F%$# Gavin Newsom

I've noted previously that Gavin Newsom is not progressive in any way, shape, or form.

Now, we are seeing him embrace his inner fascist, not only using state agencies to clear homeless encampments from state land without any other housing being available, but now he threatening to defund municipalities that do not clear homeless encampments as well.

I get that the recent Supreme Court decision (City of Grants Pass v. Johnson) allows for communities to exile homeless people, but the unholy glee that Newsom shown in response is awful:

After personally participating in the forced displacement of homeless people in a Los Angeles encampment, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to withhold funding from counties that don't sufficiently crack down on the unhoused.

Buoyed by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court's recent City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson ruling—which was welcomed by Newsom and other Democratic leaders like San Francisco Mayor London Breed who filed amicus briefs in the case—the governor issued an executive order last month directing officials to clear out homeless encampments, which have proliferated amid rampant economic inequality and stratospheric housing prices in the nation's most populous state.

After taking part in a Thursday sweep of an encampment in Mission Hills in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, Newsom declared: "I want to see results... If we don't see demonstrable results, I'll start to redirect money." 

Newsom praised leaders like Breed and Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for reducing the number of people sleeping on their cities' streets and directed his ire mostly toward county governments.

"This is a sincerely held belief that we need local government to step up," the governor added. "This is a crisis. Act like it." Newsom has made—and followed through on—similar promises in the past. Last month, his office redirected a $10 million grant for San Diego County to buy so-called "tiny homes" for the unhoused because officials there "could not move with the urgency the housing and homelessness crisis demands."

University of California, Los Angeles sociology professor and homelessness expert Chris Herring told The Guardian following Newsom's executive order that the directive is "giving a green light to a harsher approach" to tackling California's unhoused crisis, which critics say criminalizes people for being poor.

The cruelty is the point.

We as a society, and politicians as individuals, should be judged by how they treat the least of us.

Gavin Newsom has failed.