Willie Brown, the 92-year-old former mayor of San Francisco, sat down with Bill O'Reilly and delivered the kind of blunt assessment his own political side rarely tolerates. The city he once ran is broken, he said. And the people who broke it meant well.
That distinction, between good intentions and catastrophic results, runs through Brown's interview for O'Reilly's upcoming NewsNation special, "The Decline and Fall of San Francisco." The former Democratic power broker did not mince words about the progressive policies that have turned one of America's great cities into a national cautionary tale.
As the New York Post reported, Brown pointed the finger squarely at the social-services establishment and the ideology that drives it. He singled out NGOs that hand out free tents to the homeless, a practice he said only makes conditions on the street worse. He criticized the policy of giving an extra $100 a week to drug-addicted welfare recipients. And he drew a sharp line between compassion and competence.
"The collection of people from social workers world, mean well, but don't understand the mentality of some individuals."
That is not a line from a Republican campaign ad. It came from the man who served as San Francisco's mayor from 1996 to 2004, a fixture of the California Democratic establishment for decades.
O'Reilly described Brown as "fairly tough on crime" during his years running San Francisco. Brown did not disagree. He told O'Reilly that crime and other antisocial conduct must be dealt with by strong enforcement, a position that puts him at odds with the progressive wing of his own party.
Brown said he was "literally mindful of conduct for people" during his time in office, and remains so now.
"And I am really focused on having all of us obey and mutually respect each other and obey the law and obey all the rules."
Simple enough. Obey the law. Respect others. Enforce the rules. These are not radical propositions. But in modern San Francisco, they amount to heresy. Brown acknowledged that the far left criticizes him "every day" for holding these views.
He also offered a broader theory of urban decline. Cities change, he said, and not always for the better.
"Well, you got to know that over the years, almost every location in America goes through some revolutionary process. And the newcomers sometimes bring their existing conduct and culture with them."
Brown did not elaborate on which newcomers he meant. But the remark carries weight coming from a man who has watched San Francisco's transformation up close for half a century.
O'Reilly pressed harder on who bears responsibility for the city's spiral. He pointed to Gov. Gavin Newsom and former mayor London Breed as the officials most directly accountable for San Francisco's soaring homelessness and drug abuse problems.
Brown declined to name names. He said doing so was "not worth wasting time" on and would not help fix the city's situation. That restraint may reflect political loyalty, personal calculation, or simple pragmatism. It also left the harder indictments to others in the special.
Michael Shellenberger, the journalist and author of "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," was less diplomatic. Shellenberger told O'Reilly that Newsom had a chance to change course and flinched.
"What we see in Gavin Newsom is somebody who needed to pursue a new approach, but he didn't have the courage to follow through on it."
Shellenberger pointed to a specific failure: Newsom promised an entire program in his 2020 State of the State address but never delivered on it. The details of that program were not spelled out in the special's preview coverage, but the pattern is familiar. Grand announcements. No follow-through. The problems get worse.
Brown has been sounding this alarm for years, even if his own party has not been listening. Back in 2022, he told the New York Times that San Francisco "is plagued with idealism." That phrase deserves to sit on a plaque somewhere in City Hall.
Plagued with idealism. Not plagued with crime, though it has that. Not plagued with fentanyl, though it has that too. Not plagued with homelessness, tent cities, open-air drug markets, or fleeing businesses, though all of those are present in abundance. The root cause, in Brown's telling, is the ideology that prevents the city from confronting any of it honestly.
The social workers mean well. The NGOs mean well. The politicians who loosened enforcement, expanded handouts, and treated lawbreaking as a symptom rather than a choice, they all meant well. And the city fell apart anyway.
Brown said it plainly:
"There were people who really, I think, meant well, but they did not understand."
That is the most generous possible reading of what happened to San Francisco. It assumes ignorance rather than indifference. It assumes the architects of the city's progressive experiment simply did not grasp what their policies would produce.
The specific policies Brown and others flagged in the special tell the story in miniature. Handing out free tents does not end homelessness. It institutionalizes it. Giving drug-addicted welfare recipients an extra $100 a week does not treat addiction. It subsidizes it. Replacing enforcement with social workers does not reduce crime. It signals that crime will be tolerated.
Each of these policies has a constituency. Each has advocates who can articulate a compassionate rationale. And each has made San Francisco measurably worse for the people who live there, work there, and walk its streets.
Brown, to his credit, has not pretended otherwise. He governed with enforcement in mind. He believes in rules and expects people to follow them. That these convictions now mark him as a dissident within his own political tradition says more about the Democratic Party than it does about Willie Brown.
O'Reilly's NewsNation special, set to air Thursday, promises a broader look at the forces behind San Francisco's decline. Brown's interview is one piece of it. Shellenberger's critique of Newsom is another. The full scope of the program, and whatever additional evidence or interviews it presents, remains to be seen.
Several questions hang in the air. What exactly did Newsom promise in 2020, and why did it never materialize? What role did Breed's administration play in accelerating the city's problems? And will any of the officials most responsible ever face a real accounting from voters or from their own party?
Brown's refusal to name the guilty parties is understandable for a 92-year-old man who spent his career building the very machine that now runs the city into the ground. But his willingness to diagnose the disease, even while shielding the carriers, still carries weight. When a lifelong Democrat tells you that progressive idealism is destroying a city, the polite response is to listen.
The less polite response is to look at the streets of San Francisco and note that the evidence arrived long before the confession.
