As Brandon Morse reported last week, conservative activist Scott Presler did a good thing by organizing a community cleanup earlier this month of the poverty-stricken areas of Baltimore that are plagued by trash dumping and the failure of the city to pick up the trash on a consistent basis. To recap:
After President Donald Trump drew attention to Baltimore, some of his supporters went down to West Baltimore to assist with a cleanup effort. The group posted pictures of the effort with before and after photos and found some interesting things along the way.
According to OANN, the group was led by activist Scott Presler, who lead over 100 volunteers after the controversy first arose in the media. Presler said his cleanup effort started with a simple tweet about going to clean up Baltimore, even if it’s just by himself. The tweet went viral, and before he knew it the effort had a slew of volunteers ready to go.
The residents themselves were highly grateful and didn’t seem to be angry at Trump whatsoever.
Presler’s cleanup and the photos and videos he posted afterwards caught the attention of the liberal editorial board snobs at the Baltimore Sun, who wrote a sneering editorial in the immediate aftermath that focused more on what they believed Presler’s motivations were than the actual good deeds that were performed. Here’s just some of what they said (bolded emphasis added):
Whatever he says his motives were, Mr. Presler’s presence in Baltimore reinforces the tired image of our failing urban cores. That the poor people in this dilapidated city can’t take care of their own neighborhoods and all the public officials around them have failed as well. The bureaucratic, all-talk Democrats strike again. If a crowd of volunteers could clean up 12 tons of trash in 12 hours, how incompetent and helpless must Baltimoreans be if they can’t manage it in decades, right?
In short, the paper was far more concerned with the fact that Presler and his team made Democrats at the local, state, and national level (like longtime Rep. Elijah Cummings) look bad than they were with what was actually done by the volunteers to clean up the piles of trash and bring the community together.
The BS editorial board also indicated they were skeptical that Presler would return as he had said he would:
We also hope Mr. Presler keeps his promise to return to Baltimore once a month. It would definitely give his motives more credibility.
[…]
In the meantime, we’ll see how clean the neighborhood still is when he returns in September.
They needn’t be skeptical anymore. Presler alerted them Monday in a tweet that planning for the second cleanup effort was already underway:
Dear @baltimoresun,
I want you to know I'm meeting with my volunteer team this week to plan Baltimore cleanup #2.
I made a promise to 81-year-old, Louise, that we would come back to West Baltimore & I'm a man of my word.
— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) August 12, 2019
To get a good idea of what Presler and his team first came up against when they visited the city, watch this video done by Fox 45 last year of a tour they went on with then-Mayor Catherine Pugh (D) of the hardest-hit areas of the city:
A firm September date has not yet been given by Presler as to when the cleanup crew will be returning to Baltimore. Stay tuned for more info in the coming weeks.
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— Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter. –
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