CLAY: We got a couple of callers who want to weigh in on experiences in Seattle as they can no longer investigate rapes, according to the Seattle Times, because they do not have sufficient staffing in their police force, and they’ve lost 25% of all police in the last two years in the wake of the BLM protests surrounding George Floyd, as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco have all become lawless wastelands in many ways in the wake of those protests and as woke white people have destroyed three cities that were the crown jewels of the Pacific Northwest.

Susanna in Spokane Washington. By the way, we are number one in Spokane, I believe. Susanna, what were you going to say about your experience? You had an experience with violence in Seattle?

CALLER: Yes, I did, about a year ago, a little over. I was attacked in my apartment building, and I was able to identify the perpetrator with the help of the building management and the Seattle police. However, he was in transition to become a “she” and declared himself a she, and at that point — I quote — the police detective told me, “This is a hot potato and no one’s gonna touch it.”

And I was encouraged by both the police and my building management to just let it go, and I’ve since fled to Spokane like so many of us. There’s blood on the hands of that former mayor, Jenny Durkan, as well as Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington. They now have someone I understand called Bruce Harrell who purports to be more moderate. But really, it’s just another place on the spectrum of the same woke, anti-police agenda.

CLAY: How long had you lived in Seattle, Susanna?

CALLER: Twenty-five years.

CLAY: And you liked the city. I mean, 25 years is a long time to live in a place. It’s a beautiful community. When did you start to notice things go downhill?

CALLER: It was gradual. I worked part time in the schools, so a lot of lost their careers and livelihoods by pushing back. It was parallel to some of the national downturns. But it was more really pronounced after the George Floyd incident. That’s when it just kind of all imploded and exploded. But, yes, it was a jewel of a city. I loved being by the ocean, by the Sound there. It was very diverse. And that was also politically as well as, you know, in other ways economically. And I think with the tech sector, the wokeness really became more pronounced.

CLAY: We gotta break here, Susanna. I want to keep the phone lines open from the Seattle area who have in the Seattle area recently to be able to call us.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Adrian in Fort Myers, you just left Seattle to move to Florida. Why?

CALLER: My husband and I just couldn’t sit there and take it anymore. I lived in Seattle for about 30 years, San Francisco prior to that. My husband’s 20 years, and it just got crazy and it just got so, so weird.

CLAY: Is it the last two years where things…? You lived there 30 years. Obviously you live in a city for 30 years, you come to love it for sure. So was it the last two years where things just went completely awry?

CALLER: Yeah. It just… Well, it started a little bit before, like, the pandemic and, like, the whole George Floyd and CHAZ thing. It started a little bit before that. I mean, you know, I lived there in my twenties, and I would be completely comfortable going out. My girlfriends and I just going to the bars and just walking the streets of Seattle. Now you couldn’t pay me to do that at night.

BUCK: You know, Clay — thank you so much, Adrian —

CLAY: Thank you for the call.

BUCK: — in New York in the early nineties when it was at its most violent and I was a kid growing up here, “Do women jog alone at night?” is always the thing. And I think about how, if you had asked me that under the Bloomberg administration or midway through the Giuliani administration, I would have said, “Absolutely.” And even the beginning of the de Blasio administration ’til he ruined the city — which is what he tried to do.

If someone asked me now… My sister, it was her birthday yesterday. Would I advise my little sister to go jogging alone at night in Central Park? I would say, no. Just these anecdotal, these revelations you have where you go this is a city in decline, this is a city where they need to get it under control. James, apparently, in Oklahoma left Seattle five years ago sold his business and left. James —

CALLER: Yeah, you lived in Seattle for 19 years. When I got there, it was the cleanest, safest city that I’d ever lived in with the healthiest downtown that I’d ever lived in. I’ve lived all over the country. I worked in the fourth biggest department store in the United States, 89,000 square feet of retail. It had been there and it had been an institution for a hundred years. That building is empty, okay?

It’s the best piece of commercial real estate in Seattle. It was killed by a combination of anti-parking regulations, traffic lane minimalization, allowing people to continually march around on the streets without permits and block shopping traffic on sale days, people invading the store, no punishment of shoplifters, no punishment of vagrants shooting up in the restrooms, trespass people. Nobody gets prosecuted when they spray blood on the restroom walls with needles or collapse in your store. When I got there, it was beautiful and clean. When I left, I had to step around vagrants and their human manure to get in and out of bakeries.

BUCK: Crazy. Yeah. Thank you for the call.

CLAY: Yeah, he said he left five years ago. We’re hearing from a lot of people who left. Greg, you’re just over the mountains east of Seattle, and you are seeing people fleeing Seattle and moving into your neck of the woods.

CALLER: Yeah. I mean, it’s good to be on with you guys. You can pretty much split Washington down the Cascades, and on the right side you’ll have the Republicans, the left, the Democrats. But it’s funny; a lot of them will come over here ’cause they can sell their houses and buy over here for cheap, but then if they bring their politics over here… You never used to see campers over here. If they bring it over here, then it’s like they don’t put two and two together. They’re the problem, they’ve created this issue in Seattle, and now they’re gonna bring it here. So it’s just common sense, but they just don’t see it.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s the problem a lot of people are using the analogy of locusts. You destroy one area and then the locusts move to another area not recognizing that it’s their embrace of the politics that created the situation that led them to leave. I actually — and I hope that isn’t going to occur in much of the country. I actually think a lot of red state people are bailing. You know, red staters who live behind enemy lines, so to speak, are finally saying enough is enough and they’re coming to new states like Tennessee, Texas, Florida because the politics there is more in agreement with what they support, and becoming more red.

BUCK: As a New Yorker who’s had two of his brothers move to Florida, crime, taxes, and covid are what is pushing this current migration. It’s not just, you know, better weather. Florida’s already had great weather. Texas has always had very good weather.

CLAY: Low taxes. Yeah.

BUCK: Yeah, and no taxes, right. So it’s the change in the perception about these cities. But I do think the same way, Clay, we’ve been talking about — to bring in a little optimism here — Democrats are heading for a much-deserved electoral annihilation in the midterms and then, of course, I think we’ll see what happens in the next presidential election, cities have reached the point… They’re reaching that bottom right now, a lot of them.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They’re reaching that bottom where they’re sick of the crime, they’re sick of the dysfunction, you know. Even Mayor Adams here in New York has realized you gotta get it together, buddy! We don’t need selfies of you with celebrities. We need no more old ladies getting mugged on the subways or walking down the street to go to the store. That’s a big change in perception, and that needs to happen.