Steve Sailer has a post up on this article in the NYTimes about Baltimore’s rising crime rate. When reading ruling class media organs like the NYTimes, the first thing I do is look up the writer, if I’m not familiar with them. The person assigned to the piece tells you a lot about what editors think about the topic. In narrative journalism, the narrator is the most important part of the story.

I’ve never heard of Jess Bidgood, so I looked her up. According to her twitter page she covers New England for the Times and she likes day trips. I suspect she enjoys chamomile tea and walks on the beach too. She also looks a lot like Maureen Dowd. Last time I checked, Baltimore is not in New England and it is as far away culturally from Somerville as you can get in this country.

Doing a bit more digging I found her profile at the NYTimes and her LinkedIn page. It turns out that Jess – now that we are familiar, I feel I can call her Jess – is a 20-something cub reporter working as a contractor for the NYTimes. Like a lot of graduates of elite colleges, she has not wandered too far away from the campus. Therefore, her knowledge of the world is limited to what she reads on-line and whatever is within walking distance from her apartment.

Having lived and worked in Somerville, back when the Whitey Bulger was killing people at the Marshall Street garage, I know something about the place. Even at its worst, it was nothing like West Baltimore. Today, it is slowly gentrifying as nearby Cambridge becomes too expensive and too developed. The spillover effect is turning the once gritty working class town into another hipsterville.

There’s nothing wrong with that and I’d argue it is a good model for a place like Baltimore. Figure out how to drive up housing costs so the poor flee to somewhere else. Then bring in a bunch of hipsters to spruce up the place and before long you have a city with low crime and a thriving social life. It may be entirely synthetic, but it beats burned out vacants and gun fights between street gangs.

The takeaway though is that the NYTimes assigned this story to a girl who is better equipped to do side bar pieces on apple picking. She is simply out of her depth and her editors at the NYTimes know this. That’s why they assigned the story to her. Odds are they arranged for her to spend a few hours with the city’s media liaison who arranged some interviews and a drive around the ghetto. She may as well have done the story over the phone and used a telescope to see the ghetto.

Given that there is nothing in the story to suggest the reporter ever set foot in the city, she very well may have done the story over the wire. In fact, her background was probably The Wire. One of the more hilarious aspects of the progressive millennial hipster is how quickly the declare themselves an expert. The briefest of encounters is elevated to a life changing personal experience, from which they become and expert. Never mind that these personal experiences happen at a great distance, often through YouTube and cable television.

The article itself is laughable nonsense, written in the style popular with millennials. It’s a listicle with a blurb “voxsplaining” each bullet point. The content is not important. It’s the pose that is the feature. That’s what Steve Sailer misses when reading this sort of stuff. He’s an old white guy who reads for the textual meaning and perhaps some esoteric meanings buried between the lines of text. Similarly, he expects numbers to be reflections of reality.

In the Cult, words have no meaning beyond the feelings they elicit. This article is intended to make the reader feel good about feeling bad for the blacks of the Baltimore. They don’t really care about the blacks of Baltimore. They are just stage props. The point is the writer is letting the reader know they are a good doobie for caring about the right things, proof of which is they retweeted this article.

Signaling is a part of human behavior. Our clothes, grooming, jewelry, choice of language all signal things about us to the rest of the humans. Groups codify this behavior and layer on insider language so adherents can easily identify one another. The fascinating thing about the modern Progressive is that’s all there is. There’s nothing more to it than letting one another know they are on the same team.

In so far as what we think of as Progressive – egalitarianism, meritocracy, anti-racism, multiculturalism – there’s nothing of substance to it. The irrationality of it is not the point, which is why rational arguments against it go nowhere. Whatever Progressivism claims to be or may have been, today it is just a defense of the status quo posing as an avant-garde critique. It’s a room full of snooty people in funny hats sneering at the one guy not wearing a funny hat, because that’s what people with funny hats do.