Ever seen those signs in someone's yard that have multi-colored sentences that read things like, "In this house we believe black lives matter, we believe that no human is illegal, we believe in women's rights," etc., etc? They post signs like "this is a gun-free household" to virtue signal their leftism to the rest of the neighborhood.
We get it, Cynthia. You're better than everyone else.
This is an established pattern of Democrat thinking. Virtue signaling your moral superiority and then standing confused when things go up in smoke, and I mean that both figuratively and literally.
That happened at a macro level recently in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the town celebrated their last "neighborhood watch" sign coming down. According to officials, these signs were racist and discriminated against non-whites.
Ann Arbor, MI removes 600 anti-crime signs to be "inclusive" & "welcoming" pic.twitter.com/fnCCF4nAlp
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 29, 2026
As you can see, they wanted people to feel "welcome" and to be far more "inclusive." Council Member Cynthia Harrison claims that black people were being questioned in neighborhoods about why they were there, and if I'm being honest, I don't believe her. Clearly, the town isn't very racist if they elected her to the council.
This reads as a mass virtue signal by the town itself, and it's one that the politicians were only too happy to help with. I mean, they made a whole video about it.
But if you stop to think about it, their little display is kind of racist.
I looked into the story further and found that no real indications were given that racism was occurring from the neighborhood watch. Within the story reported by M Live, the only thing we're given is just hearsay, something about "lived experience," but not a personal one, and even a mention of Trayvon Martin:
“Many of us could not talk about this culture without remembering Trayvon Martin, a young Black teenager walking through a neighborhood he had every right to be in, yet perceived as a threat simply for being there,” she said.
The tragedy of Martin being fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, did not happen in isolation, Harrison said. It happened in a broader environment that normalized surveillance over relationship and fear over familiarity, she said.
The Neighborhood Watch is there to stop crime, not a race of people. Plenty of people who aren't white are in neighborhood watches. There are plenty of black police officers in the United States, and I'm willing to bet more than a few in Ann Arbor.
So, let me get this straight.
The Ann Arbor neighborhood watch did nothing wrong, yet the signs are being removed on the assumption that they made black people feel uncomfortable?
Do the Democrats in Ann Arbor not understand that they're placing black people on the opposite end of an anti-crime practice?
Are they saying black people are criminals?
Because that's kind of what they're saying.
So what's happening is that they're effectively taking down signs that make crime less likely to happen in a neighborhood because they think black people are more likely to be targeted for suspicion, and thus these signs have to go... despite there being no indication that neighborhood watches in Ann Arbor were being racist. The council didn't have any examples to pull from, so they had to talk about Trayvon Martin.
Here's an interesting fact. Neighborhood watch signs actually do reduce crime, as found by this study, which concluded:
The results of both methods show that neighborhood watch was associated with a reduction in crime of between 16 per cent and 26 per cent.
I have an idea.
Ann Arbor should just post big signs in front of neighborhoods that advertise the fact that they're gun-free. I think that if you're going to be stupid enough to increase the rate of crime in your cities and neighborhoods, then you should just go all-in and make the virtue signal complete.
Advertise every leftist moral position you have, and let the chips fall where they may.
But the bottom line here is that the Democrats created a racial situation out of thin air, which effectively implicated black people as criminals without actually saying so, and it really goes to show how the virtue the Left likes to show everyone they have is often the tell that they're the villains in the room.
