The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW "Untenable": How and Why Cities Were Broken

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

To best understand the future threat of 15 Minute Cities, SmartCities, etc — take a look at the last 60 years. Urban flight was both black and white but media made it racism, ignoring the true problems. Jack Cashill's book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities", is both a personal look, having grown up in Newark, NJ and a bigger picture look at the problem coming at us.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

all right joining us now is an author of many books i've seen his name many different places but you got a brand new book out uh untenable the true story of white ethnic flight from america's cities uh his name is jack cashel uh cashel sorry and um rhymes as he said with uh dashel if you remember that guy from politics. But anyway, Jack Kaschle is with us. And we want to talk about this, and it's especially relevant based on what has just happened in Supreme Court decisions. Tell us a little bit about it, Jack. Right, you know, because I had basically, I'm just going to show you the book here.

It's untenable. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey during the fall of newark and i watched it firsthand and uh what i uh was able to come away with was a experiential reaction to what i was seeing this is in the 60s and 70s uh and then when i read these Supreme Court decisions, which I did, which is hard to read because the absence of facts sort of pound my fact-filled brain like waves against the shore by Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sotomayor, is that they deny this happened. They insist that all of the disparities between white and black income are rooted in the past and rooted in Jim Crow, slavery, et cetera, the Homesteading Act. I mean, they're throwing all of these things up against the wall, but neither of them hints at the reversal that occurred in black fortunes during the 1960s and that has continued to occur to this day. Yeah.

And it's an amazing kind of denialism. You were just talking about it right here. You're a climate denier. You're denying a, you're a skeptic of a phenomenon that is based on dubious computer projections, right? You can recall that these people, much like Holocaust denialists, deny a real tragic concrete phenomenon, and that is the destruction of America's cities, and from 1960 to 1980, a destruction that continues to this day.

And some people, I pointed out last week, somebody said that Brown Jackson is kind of like Harris. And the way that he approached this, she said something ludicrous about unemployment and had a 40% increase because they didn't have affirmative action or something like that. And said, well, stop and think about that.

You would notice that if it were that high and the fact that it's doubled it you know you would uh it just absolutely makes no sense whatsoever uh to uh the the you know just basic logic the the facts that she threw out there the number she threw out there couldn't possibly be true she just uh pulled them up out of thin air but you know you're talking about to the degree that the numbers have any relevance, they hinge on the fact that she's denying why there is this disparity. Yes. So if 64% of the black children in America are living in single-parent homes, and 16% of the Asian children are living in 16 single-parent homes, there's going to be disparity in her

outcomes, even if they're genetically equal, right? And there's going to be disparity in the single mother's ability to create equity. Because last time we tried to put single mothers in homes, we got the subprime crisis. And they do it all over again. They do it by ignoring the reality that I lived as an adolescent in Newark, not just me, but millions of people did all across the country. And cities like Newark, big cities like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York. I've heard from people all across the country, David, and our experiences are remarkably similar. And Congressman Burgess has talked about that, how there was a vibrant middle class in the black communities, and it was destroyed by the Great Society programs of LBJ. As a matter of fact, it's kind of surprising to me, you know, there was that book that

was written by Charles Murray, Losing Ground. And, you know, that was something that was used at the time of the Reagan administration to talk about how this is not working. It's actually counterproductive. It's hurting the people that it was intended to help. And yet it's amazing to see that, you know, he's some of the people out there pushing universal basic income. It's like, what is going on? You know, this is, that's just a massive welfare program for everybody. And that's what is really concerning about this, because these people have not learned anything. Even some of the people who had learned something about it at one point in time seem to have forgotten that lesson. And they're pushing us in this direction.

And they're going to extend this to everybody. This is not just going to be for the poor people. They want with universal basic income. They want to breed dependency for everybody, don't they? No't they no i mean right why not subvert all families equally that way there'll be a lesser gap between the races yeah no i i am an untenable i tell it as a personal story it's this part memoir of a part social history and i got the title from a friend of mine. I lived in my block in 1960, and I was 12 years old. It was like the perfect urban block. You know, it was integrated.

On my street, there were immigrants from 14 different countries. I'm checking the census. I found this out. There were 363 people in the block. And in 1950, that's the last year a census is accessible, there were 85 households on my working class block. It was an integrated block. 83 of those households had a male head of household,

a married male head of household, 83 out of 85. Out of those 83, two two were retired two were unemployed 79 were working and the census lists their jobs there was no blue collar job in america this side of lumberjacking that was not represented on my block casket making rubber molding hucksters and my favorite there were 30 women who were working outside the home my favorite though of all the all the all the job titles was janitress right so here's a woman who embraced not only her job but her sex right and what was it she's a janitor oh janitress okay Okay. I've never even heard that word before. And then a dozen years later, this is 1960.

