Fresh off condemning libertarian "freedom" rhetoric as racist, TV producer David Simon, creator of the acclaimed HBO series "The Wire" and others, talked to the non-profit "public interest" news outlet ProPublica about his new miniseries "Show Me a Hero," on the desegregation of Yonkers, NY, after a federal judge ordered public housing projects to be built in white, wealthy parts of town. Simon lamented "the dynamic of hyper-segregation," then explained the term with the illiberal gesture of making insulting generalizations about an entire race: "White people, by and large, are not very good at sharing physical space or power or many other kinds of social dynamics with significant numbers of people of color."
David Simon
By Clay Waters | August 17, 2015 | 11:00 PM EDT
Television writer-producer David Simon, whose acclaimed HBO series The Wire and Treme pushed liberal approaches to urban policy, sat for a New York Times interview to promote Show Me a Hero, Simon's HBO mini-series about the Yonkers, NY, desegregation controversy of the mid-1980s. It also provided Simon yet another platform to rail against the "astonishing moment of political amnesia" that marks what he sees as today's "entrenched libertarian notion," as well as suggesting that libertarian rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberty" is just code for racism.
By Tim Graham | December 8, 2013 | 6:35 PM EST
David Simon, the toast of Hollywood and the cultural elite for creating the inner-city Baltimore crime drama "The Wire" for HBO, unleashed a left-wing jeremiad on the "Two Americas" at a "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" in Sydney, Australia.
He also shocked Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik for admitting people don't really watch his HBO stuff. As his show "Treme" ends on Sunday, he declared, “I don’t know about HBO. They may be getting hip to the fact that nobody watches my [expletive] when it’s on the air. And that’s not likely to change, I don’t think.” The British newspaper The Guardian published his talk in Australia, where he ran down America and talked up Karl Marx as a "diagnostician" of capitalism's ills.
By Tim Graham | July 15, 2013 | 10:58 PM EDT
Via The Wrap, we learned that on his blog “The Audacity of Despair,” former Baltimore Sun reporter and "The Wire" creator David Simon bluntly attacked the George Zimmerman verdict, suggesting it begs for racial rioting. He had that self-righteously arrogant tone of a former sportscaster who couldn’t keep a job in cock-eyed commentary.
“If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford,” Simon confessed. “Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence — these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve. I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.”