Homelessness

Alex Byrd was shooting meth in his wife’s bathroom while looking up a rehab center to check into. Before his most recent stint in prison, he’d been a major player in the drug trade, controlling distribution at every strip club on San Francisco’s Broadway Street and dealing all over the Bay Area from Oakland to San Jose. But while he was locked up, a leader in Nuestra Familia, his prison gang, offered Alex the chance to retire. When he got out, Alex promised his wife he’d never go back to prison again. But he was still an addict — and now it was a lot harder than it had been before, since he no longer had a constant supply of drugs. Now he had to work for his drug money, which is to say to engage in petty crimes like robbing Amazon stores. “It was a burden,” Alex says.

So far this year, Philadelphia has seen more than two shootings a day. Among the statistics was a local rapper known as Phat Geez. Here’s the message in his song “No Gunzone”: “Killings all up in my city / Can’t get enough of it / Facing all of these problems / I cannot run from it.” Derrick Gant was his real name. Dead at twenty-eight. So now comes Cherelle Parker, only a few months into her first term as Philly’s Democratic mayor, trying to plug the dike against a flood of lawlessness. Looking across her native city, she says that too much of what she sees is never OK, no matter concerns, including hers, about “root causes.

I stood across the street from Seattle’s City Hall, next to a long line of tents. There were more than fifteen of them, no more than a few feet apart. In between the tents, furniture and trash was piled high. The encampment took up the entire sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to walk in the street and triggering nonstop honking from passing cars. In a parking lot on the corner, people from a local mutual aid group stood at a booth, handing out food and water. They had signs making clear their views: “Stop the Sweeps,” “You sweep we strike,” “Fuck Capitalism,” “Equity now!” and “Smash Fascism.” This particular aid group were self-identified anarchists.

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.   Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives.

Since the death of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, the media elite have rushed to maintain that he died not just from a chokehold, but the systemically racist, capitalist, selfish system that regularly fails homeless people. The headlines: "Jordan Neely Was Already Dead: New York reckons with a homeless epidemic and a killing." "How New York City failed Jordan Neely." "Jordan Neely’s death reflects the inhumane consequences of being homeless, experts say." Ah, those experts, who are always right and never wrong. Except, of course, when they are provably wrong.

A few weeks before Easter, a staffer for Republican senator Rand Paul was randomly and brutally attacked in downtown Washington, DC. The staffer, Phillip Todd, was leaving dinner with his friend when an assailant stabbed him four times in the abdomen, skull, brain and lungs. He suffered a punctured lung and potential brain bleeding. Todd was rushed to hospital, where he was operated on and ultimately survived the attack.   The man who stabbed Todd is a forty-two-year-old named Glynn Neal. Like many of DC’s violent criminals, Neal has a lengthy rap sheet. Virginians for Safe Communities, a nonprofit organization, detailed the man’s long history of criminal behavior.

Americans may never before have felt their country was farther from its finest hour. And yet, on the Fourth of July last year, residents gathered in the heart of its birthplace for an ever-rarer expression of patriotic sentiment. It was to be a brief display. Blood spilled before the clock struck ten. Though no one saw a gunman or heard gunfire, two police officers were struck by stray bullets on the famous steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Word spread quickly, and suddenly no one could be sure whether they were hearing fireworks or gunshots. On the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, patriotism turned to terror, then shrieks gave way to silence.

The National Park Service cleared a major homeless encampment in downtown Washington, DC on Wednesday, a move that eased local residents and infuriated activists. McPherson Square, located just blocks from the White House, has been effectively cordoned off from the rest of the public since the proliferation of the tent city during the pandemic. The Spectator was the first to report in December that the NPS would start enforcing its no camping policy on park land in the nation’s capital. Signs went up around McPherson Square last month warning the inhabitants of the tent city that they would be removed on February 15.

After years of neglect, it seems federal and city officials are finally removing the homeless encampments littered across Washington, DC. Earlier this year, homeless people were cleared from areas outside of Union Station ahead of President Joe Biden's address to the nation from the historic train hall and bus depot. Within the past month, the National Park Service also cleared encampments from Scott Circle. The removals are part of a longer-term plan by the National Park Service. The NPS will be enforcing its "no-camping regulation" across the nation's capital, with the goal of having all encampments on national park land cleared by the end of 2023.

Less than a week out from the 2022 midterm elections, the White House announced that President Joe Biden would be delivering a speech warning of alleged "threats" to democracy. The backdrop for the address tonight that will almost assuredly accuse his fellow countrymen of being extremists and traitors? Washington, DC's Union Station. In many ways, Union Station is the ideal backdrop for a speech by the leader of the Democrat Party. It is the perfect embodiment of what the left's foolish and deranged policies have done to our nation: reduced a once thriving and majestic place into a crime-infested trash heap. Just seven years ago, I interned down the street from Union Station.

Mayor Eric Adams has found himself stuck between a Texas rock and a New York hard place as thousands of illegal immigrants have been bused to the Big Apple by Lone Star State Governor Gregg Abbott in recent months. Now, a decades-old New York City policy called “right to shelter” has Adams's hands tied as he tries to find beds for the city’s new arrivals. The result is a crisis for the homeless shelter system, mostly of the city’s own making. This week, as Gotham began turning away dozens of homeless New Yorkers from its facilities, the Adams administration suggested it was time to revisit the “right to shelter” policy, which guarantees a bed to anyone in New York City who wants one.

Michael Shellenberger is an unusual political candidate. He’s also arguably the only person with a chance of stopping Gavin Newsom from spending four more years as governor of California. A fifty-year-old environmentalist, Shellenberger is a former Democrat running for governor as an independent. And he has form when it comes to aiming leftwards. A self-styled ecomodernist, he has been a vociferous critic of the environmentalist movement, its insularity, economic illiteracy and fetish for scarcity. More recently, he has set his sights on the progressive approach to homelessness and addiction.

Did you make good use of the neatly palindromic 2/22/22? To refresh your memory, it was a day that turned out be the narrow window between the moment when the evolving “science” suddenly allowed Democratic governors to start lifting their states’ mask mandates, and Vladimir Putin launching his special mission to “protect the people” in eastern Ukraine. I hope you enjoyed it, because given the way the mainstream media portray the news these days, it may be a while before we’re all allowed our next respite from the seemingly permanent existential crisis that runs as a through-line to our human condition.