The ‘Kensington Beach’ Instagram creator spoke about fentanyl overdoses at the RNC on Tuesday

Michael Coyle, a Philadelphia native who started the “Kensington Beach” Instagram account, which shows shocking and often disturbing scenes of human suffering from the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, spoke at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night.

The theme of the evening was “Make America Safe Again,” and speakers painted a dark image of an America plagued by rising crime, despite crime falling in most big cities this year. Coyle addressed the crowd in a lineup that included GOP politicians like Senate candidate Dave McCormick and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Coyle spoke toward the end of the second night of the convention, after former President Donald Trump had arrived to listen to speakers from the VIP section of the arena.

He introduced himself as from one of the “worst neighborhoods in America.”

“Our streets are plagued by drugs,” Coyle said of Kensington. “You’ll find human feces in front of your business or someone lying dead on your front steps. Politicians say nice things or clean up the streets for a couple weeks in an election year or when someone famous visits.”

The neighborhood has attracted national attention and visits from politicians, and is often cited by Republicans as an example of crime and drug use in big cities.

Kensington is the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid epidemic. More than a third of the city’s 2,500 narcotics and drug-law violations recorded by police in 2023 occurred in Kensington.

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, a Democrat who took office in January, has made cleaning up Kensington a chief priority of her administration and has promised to shut down the area’s open-air drug market. The city recently dismantled encampments and increased police presence in the neighborhood, as part of a larger multistep public safety effort.

In a provocative but brief speech, Coyle, wearing a “Kensington Beach” hat, told the crowd about how ‘tranq,’ a new drug, was making the drug crisis worse.

“Do you know what the smell of rotting flesh smells like?” he asked delegates. “The people of my city do,” he said.

Coyle blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for fentanyl “pouring into our border.” He called Trump “a leader who will end the urban nightmare.”

While fentanyl was involved in the majority of drug overdose fatalities in 2023, the GOP claim that an “open border” is the leading cause of those deaths is an exaggeration. Fentanyl is largely smuggled by U.S. citizens through legal ports of entry, rather than by migrants sneaking into the country. Border officers have seized an increasing amount of illicit fentanyl, numbering in the hundreds of millions of pills, under Biden.

There has been an increase in social media accounts documenting the opioid crisis in Kensington in recent years, some of which have been criticized for exploiting human suffering. In some cases, users have even monetized the content.

In 2019, Coyle told The Inquirer that he started the page to raise awareness for the crisis. He said he named the page Kensington Beach because of the way people suffering from addiction and laying on sidewalks reminded him of people lounging down the Shore.

“I’m just bringing awareness to what’s going on in my neighborhood,” Coyle said then. “It’s already here. It’s been here for years. And I’m just a guy who just so happened to start an Instagram page and it’s catching a lot of light.”

On the RNC stage Tuesday he said he “started a nonprofit to help the neighborhood I loved and shared videos online of the horror we live with.” He also said he organized a needle cleanup there.

When his remarks were over, Coyle lifted his hat up and said “Kensington Beach for Trump!” before leaving the stage.

Coyle was the second Philadelphian to take the stage at the Republican National Convention this week. Amber Rose, a model and Philadelphia native, spoke at the convention Monday. The Trump campaign has tried to highlight “everyday Americans,” among the politicians featured throughout the four nights of programming.