works is for housing to be conditional, and they call it contingency management. So if you pass a drug test, This was done in famous studies in Alabama and Birmingham. If you pass a drug test, you get your own room or your own apartment unit. If you fail the drug tests and you go back to congregate shelter where people are all together in a big space. People don't like it as much, but it should be safe and clean. But nonetheless, the basic view that I have, and I think most experts that are familiar with addiction, is everybody should have a right to basic shelter, but don't get your own apartment unless you're on subside department, unless you unless you earn it. So that's what I mean by the housing earned. So Gavin has just been, you know, dogmatically embraced this housing first model, which just says we've got to just give people without conditions, their own hotel room, without or their own apartment unit, without requiring sobriety or abstinence or frankly anything you know, including just maintaining the room and not destroying it. And and it's just it comes it's not it's terrible. It doesn't come out of any addiction research. It just comes out of a political ideology which you might call victim ideology, which is the idea that people that we declare to be victims everything should be given and nothing required of them. So that's basically how we get from there to from the from twenty years ago to now, that policy becomes statewide in part because the Gavin news and champion at and then every sort of new iteration of new housing. And what we saw on COVID was basically billions spend just buying old hotels and converting them and then and then giving them over to homeless addicts. And so part of this is what you've referred to as the homeless industrial complex that when because right you pass at tax uh, they pass pass attacks increase or a referendum, and we fund the citizens of the state of a city. Um in Los Angeles as a measure called Triple H was a billion dollars towards the homelesses problem. Citizens contribute tax dollars. Those tax dollars are supposedly supposed to go towards solving this issue, but they continue not to solve it. So right, those tax dots, those dollars have to go somewhere, and people seem to overlook that there's an entire apparatus in place, from advocacy groups to five oh one c threes, to consultants and whatnot that they as the cascade of dollars falls down, or even even developers who are supposed to be building this housing and these structures. You have this cascade of money and a bunch of people are grabbing the dollars as it's coming down. And to to continue to actually modify the policies towards the most effective ones, some of those some of that money shifts from the members of that apparatus somewhere else. It seems like Gavin Newsom is unwilling uh, and these people continuing to advocate for an approach that will continue to line their pockets. Gavin Newsom is unwilling to to tell them no, say say that the party is over. That seems to be the case. Yeah, that's right, it's I mean, there's a financial benefit to Gavin and the Democrats because they get money kicked back to them from the developers from the homeless industrial complex. That that is taxpayer money that they've given away. So it's a bit of a scam as you've as you've sort of described um where where taxpayers who think we're solving homelessness, it actually goes to make the problem worse by creating these um these u perverse incentives for homelessness. The developers then give money back and from the campaign contributions to the same politicians who then go sell the same solutions. So that is yeah, that's basically what's occurred. And a point that you harped on yesterday and your sub stact piece about Gavin knews some kind of acknowledging that he's ill equipped, he's not equipped to solve these problems, is because his he is part of a political system that is built by all these organizations, and he's what the machine spits out right, So for him to acknowledge why he continues to just ignore the you know, dismiss the notion that there's any problem. Um, the the donor groups and the advocacy groups that support him have a staken in not admitting that they're wrong. So if the governor admits something was wrong, he's essentially acknowledging that his supporters have been a failure in admitting failure. And so can you explain, beyond just the homeless homelessness issue, how Gavin k Newsome essentially indulging or having to kind of stay on code with the groups that support him and put him in power is harming the governance of the state. Yeah, well, you did such a good job of explaining it, can add and you've done it perfectly. Thank you, Thank you just your your view on that and how you know, I guess how you've noticed that. Yeah, well, I mean, I think what's interesting. So I wrote this piece tomorrow called, I mean, sorry, this piece yesterday I think called something like why Gavin need some can't govern or something like that. But I basically observe that across all these issues. So we're having a crisis of governance on a bunch of different things. At the same time. We have we don't have enough housing, we don't have enough fresh water during a time of drought and and indeed freshwater or something that we can create, uh, And we don't have enough electricity, so we have blackouts. And then you have we have a homelessness crisis, and we have an increasing crime and we have terrible schools, and it's all getting worse like each and not that's not just like my opinion, Like the objective measurements on each of these show that we're in this crisis situation. And it's baffling on the one hand to people like Gavin because they're kind of like, look, I've done everything the experts told me to do, and now we're in this crisis. So they kind of look around and they go, who can I blame? And so Gavin tends to either blame the well, he'll blame various people. He tends to blame counties since of course there's a statewide governance system that he's in charge of it and there's counties, so he blames them. He also blames climate change, which is ridiculous. Yeah, for everything, there is climate change, but we've known about climate change and he's just to be able to prepare for it. Um And then he also then with the housing he blamed nimbies, not in my backyard activists. Now in the latter sort of interesting because I gets you into tricky territory because those are voters. So in general he's been elected with the support of nimby voters, not in my backyard voters. But that was the excuse he gave to the San Francisco Chronicle, which wants to see more housing for home because they think housing is the reason that people are on the street, not addiction. So that was interesting, and I just point out, Yeah, I mean there's a way in which now nimbies are just kind of a final bit of resistance to just putting more shelters everywhere. I mean, there is a way in which they're just sort of farming addicts and mentally ill people. You know, they're trying to they're bringing them here, they're trying to put their using taxpayer money to put them up, and just trying to expand as much housing and shelter for homeless people and there's some resistance now quite understandably from people that I know that if you introduce more of that homeless housing in their neighborhood, the chances are low that it won't turn into an open drug scene. That's part of the issue is that if you're not going to enforce any abstence or sobriety in the homeless shelters or the homeless housing, you end up with this open drug scene around those facilities and neighbors in San Francisco and the rest of California. Quite understandably, not one of that and another you mentioned and some of Gavin's deflection is the city versus county verse state levels in California is just a humongous tear a tory with the eumongous governmental and municipal apparatus um. In another place where you've kind of part of your platform acknowledges where those distinctions are are inhibiting solutions is in terms of mental health. And here's something that I don't think a lot of people know, um when they continue to to wax poetically about, you know, donor dedicating more funds towards mental health treatment. California spends the most on mental health per capita in the nation, yet we get essentially the worst results. So your platform seems to aim towards centralizing that at the state level because you believe that fractionalizing it at the county level is is is inefficient, and is indulging in worsening the problem. That's right. And so I mean the first reason that you should have one centralized psychiatric and addiction care system at the state level, which I'm calling cal psych, is because it means you only have one government agency as opposed to fifty eight. I should have made this argument earlier in my campaign because I realized what a good Because I get all my conservative, my conservative and libertarian friends, they go, it sounds like you're proposing this big expansion of government. I'm like, I'm actually proposing to eliminate fifty seven government agencies. I mean, imagine fifty seven government agencies all doing the same administrative work. It's a complete, colossal waste of money. I mean, it's shocking actually when you really think about it. I mean, maybe it made sense back in the nineteenth century when we didn't have this big psychiatric and addiction care prom but in this case, it's just bonkers. And by the way, it's been advocated for by plenty of center right people over the decades, it wasn't. I've had a hard time remembering where I stole the idea from, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't my idea. Um and that it's either way, a centralized state level, a state level organization is still a contraction of overall government from the fragmented county system. That's right, that's right. But the number so that's the first is that so the number one advantage is official sency of healthcare delivery. So in this particular mental illness slash substance use disorder, it's very important that people getting going to rehab, either to you know, detox or if they're going to a ninety day or even day program, that they get the heck out of the open drug scene in the cities. I would love to shut down the open air drug scenes within like my first thirty days in office. It's going to be hard to do that for a variety of reasons. So, but you can, you know, like some of the overdoses on drugs or they're arrested in San Francisco, there's no reason they need to be treated in San Francisco, it might be much better for them. It would be much better for them to be treated somewhere where they're not daily exposed to people selling their drug of choice. So that's much more likely to be in the country. I mean, we often do mental I mean there's a whole long tradition of doing mental illness and rehab in more country settings rather than city settings. But certainly, you know, into parts of California that allows us to have facilities where the rent is cheaper, where the land is cheaper, where the labor is cheaper. It also means that if some like you know, if all the slots are filled up in Eureka and there's openings in Riverside, you can move people around pretty easily and um, and if they're from different parts of the state, they can be closer, our friends and family be easier to reaffiliate them. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why it makes sense to do this at a statewide level. And we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break as to the particulars of our our current addiction problem right now, and seeing that just massive spike in deaths from from drug overdoses and uses over the first two decades of the century. Even beyond California, there seems to be something different in the water, right, meaning the drugs that are being abused now are uniquely dangerous. UM, both the the new version of meth of whatever has been going on and this this century with met em fhetamines and fentanyl. Um, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what you've discovered there in terms of why the issue of addiction is becoming so much um in both volume and intensity is becoming worse because of the nature of the drugs themselves. And this gets to another motivation I had for writing San Francico, because of course, you know, whenever you're doing something big, you always have multiple motivations. But one of my motivations was in seventeen, I and many other people noticed that the total drug overdose and poisoning death in the United States had reached seventy thousand something about that number that had gathered a lot of headlines and we all saw that, and I saw it, and I was like, and I looked back and the year that I had really stopped working because the other issues that I had done work on drug decriminalization in the late ninety nineties for George Soros's foundation. This has become a source of significant contention on social media it. I did do work for the Soros Foundation in the late nineteen nineties on drug decriminalization and harm reduction, but then I basically stopped in the year two thousand to focus on environmental issues. But when I got out of that work, in the year two thousand, seventeen thousand people were dying annually of drug overdose and and poisoning deaths. My understanding was that we were trying to get people not to go to prison, but to go to rehab. So I get to seventeen I look at those overdose deaths and I was like, what happened? You know, why is rehab not happening? Why is there no treatment on demand? Or is there? And I knew that obviously. I mean, because everybody knows, because it's been heavily publicized that we had a big opioid epidemic, and the basic contours of that story most people know. We overprescribed prescription opioids, We allowed too many prescriptions. The culture people demanded more opioids, the doctors promoted more opioids. It had a little bit to do with the fact that we're such a hyper capitalist society. It also had to do with the fact that the government didn't regulate it. It also had to do with the fact that we're very entitled and people felt entitled to opioids, and whereas in Netherlands there's much more of a they kind of kept more of a stigma a hard line on it. So nonetheless you get this opioid crisis. Obama tightens up the prescription regulations around, a lot of people don't switch to heroin, so you get a much bigger hair. You always had heroin. You've had heroin here for whatever, you know, a hundred years almost, but heroin becomes much cheaper. The Mexicans start bringing in heroin that they start delivering by a car. They adopt a more non violent approach. Interestingly enough, this is all detailed in Sam Communes' um Dreamland. A lot, a lot of heroin comes in and that starts happening between so you get this big increa U and overdose deaths. The other thing is that you know it's it's not it's hard to overdose on heroin alone. A lot of those deaths were occurring with a mixture of alcohol and heroin or bens of diazepines and heroin bends of diazepines are anti anxiety meds like xan x. Then you also had a second drug epidemic that was just creeping along the whole time, which of course was meth amphetamine made famous by breaking bad. So you had both these drug epidemies happening, and then you get to today where we have a hundred and five thousand drug overdose and poisoning deaths over the last twelve months. And that is then the big increased then is from fentanyl and fenconyl is a synthetic opioid. So there's been a bunch of debate, but basically the consensus view, which I agree with, is that fentanyl and meth amphetamine are much more serious drugs than heroin and the earlier meth or even than the cocaine. But we are now in a second kind of meth amphetamine. You know, on the street, you hear mix things about the new meths. Some people complain is too weak, other people complain that it makes them psychotic. It does appear to be increasing paranoid psychosis everybody. I'm not like not everybody. A large percentage of people I interview on the street who are smoking meth are psychotic when I interview them, and they come in and out of psychosis. So that's the basic contour of this. But these big spikes and deaths were heavily driven by fentanyl. And I say that though because with some caution, because I do think sometimes there's been a tendency from some really pro legalization people to sort of ascribe everything defendyl and to ignore the fact that we had that we rose from seventeen to seventeen seventy thousand deaths between seventeen and they're doing that to make the case for basically legalizing heroin as so people would use as an alternative fentanyl, And I don't think that that's why, or in any way would put an end to the deaths or the addictions. So the role of fentanyl is kind of peculiar because on the one hand, yes, it's more available, and you have some people that are deliberately, involuntarily and knowingly using fentanyl, But then you have this dynamic of so many essentially contaminated cocaine or other drugs that are laced with fentanyl, And I sit here scratching my head thinking, We'll wait a second. Is this some grand conspiracy and there's somebody trying to connect contaminate out of malicious motives and contaminate the drug supply and kill people. Is this something that's just going on that It's like at subway when one ingredient from the assembly line accidentally gets in the into another sandwich. It wasn't meant for. How is how and why is this fentonyl getting into a non fentanyl drug supplies and killing people who don't know they're taking fentanyl. Yeah, so just that's an easy one. I mean, all the evidence is that it's accidentally contaminating any other drugs and there's no evidence of a conspiracy to kill users. Um, lots and lots of evidence of contamination occurring in messy laboratories. Now there is some evidence, let me, let me qualify that there is some evidence that fentyl is being introduced into cocaine and other drugs as a way to increase addiction. However, you have to balance that against the fact that drug dealers want to keep their customers alive. Drug dealers do not have an incentive in killing their customers and so now there's some conspiracy theories that the Chinese or trying to kill Americans, and I just and I'm not seeing it now. Could the Chinese if they wanted to crack down on these precursor chemicals to fentanyl and methane fetamine more than they are Absolutely they could. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Why aren't they? You know, in part because these are precursor chemicals that are used for other things? Um is it also because there's somewhat a moral and they've just really embraced commerce capitalism. They just don't care if they can get away with it, and it makes them, you know, factory owners or industrialists rich, they don't really mind. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean I think it as their own people, there would be more motivation. But I mean I think that you know, the thing is that Chinese they make they make a lot of money selling to us, and so I just don't think now would they like to weaken us? Maybe for geopolitical reasons, And it just starts to get to be a bit of a stretch, And we just don't have evidence that whereas we have a lot of evidence of accidental contamination and and it's so it's it's well explained by that, but you know, I think there's a saying aside kind of you know what, all the motivations are the question of what do you do about it? And I am very skeptical of being able to stop these drugs from coming into the United States. We weren't able to stop heroin and cocaine from coming in even though they had much longer supply chains. I mean, you gotta remember, the supply chain for fentanyl and meth is just it just goes China, Mexico, San Francis, USCO. These supply chains on heroin, I mean you might remember, like you seeing these movies or you know, it's like there's an Afghanistan, you know, you're like and the poppy fields, and then they're moving it around, and it's just more it's much more kind of to process it in a particular way. Plus it's now so concentrated you can like nail sufficient quantities of fentanyl to somebody in San Francisco and you have enough to basically supply everybody for a month. So I'm skeptical of interdiction at that level. I'm not against doing things like trying to crack down the precursor chemicals. But we should be we should be um, we should not. We should not count on that. We's not rely on that, nor do I think. So that's on one and on the other end, there's the individual drug user. Let's say somebody just using drugs in the privacy of his or her own home. I don't think that's a priority for law enforcement. I think it's a terrible and crazy but I don't think that that that police should be trying to go into people's homes and sort out their drug use. I think the right place to focus our efforts is the open drug scenes, and that is also what law enforcement have basically concluded. That's what the Europeans have concluded. Do you you shut down the open drug scenes? Do you stop drug dealing? No? Do you stop drug use? No? Do you stop drugs from coming the country? No? But you you you solve a particular problem of social disorder, You rescue your cities, and you make it harder for addicts, I mean addicts. It's good for addicts too. It's good for it to be it's good to reduce the availability of these dangerous drugs because it makes them more expensive. It means people use them less. I mean I would hear stories anecdotally where addicts would have to like spend the whole day trying to find their drugs, trying to get to the dealer, trying to get across town trying to find the drugs. That's a much better situation than just to be like five feet away from your dealer and smoking meth and fetamine every two hour. Meth and feel every two hours in spaces that are supposed to be there for public consumption use. Yeah, public clauses, trains to tions. Yeah, that's it's what we saw here with Venice Boardwalk. And you think there should be a crown jewel of southern California, place where people families can come and enjoy our our you know, the the natural landscape and the ocean in the beach, and instead that this is what there is there. And as you say, UM, kind of a breakdown of social order. Sometimes it doesn't have to be anything more definable than just that. UM. And so you also mentioned UH, and you also referenced, you know, a certain approach for law enforcement. I want to get to that in a moment. But UM also towards the the idea of conspiracies and questions of how what is the motive behind certain decisions that's some seem to have impact. A gentleman that you work for named George Soros. His name comes up quite a bit, um. I have a particular kind of view on him and his role here. I'd love to to know your thoughts on it. So on the one on the one side, you've got people who seem to think that George Soros is part of some either is in and of itself himself or as part of some sinister cabal that has a self interest in societal disorder and destruction, much like in referencing some of his bets on currency that wealthy things of that nature. And then on the other hand, you've got people who just dismiss any claim uh in attaching Soros as a bad actor to any movement or issue, because oh my god, you're just You're just part of some conspiracy. But the truth is is right in between where he's just a rich guy with bad ideas who funds bad ideas and is insulated from the impact of them, so he continues to fund them. Right, It doesn't seem more complicated than that, and seems to be your less interesting is less interesting. It's more interesting on the one hand, is less interesting on on the one hand, And that, you know, some of his ideas aren't bad. I mean, you know, he also famously funded um, you know, uh the free you know, he funded uh, the you know sort of the media during the Soviet during communism, I mean he was funding anti community, mean you know, anti communists, uh, literature, you know, during the eighties. Um, he's funded all sorts of human rights stuff that I think most people would agree with. What's more, And yeah, I mean I get accused of it too. I get accused of anti Semitism because I even mentioned Soros. I then just crazy, which is bonkers. You know. I also then, of course worked for him, so that would the idea have been nice? Tohow be can anti semetter? It doesn't make sense? Um. But then I was being dragged on by the right yesterday because I argued that that's not what's motivating sorrows, and that what we know, we know what's motivating sorrows. He's he's what I would I think the right label is left libertarian. It's libertarian in the sense that and he says this and I quote, I quote his guy, just his his, the person I've known who worked for sorrows for many decades, just saying that. He said, you know, George thinks that if people want a product, they should be able to have it. I mean, that's your standard libertarian case for drug legal zation. Um, none of you, I hold. I love freedom, but I don't think you should just be able to have anything you want. You know, that's not you know, if it causes significant harm, I think it should be regulated or prohibited. And then the left wing part is the idea that two victims, everything should be given and nothing required. So it's really this idea that I get it in the book. It gets summarized at best in my argument with a c LU attorney where I say, well, what should we allow public defecation? And she goes, well, it depends. Is it a frat guy? Remember this passage. Yeah, she kind of goes, well, is he a frat? Is he like a frat guy? If it's a frat guy urinating, the police should arrest him. But if it's a poor homeless guy who's mentally ill who's defecating, he should not be arresting. He should be offered services, and I was in my where I come down on this is I kind of go, this is all comes also comes out of a kind of um demonization of the police, and I think some genuine confusion, but also some deliberate miss representation, which is that just to be arrested, people think people conflate arrest and incarceorrate. That's I think people that don't know much