As I have pointed out elsewhere, a number of high profile “conservatives” both in Canada and the States who were formerly “liberals” chose to abandon the Left, finding it intellectually absurd and morally repugnant. While they may perhaps exist, I know of none who moved in the opposite direction for similar reasons. Coincidentally, I just watched a video in which Candace Owens made the very same point, stating that while she knew many former Black “liberals” who had chosen to become “conservatives,” she knew of no Black “conservatives” who had decided to move to the Left.
Candace’s personal story is a lesson on the impact of culture. Born into poverty in Connecticut in 1989, she implies her parents to have been the very sort of dysfunctional, directionless, unmotivated Blacks typical of so many inner city dwellers today. It was her grandfather who saved her, taking she and her sisters into his home when she was nine and exposing them to the values which continue to be the criteria by which she lives her life. Ironically, she points out, while her parents were born to an America significantly less racist than that of her grandfather, the latter, a hard working sharecropper, never played the victim card, never denounced Whites, and as a God fearing Christian saw moral integrity and hard work as basic human responsibilities.
Nothing gives Candace greater joy, she says, than when young Black people thank her for giving them back their life, for rescuing them from the servitude of Victimhood preached by the Left and convincing them that they can in fact succeed on their own.
At the same time she is bemused that her repeated invitations to members of B.L.M. to debate her have been rejected. Her feeling, of course, is that they fear she will expose them not as genuine champions of Black Lives but as a gang of Leftist Ideologues intent on destroying Capitalist America.
How wonderful is it that Amala Ekpunobi, a young woman of Nigerian and White parentage, should have recently entered the public eye with a story utterly consistent with that told by Candace. The product of a broken home, her Black father having left some time ago, Amala describes her White “progressive” mother as very opinionated and a fundraiser for some Leftist organization. Yet while constantly bombarded with “progressive” propaganda, Amala was shocked to frequently overhear her mother’s various Black co-workers engage in vile, truly racist, anti-White rants. Further compromising her allegiance to the Left were her inspiring “conservative” grandparents who, not unlike Candace’s, saw the cult of Victimization exploited by “progressives” as an absurd attempt to exonerate all “minorities” of any responsibility for their condition. Refusing to accept what she sees as a license for widespread immorality, Amala is now a passionate critic of Leftist hypocrisy and a powerful spokesperson for the on-line University founded by the “conservative” Dennis Prager.
Black Pentecostal minister Eugene Rivers has been working within inner city America since the Eighties and insists the problems there are less a product of “systemic racism” than of the complete cultural and moral degeneracy of the young. As would seem to be validated by the experiences of Candace and Amala, he says earlier generations of Blacks submitted to truly oppressive conditions nevertheless continued to live with courage and integrity, the ultimate irony being that many of today’s young wouldn’t even qualify to be slaves. B.L.M., Rivers points out, has not so much as lifted a finger to rectify the real problems within Black urban ghettos.
Inasmuch as the major issue there is the absence of family values and indeed any sense of moral responsibility, especially among teenage boys apparently given to fornicating with reckless abandon, the antics of cultural icons such as Cardi B and Lil Nas X, both recently in the news, would seem very relevant to the issues at hand. The subject of my next blog, an article in Rolling Stone denouncing all “conservative” criticisms of the performances of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in their WAP [Wet Ass Pussy] video, is a perfect example of the intellectual and moral void at the heart of the contemporary Left.