See here for an account in the Power Line blog about the deterioration of Minneapolis, in particular, its Uptown neighborhood (hat tip: Mark Spahn). That was a neighborhood I went through many times beginning from when I was very young and taking swimming lessons at the downtown YMCA, since the bus I took to get to downtown went through the Hennepin and Lake intersection (the heart of the Uptown area). It’s hard to believe that an area that was calm and peaceful for so many decades is suddenly too dangerous to be in.
When was peak Minneapolis? When did it start to go downhill? Was it doing fine, and then suddenly went into a steep decline with the death of George Floyd? Or were there signs before that that all was not well. My wife has reminded me that the West Bank neighborhood near the University of Minnesota deteriorated some years ago, so possibly there were other signs that something was wrong. Since I don’t live there anymore, I was not aware of them.
Now all of this destruction is not the result of white supremacists, no matter what the clueless might think. No, it is leftists doing it to themselves. And it is the result of one dreadful mistake that they have made, namely that being soft on crime helps the poor. When I became critical of the left, this was one of the first of my former beliefs that I jettisoned. No, it doesn’t help the poor at all, except for a few of them on a short-term basis.
But it does allow wealthy elites to feel good about themselves.
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