Liberals who are tempted to jump on the bandwagon of using "leftist San Francisco" as a punching bag would do well to note that the only substantively "progressive" thing about SF is that it's where the gays are. That's it. The mayor endorsed Bloomberg for president in 2020, and SF made exponentially more national headlines for recalling its progressive DA than for having had one in the first place. So with the exception of law-and-order rants delivered by reactionary pundits that sound indistinguishable from a speech by the mayor of SF, the punching is liable to consist entirely of mocking references to articles like this one.

It's not in good faith, folks! It's not about "crime"! SF is a useful punching bag for conservatives not because of facts about local politics but because of a general countercultural attitude and openness to alternative lifestyles that, in spite of everything, it continues to abstractly represent in the cultural imagination. CNN is literally signing up to help Birchers fight a hundred-year war against hippie longhair faggots that they started fighting in the '60s and never fucking gave up, and is calling this "centrism."