Owens, Elder, Sowell, Woodson etc. have important things to say about current events.
By the AFP Staff
For anyone who followed the recent protests and riots closely, the rallying cry for many has been to “listen to and learn from black Americans.” That conversation can be a very different one, however, depending on whom you listen to.
Take young black activist Candace Owens, for example. Few individuals today have had to face the kind of disgusting vitriol on the internet that is regularly lobbed at Owens, but this fearless young woman gets out there every day to voice her reasoned opinion on social media platforms, despite the fact that all of these are overwhelmingly dominated by far-left-wing activists.
On June 9, Owens led the charge, sharing a ridiculous video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and other top Democratic officials, dressed in African garb and “taking a knee” for eight minutes in the U.S. Capitol.
“I have to say—I thought there was at least one or two things that the Democrats wouldn’t stoop to for the black vote, but there is apparently nothing,” she wrote on Twitter. “Dressing in African garb and getting on their knees for a photo op because it’s only four months to November.”
On June 7, she fired off a tweet on Twitter in response to the violent protests and the calls for white Americans to cave to the left’s increasingly insane demands.
“If you believe everything that is wrong with black America is the fault of white people, then you believe in white supremacy,” she wrote. “If you believe blacks will only get better by and through the actions of white people, then their supremacy is implied. I’ve never bought into that.”
In perhaps her most attacked comment to date, Owens wrote about George Floyd, who was asphyxiated by police after trying to buy cigarettes with a fake $20 bill, sparking the protests, lootings, and other violence.
She wrote: “Guess my message to little kids would be for them not to idolize men that get high on fentanyl, get high on meth[amphetamine], use counterfeit bills, shove guns into the stomachs of pregnant women while robbing them, go to prison five times. What a truly horrible message I carry.”
Owens has faced hateful verbal abuse over that statement as well as a video that questioned why liberal and black activists took to the streets to protest and riot because of Floyd, who went to prison for years after he pointed a gun at the belly of a pregnant women before robbing her in 2007.
An autopsy showed that Floyd, who had supposedly changed his life following his time in prison, was high on fentanyl and had recently used methamphetamines when he was killed at the hands of police.
Owens has stated that Floyd obviously did not deserve to die for passing off a fake $20 bill. She is only questioning why left-wing activists and blacks are destroying their own neighborhoods while making a hero of this clearly very troubled man.
Owens was recently kicked off the crowdfunding website “GoFundMe.” The company claimed her campaign constituted “intolerance,” charging that it violated the company’s terms of service, specifically “user content that we deem, in our sole discretion, to be in support of hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance of any kind.” Owens had been raising money for the Parkside Café in Birmingham, Ala., owned by a conservative man. Michael Dykes, the founder of Parkside Cafe, had called Floyd a “thug” and said protesters were “idiots” in a private text message sent to the co-owner of the bar as well as one of Parkside’s employees. Dykes’s text message was shared with others and eventually was posted to Facebook by a disgruntled employee. Not surprisingly, the backlash has effectively destroyed his business.
Owens had managed to raise over $200,000 for Dykes before her campaign was arbitrarily shut down by “GoFundMe.”
Owens is but one of many black conservatives who have been spent decades fighting left-wing lies.
Talk show host and author Larry Elder is another and is featured on page 8 in this week’s issue. Elder recently took to Twitter to destroy liberal claims concerning “systemic racism” and “oppression,” writing, “Assume there’s a vaccine against white racism. Would 70% of black kids still be raised in fatherless homes? Would 50% of blacks still dropout of many urban high schools? Would 25% of young black urban men still have criminal records? Would blacks still kill 7,000 blacks every year?”
Thomas Sowell is yet another voice to listen to. Considered by many to be the godfather of conservative black activism, Sowell, even at the age of 89, is still active on social media, taking down liberals head-on.
On June 7, Sowell hit back hard against leftwing activists and what he calls “race hustlers,” writing on Twitter, “People sometimes ask if I have tried to convince black ‘leaders’ to take a different view on racial issues. Of course not. I wouldn’t spend my time trying to persuade the mafia to give up crime. Why should I spend time trying to convince race hustlers to give up victimhood?”
A day earlier, he chimed in with the following chestnut: “Achievement is not what liberalism is about. Victimhood and dependency are. Many things that would advance blacks would not advance the liberal agenda. That is why the time is long overdue for the two to come to a parting of the ways.”
Robert Woodson is another black conservative who has risen to considerable success. A former senior advisor for President George W. Bush, Woodson has been making the rounds on network news television lately to offer his opinions on the recent protests.
