Today, when people across America think of Seattle, it is marred by the image of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and a lengthy year’s worth of rioting only overshadowed by the likes of Portland. They think of sidewalks obstructed by tents, trash, needles, and random violent assaults.

These negative associations with Seattle have been largely limited to downtown Seattle, on the south side of the Ship Canal Bridge; the other shore of Lake Union.

The north end of Seattle is a suburb of its downtown counterpart and has seen few of the problems downtown has, of which activity tends to be isolated along Highway 99. Yet, it is governed by the same Mayor and City Council as downtown Seattle, and those problems are now surfacing in communities who thought they had adequate distance from these problems.

The Bitter Lake Community of Seattle is on the most northern edge of North Seattle, only a handful of traffic lights shy of exiting city limits entirely. It’s a much more quiet single family home community, nestled in side streets between the main drags of Greenwood and Aurora avenues.

During the pandemic when students shifted to remote learning at home, a homeless encampment formed on school property at Broadview-Thompson Elementary School in the Bitter Lake Community. Parents were apathetic at first, adopting an ‘out of sight out of mind’ position, and assumed that the situation would be handled by the time students returned to the classroom on school grounds. 

The encampment started in July of 2020, and the city promised it would be removed that September. Yet the encampment has not been removed, and has only grown larger.

As time drew closer to the beginning of in-school learning, the Seattle School Board asked the city not to remove these camps, including the one at Bitter Lake, barely within the city’s grasp. Parents began to worry about their children’s safety returning to school.

As children returned to school to finish the remaining school year, the encampment continues to grow. Weapons have been found in the encampment on school property, and the school was placed into lockdown over a pellet gun spotted in the camp.

Now, King County has brought their needle exchange program to the elementary school, handing out needles and syringes to members of the encampment right in front of children on school grounds.

From local Seattle ABC affiliate KOMO:

“‘To see them (public health) disperse the needles right on your frontage in plain sight for everybody to see was an outrageous moment,’ said Paul Riemann whose home looks directly into the encampment.

Neighbors said the criminal activity is mounting.

In the last two weeks, police have been called to the camp several times, a large sword was seen outside a tent and last Tuesday the school had to ‘shelter in place’ when a camper was seen with a pellet gun.”

The school district runs a unique model where they are only accountable to public opinion (where they’re currently catering to the Wokes) rather than being accountable to the students whom they teach, and the parents of the students. They don’t actually have an incentive to do right by whom they should be accountable to. 

Perhaps voting for School Board Members should be a privatized vote reserved for people who actually have school aged children in the district, rather than everyone who is eligible to vote who have no skin in the game. But this is pie in the sky, as it makes way too much sense to actually come to fruition. 

Not everyone can afford private school, especially if they have several school aged children. With two income households, not everyone can find time to homeschool; though with all children learning from home and having to make time to accommodate this, I hope many can give this a second thought. Do it if you can.

What can really make a difference however, is School Choice. This is a system where the student is funded rather than the school, and can choose which public school they want to attend. This would force schools and districts which have become comfortable with zoning and not having to act in the best interest of their students, to immediately be forced to do so. The alternative is that students leave, and therefore funding also leaves. If a school consciously continues to underperform or not provide a safe environment, the conclusion will finally, for once, be as it should. The school will rightfully close, and not look good on a future resumé.

This would make a world of difference for students in the Bitter Lake Community, who are currently zoned into Seattle Public Schools without a choice, to be given the option to attend Shoreline Public Schools just a few traffic lights away. 

Also, if you are a parent who believes schools should serve students and not the mob, consider running for School Board.

The post School Choice Needed as Seattle Allows Homeless Camp, Drugs on School Property appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Seattle has long been throwing money at the Homelessness problem to no effect. So they decided to throw their money at a Stripper instead. A black transgender stripper named  Beyonce Black St James for the extra woke points.

“The people in this video are in control of homelessness policy in the Puget Sound: do you trust them with your money?”

Beyonce Black St James wore pasties and went from table to table giving attendees lap dances and taking dollar bills with her mouth at the government event.

This took place at a summit on Homelessness paid for with taxpayer dollars. Watch the video below.

Christopher F. Rulo who has directed documentaries for PBS and Netflix was none too impressed. He took to Facebook and wrote:

“This is your taxpayer money hard at work.

