It seems as if the right has once again become unentertained with courting black voters, following the failed “blexit” approach leading up to the 2020 presidential election. This has led to many popular conservative media pundits going back to the old ways of ignoring or straight-up bashing black people instead of pretending to like them for votes.
In recent history, the Republican Party has been quite unpopular amongst black Americans, with 2012 GOP nominee Sen. Mitt Romney winning just 6% of the black vote, and with former President Donald Trump winning only 8% in 2016 according to NBC Exit Polls. After massive social media campaigns, waves of fundraising, and events marketed to black democrats during Trump’s term, many on the right seemed to genuinely believe that a black mass-exodus of the Democratic Party was on the horizon for election night 2020. The week before the election took place, polling company Rasmussen Reports claimed that one-third of black Americans would vote for former President Donald Trump in his reelection bid, which would’ve been a drastic change from 2016. However, that poll was proven to be false, as Trump got only 12% of the black vote, just four points higher than before.
It’s quite clear to me that the strategy of calling black voters “brainwashed” and telling them to “stop being slaves on the democratic plantation,” didn’t really resonate. Who would’ve thought? Well, most mainstream right-wing personalities seemed to completely ignore the general distaste coming from the majority of the black community and continued to lie to their mostly-white conservative fanbases about the success of such voter outreach methods.
This led to a huge disappointment once all of the believers of that faulty Rasmussen poll saw the election results. They just went back to stereotyping black people as ignorant criminals, which really isn’t that much worse than painting them as ignorant slaves.
Conservative media personalities who used to promote the idea of black people leaving the left en masse now share what I believe to be the equivalent of the left’s “black trauma porn” – the genre of media depicting the black experience as one threatened by white supremacy every day. I call the right-wing version of this “black violence porn,” which aims to generalize the black community – and black men, specifically – as morally bankrupt thugs. A good example of this switch in messaging comes from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who shared posts promoting the Blexit Foundation just before the 2020 election, and now spends his time posting videos of random black men committing crimes to arouse his fanbase. To be fair, Walsh has a long, well-documented history of posting Twitter threads of different black men committing various crimes with no real similarities besides race.
However, these types of alarmist posts are becoming more and more frequent from him and other popular talking heads on the right. Black voters are being used as a scapegoat for the country’s problems, as opposed to the faulty, big-government policies and mainstream degenerate culture that got us all here in the first place.
So, after the patronizing strategy of essentially calling black voters too stupid to know what’s good for them, the right expects to win by demonizing an entire race? I’ll give some free advice to anyone who claims to want to win the black vote: listen to black people.
If the majority of your support comes from people who aren’t part of the black community, you’re doing it wrong. If you find yourself trying to get black people to come over to the right and then turn around and blame black culture for the degradation of the West, you’re definitely doing it wrong.
Cardi B is not representative of black culture. The less than 1% of the black U.S. population who commits violent crimes is not representative of black culture.
There are problems within the black community, but pandering and being disrespectful is not the way to address them if you actually want things fixed.