Everything's smooth. We got commerce and all the shops are filled. People are going to church and buses and movie theaters and vibrant community. And like a thousand other communities across America in 1960. And then about 1972, my last friend left the block. And I asked him, now he's a Democrat, so he's arguing against interest. And we were a bunch of us talking. And this was just last year. And I said, Artie, so why did you and your widowed mother finally leave the block? You guys were the last ones out and he said well jack uh it became and he's searching for the word untenable and i said what do you mean by untenable he said well when your mother's been mugged for

the second time that's untenable wow when your home is invaded for the second time that's untenable and i said thank you arty you just gave me my title you know so that's untenable. And I said, thank you, Artie, you just gave me my title. That's amazing. But what's interesting too, David, is that this exodus of white ethnics from the cities, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, created a dramatic political turn. These people, we all grew up as Democrats and once we went through

this process and saw what was happening and saw the media lined up against us so the progressives lined up scolding us for leaving shaming us for leaving white flight uh I would say 80 to 90 percent of the people that i've communicated with i talked about 50 people are now republicans wow in fact uh you know growing up in newark new jersey uh since the uh the close-in real estate was too expensive it had already been well occupied and so the people who left had to flee south down to Garden State Parkway, 50 or 60 miles into these slapdash suburbs being thrown up in the hinterlands in the Jersey Shore, the Pine Barren area. So as a result of that, Ocean County now,

New Jersey, which is where they also filmed the show Jersey Shore, is the reddest county in New Jersey. It's as red as West Virginia. They vote two to one for Trump both times. Right. And on the Seaside Heights boardwalk, they have shops dedicated to Trump paraphernalia. You wouldn't know that from thinking you think of New Jersey as a blue state, which is because of the the big city the controls and the big cities but these people have exiled and it turned them as a and yet no one talks to them no one has ever talked to them before no one's ever asked them why they left

yeah yeah and of course you know one of the reasons that they're able to uh as they see the cities being destroyed by these political and they can flee and they can go further south and it increases their time perhaps for commute for their work and that type of thing but they have that ability to do that that's one of the things that they're trying to take away from us they want to pack us into these cities i refer to these smart cities and stuff as indian reservations because you're not that's a good parallel yeah you're not gonna be able to flee that's right yeah they going to lock you up. That's right.

Yeah. They're going to lock you up. Yeah, they control you. That's right. Right. So you've got all these Saturdays. They put you in elevators. They put you in, you know, public transportation and you're controlled. That's right.

Yeah. As I was saying earlier today, just imagine lockdowns without any private cars. You know, next time they do that if we don't have private cars. So you've got all these. Where are you, David? Where are you located? Oh, I'm in Tennessee. I fled to the hills.

A lot of people have fled to Tennessee. Oh yeah. It's very, very Republican. And yeah, we came through here with all the lockdown stuff. So people were not buying the mask stuff and the officials are not pushing that stuff. And so, yeah, we're uh we we we got out of texas even out of because i was in austin at the time yeah well austin's as bad as anybody else oh yeah it's like california but yeah it's uh you know there's a as i'm sure you're aware there's a second we're into white flight 2.0 now uh but we don't call it that because the

people who are fleeing are them you know, they're the progressive elites, the ones who can work remotely and white flight 1.0, my white flight, uh, it was the blue collar people who left today. The blue collar people have to stay behind because you can't, you know, replace a sewer pipe remotely,

you know, um, but the major cities and not, and, and the worker, the city, the more people they've lost, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, they're hemorrhaging millions of people collectively. Overwhelmingly white, and yet the media does not dare label this as white. That's something only the underclass gets labeled with. That's right.

So myself and a lot of my friends, we'd borne a grudge for a long time. And fortunately, finally, and unsettable, I've got to plug my book here, I get to tell the story. Well, and you mentioned as you were talking about this and your experience there in New Jersey that the book is about, you talk about the fatherlessness. And that is such a key thing and we see how this is the vitriol and the hatred uh of fathers you know we now have um

uh you know an archbishop of course saying well you know the our father is real troubling because the patriarchy in it and we have robert downey jr saying yeah men are just so awful we've got to have a matriarchy and all the rest of the stuff. But it is, it began as a very subtle attack on fathers. Didn't it? Where uncle Sam came in to provide for the family. I think that's really where you start looking at this LG LB, this LBJ, uh, program. I've said LGBT for so long, but, uh, that's really where, where this started coming in and started breaking up the

family didn't it with the um that's exactly right david and i circa 1950 something like 80 85 percent of black children were living in with two parent homes i was a paper boy in newark so i went into all these homes and some you know like they were we just thought it was a different ethnic group we didn't think of them as this is into the into the early 60s uh and then but these programs have started locally in various places lbj sort of packaged them together and then um expanded them uh and under the rubric of the great society and it was his effort to buy the black vote for the foreseeable future, which he put in extremely crude terms, which I'm not going to repeat on the air.

And unfortunately, he seems to have succeeded. He succeeded by making or helping to make or accelerating the destruction of the black family and making single mothers especially dependent on the government and adverse to voting against any uh you know political party that would threaten that dependency it would threaten their their sustenance it's a it's a great racket and unfortunately uh for the black community especially and for anyone who lives near it it's worked

yeah you can certainly see the war on the family now as they're hostile to parents being involved with curriculum at PTA meetings. They're now extremists and dangerous and that type of thing. But it really did begin in a very subtle way with what looked like it was intended to help people. That was what was so insidious about it was how subtle it was. And yet it provided these perverse incentives that really started unraveling the family along with entertainment and all the rest of these things. But that was a core thing going back to, um, uh, to that government policy that you, that you've just been talking about. Uh, sorry.

Cause if, uh, you know, and I've worked for the Newark housing authority. I mean, so I saw this stuff up close and I started chronicling what I was seeing. Um, and it was disastrous. I mean, you didn't have to wait 50 years to see who was going to be a disaster. By 1970, the handwriting was on the wall. So Newark, for instance, which had 24 homicides in uh 1950 by 1970 it had 158 and the population had shrunk you know and um so you see that now in the debate for reparations right they're into 60s nihilism, too. They have to pretend that what happened in the 1960s, and I use that generically, I mean, expands a little bit each way, in which their civil rights leaders cheered on was responsible for their own undoing.

So, and it's maddening. You know, I was in a televised debate on reparations last month, David, and it was very telling. This is televised on our local PBS station in Kansas City, where I live now. They had a very hard time finding a second panelist to join me. Nobody wanted to touch this. They're afraid, right? It's so insane. White people are afraid to speak out well there's no there's a

reason this you're going to be seeing reparations committees succeeding and getting their way yes as they've already done in evanston illinois yeah we had the evanston representative there as part of the debate yeah and whenever i mentioned like uh the great society or the 60s or the consequences of that they would act as though they didn't hear me like they just talk go back to talking about jim crow and homestead act and you know uh slavery i mean those are bad things i admit it right no no denying that but they were competing in the cities like where i grew up every kid i knew had a living relative who was born in another country. So we're all migrants in a way.

And we had left, some of these people had left more horrible places than the blacks who were coming up from the South and the great migration. We had all come from bad places. We come to a city like Newark or any American city looking for freedom, for opportunity, for security, for the rule of law. And for a period of time, we had that collectively, blacks and whites together. And then we didn't. Yeah. Yeah, my wife is from New York, Long Island area. And everybody that she knew was like second generation, first or second generation immigrants.

Her family came from Italy and Poland and things like that. And yet, you know, when you look at this reparations thing, there's absolutely no way that it could be practically applied. You can see what the agenda is pretty clearly with this. You go back and look at the Great Society great society programs of lbj uh you could kind of you know get the idea that what they're trying to do is build dependency and that's what they did do uh but you know it looked like it was going to be something beneficial but this doesn't even have a way that they can actually apply it because as you're talking about all the people

who have come here you know uh well after slavery you're going to come after them simply because of the color of their skin. And then when you talk about other people like the Obamas, you know, how do you make these kinds of adjustments? You know, he says clearly he's half white. So what do you do with a situation like that? And his black half had nothing to do with the American slave experience. That's right. That's right. same thing with kamala harris right i mean would she get money because her her mother was jamaican you know and there's a good percentage now of black americans

who come from either africa or the west indies they tend to be more conservative and they also tend to be more productive because they weren't corrupted by the whole welfare dependency program. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But it becomes this thing that is absolutely unworkable. And I think the only purpose of it is really to sow strife within different groups against each other. Because there's no way they can ever do it, so it's always going to be a perpetual irritant that they can mine for

political purposes, isn't it? Right. The, uh, when I was in the reparations debate with this woman from Evanston where they have a program in play, uh, and Evanston had 7% Trump vote. I mean, so that tells you something about Evanston. It's a university town, but it's also an affluent Chicago suburb. That combination is deadly. And so that means there's money to

suck and people willing to give it. So what they started to do was, then they worked redlining and they decided that redlining was part of the whole legacy, even though that practice ended in 1968. And 82% of the people who were redlined were white, but that's irrelevant. Only blacks were eligible in Evanston. They had to prove that they were legacies.

That is that they were, their parents were in Evanston up to 1968. And then they had to prove they were black. And then they were given $25,000. First, it was to be for a down payment on a home or home repairs. But then they decided that was too much hassle because they'd have to check. So they just decided to give everyone $25,000. I mean, this is a racket.

Yeah, it has. It's got elements of universal basic income in it, except it's not universal. It's there to create racial division and ethnic division and strife. So, you know, and that's really been the tactic of the Marxists here in this country is to set things up along ethnic and racial lines because they feel, and I think they're right, it's going to work better than their class warfare that they had in Europe. We don't have that here. So they exploit that kind of division. We were talking about Obama, and you have in your book something about Michelle Obama and how a black flight problem is going to affect her potential run for president, because we all know, I agree with you, that she's going to run at some point in time.

Who knows? It might even be this next time, because the articles about Biden are, when should he get out? Not whether he should, but when. That's what I saw on Drudge Report, which is a pretty good aggregator for mainstream media now. When is he going to get out? So I don't know. When is she going to run? Well, and her bench is so shallow.

