Story likes this are a good reminder that people will go to great lengths to avoid running afoul of the official morality, enforced by the ruling class. Violating the taboos of the commoners is never a problem, as long as the rulers are OK with it. In post-modern America, a way to show your worth in the ruling class is to violate the norms of decent people. To go the other way is to risk being ruined, as the ruling class is as ruthless as Muslims when it comes to enforcing their morality.

Baltimore has an interesting history. Up until the 20th century is was basically a port city without much industry. When industry arrived, it did so with a vengeance. Poles, Italians and Irish flooded in to work the docks, steel mills and factories. They had an enormous car plant near the docks that employed tens of thousands at its peak. In the 1950’s, Baltimore was one of the more important cities in the country. It was economically importation and had one of the leading newspapers in the nation.

The civil rights movement and its fallout in the 1960’s hit cities like Baltimore particularly hard. Traditional neighborhoods were broken up in something called block busting, as the usual suspects would buy a house and move in a black family. Everyone would put their house up for sale and the pirates would swoop in and buy at an increasingly discounted price. Basically the landlords figured out how to monetize racism. Baltimore went from roughly 75% white at the end of World War II to majority black in a decade.

As black on white crime increased, the politics became tribal. The remnant of the white population hung on for a while, but they were playing a losing game. Crime control became racist and fell away. The public schools fell prey to the racial spoils system and the collapse of human capital. The middle-class, black and white, fled the city. There was a respite for a while in the 2000’s, but like Detroit, Baltimore is dying and headed for bankruptcy. If you want to see the future, visit Charm City.

Maybe the Left can be forgiven for trying to address the issue of race and the very real results of discrimination. In retrospect, their solutions sound like the rantings of a crazy person, but at the time they probably sounded plausible. After fifty years of failure, there’s simply no excuse for race hustlers persisting in their views. Every conceivable effort has been made to make integration work. Trillions have been spent on a problem that is no better now than fifty years ago. It’s time accept reality.