Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy
Posted on | August 2, 2020 | 3 Comments
When President Trump first raised the accusation last month that Joe Biden is planning to destroy the “Suburban Dream Lifestyle,” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and half believed the media claim that Trump was just “stoking fear.” And then I investigated, and discovered that Democrats plan to abolish single-family home zoning.
Crazy? Yes, it sounds so crazy that you can’t imagine that anyone would seriously propose such a policy, but this goes back to something the Obama administration actually did (by executive order) in 2015, “tying federal community development grants to proactive efforts by communities to integrate neighborhoods,” as left-wing Mother Jones described it. This issue gets very deep very quickly, but the basic idea is that suburban communities that maintain single-family zoning thereby restrict the areas in which “affordable housing” can be built and — stay with me here — “affordable housing” is just code for homes for black people because, presumably, “black” is a synonym for poor.
If we’re going to be slinging around unsubstantiated accusations of racism (which is what the media do with Trump 24/7), can’t we discuss how racist it is to assume that all black people are poor, and vice-versa? As if there is no such thing as “white trash”? I mean, if you’re living in an upscale suburb neighborhood, and somebody proposes to build “affordable housing” right down the street, you’re going to be angry as hell. Does it really matter what race the residents of “affordable housing” are? Like, somebody is building a trailer park full of Kentucky hillbillies, but you’re OK with that, just so long as no brown people move in?
This is absurd, but you see that “proactive efforts . . . to integrate neighborhoods” was a policy based entirely on statistics about where people of different races live. Even if there is no discrimination, you see, there are still statistical disparities in housing patterns, and these disparities must be eliminated by “proactive efforts” or else, no federal money for your community. In 2018, the Trump administration rescinded that Obama-era rule, but almost nobody noticed at the time, mainly because the media was so busy with “Russia! Russia! Russia!”
What happened last month to turn housing policy into headline news? Stanley Kurtz of National Review got poking around on Biden’s website, saw what the campaign was proposing, and wrote an article with the headline, “Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs.”
This is quite literally true. Biden is proposing to effectively destroy the ability of suburban communities to govern themselves, so that all zoning decisions will be subject to veto from the federal government if any such local decision were insufficiently “proactive.”
Biden and the Democrats have embraced, as the basis of policy, what Vox Day has called Magic Dirt Theory, “the idea that beliefs, behaviors, and values somehow appear in particular geographical areas, from the air, from the water, or from the ground, rather than being carried from place to place by groups of people wherever they happen to be.”
Basically, you have to be hate-listed by the SPLC to say in plain words what’s wrong with Magic Dirt Theory. Patterns of human behavior cannot be automatically transformed by transferring a person (or a group of people) from one geographical location to another. I was born and raised in Georgia by parents who grew up in Randolph County, Alabama; despite having grown up in a middle-class suburb of Atlanta, my behavioral patterns in some ways still reflect the folkways of my rural ancestors. If this is true of myself, I suppose it’s likewise true of others.
For example, my friend Pete Da Tech Guy has never set foot in Sicily, but anyone who has ever met him would have no trouble guessing that he is a man of Sicilian ancestry. We do not need to deny the possibility of cultural assimilation to observe that differences in ethnic cultures persist. Therefore the attempt to “solve” the problems of racial minorities by relocating them to majority-white communities — a Soviet-style policy of forced resettlement — is apt to disappoint the utopian hopes that inspire such proposals (to say nothing of the violations of liberty involved). I could continue this discussion at some length, but the point is that this lunatic scheme of the Biden campaign is being dismissed by the major media as a “right-wing conspiracy theory,” despite the fact that it is described at length on Biden’s own website.
It is now “racist” to quote Democrats, I guess.
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3 Responses to “Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy”
August 3rd, 2020 @ 9:18 am
[…] of that is preamble to explaining that yesterday’s blog rant (“Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy”) was really a warm-up for a 1,900-word opus that begins […]
August 3rd, 2020 @ 11:14 am
[…] And won’t rest until everything is a high-rise, mess. Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy. […]
August 9th, 2020 @ 11:56 am
[…] Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make “Magic Dirt Theory” Federal Policy When President Trump first raised the accusation last month that Joe Biden is planning to destroy the “Suburban Dream Lifestyle,” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and half believed the media claim that Trump was just “stoking fear.” And then I investigated, and discovered that Democrats plan to abolish single-family home zoning. […]