The Decline and Fall of San Francisco: A Bill O'Reilly Special

Transcript
Tonight, you get what you allow. And San Francisco allows a lot. The city by the bay is in disarray.

What the deuce happened? Rapid homelessness, drug use, untreated mental illness, and crime. Lots of crime. Bro.

All because the radical left has been encouraging this kind of behavior for years. If you're going to be homeless, pretty f***ing easy. No sobriety requirement, so you can sit in your room and shoot dope all day. And so how did this happen? And why didn't the politicians stop it? Gavin Newsom needed to pursue a new approach. But he didn't have the courage to follow through on it.

Get ready to get angry. This is the decline and fall of San Francisco. Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly, and welcome to this News Nation special. The collapse of social order in San Francisco.

I hate to do it. I hate to do this report, but the truth has to be told. I'm standing here on the Presidio. It used to be federal territory. Golden Gate, a world-famous symbol of one of the most dramatic cities in the country. It is falling apart. It is dangerous. Places are filthy. Not the whole city, but it is something that has never been seen in the United States of America. How did it happen?

For the next hour, we will explain it. We will back it up with every fact you can imagine. There are no two sides to the story. This city has collapsed in the social order arena.

Throughout history, San Francisco has been a place of acceptance where flamboyant people, people who didn't fit in other places, were welcomed here. And it grew up. Then you had an infusion of politics. Left-wing progressive politics. That was off the Vietnam War. And slowly, civility and social order eroded. The San Francisco of yesteryear wasn't heaven, but it sure looked a lot better than what it looks like today.

President Trump has noticed. He recently released a video on True Social with a series of before and after images of San Francisco. It's disturbing. Now I stand here in a very safe area. The Presidio is beautiful. Three miles over, free fire zone. A legion of drug addicts, mentally ill miscreants, thieves roaming the city. Nobody does anything about it.

Now I sound kind of insensitive. And maybe I am. But I got to tell you the truth. You cannot allow 10,000 mentally ill and drug-addicted people, substance abuse alcohol in there, to roam around the city doing whatever they want. And that includes defecating in the street. But get this. The people of California voted in a proposition not to prosecute criminals who steal less than $1,000. Hello? So you walk into a store, you take whatever you want, and you walk out of the store without paying. This is anarchy. This is San Francisco, 2026.

So, as I said, for the next hour or so, we're going to back up everything we say. How did it happen? Who are the villains? Are there any heroes? Let's go.

Before you say, "Hey, every city's got homelessness and crime," let me stop you. I don't want to hear it. The numbers don't lie. And the story they tell is absolutely awful. As of 2024, San Francisco has a homeless rate of 101 per 10,000 people. Compare that to other big cities like Houston or Miami. It has a population of approximately 37,000 drug addicts at risk of overdose every day. Nearly as many people as there are kids enrolled in San Francisco's public schools. And last year, the city spent $106,000 per homeless person. Again, look at how that stacks up against other major cities.

Of course, you can find similar examples of municipal lunacy in other progressive strongholds like Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and LA. But bottom line, San Francisco's homeless problem is as distinctive to this town as its cable cars and sourdough bread. The question is why? I think the city is in steep decline. And when I used to come here, it was clean. Now, it's kind of dingy. And there are people here who are causing an enormous amount of pain to other people. And it doesn't seem like the city fathers of the state of California have any solutions to it at all.

Well, you got to know that over the years, almost every location in America goes through some revolutionary process. And the newcomers sometimes bring their existing conduct and culture with them. Willie Brown is a legendary political figure in California. He served as mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004. When Willie Brown was mayor around the turn of the 21st century, you wouldn't have allowed what is happening today. Okay? Once you left office, the city spiraled down into anarchy because laws of public safety were not enforced. Okay. Open use of narcotics, open sale of fentanyl. Fentanyl would kill you. All right. Defecating in the street. All of that not enforced.

Who is at fault for that libertine philosophy? Who did it? It wasn't anybody's fault as such that you could point to the rest of the left leadership. It's not worth wasting time discussing whose fault it is. I want to continue as I'm currently doing, participate in and altering the process. Brown doesn't want to name names, but we will. The people responsible for this catastrophe are former mayor London Breed, Governor Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and Brown's ex-girlfriend Kamala Harris, all of them committed to a progressive ideology.

