You know it’s campaign season when the Left starts trotting out their special victim groups in order cast the partisan opposition as comic book villains and themselves as angelic saviors with “But WE Care” magic wands. The Nation doesn’t disappoint.

Americans’ attitude toward people sleeping on the street has become angrier, crueler, and more overtly violent. Blame a right-wing propaganda campaign.

Oh, but certainly The Nation author of this piece, Ned Resnikoff, isn’t engaging in any propagandistic language from the get-go. See, Americans are unable to see with their own eyes the rise in homelessness in their neighborhoods. They never experience any downside to having drugged-out, mentally ill, violent criminals blocking sidewalks and taking over public parks. Nope, nosiree, gentle reader. Americans are being sucked in by … drum roll … rightwing propaganda! RHEEE

The killing of Jordan Neely this spring and the subsequent valorization of his killer, Daniel Penny, who was recorded choking Neely to death on a crowded subway car, dramatized a process that has been playing out in subtler ways across the country. In San Francisco, a man was recorded attacking random unhoused people with bear spray. Another San Franciscan, expressing frustration with a spate of car robberies, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he wanted to burn down the encampment where the alleged carjacker lives. Nationwide, murders of unhoused people are climbing; every week, this country is producing more Daniel Pennys.