Blue States’ Caveman Comeback

Gosh, those blue-state policies on homelessness sure are compassionate: In California, the homeless get to live in caves! That’s right: A homeless encampment near Modesto was discovered dug into riverside caves. Post-clearout, the trash filling the 20-foot-deep underground habitats was enough to cram two trucks and a trailer.

In other words, progressives aren’t revolutionaries, they’re devolutionaries.

The drugs and violence afflicting San Francisco’s Tenderloin are so serious, the city called a state of emergency within the area. Heck, piracy recently resurged in the Bay itself. LA cleared literally tens of thousands of homeless people off its streets this year, but tens of thousands more remain.

And the squalor clearly isn’t confined to the (once-)Golden State’s big coastal cities; Modesto is inland, with a relatively small population. Worse still: The caves have been cleared before, a local volunteer reported, only for the homeless to return. So they’ll be back again after the latest clearout.

Persistent populations of homeless who colonize public spaces are the result of policy choices — rooted in the same “progressive” approach of turning blind eyes to felony drug use, retail crime and public disorder.

Including the disastrous rulings of the leftleaning Ninth Circuit, which covers Western states, that punishing people for public sleeping and camping violates 8th Amendment rules against cruel and unusual punishment.

Small wonder that Los Angeles saw around 75,500 people homeless on any given night in 2023, a major jump over 2022. Or that San Francisco has seen tourism plummet 16% over pre-pandemic levels while office vacancies hit a record 31% in May.

Even the state’s ultra-woke Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the homelessness crisis a “disgrace,” which is the understatement of the century. But the Modesto caves show that this progressive disaster is quite literally plumbing the depths.