Ingram's July 2026

BETWEEN THE LINES

Pointed Perspectives & Penetrating Punditry | by Jack Cashill

OK, I Was Wrong About the World Cup

Kansas City—with a little planning and some luck—pulled it off.

The conversion came quickly. I was driving south on Main Street toward the Country Club Plaza when I heard a ruckus coming from Mill Creek Park, site of the erstwhile J.C. Nichols Fountain. “What are they protesting now?” I asked myself. Turns out they weren’t protesting at all. They were cheerlead ing for Argentina’s national soccer team in anticipation of that evening’s game at the erstwhile Arrowhead Stadium. I must say, the eagerness to “erstwhile” our past bugged me throughout the area’s preparation for the World Cup. In the same spirit that the city stripped the name off the most celebrated of its fountains, FIFA’s make-over artists erased the name of Arrowhead Stadium. For the duration of the playoffs, Arrowhead Stadium had to pretend to be “Kansas City Stadium.” For the sake of our foreign visitors, we seemed to be creating a Potemkin Kansas City. And yet, what a refreshing place Potemkin KC proved to be. Our visitors seemed to appreciate the area more than did the locals, certainly more than does the city planning class. As our visitors happily wandered through the Plaza and Westport, they seemed blissfully unaware of the area’s erstwhile glory.

The Kansas City writ large that the visitors found, they liked. Almost every visitor interviewed spoke of how welcoming the people were. This observation did not surprise me. When I first moved to town many years ago, I had the same impression. One visitor enthused, “The high ways are a breeze.” Another fellow added, “Everything is very quiet. The roads are quiet.” Driving in Kansas City has always been a breeze and “quiet” because drivers need not honk at each other as they fight for space. It is unfor tunate the “street dieting” crowd does not appreciate what the visitors do. Several visitors spoke to how “very clean” the city was. Noted one woman, “The city is clean and beautiful and everything is manicured,” much cleaner and more manicured, I might

Happily, the miscreants who have scared locals away from Midtown gave Mayor Q a break for the World Cup. Crime fell in Potemkin KC during the six-week stretch, even as officials had readied themselves for an increase. True, on June 16, 2026, on Interstate 70, a driver pulled alongside an Uber carrying Argentina fans to the stadium and fired twice. Fortunately, the shooter missed the Argentinians. Unfortunately, he hit the driver, a local fellow whom police did not identify. The driver survived and saved Potemkin KC the notoriety that descended on the real KC after the fatal shooting at the last Chiefs Super Bowl parade.

add that it was six months prior. Penn Valley Park, through which I often walk, mutated from grotesque to picturesque almost overnight. Now if we can only keep it that way. One young woman from Arg entina made a shrewd observation that our city plan-ners seem to

Acknowledging that extra policing lowers crime was something of an “own goal” for the mayor, whose political allies have made a rally ing cry out of defunding law enforcement.

Mayor Quinton Lucas praised the city’s security operations as “large-scale policing at its best.” For Lucas, acknowledging that extra policing helps lower crime was something of an “own goal.” If he has never exactly chanted “defund the police,” for many of his political allies “defund” has become a rallying cry. Relieved that nothing horrible happened during KC’s moment in the sun, Lucas boasted, “We got thousands of ques tions, it seems, for years. Will we be ready? Can we handle it? How could this city pull it off? And we did do it better than anyone else.” Better perhaps, but Q was one stray bullet away from international outrage.

forget. “I am proud to be in Kansas City this year,” she said. “This is the most American city you can get.” Yes, exactly. Given its centrality and its history, Kansas City embodies what international visitors found most refreshing about America writ large. The angry, divided, depressed xenophobic, impoverished America their media promised proved to be a sustained lie. Traveling through flyover country, visitors found an

Jack Cashill Ingram’s Senior Editor P | 816.842.9994 E | Editorial @ Ingrams.com

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Kansas City’s Business Media

July 2026