Kanye West is not shy. As Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed disemboweled New Orleans in a frenzy of immutable destruction, West told the watching world that President George W. Bush had little motivation to help the city’s mainly black denizens. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” West said—on live television, no less.
West can be forgiven. He was wrong. But the MAGA-behatted serial antagonist and “free thinker” could become right. He could come out and say the supposedly unsayable among black Americans. He could say: Democrats don’t care about black people.
Because, they don’t. Do they? If they did care about black Americans then they wouldn’t be Democrats. After all, what have black Americans got in return for their electoral devotion to a party which, privately, regards them as vote-fodder to be whipped up into hissing lava come election day, and discarded once they’ve squeezed the last “progressive” into office each cycle?
Not a lot. Today, black Americans are almost three times more likely to be in poverty than whites. Black households earn just $57 for every $100 made by white families. For every $100 held in wealth by whites, black families hold a little over $5.
Of course, black America’s historic devotion to the Democratic Party springs from the civil rights plank rightly adopted in the 1960s, which bestowed a deeply wronged people with some semblance of long-overdue dignity.
But that was a different Democratic Party than the identity-politics bewitched, lambently Marxist one that exists today. Today’s Democratic Party cares little for the working people it used to champion, preferring openly to deride them as irredeemable.
Yet Democrats are coy in the management of their strongest voting bloc. They have to be. In the 14 presidential elections since 1964, Democratic nominees have devoured an average 88 percent of the black vote. A party reliant on the trafficking of misery can’t afford too many defections from what Kanye West called a “mental prison.”
Black votes matter. Their lives? Not so much.
Some of America’s most desperate cities are run by Democrats—Baltimore, Memphis, Oakland, St. Louis, Detroit—aloof of stratospheric murder rates, riven poverty, and hopeless school systems motoring a conveyor belt of resentment. Like the old trope follows: there ain’t no votes in a cure.
Black Americans who dare to mention such facts are quickly Uncle-Tommed by those engorged on such misery. Turning Point USA’s Candace Owens still takes the risk.
Owens, a 28-year-old conservative activist, broke from what she calls the “thought plantation” just two years ago, doing more, it must be said, for the American Right than the “conservative movement,” which conserves little and moves less.
Paired with Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s founder, the Millennial twosome flew out to L.A. once Kanye West broke the Internet by tweeting: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”
Predictably, the oldsters of Young America’s Foundation warned in a leaked memo that such bold sorties could reap “long-term damage” on “conservative students and the conservative movement.”
After all, Kanye West probably hasn’t riffled through Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. But he has just claimed his eighth consecutive No.1 album—one of only two artists to do so—while managing to tweet a Thomas Sowell aphorism in some spare downtime from being the biggest star on the planet.
And, according to a Reuters poll, President Trump’s approval rating among black men doubled in the week (April 22-29) that West declared he and the president were “dragon energy.” Overall approval jumped from just under 9 percent to 16.5 percent. The strength of this bounce can’t be laid solely upon the artist’s shoulders, but, something shook the sidewalk.
Like other demographics, more black voters like Trump’s economy, than the man himself. A recent Harvard-Harris poll found one-third of black Americans said they were “better off” under the current economy, while 32 percent approved of the president’s economic stewardship.
Such news is enough for the commentariat to peck out a few op-eds decrying the president’s apparently “cynical” attempt to woo the black vote. Commuting Alice Marie Johnson’s two-decade nightmare for a drug offense—after meeting with the hugely popular Kim Kardashian—was all part of this nefarious plan, according to this view. President Trump must be the worst “fascist” ever.
Kardashian, who happens to be married to West, might not meet with the approval of the marmish conservative movement, but they are two of the most-talked-about people among 7 billion. If President Trump is ever to slice even 5 percent more of the black vote, he could do worse than charm “Kimye.”
As Candace Owens told “Fox and Friends” last month, Democrats can’t win if the black vote shifts by even five points. Yet Owens and Charlie Kirk, masters of new media, are busy racking up tens of millions of eyeballs with their affable ways. Both have had smiley meetings with the president. Meanwhile, old media tragically speculates over the Trump-Kim summit dinner menu.
Democrats have reason to jitter. With research showing a 20-point leftward shift since 2004, the now unrecognizable party of typically moderate Black America could be facing a Katrina-scale catastrophe of its own.