On this week’s Sunday Special, Jack Posobiec is joined by Raheem Kassam to discuss the rise of “no go zones” in American cities. Poso and Kassam make predictions about the future of large populous areas and how crime will affect the zoning of new and current business in these cities. The duo also touch on the effect of de-policing in these large urban areas and how it has brought about a surge in crime and deaths, spreading beyond even the borders of the cities implementing these policies. La...
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Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Bore.
Today's Sunday special is Here we are returning with the editor-in-chief of the National Pulse, Mr. Raheem Kassam.
Raheem, thanks for returning to us.
Thank you for having me back.
So one of the original things that I knew of Raheem Kassam before you and I got to know each other, unfortunately, much to both of our chagrins, is that even, I mean, I knew about Brexit, I knew about Nigel and UKIP, but you had a book in, I believe it was 2017, called No Go Zones.
And this was all about Europe and the rise of European no-go zones.
And I've been thinking recently about the, and particularly, so I actually went over myself to Malmo, Malmo, Sweden, and we went into, it was called Rotterberg, inside, inside Malmo.
And this was sort of the no-go zone, Tanya, believe it or not, inside there.
And it was terrible.
It was, I mean, drive-by shooting happened the night before we landed.
All the taxi drivers were talking about everything that was going on.
They said it was a lot of, Somali gangs versus the more established Arab gangs that had been there.
So it's really gang violence that was coming up.
And, you know, it's not something you think of when you think of Sweden, you know, you think of, you know, you know, I know what I think of open open sandwiches and open face sandwiches and smorgasbord and meatballs.
Yeah, meatballs, you know, and leggy blondes, blondes, Vikings, etc.
So That was very eye-opening, and I remember this was a huge story and a huge narrative for so many years.
And of course, Trump made his famous statement about it, which really set off a lot of this.
You remember what happened in Sweden last night?
I noticed though that here we are five years later, and it feels like the same type of thing is happening again.
But it's not necessarily, or at least we're not hearing about it as much in Europe, but it's happening in America.
So this is my thesis.
That a lot of American inner cities, and in some cases, cities themselves inside America, major cities, every major city, is becoming a no-go zone and it's because of this massive rise of violent crime.
You've been in Washington, D.C.
for about as many years as I have, and we know there's certain parts of the city that you just don't go to.
There have always been, Anacostia was a huge one of these.
When I was in the DIA unit, or even when I was at Navy Intelligence, Navy Intelligence is located in Suitland, Maryland.
That's Prince George's County.
That's like MS-13 Capital.
That was, if you get off work, you drive.
You just drive straight out.
You do not stop.
You know, we had a guy, we had an E3 that came into our unit and he had just been transferred in and he thought it would be really smart to get to get himself off base housing at like some apartment down the street.
And we basically had to, we basically forced him to move within the end of the first week that he was there.
And the apartment building he was at, he was like, oh, I'm going to save some money.
It'd be great.
Yeah.
There was a shooting like the day after he left right there.
And so the fact that all of this is going on, and Balling Air Force Base, where the DIA is, it's also the home of Marine One, the entire Marine One fleet that the president uses.
And you can go within a stone's throw of there, and you're in one of the most violent neighborhoods in America.
And it blows my mind.
Give me your take on my thesis here.
Has America seen the rise of no-go zones?
Yeah, I think, I think we're living the rise of American no-go zones right now.
And, and, you know, I'll, I'll coin, I'll coin this phrase for the sake of the conversation as well as the subtitle of my book is how Sharia is coming to a neighborhood near you.
Um, and I suppose that still remains the case, except for the fact that it's a Sharia of the left of the political left, rather than a Sharia of radical Islam that you're seeing taking root in so many cities across the United States at the moment.
I think it was accelerated in large part by COVID and the movement away from downtown office buildings.
The downtown of Washington DC itself became, you know, the entirety became a no-go zone for a couple of days when the BLM marches were taking place and I went out there with my camera and documented what had happened there and started to see how it was taking root in lots of American cities.
And I've worked on this thesis for a while now, is that as you see, you know, downtowns like Houston and Dallas, and this is going on all over the country, but these two really stick in my head from recent visits, they They are not just empty, but they're effectively becoming shanty towns.
The office block buildings are obviously empty and they are in the process of converting those into residential areas.
But they're not going to be high-end residential areas.
They're not going to be places that people want to live because there's nothing really there anymore.
You know, in places like Dallas, you don't go downtown, you go to Highland Park.
Houston has its own.
They're building these kind of rich little areas in the suburbs and outside of the downtown areas that typically hosted the types of places that I like to go to, right?
The steakhouses and the fancy restaurants and all of that stuff was downtown.
Not the case anymore.
And I think we're living that moment where these things are changing right now, and my prediction is this.
within three to four years, maybe I'll go as high as five, but not much longer than that.
You're going to see all of these downtown areas in what used to be prideful American cities turn into shantytowns.
Well, I mean, Chicago, of course, the magnificent mile, right?
