A Case for the National Guard in San Francisco

A Case for the National Guard in San Francisco

Trump might be personally unpopular, but some of his key proposals enjoy overwhelming support among his most vocal detractors. For instance, in 2024, San Francisco went for Harris 85/12, but now the Golden Gate City wants the National Guard to bring law and order.

This approach to crime-fighting was a success in post-BLM DC and Memphis, but is now bogged down in legal battles elsewhere. Trump showed no intent in letting down and on Wednesday expressed willingness to deploy troops to what he said “one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess”.

Since the 1960s, San Francisco has fashioned itself as a champion of permissiveness, opting to address addiction not with policing but legalization and harm reduction. Over the course of the last two decades, the opiate epidemic spiraled out of control, exacerbating the drug and homelessness problems. These issues plague all West Coast cities, but San Francisco, with its poop map and regional public transit system crawling with fentanyl zombies, became the avatar of depravity.

One generation later, it had had enough. As the local publication The Voice of San Francisco reported:

A March 2025 citywide survey reveals a striking consensus: two-thirds (61 percent) of voters unequivocally urge federal intervention to deport illegal fentanyl traffickers who exploit our legal leniency to peddle death. Toss in those who “somewhat agree,” and this sentiment surges to an overwhelming 83 percent.

In other words, the willingness to call in federalized troops to fight the war on drugs—the war that the locals once made into the punchline of every joke—is now the mirror image of the Democrat vote in the last presidential election.

The business elites, as cowardly as they are, show a certain realization that the masses might be right on this issue. In a recent New York Times interview, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff expressed support for the deployment of a federalized National Guard in the troubled city. That’s the same Marc Benioff who just seven years ago campaigned for Proposition C, which raised corporate taxes on the promise to end homelessness by, as the failed Boomer-commie consensus advised, funding services for street dwellers. After facing a backlash, the tech leader reversed himself once again, coming out against the Trump solution

Local and state officials, all Democrats or further left, oppose the idea. Governor Gavin Newsom is in the early stages of a presidential run and reflexively opposes everything MAGA. He is suing the president for attempting to federalize the California National Guard. Newsom himself is out of suggestions for fixing the homelessness and the drug addiction epidemic from which it stems. It’s not for the lack of trying—Golden State’s chief executive has been promising to end homelessness since he ran for San Francisco Mayor in 2003. It was his marquee issue before he gave up and recalibrated for the national scene.

The Board of Supervisors is similarly disinterested in law enforcement.

Only two out of its eleven members support deporting fentanyl dealers. And Mayor Daniel Lurie, elected in November 2024 to restore the long-lost sense of normality, insists that he got it under control.

In an interview with ABC7 this July, Lurie boasted of the achievements of half a year of his administration:

He said crime is down 27% in San Francisco. In Union Square and the Financial District, crime is down 45% since he took office.

However, the Union Square and Financial District area is now depopulated. With few stores remaining open and few employees commuting to work, there is hardly anyone to commit a crime against. And although Lurie continues to insist that tourism is back to pre-lockdown levels—which was already on the decline thanks to the junkie issues—tourism alone doesn’t account for all of the decline. Too many local businesses were once sustained by the white collar workforce that switched to telecommuting.

It’s observably true that the encampments are down from their COVID glory when harm reduction enthusiasts insisted on spacing out homeless tents in the name of social distancing, allowing them to spread deep into residential neighborhoods. Yet fentanyl markets set up by illegal migrants are still functioning in the heart of the city, and fentanyl zombies are not hard to find—although the authorities are obviously trying to tack them out of the way.

A better way to judge the severity of the drug epidemic is not by the proliferation of homelessness but by the number of fatal poisonings. The data for 2024 and 2025 haven’t been finalized yet, but it looks like there have been 635 such deaths in all of last year—significantly less than its extraordinary 2023 peak. Unfortunately, the trend doesn’t appear to hold—from January to September 2025, 497 people died of drug poisonings in San Francisco. In other words, it looks like the numbers stabilized. Most of these deceased have fixed addresses.

That shouldn’t be surprising considering that San Francisco has a catch-and-release culture for fentanyl dealers. The cops might arrest them, but the progressive judges set them free, and the mayor is powerless before them.

One has to be willingly blind not to notice that the dealers are all illegal aliens. They—and the network that brought them here—can be all swept away if ICE is allowed to do its job. It shouldn’t be hard to do, considering that the individuals selling deadly poison to Americans operate out in the open. Yet San Francisco is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state—and that’s more important than saving lives.

Although again, the situation improved under Lurie, many San Franciscans are unhappy with that new normal. Why settle for Lurie’s “encampments are at an all-time low,” when anyone who lived in the Bay Area longer than fifteen years remembers the time of no tents?

Even if Lurie has been in office for less than a year, it’s clear that his ideas are outdated half-measures. San Francisco needs a robust law enforcement agenda that local and state governments have failed to provide.

Because the California political establishment will fight it tooth and nail, a meaningful shake-up needs to happen. At the end, it’s up to the local citizens to decide how badly they want to live in a functioning city and if platitudes about the undocumented or anti-Trump are worth having to put up with Fettys Wonderland downtown. It will take an exercise of power to bring back the city—maybe Benioff can change his mind again and sponsor a transition.

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