Now, just before the mid-term election in November, 2018, the enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s leadership seems to be greater than ever, to judge by the size of his rallies, the rapturous applause that greets him and his every statement. People wait through the night to get into a stadium where he is to speak the following night. Tens of thousands get in, more tens of thousands watch him on screens and listen to him outside. Though the weather is cold. Though the mainstream media tell voters that he is as bad as the worst dictator who has ever lived, this generous, unaffected, extremely capable businessman, with a star’s charisma and all the right values, has won the love and trust of at least half the American people.

And thousands are walking away from the Democratic Party, discovering, probably to their surprise, that they are Trump supporters. They have formed a movement called #WalkAway, founded and led by Brandon Straka.

Brandon Straka

How the revelation that Trump Is Right came to this former Democrat, Jani Allan records at the Epoch Times:

When you are a gay, strikingly handsome cosmetologist, hairdresser, singer, and a theater actor in New York City, chances are you’re also a Democrat.

On the night that Trump won the presidential election, Brandon Straka wept; there are pictures of him crying.

He said:

I was devastated. I still believed the media! … They told us that Trump was a racist, a bigot, and a homophobe. I thought he would harm black, Jewish, and gay people; he was “dog-whistling” to hate groups. We were told that hate crimes were spiking and that Vice President Mike Pence was going to advocate conversion therapy for gays. …

The Democratic party was my tribe.

Then he began to notice a discrepancy between what the media said and what was actually happening.

A friend showed him a compilation video of the media trashing Trump. …

I saw all the moments that were replayed by the mainstream media. Remarks taken out of context. Black people edited out of audience shots. Endless fodder for the Trump-haters. Then the Charlottesville rally happened. I had had my eyes opened to how dishonest the media is and how they manipulate people’s behavior and then, they twist the narrative again. At Charlottesville, I saw clearly that Antifa are the aggressors. They become violent, but the media never denounce the violence of the left. More recently, there was the Kavanaugh lynching. There is no level to which the left will not stoop. [To them] the ends justify the means.”

Last year he wrote, produced, and sang Resist: A Rock Revolution. What began as a demi-opera — something written by a liberal devastated by Trump’s election — grew into Straka’s personal journey to conservatism. …

A friend warned him about speaking out.

Which made him all the more determined to speak out.

There is a reason it’s called the silent majority. There are reasons people don’t speak out and say, “Something is very wrong here.” They are afraid of being shunned by their friends, losing work, being considered crazy because they are no longer part of the hive-mind. Look what they did to Kanye West when he went to the White House. I wish I could reach out to him! But it just needs one person to speak up, one person to say, “The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

Straka speaks as though slightly amazed …

Then, one day, I was jogging in Central Park and it came to me in a flash. I am not going to be silent! As a gay man, especially, I am going to be the unsilent minority.

That’s when  he decided to do the #WalkAway Campaign and make a video to launch it.

I wrote the script in 20 minutes. It was as if there was a printer in my mind. After I finished, I thought, “Everybody needs to hear this! … I’m an actor and a singer. I am good at setting a stage and telling a story. …”

A friend pointed the camera at him. This is what he said:

Once upon a time I was a liberal, but the Left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded and, at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric. Liberalism has been co-opted and absorbed by the very characteristics it claims to fight against. The Left has allowed themselves to become hypnotized by false narratives and conclusions perpetuated by social-justice warriors who misrepresent and misconstrue facts, evidence, and events, to confirm their own biases that everyone who does not comply with their prejudicial conclusions and follow their orders is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, a white supremacist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, and alt-right extremist. 

It was May 26 when he posted the video, which he edited himself, on social media.  

Five months later, Straka has more than 97,000 followers on Twitter, and his Facebook video has been viewed a million times.  

The movement has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, Dinesh D’Souza, Tomi Lahren, Roseanne Barr, and Robert “Buzz” Patterson (who walked away after serving as the senior military aide to President Bill Clinton). 

Straka has become a cynosure of attention. … People like Candace Owens, from the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA, are contacting him.

I didn’t think when I released my video I would be celebrating at a fancy hotel wearing an “I Love Trump” top hat and tuxedo.