I mean, it looks like either she or Gavin Newsom. I know. And if you're the poster child representing San Francisco, I wouldn't want to brag about that. No, but Michelle Obama had very responsible parents, Marion and Frazier. Her father was, you know, allegedly worked for as a water engineer for the city of Chicago, which is a front job for his work as a precinct captain and daily machine. Her mother was a stay at home mom. mom they were they had enough money to do that michelle grew up in a in a black co-op for the middle class it was the a wonder of its age

called the parkway gardens but by the time she was old enough for school that neighborhood had so deteriorated that the original settlers were getting out and they're all black right and so what uh michelle's mother did and this was a classy misdemeanor she enrolled her in a school like a 15 minute drive away from her neighborhood because even though the neighborhood school was brand new shiny school the project kids were going there and the mom didn't want michelle and craig her brother in with those kids understandable actually so they drive her down 15 minutes away to a neighborhood that had been jewish but was rapidly transitioning enroll her in school there and then two years later they moved down there's black flight they were fleeing parkway gardens for the same reason that white families were fleeing places like North Woodlawn

in Chicago or South Shore, which is where Michelle ends up. And then when it came to high school, the Robinsons didn't want to send their children to the all-black high school two blocks away. So they sent Craig to a Catholic school, even though they're not Catholic, they had to pay for that. Marion had to take a second job to pay for him to avoid the local public school and they sent Michelle like 90 minutes each way downtown to a magnet school and that's classic I mean it's just that is what responsible parents do another woman who lived in that same neighborhood uh was donna west in south shore in his chicago neighborhood and her son goes you know he's 10 years old he's out riding his bike gets jumped by a bunch of black kids they cut the tires of his bike you know and beat him up send them home

and don the west says if they can do that to kanye we're getting out of here she says in her book she says call it black flight. Call it what you want. We're gone. This is Kanye West, mother. In my town, and I tell this story in the book because it's a very poignant story. And it's so typical of what black families went through was a woman named Sissy Dugard was her name at birth. She's one of eight children. Her father comes up in a great migration, hardworking guy, works at a foundry throughout the Depression, supports his

eight children, takes them all to church, takes care of his ailing mother. Sissy grows up, you know, really hardworking, God-fearing, you know, church-going woman. She marries John Houston, a fellow named John Houston, whose family lived in my neighborhood. And they have their daughter, Whitney, right? Whitney Houston. And so in her memoir about Whitney Houston, Sissy talks about how they lived in this cozy little village. It was an integrated village in Newark, and they loved it. Everyone was nice to each other. And then the crime started coming in, the drugs started coming in. And then she said,

then the riots come in 1967. And she says, we've got to get out of here. Three years later, they moved to the suburbs. That was what happened with your black, with your white, with your Asian, Hispanic, whatever. It's just that the white people were singled out and shamed for leaving yes and they still bear that stigma white flight you know yeah well that's always been the case you know people have uh going back to jefferson's i mentioned frequently you know he was not big on cities uh he said they threatened the wealth the health and the liberty of mankind and so you know what made it possible really was the car. And so you started seeing that happen a lot as people got out of the big cities

and got into the suburbs. The urban planners really hate that. Oh, they hate it. They hate it with a passion. And I remember the guy who is the CEO of Lyft. He used to be an urban planner before he became the CEO of Lyft. And so he wrote a paper talking about how cars are the most evil invention of mankind and cities were the best thing that was ever invented.

It's like, what? How upside down and backwards that is. But that's the model. I think the thing that is interesting about your book, Untenable, is the fact that people understand this by the experience. They understand that they need to get out of these bad areas. They have the ability to do it now. And as I see these mega cities, the 15-minute cities,

the smart cities and all the rest of the stuff, their impulse is to try to concentrate us into these areas. But everybody, white and black, understand that that's not what they want. They have the ability to get out. And I think it's going to be, if we can get people to understand where this is headed, nobody's going to have, because nobody wants it. And we've seen people voting with their feet and they need to be able to understand where this is going.

But I think it's a positive thing when you, when you look at how you had this flight out of the cities that you're about in Untenable, I think that's a good thing because people already have that experience. They have that learning experience in them, and they know that they don't want to be packed into these cities. We just have to get them to understand where this is all headed, I think. No, you're entirely right. And we're seeing it all happen all over again.

In my generation, we learned as adolescents. So for instance, I commuted to high school in New York City. I won a scholarship to a New York City high school. And when it was time, I met my wife in graduate school at Purdue, and I loved Indiana. It was such a nice bucolic kind of place. And I said, when we were looking for jobs, I said, no big cities. I'm sorry i'm i want nothing to do with them now and here's here was the rub this is about 1975 we're finishing graduate

school uh white males weren't employable in my field at all period we were getting letters there they're bragging about how we have no interest in you if you're white and male yeah so i had to follow my wife wherever she could get a job and we ended up in kansas city because i needed a city big enough to employ me but not so big there was smother us uh you know a city in which you could easily have two cars and not not be an issue uh because i did not want anything to do with that that manhattan's lifestyle you know that kind of New York, New Jersey style. And what happens is when you live in those areas, David, it almost forces you to think communistically, you know, you, you're always thinking collectively, you know,

whether you're riding an elevator or taking a subway. And that's why those cities were such not so much hotbeds of actual COVID, but hotbeds of COVID paranoia. And they welcomed almost that kind of draconian suppression of freedom and movement. I don't know how they did it. Because I just ignored COVID from day one. And I tried to lead a public protest on day one, actually. And then I found that most of my friends were not quite as freedom loving as I thought they were, you know?