The They are beset now with these what they call teen takeovers, where one of the recent and this girl, and she's been on Fox, she's been on everywhere, was just surrounded, this young white girl who was surrounded.
But the fact of the matter is, that was in one of the most One of the richest neighborhoods of Chicago.
And I was actually on with Charlie, Charlie Kirk talking about this.
And I'm more of a Philly guy.
He's from Chicago, though.
And so he when he saw the address of where the, you know, the intersection where this took place, it blew his mind.
He said, how could there be something like this going on in one of the ritziest downtown areas of Chicago, a place where, you know, now in Philadelphia, so we've already gone through this.
I've already had that sort of process of shock where you knew that it used to be that, you know, so Will Smith, the Fresh Prince, right?
You knew if you went to West Philly, things were, you know, things were going to be trouble if you, which is interesting too, because in Philadelphia, it goes, University City, which houses the University of Pennsylvania.
And the University of Pennsylvania, there are the children of world leaders who go there.
I mean, this is Ivy League.
There are professionals going there, et cetera, et cetera.
And then if you go four or five blocks up, if you continue west, up the same street, you immediately get into rundown row houses.
You get into areas where the move bombing took place in the 1980s, believe it or not.
And it isn't even too far to the intersection where Kermit Gosnell's House of Horrors took place, the abortionist.
It It's within walking distance of the University of Pennsylvania.
But I think for people, if you're not from the area, you think of all these narratives as totally separate things.
You wouldn't realize that they're in that proximity.
And so the University of Pennsylvania dealt with this by having one of the largest, I believe, the largest private police force in the entire state of Pennsylvania is right there.
And one of the only private police forces that is armed.
In the state of Pennsylvania.
Because of this, again, you've got millions of billions of dollars, right?
This is the Biden Penn Center, etc.
is there.
And they have their office in DC as well.
But this is a huge, huge place that's directly tied to all of this crime.
And they used to do the teen takeovers there, even when I was living in Philly.
I remember this.
And so then I was at Temple University when I was in school, and this was 20 years ago, but Temple was in North Philly, and we knew that the campus itself was safe.
But if you did something off campus, you went off campus into North Philly, up North Broad Street, and you were out there at 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning, You were asking for trouble and every single one of the stories that I ever heard of someone being mugged or something like that happening again, this is 20 years ago was it was always that situation.
I was walking home from the party by myself at 3 in the morning.
And, right?
That's no longer the case.
Now, when I hear stories about my alma mater, it's, oh, there was a student who got an apartment right off of campus and someone carjacked them and then shot him in the head because he fought back, which is something that happened.
Or, oh, there was somebody who he was It seemed like an attempted carjacking at first, but then he ordered him into his apartment and started actually taking everything from inside the apartment while they were there.
This just steps from campus, just steps away.
And as well, there was a story of the killing of a Temple University police officer just not too long ago that really resonated with me because this happened right outside the student center, right outside the student center.
Within within view of the campus itself and so one thing that I tell people now I used to say you could go but just stay on campus not just I'll never bring my children anywhere near there anywhere near there whatsoever.
It the city of Philadelphia is a no go zone at this point as far as I'm concerned, every neighborhood in the entire city has become this way.
The people keep voting for it, so there's not really much you can do at that level other than get your family out and get them out as fast as possible.
And so I see other cities and people who are from those cities going through this process, which you have really documented quite well, I think, on Washington, D.C.
In fact, just before the interview here, there were sirens, you know, going on.
And because I think D.C., they have the Citizen app, right?
Not every city has it, but D.C.
does.
Yeah, that's right.
What are some of the things that you've seen on there since 2020 and now that you never used to see before?
Well, look, I live in a pretty affluent part of Washington DC, and yet there are Two, three blocks away from where I sit, regular reports of assaults and carjackings, and you can probably hear the sirens.
There's another one right now!
There's another one right now!
Right now!
You know, you can't script it, right?
And, you know, around here we have multiple police.
We don't have just the DC Metropolitan Police, we have Capitol Hill Police, you have Secret Service that comes around here, all of that.
And yet, I've lived in some dangerous places and I've been to some really dangerous places.
I went to some extremely dangerous places, as you say, for that 2017 book No Go Zones, but it's going that way.
For somebody like you, i.e.
somebody with a family, I wouldn't recommend going around here taking the family, taking the kids, taking the wife, letting the wife go around here with the kids by themselves.
Absolutely not.
I mean, absolutely not under no circumstances.
Um, I say it to the women that work around here that are my friends.
I always say, please, you know, make sure your home by the time, uh, uh, you know, darkness hits it's, it's fundamentally unsafe.
And again, look, a lot of people hear this and go, well, of course it's a city, high concentrations of people living together, those things, you know, those things can happen.
Right.
But that's, that's a cop-out and it's especially a cop-out when you think about the.
The leaps that were made, you only have to go back and watch, you know, On Fire The Vanity's movie, watch Taxi Driver, and watch the leaps that were made after those things came out that people turned around and go, actually, you know what?
