Homelessness: Myth and Menace

By Robert Stacy McCain

Years ago, the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case brought attention to a fact of which social scientists have long been aware, but which the high priests of political correctness have attempted to conceal from the public: Homeless people are dangerous.

Brian David Mitchell, the perverted self-proclaimed “prophet” who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, had been a homeless panhandler for years. Like many other homeless people, Mitchell had a history of drug abuse, crime and mental illness. But because of political correctness in the media, this point was obscured in the coverage of the story. Now, we have further evidence of the problem. Miley Cyrus decided to have a homeless man as her “date” to the MTV Video Music Awards. An aspiring model, Jesse Helt accepted Miley’s VMA trophy and lectured the national television audience:

“My name is Jesse and I am accepting this award on behalf of 1.6 million runaway and homeless youth in the United States, who are starving, lost, and scared for their lives right now. I know this because I am one of these people. . . .
“I’ve survived in shelters all over this city. I’ve cleaned your hotel rooms. I’ve been an extra in your movies. I’ve been an extra in your life. Though I may have been invisible to you on the streets, I have a lot of the same dreams that brought many of you here tonight.”

He forgot to add, “Oops.”

Miley Cyrus’s homeless VMAs date Jesse
turns himself in after being sought
by police for violating his probation
Miley Cyrus’ homeless VMA date finally turned himself in to police Thursday night and was formally arrested for violating the conditions of his probation.
Jesse Helt walked in to Polk County Jail in Dallas, Oregon just before 8pm and was booked in by duty officers.
Helt had been on the run from the authorities for three years and lived homeless on the streets of Los Angeles before he shot to fame at the MTV Video Music Awards last Sunday.
Martin Silbernagel, Polk County Director of Community Corrections, said the 22-year-old is expected to post $2,500 bail and will be released within hours.
‘He turned himself in and was arrested, we expect a court date in two weeks,’ he said.
Homeless Helt has been on the run from police since moving to Los Angeles, where he lived on the streets after breaking probation following a drugs test back in 2011.
A judge in his home state of Oregon issued a warrant for his arrest for repeatedly violating the terms of his probation. . . .

Larry O’Connor at the Free Beacon:

So Jesse has a criminal record, an open warrant for his arrest, a drug problem, and is homeless because he took the brilliant career path into the safe and secure world of modeling. . . .
The fact is, Jesse deserves to be homeless. I don’t care if that sounds cold-hearted or mean-spirited, it’s the truth.
Instead of propagandizing young people with the fear-mongering lie how a homeless person is just the same as anyone else but for a few bad breaks, Miley would have done our culture a greater service by having her prop (let’s be real, he wasn’t really her date) admit to all of the awful life choices he made that led him to living on the streets.

That’s pretty harsh, but it does point to a larger issue that has long been neglected in discussions of “homelessness.” Back in the 1980s, this became an “issue” because Democrats wanted to leverage homelessness as a way to impugn Ronald Reagan’s policies. But the problem had nothing to do with Reagan and everything to do with a series of court decisions that had made it more difficult to lock up insane people in lunatic asylums, and nearly impossible to enforce laws against vagrancy. The so-called “deinstitutionalization” of the mentally ill was a policy that had been pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union and other liberals during the 1970s. This coincided with other trends — including rising rates of divorce and drug abuse — that had the combined effect of creating a population of dopeheads, alcoholics and crazies who had no families to take care of them, and no place to go.

Furthermore, once the media jumped on the bandwagon of hyping the “homeless crisis,” ginning up lots of ignorant public sympathy, bums and petty criminals realized they could cash in on this, panhandling on the streets, often falsely claiming to be Vietnam War veterans. State and local governments started throwing money at the problem, and non-profit agencies reaped a bonanza of grant money to help deal with the “homeless crisis.” This created what was in effect an industry of professional activists — Homelessness, Inc. — who made their living from the misperceptions of the problem, misperceptions that the activists themselves helped create in order to gain the political clout necessary to shake down government agencies for more money.

It was a racket, one of the most shameless hoaxes ever imposed on the American public, and the media still refuse to tell the truth about the problem. Everything you need to know about homelessness, you can learn from reading Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed, Fred Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here and Myron Magnet’s The Dream and the Nightmare. You might also want to read P.J. O’Rourke’sParliament of Whores, which has an excellent (and hilarious) chapter on how the “homeless crisis” was invented. That’s four books — just four — and if you read what they have to say about homelessness, you’ll know more about the reality of this problem than do 99% of reporters and editors in the liberal media.

Miley Cyrus’s stunt at the VMAs was a perfect example of how vastly ignorant liberals are about the real world. She seems to have actually believed Jesse Helt was a helpless victim, and she gave him a platform to insult Americans with his dishonest lecture.

Miley Cyrus should be ashamed of herself. But if liberals had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

http://theothermccain.com/2014/08/29/homelessness-myth-and-menace/