Last week, Seattle and King County leaders hired transgender stripper Beyoncé Black St. James to perform at their annual conference on solving homelessness. As the video shows, the programming has nothing to do with helping people on the streets—it’s about affirming a radical ideology that puts identity politics above solving real problems.

For years, city leaders have claimed that they “need more resources” to solve homelessness, but apparently they find it totally appropriate to use their existing budget to pay for a transgender stripper to fondle, kiss, and grind on members of the region’s homelessness nonprofits and taxpayer-funded organizations.

Here’s truth: it’s not a lack of resources that prevents Seattle from solving homelessness; it’s a lack of leadership. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, Seattle and King County spend more than $1 billion a year on homelessness programs—but have failed to deliver results for more than two decades.

The people in this video are in control of homelessness policy in the Puget Sound: do you trust them with your money?”

The Seattle Times reports that “Kira Zylstra, the Director of King County’s coordinating agency for homelessness is on paid administrative leave.”

The Times also notes that All Home, the agency that Zylstra directs, has long been criticized for being weak and ineffective.

Seattle’s solution to homelessness? Throw stripper parties for their ineffective agencies while telling the rest of us to be compassionate and understanding as we step over feces and needles.

I’d love to say we’ve reached peak Leftism, but they can do worse. Give them time.

The post Seattle Hires Transgender Stripper for Homelessness Summit appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The post DC Housed Homeless In Swanky Upscale Apartments. It Didn’t End Well appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Rob Shimshock

Former NAACP branch president Rachel Dolezal, who lied about being black but still identifies as black, is now jobless, living on food stamps and expects to lose her home next month.

“There’s no protected class for me,” the former NAACP branch president told The Guardian. “I’m this generic, ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take out their hostility on. And I’m a target for anger and pain about white people from the black community. It’s like I am the worst of all these worlds.”

Dolezal has applied for over 100 jobs, but has received no offers, even from a supermarket. She has, however, been offered work in porn and reality TV. While a friend helped pay her rent for February, Dolezal expects she’ll lose her home next month.

“I do think a more complex label would be helpful, but we don’t really have that vocabulary,” said the former Africana studies instructor. I feel like the idea of being trans-black would be much more accurate than ‘I’m white.’ Because you know, I’m not white.”

“It wasn’t like the honest thing to do is say, ‘I’m white’, because race is a social construct,” stated Dolezal to The Guardian. “And this gave me this great sense of internal freedom: I wasn’t actually all fucked up. I was actually on to something this whole time.”

“I’m not going to stoop and apologize and grovel and feel bad about it. I would just be going back to when I was little, and had to be what everybody else told me I should be – to make them happy.”

The former chair of Spokane’s police ombudsman group sunbathed, used traditionally black hairstyles, checked the “black” box on employment and medical documents, responded to inquiries about her ethnicity with “mixed,” and, if asked whether her mom or dad was black, said her mom was white.

Dolezal detailed her childhood in Montana in the article as one containing a suppression of her creativity by her white Christian fundamentalist parents, who supposedly beat her.

She says that she drew herself as having curly hair and dark skin and would cover herself with mud and pretend to have been kidnapped from Africa. When her parents adopted black children, she braided their hair, educated them on black history, and “began to see the world through black eyes.”

“On the white side I noticed hatred, fear and ignorance,” recounted the former NAACP branch president to The Guardian, describing her experience at college in Jackson, Miss. “And on the black side I noticed fear, anger and pain. I felt more at home with the anger and pain towards whites, because I had some anger and pain – toward not just my parents but also, even though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, towards white supremacy.”

Dolezal braided her hair and wore dashikis as symbols of “renouncing the propaganda standards of European beauty being superior.” But while some progressives would deem these acts cultural appropriation, Dolezal noted that African American peers in her church said that “to copy is to compliment,” according to the article.

A year after Dolezal received a graduate scholarship and teaching capacity at the historically black Howard University, she became pregnant and her tutor revoked the two positions. Dolezal sued Howard for both gender and racial discrimination because the tutor had said “your white relatives can probably pay your tuition.”

“I would say the primary discrimination was gender,” remarked Dolezal. “It sounds bad, right. It sounds like I just played that card for my advantage. But I just knew that if I did not have my scholarship, we were going to lose our apartment and Kevin was going to have to drop out of school.”

