A Toxic Baltimore Brew
Scattered among the ruins of their ancestors' achievements, the white boys of Baltimore succumb to the destructive power of hate
On the west side of Baltimore—on Willard Street, just off Frederick Avenue—there is a cluster of old brick buildings slowly falling into ruin. Though barely noticeable from Frederick Avenue, such is the size and style of the buildings, even in their decrepitude, that they caught my attention as I was driving past one day in 2018. I circled around to investigate.
The chainlink gate into the complex from Willard Street stood ajar, so I parked, surveying the neighborhood. It was apparent the street was a pretty open drug market, but, as it was mid-morning and I was with a couple of friends, one of them a 90-lb American Staffordshire terrier, we decided to enter the obviously abandoned premises.
We spent an hour or two exploring. Anything of value that could be wrenched out of the building had been carted away. Everything glass had been broken. Floors that were more exposed to the elements had rotted away and evidence of fire could be seen in several places. The areas closest to the entrance were covered in trash and used syringes. But what remained of the original was truly beautiful.
The buildings were originally home to the Eigenbrot Brewery, founded at that location in 1873. In 1920, Prohibition destroyed it along with dozens of other small, independently-owned Baltimore breweries, their abandoned buildings all that remains of this once thriving industry. “Brewery architecture,” says Baltimore Heritage, “…with its romantic, Germanic character and elaborate decoration, has given Baltimore some of its most interesting industrial structures.”
Indeed, it was the elaborate brickwork in the old brewery on Willard Street, still standing more than a century after the business was destroyed, that was most noteworthy. There were arched passageways and arched doorways and cupolas and balconies overlooking cavernous rooms with long, curvilinear walls ...of brick. Many of the windows were elegantly, superfluously, arched.
The German-Americans who built this brewery went out of their way to make it graceful—the elegance emphasized by the perfect precision of the brickwork. Even in the image at the top of this page, in which the brickwork is incidental to the photo, the precision of it is evident. And notice the thickness of the walls.
That's me in the photo, by the way, looking out at the heroin market on the street below. The sellers down there were black. The buyers were mostly white—possibly including some of the descendants of the people who had built or worked in the brewery from which I was observing them. For these descendants, prohibition was never repealed.
Here’s a graphic I made back then showing the rank among the 3,142 counties in the United States in opioid overdose deaths for Baltimore and Baltimore County (Baltimore City is considered its own county).
For the decade I looked at, Baltimore City was never better than sixth highest in drug overdose deaths per one hundred thousand people—twice having the highest death toll in the country. Baltimore County, meanwhile, the suburban ring around Baltimore, was by itself 40th or higher.
The high rate of heroin abuse in Baltimore is most visible at many of the major intersections in the city, where panhandlers work the lines of cars waiting for the light to turn green. Frequently, they are working the cars in both directions, sometimes in all four. And even though white males make up just 12 percent of the population of Baltimore, almost 100 percent of the panhandlers are young, able-bodied white males.
It was the extreme racial skew of these panhandlers that particularly struck me when I moved to Baltimore from Washington, DC, in 2015. Curious to find out what was behind this new phenomenon, I started making it a point to park, get out, and talk to them. Every panhandler I spoke with was a heroin addict. In other words, every panhandler was committing slow-motion suicide—anesthetizing the pain while waiting to die.
I did a little research and discovered that in the country as a whole, white males were the demographic most likely to die of an overdose—followed by white females. On top of that, while we were just 30 percent of the nation’s population, white males were 70 percent of the nation’s suicides. A truly stunning statistic. Clearly, it wasn’t only the breweries we built that were falling into ruin.
But, the disintegration of this white male cohort isn’t surprising in the least for anyone who has been paying attention to the brutal denigration of white males ubiquitous throughout our society for decades—especially from the 1990s on. A white male born in 1990 was born into a world in which the institutions his ancestors built for his benefit have been turned into weapons against him (if you don’t believe me, go into any public library and look at the titles in their featured new books section). He has only known a world in which poisonous fallacies like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” are accepted as self-evidently true by his own culture. On television, in the classroom, in the newspapers, and, particularly, at the movies he is told over and over and over that his ancestors were racist oppressors and that the history of his people is shameful. If he succeeds in life, it is due to unearned privilege, the lie that makes him doubly to blame if he fails. He is even to blame for the failures of others thanks to the implicit racism he exudes through the color of his skin. The reigning dogma throughout his society is that diversity is our strength, thus the white man is our weakness. He is also the villain, the social retard, the sexually inadequate buffoon who can’t dance. He is a member of the only group it is okay to ridicule. He is the only American who can be denied a job explicitly and legally based on his demographic. He is hated by his own culture. No wonder he is falling into ruin.
