Elon Musk slams San Francisco for 'zombie apocalypse' and giving in to 'woke mind virus' after Dave Chappelle criticism

ELON Musk has blasted San Francisco for its progressive social policies after Dave Chappelle did the same at a surprise set in the city last week.

The comedian took aim at the homelessness and addiction crises racking the Bay Area.

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"What the f**k happened to this place?" Chapelle asked during his set, SFGATE reported.

He described San Francisco as "half Glee, half zombie movie."

Chappelle also told a story about a person he found defecating in front of a restaurant he wanted to eat at.

Musk commented on the set in a tweet boosting a post from conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong, who blasted the city's "woke" leadership.

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"The disaster that is downtown SF, once beautiful and thriving, now a derelict zombie apocalypse, is due to the woke mind virus," the owner of Twitter and Tesla said.

DRUGS AND CRIME

Musk moved Tesla's headquarters from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas, in 2021, but many locals feel the same way.

TogetherSF Action, a political coalition, created a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign called "That's Fentalife!" urging local leaders to address the rampant drug use in the city.

"No yelling while selling drugs. Kids are trying to sleep around here," one ad said.

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"Farmers markets are out... Open-air drug markets are in," another said.

San Francisco needs to provide more funding for law enforcement to fight the fentanyl crisis, TogetherSF's executive director Kanishka Cheng told SFGATE.

But at the same time, she said the city needs to make rehab and other services more accessible to users.

Street crime and rampant drug use in San Francisco have garnered a lot of media attention since the pandemic began, but these issues are not new to the city.

Downtown and other nearby neighborhoods have been hotspots for this kind of activity for decades.

In some ways, crime rates in San Francisco are actually lower now than they were before the pandemic.

Murders are up from 2019, but robberies and thefts are down.

'PEOPLE ARE SCARED'

The decreased foot traffic and notable retail and office vacancies in the city have more to do with the advent of remote work, local journalist Joe Eskenazi told CNN.

"There have always been large numbers of unhoused people in San Francisco," he said.

"The difference now is that with fewer people downtown, a higher percentage of people you see are visibly homeless," Eskenazi said.

But he didn't deny that situation has gotten worse for the city's unhoused population.

"There are more overtly miserable people out than there used to be," Eskenazi said.

"You’re seeing more chaotic, horrific conditions ... I think that people are scared."

This fear sometimes gets woven into narratives about the city that are exaggerated or untrue.

The city's streets are not a scene out of the apocalyptic action movie Mad Max, Eskenazi said.

When tech mogul Bob Lee was murdered in San Francisco earlier this year, many immediately assumed it was an instance of random street crime.

But it turned out that Lee's attacker was a fellow tech executive.

HOUSING PRICES

Retail and office vacancies may be up, but that doesn't mean the city's notoriously high housing prices have come down in a meaningful way.

"One of the reasons in San Francisco you see people shooting drugs on the street is because in other parts of the country, those people can afford to be inside," Eskenazi said.

Soleil Ho, a restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, chronicled in an op-ed for the paper how hard it was for her to find an affordable place to live.

"Finding an apartment is as absurdly competitive as ever," she said.

The people who fled the city during the pandemic tended to be wealthier, so their departure didn't have a big impact on the affordable housing crunch, Ho said.

She added that the lower introductory rents implemented at the time to reel in new tenants have expired, leaving many apartment seekers in the same situation they were in before the pandemic.

"Simply saying things are worse or things are better strikes me as being reductive," Eskenazi said.

"(But) things are certainly more expensive."

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