It’s easy to love Oprah Winfrey whose heart is no doubt in the right place. But like many on the Left, it’s her brain that needs reconditioning. I recently re-watched a video of Bill O ‘Reilly discussing her address to the graduating class of Tennessee State U. in 2023. In her speech she informs her mostly Black audience of the many horrific aspects of contemporary America wrought by political “conservatives.” O’ Reilly proceeds to show how every one of her accusations is grossly simplistic if not an outright lie. I shall do the same.
Oprah says Women’s rights are under attack, referring specifically to the abortion issue. But she fails to mention that another living being is involved, making Roe v. Wade far more complex than a mere matter of women’s rights.
She accuses White Westerners of re-writing history to their own advantage. While the many rational “conservatives” I admire would never dream of whitewashing Western cultural history, the Left and its many “victimized” groups consistently simplify and distort the past in defense of their conviction that Western Civilization is the greatest evil ever to have assailed the species. How many of you know that it was mostly Black Africans who were selling their own people into slavery in pursuit of profit? How many of you know that Great Britain was the first nation to officially ban slavery from its domain early in the 19th C.? I have read articles by Leftists claiming the Civil War, which cost America over half a million lives, was in no way the result of a genuine concern for the welfare of people of color. Yes, elements of White racism have persisted to the present, but this does not cancel the fact that Lincoln and various other U.S. leaders 150 years ago were more truly enlightened than the rulers of many Asian/African nations today. Of course you’d never learn this from the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Black “intellectual” who ludicrously sees all of American history through the lens of his racist bias, a bias which Oprah apparently shares.
On and on she goes, citing the awful fact that the LGBTQ community is often a target of criticism [i.e. “hatred”], while failing to mention any of the truly questionable initiatives it has pursued. Voters’ rights, she says, are in jeopardy, apparently comfortable with efforts by various Democrats to get voting rights for illegal aliens, knowing full well they will vote Democrat. Books are being banned, she claims, failing to mention that 90% of the banning, “cancelling” and general suppression of free speech evident today is coming from the Left. And of course she mentions the heinous Jan. 6 “storming” of the Capitol, an event too complex to deal with here, yet one which was in no way the violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government constantly denounced by the pathologically dishonest Left.
In response to Oprah’s charge that “conservatives” are not adequately committed to the issue of Climate Change, O’ Reilly points out that she owns 10 houses and no doubt has a “carbon footprint” 100 times greater than that of the average American. In the same way, her charge that the country’s Blacks are still the victims of “systemic racism” would seem to be rendered absurd by the fact that she is one of the wealthiest, most influential women in the world today!
Life is complex. As I said in my opening sentence, it’s easy to love Oprah, yet the impact of her truly biased, truly simplistic opinions on a significant portion of the American public is truly pernicious. Were she spewing such nonsense on behalf of the political “right,” she would no doubt already have been cancelled by the self-righteous Left. Hopefully, however, the Free Speech so important to America’s founders and Post-Enlightenment Humanists in general, will yield the sort of rational debate necessary for the exposure of the truly irrational nature of many of the obsessions of the contemporary Left.
Each and every week some former Leftist radical comes forward and renounces the current state of the “progressive” narrative. Brianna Wu, the transgender whom I discussed a few days ago, is a perfect example. Perhaps Oprah will at some point come to realize that the biased, simplistic, anti-White, anti-American gibberish she spewed before the graduates of Tennessee State U. last year, was actually an example of the “hate speech” which the Left pretends to abhor. One can only hope!