Dolezal had acquired the idea that racial identity was “an invention of human beings” from Howard University. But according to her brother, “when she came [to Howard], they saw she was white and she wasn’t treated that well, especially by people that worked there. She probably started developing this kind of dislike for being white and dislike for white people. She used to tell [her adopted brother] … that all white people are racists. She might have developed some self-hatred,” as reported by CNN.

Follow Rob Shimshock on Twitter

Send tips to rob@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The post Rachel Dolezal Is Nearly Homeless, On Food Stamps appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Zach Foster

Most people are used to seeing signs that say, “don’t feed the animals,”  as those signs are posted in parks and zoos. What no one expects to see, however, are signs that say “Do not feed the people,” right?

One of the oldest traditions of Western civilization is giving alms to the poor, including feeding the homeless.  The City of Los Angeles almost made it illegal to feed the homeless.  This is how a group of activists stopped big government in its tracks.

In 2013, Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge introduced a motion before the City Council prohibiting anyone from feeding the homeless in public rights of way (sidewalks, street corners, open areas).  The councilmen justified the motion on health and food safety reasons.  Libertarian activist Angela McArdle had a problem with the motion.

“Who are they to tell the people they’re not allowed to help the needy?” says McArdle.  According to the paralegal and Libertarian activist, she and her friends have been feeding the homeless for years.  LaBonge’s rationalization for the motion was that it protected the homeless from food poisoning from improperly prepared food.  If people wanted to help them, they would have to incorporate, become accountable to the IRS, open a kitchen, and have their facilities inspected by city, county, state, and federal bureaucrats.

“Not all homeless people are out there on the corners asking for change.  Most of them keep a low profile—it’s so easy to get harassed or assaulted.  A lot of them really do go hungry and need the help.  If I want to make sandwiches at home and hand them to the homeless people I see on my way to work, that’s my business.”

One of the biggest problems with the motion proposed in the L.A. City Council is it’s typical of the current atmosphere.  Very few cities in densely-populated California actually do anything to solve the problem of homelessness.  Rather than developing and enacting policies to reduce homelessness, city councils go for the quick fix and make it illegal to be homeless.

By passing vagrancy laws, restricting the hours and use of public spaces, and making feeding the homeless in public spaces illegal, cities merely pass the buck as entire tent cities and homeless populations are legislated out of one city after another.  They bounce around the L.A. County grid like ping pong balls.

“Just recently, the City of L.A. made it illegal for people to sleep in their car,” McArdle says.  “That infuriates me.  My legal clients are people who were wrongfully evicted or foreclosed on.  The first few nights, many of them have nothing but their car for them and their children to sleep in for that night.  All the City government did was take away another safety net protecting people from the city streets at night.”

In addition to losing a layer of protection against the grittier kinds of people found on city streets and alleys, people in violation of this ordinance will be ticketed or possibly detained.  That only creates another financial burden for the homeless, many of whom lost their homes due to financial struggles, not delinquent behavior.  Restricting the public from feeding the homeless is one more burden on the latter group.

Angela McArdle and friends joined up with the non-profit Monday Night Mission to protest the indefensible motion.  The protest was held on Hollywood and Vine, fittingly in the district of Tom LaBonge, sponsor of the anti-homeless motion.  Nearly a thousand people attended and it was covered in the local L.A. TV stations.  The overwhelming show of public opposition to the motion put an end to it before it was voted on.

Three years later, Tom LaBonge retired amidst allegations of misuse of $600,000 in taxpayer funds.  The L.A. Times reported that the City Attorney’s investigative task force has approved only $83,000 of the $600,000 spent by LaBonge’s office.

The defeat of the anti-homeless motion is an example of ordinary citizens standing up to government overreach.  Libertarians often get discouraged because it’s so difficult electing Libertarians to high office.  But what Angela McArdle and her friends did shows how city governments can be tyrannical too, not just the Feds, and that We the People have power over the bureaucrats who want to rule us.

“I’m proud we were able to make a difference,” McArdle says with a broad smile, “but even if the motion had passed, I would have broken that law a hundred times.”  Now that’s the spirit!  Not surprisingly, McArdle found a home for her activism in the Libertarian Party.

WATCH TLR’S LATEST VIDEO:

The post Feeding the Homeless: Activist Stands Up to City Government appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

by Micah J. Fleck

What do we think? Is this a just proposition? Hawaii might introduce a new bill that will reclassify homelessness as a medical condition.

