Monday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson argued President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal seeks to end suburbs.
Carlson pointed to prominent Democrats calling traditional infrastructure, including road, bridge and the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system, “racist.”
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: In early 2009, more than 12 years ago, the Obama administration made a surprisingly probably unprecedented accusation against Westchester County, New York, a pretty liberal place. According to the Obama administration, Westchester was an instrument of white supremacy, not the good liberals who live in Westchester, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and many others. No one accused them of being bigots.
The problem was the buildings they lived in, all those single-family homes row upon leafy row set back from the street, well-tended lawns, and mailboxes. Those were all examples of racism — literally structural racism, and the only solution the Obama people announced was much greater density, more subsidized housing complexes in Westchester, more high-rise apartment buildings, maybe some drug-addicted vagrants living on the sidewalk begging for change.
Only if Westchester County became more like the Bronx could it become non- racist.
Well, this was all something of a surprise to the people who live in Westchester, again, most of whom are dutiful liberals. They didn’t realize they had a white supremacy problem. Between 2000 and 2010 for example, according to the census numbers, Westchester’s black and Hispanic population had risen by more than 50 percent. So, how could the county be racist? It didn’t seem to make any sense.
In court, the Obama administration explained their reasoning. They singled out Westchester’s practice of standard zoning. That referred to county regulations that restricted the height of certain buildings and limited the placement of sewers to protect the drinking water. It sounds reasonable.
But according to the Obama administration, those were restrictive practices. Restrictive practices as a legal term that under Civil Rights law means they were racist, and because they were racist, the Obama administration withheld more than $20 million in Federal funds from Westchester County.
If the county wanted the money, it would have to construct 10, 000 low- income high-density very non-racist apartments. So, this battle, it didn’t get a lot of news coverage, but it went on for all eight years of the Obama administration and in the end, to its credit, Westchester fought back because they could afford good lawyers and they eventually won in court.
But many places couldn’t afford good lawyers. They are not as rich as Westchester, so they had to relent. Under pressure from Federal ideologues, communities in Oregon and Minneapolis, for example, with very little news coverage abolished single-family zoning. This all happened in recent years.
The question is why is it happening? The goal isn’t to eliminate racism, the goal is to eliminate suburbs. So, rather than improve the lives of people who live in crappy places, the idea is to destroy the lives of people who live in nice places. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to eliminate the suburbs?
Well, there’s a very clear political reason. Suburbs are typically purple, politically. Republicans can win just as Democrats can. But if your goal is to make the country a one-party state, you’d want to change this. You’d want to make suburbs into cities and if you did that, you’d win every time. Democrats win cities.
Of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, Democrats run nine of them. Of the 50 biggest, they control two-thirds. It doesn’t mean they’re good at running cities, they’re not, many of our cities are on the verge of collapse. People are running away from them, but making cities better is hardly the point, winning elections is the point.
Democrats are happy to admit this. Here’s Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts from yesterday. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. AYANNA PRESSLEY (D-MA): This is about human and physical infrastructure, progressives in Congress have been leading this fight. Care economy is infrastructure. Climate justice is infrastructure. Housing justice is infrastructure. Transit — public transit is justice infrastructure, and so these bold investments must be made to support workers and families in order for us to have a just, equitable, and robust recovery from this pandemic.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Housing justice. It sounds like a term that maybe Ayanna Pressley just made up. What does that mean? Well, if most people were asked, they would say, it means you’re not allowed to prevent people regardless of what they look like or where they are from, from moving into a specific neighborhood and that’s true, that’s been Federal law for a long time, more than 50 years. You can’t discriminate in housing sales, and you shouldn’t be able to.
But that’s not what she is talking about. She is talking about something very different. She is saying, if neighborhoods look different, then by definition, they are racist. If one is nicer than the other, you have to make it less nice or else that’s not equity.
The Obama administration was on this early. In 2015, the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Obama issued a final rule on what it called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. Now, according to the HUD Secretary at this time, Julian Castro, the Fair Housing Rule was simply intended to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The law that makes it illegal to discriminate in housing sales or in renting on the basis of race. Again, that law has been on the book a long time and it’s not controversial.
But that law also requires local jurisdictions that receive Federal money to take steps to affirmatively further the goal of eliminating race discrimination in housing. Huh.
This is a complex word play, but here is what it means. Under the Obama administration, HUD went one important step further. According to Julian Castro, the existence of quote, “concentrated poverty” in urban centers as opposed to the suburbs constituted de facto evidence of racial discrimination. In other words, as long as there is a place that’s poorer than the place you live, the place you live is racist. That’s insane, but on the basis of that assumption, they move forward.
And local jurisdictions were told to eliminate single family zoning and increase density in business districts and if they didn’t comply, they might lose millions of dollars in community development block-grants from HUD That was a very radical step and most Americans were unaware it was even happening and people who live outside the cities are very against it, including faithful Democrats. None of them were for that.
If they wanted to live next to Section 8 housing, they would have stayed in the city in the first place. So, people hate this idea. Suburbs are very complicated organisms like everything humans build. They’ve developed over a century, in some cases, more than a century — for good reason. To have Federal ideologues come in and destroy them is very threatening to people. They’re not for that.
