Just watched Tucker Carlson interview Victor Jimenez, former Democratic spokesperson for Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who says reality forced him to abandon Biden and the Democrats and become a Republican. A Black Hispanic man, Jimenez suggests the current administration is literally destroying both the American economy and respect for the Rule of Law. While it is generally assumed that Latinos will vote Democrat due to that party’s lax immigration policies, a significant portion of those law abiding citizens who entered the country legally are actually appalled by the chaos Biden has incited at the Mexican border. Echoing Trump who was of course reviled as a racist for his views, Jimenez says the hundreds of thousands of South Americans simply seeking to escape the hopelessness of their homelands are in fact accompanied by an alarming number of gunrunning, drug smuggling criminals who will do nothing but harm to America in general and its Hispanic community in particular. The over-all implication of his interview is that one would have to be more or less demented to continue to support the policies of the Biden government.
Today, Dec. 3, Prager U. published a wonderful interview with Dr. Carol Swain, an accomplished but now retired law professor at Vanderbilt University. Growing up in a still decidedly racist rural Virginia, giving birth to 3 children before the age of 20, she nevertheless proudly declares that while she was “poor, black and female,” racism didn’t keep her from achieving her dreams. Clearly of the opinion that the Civil Rights movement radically changed America, perfectly willing to admit that it was inspired not only by Black warriors such as M.L.K. but by millions of compassionate Whites, she utterly rejects, in fact openly mocks the notion of Systemic White Racism. Indeed she sees it as the stratagem of a self-indulgent generation of Blacks eagerly willing to blame their failures on everyone but themselves.
I shan’t give a detailed account of Dr. Swain’s statement which is readily available online. But it is a wonderful example of the creed of personal responsibility which goes to the very heart of “conservatism,” while for the contemporary Left, smitten with the “materialistic determinism” of Marx, one’s personal failures are always the fault of circumstances beyond the self. It is a world-view, she suggests, which will inevitably produce nothing but hatred and strife.