Then this happened, to Straka’s immense delight:

On Oct. 27, he received a tweet from the president himself:

#Walkaway. Walkaway from the Democrat Party movement marches today in D.C. Congratulations to Brandon Straka for starting something very special. 

On Saturday October 27, 2018, “Straka and his ‘unsilent minority’ took the #WalkAway movement to Washington” and he led a march of thousands. 

The event was totally ignored by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, ABC’s Joy Behar, and the late night comedians. In fact, apart from Fox and the New York Post, none of the mainstream media covered the event.

Still, everyone [who knew about it] agreed that the #WalkAway from the Democratic Party D.C. march was a “YUGE” success.

So what lies ahead for Straka? That is, apart from his newfound political clout.

He said:

I want to make documentaries about American culture … I want to make it cool to be a patriot and an American.

Which can only mean an American who honors and will defend the Constitution. A citizen of the Constitutional Republic of the United States.

Americans are bound into a nation by the Constitution. Nothing else.

So America “needs” to have a woman leader?

And she “should” preferably be black?

Your sex and race are not in themselves qualifications or disqualifications for leadership.

But intelligence is a qualification for it. So is political acumen. So are strength of character, determination to defend the Constitution, steadfast commitment to freedom and patriotism, competence, and the power to communicate. Especially if they are all present in one person.

They are all present in Candace Owens.

Candace Owens

And Candace Owens is calling for an exit of black voters from “the Democrat party”: 

When I uploaded my first video onto YouTube one year ago, I entitled it “Mom, Dad, I’m a Conservative.”

It was a two-minute satirical stab at the social exiling that many Americans face when they announce their conservatism to friends and family.

Soon thereafter I would discover that for black Americans, the punishment that awaits is far worse than any social exile: it is a full-court social lynching.

Search the name of any prominent black conservative and peruse the words written by liberal journalists:

Dr. Ben Carson is a “porch monkey”

Larry Elder is but an “Uncle Tom”

Kanye West is “in the sunken place”

Clarence Thomas is “a womanizer”

I have been branded a self-hating black, Nazi-sympathizer and rather astonishingly — a white supremacist.

The underlying sentiments are clear; black people are meant to think and act within the confines of what white liberals deem acceptable.

But while in the past the threat of slander has worked to lag the spreading of black conservatism, over this last year, I have observed something of the opposite effect.

In fact, what many have misdiagnosed as political tension between two ideologically disparate groups is actually something far greater, far more deep-rooted, and much more likely to alter the trajectory of this country as we know it.

Across America, black people are beginning to question political orthodoxy. We have been quietly building an ecosystem of free thinkers and at long last, the intellectual dam is breaking.

This unique moment will come to be known as BLEXIT: the black exit from the Democrat party. …

BLEXIT is a national movement of minorities that have awakened to the truth. It is for those who have taken an objective look at our decades-long allegiance to the left and asked ourselves “what do we have to show for it?” …

Beyond anything else, BLEXIT is a chant of freedom. It is a chorus of voices from across the country whose hearts are exploding with the realization that we are more than the color of our skin.

We are also more than a voting bloc.

We are Americans first and foremost and we will work to piece back together our broken communities — absent overreaching government structures, absent hand-outs, and alongside our American brothers and sisters.

The tides are shifting. New leaders are emerging to help steer open minds into the uncharted possibilities of our futures.

We need all of America to join us in this fight. No matter your skin color, we need you to take up metaphorical arms against the Democrat party. First, visit our website, BLEXIT.com, where you will find the hard truths about the bigoted racism within the Democrat party. Second, spread the word. Your voice matters to those who are looking to make an “exit” from the bondage of the Democrat party. Finally, stand for truth. This battle will be one of the most consequential culture wars in American history. Your support is needed to allow us to arm the next generation with the facts they need to be free.

The “Democrat party”, moving ever more to the Left and becoming ever more aligned with the worldwide socialist movement, presents itself as – even perhaps believes itself to be – characterized by concern for the underdog. The Party of Compassion. 

Socialism always advertised itself as a movement for the raising and empowerment, the “liberation”, of the oppressed: of the “workers of the world”, said Karl Marx; of the “outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and colors, the unemployed and unemployable”, said Herbert Marcuse, theorist of the New Left; of “the wretched of the earth”, said Frantz Fanon; of “women”, said the feminists; of “homosexuals” said some Leftists and later many; of “blacks”, they said in some places at some times and all of them eventually.

