In truth, the provenance of the video doesn’t matter that much. What’s more interesting is how this particular incident dovetails with a larger conservative meme (pushed, for example, by Tucker Carlson, and Toboroff herself has appeared on Steve Bannon's TV show) that American cities are fallen dystopias. It's an idea that those on the right and ostensible left—Weinberg clarified in later tweets that he plans to vote for the Democrats nationally and centrists locally—have all glommed on to, asking for a tougher crackdown on crime and homelessness, while ignoring the real cause of the problem: rampant capitalism that has engendered a devastating housing crisis.
In this imaginary, cities are pressure cookers ready to blow if there isn’t enough law and order. Segments from conservative channels regularly go on about how liberals are destroying San Francisco by letting criminals run amok by refusing to incarcerate them and defunding the police. This idea is popular among the Tucker Carlson acolytes of the world just as much as wealthy people who ostensibly hold progressive views.
The reality, however, couldn’t be more different: There are few, if any, cities that have actually attempted to defund police budgets or loosen punitive punishments, and crime is not on the rise nationwide or even in cities. Liberal political campaigns only gestured towards defunding the police, but in reality pushed to increase budgets. In supposedly war-torn New York City, Eric Adams pushed a budget that cut everything but police funding.
“This is the nature of carceral ideology: It cannot fail, it can only be failed. When crime goes up in areas with modest reform efforts, it’s the reform efforts that are to blame. When crime goes up—by roughly the same percentage—in places where no such reforms exist, Tough on Crime ideology and the lack of a robust welfare state or social services cannot be blamed. Instead, it’s blamed on a lack of churchgoing and oppressive liberal lockdowns,” Johnson wrote.
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