So, Oh yeah. The lockdown was the antithesis of everything this country is about. It's just as amazing. And there was obviously nobody was dead from it. You know, we, it was all just projection.

It was all based on computer models, which is very alarming. When you look at the climate alarmism that they might use these computer models to lock us down again. But, you know, I know what, in fact, when I went on Facebook and I have a fair amount of followers on Facebook and I said, this is literally the day one of the lockdown in Kansas City. And I said, I'm willing to be the public face of protest. Anyone wants to join me? I said, we're shutting down our economy. And between the states of Missouri and Kansas, there have been four deaths so far. Right?

This is crazy. Yeah. And then one of the commenters wrote in, I hope you're number five. I know. I know. That's the way they were thinking already. And, you know, part of that is you look at the big cities, and I think it's kind of a natural reaction that as people get packed together, it's kind of like the elevator phenomenon, right?

You pack a bunch of people in elevator. Nobody wants to look at each other. You know, you look at the ceiling or you look at the floor, a little bit of space there, you know, people start will relate to each other as human beings, but the more you pack people. And so I think that's kind of a general phenomenon about the cities. You know, they're like elevators. Nobody wants to know anybody or anything. And so everybody keep them at a distance. And if you can't keep them at a distance physically, because you're packed into a city, you keep them at a

distance socially. So they naturally fell into that social distancing thing. Right, exactly. And to your point earlier about what planners want to do, they want to put us in those situations. For about a bunch of years, maybe a dozen years or more, I, through a regional business magazine that I'm affiliated with, I moderated a monthly roundtable of CEOs in various industries. And a couple times a year we do urban planning. And their model city, I mean, and they were openly expressing, why can't Kansas City be more like Portland?

That was the model. And I said, Portland's going too far. I said, in Portland, I said, the sign that the city's gone bad is that when they have one mime, when they have a second street mime, one mime, the city can endure. When they have a second mime, then the city's in trouble. I should have said when the first Antifa chapter shows up, you know this city's in trouble. But Portland was a model. Ten years ago, I only visited Portland. Have you ever been to Portland?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, the guy that rides a unicycle wearing a kilt playing bagpipes on fire. Yeah, that's Portland. I was there 10 years ago. By then, it was still a pretty charming, quirky, eccentric city. I distrusted a city in which people would line up for two hours in advance to get a donut, but nonetheless, that was a sign, I guess. And I was visiting a black friend of mine, which is even more curious

because there's almost very few black people in Portland. And he was treated like a visiting sun god, you know, when he went to the neighborhood. And then it's self-destructed. Who could believe San Francisco would do what it did to itself? It was my favorite city. I've been there 15 times. You know, I wrote a book on California What's the matter with California And I didn't include San Francisco

It was kind of a bright spot It destroyed Los Angeles You look at Portland and they have the signs Keep Portland weird They do the same thing in Austin That donut shop The zombie donut shop They open that up in Austin

We got to get out of here That's a sign donut shop the zombie donut shop or something they open that up in austin it's like you know the family we got to get out of here it's that's a sign yeah in portland it was the voodoo donut that's right voodoo that was what it was yeah not zombie oh it's a chain that's even worse it's not even you know unique to uh you know yeah i mean it's when a bit of jerry's opens up in your neighbor and you know it's time to leave right next to the to the zombie donut shop uh you were talking about of course again it comes a lot of this comes down to transportation and one of the things that i find interesting is um you know the racist highways you talk about in your book uh and and the rationale for that is totally contradictory to what they want to do with the 15 minute cities

right they're saying well you're by the traffic is bypassing our neighborhood. So we've got to tear down these highways rather than building any more infrastructure. They want to tear down what was there to kind of preserve, uh, you know, a pedestrian area. And at the same time, they're giving us this other thing. Well, we don't want the, any cars on the streets. We want people to be able to walk around or ride bicycles or whatever. But again, it's just this, you know, the racist highway stands in stark contrast to everything else that they say they want in these new cities.

Let me flash a book here and untenable. I mean, it's one myth after another that I got to expose. I really, no one had written this book before. No one had interviewed the people who fled the cities, asked them why they fled. No one had examined the whole notion of the racist highway.

Pete Buttigieg famously talks about highways built on a foundation of hate and all this. And in the myth, and Buttigieg says this out loud, the city, you know, the highway planners built these highways to divide white and black neighborhoods right yeah well I lost my home childhood home to a highway we had to move because of a highway it's I-280 and what I-280 did was cut the white northern half of my neighborhood Roseville off from the white southern half of my neighborhood, Roseville, off in the white southern half of my neighborhood, Roseville. One other interstate came through Newark at that time was I-78.

