On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, author Michael Shellenberger joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to talk about his new book “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” and how progressive policies are exacerbating drug addiction and homelessness in urban areas in the United States.

“The basic things that you need to do to treat homeless, drug-addicted, mentally ill people is the same whether you’re in the Netherlands or Japan or Canada or the United States. But I think progressives got themselves really ideologically committed to a kind of victim ideology and really committed to de-incarceration and even also to the defund police stuff,” Shellenberger said.

Not only does Shellenberger believe that this ideology “has had extremely negative consequences including addiction, overdose, drug poisoning, homelessness, and homicides,” but he also noticed that it often becomes popular with people whose “discourse is just centrally anti-civilization, anti-capitalist, it’s anti-Western civilization, it consistently attacks the institutions and social values that make civilization possible.”

“The people that I identify as really the main forces behind that ideology, are not elected leaders, it’s not the governor, it’s not the mayors, those guys are just kind of big kind of tools who come and go. It’s really the scholars, the academics, the activists. They’re the ones that have really prosecuted this narrative and this ideology that we can kind of divide the world into victims and victimizers. And then the victims are not just sort of good but are also sacred and they become a kind of spiritual. The punch line of ‘San Fransicko,’ it’s pretty similar to [my other book] ‘Apocalypse Never’ which is that this is a new secular religion,” Shellenberger said.