Censorship is at play in Baltimore’s crisis

The Boston Globe reports:

It didn’t take long for the mayor to surrender. “We don’t have thugs in Baltimore. . . . We have a lot of kids that are acting out,” she told a group of church leaders. For good measure, she blamed her “little anger interpreter,” pointing to her head in self-abasement. There was more apologizing online. “I wanted to clarify my comments on ‘thugs,’ ” she tweeted. “When you speak out of frustration and anger, one can say things in a way that you don’t mean.”

So now in Baltimore, with the seventh-highest violent crime rate among US cities, the nonracial word “thugs” is banished as racist — even when spoken by a black mayor. Thus the degradation of the public discourse proceeds.

When words lose their meaning... people will lose all of their freedoms to paraphrase something Confucius said.