When reports began to emerge that the media was colluding with the U.S. government, Capistrano Unified School Board candidate Kira Davis became increasingly concerned about no longer having a stopgap measure in place.
“We are on the precipice of tumbling right down into full-on socialism,” she said. “We are in a very dangerous place because media is supposed to be the watchdog for the government and when media colludes with the government, that is a huge problem."
Davis is the author of Drawing Lines: Why Conservatives Must Begin to Battle Fiercely in the Arena of Ideas in which she discusses women’s rights amid the transgender movement, school choice, the cancel culture, critical race theory as well as civil rights, and Covid fights.
“I think we only have to look to our neighbors to the north to see how that's worked out for them,” Davis told the Southern California Record. “Canada has almost completely succumbed to complete socialism. I wouldn't even call Canadians free right now.”
As an editor-at-large for RedState.com, Davis experienced the growing link between the media and the U.S. government firsthand immediately following the Jan. 6, 2021 rally at the U.S. Capitol.
"We were just inundated with strikes and red flags from Facebook and Twitter," she said. "Suddenly, they were just really cracking down on our language. They were running algorithms through every article. We ended up self-censoring because we just didn't know what was going to be the trigger that would end us on social media."
Davis wasn’t always a conservative. She was born and raised in Canada by an American father and a Canadian mother.
“My father went back to the United States pretty quickly," she said. “I was a default Democrat. Both my parents are what I lovingly call ‘godless hippies.’ I was raised in an atheist environment.”
It was the combination of a religious conversion in her teens and motherhood that landed her on the road to conservatism while she was living in Gary, Indiana, with her husband where she ran an afterschool program as part of her father-in-law's church.
“He was the first Black man I ever met who called himself openly a conservative and a Republican," she said. "I thought it was so strange.”
But these days, Davis has joined the ranks of strange. Because of her conservative views, she’s been labeled Aunt Jemima, Auntie Tom, a traitor, a backstabber and a sellout.
“I was departing from the traditional point of view and when I would be vocal about it, the people around me didn't appreciate it,” she said.
Davis has since relocated to Orange County with her family where she unsuccessfully campaigned for a seat on the Capistrano Unified School Board.
"I don't think we're waking up too late because I'm looking around me and I'm watching people say, 'I need to get in this arena. I need to get in this game' and I think the school board thing is really the biggest example of that," she added. "Unfortunately, I didn't win my school board race here in Southern California, but thousands of other conservative parents across the nation did."