COMEDY = TRAGEDY PLUS SOCIOPATHY.

Byron York, longtime National Review propagandist now working for the malignant Washington Examiner, does a weird update of the old "you love blacks so much well what if they mug and rape you" shtick conservatives used to haul out whenever white liberals tried to be nice to anyone other than themselves:

WOKE DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. One of the most extraordinary stories to come out of the recent national unrest following the death of George Floyd came from a leafy neighborhood in Minneapolis called Powderhorn Park. After the Floyd incident, the residents, who are largely white progressives, decided that they would no longer call police if they needed help or if crime threatened them. "Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger," the New York Times reported. 

Word got around. Homeless people flooded into the neighborhood park -- there are now about 300 living in tents. Some are mentally ill. Some are addicted to drugs or alcohol. "Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers," the Times reported. "At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances." 

That has made some of the residents a bit nervous. Of course they want to take a stand against the police -- what progressive doesn't these days? -- but it really is a bit scary. So the new neighbors are not quite as welcome as they were just a week or two ago. "I'm not being judgmental," one resident told the Times, explaining why she not longer let her children play alone in the park. "It's not personal. It's just not safe."

Ho ho, silly liberals! And one of them was recently robbed at gunpoint -- the gun suggests to me his assailants were not homeless bums -- and feels bad about getting the cops involved. York has a laugh over this, omitting what the guy said when the Times asked him about that: "Yeah I know and yeah it was scary but the cops didn’t really have much to add after I called them." (Come to think of it, how many of us ever get anything from the cops after a robbery besides a strong sense that nothing can be done?)

But the signal offense in York's column is that he seems to think the homeless people didn't exist before the liberals' "wokeness" summoned them -- like they were spontaneously generated. I can guarantee you they did exist, but were existing elsewhere, almost certainly in a less privileged community. York is ragging on the residents because they didn't have the sense to use their privilege to send the homeless to go bother someone who lacked their civic muscle and thus couldn't force the bums out of their neighborhood.

I guess the idea that, instead of inflicting the misery of our most desperately poor citizens on the next-most-desperately-poor citizens, we might address the homeless problem directly by, for example, giving them homes is too ridiculous for York even too contemplate. You know, like giving everyone health care.

Meanwhile the economy just shit out another million-and-a-half unemployed, many of whom will be swelling the ranks fo the unhoused shortly. I wonder how long blow-dried toffs like York will be able to keep laughing it off.