The reason we have a homelessness epidemic is that essentially, progressives got it in their heads that the incentives for good behavior and the consequences for bad behavior were bad. Journalists and former lefty activist Michael Shellenberger was so horrified by what he saw happening in San Francisco that he did two things. First, he stopped being a lefty. Second, he wrote a book about what was happening and gave it this title: San Francisco.

Somehow it was immoral to require mentally ill people, drug addicts, poor people, people with problems to change their behavior. The idea was that it's not empathetic for people to demand that people change their behavior. Instead, you get policies like San Francisco's General Assistance Program. It gives every qualifying homeless person hundreds of dollars a month on a debit card. You know, the city pays them about $1,000 a month and some cash. No, no, no, no, not that much. They do get some assistance. Why? Because this city has always had a great level of generosity. Fine. But do you think it's smart to give people money to buy heroin? Because that's worse. I don't think anyone in his right mind would tell you it would be smart to give money to buy any drugs.

Well, arming themselves, but no. You provide resources. Some people take advantage of them. I would tell you that there is conduct by some people that live in this city, and they just got here, period. Because they were chased out of Denver, they were chased out of wherever, and they were chased here. And they get the money they're going to be, they are usually, we are more generous, or at least we have been giving money to drug addicts. Oh, and you're not prosecuting. Look at people. You give money to people in need. They've created an incentive for homelessness.

The numbers are shocking. In San Francisco, it's somewhere between $100,100 and $120,000 per homeless person spent per year just by the city of San Francisco. That's not including the $24 billion that was spent by Gavin Newsom over the last six years at a state level. It also doesn't include federal programs. So you've got a huge amount of money going in to incentivize homelessness. This video from 2022, shot by Shellenberger, says it all. If you're going to be homeless, pretty f***ing easy. I mean, if we're going to be real estate, they pay you to be homeless here.

When you said that San Francisco pays people to be homeless, what did you mean by that? You mean that literally? Yeah. I mean, I get $620 a month in from General Assistance. Are you? Wouldn't you? How was that? Hard to get? F***ing phone call, bro. And that's just the tip.

For years, the city poured billions into a policy called Housing First. What does that mean? Well, instead of building temporary shelters where people need to seek treatment or look for a job, the city just gives them an apartment. You heard that right. You can find hotels like this all over town, converted into free housing for the homeless. These single resident occupancy hotels basically become modern-day opium dens where people are in there, they're partying together, they're smoking fentanyl or smoking meth. There's drug dealing happening inside of them. They're extremely dangerous places. People are assaulted in them. People are murdered. People overdose and die.

And so when you say, "We're going to go in, take care of the homeless," why build more of those facilities? It's actually just creating a death sentence for people that are addicted to hard drugs and suffer from mental illness. That part about the death sentence is not hyperbole. We now know from a 2021 study done by Harvard University that they gave housing unconditionally to homeless people, 86% of whom either had a drug addiction or a mental illness, and half of them died within ten years. Only 12% actually remained housed. Those are terrible numbers.

When you're killing four times more people than you're actually keeping housed, those are absolutely terrible numbers. And don't let anybody tell you that B.S. about homelessness being caused by high rents or other inequities of capitalism. Look, these other cities where housing costs have increased have actually seen a homeless decline. The fact is, homelessness got out of control in San Francisco because the city intentionally made itself a magnet for anyone looking for freebies with no strings, lax law enforcement, and cheap drugs added to the problem.

So how do we know that? Because we talked to some former street people. You can buy fentanyl for as little as $5 on the street right now. So drugs were available all the time. I look back and can't believe I've been through what I've been through. That's next.

Do you like getting drunk, high, stoned, you know, lighting it up like the 4th of July? Well, then San Francisco is your kind of town. There's about 37,000 hardcore drug users in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe knows what he's talking about because he was a drug addict himself. How long were you a hardcore drug addict? At least about five years. I was hardcore. I had surgery on my foot. I was given oxycodone as a prescription for the pain. I got addicted to those pills that spiraled into heroin and eventually, fentanyl, which led me to the street. Okay. Yeah. Living in a tent. Is that where you were? Actually, I was just sleeping in a doorway. Not even a tent. So you sleep in a doorway? You buy drugs? Easy. It was easy to get them, right? Oh, yeah.

We have an organized drug dealing network in San Francisco that works in shifts like a union job. 24/7. That's the culture that you have in this city, but it is not as dominant as you make it. This city is as interesting and as in transition as most cities in America. But you know, and believe me, they are all okay. But there's no strategy here. I don't see one. There's no strategy to solve this problem that's been going on now for almost a decade. Come on, you. There's nobody who knows San Francisco better than you. I know you're trying to put a good face on it. And sure, a city I understand. But you know the social problem; you know that there doesn't seem to be a solution to it.

