Conservative podcaster for PragerU Amala Ekpunobi brought her message to Minnesota last week, joining Dennis Prager as a speaker at the Center of the American Experiment’s annual gala.
Liz Collin spoke with Ekpunobi ahead of her visit where she explained how hearts and minds can be changed, referring to her own story.
Ekpunobi was raised in a far-left household before she had an ideological transformation.
“I was raised by a single mother of three who happens to be a radical leftist. And still is to this day. I was raised with that sort of ideological bend. When I graduated high school, I thought there was no better thing to be than an activist,” she said.
Ekpunobi said she was taught to fight “my oppression I was facing as a black woman in America, or biracial woman.”
However, she explained there was “hypocrisy within herself and the people she worked with.”
“I went on a journey, and ended up finding conservatism and conservative voices, like Dennis Prager, Tom Sowell and Larry Elder, and I have this sort of wake-up moment that I felt the need to share with the world. Now, here I am,” she explained.
Ekpunobi has more than a million subscribers to her popular PragerU show called “Unapologetic with Amala” and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
“It was many gradual moments that ended up occurring in my life where I was forced to confront my ideology. I ran away from it as much as I possibly could, and tried to steer clear of challenging myself and challenging my beliefs. But at the end of the day, the straw that really broke the camel’s back was the amount of racism I was witnessing and racism specifically towards white people. I sort of had to reconcile this idea that we are claiming to be tolerant and anti-racist, but spouting all of this rhetoric, and that ended up being what really drove me off the edge,” she said.
Ekpunobi spoke about her past trip to Winona State University.
“The university staff and faculty and students were unhappy about that visit. Of course, there was a conservative audience there waiting for me, but it seems as though young people are being ravaged by these ideas of leftism and are deeply entrenched in these very woke, quite frankly, not great ideas,” she said.
She brought a message to GenZ in hopes of “maybe leading them to a different perspective.”
She encouraged that generation to speak out.
“You will find that when you do, there are so many people who are just waiting for the first person to step up and come out of the woodwork. If you’re scared of what’s going to happen to you, initially, when you speak out, you should be far more scared of what happens if you never do because we run the risk of just losing what makes this country great,” she said.
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Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