Blacks were not always classed by the prophets of the Left as worthy of liberation. Karl Marx was a fierce racist, despising blacks and Jews (though or because he was Jewish), and agreeing with Friedrich Engels that the Slavs should be wiped off the face of the earth. (See for instance here and here.)

In South Africa, in the early 20th century, the motto of the Communist Party was: “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”. Then, in 1928, the Comintern decreed that the South African case must no longer be subjected to “class analysis”, but instead to “race analysis”, so the blacks replaced the white workers in the tender concern of Stalin’s Kremlin.

In the real world, the extreme oppression of all classes, both sexes, and all races by the self-proclaimed Parties of Compassion wherever they came to power – in Russia, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba – has repeatedly and invariably demonstrated that the Left is actually characterized by hypocrisy.

And intense, dumb, unexamined, class snobbery.

Connoisseurs of irony can particularly savor the treatment meted out by the Left, and all the politically compassionate, to a genuine working-class rebel leader now that one such has finally arisen in Britain to defend young girls exploited and oppressed by Muslim immigrants. Yes, young girls and boys persecuted by rapists of other races and colors coming from the countries where the wretched of the earth proliferate. He is called Tommy Robinson. They look down on him. They not only call him a “neo-Nazi”, “bigot”, and “racist” – though he is none of those things – but also an “oik”, which means a person of low class, an uncouth person. It is an expression of sheer snobbery.

And what do the Leftists and their sympathizers who rage against President Trump hold against him? They say he is “vulgar”, that he has bad taste, that he is not of their class. Right – the  Latin word “vulgus” means the common people. Although he is rich and the rich are the upper class of America, they say he lacks the necessary refinement of the socially superior.

It wasn’t the compassionate snobs but the workers of America who voted for Donald Trump to be president. And very many who were poor before he came to power are now in well-paying jobs.

And it is a black woman who is leading the movement she calls BLEXIT, whereby the blacks of America, in numbers yet to be counted, will take their votes away from the Democrat party and give them instead to the Party of Trump.

“Racism is being used to turn blacks into single-issue voters.”

Candace Owens speaks for conservatism, capitalism and the free market:

Bill Whittle explains why a few words from Kanye West threaten the very existence of the Democratic Party:

Those glorious Greeks of old conceived and implemented an Idea that took civilization thousands of thought-miles forward: individuals from any country, any nation, any tribe, could live together under the same rule of law.

What bound them, what commanded their loyalty, would be the Law rather than the Land: the Ius not the Rus – in the language of the grand old Romans who adopted the same idea. 

In the Roman Empire, at first, all the religions of all nations and tribes were tolerated, though tolerance and respect were demanded also for the gods of Rome.

It was a demand that the Judeans, who worshiped one god only, objected to. Their obstinacy on that score did not serve them well.

The Judeans became actively rebellious against Rome, whose protection they had originally invited. The Romans put down the rebellions, finally abolishing the province of Judea entirely. The Judeans turned into the wandering tribe of the Jews.

Before the first of the two great insurrections that ended in the dispersion of the Jews, an energetic Roman citizen of vast ambition came to the Judean capital, Jerusalem, from Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia in Asia Minor, and started a movement that was ultimately to destroy and replace the Roman Empire.

He called himself by the Hebrew name Saul (later changing it to Paul). He took the idea of the One  God and mixed it up with mythologies of Roman gods, claiming that the One God had a Son who was killed and rose again from the dead. He named the Son by the Greek name Jesus. His Jesus had been a living person, a Judean who had led a small weak rebellion and was executed for it. His followers maintained that he had “risen in the flesh”, and Saul/Paul was so excited by the tale – enhanced by the claim that the resurrected man was the long hoped-for Jewish Messiah (“Christos” in Greek) – that he invented a new religion. It came to be called Christianity. He moved about the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire from whence he’d come, preaching it; finally taking it to Rome itself, where he died. He won converts. No one knows how many in his lifetime. Some of them reverted to their old polytheism or Judaism, but a fair number remained faithful to the new two-in-one divinity. Some converts composed books about the life of “Christ Jesus” – which Paul himself had not been interested in. The books, and Paul’s letters, eventually provided the mythology of the new religion.Through them the two-in-one divinity became a three-in-one divinity, a “Holy Spirit” being added to God-the-Father and God-the-Son.  The Son was chronicled as being begotten by the Jewish God upon a virgin mother (a concept familiar to the polytheists of classical times).

By this means and that means, the religion spread; through Paul the wandering preacher, the books of the myths, and the appeal that the religion itself had (with its promise of a blissful everlasting afterlife for the obedient faithful, and despite the threat of an eternity of torture for the disobedient unfaithful, the judgment being made by the Triple God alone). It became the Catholic Church, highly organized everywhere, headed and led by the the Church in Rome. More than a hundred years after Paul’s death, a Roman Emperor embraced Paul’s religion, and a few decades later Christianity was imposed on the whole Empire as its the official religion. Gone was the tolerance of earlier years. A few decades more, and Rome itself, weakened by Christianity, fell to the barbarians. The Church slowly took the place of the old order. The Church became the Roman power throughout western Europe. (The Eastern Empire, with the Emperor seated in Constantinople, is another story.)

Paul of Tarsus, though he never knew it, sustained and extended the power of Rome through his invention. But the Great Idea of the Greeks in the days of their glory, and of the Romans in the days of their grandeur, was changed.  Sure, individuals from any country, any nation, any tribe, could live as a “community” under the same rule – but it was the rule of the Roman Catholic Church, and that law was a different kind of law. It was the imposition of dogma: an orthodoxy, a uniformity of belief, essentially intolerant. 

Darkness descended. The Great Idea died.

It rose again after many hundreds of years. It was resurrected as the Idea on which the United States of America was founded.  

For two hundred and twenty-two years the Great Idea has made the United States of America, with a population of individuals deriving from many lands united as one nation under the law, free, prosperous, and powerful. United by Ius not Rus. Geographical origin, ethnicity, physical appearance, religion had no bearing on the rights the law gave all who lived under it. The unifying rule of law insisted on tolerance. By doing so, it guaranteed liberty. 

Now, it seems, that is changing. The Great Idea is under attack in the USA.

Tribes are being formed; some friendly to each other, some inimical to each other. Political cliques and cults, secessionists, states’ governments, defy the federal law. Many prefer to think of themselves as Blacks rather than as Americans, and their enemy as Whites. They actively seek to return to the savage ways of inter-tribal strife. It is atavism. It is a drawing down of darkness as intolerance spreads.

A good description of the disintegration is given by Sultan Knish. He writes (in part) at his website:

The Nation of Islam [NOI] preaches that black people are the master race. It doesn’t just hate white people, Jews and a whole bunch of other folks. It hates them out of a conviction in its own superiority. According to its teachings, “the Blackman is the original man” and lighter skinned people were “devils” created by an evil mad scientist to rule over black people until they are destroyed by UFOs.

It even teaches that monkeys are descended from white people.

Progressive media essays defending Obama, Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Danny Davis, Mallory and other black leaders for their Farrakhan links have urged concerned liberals to look at the positive aspects of the Nation of Islam, its love for black people, not the negative, its hatred for white people.

But it is the “positive” that is the problem.

Intersectionality promises to package tribal identity politics into a utopia of social justice. But the essence of tribalism is the superiority of your people and the inferiority of all other groups. …

The clown car of identity politics runs smoothest when it has a common enemy: white people. Coalitions like the Women’s March assemble an array of groups who are united by their hatred of Trump, white people, Israel and root beer. And it works as long as no one lifts up the hood and looks at the engine.

Black nationalism is racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and homophobic. The Nation of Islam isn’t an exception. From Jeremiah Wright, “Italians… looked down their garlic noses”, to Eldridge Cleaver, “rape was an insurrectionary act” to Amiri Baraka, the ugliest possible supremacist bigotry is its natural state.

“We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of s___),” Amiri Baraka wrote. “The fag’s death they gave us on a cross… they give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves.”

“I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured… So come for the rent, jewboys,” the Guggenheim fellowship, PEN and American Book Award winner, and former Poet Laureate of New Jersey ranted.

