I traveled through Kentucky before and I guarantee you this is a reaction to the drug crisis that hit the Bible Belt. The major cities have tons of homeless people who sleep in the parks and downtown areas. They do day labor, and are good people if you get to know them. They aren’t causing trouble at all; the housed people just don’t want them around because they’re perceived as an eyesore.

So the fascists’ response is to start what is essentially genocide. This is one of the things they’ve fantasized about doing for a long time; they want clean, empty streets and it never occurred to them that the only effective way to do that is to simply house all the homeless people. And it never occurred to them to try that because they don’t perceive homeless people as members of the community; they at best see them as violent, crazy threats to their safety, at worst as not even human, just a disgusting pile of filth, and so the only solution they considered or even want is to simply force them out of sight.

They don’t get that doing that won’t make homeless people go away, unless every single person is murdered, and guess what they want to do?

Remember how stand your ground was used to murder Trayvon Martin?