America's Treatment of the Homeless Was A Harbinger of the Current Fascist Regime
Criminalization of being homeless is where cruelty being the point was perfected
Grants Pass v. Johnson was decided last year by the Supreme Court, in which they ruled along the predictable ideological lines that the criminalization of homelessness was perfectly constitutional. Why, you might ask, would they do that? On what grounds could they argue it was legal to act in such a manner, to criminalize a situation where the “criminal” often had no avenue to purge themselves of the “crime” in question?
Well, if you ask that question, you’re not alone. This is Donald Trump’s Supreme Court, though, and just like Trump’s idiotic tariff decisions (folks, he slapped tariffs on our own overseas base in Diego Garcia today, which is so galaxy-brained that I lack words for it), there is no law, logic or reason that will slow them down when they’re determined.
Coming into oral arguments the precedents, as explained by 5-4, were very limited and contradictory. So it was somewhat of a blank slate situation when they sat down to write their opinions, but as has become the norm with this majority, they take the same opinion that the minority is using in their dissent and cite it for their majority opinion, even when the case and precedent are at complete odds with what they write.
Without getting too far into the weeds, what the majority opinion, authored by Justice Gorsuch, argued is that they are simply criminalizing the act of camping outside in a public space. They are not criminalizing the state of being homeless, just any of the actions that a homeless person would have to take to survive. You can’t sleep in your car, you can’t sleep on park benches, you can’t pitch a tent in a public park, you can’t sleep in a doorway, there’s only one shelter within the city and it doesn’t allow medical equipment to be brought in, so if you’re homeless and have an oxygen tank or a wheelchair, whoops, too bad!
Esquire ran one of the most searing articles I’ve ever seen about homelessness last year, firsthand written by a talented reporter, Patrick Fealey, whose illnesses drove him out of steady work. Social Security Disability, commonly known as SSI, has strict income requirements, because in America it’s not enough to struggle through life with substantive disabilities, but you also have to be poor, too [On that note, feel free to donate to a GoFundMe a local family set up for Patrick after a week of searching for him—It is verified and I gave myself]. One of the things he captured was how every time the police told him he had to move somewhere else, that he had to move his car somewhere else, that he couldn’t be here or there, they’d come along and make him move again. Constantly disrupting his sleep, even when he parked at places they told him he was allowed to use for overnight sleeping, like the Walmart parking lot. To be homeless is a cruel fate, but to be homeless in America is a special kind of hell, for America does not deem you worthy.
For decades, our politicians and our media have used homeless people as a stand-in for “crime issues.” They scream about the homeless urinating or defecating in public, but provide no public toilets as other nations do. They scream about the drug abuse, yet do nothing to help them stop abusing. They scream about the mental illness, but God forbid we have universal single-payer healthcare so they can take medications to prevent episodes.
They scream that if the homeless only worked hard enough, they wouldn’t be homeless anymore—yet businesses often will not hire or even interview homeless people for jobs. Despite that, Many homeless people do work, but then aren’t able to stay in a shelter because of curfew rules, or the shelters won’t allow them to bring their child, or their pet, or any number of things. Some shelters will have more lenient rules, but then discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. Sixty percent, that’s six-zero percent, of homeless women are fleeing domestic violence, and yet we continue to erect such high legal barriers for women who have been battered, raped, or both that they are victimized again by being driven out of their own homes. These women are forced into a cycle of shelters, if they’re lucky, and the unlucky ones often weigh the situation and return to their abusers because we do not offer a better choice.
