Diagnosis Murder: New Book Chronicles The Left’s Assault on American Cities

President Harry S. Truman once observed, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Many of today’s political problems can be traced to the fact that too many Americans still get their news—which is just very recent history—from the sources known as “mainstream” media. This is a big part of the reason why both in 2012 and 2021 surveys showed that conservatives are better informed about the country than those on the other side of the aisle. 

But what ought we to do? While there are certainly people on the left who are impervious to reason or facts because either they are lying or they can’t psychologically bring themselves to question the narratives they’ve been trusting for so long, there are others who’ve felt a crack in their worldviews. Perhaps they discovered Hunter Biden’s laptop was real. Perhaps they discovered their own children’s grade school was teaching Critical Race Theory despite the claims that this only happens in law school. Or perhaps they discovered that their own communities are falling apart and the “party of the little guy” Democrats are not healing but encouraging that dissolution. For these people waking up to a new reality, Seattle reporter and talk show host Jason Rantz’s new book, What’s Killing America, is the ideal gift.

Rantz, a talk show host on Seattle’s KTTH Radio and frequent guest on Fox News, has become over the last five years one of the better-known reporters on what is happening on the left. Like Townhall’s Julio Rosas and The Post-Millennial’s Andy Ngo, Rantz has made his name not merely talking about what’s going on with BLM, Antifa, and the crazy politicians of Seattle. He has put on the masks and infiltrated Antifa actions, gone into the “autonomous zones” set up by crazed BLM activists, and done all the shoe-leather reporting today’s “journalists” never do.

That’s what makes his book hum along. His subtitle, “Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Cities,” indicates the scope of his book—cities from coast to coast and from north to south. As such, he relies on the reporting of many others across the country from New York to Minneapolis to Houston to LA. But many of his best—or worst, depending on how you look at it—stories are the ones that he himself investigated along the corridor from Portland to Seattle.

His first chapter, “Seattle Gets Autonomous,” is the first of five chapters in the book making up Part I: The Rise in Crime. Rantz gives hair-raising accounts of his three weeks of reporting from the Seattle neighborhood that city officials allowed radical BLM activists to take over for much of that “summer of love,” as Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan called those terrible months of 2020. The Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), later renamed CHOP (“Occupied Protest”), was an economic and personal disaster for both the businesses penned in and the people who were occupying the neighborhood. As Rantz recounts the toll it took on all, including multiple deaths, he notes ruefully, “The movement proclaiming that Black Lives Matter was responsible for taking and hurting multiple black lives.”  

This theme—of supposedly compassionate policy hurting the very people the radical left and Democrats proclaim they are protecting—is repeated over and over throughout the book. Chapter Two, “The War on the War on Drugs,” displays how the supposedly progressive policies adopted first by the West Coast states and now further east were almost universally based on bad studies and produced negative outcomes almost overnight. They don’t work in theory or practice. Nor do the theories and practices that: defund police, replace officers with social workers, decriminalize property crimes, lessen penalties for drive-by shootings, turn auto theft felonies into misdemeanors, end cash bail, restrict the police use of non-lethal weapons, restrict police pursuit of criminals in vehicles, and. . .well, the difficulty is that there are so many of these policies that a list of the ones treated by Rantz would take up several pages. Perhaps the most important ones are those covered in Chapter Five on sanctuary cities.

What’s clear from Rantz’s treatment of them is that while we can say that Democrats are to blame for them, we can’t say it’s just politicians. Prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats all come in for blame in various cities and states. And while all politics is local, the role of state-level Democrats and, in particular, the federal government is very large. Both the Biden Administration and our ever-left administrative state almost always have some role in encouraging and/or funding the craziness that is destroying once fine cities.  

Part II is titled “How the Progressive Lifestyle is Destroying Our Cities: Their Rule, Our Demise.” In the five chapters that make up this part of the book, Rantz covers four topics in particular: housing, payment schemes for the poor and others, education, and environmental legislation.

Housing is covered in two chapters since it takes one to break down all the myths about fixing homelessness that are rooted in the ur-myth (we just need to get people in houses!) and one to break down the supposed proof of concept in a Salt Lake City program that had a few early successes that were touted without mentioning the overall failure.

Through a series of horrific stories about programs that put homeless people in houses, apartments, and hotel rooms, one gets to see both staggering wastes of money and—again!—how the very people who are supposedly being helped often end up in worse situations than before. One of the worst stories Rantz recounts concerns a mentally ill homeless man who started eating another man’s face. Large proportions of the homeless population are homeless not because they are down on their luck in some Great Depression-laid-off-the-workers fashion, but because they suffer from mental illness or are addicted to drugs. The “permanent supportive housing” solutions offered don’t work when they don’t have any requirements to them. Strangely enough, the people on the left who prattle about “root causes” of poverty never seem to consider them in housing.

The same lessons of housing apply to Universal Basic Income programs: just handing out money might make the activists and those receiving the money feel a bit better, but it doesn’t actually lead to better outcomes when unmoored from any incentives for the recipients to change their lives. Racial reparations are no better, but they come with even greater negatives as they feed the dangerous victimhood narratives that both hold back many black people and increase racial tensions.

With regard to education, Rantz covers a subject that has been the occasion for many people on the moderate left or middle to have second thoughts. After all, public education isn’t just a disaster in blue cities; the stories that he tells are often from red states and even red cities where education bureaucrats are also red—but only in the old Marxist sense. They push socialism, BLM, Palestinian activism, and radical gender ideology that alienates children from their own bodies. The stories range from the terrible to the absurd—from getting rid of School Resource Officers and suffering increasing violence to schools that cancel Thanksgiving as “racist.” Then again, everything, including math, is racist.

That “everything” includes the weather. The final chapter deals with the policies enacted, in the name of the environment and, of course, antiracism, that are ruining ordinary life for humans: the war on cars, the war on single-family housing, and the war on gas stoves and other appliances. Rantz rightly judges that all these bans “are part of a greater effort to control the American people.”   

Many people open to thinking anew about voting and policy choices will not want to be controlled. Yet Rantz’s book is ideal not just for those on the fence. It’s also a great read for those of us who have already been paying attention and would like to have a handy resource for stories and stats. Rantz’s combination of research and first-person accounts of what the numbers mean for ordinary people makes this book both useful and gripping to read. Though he doesn’t overdo it, his occasionally exasperated or snarky comments lend a deeply human touch. At 288 pages of text, What’s Killing America is thick but readable in a few days. And for those who want to dig deeper, Rantz has 65 pages of notes to explore the stories and studies he cites.

Rantz doesn’t sugarcoat the situation, though he does point out the occasional good decisions made—even by Democratic politicians. Yet the overall diagnosis of what happened to so many American cities and suburbs is attempted murder of dynamic and delightful cities—a murder by ideology and policy. And the culprit is definitely the radical left, aided, abetted, and often funded by Democrats. Rather than let these cities die, Rantz suggests in the end that Americans need to start fighting back.

His advice is for those who are in communities under assault to pick one issue to start and “get activated.” Though conservative Americans know that life is more than politics, if we want to keep that “more,” we’re going to have to be much more political. The Founders’ ideal of “self-government” is more than just personal discipline and more than just voting. It’s writing letters and emails, making phone calls, and, yes, even attending meetings to take back communities.

Rantz doesn’t provide the reader with all the solutions. That’s ok. He has given people a lot of solid recent history in order that we the people can step up to the challenges lest we “go from exploring what’s killing America to what killed America.”

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.