Daily Wire's Matt Walsh: “Compassion for the homeless has gone way overboard”
Walsh: “They would rather just do drugs than have a home”
Published
Citation From the June 25, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH: I think that part of what we're seeing in our country clearly is that compassion for the homeless has gone way overboard. We are so compassionate towards them, that it's turned into a kind of psychosis at this point, which is how you end up with stories like this. For years, we've been told, oh, don't judge the homeless, don't assume that they're bad people, don't dehumanize them. And it's true that we should have compassion for all people. We shouldn't dehumanize anyone, that's true. But we should also recognize that these are -- for the most part. OK? For the most part, not in every case, but in most cases, these are mostly people who have given their whole lives to drugs. Their only priority in life, the only thing they care about, the only thing they want to do is drugs. And that's why they're homeless, because they would rather just do drugs than have a home. And now they are inflicting that lifestyle on everyone else. They are actively making everyone else's life worse, a lot worse. They are destroying other people's lives for the sake of destroying their own. And it's like we have this idea that you can't be angry about that. Right? Even the guy in that video is a business owner. He's obviously mad about the way this is all worked out, but he made sure that this is not a war on homeless people, nothing against the homeless, because he thinks he can't be mad at them. But no, you can be mad at them, you're allowed to be angry.
These are people who are actively -- they are destroying your community. They are ruining it. They are making it dirty, disgusting. They are making you less safe. They're making your family less safe. They are robbing you. Sometimes literally, and sometimes by setting up their freaking tents outside of your business, they are taking from you. They are destroying your life. You're allowed to be angry about that. Angry at the political leaders who have allowed this to happen, but also angry at those people for doing that to you. They are doing that to you. And I would argue that assigning no agency to these people whatsoever -- now, I'll be the first to say, homeless people, again, they're all almost most of them are drug addicts. Many of them are also mentally ill, but assigning no agency to these people whatsoever, like we can't blame them for anything at all, that's dehumanizing because now you're treating them like animals. You're treating them like -- what are they, rabid dogs? That's that's how you're treating them. So to treat somebody like a person is to recognize that they have some element of agency and are responsible to some extent for their own behavior. That is what it means to humanize someone, to treat them like a human being.
And, now, if you wanna argue that back in the bad old days, you know, back in the old days, people went too far on the other end of the spectrum when dealing with people with, you know, homeless people and you just called them bums and that was it. If you wanna argue there was not enough compassion, OK, maybe, But at this point -- and I'm not even sure that I would agree with that -- but what is undeniable is that we have gone way too far in the other direction at this point, and we see this now with the way these cities are run.