BUCK: Let’s talk about how Democrats are destroying cities. If you live in a city right now if you’re listening to this, whether it’s New York or Houston or L.A. or San Francisco or Seattle or Portland or you name it… Those are just ones that come to mind. Miami is doing pretty well, I should say. I think Phoenix is doing pretty well too. I’d have to check in on that one.

But if you’re living in any of those cities I just mentioned, you understand that they’re just getting completely and utterly ruined, and it’s pretty obvious as to why. Democrats have embraced — and we’ve seen more of this over the pandemic period — soft-on-crime policies, but also a general attitude of not just lax but really inviting vagrancy, quality of life deterioration, open-air drug use.

If you want to get a sense of how bad it is, there is a piece up at the Daily Mail, “I Get PAID to Be Homeless in San Francisco — It takes one phone call’: ‘Old school junkie’ says he moved to woke city because he gets $620-a-month that pays for his Amazon Prime and Netflix on his phone,” which he watches and enjoys; so he doesn’t not really care about any of the things that people would assume. “Oh, well, what about career and everything else?”

No. He’s selling drugs, he’s selling fentanyl. In fact, in the article he talks about selling fentanyl to a 15-year-old. It’s a highly lethal drug, as we all know. Over 100,000 people dying from drug overdoses, two-thirds of them from fentanyl alone and opioids last year. Here he is. This guy’s name is James. He’s speaking to author Michael Shellenberger in San Francisco about what it’s like and the choices he’s making.

People say lack of housing forces local residents into the streets, but James says he came from Texas to San Francisco for the drugs, the non-enforcement of anti-camping laws, and the $820/month in welfare & food stamps. James says he sold fentanyl, 2 weeks ago, to a 15-year-old. pic.twitter.com/5qMr6tmlWs

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 9, 2022

BUCK: The cops won’t do anything, Clay. He’s selling fentanyl in broad daylight to teenagers, and he’s like, “No big deal. It’s San Francisco.”

CLAY: It’s a mess everywhere. I’m out here for the Super Bowl, and one of the writers at OutKick, Armando Salguero, wrote about the homeless situation in L.A., and I know there’s a lot of people listening to us right now in L.A. who there are just homeless encampments in (chuckling) really high-end coastal communities where you have to walk by and they don’t even make an effort now. They’re almost permanent homeless communities because of the opportunities that California provides.

Certainly, if you’re going to be living outdoors, L.A. is one of the best places you could be just based on the pure climate. It doesn’t get that cold. It doesn’t get wildly hot, generally speaking, and all of this is being incentivized. It’s wild because some of these Democrats claim not to be capitalists, but they are not willing to recognize that when you incentivize behavior…

Buck, I saw a data point the other day I couldn’t believe. There are more working-age Americans, men, who are not employed right now as a percentage — I think it was 25 to 54 — than were the unemployed during the Great Depression. There are so many men out there that are choosing not to work — and certainly we got an issue with women’s employment, and I think to a large extent, that’s a function of the childcare issues associated with schooling and the yo-yoing of schools being open or schools not being open.

Women bear the brunt of responsibilities for child rearing in this country still. But the way that we are disincentivizing work — and, thankfully, they didn’t pass Build Back Better, because it was going to further disincentivize work — is going to continue to have a generational impact. In the first hour of the show, what did we talk about? The 7.5% inflation rate, the highest since 1982. I’m still blown away by the data point we shared in that first hour of the show, Buck.

In 1982, our national debt was $1 trillion. Forty years later we’re at 7.5% inflation, and our overall national debt is at $30 trillion. So in the past 40 years we have added $29 trillion to our national debt. And who owns a large share of our national debt? China. So we talk a lot — the Winter Olympics are going on, Buck, we talk a lot about the interplay of the United States battle against China.

And I hear almost no one discussing in the political realm how in the world can we win an international battle with Chinese communist authoritarians when we have allowed them to own a huge percentage of the United States debt? They effectively have us by the purse strings in many ways, in a way that didn’t exist when we were going head-to-head in the early eighties with Russia, right, with the Soviet Union. It’s scary, really, when you think about it.

BUCK: So on to the cities, by the way. Phoenix, Arizona, I was right and wrong on that one. They had a big spike.

CLAY: It’s bad there too?

BUCK: Bad there too. So for everyone listening in KFYI territory down there in Phoenix, Arizona, just want to say sorry. It’s fascinating. You don’t see much in the way of headlines, but they had a spike in homicides too. It hasn’t got a lot of national news coverage: From 5.9 homicides per hundred thousand people to 7.5. So that doesn’t sound like that much. That’s a substantial increase, those numbers overall —

CLAY: Percentage-wise.

BUCK: — percentage-wise, exactly. And it actually accelerated faster than the national average. So Phoenix also in rough shape. But in San Francisco is where you have the quality-of-life crimes, Clay, and all of those issues coming together in a way that even longtime L.A. libs that I know and San Francisco residents — longtime San Francisco Bay area folks that I know — are saying this is just completely out of control.

