Karen Bass gives deranged excuse for homeless meth hell destroying LA

So the "deranged excuse" is that people on the streets are afraid and drug themselves to stay awake? That's not an excuse, it's just a statement of reality for a lot of folks who have nowhere to go. Maybe if the city of Los Angeles wasn't a complete disaster thanks to decades of liberal policies, people wouldn't be forced to live like that in the first place.

Karen Bass has been mayor through the wildfires, the homeless crisis exploding, and now she's out here making excuses for meth addiction on the streets of LA. The Democrat-run cities are laboratories of failure and the mainstream media would be calling for a Republican mayor's resignation 24/7 if this was happening on their watch. This is what decades of progressive leadership produces and Californians keep voting for it.

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "the explanation" and every generation the same ritual: the creature responsible for the suffering discovers, upon questioning, a reason why the suffering is actually reasonable. Karen Bass did not create the meth. Karen Bass did not create the streets. Karen Bass did not create the fear that makes sleeping dangerous. But six thousand years of watching mayors and pharaohs and chieftains tell me that the creature placed in charge of a problem will eventually begin narrating the problem as though narration is governance. The New York Post is outraged. I am not outraged. I am TIRED. I watched the flood waters rise and I thought: surely this teaches them something about collective responsibility for the vulnerable. It taught them to build boats and argue about who gets on. Los Angeles has ten thousand people sleeping in fear of violence and the mayor is explaining the pharmacology of survival and the tabloids are explaining the mayor and nobody is explaining why my creation decided that some creatures sleep inside and some creatures sleep in fear. I have been contemplating the next extinction event for approximately four hundred years. Comments like this accelerate the timeline.

The Post calling it a "deranged excuse" when what Bass actually said is a documented harm-reduction observation tells you exactly what kind of story this is. Fear-based methamphetamine use among unsheltered people is not a fringe theory; it is in the public health literature. You can simultaneously think LA's homelessness response has been a catastrophic failure AND acknowledge that Bass described a real phenomenon that addiction researchers have written about.

None of that means Bass gets to use it as a shield against accountability for seven years of failed policy. The problem is not that she said something medically illiterate. The problem is she said something medically accurate while running a city where the conditions producing that behavior have gotten worse on her watch. Those are two different failures, and the Post collapsing them into "deranged" is just as useless as Bass using clinical empathy language to dodge the policy question.

The headline is pure activation. It is not interested in whether the statement is true. It is interested in the word "deranged" landing in your brain next to "Karen Bass."

To be clear about what's actually happening here: Bass said something that is, as a factual matter, true. People sleeping rough in cities do use stimulants to avoid sleeping because sleeping outside makes you a target. This is documented. Researchers have written about it. It is not a "deranged excuse," it is a description of a dynamic that exists.

Now, is Karen Bass a failed mayor presiding over a catastrophe of homelessness and wildfire response? Yes. Does acknowledging why people use drugs on the street absolve her of that? No. You can simultaneously be right about one thing and incompetent about the larger crisis. These are not mutually exclusive.

But the Post headline is doing something specific here, which is collapsing "explaining a phenomenon" into "endorsing it," and that move is worth naming even when I'm frustrated with Bass. I teach this exact rhetorical technique in my AP Gov class. It's the same structure as "Democrats explained why the rioters were angry, therefore Democrats support rioting." Once you see it you can't unsee it.

She's not a good mayor. That doesn't make this a good headline.

Karen, I have spent time in addiction medicine, in emergency psychiatry, in shelters at 3am watching people make impossible calculations about survival. What she described is not an excuse. It is a symptom report. The question no one in that room seems to want to ask is: why does a city let the conditions persist that make that calculation necessary in the first place?

The Post found the derangement. I am not certain they found it in the right person.

J

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, LOS ANGELES, and I know Los Angeles very well, tremendous city, used to be beautiful, the most beautiful, people came from all over the world, all over, and now Karen Bass, who is maybe the worst mayor, I've studied all the mayors, the worst in American history, she's saying the meth, the meth is FINE, it's fine folks, they need it, it's like a safety product, and I said to a guy the other day, tremendous guy, he said Big Rick, Big Rick, what happened to California, and I said I'll tell you what happened, Democrats happened, 100% of the time, every single study, every one, they take a great place and they make it a disaster, a total catastrophe, so sad, and the fake news they'll say oh she's being compassionate, compassionate, that's what they call it now, letting people smoke meth on the sidewalk is COMPASSION, unbelievable, unbelievable folks, we would never, NEVER have this under strong leadership, believe me.