The prevailing narrative in America at the moment is that immigrants and minorities must support the Left wholesale. If they don’t, we’re told, they are supposedly betraying themselves and their community. Those with the courage to buck the trend are often derisively labeled traitors, vilified with racist pejoratives, or accused of being “white on the inside.” Such pronounced vitriol in today’s hostile political environment is occurring now more than ever.
The truth is that so many of the progressive ideals that have come to define the Left are diametrically opposed to the values of countless immigrants and minorities. The Left has become almost “valueless” as they continue to deconstruct morality, faith, and tradition into oblivion. Conservative ideals, on the other hand, not only echo traditional moral and religious values but also rational and reasonable ones the Left abandoned long ago as it goes further off the deep end, embracing critical race theory and decrying “toxic masculinity” and “privilege.”
As a result, conservatism is becoming increasingly popular with minorities again. Below are six minority voices that challenge the Left by promoting values grounded in conservative ideals.
1. Coleman Hughes
A fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, Coleman Hughes has emerged as a vibrant intellectual voice. He approaches complex issues such as race in America with persuasive precision.
His recent essay for City Journal on police brutality is argued with much-needed nuance and sophistication in such a volatile period. While Hughes underscores that racism does exist in America, he also states, “I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.” He reaches such a conclusion by mining data and relying on critical evaluation gained, in part, from his degree in philosophy earned at Columbia University.
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Hughes offers a significant list of police officers “killing an unarmed white person” from 2015 alone that were disregarded by the media. Hughes asserts that “[f]or every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way.” He then offers an unavoidable moral conclusion:
“At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new ‘anti-racist’ bias is justified — if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt — then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.”
Finally, Hughes offers the kind of adroit thinking that resists yielding to dogmatic overtures and forces all of us to evaluate our positions on such a combustible issue: “If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.”
2. Alfonso Aguilar
Alfonso Aguilar is the “first and former” Chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship under President George W. Bush. He’s currently the president of the Latino Partnership of Conservative Principles, “a Washington, DC based advocacy group, which promotes conservative values and ideals within the Latino community and works to integrate Latinos into fuller and more active participation and leadership in the conservative movement,” according to their website.
Aguilar is an important voice for conservative Latinos who are often maligned for their beliefs and principles by the Left. Recently, Aguilar wrote a thoughtful and provocative piece for The Western Journal detailing Joe Biden’s hypocritical stance on border protection, pointing out that the former vice president “voted for the Secure Fence Act in 2006 that mandated the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing.”
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Aguilar’s piece also offers humane and ethical imperatives for border security that are all largely dismissed by the Left. He rightly states, “migrants are targeted by criminal organizations and subjected to violence and other crimes, including abduction, theft, extortion, torture and rape.” Even more horrifying is the fact that upwards of “80 percent of Central American women and girls are raped on their journey to the U.S.” and that it’s “well documented that our southern border has become a hub for sex trafficking because it remains porous and not in operational control by the Border Patrol.”
3. Kim Klacik
Kim Klacik’s meteoric rise can be attributed, in part, to her viral campaign video. The video dismantles any hubris the Left can offer Baltimore as the telegenic Klacik exposes so much ruin in the city long-held by Democrats.
“Klacik is seen in the video walking through West Baltimore,” according to The Spectator, “daring to shine a light on abandoned streets that have been run by Democrats and ignored by Republicans for decades. And the public took notice. The video has more than 12 million views on Twitter alone and landed Klacik a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.”
Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images
Like many minorities, Klacik felt compelled to disavow any notions of being a victim that the Left insists upon. Though she voted for Obama in 2008, she was dismayed by “the President and First Lady emphasizing their apparent victimhood.” Her disappointment made her realize that “her values were more in line with conservatism.”
Klacik is hoping to represent Maryland’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House this November.
4. Hamza Yusuf
As one of the world’s most prominent Muslim scholars, Hamza Yusuf suffered tremendous backlash when he accepted a position on President Trump’s Commission on Unalienable Rights in 2019. The Middle East Eye insinuated that he was some “apologist for American empire and a stooge.” A hostile piece in Al Jazeera decried Yusuf’s appointment to the commission, arguing that he was “perpetuating imperialist propaganda and defending rights repression.”
Like most such accusations from the Left, these smears only demonstrate their own biases and myopic biases. Yusuf has increasingly used his prominence to give greater voice to morality and meaningful faith and to call into question the progressive onslaught that now assails our nation.
In 2018, Yusuf sat down with the late English philosopher and lauded conservative Roger Scruton in a compelling discussion on the role of conservatism today. Yusuf also recently wrote an eloquent and elaborate piece against abortion that was met with disdain by the Left.
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Yusuf bolstered his argument against the practice not only by citing passages from the Abrahamic traditions but by also drawing from other major religious traditions around the world:
“Strong prohibitions against infanticide and abortion also exist in Hindu and Buddhist literature. India, despite Hinduism’s condemnation of abortion, currently suffers from an epidemic of female feticide and even infanticide.Buddhism, much to the chagrin of Western pro-choice advocates who view the faith as meshing with a progressive ethos, clearly condemns abortion in its earliest scriptures. The Dhammapada, an early collection of sayings of the Buddha, states, ‘Considering others as yourself, do not kill or promote killing. Whoever hurts living beings … will not attain felicity after death.’”
Yusuf ends his essay unequivocally, stating, “For anyone who believes in a merciful Creator who created the human being with purpose and providence, abortion, with rare exception, must be seen for what it is: an assault on a sanctified life, in a sacred space, by a profane hand.”
5. Benjamin Yu
In many respects, Benjamin Yu embodies the American experience for many minorities. The son of Chinese immigrants, his family fled the oppression of their homeland. Yu later enlisted in the Army following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, as detailed by his website.
Yu is now an emerging conservative voice whose firsthand experience with Marxism at the hands of the Chinese regime has made him a fierce critic of the Left.
“But over the last few years,” Yu wrote in a piece for The Hill, “I’ve witnessed more of my fellow Chinese-Americans abandoning the Democratic Party and generally becoming more politically conservative. There are several reasons for this, including Chinese Americans’ cultural conservatism and the Democratic Party’s slide toward socialism, which reminds many of us of the communism we fled in China.”
Yu also added that the values inherent to Chinese immigrants are now completely at odds with the Left, arguing that “Chinese-Americans have been alienated by the Democrats’ emphasis on political correctness, social justice, wealth re-distribution and LGBTQ rights.”
6. Marcellus Wiley
A former NFL player and current host of “Speak For Yourself” on FOX Sports, Marcellus Wiley has been a vocal opponent of Black Lives Matter in recent months. He took specific aim at BLM’s since-redacted mission statement that included a direct attack on traditional families:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement… When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual…”
Wiley, who attended Columbia University, denounced BLM in no uncertain terms on his show, echoing foundational conservative family values, stating, “My family structure is so vitally important to me…Being a father and a husband, that’s my mission in life right now.”
Leon Bennett/WireImage
He then countered BLM’s attacks on traditional families with a deluge of facts:
“Children from single-parent homes versus two-parent homes. The children from the single-parent homes — this was in 1995 I was reading this — five times more likely to commit suicide. Six times more likely to be in poverty. Nine times more likely to drop out of high school. Ten times more likely to abuse chemical substances. Fourteen times more likely to commit rape, 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.”
Wiley also made a pointed critique of the Left’s “systemic racism” narrative by offering his own self-evident proof of progress, according to FOX News: “I’m on a show that I’m hosting along with another black guy who is hosting with me, who replaced another black guy — and that’s just one example of it.”
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.