In August 2025, The White House issued a press release to promote PDJT’s executive order restoring order blah blah blah.
Here is a summary: Homelessness in America is making cities unsafe.
- The root cause of homelessness is untreated mental illness and substance use.
- Current programs do not address the root cause of homelessness. which is untreated mental illness and substance use.
- The executive order will fix the root problem by circumventing due process or eliminating due process all together by forcing people into long term institutional settings for humane treatment – and requiring assisted outpatient treatment for those who rely on public assistance.
The idea is that by criminalizing mental illness and poverty, keeping people in institutional settings (institutional setting is undefined) for long term humane treatment (also undefined (sort of)) followed up by more forced treatment through Assisted Outpatient Treatment (which is a euphemism for court ordered medications), surveillance through AI tools and data sharing between private companies, institutions and law enforcement, homelessness will end.
This is a great strategy for filling up private prisons and private institutional settings, depriving people of their liberty and jeopardizing everyone’s civil rights. Not necessarily everyone’s civil rights, just the people who need them. At a certain income level, civil rights become parsley; esthetics.
If you can purchase a civil rights package, a presidential pardon or a new social construct, like affluenza, you needn’t concern yourself with things like due process. The rest of us need the civil rights that are in place to protect us.
People fought for centuries to make sure human beings, regardless of how they looked, acted or chose to live their lives, would have the same rights as everyone else – as long as their choices did not infringe upon the rights of others.
It may seem like they are right about the root cause of homelessness. It is easy enough to scapegoat mental illness, substance abuse, other personal attributes, moral shortcomings or disregard for law and order (to be clear, I am not talking about congress being ineffective or the executive office’s utter incompetence. A person can get arrested for saying such things) as the “root causes” of homelessness. Maybe this is not true?
There are other possibilities that should be considered before the country goes back in time.
TBC