Well, you cannot take away somebody's right to stand on the corner. But hang on. It's not just a matter of live and let live. For years, San Francisco has encouraged intravenous drug use. That's right. It's all because of a policy called harm reduction. Harm reduction is just a model for maintaining addiction and trying to reduce the harms of addiction. It's a case of where that logic was taken to such extremes that now harm reduction advocates give away crack pipes, meth pipes. Not at all clear how what harm that's being reduced.

It got so crazy that at one point, the city was actually paying for billboards with taxpayer money that encouraged people to actually use hard narcotics safely. They showed people at a party; they showed a homeless guy. They communicated the message that there was a safe way to use really hard drugs like fentanyl and meth. The irony, says Shellenberger, is that San Francisco, like most of California, is no libertarian free-for-all. At least not for the rest of us.

It's the ultimate nanny state when it comes to legal but unhealthy substances like food, chemicals, and especially tobacco. San Francisco has cracked down severely on secondhand smoke. So you would think, okay, then they're going to be against the secondhand smoke from smoking fentanyl and meth. But on the contrary, within the progressive mind, by definition, if you're homeless, if you're a street addict, you are a victim and everything to you should be given and nothing required. That is the key. In San Francisco, it's all carrots, no sticks.

Gina McDonnell knows all about that. She was an addict on these streets. We have permanent supportive housing in the city where they literally take a person off the street and put them in a room alone, and they take drugs all day long. No supervision. And there's all these services that we pay for that are available to them that they can take advantage of. But there's zero requirement for them to participate. No sobriety requirement, no sobriety requirement, no checking in with your caseworker. No any of that. So you can sit in your room and shoot dope all day.

And I personally knew 15 people when I was out on the street that died of a drug overdose, 15, 15, including waking up next to three different people three different times, who had died overnight from drug overdose that were decent human beings. They were just sick with the disease of addiction. But even though you woke up next to three corpses, yeah, you still did your fentanyl that day, right? Absolutely. Addiction wins every single time.

And yet both Tom and Gina turned their lives around and got clean. How did they do it? Well, they got locked up. I thank God every day for Alameda County Sheriff for putting me in handcuffs, putting me in the back of a car. So the system actually saved you because you went so far over that you had to be put in a facility against your will. You didn't want to be in there, right? But they did that. Yeah, that's an interesting lesson. The moral of that story is simple: you have to hold people accountable for their destructive behavior if you ever want that behavior to change.

Coming up, drug addiction is only part of the problem. What about the crisis of mental illness? We'll tell you about San Francisco's approach. Spoiler alert: the policy is really crazy.

You are looking at security footage of a San Francisco woman being randomly attacked by a mentally ill homeless man outside her condo building in the South Beach neighborhood. Pulled to the ground, she fights for her life before finally escaping with minor injuries. The accused lunatic was arrested, but San Francisco being San Francisco, he was back on the streets just a short time later. And that's just one guy in San Francisco. There are thousands of homeless, mentally ill people roaming the streets, and they are a danger to themselves and others.

Okay. You saw a lot of mentally ill people out of tons, tons. As we saw for ourselves, you can't stand on a sidewalk for ten minutes in some parts of the city without a mentally ill person approaching you. Very, you need some help? Yeah. Okay, sir. All right. You do. You need help? Good. Yeah. You're good. All right. This is bad for poor old guy.

More than half of the city's homeless population has psychiatric conditions. Mix that with the rampant drug use and government handouts, and you've cooked up a recipe for disaster. The research is really strong on this, that the schizophrenics that are at greatest risk to themselves or others are ones that use hard drugs because they create psychosis. They create this heavy intoxication or states of mania.

I was in psychosis so bad that I believed people were following me. I was eating parts of my phone. I was eating the SD card out of my phone. That's how crazed you got from the drugs. This is what happens when mental health care gets rebranded as a human rights violation. A big part of that was the ACLU was adamantly against anything that would have a court order to require mentally ill people to be in psychiatric asylums. That's the American Civil Liberties Union. Same folks who continue to oppose involuntary psychiatric intervention to this day.

You have these organizations that tell you that people have the right to do what they want. They have civil rights. You have the ACLU coming at you. Because the ACLU and the progressive left in California are so adamantly against anything they perceive to be coercive or mandatory, we're not getting the seriously mentally ill the care that they need.

