WND Loves Jack Cashill’s New Book — And So Does VDARE

WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill took a break from obsessing over Barack Obama to write a book on a different subject. Joseph Farah gushed over him and his book in his June 29 column:

Longtime WND columnist and author Jack Cashill is a lot like me. We can reminisce about the Jersey Shore, those “Wildwood Days” growing up, or comparing Newark and Paterson for hours on end. We’re kindred spirits, raised by different mothers and fathers in a not-so-different universe at approximately the same time and place.

[…]

I’ve admired Jack much over the years. I wish I had told him that more often. I think I will after just having read his latest exquisite book, “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities.” This a very serious book – in fact the first of its kind – on the subject of “white flight” written from the perspective of those forced to flee.

Yes, I suppose some white people left cities because of racism – probably a distinct minority. Others, like the Cashill family, left with regret because they loved Newark.

“By the end of the 1960s,” Cashill recalls, “the state had razed many of our homes, mine included. A lethal riot had scorched the neighborhood. My friends and their families had scattered to the winds, and a twenty-foot-deep trench as wide as a tennis court forever severed the north end of Pigs (short for Pigtails Alley) from the south. To the degree anyone beyond our world noticed, it was to scold us for our own displacement.”

[…]

“There is no understanding what really happened to Newark and other troubled cities without knowing a little about the white ethnics who inhabited those cities and their attachment to the neighborhoods they lived in,” writes Cashill. “Almost to a person, they or their kin came to America for the very quality now sadly absent into many cities: freedom, security, the rule of law, opportunity.”

Again, Cashill points out some timely common sense.

“Of course, too, white ethnics were not the only ones to ‘flee,'” hel writes. “Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians left the cities for much the same reasons urban whites did, but only whites were shamed for leaving, thus the word ‘white’ is in the book’s title.”

Do you want to read a truthful telling about the continuing epic horror story of our once-great cities? You will get it in Cashill’s book, his 17th, by the way.

The page for Cashill’s book on the WND superstore page notes that the Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell contributed a blurb: “A startlingly honest and poignant look at ‘white flight’ from the white perspective. A necessary and overdue corrective.” It was published by the Simon & Schuster-distributed right-wing imprint Post Hill Press, which notoriously published a memoir by one of the (white) Louisville police officers who killed (black) Breonna Taylor (which S&S distanced itself from).

Given that Cashill has been obsessed not only with attacking Obama but also in trying to lionize (white) people like George Zimmerman and Derek Chauvin and denigrating the (black) people they killed — Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, respectively — it appears that his goal with this book is to try and absolve white people who fled major cities in the 1960s of racism as black people began to assert their rights.

Another indication of Cashill’s pro-white focus comes in who else is championing it — specifically, the white nationalist organization VDARE., which made it the subject of its book club for July, as  James Kirkpatrick explained in a July 7 blog post:

During my time within Conservatism Inc., there were a number of honorable exceptions to the ”movement”’s usual pattern of marking time and making a living while America burns. Jack Cashill is one of those exceptions. And on July 4, Independence Day, he has a new book coming out that will hopefully make a major impact on the debate surrounding race in the United States. 

Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities tells the story of white flight from the white perspective, explaining why Americans left their communities and the untold wealth and social capital that they had built up over generations in order to escape the ”Great Society.” It’s a story that we are all living with today. For those of us who grew up in the suburbs, it’s a story that literally shaped our entire lives.

It would be hard for Cashill to escape that kind of endorsement. And Cashill is not escaping it — rather, he embraced it, taking part in a podcast about the book for VDARE, a snippet of which is here.

We haven’t read the book — Post Hill Press has not seen fit to send us a review copy — but we may have gotten a preview of its attitude in Cashill’s June 7 column, in which he rehashed the canard that the Community Reinvestment Act — created in the 1970s to spur investment in low-income areas that had been denied it in the past due to discrimination and redlining — caused the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, weirdly framing the CRA as “reparations.,” and complaining: “When the bubble finally burst in 2008, no one wanted to address the moral/cultural factors that contributed to it. There was nary a word about the cultural embrace of credit, the breakdown in the family, the media support for profligates, or the government imposition of race and gender quotas on lenders.” In other words, he’s implying that black people are not sufficiently moral or capable of maintaining a house and mortgage. In fact, the vast majority of subprime lending was done by mortgage companies and other financial institutions that weren’t subject to assessments under the CRA.

Cashill’s book doesn’t seem to be explicitly racist, but given the company he keeps and his past defense of white people killing black people, we can safely assume that it is very much racist-adjacent.