American society is governed by people who are so quick to cite their Christian religion when it benefits them—not paying health insurance costs for birth control or abortion, not having to abide by anti-discrimination statutes because they claim Christianity gives them license to shut out divorced people, LGBTQ people, Muslim people, Jews, et cetera—but completely ignore Jesus Christ’s dictum to not hoard wealth, to care for the poor, the sick, the wretched, and the homeless. Even the simplest, easiest thing that Jesus taught, to “Love one another as I have loved you,” is a bridge too far for these people. That includes the right-wing majority on this court, so quick to cry foul when anyone questions if their faith would interfere with their judicial decisions, when the real issue is how much of the central tenets of their faith they ignore whenever it conflicts with their desire to inflict cruelty! And so it is here in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
The ruling ignores all context around homelessness, as Justice Sotomayor blasts the majority in her dissent. It ignores all of the information I listed above. It ignores basic logic. It ignores the Catholic faith that five of the six justices swear by, for charity to the poor is a major Catholic tenet, especially to Pope Francis. For all of the faults of the Catholic Church, they preach this one strongly, and as a young Catholic, I was required to do a lot of volunteer work with the homeless, especially in my middle school years, where our catechism courses were taught by an old, vibrant nun named Sister Marianne, who was very much out of the liberal Catholicism that animated Robert F. Kennedy Sr. We went to shelters and served food. We went to food banks and packed cases for the poor. We were required to collect donations for the homeless of money or goods. It is a core belief, one that dovetails nicely with what a socially responsible government would do for its most vulnerable citizens.
We spend three times as much money incarcerating the homeless as it would be to provide them year-round shelter. Prisons are far more expensive to maintain, but as with many such things, they’re also good money. Because so many areas have privatized incarceration, from states to ICE (our neo-Gestapo), those who own and run the prisons make big money from the government. It behooves them to help push this narrative of criminalizing homelessness because they can profit from it. The bulk of American media outlets operate on a nonstop diet of what’s become known as copaganda, the laundering of police narratives that is then used to inflate budgets outrageously. It’s why the San Francisco Police Department, one of the largest offenders of this behavior in the country, has a dozen uniformed officers running a communications department. It’s why the New York Police Department racked up three-quarters of a billion dollars, yes, a billion, in overtime costs alone, in Fiscal Year 2023. Copaganda allows the police who do the job for all the wrong reasons (and let’s face it, that’s a majority of American police these days, based on a whole host of evidence) to profit from manipulating public opinion.
A ruling for Johnson in the decision would have been the morally correct decision, and the legally correct one as well, because to criminalize homelessness means that the homeless become trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. They are constantly fined or jailed, and those records then contribute to a severe inability to find a job that pays well enough to afford shelter. For those who can find work, it’s unlikely to pay enough to keep them housed. Many cities, counties and states lack enough homeless shelters, and repeatedly claim it costs to much to build them, but again, they will pay three times as much to lock up and jail the homeless. Additional funds are wasted on the use of police to regularly drive out the homeless from wherever they take up sleeping, which includes smashing up any goods and destroying any tents homeless people have obtained. It thereby makes it even harder for the homeless to get a foothold out of their nightmare.
The cruelty is the point of these policies, because they do not make any moral, ethical, legal, or fiscal sense.
How does this tie in with the fascism taking hold, root and branch, throughout the government of our nation and many of our states? The decades of punching down by the powerful, culminating in officially criminalizing homelessness, has conditioned many people. It’s desensitized them to the cruel and malicious treatment of those who in most cases had no control over becoming homeless. Privatizing incarceration lowered the standard of the prisons below human decency while making the wealthy even wealthier. Turning homeless people into a convenient excuse to spend more on the police state, while simultaneously lowering their status to untermenschen, was a test run for broader fascism. Conservatism in America prior to World War II was that of isolationism, yes, but it was also that of blocking immigration, of letting the homeless suffer and starve during the Great Depression (a depression wholly of their making through corruption and unregulated banking), and when Franklin Roosevelt led the Democrats to twenty straight years in control of the government through left-wing social care policies and regulation of the wealthy, all while leading us to victory in the Second World War, they shifted gears.
They became anti-communists, but in doing so tacitly supported the second generation of fascisti in the world: Francisco Franco in Spain, Juan Peron in Argentina, Kurt Waldheim in Austria (literally a former Nazi who never went through re-education!) and as UN Secretary General, Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar, the death squads of 1980s El Salvador, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the juntas of Greece and Argentina after Peron’s death, the list goes on for miles. Brutal, murderous people, and in supporting them against Communism, American conservatives slowly began absorbing their beliefs, tactics, and a belief that democracy should be of the few, not the many.