According to the latest report:

As an emergency room doctor, Hawaii Sen. Josh Green sees homeless patients suffering from diabetes, mental health problems and an array of medical issues that are more difficult to manage when they are homeless or do not have permanent housing.

That’s why Green says he wants to homelessness classified under Hawaii state law as a medical condition.

If homelessness is a disease, he reasons, then doctors should be able to write prescriptions for the cure: Housing.

“It is paradigm shift for sure, but the single best thing we can do today is to allow physicians and health care providers in general to write prescriptions for housing,” Green said.

Green last week introduced a bill in the Hawaii Legislature to classify chronic homelessness as a medical condition and require insurance companies to cover treatment of the condition.

But if a doctor wrote a prescription for six months of housing, where would the patient fill the prescription?

That’s where Green wants Medicaid to step in.

He wants to redirect some of Hawaii’s $2 billion annual Medicaid budget to pay for housing.

He says the state could spend less Medicaid money by dedicating some of it to housing instead of paying for frequent visits by homeless people to emergency rooms. A recent University of Hawaii survey found health care costs for chronically homeless people dropped 43 percent when they had decent housing for an uninterrupted six-month period.

“Housing is health care, because it does afford a person a much greater chance of sustaining their health,” said Connie Mitchell, executive director for the Institute for Human Services, Hawaii’s largest homeless services provider.

But she cautioned that choosing who qualifies would be a challenge.

“You need to really look at when that’s appropriate, because there’s a lot of people that become homeless,” Mitchell said. “Just because they become homeless doesn’t mean it entitles them to write a prescription for a unit.”

Hawaii had the highest rate of homelessness of all U.S. states in 2015, with 53 homeless people for every 10,000 residents, according to The National Alliance to End Homelessness.

WATCH TLR’S LATEST VIDEO:

The post Hawaii Bill To Reclassify Homelessness as Medical Condition; “Prescription Housing” Coming appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Caleb Coggeshall

Feeding the homeless is a noble action, as long as one has permission from the state. Simple kindness for fellow man has become punishable in the last few years, as people have gone to prison and faced fines for feeding the homeless. Unfortunately, these incidents are not isolated, as there have been several cases of people being forcibly removed from public property for handing out food. It might sound like a joke, or an exaggeration, but it has happened more than people realize. Below are a few examples.

Arnold Abbott, a supporter of the homeless, has been cited at least three times for feeding people in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After having been arrested in 1999 for this action, he filed a lawsuit against the city and won. Abbott asked that the city honor that ruling when he was cited again in 2014. Two Christian pastors also faced the law alongside him: Dwayne Black and Mark Sims. All three men were required to pay a fine of $500 and face sixty days in jail. Apparently, these men broke a city ordinance which prohibits the sharing of food publicly. The ordinance goes on to say that “organizations distributing food outdoors would have to provide portable toilets for use by workers and those being fed.”

A similar happening occurred in Kansas City, Missouri. A group of volunteers known as Kookers Kare gathered thousands of pounds of food to distribute to 3,000 homeless individuals. Bureaucrats from the Kansas City Health Department decided that wasn’t going to happen and told Kookers Kare that since the food hadn’t been previously inspected, it was unfit for consumption. As if that weren’t bad enough, the health department said that the comestibles also had to be destroyed. After spending time and energy preparing all that food, the workers had to saturate it all with bleach so it couldn’t be eaten.

Lastly, it looks as if Florida may have a special aversion to the homeless, because only a few weeks ago, members from the group Food Not Bombs were led away in handcuffs. There is a law in Tampa that one needs a special permit to destitute in public parks, and a fact Food Not Bombs was certainly aware of. However, obtaining a permit to feed people in a public park in Tampa is expensive, which gives reason to why the organization decided to forego the legal paperwork. Instead deciding to go ahead with their plans. A plan which, as a consequence, landed seven members with new silver bracelets.

WATCH TLR’S LATEST VIDEO:

The post Feed the Homeless, Become a Criminal appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The United Nations global warming deal could make another five million people homeless in the world’s poorest countries, for the express purpose of setting forest land aside to slow global warming through conservation.

Millions who live in and depend on forests for their livelihoods could be evicted from their wooded homes, according to new study which will be released later this month.