We actually don't like our cities to be that way.
We don't want the house next door being a brothel.
We don't want the underpass under the highway being somewhere where you can't turn around and drive if you got on the highway incorrectly.
Without fear of getting your tires stolen off your cars and so on and so forth.
And you talked about how close it is to the rich people.
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., there is this spate right now of wealthy kids going to college who are having their expensive puffer jackets.
They have these expensive, like, $5,000 puffer jackets that is some kind of fashion statement, I guess, nowadays.
I've heard Pope Francis has one, too.
Yeah, that's right.
It's like a deepfake they made of him.
And those are being targeted.
In midtown Manhattan, Uh, if you wear the Apple Pro Max headphones out of your house, you aren't likely walking back into your house with them.
It's, you know, they're being ripped off your head.
It's, it's a spate of things and, and you know, you can see the targeting going on here.
Um, you add to that the reluctance to really properly police any of these areas by, by the, you know, the liberal left city councils and the Muriel Bowser in Washington DC and so on and so forth.
You end up with the perfect storm, and the perfect storm is this.
I'm sorry, I said this years ago about London under Sadiq Khan, and I'll say it now about so many American cities.
They're turning me into sh**holes.
It's sad, right?
It's really sad.
Actually, we were We were looking at some travel plans for this conference that's going on in Europe and we're bringing the kids and so typically you know when you fly over there's direct flights but then there's also transfers and one thing Tanya and I'll do too You know, save some money, but it's also can be kind of fun, is you do like a one-day transfer city, one-day transfer stop.
So you'll do a stopover, but just stay there for a day.
So, you know, last year when we were on the way to Poland, we did it in Rome.
It was amazing, right?
So just one night, essentially, 24 hours.
But how much of Rome can you see in 24 hours?
And it sort of becomes a catch-all.
And so you see so many of the ones through London.
And even though the airports are all outside the city, it's about an hour, give or take, you can get in.
Yeah, I said no to all of them.
I said even though it was cheaper to go through London, I said absolutely not.
I'm not interested.
It's not worth it.
It's not something that I feel any need for whatsoever.
We got another, another siren.
And that's distinctly a police siren.
It's just unbelievable.
Like, you know, this is the middle of the day, you know, you can see by the lighting in this room, um, middle of a, middle of a, uh, a work day.
And, and, and this is what you have.
It's interesting that you say that because we did that as kids, uh, ourselves, you know, my first trip ever to Washington DC was when we were taking a, uh, layover, uh, From london and i think we're going to orlando and florida to visit family but my parents decided to surprise us with i think we did two days in manhattan and half a day in dc and back back then you would think like.
Yeah, those cities had improved.
It was post Giuliani in New York, and a lot of gentrification was going on in Washington, D.C.
I mean, people from D.C.
will know what I mean when I say this.
You certainly wouldn't have gone to the Navy Yard back then.
No.
The first time I went to D.C., it was like that.
I remember going there on a field trip when I was in grade school.
Number three, by the way.
Yeah, this sounds like it's a soundtrack that we're laying over this.
That's a cop car right there.
Wow.
I don't know what to tell you.
Maybe I should check the Citizen App.
You should check the Citizen App.
Yeah, this is real time.
So no, but I remember going to visit to see the Smithsonian and do some field trip type stuff as you do growing up in the Philly area.
Not far.
We also used to go to the March for Life.
So that was something because we're Catholic.
So that was something that you, you know, you get a day off, you go to the March for Life, etc, etc.
It's great.
And it's only a couple hours by bus.
And I remember, though, you know, we were told very specifically that you do not leave the hotel, you do not go into Navy Yard, you do not go anywhere that's not, you know, I mean, it was drilled into us.
Now you look at Navy Yard and this is like one of the most, for folks who don't understand what we're saying, this is the area, the neighborhood around the Navy Yard in D.C.
on the river.
And then the wharf, which is a bit down from there.
These are some of the most gentrified areas of DC over the last decade.
There's been tens of millions of dollars poured into these areas under Muriel Bowser.
And by the way, to her, something for when you're on the left, you're supposed to be against gentrification because what have they been doing?
They've been taking the families that have lived there for so long and they're pricing them well and kicked them into PG County.
Yes, but the Chinese are getting visas and that's what's important.
That's so important.
DB5 baby.
So as we're talking right now, I look up the, uh, there's a Twitter account called, um, at real time news, 10 DC real time news.
Um, I won't give away, you know, my exact location by talking about this, but 10 blocks away, um, shooting, uh, On the scene, DC Police Department, shooting with one individual, gunshot wound, injuries, middle of the day.
Wait, wait, wait.
In broad daylight.
You're serious.
There's actually a shooting that went on just a few blocks from your apartment.
24 minutes ago, according to that tweet.
As we were recording this episode.
Yeah.
That just happened.
Yeah.
You gotta get out of there, man.
You have to get out of there!
Well, somebody has to stay here and hold the fort down, you know?
We're gonna have to make American cities great again at some point.
Um, and I, I think that's something worth mentioning as well is credit to these people because the, even the DC local media doesn't cover, give this the coverage that it should get.
And there are all these little, um, former corporate media people that have gone, um, independent and they spend all day long tracking down.
You know, these shootings and these carjackings, because there's a guy that's phenomenal.
Yeah, yeah, and otherwise you'd never hear about them.
I think there was something like 12 shootings this weekend alone in Washington D.C.
But you don't, you know, when do you see flash of that on the chyron on CNN or Fox News or anything?
You have to rely on these.
Now the great thing about them is they always provide source material so you can go back to the D.C.
Metropolitan Police Department's website and cross-reference that information.
But I'll tell you, if somebody wants to make a living out of running a news site, you know, a DC crime news site, you have no shortage of news.
No, honestly, I mean, you could, it would be a billion dollar idea, probably a billion dollar idea, if you just did a essentially a crime blotter, and then you had specific ones.
You remember Gothamists?
You remember when Gothamists used to be around?
It was like the cool stuff to do, and they had DC, they had Gotham, they had Shanghai, because when I lived there, I read Shanghaiist was one of the ones they had.
I believe the whole thing was shuttered.
Yeah.
But you'd basically do that, but for crime, and then run each city.
A billion dollar idea, right there.
Yeah, but you'd be targeted so quickly.
Oh yeah.
Because the regime does not want that information out there.
It is to the extent where you'd need a pretty significant newsroom, actually, to put all of that information together.
It's happening all over the place, all the time, in all major American cities.
If somebody wants to bankroll it, you and I can put it together, Jack.
But let me ask you, and there are some Chicago ones out there, and there's some Philly ones at least Twitter account level that have started to come up.
But let me ask you, why does it seem that these stories or this narrative that America has become so violent, that it doesn't sort of gain any traction at all whatsoever?
That Are Americans just immune to it?
I mean, the wire came out, what, almost 25 years ago that showed the violence of Baltimore.
And that hasn't changed.
If anything, it's increased thanks to the Freddie Gray riots, which were one of the first riots that I ever covered on the ground in person in 2015.
The response to George Floyd.
Obviously, we have to talk about the George Floyd effect here.
So the left will make this argument that they'll say, well, there hasn't been a defunding of the police.
Yes, maybe, but there's been de-policing, right?
So there's been de-policing in these areas, de-policing in the cities, de-policing on the highways, which is something that nobody talks about, that's led to massive reckless driving deaths.
And, and why, if you're the police officer, are you putting your life in danger?
If you know, you arrest this person and there's not going to be any significant charges.
You'll be right next to Derek Chauvin.
Right.
But they're not going to be charged.
You know, the, the, the, the DAs are not.
Right, right, right.
Right.
It's just, it's not worth putting them in cuffs.
It's not worth the paperwork.
It's not worth the risk to your life.
It's not worth any of it.
It's not worth even it.
They go again.
It's not worth it even for your boss's umbrage that will be targeted in your direction if you make that arrest, if you intervene in that incident, so they just forget about it.
And here's the answer to your question, right?
We have to realize that on this matter, Um, Kanye West was correct.
You know, George Bush doesn't care about black people.
Barack Obama didn't care about black people.
Joe Biden doesn't care about black people.
Muriel Bowser doesn't care about black people.
A lot of these things are happening to black people in predominantly black neighborhoods.
And so why would they do anything about it?
Right?
Like they see those people as, you know, remaining on their plantations on their Democrat left plantations.
They don't think they're going to move off them, uh, you know, in any significant way anytime soon.
What's the point?
Leave him to it.
That's what they think.
Well, and you made the point before about, you know, pre Giuliani, New York and post Giuliani.
But people need to understand that that's sort of the Scorsese taxi driver in New York versus the New York of the 90s and really the 2000s, especially when Times Square became the amusement park that it is now.
This was because a massive increase in policing, a massive increase in arrests.
It was because of policies like stop and frisk.
It was because of prosecutions, and it was because of a very proactive stance on policing directly targeted.
And this is what I love.
And this was that leaked audio, the hot mic on Michael Bloomberg from some fundraiser when he was trying to run for president in 2020, where he said, well, we send police to the minority neighborhoods.
And the entire media tried to frame it as We're sending them there because we want to arrest more minorities.
And I'll give him credit for a guy who's on the left nominally.
He said, you're looking at it all backwards.
I'm not sending police to minority neighborhoods to arrest minorities.
I'm sending the police there to protect the minorities.
That's the point of police.
And we've we've gotten so far in this country with this massive, I call it a psychological operation against police, the demonization of police that's been going on, really kicking off with Ferguson, the original BLM hashtag, whichever forgets that started as a hashtag on Twitter, that has done more to increase The deaths of black Americans since it began than anything else.
And yet they'll find some viral video and they'll decide that that's exactly what's going on, because you have these politicians who don't understand statistics or people who just don't care about statistics and know better that will go on and lie about it.
And it's.
You know, I'll put it this way.
For some of the cities, it's very hard to see what you do with this.
Obviously, you've seen the success in New York and maybe they can get back to that.
Philadelphia?
I don't know.
At least for D.C., there is an option and it's called Takeaway Home Rule because D.C.
is not a municipal city.
It's not a municipality.
It is a federal territory.
It is very similar under federal law to, say, Guam or Puerto Rico in this sense because it doesn't have statehood, nor should it receive statehood.
And by the way, I'll go a step further.
Not only should D.C.
lose its home rule status and go directly back to the Congress, but If those parts of D.C.
want to have representation, etc., like they all call for, that's perfectly fine, because I'm sure you know that on your U.S.
history that Alexandria and Arlington used to be part of Washington, D.C., because in the Constitution, if you read the dimensions, D.C.
is a square, right?
Well, a diamond, I guess.
And they were De-annexed, I guess you could say, or re-annexed by Virginia at one point for these very same reasons in the 1800s to receive their representation back.
And I say that's fine.
If you want to attain statehood, that's absolutely fine.
The name of that state is Maryland.
You will become part of it and you'll receive all the representation you want.
Yeah, it's going to stick in the craw of Virginia voters if they are made to subsume more DC residents into their voting whatever, but that's true.
It's actually factually correct that the federal side of Washington DC must be, you know, Capitol Hill down to the White House, surrounding areas, that sort of thing, and the rest Can go and join the states that already have representation.
I think there is a huge case for that.
I'd like to talk about Taxi Driver more because, funny enough, I didn't even know we were going to get this far into this sort of conversation, but I was actually re-watching it just last night.
And that scene that I'd forgotten about when the political candidate is in the backseat of his cab and he's saying to him, he goes, I learned more from taxi drivers than I learned from everybody.
He's pandering and he says, well, what do you think should be done?
And De Niro's character turns around and goes, well, I just think somebody needs to just get in here and clean it all up, flush it down the toilet.
And remember, it's that same attitude and it's that same realization and also that same frustration that you see in a movie like Falling Down, right?
Where city doesn't work.
Man who has paid into city and served his city in whatever way all of his life suddenly finds out nothing around him works.
And I understand that these aren't supposed to be protagonists in the strictest sense, in these movies.
But those movies are what led to people like Mr. Giuliani coming along, becoming the mayor and going, you know what, somebody does really need to clean this up and flush it down the doorway.
And I think you're going to start seeing more of that in popular culture now as American no-go zones proliferate across the United States.
You'll probably see a lot more of that reflected in common culture.
When I was in New York covering the arrest of President Trump, I had a taxi driver tell me, and we were staying in the East Village, and I had a taxi driver tell me that he thought that the city was as bad as Dinkins, as it was under Dinkins, which is immediately prior to Giuliani. as it was under Dinkins, which is immediately prior to Oh, producer Angelo is sending me the great quote from
from the immortal Travis Bickle, "Someday a real rain will come "and wash all this scum off the streets." - That's right. - And then actually, believe it or not though, totally separate case, but the driver that picked me up at the arrest of Trump, so it's amazing, right?
All of this is going on in New York.
You'll get stuck up for wearing a pair of Apple Maxes and Donald Trump is the one getting arrested for some paycheck thing, the discrepancy that they claim exists.
But the driver who picked me up from there and that was taking me back to the hotel, he asked me if I had been at the thing.
I said, yeah, because he knew where he was picking me up from.
I said, yeah, I saw that.
And he goes, And it turns out that he was Armenian.
And he goes, you know, you know, the person they should be really arresting and said, who's that?
He goes, he goes, they should be arresting that effing Victoria Nuland.
That's the one they should be arresting.
Wow.
I was like, and then immediately I immediately turn my phone on, hit record, go on.
So you were saying about Victoria Nuland.
And then I didn't actually release it because it just I don't know, it didn't feel like one of those things to release.
But it was it was amazing to me that The taxi drivers?
No, man.
You can't hide that stuff from the people that live on the ground.
You just can't do it.
Yeah, I was thinking about this a moment ago.
Because, you know, taxi driver and taxi driver, he goes and he puts the suit and tie on and he takes the girl out for the By the way, a slice of apple pie with cheddar cheese melted on top, which is something we don't do enough nowadays.
I'm going to bring apple pie with cheese back.
You're not going to have that.
Oh, apple pie with cheese is amazing.
It's amazing.
That sounds terrible.
Yeah, I know.
Listen, I know.
This is worse than your pizza appetites.
Now listen, we'll talk about that another time, but you find me a taxi driver in New York City today that owns a shirt and tie, let alone is walking into a political campaign office and chatting up the girl at the desk in proficient English.
A lot has changed in that regard as well.
And I think one of the things, yes, you can still find them every so often.
By the way, do we have to call it the King's English now?
Yeah, you do.
Oh, that's right.
Oh, I was mortified this morning.
I picked up the Telegraph app on my phone and somebody had passed away, you know, one of these sort of X Factor, America's Got Talent hosts.
And it says, Queen sends condolences.
