Oprah has been nicknamed the "Queen of all media." She’s also a self-made billionaire and Forbes estimates her wealth at $2.5 billion, which places her at No. 1,217 … in the world. So, when she talks people should listen.
Students at her alma mater, Tennessee State University, had that opportunity this past weekend. She delivered a memorable commencement address. Not necessarily memorable for the best reasons. Sure, Oprah wowed the crowd with some compelling anecdotes, but couldn’t avoid politics and emulating her party’s standard bearer – President Joe Biden.
Out of nowhere, she dropped the hammer, pounding the captive audience with a series of leftist talking points, including: alleged book banning, LGBT+ complaints, the debt ceiling and, of course, guns. She claimed they are "military-grade assault rifles," but any rational gun owner knows that claim is bogus.
Her speech started out on a positive note as she explained growing up poor and building a mega-star career from nothing. She told the crowd of her time at TSU and how she was pulled out of class for a TV job offer. It led to her first job at a television station and the rest, as they say, is history.
That’s what she gave them, a personal history lesson, mixed with a healthy and positive dose of faith – for a while. Then she moved directly from God dreaming "a bigger dream for you than you could ever imagine for yourself" to politics.
Her speech took a sharp left turn. "You've witnessed the storming of the capitol and the death of civility. You're acutely aware that voting rights are being gutted. Women's rights are being dismantled."
Ahh, the "death of civility." Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that.
She went on, rattling off something like 13 different agenda items in a little more than 30 seconds. At least 11 of those are easily identifiable as leftist agenda. "Books are being banned. History is being rewritten. The Supreme Court is being corrupted. The debt ceiling is being held hostage. The climate is changing. The LGBTQ community … the LGBT+ community is under attack," she told her captive audience.
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Only when she claimed, "The Cold War is back," did she veer from standard liberal orthodoxy. And it wasn’t clear she intended to do so. Certainly, power-mad Russian President Vladimir Putin is to blame for that one, not conservatives. Whether Oprah realizes that is another matter.
She took the time to praise two new Democrat rising stars – Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. They were kicked out of the state legislature after taking part in a rowdy protest right on the floor of the Senate. She declared, "they're building on the legacy of giants" like the late civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis.
But what about that "civility" thingie? If all those things are bad by her definition, so are the people she thinks are doing them or support them. So, not really all that civil after all.
This is directly from Biden’s bait-and-switch playbook. He whined about the lack of Senate civility back in 2019 when he was in campaign mode, talking about the old days. (Sometime soon after Methuselah, when Biden was first elected.) "At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done," he recalled.
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Then in November, 2021, he pretended to hope "that we can get back to a place where there’s more civility in politics." Of course, he also got mad in early 2022 when questioned about campaigning "on a return to civility." But that didn’t matter. He already had moved on.
Naturally, Oprah followed his lead.
I’m not belittling her. I have followed Oprah’s career since the 1970s when she took a job at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. Soon she was co-hosting a local talk show that would foreshadow her future success called, "People Are Talking." She has my respect. But the problem with being a professional talker is sometimes you talk too much or forget to listen and understand.
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Oprah, like most super-wealthy liberals, can’t contemplate a world outside her bubble. She and Biden could never imagine a conservative speaker bombarding a college audience with more than a dozen conservative arguments on one of the biggest days of their lives.
Even if that speaker was miraculously allowed on campus and neither boycotted nor interrupted, almost no conservative would dare deliver such a blatant propaganda piece.
Picture this: "School libraries are used to indoctrinate. False history is turning us against our country. The president has been corrupted. The deficit is beyond counting. The green movement is taxing Americans to pay the rest of the world. Transgender extremists manipulate our children," she told her captive audience.
The result would have been the uproar heard ’round the world.
And Oprah and her friends would have been among the first to complain.