The broad daylight thefts, the refusal to prosecute. I spoke to yesterday a Democrat — this is on The First TV, a Democrat alderman in Chicago — Clay, who said that they just passed a bill — no one even paid attention — that if you steal less than $10,000, they will not prosecute it as a policy.

CLAY: Oh, my gosh.

BUCK: I was like this is what the guy told me, Alderman Lopez. You gotta be kidding me, less than $10,000? I said you have a huge increase in the amount of carjackings going on in Chicago. This is getting a lot of attention. You know what the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, says is the cause of carjackings? Remote learning!

Because more kids are not in school, so their cars… I don’t think the kids are really the ones doing the carjacking, certainly not young teenagers. Some, maybe, but, you know, generally speaking, that’s not what’s driving this. San Francisco, you know what they’ve come up with as solutions? I just want to point out how crazy this has all gotten. There’s now a campaign, Clay, to bring homeless people into your spare bedroom in San Francisco!

This is being talked about. Like we should just… Not we, but they should just take people off the streets. All these Nancy Pelosi voting libs who work in, you know, Big Tech or they work for the government or the city or whatever, they’re not taking people with extreme… There’s 8,000 homeless people estimated in San Francisco right now. Almost all of them have severe addiction and mental illness problems.

Some of them — and this was all in the Daily Mail piece — walk around in broad daylight totally naked. Some of them walk around clearly in mental distress, cursing, screaming at people on the streets. And the Democrat response to this is, “Don’t bother them. That’s inhumane.” No, inhumane is letting people wallow in these states of despair and destroying whole communities.

CLAY: It’s a mess. You know it’s gotten bad, Buck. Yesterday we played audio of Al Sharpton in your hometown of New York City saying he can’t even buy toothpaste because too many people are stealing toothpaste. Now, I don’t know what the market is to resell toothpaste. (laughing) I don’t know. That’s kind of crazy, right, that there’s even a market to go basically steal anything. They have to put stuff under lock and key.

And I think there’s a lot of people out there who may not live in these cities that have an indication that things are not going well. But when toothpaste is under lock and key in New York City, you can’t even walk into a drugstore and buy toothpaste without having to ask someone to unlock it for you, we fundamentally are failing. And the message that that is sending is that there is no justice, there’s no crime — $10,000 in thievery, Buck? I mean, think about how much you would have to fill up a cart with to get $10,000 worth of gear.

BUCK: Alderman Lopez of Chicago also told me yesterday — and I want to check this out and make sure, ’cause I’m now finding out things about how these are decisions being made by Democrat prosecutors in entirely Democrat cities. This is their issue; their party is ruining these cities, right? They’ve got full left, full-commie crazy and they’re striking these places.

And New York, of course, is the one that gets me the most fired up ’cause I’m living here with this absurdity all around me in many ways. Clay, they changed the law in Chicago now so that if you shoot at someone and you miss and hit somebody else, that will not be prosecuted as homicide. I believe it will only be prosecuted as involuntary manslaughter.

CLAY: Well, this is like the Wild West. Remember they had the huge shoot-out, and everybody argued they were self-defending themselves and nobody got charged, in Chicago, right? This is like old school Wild West shoot-outs, OK Corral modern-day. And everybody just says, “Hey, it was self-defense,” and there’s no actual prosecution.”

BUCK: Just so you know what Clay’s talking about, this actually happened. Some of you probably saw the video. It was a couple of months ago. And you know who the prosecutor was? Jussie Smollett’s good friend, Kim Foxx.

CLAY: Oh, of course. Of course.

BUCK: Of course, and she saw broad daylight video. These guys, it looks like a scene from a movie. It looks like you’re watching The Wire during a shoot-out or something. Broad daylight, I think almost a hundred rounds exchanged between these guys in a crowded part of an urban area, and when they arrest them, the cops showed up, the initial prosecution decision was, “Well, we can’t prosecute them for the shootings because we don’t know who started it.”

I’m pretty sure in New York, if they find a stockbroker with an unregistered 20-gauge shotgun for sporting clays, they want to send you to Rikers for a few years because “gun violence.” But in Chicago if you’ve got two guys in gangs shooting at each other in broad daylight, Kim Foxx doesn’t really want to make anyone’s life too hard when they’re threatening the lives of others. That’s basically where we are.

CLAY: And as you said in your piece that’s up at ClayAndBuck.com and also at FoxNews.com, people who are bearing the brunt of all of this massive increase of inner-city violence are overwhelmingly minorities.

BUCK: I was gonna say antagonizing, antagonizing the left. The title is “BLM-Defund Police’s Legacy is More Dead Police Officers, Surging Crime.” That’s the title. It’s on Fox News, it’s on ClayAndBuck.com right now — and, Clay, this needs to be answered for. People need to lose their jobs and politicians need to be kicked out of office because the stakes are too high and you see it in San Francisco, you see it with what’s going on in these cities across the country. They got their way and they ruined them, and now it has to stop.