And I thought to myself, what?
And you open the article and it's Queen Camilla.
And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're not doing that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, of course, older people will remember the Queen Mother was the Queen once upon a time, you know, before the Queen became the Queen.
So, that's the way it works.
Was the Queen Mother, but that would be until someone came of age, right?
That was before she took the throne, before Elizabeth took the throne.
The Queen Mother, her mother, was the Queen.
I don't know.
Strange, isn't it?
No, no.
I don't accept that.
No, I thought I was having a stroke or something.
I thought maybe I imagined that Queen Elizabeth had passed away and she didn't.
And I got very excited for a moment.
And then I realized that talking about Camilla, this is dreadful.
Even...
Even worse as the UK slumps into a clown show version of itself.
Yeah and you want to talk about cities that haven't been the same in a long time.
I mean London, Look, if you hang out in Mayfair, if you hang out in Westminster, fine.
You're broadly going to be left unaccosted, and they're very nice places to hang out.
But make sure to keep your Narwhal Tusk nearby, just in case.
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
That was London Bridge.
And the Polish Chef.
That's right.
But if you start venturing out into the Brixtons and the Camberwells and the Tower Hamlets and so on and so forth, my goodness, you better have your head on a swivel in those areas.
Really?
Now, would those be considered suburbs?
Yeah, yeah.
London's massive.
It has 32 constituent boroughs.
Right.
But so what I mean by that is, I mean, are they are they analogous to American suburbs?
Because unfortunately, what we've seen and what I've seen in in the Philadelphia area, my parents still live in Philadelphia suburbs, that you see it in D.C.
as well, that this crime is not Static.
It is not stationary and that it is spreading out into the suburbs.
It is going out further.
We just had a shooting a couple of weeks ago here that took place right outside of Disney World.
So this was, you know, Orlando.
And this was this was the one where, if you remember, his name was Keith Moses, where this guy was so crazy.
That he actually went back to the scene of the crime and shot the reporter who was reporting on his earlier shooting.
Do you remember this?
And this was within, so they called it an Orlando shooting, but if you actually, again, because Orlando sort of has the, you know, sort of the main city part, but then the most of it, most of Orlando is, it's the theme parks and then it's the, it's either the resort hotels or the off resort hotels.
Where, you know, if you're looking to save a couple of bucks and you get your family in, you know, that's where you stay.
This was right down the street from the hotels.
This was not in some inner city area.
Killed a nine-year-old with the initial killing and then came back around and was like dating the mother or something like that and shoots the reporter.
And so, I mean, I use that example just because it was so heinous, but we've seen it again and again.
Actually, at the Uh, I'll just say it at the bowling alley near where my parents live, the bowling alley that I learned how to bowl.
There was a, you know, like a gang shooting from Philadelphia.
It's like, why are Philadelphia gangs coming out to the burbs and, you know, settling beefs at a suburban bowling?
It makes no sense.
Right.
Um, but it's also, it just speaks to this wider depolicing that I feel like that's going on.
And I think in any of these States that if you've got an ability to, um, you know, cause some of these States, like, you know, Pennsylvania is kind of a purple state or, You know, St.
Louis is a great example where Ferguson took place.
That's a red state.
OK, that's a red state where the crime in St.
Louis, particularly East St.
Louis, is absolutely horrific in terms of homicides.
And yet you don't.
New Orleans is another example.
It's a red state that has an excuse me, Louisiana's a red state.
But New Orleans has an incredible homicide problem and they don't seem to be dealing with this at the state.
I think you have to take state action.
I think you just have to take state action where you have the ability.
And of course, the media is going to lose their minds over this, but what else would you do?
Yeah, and if anything, we need to be making the argument for the fact that, look, you'll forgive me for this because I'm a city boy, right?
Like I was born in a city, raised in a city.
I love cities.
I travel to cities all the time.
And genuinely enjoy ambling aimlessly around a new city.
I was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, did it there.
I was in St.
Louis last summer, did it there.
And you start to see- Wait, can I speak to something real quick?
There's a huge difference between, and this is where I think you would have in common, that we're not country boys.
And there's a huge difference between your country boy, which is a cultural conservative.
I think you grow up with conservatism.
It's all around you.
But being an urban conservative, it's much more reactive, I feel like.
It's just much more reactive because the culture is quite different.
Yeah.
We're the renegades in our towns.
We're the ones pointing at the street corners going, remember what that was like five years ago?
Why isn't it like that anymore?
And there is this resurgence.
I have letters to my old local paper talking about how we shouldn't make the town a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants from Mexico because it's going to increase crime and it's going to shut down the hospitals.
Guess what?
All the hospitals are shut down.
The crime isn't completely insane.
The hospital where I was born, I talk about this all the time, the hospital where I was born has been razed.
There is an empty lot in its place and across the street is a Planned Parenthood clinic.
That's where I was born.
Well, look, I mean, the resurgence of gang culture is absolutely massive now, and it's a thing that nobody's talking about.
There were these conversations that happened in the early 90s.
Remember, I think it was Tipper Gore wanted to ban rap.
Hillary Clinton, the super predators comment, Joe Biden coming out with the crime bill.
I mean, this was a Democrat, left wing, mainstream, centrist position in the 1990s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.
And, um, you know, like your solution, like your state led solution there is going to take some radical conversation, um, about what's going on in these areas, because look, I could probably, you know, touch wood, probably go through my life in Washington, DC without necessarily seeing anything firsthand like that.
Right.
Like, like somebody being shot in front of me.
Right.
Touch wood.
But on the other hand, like you say, these aren't static problems.
And these gangs that, for instance, you want to take Anacostia, or you want to take that area down by the wharf, you want to take the old Navy Yard, you can go up to Ekington in Northeast DC, just north of Union Station, by the way.
Literally like five minutes walk north of Union Station.
Catholic University.
Catholic University, absolutely.
You're starting to see this encirclement now of gang warfare around the city.
And now that certain gangs and certain groups of people from these ghettos have established control over their local neighborhoods, now they're pushing out and having confrontations with rival gangs.
And that is becoming a real thing here now.
This is why, by the way, these 12 shootings take place over the weekend.
It's not people necessarily getting mugged when they come out of Union Station and then being shot.
They're just being mugged and maybe kicked in the backside.
But it's the gang members.
Well this is why you get the birthday party shootings.
Indiscriminately.
You know, driving past funeral homes, driving to birthday parties, and lighting each other up.
And of course, every so often, unrelated civilian catches astray.
And that's getting more and more common.
Right.
So this is probably the policy that you can tie this directly to.
We need to emphasize the de-policing because that is a huge part of this.
But obviously, no cash bail is this policy that you can probably most directly tie to this bail reform in general.
But I do think it's both.
I think it's no cash bail and de-policing.
You're taking off the brakes.
You're taking off all the brakes on the system.
And the amazing thing is, The system was working.
D.C.
was cleaned up.
New York was cleaned up.
Do you think anyone would be investing in D.C.
if it wasn't for the fact that the crime was down?
Of course not.
The same with New York.
That's what the investment was in.
That's how Donald Trump made his money by believing in Manhattan and starting to go in in the 1970s when it was still taxi driver time.
People called him crazy.
Um, but he said, I believe in Manhattan.
And I think Manhattan can come back.
He tried to do, remember Trump world was going to be at their Trump city was going to be a thing on the, um, Was that on the Hudson?
And there was this whole bit, he never quite got all the way there with it, but he believed in this idea that you could bring the cities back.
And under Giuliani, it was the two of them from an economic and a criminal perspective, the broken windows policy.
And almost every time that I do one of these with Mayor Giuliani, I always bring that up to say, I say, Mr. Mayor, you know, you were the man who fixed this.
You were the one who had the right answer.
And part of, not the only reason, but part of the reason I think they demonized him is because they don't want anyone considering doing that again.
Yeah, I was reminded, I was just looking up, I was reminded when I went, there's a little town in the south of France called Béziers.
And Bézier, being in the south of France, a lot of people can imagine the types of migrant crime that were going on there.
Extremely gang-related, Arab-dominated crime that was going on down there.
And the mayor, he was actually a chap called Robert Menard.
He was of the left, Defected to the right, but not to any right political party.
Just sort of said like, you know, I don't associate with the left anymore.
And by the way, we're going to clean up this city.
Now it's a small, it's a small city, but what he did was obviously massive, you know, policing presence, physically cleaning up the neighborhoods.
He says that did a huge amount, uh, for, for, for stopping crime, you know, broken windows policy.
Yeah, I mean literally cleaning grime off the buildings.
He said, you know, just changed people's interpretations of where they were and what they were doing there.
And then he instituted this thing called the Big Brother Program, where he actually went into these communities and recruited from within these communities people who acted as police liaison officers to the leading gang members.
And so every time that there was a big bust up, big shooting, whatever, they would have this community come together with the police, the big brothers, and the gangs themselves, right?
Because a lot of these gang members, right, remember are teenagers still.
So they don't necessarily- And their families live there too.
Right.
And he credited that.
And I know it's a little bit more of a softer touch and it's a little bit like negotiating with the Taliban, right?
But at the end of the day, the Taliban taking over, you've got to start negotiating.
You've also got El Presidente down there in El Salvador, who's got a little bit of a different approach.
But again, that's because in his situation, I mean, the gangs had become- Institutions.
They were taking over the country.
They were taking over the entire country.
They were becoming the government.
They were effectively the government in certain areas.
If you wore the wrong number on your shoes or your shirt or you wore the wrong brand of shoes in a certain area, that's a rival brand.
So it doesn't matter how old you are, you're shot up.
Right.
We're down to our last five minutes, but there's this policy that President Trump has called for Where I don't know if it sounds like he's abandoning the cities or what, but he said, you know, let's go there.
Let's say he's talked about creating 10 American freedom cities, brand new cities from scratch.
And I get the impression that in him saying that, he's referring to all of these issues that we're talking about of the current cities.
And I have to give him credit for having a forward look.
I don't know anyone else out in the playing field right now who's suggested any kind of futuristic vision for America.
Other than simply, like you and I have been saying, just reacting to all of it, which are things that can be done.
But what do you think of that idea?
Does it appeal to you?
Do you think it's charismatic, this idea that we can create new cities and hopefully avoid these pitfalls?
Yeah, it is weird that in a lot of places we've given up creating new places.
Throughout human history there hasn't really been the relent on the development of new urban and suburban areas as there has been in recent decades.
So I think even just from a planning perspective, right, a developmental perspective, a futurist perspective, this is one of the problems I always have with my own side is that we conservatives are always so easy and quick to lament the problems with today, but never that quick to suggest the solutions.
And I do like that solution for that reason.
I like that solution also because it serves to underscore some of the other points that we've been making about architecture and beauty and aesthetics and city planning and all of this stuff where we can actually do this and start from scratch and go like, okay, let's take the best of this, this and this and the best of this, this and this and we put that all together. this and this and the best of this, this and New city, great, fine.
Which, by the way, if you know Donald Trump, he's a builder, he's a real estate developer.
That's kind of the whole point of Donald Trump.
What I'm still unsure of is what he's talking about when he talks about tent cities, and he talks about taking a lot of the homeless out of current existing American cities and moving them to tent cities.
You know, effectively in the suburbs, right?
He's talking about doing this just outside of... and I just think that hasn't fully been fleshed out yet.
It sounds to me like one of these DC think tank ideas.
Right, right.
You've got to find some kind of remote... Well, actually, I used to be at Fort Meade, and there's a... down the way from there is actually where the DC Juvenile Hall is.
So it's physically in Maryland, but it's actually land that's not owned by the federal government.
It's immediately adjacent to Fort Meade, but it's where NSA is, but it's actually owned by the city of DC and it's where they held their juvenile hall so I mean, or you know Atlanta is kind of doing their member there they're having that that Treehouse Antifa situation and so there are areas outside of cities that are underdeveloped or undeveloped I think could be used but yeah I would obviously hope that they're not going into the suburbs.
We could have a NIMBY problem on that one.
I would also not call them tent cities like because you know we all remember Hoovervilles or you know not I think what it does is give him the ability to have a solution.
It's like the wall, right?
they're going to use it against him, whether or not it improves the cities or not.
But it does, I think what it does is give him the ability to have a solution.
It's like the wall, right?
It starts a conversation.
It starts the conversation, but it's also very clearly Donald Trump, the real estate guy, who's looking at major American cities and going, "I wouldn't invest there." You know, and he's trying to think of like, what would make you invest there again?
Like, how would you rejuvenate these places that took hundreds of years to build up?
Because you, you wouldn't want to lose them, right?
You don't really want to lose downtown Dallas.
You don't really want to lose midtown Manhattan.
I'm shocked when I go out to the west coast of what you see in LA, what you see in Seattle, what you see in Portland.
And so I think it's coming from a good place.
I just think it needs a little bit more fleshing out than just saying, we're going to build 10 cities on the edge of cities.
Like, you're doing what?
We are just up against time here.
Raheem Kassam, final thoughts on the issue?
American No-Go Zones, what do we do?
It's a fantastic thing that we're having this conversation because it means that some forward progress is within sight.
These are the positive kinds of conversations that you need to have about how you improve.
And look, I always say this, cities can be great places.
I understand it's not for everybody.
It's definitely for me.
I like everything on my doorstep.
I'm a walker.
I'm not a driver.
I don't do manual labor.
Um, and so I think, I think it's a good conversation to have because maybe it will mean that certain people who might have spent some time in cities before, but have been put off from it for a long time, might start thinking about, Oh, okay, well, if we're going to improve them, if we're going to zhuzh them up, if we're going to reintroduce real policing into these areas, then American cities can be great again.
They should be.
Amen.
You know, a funny note on that.
So, of course, you know, you and my wife, what you have in common is that you're both from Europe.
Europe is designed for walking.
So, Tanya drives here, but usually, like, you know, she calls when you're drunk and, you know, she'll come pick you up, as happens.
And the very first time she ever drove a car in Europe was last year.
She's never driven a car in Europe her entire life before she moved to America when she was 18.
So that, it blew my mind because she's, why would I?
Why would I have to?
You walk around town and then you take the train to the next town.
And that's all you have to do.
Public transportation in major built up areas is not a bad thing.
Like, I'm not a bus guy.
Frankly, nowadays, I'm not a train, I'm not, you know, a tube guy either.
I did the tube a lot.
Growing up, but it can be very good.
It can be very, very effective.
It can't be rotting tin cans being dragged down the street like some kind of, you know, like the H Street sidecar, whatever it's called, streetcar in Washington, D.C., that the government is now paying people to ride because nobody wants to take it because H Street is a ****hole.
So, can be done.
Major walking American cities coming to a future near you.
