Jay Stephens is a young Black woman who says her four years at a prestigious Liberal Arts College in the U.S. turned her into a committed “conservative.” Hoping to be confronted with the great ideas that had shaped history, seeking solutions to the very real socio-economic problems beleaguering her people, she was appalled to be subjected to what she describes as a relentless onslaught of Leftist propaganda. Ultimately aligning herself with the “conservative” Prager U, she found the Narrative of Oppression used by her educators to explain the plight of the poor, people of color, women and gays, sentimental, morally null and intellectually unsatisfying.
Candace Owens, another young Black American woman, always believed she could do anything a White girl could do if only she applied herself. A firm believer in hard work, she finds the tendency of some to belittle the “work ethic” as an aspect of White oppression, absurd, both because it is self-evidently beneficial and because those critics are in fact living in a predominantly White country. Convinced that Martin Luther King would not approve of Antifa or B.L.M., she sees the world in moral terms rather than those prescribed by the color of her skin. Shortly after George Floyd’s death she published a detailed account of his criminal career. While certainly not exonerating his killers, she wondered why Black Americans would be willing to go to war over the death of a drug addicted thug who had clearly contributed to his own demise. Those given to defining systemic racism as the cause of the deaths of so many young Black men in confrontations with the police, are invariably outraged by reports issued later of the criminal background of the victims, claiming those reports to be further confirmation of their views. But the truth is the truth and doesn’t give a damn about the color of your skin. Turns out Jacob Blake also had a violent criminal background, indeed was up to no good on the day of his death at the home of his ex-girlfriend whom he had allegedly raped in May. For a rational moralist such as Owens, the fates of both he and Floyd are complex issues with more than enough blame for all involved. For those given to the mindless Identity Politics of the Left, life is very simple, indeed can always be reduced to mere matters of Black and White.
Black “conservative” Larry Elder loves to cite his father’s conviction that you get out of life what you put into it. Like Candace Owens, he believes in personal responsibility. Disgusted by the impact of the social policies of post-Woodstock “progressives” on the mores of young Black Americans, he points out that in 1960, when Blacks clearly were still the victims of various forms of prejudice, approximately 5% of their kids were born to a home without a man while by 2015 that number had swelled to over 40%. Of course those Lefties locked into their ideology insist these statistics are relatively meaningless, but the facts speak for themselves. Black kids born to fatherless homes are significantly more prone to drug abuse, hyper-aggressiveness, gang membership, criminal behavior and suicide than those born to a “nuclear family.” Yet a good deal of Rap suggests it is eminently cool to f… every ho in sight, a truly sophisticated moral principle to which no “progressive” would ever dare utter a word of dissent.
In July Elder posted a video of 4 or 5 young Black men who admitted to having sired 87 children with approximately 50 different women! Insisting that refusing to condemn such behavior incites it, Elder argues that the benefits available to mothers without husbands actually motivate them to have even more kids. An L.A. Times poll found that 64% of the single, lower income women questioned admitted to getting pregnant simply to cash in financially.
Black journalist Jason L. Riley’s 2014 book “Please Stop Helping Us” argues forcibly that welfare and affirmative action programs designed to help poor Black people actually tend to stifle their commitment to self-improvement. Republicans both Black and White abhor the fact that as each election approaches, Democrats fill the air with promises of even more generous welfare programs, programs clearly designed to buy the vote of impoverished Blacks, programs which “conservatives” aver merely perpetuate them in their state of socio-economic servitude.
I find it hard to believe that Black Economist Thomas Sowell actually flirted with Marxism as a young man. Clearly having recovered from his brush with insanity, he now sees the free-market system of Capitalism as the only means of allowing the Individual to succeed or fail on his own without the intrusion of some coercive, authoritarian government devoted to the imposition of some decidedly arbitrary definition of “social justice.” Of course those born into poverty have more to overcome than those born into wealth, but the barriers to success in a Free Society, however inequitable they are deemed by Socialists, are nowhere near as dire as those which inevitably ensue from the well-intended though incredibly naive enshrinement of Totalitarian Government Power. History agrees.
Sowell’s defense of the inherent “morality” of Capitalism is perhaps best expressed in his assertion that he has never been able to understand why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned, but morally justified, in the world of “progressivism,” to want to confiscate the money of others.
Of course a myriad of White “conservative”commentators agree with all of the above. Citing them, however, merely leads to charges of racism while, in the condescending “logic” of the Left, those such as Jay Stephens, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, etc. are all merely “Uncle Toms,” the mindless victims of White propaganda.
In a May interview on N.Y. radio, Joe Biden told Black Americans that if you vote Trump, you ain’t really Black! It is a sentiment repeated often by Michelle Obama who implies a vote for a Republican is in fact a vote for White Supremacy. If it has occurred to you that invoking Race rather than proffering rational, empirically based arguments is the main weapon in the arsenal of the Left, you might want to ask yourself why.