Woody Cozad wrote a fawning review of WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill’s book “Untenable” (you know, the one that’s beloved by the white nationalists at VDARE) for the right-wing Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website:
Our well-intentioned government—named the “Good Intentions Paving Company” by financial analyst James Grant—always seems to find itself scrambling to explain how its latest scheme for a better world has delivered us into an even lower circle of hell. Bureaucrats to the core, they’ve even developed a one-step procedure for dealing with this task: blame it on the people. The term “white flight” is a product of this procedure.
A principal benefit of this system is that the Paving Company doesn’t have to ask people—in this case, the whites who took “flight”—why they fled. It must be because they were fleeing from nonwhite people, and fleeing from nonwhite people is racist. Why would you bother consulting racists about their motives?
Untenable, punctures this familiar white flight narrative. Cashill’s subtitle promises the “true story of white ethnic flight from America’s cities.” Cashill has learned a thing or two from his fellow descendant of Irish refugees, Ronald Reagan: damn the statistics, tell the stories. In fact, let people tell their own stories. In this book, they finally get the chance to do so.
Decades on, few have bothered asking white ethnic residents why they left the neighborhoods where they had met and married spouses, raised families, made their livings, drank beer together, cheered the home team, and gone to the movies. They (or their forebears) hadn’t left Ireland, Germany, Italy, or Poland lightly. It took poverty, starvation, tyranny, and decades of suffering, in many cases, to get them to our shores. We’re expected to believe that they dropped the fruits of a lifetime’s effort in America and decamped for the suburbs solely because some black families bought houses a few blocks away.
This certainly isn’t the story the white ethnics tell in the pages of Untenable. Their reasons for leaving boil down to two things: the rise of crime and the collapse of schools.
Which, of course, are being blamed on black people, despite Cozad’s refusal to say it out loud. So, yes, there’s racism involved — why else would VDARE endorse the book?
Cozad’s end-of-review bio describes him only as “a lawyer in Missouri” who has held other minor state offices and was once chairman of the state Republican Party. However, he’s a lot closer to Cashill than City Journal chose to disclose. He’s worked on numerous projects with Cashill: he chaired a panel about the business of law in Kansas City that Cashill moderated, he appeared in an anti-evolution video called “The Triumph of Design” that Cashill directed, and a 2017 column by Cashill touted how Cozad popped up in a Netflix video made by Robert Reich.
Seems like Cashill got a buddy of his to write a positive review of his book for a right-wing website. Doesn’t seem very honest of him.