Baraka was one of the country’s most celebrated black nationalist poets and he was a former member of the Nation of Islam. Baraka’s Black Mass circulated the NOI’s racist creation myth.

It was the NOI’s conviction of black superiority and white inferiority that attracted Baraka and so many other black nationalists. The NOI is one of a variety of black supremacist religious groups, from the similarly exotic Moorish and Black Hebrew churches, to NOI splinter groups such as Five-Percent Nation and black nationalist churches like the one attended by the Obamas and presided over by Jeremiah Wright.

But religious black supremacism is only a component of a larger cultural movement that lies at the heart of black nationalism and mingles historical conspiracy theories with racial supremacism.

The comingling of black nationalism with intersectional politics has produced a new generation (often of second-generation radicals) that dresses up its racism not only in the lyricism of the old black nationalism of Wright and Baraka, but in the obtuse academic jargon of intersectionality.

That’s where Tamika Mallory and Ta-Nehisi Coates come from. But political word salads and poetry only conceal what you choose not to pay attention to. And that’s why we’re talking about Louis Farrakhan.

The mass of progressive media articles, essays and explainers deployed to protect the Women’s March can be summed up as, “Stop paying attention.” And what we’re not supposed to be paying attention to is the slow death of liberalism and its substitution by the intolerant tribal extremism of identity politics. …

Intersectionality is a lie. Like the Nation of Islam, it’s not just a lie in its negative hateful aspects, but in its promise of a utopia once the “white devils” and their “white privilege” are out of the way.

Groups of identity politics extremists and their white cishet [pronounced “sis-het”, meaning heterosexual and “not transgendered”, ie. normal. – ed.] lefty allies can only be briefly united by the negative, not the positive. The “call-out culture” meant to spread social justice through the movement isn’t just a form of political terror; it fails to reach the innate bigotry of each identity politics group. …

Identity politics movements can’t fight bigotry, because they are naturally bigoted. Instead of actually rejecting bigotry, they project it on a convenient target like Trump, and then pretend that by destroying him, they can cleanse society. The more targets they destroy, the more they need to find to maintain an alliance whose only true unifying principle is a mutual denial of each other’s supremacist bigotries. And so the battle against racism becomes a war against microaggressions and structural white supremacy.

The whole thing is a ticking time bomb. And it keeps going off every few years. When it blows up, lefty activists rush out, as they are doing now, to plead, wheedle and warn that the real enemy is “white supremacy” and everyone needs to stop paying attention to the racist or sexist views of their own allies.

These “rainbow coalitions” of racist radicals don’t fight bigotry; they mobilize bigots for racial wars.

Tamika Mallory praising Farrakhan isn’t shocking. It would be more shocking if she didn’t. It’s hard to find major black figures in politics and the entertainment industry who don’t hang out with him.

Both Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, the first two serious black presidential candidates, did. The Congressional Black Caucus hosted him. London Mayor Sadiq Khan acted as his lawyer. The list of black entertainers is all but endless. Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube (both members), Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee, Arsenio Hall, Common, Kanye West, Mos Def, Young Jeezy and Erykah Badu to name a few.

Not every individual who meets up with Farrakhan necessarily shares all his bigoted views, but many find his tribal affirmation of black superiority appealing and they value that more than they do any kind of tolerant society. That’s what Tamika Mallory, in her own awkward way, was trying to tell us.

Black nationalism is a tribal cause. It will always put its people first. The same is true of the rest of the hodgepodge of political identity groups that form up the intersectional chorus. No amount of calling out will change that. That’s why the calling out is mostly directed at safe targets, preferably white.

There is no larger unity at the end of the rainbow. Only smoother versions of Farrakhan. Barack instead of Baraka. Rants about “white devils” and “satanic Jews” filtered through academic jargon.

A movement of bigotries can only divide us. And that’s all identity politics has to offer America. Instead of equal rights in a united nation, we will be members of quarreling tribes. And those tribes, like Farrakhan’s fans, will be incapable of seeing members of other tribes as having the same worth they do. …

The left claims that it’s fighting for equality. What it’s actually fighting for is a tribal society where the notion of equal rights for all is as alien as it is in Iraq, Rwanda and Afghanistan, where democracy means tribal bloc votes and where the despotism of majority rule invariably ends in terror and death.