Constituencies

We wake up tomorrow to primary election day in California, with status quo politicians arguing for more of the same and a series of opposition candidates arguing for dark MAGA behavior like clearing homeless encampments full of drug addicts and not pouring another hundred-billion-plus into the bizarre train project. We call these sides “left” and “right,” which doesn’t quite explain any of what’s happening. I suspect a good number of voters don’t have a map of the stakes and the players in discussions like the survival of the druggie encampment version of Los Angeles.

Video from X embeds awkwardly at Substack, so take a moment to click on this and watch video of dimwitted activists screaming abuse at LAPD officers who stopped to talk to a homeless person in a tent at MacArthur Park. The activists (who “came to feed and support people”) are certain that the police are being cruel. “You take people to jail! You don’t help them!” and “Look at this abuser! Look how he abuses people!” The large, loud, and persistent crowd eventually drives the cops away, leaving the homeless addict to enjoy his day in peace. Lucky him, that he had people to protect him like that.

So: Arresting drug addicts who use in city parks or intervening in their drug abuse and self-destructive behavior in any negative way is cruel. Helping and supporting them, bringing food to their tents in the park where they do drugs all day, is being warm and kind.

This is the premise we’re operating on in Los Angeles: enabling behavior is decency. You give things to the homeless, and support their choice, and protect them from consequences that might follow their own behavior. Mean vs. nice.

There are a few wrinkles, though.

First, the practice called “harm reduction” pays, and harm reduction needs addicts. It’s a lucrative industry. “The Skid Row Care Campus, located at 442 S. Crocker Street in Los Angeles, costs approximately $26 million a year to operate, according to the LA County Department of Health Services. It is run by three nonprofits: Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, Social Model Recovery Systems, and Wesley Health Centers. The facility distributes needles, pipes, aluminum foil, and condoms as part of its harm reduction services.”

Second, the giant RV encampments are a business. “Vanlords” buy old RVs and rent them, on the street and without services like sewage hook-ups or water, to the homeless. They’re often towed into place, because they don’t work. The thing being rented is the shell, the walls and the roof. When you see people living in poverty and desperation in ratty old dark RVs, dumping human waste in the street, that’s somebody’s rent farm.

Third, “body brokers” recruit drug addicts all over the country and ship them to Los Angeles so rehab facilities can bill health insurance for them. This is how so many drug addicts end up in California. I hadn’t realized until tonight, but this practice has become so obvious that even Hollywood noticed.

Fourth, drug addiction is married to sex trafficking. Five minutes around Skid Row or MacArthur Park make this obvious, unless you’re a very important journalist and you work for the New York Times, in which case it’s a dark MAGA conspiracy theory.

The city put a bunch of portable toilets on the streets in Skid Row, a decade ago, but removed them because they had doors that latched. Guess how that ended. From the Los Angeles Times, back when they still allowed themselves to notice the city:

A few hours after a homeless guy named Virgil died of an overdose in the portable toilet, the blue plastic outhouse at 6th and San Julian streets was back in business. Not as a toilet, but as a house of prostitution.

Five portable toilets stand at that corner in the darkened heart of skid row. T.J. says she sometimes has a customer in each of them -- a john in every john -- and scurries from one to the next, taking care of business.

Pimps, drug dealers, vanlords, body brokers, harm reduction NGOs with budgets for free needles: There’s money to be made. Unless somebody takes it all away.

Homelessness is the foundation of a predatory culture. It’s a locus of profound and sustained predation. And California is full of warm and kind people who are…helping. You know, “helping.” They’re very angry at Spencer Pratt for being so mean.

We’ll see.