Blackout

by Candace Owens

  Alas, what remains of the doomed union between liberals and leftists exists under the Democrat Party, a political group that champions leftist solutions to the perpetual detriment of black America. The entire Democrat platform is built upon an everlasting stream of victims versus oppressors, and black America is their favored horse to bet on when it comes to jamming through their policies.

  In the Left’s oversimplified version of American history, blacks are a permanent underclass who must commit their votes to Democrat politicians for rescuing. Democrats see inherent racism and struggle in nearly everything, thereby destroying nearly all racial progress that has been achieved thus far.

  The sad truth is that nearly every policy they promote invariably harms black America. Indeed, there is something about progressive policies that always leads to regressive results for black America.

  But what if black America simply refused their offers? What if we formally rejected the victim narrative, thereby rejecting the slow poison of leftist policies? What might happen if black America collectively called the Left’s bluff on racism—thereby reducing their claims of perpetual victimhood to the ill-effective emotional strategy that it is? Could we, collectively, make a return to our conservative roots?

  2 ON FAMILY

  The last few years have brought an unforeseen spread of conservatism in the West. The 2016 vote for “BREXIT”—the British exit from the European union—shocked every mainstream pundit and poll worldwide that had bet against it. After forty-three years of the United Kingdom’s forfeiting its sovereignty to bureaucrats in Brussels, British citizens had had enough. Despite being warned that their departure might lead to their economic demise, the United Kingdom voted to leave.

  Similarly, on the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s defeat of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton—a Washington insider who was glorified by the press—sent shock waves throughout the world. For the mainstream media characters who had grown used to reporting what should happen, rather than what actually could happen, these binary political earthquakes could mean only one thing: widespread disobedience. Voters had disobeyed the mainstream narrative. In response, left-wing journalists, unused to having their authority questioned, began printing articles claiming that people were becoming “radicalized by the internet.” This, of course, is a laugh-out-loud assertion born of journalists’ anxiety that they are ceding influence to independent voices.

  And indeed they are.

  On any given day, CNN, the largest left-wing cable news station in America, averages 706,000 viewers. When the world depended upon television as its primary source of information, that may have been considered a large reach, but technology has transformed our circumstances. Today, the world prefers to communicate online, and so although leftists dominate the TV market, conservatives are winning the internet.

  As an example, according to Twitter analytics, just one solitary tweet that I send reaches an average of 2.5 million people. This means that I am able to dwarf all of CNN’s viewership with a tweet—and I’m far from the only person with that capability.

  Realizing that none of their ideas were being presented across the mainstream networks, conservatives began mining the Wild West of the early social media age and found success. Social media, then, represents an existential threat to the left-wing establishment, which is why they have begun pressuring social media companies to both ban and limit the reach of conservative accounts. This explains why, in a 2018 opinion piece, the New York Times issued the rather extraordinary claim that “jihadists and right-wing extremists use remarkably similar social media strategies.” In December of that same year, the Daily Beast published an article titled “How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Right.” Thousands upon thousands of articles were written conveying the same sentiment: the internet was suddenly a problem. Of course, what was really happening was that the Left’s majority coverage (Democrat journalists outnumber Republicans 4 to 1) was now made to compete with the Right in getting out information. With a swell of independent voices rising, they were simply ill prepared to have their narratives challenged.

  Unsurprisingly, there were no feverish claims of internet radicalization until America voted for Donald Trump. Despite the mainstream media’s spending every hour portraying him as a racist, sexist monster, when it came time, America ignored their smears and picked him to lead the nation. The journalists were correct to blame our collective disobedience on the internet. We disobeyed because we were able to determine, independently, that the media was attempting to skew the election against him, and they were using extravagant claims of “racism” to do it.

  I was one such person who was “radicalized” on the internet during this time, meaning that I too learned the truth about the media’s distortions and lies. Armed with nothing more than a hunch that the media’s insistence on racial unrest was suspicious, I turned to the internet to investigate some varied opinions on the mainstream’s position that a Donald Trump presidency would inspire a white supremacist uprising.

  MY “RADICALIZATION”

  When I first became curious about conservative perspectives, I began searching YouTube for “black conservatives,” people I had previously dismissed as “Uncle Toms” and “race-traitors.” At the time of my searching, there was an ongoing mainstream narrative about the topic of police brutality. I decided to start there.

  I came across a clip of Larry Elder, a black radio show host, author, former attorney, and self-professed libertarian. Elder has dedicated decades to exposing the hypocrisies of the Left. With books like What’s Race Got to Do With It?, he has developed expert analyses on the issues crippling black Americans today.

  In the now-viral clip, Elder sits across from liberal host Dave Rubin (now a dear friend of mine) for an interview on his Web show, The Rubin Report. With the amiable intent of acknowledging systemic issues of oppression facing black America, Rubin makes the fatal mistake of suggesting that police brutality is a blatant example of racism. And with sharpshooting statistical accuracy, Elder responds with a total annihilation of the liberal narrative:

  “Nine hundred sixty-five people were shot by cops last year. Four percent of them were white cops shooting unarmed blacks. In Chicago in 2011, twenty-one people were shot and killed by cops. In 2015 there were seven. In Chicago (which is about one-third black, one-third white, and one-third Hispanic) 70 percent of homicides are black on black—about forty per month, almost five hundred last year in Chicago—and about 75 percent of them are unsolved. Where’s the Black Lives Matter on that? The idea that a racist white cop shooting unarmed black people is a peril to black people is complete and total B.S.”

  I knew that I had just witnessed an intellectual beat-down and that Dave Rubin wasn’t the only victim. In the span of fifteen seconds, Elder had knocked me into the reality that many of the issues I had accepted to be meaningful on the basis of excessive media coverage were of very little substance. With humility, Rubin then asked Larry what his opinion was on issues facing black America.

  “The biggest burden that black people have in my opinion is the percentage of blacks 75 percent of them—that are raised without fathers. And that has every other social negative consequence connected to it: crime, not being able to compete economically in the country, being more likely to be arrested, that’s the number one problem facing the black community.”

  Rubin, quickly beginning to see the light, asked Elder what could be done to tackle that problem, to which Elder boldly declared, “Reverse the welfare state. In 1890–1900, you look at the sentence reports, a black person—believe it or not—was slightly more likely to be born to a nuclear intact family than a white kid. Even during slavery a black kid was more likely to be born under a roof with his biological mother and biological father than today.”

  Larry’s declaration that even during the traumatic periods of slavery and segregation, black families were more intact than they are today, stunned me. I wanted to learn more.

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sp; The destruction of the family unit used to be considered a moral abomination, so much so that it became the cornerstone of the abolitionist movement. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, widely regarded as one of the most effective tools in shifting the attitudes of northern whites against slavery, is a 250-plus-page lament on slavery’s effects on the black family. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a chilling illustration of a father who learns that he will be sold away from his wife and children and a mother who discovers that she will be separated from her only living child. The cultural impact of the book cannot be overstated; families gathered together after dinner to read the controversial tome that pulled back the veil on the country’s most heinous institution. Readers in the northern United States, as well as in Europe, became outraged by—and sympathetic to—the atrocities detailed by Stowe.

  Of course, the formal ending of the practice of slavery became monumental in the legitimizing of black families across America. Tera Hunter, a history professor at Princeton University, spoke about this revolution in a 2010 interview with NPR. “After the Civil War, you see marriage being one of the first civil rights that African Americans are able to exercise,” she explained. “And they do that with a great deal of enthusiasm, to the point of overwhelming the Union Army, making it difficult for them to handle the numbers of people trying to get married.” Additionally, millions of former slaves conducted desperate, long-distance searches to reconnect with family members who had been sold away or otherwise displaced by the war. The result was the formation and committed maintenance of millions of black families. In many regards, the preservation of the family became greater than the preservation of self, a sentiment shared by men and women of all races throughout history.

  How is it possible, then, that some one hundred years after slavery, the great rupture of the black family began? If not even slavery or Jim Crow laws could break down the black family, if not even the inhumanity of being deemed three-fifths of a person, or being granted just a fraction of the rights of others was capable of tearing them apart—what ultimately did?

  LBJ’s GREAT FAILURE

  The Democrat Party has a long history of racism, but few can claim as much credit for damaging the black community as the late president Lyndon B. Johnson. Robert Caro’s definitive biography of LBJ, Master of the Senate, talks about his common use of the word “nigger,” not in singular use, but frequently and repeatedly. While in Congress, Johnson was an extremely conscientious member of the Southern Bloc, the Democrat-controlled voting group that was notoriously committed to blocking the progression of civil rights. In fact, during Johnson’s first twenty years in the U.S. Senate, he voted down every single civil rights measure that made the floor.

  Despite this track record, Johnson is hailed as a hero because it was his presidential inking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that granted black Americans equal standing in the eyes of the law with whites. But just how does Johnson’s signature on this act of freedom reconcile with his earlier voting record, use of racist terminology, as well as his well-documented discriminatory treatment of blacks around him? After decades of working against blacks, had Johnson experienced a sudden epiphany?

  There is a quote that is attributed to LBJ in Ronald Kessler’s book Inside the White House that may be spurious (we shall never know as it was not verbally recorded), where LBJ allegedly said to two governors, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” His reference, according to Kessler, was not to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, nor to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but instead to the launch of the Great Society program—the method by which the Democrat Party would marry black America to the government, via welfare.

  LBJ’s Great Society initiatives were a deliberate attack on the black family unit, levied through the empowerment of the poor black woman and the emasculation—and ultimate obviation—of the black man. Johnson’s promise to eradicate poverty in all of America was fully embraced by struggling blacks, so much so that they did not object to rules that rendered poor mothers ineligible for benefits when an able-bodied male was present. Black women were instead encouraged, by their government, to raise children alone.

  Emboldened by the appeal of free government money, many of the pro-family advancements made by a postslavery black community were quickly rolled back. As some black women discovered that the government could act as provider for their families, they often neglected to hold black men accountable to their children, which over time can lead to choosing less suitable partners for marriage and fatherhood. Government assistance also provides no incentive to black men to step up. This was the first major indentation that the government made upon black culture. Today, hearing black hip-hop artists rap and sing about their various “baby-mamas” is considered culturally normative.

  There is a lot of data freely available on the decline of black America between the initiation of the Great Society and the current day, but one statistic is startling. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, in 1963, 72 percent of nonwhite families were married and together. By 2017 that data was almost exactly reversed: only 27 percent of black households were married, a staggering 45 percent drop over the period. In comparison, the white population went from 89 percent married and together in 1963, down to 51 percent in 2017, a 38 percent comparative drop. Policies that were purported to “empower” black America actually resulted in the greatest family breakdown across all demographics. Another telling area of breakdown is the number of unmarried men there are in the black community. In the 1960 census, approximately 24.4 percent of white men were unmarried aged fifteen and over; the comparable data point within the black community was 29.6 percent, an approximate 5 percent difference. Compare this with current rates of unmarried men today: in 2017, 33.1 percent of white men were unmarried, while unmarried black men had risen to a staggering 51.9 percent, a variation of 18.8 percent—or, in other words, a variation jump of 362 percent.

  It is a correct assumption that these single men are not all committing themselves to lives of virtuous chastity. The majority go through what is now a normalized pattern of unmarried sexual relationships, with a high probability of fatherhood. Exceptional rates of father absence can go a long way in terms of explaining racial disparities. What the Great Society programs proved was that in the absence of fathers, children will pursue that missing paternity elsewhere, and elsewhere tends to be the streets, where an easy path to crime, and eventually prison, awaits.

  Larry Elder was correct then to point to father absence as the greatest index of predictive failure. According to the independent, nonpartisan Brookings Institution:

  Children raised by single mothers are more likely to fare worse on a number of dimensions, including their school achievement, their social and emotional development, their health, and their success in the labor market. They are at great risk of parental abuse and neglect (especially from live-in boyfriends who are not their biological fathers), more likely to become teen parents and less likely to graduate from high school or college.

  What is more, the tendency of black children raised in fatherless homes to perpetuate the environments into which they were born puts continued pressure on the government to support future generations of fatherless offspring.

  In the generations since the implementation of Johnson’s Great Society, the epidemic of fatherless homes has produced a modernized, black family dynamic that functions nothing like the model sought by early-twentieth-century blacks. The results have been exactly as dramatic as Johnson and his Democrat cronies could have dreamed. When we consider where black America is today versus before the initiation of the Great Society reforms, it’s suddenly much easier to reconcile LBJ’s racism. What better way to connive an entire ethnic group into believing that you are for them than through the enactment of pieces of legislation that will guarantee their votes for the next “two hundred years”? LBJ, arguably one of the greatest “politicians” of twentieth-century America, both convinced black Amer
ica that he was their greatest savior and ensured that they would forever be in need of saving. Black America was both freed and enslaved again within one presidency.

  In effect, the policies that were purported to “empower” black America and bridge the wealth divide between whites and blacks have only exacerbated that divide, with the added benefit of placing a tremendous strain on our national Treasury.

  Welfare is the largest expenditure in the federal budget—more than $1 trillion, yearly—with absolutely no empirical points of success that warrant its continued existence. “What if I took that kind of ‘welfare’ policy and implemented it in your family?” wrote Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation. “If I said to your sons, ‘Sweetie, you don’t have to work; I’ll take care of everything,’ and if I said to your daughters, ‘Sugar, you go ahead and have as many babies as you want; I’ll give you more money to take care of them,’ what do you think your family would be like in 20 years? I’ll tell you: Your sons would be living at home and not working, your daughters would be having kids out of wedlock, and your family would be a whole lot poorer.”

  It surprises me that the issue of welfare reform has been drawn across party lines, when politicians on both sides of the aisle have justifiably critiqued the modern social safety net and its tendency to keep blacks tight within its perimeters. Ronald Reagan was roundly lambasted for his depiction of the “welfare queen”—a woman who was said to have used “80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands,” and a woman whose “tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year,” and who, for better or worse, was said to represent the vast majority of urban (read: black) women on welfare. Despite criticism, Reagan was telling the truth. Welfarism wreaks undue havoc upon any given society by enabling irresponsible behavior from both men and women.