And what that did is cut the white Jewish half of the neighborhood off in the white Jewish half of the southern part of the neighborhood. Two highways coming through a city that was 35% black, and both times they missed the black neighborhoods, right? I mean, if they're racist highway makers, they're crappy at their jobs. I mean, they missed. And in Kansas City, where I live, we have more

freeway miles per capita than any city in the world, which makes it easy to live there. There is not a single highway that separates races or ethnicities. And 90% of the people displaced were white. And that's true across the nation. I looked nationwide to see if I could find the racist highway, David, couldn't find one. Finally, the Biden administration identifies their first plan to take out a racist highway.

And this racist highway simply goes through a black neighborhood that was built 50 years ago, 60 years ago. Who knows what the neighborhood was like then? But they went through white neighborhoods and went through black neighborhoods. And I read the early plans that took my house. And they were so, at that time, indifferent to the havoc they were wrecking, going right through viable neighbors, destroying them. And the reason the motivator was, in a place like Newark especially, the dreamers and the schemers met and the schemers got their way. 90% federal money to build a highway through your neighborhood. 90% federal money to demolish

a slum and build a housing project. So you had the, in Newark, the Boyardo family, which was the model for the Soprano, as David Chase admits as much, they set up the Boyardo demolition company and the Boyardo construction company. Boyardo Demolition Company and the Boyardo Construction Company. And the city fathers are, you know, funneling, are giving them their contracts, taking their cut. In the meantime, we're getting big high rises and we're getting highways, right? And city, you know, they talk about public-private partnerships. This is the way they work in the real world. You got, you got scoundrels on both ends.

You got both on the private and public ends. I mean, there were some people with good intentions, but they get run over very quickly. Well, it's kind of interesting. You know, you're talking about crony capitalism, public private partnerships, all the rest of this stuff, you know, gangsterism, all the rest. None of that changes, but seems like what changes is that, uh, the goal at the time, you know, back in the 60s when they were doing this stuff, they wanted to build infrastructure. Now they want to tear it down. And so they will still come out. Yeah, they'll come out with the federal matching funds and they'll find the same people, you know, who will do the demolition.

But then they don't build anything, you know. And that's the key about all this stuff that is so crazy. And at the center of it the rationale for destroying things is racism you know that's really what the racist highways that uh i call him booty gay because i had trouble uh pronouncing his name when he first uh appeared on the public scene so i thought well in fact you know i did the audio i did the audio book for uh untenable and and uh because it's it's in large part memoir i mean so i felt it was essential that i do it and when i went back i had some people review and they said oh you

mispronounced budigig you know so i looked that one up and in other words it costs about a hundred dollars so it's about a hundred dollar fix i really hated to do it. I said, I don't care how to pronounce it. I said, Booby gag. You know, it's Buttigieg. Okay, Buttigieg. And I used the name a half dozen times. I go in, put Buttigieg back in place a half dozen times. I was crazy. he's unchallenged when he

says these things, right? Yeah. Well, it is kind of interesting. Again, they're not interested. And. Well, it is kind of interesting, you know, again, they, they don't, they're not interested. And of course we could never have the interstate system that we have today. You know, they can't even fix potholes anymore. They become so dysfunctional.

The only thing they can do is tear stuff up and they cost us, you know, cost more to tear the stuff up than it costs to build it in the first place. But again, it's always comes back to racism is the excuse that they're going to use for that uh it's pretty amazing um so your book came out uh july 4th it's brand new you've already got an audiobook of it untenable the true story of white ethnic flight from america city but as we talk to you it's about everybody's flight from the cities and how it is that's right it doesn't even have to be white that's right the only reason i use white in the title david is when i say so in the book is because only white

people were shamed for leaving and we were ashamed by our betters the people who fled before we did it's like you know they said in the play on the frontier in his 19th century they said the further away you were from the frontier the more sympathetic you were about indians right yeah the closer up you are you're dealing with the reality that they're not dealing with your mother their mothers haven't been mugged their homes haven't been invaded you know their little sister's hair hasn't been set on fire and i in this one classic uh chapter of the book and it's and it's one of my favorites because it's so revealing, is that, you know, I read all the anti-racist stuff on white flight and they're horrible. I mean, they're vicious, attacking white people. And they have these grand conspiracy theories, they imagine, where white people in the cities are blockbusting and pushing black women in baby carriages and

scaring people out. They have their friends in the suburbs moving these people out on highways built by federal racists. It's crazy stuff, but these people are making millions of dollars doing it. Abraham Kendi, Tahani C. Coates, Robin D'Angelo. The white ones bother me most. They're just racketeers that got in on a racket I should have gotten in on. You know, Robin DiAngelo. Oh, yeah.