For a long time, it was subtle, this cultural enmity, this genocidal hatred, but it is blatant now. Consider the example of Fern Shen, the Asian-American founder, editor, and publisher of an online news site called BaltimoreBrew. Before starting BaltimoreBrew, she was a reporter at The Washington Post for 17 years, with stints before that at The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant.
After a player made an anti-Asian gesture during the 2017 World Series, The New York Times ran a guest editorial written by Fern Shen in which she described how the incident reopened the old wounds she had suffered growing up Asian in New Jersey during the 1960s. She recounted how a white boy in the second grade had turned around in his seat and made a ching-chang-charley face at her. (Steve Sailer, Unz Review, “Asian Journalist Cherishes Memory of Being Otherized 50 Years Ago”). And even though Asians are now “everywhere” in the United States, she explains, the persecution continues:
So it was a bit of a shock to be confronted recently by some young white children in a supermarket parking lot in Baltimore. They were up in my face, doing the old ching-chang-charlie gibberish. It didn’t upset me so much as startle me; it was like seeing a ghost.
To anyone familiar with the supermarket parking lots of Baltimore, the claim that there was a group of white children running around one of them unsupervised and making ching-chang-charlie faces at random Asians is hard to believe. Actually, make that impossible to believe, as you never see groups of white children running around unsupervised in Baltimore. What would not be hard to believe, however, owing to the fact it’s a common sight in Baltimore, would be a claim that there was a group of black children running around unsupervised in a supermarket parking lot.
I went to the BaltimoreBrew website. There was an article on the home page congratulating Fern Shen in the third person on her recent opinion piece published in the New York Times. I left a comment expressing skepticism and asking for the specific details of her story. She deleted my comment and blocked me.
Fern Shen was lying about the racist white children. But why? Does she really carry enough racial hatred from being teased by white kids in elementary school in the 1960s that she would lie in an opinion piece about an incident in a parking lot a half century later? Probably not. It’s much more likely that, as an experienced and media-savvy journalist, she understood that the more anti-white venom she could fit into her opinion piece, the better the chances were that she would be published in the New York Times. For Fern Shen, it was to her personal benefit to write a fictitious libel against innocent children, so she did it.
So what does this say about The New York Times, the most influential newspaper in the country and the 20th most visited website in the world? It’s a sure bet the paper wouldn’t have printed Shen’s piece if she had insisted on identifying the children as black. Or Asian or Latino or, heaven forbid, Jewish. What kind of hatred encourages the demonization of innocent children?
And what is the effect on white children to be slandered with lies like this? Lies repeated hundreds—thousands—of times in their formative years? Lies about them, about their country, about their history, and about their people? When these children grow up and head out into the world, can these lies have had no effect on them? How much more easily do these children fall into despair as adults? How much damage is done to their self-worth? How much of the real human suffering that attends heroin addiction and facilitates suicide is a result of the apparently limitless enmity and hatred of The New York Times and its allies?
Fern Shen was not a victim of hate. The real victim of hate was the innocent white child she libeled—the child who grew up and is right now plying his degradation at the red lights of Baltimore to procure the means of his own extinction
In Washington, I lived in an area called Blagden Alley. Directly across the alley from my office was the Downtown Boxing Club. I could watch the boxers training from my office window and, over the years, I began to notice a pattern. Frequently, when a new boxer joined the training, he (or she) would be withdrawn, shoulders hunched, head down, scowling darkly. But, if they stuck it out, in a few weeks you could see a transformation beginning to take place. They would begin standing a little straighter. Their heads would come up a bit. They would smile once in a while. A few more weeks and they were standing as tall and confident as anyone else, joining in the banter, yelling insults and encouragement with the other guys. Actually laughing. They became a whole new person, it seemed. They began actively participating in life.
The theory I developed was that when guys like that came into the boxing program, they had reached a point where the stress of living had focused all of their attention on themselves—on themselves and their problems. It’s an easy place to fall into. We probably all do it. Instead of asking how our actions are affecting the world, we start asking why the world is happening to us. We become isolated and self-absorbed and angry or depressed. Boxing forces your attention off of yourself and onto the guy who is punching you in the face.
As I considered the plight of the panhandlers in Baltimore, I thought to myself, these guys could certainly use some of that.
So I developed a program for men in distress. It was open to men of any race, of course, but it was designed to address the specific challenges unique to white males. It was a 13-week, residency only, closed campus program that included a healthy diet emphasizing raw, whole foods, a regular schedule of exercise, and a vigorous program of study in literature (e.g., Dostoevsky, Melville), philosophy (e.g., Plato, MacMurray), history (e.g., Civil War letters, oral histories of slaves, Gibbons, Reed, Menken, Melgunov, Plutarch, Tacitus), and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. It made the arguments for constancy, honesty, loyalty, friendship, and marriage. But the core of the program was two hours of intensive boxing training every day except Sunday. I named the program the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club.
In 2017, I was able to secure an 8,000 sq ft building in Lexington, Missouri and start-up funding to get the program on its feet. By the first of the year, we had the lights on and had begun to clean the place out. Word spread about the program. People checked out our website. One local man, a long-time heroin user in his early 30s, came to the location and asked to be the first client. “As soon as I saw your website, I knew this is what I’ve always needed,” he said. “I can feel my son slipping away from me, and I want to be a good father more than anything. Your program gives me hope for the first time.” He offered to donate labor to help get the place open, the first of two young local heroin users to make that commitment. Another local man, a recent college grad, made the same offer after talking to us and committing to being the first teacher hired. Several other locals stopped by and volunteered labor as well. What a rich future lay ahead!
By the end of January, the program was dead in the water and we had been served with a stop work order threatening us with arrest if we continued opening our perfectly legal business. What happened? The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) happened. It was my second run-in with them, the first occurring twenty years earlier, which I wrote about here. The SPLC published an article on their Hatewatch blog that left the reader with the impression the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club was a nest of white supremacists (my business partner was a black guy), and that I was a racist. It was the same defamatory, poison pen venom recycled from their articles 20 years earlier.
For me, on a personal level, I know who I am and am completely comfortable with the moral code that determines the way I treat others. So, for the SPLC to call me a racist has as much personal impact on me as would a dog chained in a yard barking at me as I passed. That’s just what dogs do. But I’m made of much tougher stuff than most of the white gentiles out there, who would collapse into a quivering ball of apology if the SPLC ever called them a racist. Moreover, I’m smarter than most—Jew or gentile—and can discern that this whole anti-racism thing is a fake ideology contrived by people who hate us.
In any case, the whole drama that unfolded in Lexington was interesting in its own right, and deserves a post, but, to cut to the chase, the town erupted in terror when someone among them was called a racist by the SPLC and that was the end of the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club. The residents of a small, overwhelmingly white town in rural America shut down a white guy trying to open a business in their town after someone a thousand miles away published a single article accusing him of trying to help whites.
But what about the SPLC? What kind of hatred could drive the SPLC to want to shut down a program to help men at risk of suicide or overdose? I try to imagine a group of people I hate—say, immigration lawyers: would I want to shut down a program they were starting for their comrades who were in distress and at risk of suicide? I can’t even imagine that. Even if a murderous, foaming-at-the-mouth Bolshevik who hated Christians with a genocidal passion were starting a program to help other Bolsheviks at risk of suicide, would I try to stop that? The answer is no.
The SPLC’s hatred is next-level hatred. It is the same hatred the drives The New York Times to publish lies demonizing innocent white children. It is the same hatred that drives the genocide occurring in the Ukraine right now. It is Khazar hatred and so extreme it is nearly unfathomable to the rest of humanity. But it is real and it is directed at us, so we better fathom it. There is no ducking Khazar hatred. Consider this: the SPLC is part of the White House’s National Campaign to Counter Antisemitism. That’s how serious this is.
I’ve begun posting 10-minute exerpts from Serge Melgunov’s The Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923 as audio files to make it easier for this important work to reach a wider audience. (I was going to post them as podcasts, but didn’t want to flood everyone’s inbox). Nothing I’ve ever read can convey the horror of Khazar hatred like that book.
Finally, when we visited the Eigenbrot Brewery in Baltimore in 2018, I was seized with a desire to rescue it. It was too much of a tragedy that something so remarkable was left to fall into ruin. I even tracked down and contacted the owner to see whether there was some way to revitalize the site. The owner was a typical land speculator who lived “out in the county.” There was no response. I had the same feeling for the panhandlers for whom I developed the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club. Here is a video [4:45] featuring Josh, a defeated panhandler in Baltimore and the target of the hatred of The New York Times, the SPLC, and Fern Shen.
Just came across this belatedly. Anne C linked it from Linh Dinh. You are one amazing guy. Thank you for all you've done and continue to do for our people.