Say their names:  Ryan Dorsey, Odette Ramos, Phylicia Porter, and Kristerfer Burnett.
 

These are the four members of Baltimore’s City Council who refused to condemn the terrorist group Hamas for their massacre of Israelis and others on October 7 and, more broadly, failed to condemn antisemitism and genocide against the Jewish people.
 

On Monday, December 4, Councilman Yitzy Schleifer introduced a resolution that exactly mirrored one that the Council passed unanimously in 2019 after the worst terrorist attack in New Zealand’s history, where 50 Muslims were murdered for being Muslim.  He simply swapped in the location and victims of this latest manifestation of bigotry and barbarism.
 

Of course, reasonable people may differ about how the Israel Defense Forces are prosecuting the war that Hamas started on October 7.  But this resolution was not about that.  To their credit, nine members of the Council understood this and demonstrated a trustworthy moral compass:  Zeke Cohen, Mark Conway, Sharon Green Middleton, Eric Costello, Antonio Glover, Danielle McCray, John Bullock, Nick Mosby, and Mr. Schleifer supported the resolution.  (Two members, James Torrence and Robert Stokes, were absent.)
 

In the aftermath of this deeply troubling vote, Councilman Schleifer criticized his colleagues for a “lack of moral clarity.”  At the least.
 

In coming days, Baltimore’s Shameful Four will doubtless argue that the resolution lacked nuance or failed to consider some subtle aspect of Mideast policy they would prefer to discuss instead of Hamas’s behavior and status as a terrorist organization.  That’s disingenuous; dissembling.
 

Supporting Mr. Schleifer’s resolution was just as much a moral imperative as supporting the one in 2019.  But embracing it would have forced the abstainers to put some ideological distance between themselves and radicals like those who disrupted the Council session (prior to introduction of the resolution) chanting popular Leftist slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  Again, reasonable people may differ about whether that calls for peace and harmony between Israelis and Palestinians or the eradication of Israel itself, but it’s clear what at least some Leftists think that means.  But, again, that issue was not on the table; only a dedicated radical would see it there.
 

Remember when Democratic thought leaders worried that knee-jerk liberalism was damaging the progressive cause?  Good times.  It’s now worth considering how knee-jerk radicalism might not only handicap the Democratic Party in the upcoming national election but yield unwholesome effects on state and local politics and even affect migration patterns.
 

In a recent piece in National Review, my Johns Hopkins University colleague Steve Hanke and I discussed how Americans have been voting with their feet and migrating (at least partly) due to political factors.  For example, blue California and New York each lost more than half a million residents between the 2020 Census and the latest estimate; red Texas gained almost 900,000 and Florida more than 700,000.
 

This is not a good thing.  Aside from the fact that it’s costly (both emotionally and financially) to uproot in pursuit of more congenial political climes, this makes the overall political climate worse.  As Prof. Hanke and I explain, “[r]epelling people with whom you disagree — alienating them so much they actually leave — can enhance politicians’ job security.  Their political base becomes numerically more important, and they become more powerful.”
 

The result is extremism and division.  Political competition gets weaker; the center cannot hold.  Radicals on either side can feel emboldened.  We see frequent gridlock – or, worse, bad policy choices.
 

This is, of course, a problem that goes far beyond Baltimore.  But it’s a reason why we should worry about the Shameful Four – and the radicals who seem to make up a growing portion of our fair city’s dangerously declining population – beyond this controversy.  It exposed them:  they’re out of the political mainstream.  While the episode is hurtful to many and embarrassing to all, more troubling is that it signals a set of political reflexes that will continue to encourage the reasonable to flee the city and the radical to stay.  That will not end well.
 

Stephen J.K. Walters (swalters@mdpolicy.org) is the author of Boom Towns:  Restoring the Urban American Dream, and Chief Economist at the Maryland Public Policy Institute.