They’ve steadily eroded fair elections, steadily removed the right of people to vote through all sorts of legislation purportedly aimed at combatting fraud (this despite the vast majority of voter fraud in the past two decades being committed by, you guessed it, conservatives), steadily taken over the courts through political maneuvering, steadily gerrymandered Congress, continued the subjugation of Puerto Rico as a territory despite it having more people than several conservative states, so on and so forth. Civil rights gains are being erased, history is being altered through book ban after book ban, and now we are just grabbing people off the streets who have committed no crime and disappearing them into either our ICE prisons or El Salvador’s notorious torture prison.
Our Secretary of Homeland Security, so depraved that she murdered her own dog for failing at hunting, flew at government expense to that torture prison to film a video redolent of the worst Nazi crimes. I refuse to link the video, but here’s a photo of Dachau on the left and Kristi Noem in El Salvador on the right. See if you can spot the similarities.
And, to boot, the Justice Department admitted in court Monday that at least one person they sent to El Salvador without due process, who was a legal resident, was mistakenly deported. Instead of apologizing and working to repatriate the man, they told the judge this.
For those not fluent in legal language, this means, “We don’t have him [because we illegally dumped him in El Salvador] and the court has no power to compel his return because we don’t have him and he’s not here. Please ignore that he’s not here because of our own actions, and if you won’t, we will ignore you because you don’t have the power to make us do it, and we don’t have the power to make El Salvador return him, even though we are paying them to be our gulag jailers.”
Now, this is an extraordinary admission and an even more extraordinary legal argument. In a normal society, it would bring about the fall of the government. Millions would be in the streets protesting because they would recognize how easily it could happen to anyone when the government ignores the law and declares its will to be absolute in its authority. But here, in America, the media can’t even put it amongst the top headlines.
It’s not that these items aren’t important, but when there is an argument made by the government in a court of law that they believe that they have a loophole to due process and will spam it as many times as they wish, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, that should be the top story. It is a declaration of war on the rule of law. It should mean automatic impeachment and removal of the President, the DHS Secretary and the Attorney General. It is the brightest of red lines, and the media just let it sink well down their pages into oblivion. Placement of articles always, always demonstrates the importance of a story to those covering it. Burial of this shows how ill-prepared the elites of this nation are to fight back, or how cowed they are by the rampant lawbreaking of those supposed to be enforcing the law. Either way, it bodes ill for our hope of retaining democracy.
The use of the El Salvador torture prison came up between myself and a friend recently. This friend, until a couple years ago, was a diehard leftist. He has completely flipped around, and was defending the deportations, the use of the Alien Enemies Act, just completely parroting the MAGA fascist line. We got into it and I was pretty hard on him, probably because I am so appalled at the about-face. It felt like a betrayal of shared values, of friendship, of decency. Repeatedly claiming that it’s okay to skip due process if you’re illegal, even though skipping due process means that you’re reliant on the word of those with power. Accepting the government’s word at face value was something he’d never do before, and now here he was.
I compiled a whole lot of legal and moral arguments against it, and then after the story broke on Monday that the government was warring against the Constitution itself, I sent him links and screengrabs about what happened and their argument and how you cannot trust cops or prosecutors at face value when the power imbalance is so vast. I haven’t heard a reply from him yet, and I honestly don’t think I will. I think he might feel some guilt, or perhaps he just doesn’t want to face the hard truth of what he is supporting, but if this acceptance of fascism can happen with him, think of how many less engaged citizens who have been primed by decades of violence towards the homeless and years of unchecked MAGA rhetoric will also submit to fascism without a peep.
Nazi Germany did not become the way it did overnight. There was years of a slow descent, of slowly building acceptance of imprisoning the Socialists, of ending elections, of punishing Jews for being Jews (just as we punish the homeless for simply being homeless), and eventually, ending any sense of a legal system by declaring martial law. The playbook is straightforward, and Trump’s administration is following it to the letter. Threatening neighbors, waging economic warfare, creating a tiered system of laws, none of which they will follow themselves, it’s all here.
It’s happening again. For those who claim to love freedom, who accepted the shooting deaths of thousands of children as a price to pay for the right to bear arms, are they going to defend freedom? I’m not betting on it. It’s up to the rest of us, the decent people of America, those who recognize the value of every life, to stand up and shout ENOUGH! If we win this fight, it is also upon us to demand our leaders change their ways dramatically, beginning with passing a strengthened Equal Rights Amendment to protect all of us from the othering that led us to this moment.