CNN Intimidates Black Conservatives

Two days after actresses Stacey Dash appeared on CNN to discuss the online abuse she’d taken as a black woman who planned to vote for Mitt Romney for president, CNN posted a factually inaccurate opinion piece by Sherrilyn A. Ifill. 

The CNN piece, titled “Why blacks voters reject Romney,” indentifies Ifill as “a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the chairwoman of the U.S. Programs Board of the Open Society Foundations.” Open Society foundations is a grantmaking organization founded by left-wing billionaire George Soros. 

Breitbart News writer Sonnie Johnson has written a inspirational piece that pokes holes in Professor Ifill’s many laughable claims, but I wanted to point out two other glaring errors and omissions in the CNN article. 

Ifill begins with the factually false premise that Mitt Romney has zero support among black voters — literally no support whatsoever. The basis of this statement is an MSNBC-Wall Street Journal poll from late August. The poll was an outlier. Ifill points out that in 2008, John McCain had about 4% of the black vote. Professor Ifill doesn’t tell you this, but other polls that were available to her from Gallup and Pew show Mitt Romney with about the same 4% figure in 2012. This is a small number, but it’s not zero. 

Let’s not kid ourselves, however; 4% support for a Republican candidate among black voters is abysmal. However, the diminishing black conservative vote is the function of exactly the sort of scare and misinformation campaign that Professor Ifill and CNN are engaged in.

Nowhere in her article does Ifill discuss the social pressure and abuse that black conservatives face as a possible factor, despite the recent, well-publicized case of Ms. Dash. The left has become more vocal and brazen in the last two decades about attacking any black American who dares not vote Democrat, in no small part due to Obama allies like MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton. 

It’s certainly not due to this overwhelming Democratic party dominance producing great results for black Americans as a group. As Sonnie Johnson points out, any number of statistics such as black unemployment, incarceration, or abortion rates show that Democrat loyalty has been a brutal failure.

Instead, carefully planted articles like Professor Ifill’s and CNN’s promotion of it are a big part of the problem. The left — including Soros’s organized institutional left — spins tales that Tea Party crowds are racist and dangerous to black Americans, then they insult and demean blacks who would dare test this hypothesis by participating in the Tea Party. When this strategy has the intended effect of keeping black people away from the right, then the leftist critics point at the mostly white crowds and use that as more “proof” of racism.

Here’s the reality: the American left has made it impossible to be a black conservative without taking heaping amounts of abuse. If you want to see one of the faces of real present-day racism in this country, this is it. White Americans like myself can choose to be Democrats or Republicans without facing constant catcalls for being a race traitor. Black Americans like Sonnie Johnson are only given one choice if they want to avoid sanctioned scorn. This is an outrage and an affront to our country’s basic principles. 

Merely complaining about this bias does nothing. It’s up to each of us to correct the record on every false left-wing meme and reach out to freedom-loving Americans of every race, creed, and color to let them know the truth; when it comes to conservatism and the Tea Party movement, the party is open to everyone based solely on beliefs and common values.