about the common just system do that. I've asked people before I go, do you think when I say arrest, I'm saying InCAR straight And they go, well, yeah, of course, And I'm like, that's not what it means to be arrested. Like you can be arrested and given a ticket, like it doesn't so, but you should be arrested for breaking laws and then there should be some consequence. And if you're mentally ill, the consequence should be that you get treatment. Like the consequence isn't necessarily punitive at all. It might be good, it might be medicine or if but if but if you, but there's also some coercion that might be required. So you know where I've come down to it as I go, Look, we should not criminalize addiction. If your addiction. If you're able to be an addict in the privacy of your own home and you're not causing any harm to mbails, fine, I think that's terrible, but that's just my moral judgment. I don't want to use tax fare money for it. Um. Similarly, you can be homeless, you know, but you can't sleep there, and if you try to, or you dedicate or whatever you get, are you gonna get arrested? And then you can have an alternative sentence, which might include rehab or drug treatment. But that's not the same thing as you're You're you're enforcing laws for social order, not against addiction or homelessness. Yeah, it's when that left libertarian ideal then starts to have negative externalities because once again, at some point you have to prioritize the interests of people who aren't homeless, addics of your normal roof over their head, tax paying citizen who you're supposed to regulate public spaces in a manner to allow people tax paying citizens to enjoy those public spaces, and that the priority of of law abiding citizens just never seems to come into effect when these people talk about this issue. Um and Yeah, I discussed with a gentleman I had on UM a couple of months ago. He's deputy district attorney here in Los Angeles named John McKinney says, Yeah, a lot of these addicts we were able to help them when we arrested them. The the the treatment programs came into play once we detain them. If you don't have one without the other, you just get zero. Yeah. Absolutely, I think I follow him on Twitter as I think he's a critic. Yeah, yeah, No, I mean that's exactly right. I mean, it's a big lie that it doesn't work to arrest people. It's often the only way people can get free of their addiction. Yeah. And and what the proof is in the pudding? Right? I mean, how much more evidence do we need to show that this approach leads to a tear of that social fabric and essentially ungovernable cities and unlivable cities, which is what we're seeing. And so at this point, I mean, they're just they they're doubling down on unfailed policies because they don't want to admit that they were wrong. UM. Speaking of another area where that is occurring. That also, our buddy Soros has some relevance to is the kind of demonization of law and for Samant the uh, you know, the imposing of kind of decarcerationist, reckless district attorneys that are funded by George Sorrows. No, this is not a conspiracy. Please go do the research. It's all publicly available. He proudly admits to funding these people. Anyways. Um, and look, by the way, this is a whole book about it. I was just referencing it. It's a long book. It's got it's by a Yale professor. All about Sauros is finding for these guys. So yeah, I believe that's called charged, the New Movement to transform American prosecution and mass incarceration. And so under the guise of ending mass incarceration, they've simply taken reckless policies to let let one let criminals out of jail when they don't need to, and to not monitor them or help them integrate into society. And that's something that Gavin Newsom is doing. I'd love to hear you, you know, describe, I mean, how he's contributed to this problem. Um, in reducing the prison population in California, simply for the sake of reducing the prison population, not in a manner intended to uh to allow with public safeties, shutting down prisons and intends to shut down more. Could you tell us a little bit about that. Well, I think this is very interesting, and nobody's talking about it. I mean, he so, and I'm the first because I'm because I'm running for office. It's not my job to be to be obsessed with Gavin's statements. But I've been going through his own evolution and the fall of He goes, I'm taking very seriously this problem of how do you release people from prison without them becoming homeless and criminal. He's very serious and he's sound. I kind of believe him. In fall, well, then you get to he starts letting everybody out. Now they had COVID as a bit of the excuse for it, but he keeps going. And then in the Fall he goes, well, there's been no increase in Sorry, the has been no increase in crime, but there had been. And then he says, oh, and the thing he says in he goes, he goes, maybe I'll be able to shut down a prison at some point. Well, now they're talking they said then they said last year we're gonna shut down to prisons. Now they're sending to shut down three prisons. Part of me is very suspicious of this, in part because you know, we had this recall election last year. He received a million dollars from George Soros