By the year 2004, the state of California passed Prop 63, also known as the Mental Health Services Act. California passed a ballot initiative that put a special tax on billionaires for mental health. Everybody supported it; it seemed like a great idea at the time. I supported it. Well, we didn't understand it was hidden in the fine print. Is that it only provides mental health care without any mandatory or coercive methods. But as we already know, the people who need the help the most are usually too sick with mental illness, drug addiction, or both to seek it themselves. It's the illness or the addiction making their decisions.

Did you talk to the other drug addicts? Did you, you know, was there any kind of sense of, look, we all got to kick this, got to get back into normality? Was there any of that? No. Not that. I mean, we did talk to each other. And, look, there's a community on the street. It's just a very unhealthy community where everybody's motivated by the same thing, their addiction and getting more drugs.

So what happened? The state collected the taxes, spent billions, and the problem got worse. This is what happens when ideology overpowers common sense. Would you argue with people about this? You know, some, if your senile grandmother escapes from the nursing home and is on the mean streets in San Francisco, wouldn't you want to impose an intervention on her so that she gets back to the nursing home? I think that the vast majority of people would say, of course. So why is it then you wouldn't want to do the same with somebody with schizophrenia?

When you were mayor, that's what I'm trying to get at. You were able in eight years to kind of control the craziness. What the deuce happened? I can tell you that. I think people in almost every city in America have altered their own social conduct. And in many places, more than in some other places, these drug addicts and these mentally ill people are wandering around, and they have been wandering around for a long time. But there's a considerable amount of attention that's being given to everybody in need in this city. Attention. I'd call it enabling.

If you think it's limited to self-destructive behaviors, think again, because you are about to see what San Francisco's radical left did to the criminal justice system. The police didn't even bother arresting people anymore for a huge number of crimes. And so it just became a free-for-all on the streets of San Francisco. How law and order became absolute anarchy. Next.

So this is the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, one of the worst places in the United States of America. The reason it's so bad is because there's no law enforcement at all here. There's violence, drugs everywhere. They call this stretch of the Tenderloin cartel alley. Now, I'm reporting with a mixture of anger and sadness. Should not be happening in the United States. All right. And it's happening because of one major reason: you people don't care about these people. You don't care.

All right. So every indignation you could possibly imagine happens right out here in full view. So we're going to stop for a moment. So this is our hotel right here. Up there. You can't stay in that hotel because you will be beaten to a pulp. All right. What the currency here is, is heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, all of it tinged now with fentanyl, which will kill you like that. Now, these addicted people, these street people, they don't care whether they live or die. Most of them. Okay. Their whole lives centered around intoxication. That's it.

At the same time, the city gives them needles, crack pipes. It's just insane. So the problem never gets solved. It's circular. Now, why do they come here? Why not go to Des Moines or someplace like that? Because the city of San Francisco and the state of California give them money. As we discussed earlier, cash. Okay. For nothing. And they use the cash to get intoxicated, to buy drugs. So why wouldn't you come here to San Francisco? It doesn't snow. It's not hot in the summer. And the people who live here are just terrorized.

An attack on a San Francisco police officer. A San Francisco restaurant owner, stabbed multiple times inside of his business. The weapons that they're carrying. I get it. I'm speechless. It's like what you see in the movie.

For years, law-abiding citizens in San Francisco have had to endure yet another layer of progressive insanity: radical criminal justice reform. First, California's Proposition 47, which reduced many felonies and misdemeanors, all in the name of reducing prison overcrowding. When you dive into this, you find out it's not really the police that aren't doing their job because they are. It's our judges. It's our state law. It's our state policymakers that have reduced penalties for what they call quality of life crimes. And so our court system has become a revolving door.

Okay. So they arrest them and they're back out. Nothing happens. That's right. And that's only when arrests are made at all. In 2019, when radical leftist Chesa Boudin became San Francisco's district attorney, it became a true reign of terror. He was raised by two other radicals, but had a very radical, you know, anti-police, anti-incarceration agenda, came into office and did exactly what he promised, which was to stop enforcing a huge number of laws that he claimed were the reason for racial disparities in criminal justice.

All sorts of activities: drug dealing, drug use, prostitution, illegal camping. Police didn't even bother arresting people anymore for a huge number of crimes. And so it just became a free-for-all on the streets of San Francisco. And let's not forget about the decriminalization of shoplifting. Totally insane, right? And of course, it had a highly predictable result. And so you'd have these organized syndicates of people that would go into stores and engage in smash and grabs for higher value items, with the understanding that there would be no consequences for it. That's why many retailers made the rational decision to close up shop in San Francisco.

Take a look at the list of some of the biggest stores that said sayonara to downtown. Citing crime and safety as driving factors.

Just around a corner from here at Target store, I had to close, retail stores closing all over the place because the city will prosecute shoplifting and theft. When you were mayor, and I remember that, you were fairly tough on crime. Correct.

I was literally mindful of conduct for people, as I currently am, but without the authority that I had when I served as mayor. And I am really focused on having all of us obey and mutually respect each other and obey the law and obey all the rules. Not happening.

And it goes without saying, but we're going to say it anyway that San Francisco was one of the first and remains one of the most ardent sanctuary cities in the country. So how's that working out? San Francisco has an organized drug dealing problem. It's mostly undocumented immigrants from Honduras that are brought up here by the cartels to sell drugs on our streets.

They control about 95% of the drug trade on the streets right now throughout the city. Armed. They got guns, knives. Absolutely. Guns, knives, machetes, whatever you can think of. They used to have baseball bats and steel poles stashed around the corner next to trees and all that. But these days, because everything's so much more volatile, most of them have guns.

Who were these people selling you? The narcotics Hondurans. There were no Honduran drug dealers in Oakland; these were mean guys, right? They'd hurt you. They would? Yes. I was kind of in and out of. I've seen them hurt people. Absolutely, absolutely. It's all consolidated underneath the Sinaloa cartel.

So you essentially have salesmen working for the largest and most violent multinational corporation in the world, being protected by laws that were meant to protect their victims. And now they're being used to protect perpetrators.

By the year 2022, it had gotten so bad that voters had finally had enough and recalled Chesa Boudin. In San Francisco, they decided to recall District Attorney Chase Aberdeen. Overwhelmingly, more than half of voters said the city well said yes to Proposition H, which was the question: should he be recalled? And now that Boudin is recalled, the next step is to figure out who's going to replace him.

You had to recall your D.A. here because he wouldn't prosecute any crime. But that's why we got him out. We took him out, but the damage was done. But that's just one local D.A. What about the real power players? What responsibility do they have for making this mess? Thank you all very much, California.

His political ambitions were greater than his compassion for the vulnerable. That's next.

So I'm here in a Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. The house behind me? Nancy Pelosi lives there. So why am I here? Because Mrs. Pelosi is Speaker of the House.

Was the most powerful politician outside of the president and maybe the Senate majority leader in the country for a good number of years. She did not object to her hometown going down the drain. Now, not in this neighborhood. Nancy bought her house for 2.3 million. It's worth about eight. Pristine neighborhood. Beautiful.

You had a major amount of very, very powerful people attached to San Francisco. Gavin Newsom, now governor in the state. Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi, none of them intervened or even objected to the rapid downfall of social order in this city.

Despite living in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in San Francisco, not even the Pelosis are immune to the consequences of progressive policy. On October 28th, 2022, a hammer-wielding intruder broke into the home and attacked Paul Pelosi, fracturing his skull.

The assailant, Canadian citizen David Wayne DePape, who was in the country illegally and according to friends, had a history of mental illness and drug abuse. The progressive movement, and we mentioned it before. Voters okayed a law that says, hey, you can steal $1,000, but nothing will happen to you.

So it's not just the politicians, right? That is where San Francisco politics lives in the progressive zone. One more story.

When I come to San Francisco and I rent a car, the agent says, do not leave anything on the car seat when you park. Why? Because the drug addicts will break the window and steal whatever is in the car. Will not be prosecuted. It's insane. But this is the reality of present-day San Francisco.

Are you? I'm pretty good. How are you? Now, Willie Brown is a lifelong Democrat. But when he was mayor and tried to maintain some order, he was vilified. You got attacked by the progressive left, is that correct? Full time. And I still am.

Without the power and the authority. When we say attacked, we mean both figuratively and literally. This is his honor. Catching cherry, pumpkin, and tofu pies in the face hurled by activists who opposed his housing policy.

And believe me, the collection of people from the social workers' world mean well, but don't understand the mentality of some individuals. But I was surprised because what you were promoting when you were in power was fairly common sense.

You got a big city here, and everybody has to be respected, and you can't have a huge group intruding on other people and causing trouble. And you were attacked by progressives for being a mean guy. You were a mean guy. Did that take you by surprise? Yes, there were people who really, I think, meant well, but they did not understand.

Even former addicts turned activists like Gina McDonald and Tom Wolfe got lambasted when they dared to criticize the anything-goes ideology. Well, you know, people call it less compassionate. I say it's not compassionate to let someone lay on the sidewalk and die.

I think it's not compassionate to walk past somebody who's laying in their own urine and feces and think that they are going to make the decision to miraculously get better. And what about Governor Gavin Newsom, who may run for president? What's he done to clean up the disaster zone?

The crucial moment for Gavin Newsom is in January 2020 when he gives a spectacular, like an almost perfect speech, everything you would want in his State of the State address outlining what he was going to do on mental illness, addiction, and homelessness.

It's time to stop pointing fingers and join hands in a transformational solution. And he really laid out a whole program; the governor essentially didn't do any of it. All he did was the additional spending.

So it was supposed to be some sort of a compromise between some more spending on addiction and mental illness, along with requirements for sobriety and some sort of conditions on receiving housing. And he abandoned that. And so what we see in Gavin Newsom is somebody who needed to pursue an approach. But he didn't have the courage to follow through on it.

Okay, but wait. There's a new mayor in town. And guess what? He's not completely nuts. Is there a new day dawning on the city by the bay? That's next.

So we shot this special on Super Bowl weekend, and the city tried to clean itself up for the tourists and the TV cameras, herding the homeless to overnight shelters where they could not be seen.

So of course, the city has put on their Sunday best and everything's kind of looking good. It's wonderful. There are police on every corner, beat cops, which you never see. But I also think that the residents of this city deserve this every day.

Now, here's the good news. The new mayor, Daniel Luria, has dialed back some of the progressive nonsense. And by some metrics, things are getting better. At least some of the credit goes to activists like Tom and Gina, who said enough is enough. And they said it loudly.

We formed in 2021 out of desperation. Our kids were living out here on the streets of San Francisco, severely addicted and homeless. And we felt we had no voice. And we came together and protested and kicked and screamed and yelled until they would listen to us.

So part of my advocacy work was to kind of change the direction that San Francisco was going in. So I worked hard with a lot of other people. We had a whole coalition of people in recovery to get someone like Daniel Luria elected mayor of San Francisco, to move the plurality of the members of the Board of Supervisors, our city council, to a more moderate political view, where they all kind of had a common goal of.

But that's all well and good, but you just told me 37,000 drug addicts running around, and I get it. It's not that big of a city. Right? Okay, 37,000. It's a legion of people causing unbelievable damage every day. I don't see it getting a lot better.

In fact, just this month, Mayor Luria's motorcade was attacked by Tenderloin thugs right after he gave a speech denouncing the city's broken government. I mean, come on. We didn't get into this position overnight. It took us like a decade for San Francisco to literally slide to rock bottom, which we hit in 2024. Right, right.

And so there's really kind of nowhere to go from there but up. And we can't forget the billions of dollars that the city wasted. Wasted on flawed ideology, on radical harm reduction, on Housing First models that actually didn't solve homelessness. And you could argue that it actually made everything worse, because we still had 650 overdose deaths in San Francisco last year.

I want you back in six months, and then I will come back in place. You'll come back, and you and I will walk the Tenderloin as I did yesterday. They thought I was Dirty Harry down there. And I walked down there.

Okay. Whoa! Is there a solution? There is a solution, but it's going to require federal guidance, which we're starting to get from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

But it's also going to require state legislation. States like California are going to have to actually change the law. State law around housing and around drug use, and where drug use is allowed and where progressives don't want to do that.

And you dominate the state as they want to let you do whatever you want to do, no matter how much damage you cause other people. So this is happening for two reasons. Progressive virtue signaling. They, I guess, think that they're doing these people a favor, letting them destroy themselves, I guess.

All right. And the second reason is their personal behavior. These people have said, hey, blank you. I'm going to do whatever I want. I don't care. Now, some people feel sorry for them. I'm on the fence about it.

Okay. But I will tell you what the only solution is. Mandatory substance abuse rehab. That's it. Because most of the people here in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, they want to be here. They want this. And they are dangerous not only to other people, but to themselves.

It's just incomprehensible that the United States of America is allowing this to happen. And it has to stop. This has been a News Nation Bill O'Reilly special. Thank you very much for watching.

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