In the New York City mayoral election of Nov. 4, 2025, Zohran Mamdani won the vast majority of the black vote against his two opponents, including Andrew Cuomo, who had been a liberal Democratic governor of the state. The equally liberal Democratic governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, assumed office in 2025 after capturing more than 97 percent of the black vote in her victory over a black Republican Evangelical. These facts came to mind as I read National Review Editor Rich Lowry’s delusional column in the New York Post about how conservatives can look forward to blacks becoming the dependable guardrail against progressive Democrats.

According to Lowry, the South is full of “older, religious African-American voters in, say, South Carolina’s I-95 Black Belt.” These pious, pragmatic voters rallied to Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries because they “decided the former vice president was the safe choice, and that was the end of Sanders,” Biden’s more socialist leaning rival. Apparently, we should never assume that Southern blacks, who presumably spend their days reading the Good Book, would ever embrace “the grievances of ideologically exotic, college-educated white people.”

Should I therefore assume that blacks who voted for Cori Bush in Missouri, Jasmine Crockett in Houston, the leftist firebrand Stephen Cohen in Memphis, or the far left opponent of Will Van Epps in the recent congressional race in Tennessee’s 7^th District, were transplants from the Northeast? Or perhaps I should think that the blacks who voted for Biden after instructions from longtime black Congressman Jim Clyburn were acting out of Christian conviction. I find absolutely no evidence that black political icon Clyburn is any kind of conservative. On every social issue he has been unswervingly on the left.

Conservative Inc. celebrities seem noticeably desperate to win black approval and think they can achieve this goal by pretending that black voters are becoming their friends. Although “black conservatives” do appear on my TV screen as paid Fox News contributors, I doubt I’d find many of them among Southern black Democrats. J. Burden rightly mocks that species of conservative who is always “in search of natural conservatives” but who predictably ends up empty-handed.  

Laura Ingraham, for example, talks as if black voters are banging down doors to get into the GOP.  Last week, in offering an alternative to the leftist historical narratives taught at the Smithsonian, she called for a return to an older model of history instruction in which Harriet Tubman, presumably, would place near the top. I wouldn’t be surprised if black voters seeing this kind of spectacle made fun of these whites who fantasize about how much blacks love them.

No doubt the South was once full of pious black Baptists who would never have wanted to be associated with the woke lobby or with the Islamification of our cities. But that was back then; now is now. Up until the late 1930s, most American blacks still voted for “the party of Lincoln” but they don’t anymore and there’s no reason to think they ever will again, except for small percentages.

That said, I’ve never believed that the only reason authorized conservatives fantasize about the “conservatism” of American blacks is for recruiting GOP voters. They may also be trying to get the monkey of white racism off their backs. These celebrities are eager to show us that they’re sensitive to minority concerns and to undermine leftist portrayals of the right. 

In any case, it is clear that these establishmentarians don’t have to worry about offending white Southern voters in their outreach efforts. With notable exceptions, Southern “conservatives” (or most of those who misleadingly go by that label) don’t care anymore about “preserving our heritage.” Thus, when Rich Lowry during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 called for the sweeping project of removing all statues of Robert E. Lee from public places, there’s no evidence that his Southern white readers stopped subscribing to his magazine en masse. But if Conservative Inc. hopes to recruit black voters by dumping on the Southern white past, it turns out that this plan is also not working. Jim Clyburn’s voters are not about to abandon their political home on the left because of anything written by conventional conservatives.

What has happened, and what Scott Greer documents in his new book Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America, is the formation of an independent right among younger conservatives, which is loudly contemptuous of the conservative establishment. The efforts of this establishment to reach out to the left are causing problems, which are not likely to go away. The gatekeepers will soon likely find themselves caught in the middle, or to revive my old image, on the floor between two stools, as the Baby Boomer Republicans on whom the establishment depends pass from the scene. At least part of this emerging right is much less civil than those paleoconservatives the authorized conservatives have spent decades snubbing. And the white nationalists, neo-reactionaries, and other right-wing rebels whom Greer depicts may be much more strident and far less easy for the establishment to ignore than the old paleoconservatives have been. 

Addendum: Lately I’ve been amused by the fumbling efforts of Fox News to win over sports announcer Stephen A. Smith, a Trump-hating social leftist, whom “the Fox family” have been urging to run for president. Supposedly Smith, at least according to Sean Hannity, can restore “moderation” to his party, since he is neither a socialist nor pro-Hamas. Perhaps this “natural conservative” should run for our highest office and promise that, if he wins, he will provide jobs for our conservative gatekeepers after they’re rolled over by an ill-mannered young activist right.