San Francisco is a dangerous place to live. If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of Darren Mark Stallcup. An artist by day, a fentanyl citizen journalist by night, the young man recently made a shocking video documenting life in San Francisco.
A resident of the Tenderloin, a drug-infested neighborhood overrun with crime, Stallcup describes himself as a witness to a “zombie apocalypse” and “fentanyl genocide.” Every morning, he must navigate his way through sidewalks littered with needles, human waste, and even dead bodies. He describes “Frisco” as “a fourth world country within a first world country.”
“Living in San Francisco has been a wild ride,” Stallcup tells me. He has “personally witnessed the city go from being a cultural capital to the technological capital to the fentanyl capital. After the massive tech exodus, led by Elon Musk, San Francisco lost billions in tax revenue.”
According to Stallcup, “Local leaders who gained an appetite from tech tax money soon found themselves desperate to quench their newfound appetite for money. The only other way for them to achieve this was to enable the homeless-industrial complex by allowing fentanyl to plague our community and corrupt various nonprofits and organizations.”
For Stallcup, his mornings and nights begin and end in an eerily similar manner: opening and closing his eyes to the sounds of people screaming for their lives and ambulances speeding by, sirens blaring.
“Sleep,” he says, “is very difficult to come by, especially living in the Tenderloin, where my apartment building has been broken into multiple times.”
“It’s traumatic, to say the least, a fight for survival,” he adds. Quite literally, a fight for survival. On more than one occasion, Stallcup has had to fight off burglars with his own bare hands.
Stallcup’s apartment building is surrounded by bodies (dead and barely alive), inordinate amounts of litter, tents, and an array of drug-related accouterments.
“Every morning, I go out and count the bodies,” he says, “sometimes giving them a small love tap just to see if they are alive.”
It’s “Groundhog Day” meets “The Road.” Early in the morning, white vans come by his place and stack the bodies on multiple layers of metallic trays. Welcome to modern-day America.
“This humanitarian crisis,” says Stallcup, “is a fentanyl genocide.”
He’s right. It is. In San Francisco, a person dies of a fentanyl overdose every 10 hours.
“Theft, rape, and murder is rampant,” Stallcup tells me, “with mom-and-pop shops under attack every day.” Grocery stores are ransacked dry. Cars and apartments are broken into regularly.
Who’s to blame? I ask.
“I truly believe that I am witnessing the collapse of the Western civilization,” he replies, and he believes that it’s because of corruption and people “who profit from the chaos.”
Stallcup is particularly critical of the city’s mayor, London Breed. And for good reason. Her leadership skills have been seen as, for lack of a better word, anemic.
Stallcup isn’t the only disillusioned San Franciscan. As I write this, a number of major retail stores, including the likes of Whole Foods, Old Navy, and Nordstrom, are shutting up shop and moving elsewhere. In fact, since 2019, according to a recent San Francisco Standard report, nearly 50 percent of the stores in the city’s downtown shopping district have closed.
Who can blame them?
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According to Fox News, even the city’s richest neighborhoods are being plagued by “smash and grabs, robberies, burglaries, and open-air drug use.” As Tracy McCray, San Francisco Police Officers Association president, noted, “The problems in the Tenderloin have escaped the Tenderloin.”
They most certainly have. To compound matters, gangs of youths, baseball bats in hand, are reportedly tormenting mothers and nannies, mugging them on their daily school run.
Last month, in Noe Valley, once a “charming, family-friendly neighborhood,” 11 phone robberies occurred. These robberies, according to the Telegraph, “are believed to have been carried out by the same gang who are targeting women picking up children from school.”
One woman was allegedly assaulted with a baseball bat, while another woman was punched in the face.
It’s hard to believe that, less than two years ago, San Francisco was named the 15th safest city in the world—yes, 15th. Today, as is clear to see, the city has become increasingly unsafe for all citizens. Viewed as a “liberal city,” San Francisco is, first and foremost, a U.S. city. Its demise should sadden all readers, regardless of their politics.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
But even as it seems nearly impossible to make a living, there are blessings that should not be disregarded. By highlighting strong sponsors who share our America First worldview, we have been able to make lifelong connections and even a bit of revenue to help us along. This is why we enjoy symbiotic relationships with companies like MyPillow, Jase Medical, and Promised Grounds. We help them with our recommendations and they reward us with money when our audience buys from them.
The same can be said about our preparedness sponsor, Prepper All-Naturals. Their long-term storage beef has a 25-year shelf life and is made with one ingredient: All-American Beef.
Even our faith-driven precious metals sponsor helps us tremendously while also helping Americans protect their life’s savings. We are blessed to work with them.
Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