to fight the recall. You start to wonder, is he's sort of did he you know, he's partly also he's confident that he can be re elected despite my running um and has raised all that money. So I think he just feels like he can go further for the kind of sorrows progressive agenda that maybe he could have been twenty nineteen. So he's supported and I guess, and this is the point that you make often is that while he has limited direct impact on on incarceration, criminality, and law enforcement, he his voice in the bully pulpit as governor, as the loud you know, the most prominent political figure in this state who he supports matters, and he has supported people who have contributed to this problem the decarceration is DA's Chessupudine and George Gascon. Then he had the choice on who to replace Kamala Harris as his attorney general. He put a another decarcerationist quote unquote reformist Rob Bonta, so he continues to contribute to this problem. Now we're starting to get some indicators that the people, the citizens of California have had enough. Looks like Boudine is gonna be gone on June seven. Um, the gascon recall, it's it's just a function of his numbers are way underwater. It seems to be a function of signatures. It's gonna be down to the wire as to whether or not we get enough signatures to get a recall of him on the ballot. Um Newsome and another California political actor, San Francisco Mayor London Breed. Um Breed more forcefully has said, Okay, I get it. I read the tea leaves California. California citizens are tired of this failed this failed experiment and decarcerationist in reducing the prison population just for the sake of it as opposed to matching criminality in public safety. Um, what's your read on where the states at in general? Uh? In terms and and how Gavin and the statewide actors see it in understanding that regardless of how they want to fudge the numbers, citizens in California have had enough and they believe crime to be a massive issue. I you know, I think that the elites are continue to be really out of touch with voters. I think that they live in a bubble. They live in a media bubble. The newspapers tell them everything is great. They do what the experts say they should do. You know, the polling has demonstrated they have a problem. But I think they feel pretty confident they can they can handle it. But no, I mean, I think we are I think they feel like they can cut their losses with the d A recalls. But it looks like you're right. Jess Odine is almost certainly going to be recalled in June. I do think they're going to get the signatures to recall George Gascon in November. He's the d F l A. I think then that he will be recalled. I think uh Caruso will be elected mayor. He's the former Republican term Democrat in l A. He'll be elected mayor. So I think that there is a big wake up calling BackFlash coming. Uh I'm obviously trying to speak into a running for governor. By the way, this is like a chance for me to say Schellenberger for governor. Dot com and find out more about all my issues. You can make a donation, but I think that there is room there, you know. I think what I've shown in my candidacy is that there's room for somebody to tap into both the concern around growing crime and homelessness, but in ways that I think continue to respect the liberal commitment to you know, human rights and the libertarian commitment to freedom, no doubt. And you did reference your website, but if you could just to the the audience that may be less familiar with you, how to learn more about you or to find you on the internet, how to support your candidacy and and just get more involved on behalf of the righteous causes that we've discussed during this conversation. Yeah, so Schellenberger for Gomer dot com. There's no c in Schellenberger. Just Schellenberger like it sounds. On Twitter at Schellenberger, m D on Facebook, Michael Schellenberger Instagram Schellenberger. I welcome emails and comments. I try to respond to all subs too. Emails. It's just Michael Solmberger at gmail dot com. And to just finish off here when you go and read Michael's writings and hear his message, and you compare that to what is being peddled by Gavin Newsom trying to peacock for Iowa voters for a potential Democratic primary. I believe you will find it shocking the gap in pure uh and knowledge. How informative and simply sincere and likely he is Mike is to solve these problems as compared to Gavin. Um take a look. We We would love to, obviously to hear from you from everybody who values these issues, who are interested in the welfare of California. So Mike, thank you for everything that you do when you're interesting these topics. And it was a pleasure speaking with you today his pleasures on My Matthews Wonderful Steap with you is the prevailing narrative. I am at Bilinsky once again. You can listen and subscribe to the Prevailing Narrative on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you're listening right now. Make sure to follow me on my socials at Matt Bilinsky M A T T B I L I N s K Y. The Prevailion are To was a Cavalry audio production and association with iHeart Radio produced by Brandon Morrigan Executive produced by Dana Burnetti and Kegan Rosenberger for Cavary Audio. I'm mat Bolinski, h