“Black Democratic leaders make the false claim that the problems of unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, and crime are associated with this country’s legacy of slavery and discrimination,” said Woodson. “That’s another lie.”
In a recent interview on Fox News, Woodson argued that “institutional racism” is a ruse.
“The great promise was that if you just elected blacks to those offices, the inequities would improve,” he told Fox News. “We’ve spent about $22 trillion over the past 50 years of government money—where 70% goes not to the poor but those who serve the poor. Blacks have been in office, and conditions for low-income blacks have deteriorated every year. One of the ways the leaders use to explain this decline is they use race as a ruse.”
There are many more black conservatives out there besides these figures—voices that should be heard over the chaos, looting, vandalism, and arson that has dominated the news cycle in early June.
Not All African Americans See Things the Same Way
By Donald Jeffries
Perhaps the most maligned group in America, next to “white supremacists,” is black conservatives. They are routinely derided as “Uncle Toms,” or “not really black,” or “traitors to their own race.” Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has written more than 30 books from a libertarian perspective. Sowell has written about America’s “moral bankruptcy” and focused on the censorship flourishing on all college campuses, which denies conservatives and independents a chance to express alternative views.
Larry Elder, another high-profile black conservative, reacted angrily to Twitter restricting another user for merely mentioning the name of his controversial new film “Uncle Tom.” The documentary, sure to be shunned by polite society, “is a collection of intimate interviews with some of America’s most provocative black conservative thinkers.” At some point in their lives, each cast member has been called an Uncle Tom. It’s a story about self-empowerment, of taking control of your own story by getting an education and not playing the victim card. “Uncle Tom” wants America to be a nation of “well-informed, educated human beings,” to quote from the film’s official website.
Former civil rights leader Robert Woodson took The New York Times to task earlier this year for their “1619 Project” (named for the year the first shipload of slaves arrived in the American colonies), another virtue signaling effort to instill guilt in whites, and frame America’s history entirely around the issue of slavery. Woodson, who started a “1776 Project” to counter this, declared:
What they’re doing is rewriting American history—and, unfortunately, they are using the suffering and the struggle of black America as a bludgeon to beat America and define America as a criminal organization. And it’s lethal. It is one of the most diabolical, self-destructive ideas that I’ve ever heard.
Woodson, not surprisingly, has also been highly critical of the recent protests. In a June 1 column, he wrote:
The violent protests in Minneapolis and around the country are devastating the people in whose name they demand justice. The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has again fanned the flames of racial discord and violence. Unlike other incidents, in which officers believably might have felt a need to use force, the sickening video of the officer pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes has been roundly condemned. But the violent protests have also been decried by black Twin Cities residents who are witnessing the devastation of their community. Floyd’s girlfriend, Courtney Ross, urged residents to stop looting and burning in his name.
James Meredith is remembered for being the first black student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi. President John F. Kennedy had to call out the National Guard to ensure his admission and quell riots. Meredith underwent an unexpected transformation, culminating in his 1989 appointment to extremely conservative North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms’s staff as a domestic adviser. Black leaders reacted predictably, soundly castigating him for working for the former outspoken segregationist. Meredith explained that he’d applied to every member of both the House and Senate, and only Helms’s office responded. On the 40th anniversary of his college admission, Meredith had to have armed military personnel to protect him as he attended the ceremony.
Few Americans realize that Pat Buchanan, lambasted as “racist” himself by many on the left, nominated a now forgotten black woman, Ezola Foster, as his vice-presidential running mate on the 2000 Reform Party ticket. Foster had become an outspoken critic of pornography, sex education, and the like, founding the organization Black Americans for Family Values in the 1980s. She went on to defend the police officers in the notorious 1992 Rodney King case. As a high school teacher in 1994, she publicly supported Proposition 187, a California ballot initiative to deny illegal immigrants any government programs.
Black actress Stacey Dash starred in many films and television shows and is probably best known for her roles in the 1995 movie “Clueless” and the subsequent television series based upon it. She transformed into an extreme right-winger, switching to the Republican Party in 2012 and calling for an end to Black History Month in 2016. Dash also proclaimed that transgender rights infringed upon her own rights. She was hired by Fox News, but eventually became too controversial and was fired. Dash supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
While the state-controlled media permits only an embarrassingly limited range of views on all topics, for blacks the parameters are even more restricted. The same destructive hive mentality that shames young blacks into thinking that reading and studying are “acting white,” heaps collective scorn upon individuals who aren’t on board with the “all whites are racist” defeatist mentality.
Kudos to black conservatives; standing up to the mob takes courage.
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of three books currently being sold by the AFP Online Store.
