It’s Not Just One Anchor: The Machine Behind Anti-Homeless Rhetoric
Credit Image: © Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts via ZUMA Press
This piece exposes the well-funded media and policy ecosystem that reframes homelessness as personal failure, making cruelty seem reasonable and paving the way for criminalizing unhoused people instead of housing them.
From Right-Wing Think Tanks to Viral Creators, a Well-Funded Media Ecosystem Is Shaping Public Opinion and Policy Against America’s Unhoused Neighbors
We are living through one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in modern America — one that convinces people to fear their unhoused neighbors instead of asking why housing has become impossible to afford.
A Dangerous Narrative
Across the country, a powerful shift is underway in how Americans perceive homelessness. Increasingly, people are being told that homelessness isn’t the result of rising rents, stagnant wages, medical debt, or the lack of affordable housing, but the result of individual failure.
This shift did not happen on its own. It has been shaped by a well-funded network of think tanks, media outlets, political messaging firms, and viral content creators, all of whom benefit from framing homelessness as a personal problem rather than a systemic one. And as that narrative spreads, so does the belief that punishment, not support, is the appropriate response.
We saw the consequences clearly when 30-year-old street performer Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway after expressing hunger and distress. Neely had not attacked anyone. Yet initial media coverage framed him not as a person in crisis, but as a threat. Commentators defended Daniel Penny’s actions, claiming the killing was justified — even necessary.
That reaction did not emerge from nowhere. It reflects years of messaging that has made the public more willing to see unhoused people as dangerous, hopeless, or less deserving of empathy. The violence is not theoretical. Since 1999, the National Coalition for the Homeless has documented at least 588 unhoused victims who lost their lives in violent attacks, and people without housing are up to 25 times more likely to experience violent assault than those who are housed.
And the rhetoric continues to escalate.
In September, Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade suggested on national television that homeless people should be given lethal injections. The statement was shocking — but it was not isolated.
As Invisible People founder Mark Horvath said, “What the Fox News anchor said was awful — but the truth is he’s just repeating what a lot of people already think. The negative messaging around homelessness is spreading like cancer.”
This is not a cultural shift happening organically. It is the result of a deliberate narrative project, one designed to make systemic failure appear as personal fault, to divert public frustration away from the housing crisis itself and toward the people suffering from it.
And as housing costs continue to rise, and the social safety net continues to erode, that narrative has made cruelty seem reasonable, and solutions seem impossible. At the same time, more Americans find themselves living beneath the poverty line, only a paycheck away from experiencing homelessness themselves.
How We Got Here: The Architects of the Firehose Spewing Anti-Homeless Rhetoric
The story of how we reached this point didn’t begin with social media, but it has been supercharged by it. Over the past decade, organizations such as the Cicero Institute, PragerU, and the Discovery Institute have invested heavily in reshaping the public conversation around homelessness.
Their message is clear: reject evidence-based approaches like Housing First, and recast homelessness as a personal or moral failure rather than a systemic one. What started as a policy agenda has evolved into a coordinated media campaign — one that thrives in the digital attention economy.
Through white papers, model legislation, and slick “educational” videos, these groups have built a foundation of rhetoric that redefines human suffering as a consequence of bad behavior.
Terms like vagrant, drifter, service-resistant, and choice have been repeated so often that they’ve lost all connection to truth. Each one carries an invisible argument that people are on the streets because they deserve to be.
As Barb Poppe, former executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, explained:
“When we use language that is dehumanizing — ‘the criminals on our streets,’ ‘the mentally ill,’ ‘the homeless’ — we lump together whole groups of people as undesirables. It stops us from seeing them as neighbors, coworkers, or family members. That language makes inaction acceptable.”
Those narratives don’t just influence public opinion; they shape policy. Anti-camping bans, sit-lie ordinances, and RV prohibitions all stem from the same poisoned well — one in which homelessness has been rebranded as a public nuisance rather than a humanitarian crisis.
The Modern Ecosystem: Rage for Profit
Today, those early narratives have metastasized into a content economy — one that thrives on rage. Incidentally, rage bait, defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content,” was named Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year.
On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, faceless “street documentary” channels and 24-hour livestreams of places like Los Angeles’ Skid Row and Philadelphia’s Kensington broadcast human suffering for entertainment and financial gain.
Invisible People has documented nine live streams in Kensington and three in L.A. alone. In some cases, creators earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month through ads, donations, and memberships. Their thumbnails often feature close-ups of people in visible distress, stripped of consent or context.
Meanwhile, right-wing influencers pump out daily commentary that turns systemic failure into moral panic. Their audiences, often numbering in the millions, are told that compassion is weakness and cruelty is common sense.
Mark Horvath warns, “It’s not just one Fox anchor. The real danger is the nonstop negative content circulating on social platforms that’s shaping the views of millions, especially young adults.”
This isn’t fringe. U.S. viewers watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content daily across both TVs and mobile devices combined. And YouTube has become the dominant streaming platform on television screens — in the U.S., it captures the largest share of total TV viewing time. Viewership among adults over 65 has nearly doubled year-over-year. Algorithms prioritize engagement, and anger tends to be the most effective way to engage users.
The result is an attention economy that monetizes dehumanization. Invisible People explores this topic in greater depth in part 2, which examines the financial benefits behind creators and platforms that profit from human suffering.
The Business Model of Outrage
How did we get from televised compassion campaigns like We Are the World to viral videos calling for crackdowns on poverty-stricken people?
Follow the incentives.
Platforms profit from engagement; creators profit from outrage. The more polarizing the content, the more it spreads and the more it earns. This dynamic rewards misinformation over accuracy and moral panic over nuance.
And it’s not limited to social media. National outlets, facing shrinking newsrooms and rising competition for attention, increasingly echo the same fear-based framing. “Homelessness crisis,” “zombie drug,” “urban decay” — these are not neutral descriptors. They’re algorithm-friendly bait that keeps audiences angry and advertisers happy.
The difference is that this new wave of rhetoric comes with faces and feeds that people know. They feel connected to their favorite “truth tellers,” who blur the line between journalism and entertainment. As Horvath said, “We’re not just up against misinformation — we’re up against entire ecosystems built to profit from it.”
Words That Kill
When the public is constantly fed messages that unhoused people are dangerous, dirty, or beyond help, violence becomes easier to justify.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, from 2020 to 2022, there were 97 documented violent attacks on people experiencing homelessness, 47 of them fatal. Many of the victims were male, and many of the perpetrators were young. The data show these attacks are not isolated and are often linked to criminalizing survival behaviors.
Each viral clip of an encampment “cleanup,” each headline that blames addiction rather than housing shortages, reinforces the idea that the people suffering are the problem to be solved.
As Poppe reminds us, the real issue isn’t lack of resources; it’s lack of will. “We have the wherewithal to house everyone,” she said. “We just haven’t invested in the housing, shelter, and supports that people need.”
Dehumanizing language gives policymakers permission to look away. When unhoused neighbors are framed as threats, policies shift from support to punishment. Housing budgets shrink while policing budgets grow. The results are visible on every city sidewalk and in every obituary that lists exposure as a cause of death.
Poverty Profiteers: From Think Tank to City Hall
Behind the talking points are organizations that have perfected the art of turning ideology into law.
The Cicero Institute, founded by billionaire Joe Lonsdale, has authored a series of “model bills” promoting the criminalization of homelessness. Their work has been adopted, often word-for-word, by state legislatures and city councils across the country.
At the same time, PragerU and similar “education” brands package anti-housing rhetoric into short, classroom-ready videos aimed at young people. They frame punitive policy as common sense, a marketing campaign disguised as moral clarity.
The overlap is no accident. The same donors who fund these think tanks also bankroll media networks and social content ecosystems that amplify their talking points. What begins as a white paper ends up as a viral meme, then as legislation.
When Perception Becomes Policy
Public opinion doesn’t just reflect policy — it writes it.
According to the Pew Research Center, 54% of U.S. adults say they get news from social media at least sometimes, a shift that diminishes the boundaries between reporting and entertaining. In this algorithm-driven environment, much of what people see isn’t the result of editorial decisions but what the feed decides to show them.
And as Navigator Research recently found, Americans are split between “active” and “passive” news consumers, with 57% saying they actively seek out news, while 43% say the news simply “comes to them.” That passive audience is precisely who the propaganda machine targets. They don’t go looking for information; it finds them — in their feed, in their autoplay queue, in the background of their favorite podcast.
And when those feeds are filled with dehumanizing narratives, voters and policymakers absorb them as truth. The result is a self-fulfilling cycle: misinformation fuels fear, fear drives punitive laws, and those laws reinforce the lies that justified them.
“The homeless sector has failed to educate the public or counter this harmful wave of content,” Horvath said. “Without the funding to scale, we can’t compete at a moment when our work is needed most.”
Nonprofits have been slow to adapt. Many organizations still rely on press releases and awareness campaigns that struggle to cut through the noise. Meanwhile, groups like PragerU and the Discovery Institute operate as full-fledged media publishers, flooding every platform with high-production videos, influencer partnerships, and data-driven distribution strategies.
Their methods work because they’re built for the digital world we actually live in.
Make the Truth Louder
This series exists because silence has consequences.
Every unchecked falsehood makes violence more likely and solutions harder to fund. Every dehumanizing headline pushes housing further out of reach. The anti-homeless narrative machine thrives in that silence, and it will keep growing until truth becomes louder, faster, and more accessible.
That means rethinking what advocacy looks like. It means building audiences, not just awareness. It means telling stories rooted in dignity, consent, and context, and doing it at scale.
Invisible People is committed to being that counter-voice: to exposing the harm, explaining the mechanisms, and offering alternatives rooted in evidence and humanity. Because when homeless people are dehumanized, harm follows. But when stories center dignity, change becomes possible.
“We need to make the truth louder.” — Mark Horvath
This is Part 1 of a six-part Invisible People series examining how a well-funded media ecosystem — from think tanks to viral creators — shapes public perception of homelessness and drives punitive policies. Part 2 in the series follows the money behind rage-bait content. Please share this series and help us make the truth louder!
Erin Wisneski
Erin Wisneski is the Managing Editor of Invisible People, the only nonprofit newsroom in the country dedicated solely to homelessness. She oversees editorial strategy, supports dozens of writers including those with lived experience, and ensures every story is grounded in dignity, accuracy, and a commitment to shifting public understanding toward real solutions.
Cynthia Griffith
Cynthia Griffith is a freelance writer dedicated to social justice and environmental issues.
Jocelyn Figueroa
Jocelyn Figueroa studied Creative Non-Fiction at The New School and is a blogger and freelance writer based out of New York City. Formerly homeless, she launched her own blog discussing shelter life in New York City. Today, Jocelyn is on a mission to build connections through storytelling and creative writing. Check out her book about homelessness at https://ko-fi.com/scartissueproject
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