College commencement addresses usually involve an accomplished speaker imparting a few life lessons to graduates before they enter post-college life. Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, used his speech to inform graduates that the only way forward is a total rejection of conservatism, free-market capitalism, and Donald Trump.
Barber used his speech to unveil a new “moral revolution” to rebuke conservatism which he described as “a dark and dangerous political, immoral ideology trying to cover the land.”
The NAACP president said that right-wing thinking is a throwback to the worst “demons of our souls.”
“There’s an agenda at foot from the statehouse to the halls of Congress,” Barber said. “From a sly as a Fox News station to extreme radio and that agenda is saying that the way to a greater America is to go backwards.”
He claimed that the right was working for the “dark side” and attacking teachers, public education, universal healthcare, Medicaid expansion, tax cuts, $15 an hour minimum wage, #BlackLivesMatter, gun control, women’s health, open borders, amnesty, Palestinian statehood, and transgender bathrooms.
“I’m worried about a state that would pass a bill and call it a ‘bathroom bill’ when really it’s an anti-civil rights bill, and anti-family bill, and an anti-living wage bill,” Baker continued in his tirade. “A bill that hurts children, hurts families, and hurts the poor.”
“[Conservative policies] cast a moral shadow over all of us and lead us away from greatness and character as a nation and as a state.”
He said that the millennial generation was born to reverse these trends and deliver the progressive victories of our constitution: “mercy, grace, love, equality, justice, and the common good.”
Apparently James Madison wrote those principles in invisible ink.
Watch the commencement speech below:
