Ron DeSantis slams ‘once-great’ San Francisco during California trip

Enough billionaires live in San Francisco that Ron DeSantis traveled to the liberal haven to fundraise there. But he didn’t leave town without posting a video decrying a mass exodus from the city.

The Florida Governor stood in front of a graffiti-covered wall in San Francisco and spoke directly to the camera. The presidential campaign released a one-video video of the candidate online.

“We’re here in the once great city of San Francisco,” he said. “We came in here and we saw people defecating on the street. We saw people using heroin. We saw people smoking crack cocaine.”

The sightseeing occurred during a campaign swing through the Golden State.

“You look around, the city is not vibrant anymore,” he said. “It’s really collapsed because of leftist policies. These policies have caused people to flee this area.”

DeSantis blames lax enforcement of street crime.

Former District Attorney Chesa Boudin came under fire nationally for reform policies of sending low-level drug offenders to treatment instead of jail and declining to try minors as adults. Notably, voters recalled Boudin last year.

But the city has continued to see surges in shoplifting and other crimes as prosecutions remain low and stores close.

“They don’t prosecute criminals like they do in most parts of the country,” DeSantis said, “and wreckage has really, really been sad to see. So I’ve seen so many businesses boarded up. I’ve seen so much riff-raff just running around.”

Notably, DeSantis last year suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, who he has called a George Soros-backed prosecutor unwilling to try criminals. He has considered the same fate for Orange County State Attorney Monique Worrell for similar reasoning.

DeSantis has regularly made contrasts between Florida and California a central theme of his presidential campaign, regularly feuding with California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a back-and-forth apparently beneficial to both politicians.

His description of San Francisco furthered that message.

“It just shows you these policies matter. Leadership matters,” DeSantis said. “They are doing it wrong here. No wonder why we’ve had so many people move from San Francisco to Florida over the past few years. We’ve got to stop this madness. We need to restore sanity to this country.”

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