Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
I also noticed that after a recent sweep/camp cleanup of homeless encampments in Seattle, the local Sinclair station (KOMO) was quick to run footage of people (presumably to be representative of Seattle folk generally) basically gloating that AT LAST they did something
Yes, the right are going to do everything they can to give others the impression that everyone else also regards poor people to be vermin, to be purged… preferably violently. The purpose of this sort of language is always to condition its audience to accept, if not cheer for, violence.