In language that echoes that of the Nazis against those “unworthy of life,” the long-serving Republican mayor of Lancaster, California, R. Rex Parris, recently suggested that the city’s homeless population should be given “free fentanyl … as much as they like” and expressed his desire for a federal “purge” to eliminate them.
Parris is not just a deranged individual. He has been elected repeatedly as mayor of Lancaster, an industrial city of 167,000 located in northern Los Angeles County, and a production hub for the US military, home to facilities run by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Honeywell.
During a City Council meeting in February, Parris declared that one solution to homelessness would be to “give them free fentanyl … all the fentanyl they want.” As grotesque as this suggestion was—proposing to accelerate the death of the most vulnerable by allowing them to overdose on the drug—Parris had not yet touched bottom.
In an interview with Fox LA last week, Parris doubled down, issuing a bloodcurdling demand: “Quite frankly, I wish the president would give us a purge. Because we do need to purge these people.” The language could not be more explicit. Borrowing from the dystopian fantasy of a violent, lawless extermination spree popularized in the film series The Purge, Parris has called for state-sanctioned mass murder.
Attempting to dress up his sociopathic sentiments as concern for “public safety,” Parris made sure to demonize the homeless population as a criminal menace. “They are responsible for most of our robberies, most of our rapes, and at least half of our murders,” he claimed, offering no evidence for this vile smear.
Adding religious incense to cover the stink, Parris concluded his interview by invoking the Bible, paraphrasing a passage in the New Testament, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which states: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.’” Accordingly, death by starvation to supplement death by overdose.
A licensed attorney who has held office since 2008, Parris is a seasoned operator in the ways of the American political establishment. Authoritarian posturing is his element. This is the same man who in 2020 argued that anyone who knowingly spread COVID-19 should be charged with murder, a position that substituted law-and-order rhetoric for public health measures, which were being abandoned by the Trump administration.
The mayor has repeatedly fused religion and governance, advocating policies that trample the separation of church and state. His city has led the way in high-tech surveillance of its residents, deploying drone patrols under the pretext of “public safety,” long before the mainstreaming of such dystopian tools.
And yet, as repellent as Parris’s character is, this is not merely a story of one man’s reactionary pathology. His remarks are a symptom of a diseased political order: a capitalist system in advanced decay, incapable of addressing the social crises it has produced and only able to respond with escalating repression and violence.
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, American cities have become laboratories for social cleansing. Far from opposing Parris’s barbaric logic, the Democratic Party has paved the way for it, California Democrats in particular. Last month, the city of Fremont, site of the first Tesla vehicle plant, voted to ban outdoor sleeping altogether, based on last year’s Supreme Court decision. The ordinance was repealed after a public outcry.
In neighboring San Jose, the largest city in northern California, the city council has given preliminary approval to a measure proposed by Democratic Mayor Matt Mahan that would authorize police to arrest homeless people if they refused to go to shelters three times. “Homelessness can’t be a choice,” he told the New York Times. “Government has a responsibility to build shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a responsibility to use it.”