The new study by the Rights and Resources Initiative shows implementation of the U.N.’s agenda in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) could displace up to 4.1 million living in the heavily inhabited ecologically “protected” areas and another 0.9 million who depend on the region for their economic well-being. The intended goal of this mass displacement is to set aside local forest land to fight global warming.

“Governments have targets to expand their protected areas, and now with new climate funding being available the risk is they will use this to expand in a way that doesn’t respect local rights. It could result in the displacement of millions of people,” Andy White, from the Rights and Resources Initiative, told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Previous analysis shows that as many as 17 million people have already been displaced from newly “ecologically protected” areas in the DRC alone by the local government and “international conservation organisations.” That’s almost a quarter of the DRC’s population. The new study suggests that the impacts on displaced people would be extremely difficult to mitigate.

“Our new masters … like the animals more than humans and do not mind that people suffer as long as the animals are happy,” a local Mbuti tribal leader in the DRC said.

The new analysis used data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to calculate how many people would be forced to migrate after their livelihoods were destroyed by ecological protection. Since the DRC is the world’s second poorest country, any economic disruption can be devastating to the people involved. The average person in DRC earned an annual income of just $380 in 2014.

Both the local governments of Liberia and the DRC and the United Nations have repeatedly displaced residents in the name of fighting global warming. The DRC, funded by Germany and environmental non-profit groups, plans to set aside 12 to 15 percent of its forested land as ecologically protected areas. Liberia will turn 30 percent of its forests into ecologically protected areas in exchange for $150 million in developmental aid from Norway.

Follow Andrew on Twitter

Send tips to andrew@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The post UN Makes 5 Million More Africans Homeless To Fight Global Warming appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

As temperatures dipped down to near 15 degrees overnight, the homeless population of Birmingham, Alabama had nowhere to seek warmth– that’s because a Bernie Sanders rally had taken over their designated shelter.

Sanders spoke to a crowd of thousands in Alabama yesterday, an MLK rally in the place where Martin Luther King, Jr. had marched and been imprisoned. But the optics of a compassionate rally of and for the people eroded when the Sanders campaign decided it wanted to use the building typically reserved for housing the homeless on cold nights.

The building, Birmingham’s historic Boutwell Memorial Auditorium, was important to the campaign’s ongoing push to recruit black voters. Typically, the building houses around 300 homeless on cold nights; giving those with no place to go somewhere to be warm.

Many of the cities homeless were dismayed to find the building unavailable with no alternative location afforded to them.

“We’ve never had a night like this where it will be in the teens and we weren’t able to open,” said Don Lupo of the mayor’s office of citizen’s assistance.

“Unfortunately, no, we do not have an alternative location and were unable to have the warming station tonight,” Birmingham city spokeswoman April Odom said Monday night. “However, we are working with local area homeless shelters and the BPD to help anyone in need to get to a shelter.”

It’s so lovely that the city leaders were willing to allow a political rally to put hundreds of peoples lives at risk– not to mention the compassion of sending the police around to check on them.

As for Bernie and crew; they had an opportunity to show how compassionate they truly are by either moving or postponing their rally– they did neither. Courting black voters was more important than the lives of 300 people who were forced to sleep on the streets.

The post Feel the Bern! Sanders Rally Takes Warming Station From the Homeless appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Police in Virginia arrested a homeless man Monday night after they say he dug a 15-foot-deep hole in a city park and lived in it.

City of Fairfax Police found Yosue Joel Rios, 25, at the two-room cave he had dug for himself inside Van Dyck Park and charged him with destruction of property, The Washington Post reports.

The cave was found in the park just 200 yards away from the Fairfax Police headquarters after some people walking through the woods spotted the entrance.

Rios used plywood and leaves to disguise the cave but it wasn’t enough to keep it hidden for long.

Upon inspection, police found a separate bedroom and living room in the cave with ceiling heights of around six feet high. Inside the make-shift home,officers found a pillow, books and papers described as homework assignments, NBC Washington reports.

Police didn’t know how long Rios lived in the cave before they found it and by Monday afternoon, city works employees had filled the hole with dirt.

According to police, Rios was also wanted for failure to appear in court for a previous traffic violation in Arlington County. He is currently being held without bond.

Follow Josh on Twitter

The post Homeless Man Arrested for Living in Cave He Dug in Park appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.