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November 10, 2023

Potemkin San Francisco sweeps its bums out of sight ahead of China potentate Xi Jinping's APEC visit

By Monica Showalter

So the City of San Francisco can clean up its act ... when it wants to.

And now that it's going to be hosting luminaries such as China's Xi Jinping, suddenly, the place isn't a homeless, drug-addicted, shoplifting-plagued, assault-and-robbery dump any more.

Funny how that happens.

 

 

So they could have cleaned it up all along, but they didn't -- because the only people who were affected by the disaster were mere taxpayers who lived there, major retailers and restaurants, and ordinary tourists who just wanted to give the city their money so they could see the place.

That was too much to ask. But let China's Chairman of the Community Party of China, Xi Jinping, with all his communist-regime police-state security apparat drop by, and all of a sudden, the place has become Potemkin Village II.

You remember the story of that, don't you?

According to Wikipedia:

 The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787.[1] Modern historians agree that accounts of this portable village are exaggerated. The original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be seen again.

And so it will be with San Francisco, which, for a few days, will be a non-dump, just so Xi won't have to step in human excrement and get spare-changed by a smelly, drug-addicted, bum.

San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, would have you think it was an exciting thing. Here she is with a few beleaguered businesses -- hotels and the like -- saying how great it is going to be.

 

 

Of course they do. Their guests won't get mugged in the parking garage or treated to the sight of dirty needles and used toilet paper as they step in and out of the hotels. Why wouldn't those guys be happy? They haven't seen that kind of cleanup in years.

The Chronicle, based on its headline, seems to be going along with Breed, not noticing the newly erected Potemkin Village dynamic any more than Breed does, but they are of course gaslighting the matter, hoping you just see the Potemkin mansions and think nothing's amiss.. 

 

 

But the locals do see what is going on -- and aren't impressed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's one of the best tweets, from one of the lonely conservative representatives in the California statehouse, Kevin Kiley, who knows the score:

 

 

 

 

Why, exactly, is this city able to clean up the smell and mess and 'unsafe camping' of the bums on its city streets when a Chinese potentate visits, but not for every day so that citizens don't have to step in the poop, buy a new car window, file a useless police report, and fight off the muggers?

Couldn't they do this every day, since they were able to take care of this matter in a couple of days? Couldn't the bums have been sent packing to where they came from, instead of shifted to the end of the Judah line or stuffed into the Marina? 

What it goes to show is that this is a city ruled by powerful special interests -- tech barons looking for property prices to fall as citizens move away; Big Labor, government- and foundation-bankrolled NGOs from the poverty-industrial complex who see their job as perpetuating homelessness and drug addition, the better to keep the funds flowing; the illegals lobby; and the Sorosian criminal-justice "reform" lobbies. Oh and don't discount that there's not a China lobby there, too. The city is, after all, making the city nice for Xi.

That's who runs that city and that's why they aren't about to clean it up except if Xi Jinping is paying a royal visit.

They know how to clean this place up and can do it in a couple days. They just don't. Citizens and taxpayers, see, just aren't important enough.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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