On May 12, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, demanded that cities throughout the state adopt anti-camping ordinances that would effectively ban public homelessness by requiring unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.
While presented as a humanitarian effort to reduce homelessness, the new policy victimizes California’s growing unhoused population—approximately 187,000 people—by tying funding in Proposition 1 to local laws banning sleeping or camping on public land.
In his announcement, Newsom pushed local governments to adopt the draconian ordinances “without delay.”
Let’s look at the series of events:
California severely restricts the supply of housing to benefit the wealthy. Existing homeowners and corporate landlords get rich as the price of housing soars, as the state actively restricts people from building enough to keep up with the need.
Homelessness rates soar. Millions find that the market value of their labor is now exceeded by the market value of rent. They become homeless through no fault of their own.
Instead of providing adequate services to the homeless, the state responds by demonizing the homeless. Homeless people are stereotyped. Any crime committed by a homeless person is shouted about from the rooftops. A hate campaign is enacted to portray the homeless as violent, drug-addicted, and insane. The homeless use drugs at a lower rate than the housed, but public opinion believes the opposite. Their disheveled state is portrayed as a deep character flaw rather than simply an inevitable consequence of their material reality. People are made homeless through no fault of their own. But the public is convinced through a vast propaganda campaign that the homeless deserve to be homeless and are fundamentally evil people.
The state unleashes a campaign of performative terror on the homeless population. Police disband camps and force people out, without providing anywhere for these people to go. It is simply action for action’s sake. Newsom can proudly state, “I didn’t solve homelessness, but I sure made their lives a living hell by forcing them to endlessly move from place to place! The dirty hobos deserve it!”
That’s textbook fascism. Newsom doesn’t have a solution to this problem. Solutions do exist, but they would require building enough housing to drive down its cost. And that would hurt the bank accounts of rich people. So instead, Newsom has unleashed a state terror campaign against California’s homeless population. The goal of this terror campaign isn’t to solve homelessness or to help anyone in any manner. It is meant to show middle class and wealthy people that Newsom is making those “dirty homeless people” pay for their sins. Well off folks are tired of seeing the homeless that they created in public view. So Newsom is promising to use state terror to drive them out of the public sphere entirely.
If you think this isn’t fascism, well…you need to learn what fascism actually is.