Baltimore: shithole

I hate Baltimore with a passion. Some of my worst-ever experiences have been in Baltimore, which certainly deserves its shithole reputation. Like many Democrat-run major cities, Baltimore has little to no law and order. It is rife with poverty, crime, violence, and yes—pests. The place is disgusting. I was there, back when I was an APIC employee in the very late 1990s, for a company convention that took place at the Baltimore Convention Center. I got ripped off by a scammer begging people for twenty bucks to help him with a supposed parking problem. When I invited my brother David to come by and watch a movie with me (the second Austin Powers film, I think it was), we ended up in a skanky theater that seemed to be run by sullen teens, and sitting in the front row of the theater was some demented person in a wheelchair who kept shouting "Da da da DA DA DA da da da!" at the screen. The fact that David and I didn't walk out was a testament to... what? Our stubbornness? Our completist sense of duty toward the film? Our cowardice about walking out? I'd like to think that, in the intervening years, I've grown the balls to walk out of such situations now.

Anyway, via Bill Keezer, a piece about Baltimore from diehard Trumpista Don Surber:

---

Feed: Don Surber
Posted on: Sunday, July 28, 2019 2:00 PM
Author: Unknown
Subject: Trump makes Baltimore the symbol of Democrats

Democrat Elijah Cummings enjoys a safe seat in Congress, so safe that the congressman thought he could front the clan that wants to impeach President Donald John Trump. In response, President Trump showed the nation how third world parts of Cummings' district in Baltimore is.

Baltimore's last Republican mayor was Theodore McKeldin, whose term ended 52 years ago. His successor was Nancy Pelosi's dad, Thomas D'Alesandro III.

The population was 939,024 and mainly white back then.

Now the population is 602,495 and mainly black.

In 2018, USA Today dubbed Baltimore the most dangerous city in America.

WJZ reported at the time, "The paper analyzed police crime data in the nation’s 50 biggest cities, which revealed Baltimore had the highest per capita murder rate in the nation with nearly 56 murders per 100,000 people—a record for the city. The rate outpaced New Orleans and Detroit, with a rate of 40 and 39 killings per 100,000 people, respectively.

"Baltimore’s 342 murders in 2017 was an increase from 318 in 2016."

On March 12, 2019, the New York Times published a piece by Alec MacGillis, "The Tragedy of Baltimore."

It noted that in the four years since the anti-police Freddie Gray "protests," crime ran out of control in Baltimore.

Of course, they were not protests. Even Obama admitted this, saying in 2015, "There's no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive.

"When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting. They're not making a statement. They're stealing. When they burn down a building, they're committing arson. And they're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities. That robs jobs and opportunity from people in that area."

But Obama and his administration nevertheless sided with the rioters.

As MacGillis wrote for the Times, "In 2016, the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division concurred, releasing a report accusing the city’s Police Department of racial discrimination and excessive force. The city agreed to a 'consent decree' with the federal government, a set of policing reforms that would be enforced by a federal judge. When an independent monitoring team was selected to oversee the decree, Guy was hired as its community liaison. This was where she wanted to be: at the forefront of the effort to make her city a better place.

"But in the years that followed, Baltimore, by most standards, became a worse place. In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago’s, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times as populous. Other elected officials, from the governor to the mayor to the state’s attorney, struggled to respond to the rise in disorder, leaving residents with the unsettling feeling that there was no one in charge. With every passing year, it was getting harder to see what gains, exactly, were delivered by the uprising."

Democrats took the death of one man and turned it into the deaths of hundreds. Police officer retirements went up. Recruitment went down. The poorest neighborhoods became war zones and dumps.

Now President Trump has shined the spotlight on Baltimore. Instead of ignoring his tweets, the liberal crowd pounced, which only underscored his message.

Baltimore Sun quickly exuded an editorial, "Better to have a few rats than to be one." A couple of its white columnists came in on a sunny Saturday to denounce as racist the president telling the truth.

I doubt anyone on the editorial board lives in West Baltimore, which is the center of this tragedy. They belong to the Protected Class, as Peggy Noonan put it. They are protected from the adverse effects of the policies they embrace.

I wonder what they would think if their children went to sleep in a rat-infested house each night.

[Americans know] Donald John Trump is right. Cummings has represented Baltimore for 36 years in Congress. On his watch, parts of Baltimore slid into being rat-infested war zones with [third-world] homicide rates.

President Trump pushed Democrats to rally behind Cummings. Baltimore is now the capital of this Confederacy of Dunces, as Jonathan Swift or John Kennedy Toole might put it.

---

Here's Styx on Baltimore:


The lesson the leftist media keeps not learning is: look not at what Trump says, but at what he does. But the media—and by extension, the Democrats—are too stupid to internalize this. Trump singles out a Democrat for abuse as a way to distract the gullible media from the substantive things he's doing, such as securing funding for the border wall and sealing an asylum deal with Guatemala.

And here's Paul Joseph Watson on the Baltimore flap: