By Geno Young | FreedomTalk Magazine, August, 2026 pages 12–13 
If conservatives are serious about reclaiming America’s largest blue cities, they must first confront an uncomfortable truth: We cannot win them back without winning back more Black Americans. That isn’t identity politics. It’s arithmetic. For decades, conservatives have correctly argued that the Left has trapped millions of Black Americans in a cycle of dependency, failing schools, broken families, and declining neighborhoods, while promising hope every election cycle. But if our goal is genuinely to persuade rather than merely to complain, then we must ask ourselves an equally difficult question: Why are we making it harder for people to join us?
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Race wasn’t the defining conversation of my childhood. We certainly knew racism existed, but it wasn’t the lens through which every disagreement was viewed. Increasingly, however, politics became organized around race, grievance, and competing identities. By 2016, Americans broadly believed race relations had deteriorated, with only 19% saying they were improving while nearly twice as many believed they were getting worse. A majority also said America should focus on what different groups have in common rather than what divides them. It’s safe to say that our First Black President did more to divide this nation than bring it together. Before he was even inaugurated, Michelle Obama stated that only after seeing the rise of her husband, did she feel “Proud” of America “For the first time.” The Obama Administration pioneered an era of DEI, a hyper-focus on identity politics, equating sexual orientations/alternative lifestyle choices with the plight of Black Americans, appropriating the language of the Black Civil Rights Movement to further LGBTQ causes, and a cynical view of America as the root of the world’s problems.
Barack Obama ushered in an eight year long apology tour, while extorting foreign allies with (what we now call) DEI quota requirements in exchange for resources. Yes, Obama did that. That should have been a warning. Instead of moving toward Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of judging people by the content of their character, our politics drifted toward dividing Americans into categories of oppressors and oppressed. The result has been greater suspicion, greater resentment, and greater tribalism. Conservatives rightly criticize that worldview. But we must be equally willing to criticize it when it begins creeping into our own movement.
In recent years, I’ve watched a troubling trend emerge among some corners of conservative media. Terms like “13 percenters,” “Black fatigue,” or “It’s always them” have become casual talking points, often earning applause online. Here’s the problem, those phrases don’t distinguish between the gang member destroying neighborhoods, and the Black husband working sixty hours a week to provide for his family. They don’t distinguish between the father coaching Little League and the criminal looting a convenience store. They don’t distinguish between the entrepreneur opening a business and the activist burning one down.
Instead, they paint nearly twenty percent of the conservative coalition we should be building with one broad brush—using coded “Soft Bigotry” as a way to soften extremely ugly remarks. That isn’t conservatism. It’s racism. And it’s politically self-defeating. Perhaps even more concerning is the rise of a new class of Black conservative influencers whose entire brand revolves around criticizing the Black community as a whole. Some have discovered that outrage is profitable. The more inflammatory the rhetoric, the larger the audience becomes.
In chasing clicks and followers, they often mirror the language of the very online fringe that has never wanted Black conservatives—or, in some cases, Black Americans at all—to have a meaningful place within the movement. That should concern every conservative. When fringe voices become louder than principled ones, they don’t strengthen a movement, they shrink it. Every viral insult aimed indiscriminately at Black Americans makes it easier for Democrats to argue that conservatism has no place for people who look like me. That is a gift we should stop handing them. President Donald Trump demonstrated that Republican gains among Black voters are possible.
He didn’t win a majority, but he made measurable improvements over previous Republican performances by emphasizing economic opportunity, entrepreneurship, criminal justice reform, school choice, and patriotism rather than racial grievance. Those gains showed that shared values can matter more than shared identity when people are invited into a movement instead of pushed away. The Trump 2024 Coalition was unstoppable. Anyone trying to convince you to sit out the midterms, that your vote doesn’t matter, or that the military actions of this president is grounds to just roll over and cede control of this Republic to an unscrupulous band of America-Hating Communists parading under the euphemistic facade of “Socialism” is NOT (nor EVER was) a Conservative! (Here’s looking at YOU — Mr. Fuentes, Mr. Carlson, Ms. Owens, Ms. Kelly, and Mr. Hodge 1 and 2…) President Trump’s gains are not guaranteed to continue. Coalitions require cultivation. The conservative movement should be the home of every American who believes in faith, family, hard work, safe neighborhoods, educational excellence, equal justice, personal responsibility and the dignity of earning success. Those values transcend race. But if we allow online tribalism to replace persuasion, we risk becoming exactly what we’ve spent years criticizing.
As we approach another critical election cycle, conservatives must draw a line in the sand—not against fellow Americans of different backgrounds, but against the voices inside our own coalition that profit from division. The Left cannot unite America by sorting us into competing racial categories. Neither can the Right. The future of conservatism depends on something better: speaking truth without contempt, defending principles without prejudice, and remembering that the goal was never to win an argument on social media. The goal was always to save a republic.
That work begins by remembering a timeless truth: Americans are strongest when we appeal not to the color of one another’s skin, but to the character of one another’s convictions.
