Tucker Carlson, Buckhead, and Why Our Cities Fail

It’s not an accident; it’s Democrats turning their own failures into political power.

If you attempt to watch the YouTube version of Tucker Carlson's report on what's going on in Atlanta from Monday night, you'll find yourself wading through warnings that "the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences." There is nothing pornographic in Carlson's report. Nor is there foul language. What's "inappropriate" or "offensive" in it is the truth about the people who run Atlanta, truth that everyone knows and understands. It's the fact someone might speak the truth in a video appearing on YouTube that is offensive to the "YouTube community." The funny thing is, Carlson isn't telling the half of it. The subject of the Monday segment is the effort by the residents of Buckhead, which is a formerly nice area in the northwestern part of Atlanta that is home to around 80,000 mostly well-off and mostly white people, to create their own city. Atlanta's criminal element has turned Buckhead into a war zone in recent years and particularly since the fiasco involving the drunken criminal Rayshard Brooks, who was shot by police last year. As a result, the citizens there have decided they want their own police force to keep the place safe; Atlanta's police department, which is being depopulated, if not defunded, thanks to widespread retirements and resignations in the wake of the Brooks fiasco, is no longer capable of providing that kind of public safety. Carlson's report talks with a rather matter-of-fact tone about efforts to pass legislation at the Georgia capitol enabling the birth of Buckhead. Why wouldn't Buckhead's residents attempt to form their own city? After all, upscale, law-abiding homeowners in nice areas like Buckhead are more or less members of an oppressed minority in Atlanta these days, particularly when a city like that one is governed by an "incompetent demagogue" (Carlson's words) like Keisha Bottoms. All of this is completely true. What Carlson's report leaves out is the why. Let's in...