Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele said he saw the political left in America using the turmoil over race issues underway in the country for political gain.
Steele described the left to FNC host Laura Ingraham as “exploiting” the situation.
“[I]t goes back, I think, to the ’60s,” he explained. “We had a huge culture war at that time. America did certainly one of the bravest things any nation has ever done. It admitted to having oppressed blacks and other minorities for centuries. We are still working that out. I think what we see today on the left are people exploiting that courageous gesture on the part of America by rubbing in our face that we have this dark background, this dark history, that we are denying and not facing into, and they are. So it’s a struggle for moral authority. They are saying, precisely because they are against America, they have the moral authority to come in and take America over.”
“And on the mainstream in America, people on the right and they’re right, so forth, represent that old America that admitted its wrongdoing, and it’s tried to march forward and has, in fact, changed radically,” Steele added. “But we don’t have the glamorous moral authority that the left does. And what we’ve seen in the last few weeks, they worked it very well. They breed doubt in straight-shooting Americans, in good, decent Americans, who really want to move forward in race relations and other things. But this new left says, you know, you are aligning yourself with the devil, with evil, you are not a decent person. And they have this power to stigmatize.”
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