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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So, this is exactly the sort of thing that can get brushed off as being simple bigotry; you just seem to prefer a level of segregation which cities don't provide. But I think it's worth thinking about.

When I wrote out my theory of The Four Failures of blue governance, the first thing I listed was Safety and Order, and I think there's a real tendency for people to talk past each other here; urbanists are particularly fond of saucy memes on that front, but you're literally half as likely to meet an untimely end in New York City as you are in rural America; the murder rate is comparably low, but car crashes make the big difference.

But that's unsatisfying in the same way that someone pointing out complete apathy in the face of brazen and repeated theft being given a lecture about wage theft; it's just whataboutism.

I came across this thread recapping Left Behind in Rosedale, which details how white people violently resisted the integration of their neighborhoods because they feared they would be the victims of violent crime, and then their neighborhoods were integrated, and the people who couldn't leave were violently victimized by the black people who moved in, and below that, the social capital, the ability to know your neighbors and go outside at night and feel safe, all of that just vanished. And it's left some kind of scar that the official narrative here is that white people resisted integration for absolutely no reason, and then we had integration, and the good guys won. Because that's not what people experienced. Just like the official narrative is that there was no reason for purity taboos either.

There are plenty of ideas about how to make things better well outside the right (The Atlantic ran this; Jennifer Doleac writes extensively on the topic; Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias do as well), and as far as we can tell, crime really is way down from the 90s. But how can there be any credibility without reckoning with the past?

Crime really is down compared to the crack era, and New York City is reasonably safe, even after COVID-era backsliding. It's not the only city in the country, though. Chicago in particular has a much higher murder rate, with Philadelphia not far behind. And not to leave red state cities out -- both Dallas and Houston are pretty bad. And Atlanta's will knock your socks off (well, strip them from your corpse, most likely)

Repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably is neither necessary nor sufficient. But you do need to refuse to allow racial considerations to interfere with stopping serious crime, which might involve some of the law around that act.

There's Left Behind in Rosedale and Philly War Zone; I've heard stories similar to the latter about Baltimore also. "White flight" was in large part ethnic cleansing, and we're still dealing with the results of that.