Is Just #WalkAway for Real?
I must confess it takes discipline to continue my daily reading of left-leaning media, such as Vox and the New York Times, but it does ensure a clear view of American politics. This practice incubates my continued call-outs of the left’s unfounded fears and excessive loathing of opposing views. To wit, leftist media pundits are currently at war with the #WalkAway movement, a nascent political faction that could marginalize the Democrat party.
#WalkAway is a loose-knit group of African-Americans and gay white men, who openly criticize Democrats because the party has taken their vote for granted. One of the movement’s notable black voices is Candace Owens, who has 560,000 Twitter followers and over 7 million who view her YouTube telecasts. Owens’ message is blunt: the DNC has given black Americans very little in return for 90% of the black vote. Obviously, the DNC disagrees with Owens’ conclusion, and their media cronies are pushing back. For example, the Washington Post’s Abby Ohlheiser recently dismissed Ms. Owens as “what happens when everything is viral, and nothing matters.”
Ohlheiser probably disregards #WalkAway because it is too early to predict a great schism in the Democratic Party. However, African-Americans once voted almost exclusively for Republicans - until FDR and the New Deal made black voters friends for life in 1932. Former Democrat Candace Owens left the party because she sees Democrats repeating the same mistakes of the old GOP. This begs the question: what if black voters walked away from Democrats? That would spell big trouble because, if the black vote broke along party lines like the white vote (51% Republican and 43% Democrat), few Democrats would be elected.
According to Candace Owens, “more and more African-Americans are hearing ‘different ideas’ through digital and social media” that contradict Democrat dogma, such as Joe Biden’s assertion that Republicans are “going to put you all back in chains” (August 2012). Such hyperbole is described by Ms. Owens as “fearmongering to get everybody all upset and up in arms. They want people to be scared.” Owens supports her prediction of a “major black exit from the Democrat Party” by pointing to record-low black unemployment (5.9%), 600,000 newly hired black Americans and 4.1 percent GDP growth under Republican control of Washington. She believes Republicans offer black voters the dignity of employment.
Ms. Owens has a point and it would be folly to ignore the #WalkAway movement – especially when 25 percent of black voters say their finances are better under Trump than they were under Obama, and 46 percent believe their finances will be better in four years (source: Gallup). Kanye West wore a MAGA hat in April and black male support for Trump rose from 11 percent to 22 percent. 85 percent of African-Americans support limits on immigration (source: Harvard-Harris). #WalkAway is using social media to spread the truth to black voters, such as an appellate judge rebuking California (Democrat) lawmakers for diverting $300 million in federal funds from minority communities to service state debt (source: Wall Street Journal).
The famous face of the #WalkAway movement is rapper Kanye West. The self-made millionaire (many times over) speaks passionately about how MAGAnomics serves black Americans better than Obamanomics. He is comfortable talking up economic opportunity and the value of work – and explaining how entitlements have created a “victim class.” Above all, his comments have elicited a mean-spirited backlash from the left, which Mr. West describes as an effort to suppress an alternate black perspective. Democrats present horrible optics when they try to muzzle the voice of a black icon.
Martin Luther King’s sociopolitical aspiration was unambiguous: advance American social and political constructs beyond race. Perhaps such a nation has evolved - - where Candace Owens can openly support Brett Kavanaugh and criticize Hillary Clinton's comments that the Trump nominee would “turn [the clock] back to the 1850s” and Kanye West can freely support MAGAnomics and criticize Barack Obama for doing little to help poor Americans. It should be obvious that, if Democrats don’t defend the rights of Owens and West to freely speak their minds, #WalkAway has found its just cause: every black American must be free to rise above political stereotype.
If there is an erosion of black votes in 2020, Democrats have only themselves to blame, because it is human nature to resent and reject mighty wizards that are exposed as self-serving and double-talking. If Democrats lose just 10% of the African-American vote, it would create an impossible electoral road map. In 2016, Clinton won New Hampshire only by a 2,800 vote margin, Maine by 20,000, Nevada by 26,000, and Minnesota by 44,000. Candace Owens believes the shift is already underway: “The polls told us Hillary Clinton would win and she didn’t. I wasn’t fooled by the polls [and] I believe black voters are going to exit the left completely by 2020.”