It’s not what politicians say they’re going to do that you most have to worry about, and this isn’t just because they’re notorious for breaking promises. It’s that it’s what they don’t say they’re going to do, but do anyway once in power, that’s far worse.
A good example is the Democrats’ plan to destroy the suburbs, which they see as bastions of white privilege/supremacy whose rise has occurred at cities’ expense.
Unbelievable? Well, know that this plan was already initiated in 2009, by Barack Obama, who instituted a “regulation that federalized local zoning and land-use policies,” as the Wall Street Journal recently reported. President Trump rolled back this regulation July 22, but a Joe Biden presidency would resurrect it and more, delivering to suburbs the coup de grâce.
Being used as a cudgel is the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which “requires recipients of federal block grants to certify that they ‘affirmatively further fair housing [AFFH],’” the Journal further informed. “In 1996 the Clinton Administration issued 170 pages of guidance interpreting those four words, and lawsuits proliferated.”
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In fact, a suit targeted my county, Westchester, just north of New York City. As a result, 10 out of every 50 units in a new condominium building not far from my residence had to be “affordable housing.”
It turned out that it wasn’t Section 8 housing — a.k.a. diversifying safe neighborhoods with criminals — so we’d dodged a bullet in this case. But the Democrats haven’t dispensed with their Equality™ goal here: redistributing suburban tax money to the cities, and crime and other city social ills to the suburbs.
The National Review’s Stanley Kurtz explained this well last month in “Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs,” writing (as presented at American Thinker):
Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.
That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands…. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants….
The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked.
Summing up, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson said earlier this month (video below. Relevant portion begins at 1:47), “Towns will be ordered to abolish zoning for single-family housing because single-family homes, needless to say, are ‘racist.’ …You won’t see projects being built in Aspen or Martha’s Vineyard or anywhere else Eric Holder vacations, but in your neighborhood? Oh, yeah.”
Yet there’s more. Writer John M. Contino astutely noted yesterday that there’s “a lesser known corollary to ‘defund the police,’ which is to ‘eliminate incarceration.’ That raises the question of what to do with formerly incarcerated individuals.”
Contino then quotes the Denver Post, which helps answer that question:
At a city council meeting in June … Councilwoman Robin Kniech told the audience that if “you want to end incarceration, you can’t just talk about policing. We have to talk about the other systems that co-reinforce that racism,” one of which she identified as the zoning code. That code, she complained, says community corrections facilities — halfway houses in popular parlance — “are not welcome, and in particular in single-family neighborhoods.”
So the scheme is simple:
1. Assert federal control over suburban zoning.
2. Eliminate single family homes as much as possible and build project-style buildings.
3. Defund (dismantle) the police and perhaps replace them with a federally controlled, “woke” entity.
4. Eliminate incarceration.
5. Move criminals and other ne’er-do-wells into the suburbs.
It’s a recipe for turning Mayberry into Gotham in a decade.
Leftists want to “cancel” white-picket-fence America because, in part, they believe it’s too white. As Obama would lament, suburbia is where those privileged white people fled his comrades’ enlightened policies, thus eroding the cities’ tax base and creating their social ills (as the theory goes).
Unsaid is that while there are white suburban neighborhoods and towns, along with non-white ones, the suburbs are already 35 to 40 percent non-white (including Hispanics in this category) on average — precisely matching the United States’ general population. But, hey, facts shouldn’t get in the way of an effective race-card play.
Speaking of which, because I could be a master criminal were I thus disposed, I often can predict leftists’ future proposals before they themselves even conceive them. So try this on for size:
Let’s say you’re convinced that whites possess their property only due to their privilege, to unfairness, and you want to do a Robert Mugabe and redistribute it. Simply seize federal control of real-estate-tax rates; then raise them to a point at which the average homeowner can’t afford to keep his property.
Oh, in accordance with the affirmative-action philosophy, you don’t “charge whites more” (wink, wink) — but you do offer “non-whites” a steep real-estate tax break as a form of reparations. Then white homeowners will be forced to sell their property to minorities at a cut rate or have it seized; if the latter, the residences could then be transferred to minorities via a government program.
Can’t happen? Note that Democrats in California are already pushing to legalize racial discrimination.
Of course, perhaps the above won’t happen. What’s for certain, however, is that average Americans will be visited with tyrannical policies they can’t even imagine if they empower today’s Democrats. For leftists may not always deliver on their promises, but they sure will deliver on what they fail to promise.
Photo: da-kuk / E+ / Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
