The government’s war on homelessness—much like its war on terrorism, its war on drugs, its war on illegal immigration, and its war on COVID-19—is yet another Trojan Horse.
First, President Trump issues an executive order empowering federal agencies to clear out homeless encampments and lock up the homeless in mental institutions using involuntary civil commitment laws intended for dealing with individuals experiencing mental health crises.
Days later, a gunman allegedly suffering from a mental illness opens fire in New York City, killing four before turning the gun on himself.
Coming on the heels of Trump’s executive order aimed at “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets,” the shooting has all the makings of a modern-day Reichstag fire: a tragedy weaponized to justify allowing the government use mental illness as a pretext for locking more people up without due process.
An Orwellian exercise in doublespeak, Trump’s executive order suggests that jailing the homeless, rather than providing them with affordable housing, is the “compassionate” solution to homelessness.
According to USA Today, social workers, medical experts and mental health service providers say the president’s approach “will likely worsen homelessness across the country, particularly because Trump’s order contains no new funding for mental health or drug treatment. Additionally, they say the president appears to misunderstand the fundamental driver of homelessness: People can’t afford housing.”
And then comes the kicker: Trump wants to see more use of civil commitments (forced detentions) for anyone who is perceived as posing a risk “to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”
Translation: the government wants to use homelessness as a pretext for indefinitely locking up anyone who might pose a threat to its chokehold on police state power.
When you consider the ramifications of giving the American police state that kind of authority to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, you’ll understand why some might view these looming mental health round-ups with trepidation.
By directing police to carry out forced detentions of individuals based not on criminal behavior but on perceived mental instability or drug use, the Trump administration is attempting to sidestep fundamental constitutional protections—due process, probable cause, and the presumption of innocence—by substituting medical discretion for legal standards.
Taken to its authoritarian limits, this could allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling dissidents who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.
Once the government is allowed to control the narrative over who is deemed mentally unfit, mental health care could become yet another pretext for pathologizing dissent in order to disarm and silence the government’s critics.
Take heed: this has the potential to become the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes, cloaked in the guise of public health and safety.
This is not about public safety. It’s about control.
We’ve seen this tactic before. When governments seek to suppress dissent without provoking outrage, they turn to psychiatric labels.
Throughout history, from Cold War-era Soviet gulags to modern pre-crime initiatives, authoritarian regimes have used psychiatric labels to isolate, discredit, and eliminate dissidents. As historian Anne Applebaum notes, administrative exile, which required no trial and due process, “was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”
The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state. Soviet dissidents were often declared mentally ill, institutionalized in prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, and subjected to forced medication and psychological torture.
Totalitarian regimes used such tactics to isolate political dissidents from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.
What’s unfolding in America is the modern police state’s version of that same script.
Civil commitment laws are found in all states and employed throughout American history.
Under the doctrines of parens patriae and police power, the government already claims authority to confine those deemed unable to act in their own best interest or who pose a threat to society.
When fused, these doctrines give the state enormous discretion to preemptively lock people up based on speculative future threats, not actual crimes.
This discretion is now expanding at warp speed.
The result is a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.
Once dissent is equated with danger—and danger with illness—those who challenge the state become medicalized threats, subject to detention not for what they’ve done, but for what they believe.
We’ve already seen what happens when dissent is pathologized and criminalized, and civil commitment laws are weaponized.
Now, under the banner of mental health, the same dragnet is being equipped with red flag gun laws, predictive policing, and involuntary detention authority.
In theory, these laws are meant to prevent harm. In practice, they punish thought, not conduct.
Trump’s latest executive order doesn’t just target the homeless—it establishes a precedent for rounding up anyone deemed a threat to the government’s version of law and order.
The same playbook that pathologized opposition to war or police brutality as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” could now be used to classify political dissent as a psychiatric illness.
This is not hyperbole.
The government’s ability to silence dissent by labeling it as dangerous or diseased is well documented—and now it’s about to be codified into law.
While the intention may appear reasonable—disarming people who pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others—the problem arises when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of a police state that equates dissent with extremism.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are fast approaching a future where you can be locked up for the thoughts you think, the beliefs you hold, or the questions you ask.
The government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.
It will start with the homeless.
Then the mentally ill.
Then the so-called extremists.
Then the critics, the contrarians, and the constitutionalists.
Eventually, it will come for anyone who dares to get in the government’s way.
This is how tyranny rises. This is how freedom falls.
Unless we resist this creeping mental health gulag, the prison gates will eventually close on us all.
Reprinted with permission from Rutherford Institute.