Again, even Democratic voters are not for that and of course, Joe Biden understands that. He is not a genius, but he knows what people fear. So, when asked about it during the last campaign, he lied. Watch Biden reassure you that it is racist even to suggest that he would want to change America’s suburbs. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), THEN CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Look what he’s doing now, the President, he is kind of scared because an awful lot of suburbanites are now deciding they’re going to vote for me, at least the polling data suggests, as opposed to him and he is talking about you know Biden is going to — what he’s going to do, he is going to send all these folks out to suburbia. Then, they’re going to end up with houses out in suburbia and apartments in suburbia.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, well a lot of suburban voters did vote for Joe Biden partly on the basis of that claim, that he wasn’t going to send a lot of people to the suburbs, but that was a complete lie. Now, Joe Biden is preparing to do just that.
Now, at the time, his defense was that the HUD rule by itself was not enough to restructure and eliminate suburbs. Local communities that didn’t want to comply with the rule could simply refuse HUD grants. They’d lose millions of dollars, of course, but they could survive.
What Biden didn’t say is that the HUD rule was just the first step in his new infrastructure plan, which you can read online and you should, Biden calls for dramatically expanding the Federal government’s power over suburbs. The plan calls for implementing the provisions of something called the Home Act. That was a bill first proposed by Cory Booker of Newark, who is a lunatic and reckless.
That legislation goes much farther than anything the Obama administration even attempted. It would cut billions of dollars of Federal funding to any local government with quote, “ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas or set a minimum lot size for a single family home.” So, you under this law, if you’re a town are no longer in charge of how long large your lot sizes can be. You have no control over anything. What’s the point of having a local government at that point?
But it goes farther. The Home Act doesn’t simply cut off HUD funding to suburbs that don’t comply with its equity rules, it prevents states from getting Federal transportation grants of any kind if they refuse to allow high-rise apartments or other high-density zoning in their suburbs, and that’s very different.
Unlike a HUD grant, that is money that states have to have. They can’t refuse it. States need Federal transportation dollars to fix their streets and highways, and by the way it is their money anyway. It was dutifully sent to Washington, it is every year by citizens of their states, but the Biden administration is in no mood for negotiation with suburban homeowners — screw them — with their decent schools and crime-free streets, living in their little 1950s America.
According to the principles of equity, those people must be bigots, by definition. They are living better than people who live in densely populated cities are living, therefore we must crush them. This is not a conspiracy theory. Very soon, it could be the law. Read the bill.
Abolishing the suburbs is a major part of the Biden administration’s infrastructure plan. That legislation is still being negotiated tonight, and it’s not final, but already, the media are rushing to defend it. What shills they are. What liars.
Here is “USA Today” for example. “USA Today,” the nation’s largest quote, “newspaper.” Quote, “Biden’s proposal would award grants and tax credits to cities that change zoning laws to bolster more equitable access to affordable housing. A house with a white picket fence and a big backyard for a fourth of July barbecue may be a staple of the American Dream, but experts and local politicians say multi-family zoning is key to combating climate change, racial injustice, and the nation’s growing affordable housing crisis.” Really?
Because if you wanted to fix the affordable housing crisis, maybe you would prevent foreign governments from buying up residential housing stock, which they are doing or Blackrock from buying up single-family homes and turning them into rentals. Maybe you would make some effort to loosen the housing market a little bit, but they’re not doing that. They’re doing just the opposite.
So, you may ask yourself, can the Federal government really ban you from having a suburban home with a backyard celebrating the Fourth of July with your kids all the name of climate change and racial equity? Can they prevent suburbs from having roads if they don’t build low income housing projects?
Well, under existing Civil Rights law, a plan like this only works if the Feds can prove that your roads are somehow racist, and that is exactly the case they’ve been making right out in the open. Why has nobody noticed this?
It’s not just the Obama administration that says roads and buildings are racist, Pete Buttigieg is now saying it, too. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
APRIL RYAN, THEGRIO.COM WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The interstate system was built to keep certain groups in and certain groups out, so it was built on a racist system, correct?
PETE BUTTIGIEG, U.S. TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY: Yes, often this wasn’t just an act of neglect, often this was a conscious choice. There is racism physically built into some of our highways.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Eisenhower’s interstate highway system is now racist? Really I-95 is? Route 5 is racist? Tell us how, Pete Buttigieg. Does he even believe that? No. No one believes that, just like nobody believes that Westchester County is bigoted because it has rules about where you can put a sewer drain.
It’s not about racism. Stop with that. It’s about power.
For Democrats, the goal of this infrastructure plan is permanent control over the Federal government and for multinational corporations like BlackRock, the point is driving down the costs of homes even further and building more apartment high-rises in the suburbs. That has been the goal of the most powerful people in the world for some time.
In fact, it was just a few years ago, it was 2016 that the World Economic Forum released a video explaining and we’re quoting, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”
What’s less clear is why more self-described conservatives, their job though is to conserve things like America’s self-respecting independent middle class aren’t objecting to this. It’s not that they even notice it is happening, they are negotiating this bill.
The future of the way Americans live is at stake and you never hear them say that.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor