VIDEO: Leftist analyst stretches reality to blame homelessness crisis on conservative religious families
A left-wing commentator had a bizarre explanation for the homelessness crisis in blue cities during a debate on Bill Maher's show Friday.
Anand Giridharadas, a frequent guest on MS NOW, argued on "Real Time with Bill Maher" that much of the problem of homelessness is because of religious families choosing a Scripture verse over the welfare of their children.
'We are holding a lot of your people who you failed to love and take care of.'
Giridharadas was reacting to CNN's Fareed Zakaria, who pointed out that many big cities spend "crazy" amounts of money but have not solved the homelessness crisis.
Although Giridharadas said Zakaria was right to say Democratic-controlled cities privilege the homeless over other residents who have to deal with the fallout from homelessness, he went on to defend blue cities.
"Cities are very unfairly labeled as these problem centers by Donald Trump and others," he said.
"And one thing is worth remembering. If you look at the population of all people in cities, particularly people who come to cities from elsewhere, but particularly homeless and other vulnerable people in cities, look at youth homeless: A pretty large chunk of those people [who] end up in cities were failed in some other parts of this country," he added.
"The fraction of youth homeless or LGBTQ, whatever, [is] pretty high," said Giridharadas.
"So there are a lot of families in this country who fail the first duty of family, which is to love your kids more than any other thing. And there's a lot of families in this country that look at some verse in some book and their child's face and choose the verse in the book over their child's face and drive their children out of Nebraska or out of Florida or out of Idaho," he added.
"And those kids come to San Francisco, and those kids come to New York, and those kids go to Chicago, and we have friends giving dinners with them. You live in L.A., you are surrounded by people who have those kinds of stories," Giridharadas concluded. "And so cities — every time someone is sleeping on a subway bench in a city, the rest of America can sort of say, 'Ugh, look at these cities.' But we are holding a lot of your people who you failed to love and take care of."
Giridharadas got a lot of applause from the audience for his point.
The Human Rights Campaign estimates that LGBTQ-identifying young people have a 120% greater chance of being homeless than other youth, but a total percentage of LGBTQ people among all homeless is difficult to measure.
Giridharadas previously made headlines when he opined that perhaps Fox News should not exist anymore because its reporting had goaded viewers into committing "terrorism" during the January 6 melee at the U.S. Capitol.
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Leaking cash to apparent fraud and obviously not solving the problem it was funded to solve, the homeless agency has become a political target, even among Democrats in Los Angeles.
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