Write fictional movies and stuff, you know. Yeah, it's amazing. So anyhow, I find this op-ed in New York Times from 2017. And this is so classic. This woman's name is Aaliyah Boustan. She's a professor at Princeton. She's just written a book that has won top prize in some competition. And it's basically about white flight. It has some longer, more complicated title. And she begins her essay or op-ed by saying,

you know, I imagine this, and this is early 2017, right after the election, this is 2016. She goes, I imagine Democratic strategists sitting around the room wondering how it was that Donald Trump won. And they said, was it economics or was it just pure racism? She goes, in approaching the subject of white flight, I begin with that same premise. Was it economic vulnerability or just pure racism? That's how she starts. And she concludes by saying, and I'm paraphrasing, but I'm very close. She goes, what makes this job difficult is that few of these people ever talked about why they left. And then she says, in the most condescending bit at at all is that I'm not sure they even knew why

right now if classism whereas uh taboo at Princeton is racism uh Leah Bustam would have been busted from professor to janitress you know it was that bad uh but she wasn't and so I I laughed out loud when I read this they don't know why I just talked to 50 of them they knew exactly why yeah so that is the comments and I'm saying this is New York Times I'm not sure I want to read the comments probably people saying oh yeah you weren't hard enough on these people these scoundrels instead she gets ambushed by her own readers. And person after person, Trenton, New Haven, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, all over the country, telling these incredible horror stories of why their neighborhoods became untenable. Very much like the stories I've been hearing.

Everyone had a story. Very specific. And it usually involved, I didn't want to move. We loved our neighbor at first. We loved our neighbors. Then, bang, bang, bang, bang, enough is enough. It became untenable. And then several people commented, and very specifically, how could you possibly write a book about white flight and not talk about either crime or schools. Right? Yeah. And she did.

And I think, I hope that the reader responds. These are New York Times readers. They're not some yahoos reading my blog. I mean, they're respectable people. But they unloaded on her. I excerpted a're respectable people, but they unloaded on her, you know, and I excerpted

a lot of their comments because they were so telling and so consistent. Yeah, usually the, especially in those publications, the comment section is oftentimes better than the article. Oh, yeah. Get right to the point. You know, people can understand what's happening. It's one of the reasons why they're shutting down social media as hard as they are, because people can put two and two together. They can think critically. They have experience that they can share with people. And that's a key thing. But when we look at this, again, it's the common experience of the urban issue. And I think everybody needs to understand this. If you've experienced it, you know, uh, but experience is a really expensive school. And as they say, only a fool will attend. It's the only one that a fool will attend. We don't want to necessarily experience that.

And if we go down the path that they're planning to try to put everybody in cities, that's going to be an expensive experience for all of us. And so those people who have grown up, uh, outside of cities, that's where I am. I never lived in a city, but I can always see it. You know, when I got there and I understood the issues behind it, but people who have grown up in the country, people who have grown up in the suburbs need to understand there's a big target on us. They want to put us in those failed cities. And your book, Untenable, does a great job of showing how this has just run roughshod over everybody. As you point out, only attacking the white people for doing this.

But everybody wants to get out of the cities. And it's these elite who want to trap everybody in the cities. Just amazing. Right. And they do it now. You know, in global warming, the global warming scare you were talking about. And totally on the same page with you on that one. That's a scam of Arizona.

Speaking of rackets, it works hand in glove, right? Because you take people out of their cars, and then you force them into, you know, I guess we have to live in these cities, you know? And if they had their way, you know, the whole 15-minute city phenomenon would be their dream, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

You look at what they're doing in the Netherlands. I mean, they want to create this gigantic city of tens of millions of people, tri-state city. That's why they're kicking the farmers off of their land, because they want to just pack everybody. That's been the plan for a long time. They've been open about it. But, of course, if you talk talk about it it's a conspiracy theory that's why your book telling you know talking about the experiences that people have had how this has been proven to be a failure over let's say 60 years or so at least uh you know when you look at what has happened with this um it's got a proven track record it's a horrible track record

and we don't want to be deceived into making this problem even bigger than it's been in the past. In the past, it's only affected, you know, the big cities, the Democrat-run cities, but they want to force this on everybody everywhere. That's the key thing about this. That's right. And, you know, and what I did in the book, David, is to tell a human interest story. I told the story of my own family and my own friends, so that I'm not just citing statistics, and I do a fair amount of social history in it, but that there's a heartbeat at the core of these villages that were organic, and they weren't forced, they weren't contrived, they evolved out of the circumstances of people coming to America. And then they try to, I mean, not only to corrupt them, but to control them.

You know, to control the dynamics within them, to prevent people from leaving, to shame them for leaving, you know, to contort the human experiences to fit a larger agenda. And a lot of people, as we saw when COVID broke out, it really surprised me how quickly it fell along party lines. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I expected young people to rebel against those kind of mandates. Yeah. But instead, they were the sheepiest of the sheep.

It was very disheartening. They've been conditioned, you know, when everything scary happens, they've been conditioned to lockdowns in their schools. And they even use that same terminology. I mean, they had been conditioning them for quite a while. And, of course, you know, they've been practicing their germ games for two decades themselves. It was a real, um, a real cynical movement. And so what would you say to people having experienced all of this? And we know that

this is what they want to do to us on steroids. They want to put this whole program on steroids and do it for everybody. What is the most effective way to push back against this? Would you say it's just... There's an excellent question, David, and there's one thing we can all do. And I got this sense when I was in this reparations debate last month, and that is stand up and tell the truth. Yep. You know, too many people are afraid to speak out. I get it.

You work for a corporation. You know, even when I worked in business, which I did for, I worked in advertising for about 15 years, I approached my job this way. Today will be my last day in the job. If I'm asked to do something, I refuse to do. Or I have to put up with some BS I don't want to put up with. So I live my life prepared to leave my job that day that's great i i would say that as a general rule you should live your life so or as the french

said always live on last year's income you know so you have a year of savings behind you so when you're asked to shut up or to do something horrible or to you know make decisions that are counter to justice or fair play or to uh you can say i'm not gonna do that you know i'm not going in a stupid dei training it's a nonsense or if you're in the training you stand up and say this is crap you know i mean you have to be able to do that once we do that and a lot of people can and you're right the further you live from the city the more freedom you have to speak out so that's why i admire guys who do like what you do you're on the front lines of telling the truth every day and uh i in fact i wrote my book um

my last book or about called unmasking obama i celebrated what i call this sami's thought which is the russian term for the underground press yeah and and at the same during the Soviet era people communicated through the samizdat they Solzhenitsyn's Kulag Archipelago was published through the samizdat um there's a conservative American samizdat you're part of it I'm part of it. And during the Obama years, every major story, and that's what I did in the book was to highlight the truth tellers, the people who broke the stories, who broke open the scandals. And in every case, they were, you know, some blogger in Arizona, or some guy in Philadelphia, you know, going through his, you know, the tapes of the, you know, like the Obamacare debates or something.

And then you'd see them push, push, push, push it up through the media until finally the media had to deal with it one way or another, even if it's just to kind of ignore it. Or even on social media, the people who are not doing the original research necessarily, you know, passing on information that they have seen. And as everybody starts to do it, you know, that's really kind of like the committees of correspondence. But you mentioned Samizdat and Solzhenitsyn and his idea, live not by lies. You know, and he was ready to pack it all in even when there was no alternative. You know, he was Soviet housing and Soviet jobs and everything. You go against the system, uh, you're out of there, but he was determined just like you pointed out that

he's not going to take hard today. I would tell them to read a social needs and his commencement address at Harvard. And I think it was 1977. They never asked him back, but also, you know, when I do it, I'm telling people is they get it. Yeah. Get their copy of untenable. They post a picture of it with themselves on Facebook and then they just share it with but also, you know what I do? What I'm telling people is they get, they get their copy of the antenna ball. They post a picture of it with themselves on Facebook and then they just share it with their friends, you know? Yes. Yes.

And it's because the some is not works. I mean, we have to deal with the sensors and the, you know, the filters and all that stuff. But, uh, the reason they have those sensors and filters,

because it is because of some is that works. That's right. And that's why they're so desperate to, uh now censor people i mean they're just they own it they don't even try to deny it anymore now that you've got the supreme court slapping biden down uh they say well you know and even have people in the press i never thought i would see the day when people in the press are going to cheer on censorship they've become openly open puppets of of the of the regime and i'll call it you know yeah i mean uh i mean you know walter kronkite was something of a fraud but the uh walter cronkite we imagine would be shaking his head

watching the uh you know who who's the walter i don't even know who's the news anchors today but there must be someone you're saying you mean they're saying that out loud you know we're supposed to keep this quiet operation mockingbird yeah I went all those years keeping my uh political police undercover you know because he was big leftist and he but he did a reasonable job trying to conceal it and yeah you know yeah he's not Chuck Todd or who else uh Joe uh Joe Joe in the morning I can't remember his name anymore. Yeah. Scarborough. Yeah. Scarborough. Yeah.

These, these, they're open puppets and they have no shame and the government has no shame to violate the first amendment and they're getting away with it. That's why, you know, now is the time where everybody needs to, to push back on this. They need to understand what is happening. Your book makes a great case about what is truly the issue and, the city thing america cities and to look at the history if we want to know you know where we're going you have to understand the past they always want to try to eradicate the past so they can control the future another orwellian technique but we need to understand what has happened with the cities how these same types of people have

used that to oppress and to create crime and chaos for control. And if we understand our history of our cities, people are not going to as easily, I think be fooled into this program that they're trying to impose on everybody. So it really is, it's a book about the past, but it really is about the future.

And that's right. And it's important because what happened 60 years ago is happening again today. And, uh, yeah. And we're facing the same dishonest, uh, horses,

but they're even more dug in now than they were then. Then they were experimenting. Now they've, uh, institutionalized that dishonesty in ways that were, you're right. Unimaginable 50 years ago. Yeah.

And, and it's weaponized with technology as well. I mean, when you look at this and you look at their ability to observe and control movement and then their ability to, if they get their CBDC stuff in, to be able to control what we spend. I mean, we're looking at something. If we don't get wise to their game, we are looking at a kind of tyranny that mankind's never seen before, the kind of tools that these people have.

Human nature doesn't change, but technology has certainly changed. So we need to understand we're coming from Intenable, the true story of white ethnic flight from America's cities. It just came out, 4th of July, by Jack Cashel. Thank you so much, Jack. Great talking to you. Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. It was a wonderful conversation.

Keep up the good work, okay? Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. We're going to be right back, folks. Stay with us. Decoding the mainstream propaganda. It's the David Knight Show.