On the July 26 episode of Life, Liberty, and Levin, Stanley Kurtz addressed President Trump’s claim that, if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, he will abolish suburban life. Kurtz confirmed the claim in his discussion with Mark Levin, saying, “They consider suburbs themselves in some ways fundamentally unjust.”
Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told Levin that former President Obama and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party view suburbs as fundamentally unjust communities that prevent taxation from flowing into the urban cities they surround. This echoes what many have observed about progressive taxation policies—that they seek to redistribute wealth from people who have fled America’s cities for a better quality of life.
The issue has become a major talking point for the Trump reelection campaign.
The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020
They’ve even turned it into an ad:
Trump’s Warning That Biden Would ‘Abolish the Suburbs’ Isn’t Racist, and It Isn’t Hyperbole, Either
Dr. Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), announced last week that he’s stripping the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule” (AFFH) added by Obama to the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
President @realDonaldTrump and I agree that the best run communities are the ones run locally. Today, we are tearing down the Obama Administration's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was an overreach of unelected Washington bureaucrats into local communities.
— Ben Carson (@SecretaryCarson) July 23, 2020
I am unwavering in my commitment to fair housing — when I arrived at @HUDgov we had a disappointingly HUGE backlog of fair housing complaints that the Obama Admin had forgotten about. From January 2017 to present, we have successfully resolved 22,933 cases.
— Ben Carson (@SecretaryCarson) July 23, 2020
Of course, the progressive Twitter crowd hooted and hollered in response to Trump’s tweet. HuffPo wrote, “Trump Brutally Mocked For Tweet Appealing To ‘Suburban Housewives’; One Twitter user joked that the anachronistic tweet would help the president win the 1956 presidential election.”
Hey Suburban Voters, Joe Biden’s Housing Policies Will Ruin Your Communities
Nevertheless, Kurtz told Levin, “Of course, as you mentioned, they want suburban votes. What they’re a little less eager to have understood is they consider suburbs themselves in some ways fundamentally unjust.”
That is viewed by Obama and many other Democrats as a way of selfishly keeping your money from less-well-off people in the cities. So the Obama administration, riding on some language in the original Fair Housing Act that did not have all the meanings he gave to it, created a really massive rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule.
Obama took that brief mention and created out of it a transformative role, a little bit like Obamacare, in that it’s a massive rule that does a great many things. The bottom line is that AFFH would radically undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs. It would allow bureaucrats in Washington, in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to control zoning laws, to control the placement of transportation and business districts, even to some degree the drawing of school districts. In other words, almost every important local governmental responsibility could, under AFFH, fall into the de facto control of the feds.
PJ Media’s Stacey Lennox has been sounding the alarm for several weeks now. She wrote,
However, my bet is if they figured out Joe Biden was planning on destroying their communities, they might be a little more attuned to their self-interest. Joe Biden has signed on to a plan that will take local control away from community planning using federal funding as leverage.
Stanley Kurtz at National Review is ringing the alarm bell. An Obama-era regulation that has not been rolled back by the Trump administration is about to weaponized in a significant way if Democrats gain power. The regulation could lead to such considerable wealth redistribution, Kurtz wrote an entire book about it.
The AFFH takes an anti-discrimination law and twists it to such an extent that it now includes enforcement of progressive taxation in the name of social justice. Good riddance. This should actually play very well with suburban voters, despite the mockery from the woke Twitter brigade.
Jeff Reynolds is the author of the book, “Behind the Curtain: Inside the Network of Progressive Billionaires and Their Campaign to Undermine Democracy,” available at www.WhoOwnsTheDems.com. Jeff hosts a podcast at anchor.fm/BehindTheCurtain. You can follow him on Twitter @ChargerJeff, and on Parler at @RealJeffReynolds.
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