People also maliciously ignore the obvious fact that living in a society which is lenient towards burglary automatically attracts opportunists, who were not actually poor in the first place.

People like watering down good versus bad as if it were binary. They don’t care to think a good person can sometimes be bad, or that many crimes are crimes of opportunity, because then they’d have to question their own goodness

Do you really think people he met on some random hiking trip are "maliciously ignoring obvious facts" as some convoluted political tactic?

Personally I think it's because people have these standard narratives floating around in their mind, and pattern-match them reflexively even when it doesn't make sense.

I have several teachers in my extended family, so I hear a lot of teacher stories. There’s a similarly weird phenomenon that happens when they have to do major discipline like suspension or expulsion: Critics come out to heap blame on the teachers for “failing the students”. They defend the child as the victim and heap blame, either collectively or individually, on the teachers involved. Some times they hand wave it away as blaming society. However, the one thing that is not allowed in these discussions is any appearance e that the child has responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Note that some of these children are nearly 18 years old at time of expulsion.

For some people, the only lens they have is a 1-D spectrum of perceived societal power. Blame can only flow up the spectrum and victimhood can only flow downward.

As soon as anything violates this idea of how justice, blame, and victimhood should work, they jump in to defend the side they think should be the victim in their worldview. They inject unrelated or assumed narratives to try to load up the victimhood of the lower side (living wage) while trying to downplay any victimhood on the upper side of their 1-D worldview (insurance can pay for it, you have enough money to replace things). By rewriting the narrative with something new that they injected , their worldview is protected and they can continue to feel correct.

In the teacher example above, this has a sad side effect where the problem students now know they have advocates to protect them despite their bad behavior. Some of them are becoming very good at reaching out to those advocates to share a sob story and replace their narrative with one of being the victim on social media. It’s creating a scary environment when kids know that not only are there no consequences for bad behavior, they know they can find someone to help defend them for it.