The People’s Republic of San Francisco is set to finish the job that Floyd Hoax rioters began in 2020.
The once-great, once-beautiful city will use $3 million of foundation money to decide which of the city’s remaining statues — those that Floyd Hoax rioters left intact — must come down because they don’t represent the city’s “values.”
An obvious target will be those that promote “racism,” “white supremacy,” and other imagined problems of the past.
As that project proceeds, Mayor London Breed’s city is a dying, crime-infested cesspool.
Power and Privilege
The beginning of the end for many of the statues began in 2018, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, when the city removed its “Early Days” statue because it featured an Indian at the feet of a Spanish missionary.
But “the effort gathered steam amid the racial-justice movement in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd. That year, crowds toppled statues throughout the country that glorified Confederate Civil War leaders, which critics said paid homage to the country’s racist past,” the newspaper continued.
Funding the project is $3 million from the leftist Mellon Foundation.
The project, called “Shaping Legacy,” was discussed at an Arts Commission meeting last week when senior project manager Angela Carrier explained that looking at San Francisco’s monuments and memorials as a whole shows “a concentration that talks about power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.”
“These monuments no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for,” she added.
The monuments and memorial[s] were listed in an inventory last updated in June, 2023. They range from Lotta’s Fountain installed on Market Street in 1875 to the bust of George Moscone at City Hall to a dozen or more statues of explorers and war heroes in Golden Gate Park. The most recent addition is a 9-foot bronze of Maya Angelou being installed at the Main Library in September. It, too, will be subject to review. The entire Civic Art Collection consists of 4,000 objects valued in excess of $100 million.
The project’s mission statement says its goal is to confront the inequities of the past in order to confront the inequities of the present.
A thin story about the project in SFist reported that “an audit of the city’s 98 Statues [will] determine if any should be removed for being racist or sexist.”
The city announced the $3 million grant last year. It was part of Mellon’s commitment of $250 million “to transform the nation’s commemorative landscape through public projects that more completely and accurately represent the multiplicity and complexity of American stories,” said a news release from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Other targets are Asheville, North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; and more.
“Pulse Check”
The money in San Francisco will fund “Pulse Check: Accountability and Activation of Future SF Monuments, an initiative encompassing a racial equity audit of publicly accessible works in the Civic Art Collection, community engagement, and several community-led artist activations in public spaces.”
The object: rid the public landscape of anything a leftist public officials deem “racist,” the release said.
“With the support of this grant, we can continue this important work to ensure our City’s monuments and memorials are reflective of our values and showcase the art and stories of all the people and moments that make our City so special,” Breed said.
When Floyd Hoax rioters tore down statues “in protest of their racist and colonial histories,” the Arts Commission sprang into action to establish the Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee (MMAC) to “reimagine” public art.
The release explained the “Pulse Check” project in more detail — and in typical leftist code:
This project will engage communities that have historically been excluded from discussions regarding the evaluation of works [of] art and the process of commissioning new works. It will conscientiously facilitate the creation of contemporary, dynamic, and healing art in the San Francisco landscape. A team of multidisciplinary artist leaders and local facilitators will conduct broad reaching community conversations that will guide two project components: (1) a racial equity audit of publicly accessible commemorative works in San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection and (2) a vigorous community engagement and multidisciplinary opportunities for artistic activations in public spaces.
The newspaper did not offer a list of possible targets for the wrecking crew, but among them might be a statue of Abraham Lincoln and memorials to Admiral George Dewey and writer Robert Louis Stevenson
The Beginning
Again, the event that gave the leftist city free rein was the death of drug addict and career criminal George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. Floyd died of a drug overdose while being restrained by police. But the leftist mainstream media lied that cop Derek Chauvin “murdered” Floyd. The Chronicle repeated that lie in its story about the statue-destruction project.
Among the statues destroyed were those of Star-Spangled Banner writer Francis Scott Key, Catholic missionary Junipero Serra, and Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant.
The MMAC “issued its final report in 2023, recommending the equity audit now being undertaken,” the Chronicle continued:
“What the audit will do is decide which monuments are considered offensive today, and if so, what should replace them “ said Dorka Keehn, a former Arts Commissioner, who chaired the Visual Arts Committee in 2020 when the Columbus and part of the Pioneer statues were removed. “A broader question is, ‘how long should any monument be in existence?’”
Crime Wave, Empty Buildings
Yet while Breed and her “progressive” disciples fret about “racist” statues, the city decays.
In March, Newsweek offered a list of the businesses to shut down in California because of crime, notably “regular theft, property damage, robberies and car break-ins as threats to their employees and customers.”
Macy’s closed its signature store in Union Square in February because of shoplifting. In May 2023, high-end retailers Nordstrom and Whole Foods closed stores in San Francisco, “citing crime and the deteriorating economic conditions of the city’s downtown.” In September, Target followed suit.
The crime rate was 67 per 1,000 residents.
While city authorities’ data show that crime has dropped in San Francisco in 2023, the state of neglect of its downtown, with a record-high number of vacant office space, has exacerbated an already-existing situation of homelessness, drug use, and often crime.
Last year, overall crime had decreased by 7 percent compared with 2022 and 13 percent from 2019; property crimes dropped by 34 percent, including an 11 percent decline in car theft and a 16 percent decline in burglaries. Violent crime was down 23 percent.
Late last year, The San Francisco Standard revealed that 35.9 percent of the city’s office space is vacant, “more than 31.5 million square feet.”
And from January 1 through December 15, 2023, the website reported, some 20 cars per day were stolen.
Such is the city’s problem with car break-ins that an X feed is devoted to them.
In July last year, ABC News reported that “San Francisco’s retail hub is turning into a ghost town.” That report noted that Old Navy had also closed its SF location.
How removing more statues will resolve the city’s decay and crime wave is unclear.
H/T: Breitbart
