Opinion

10 Shocking Things You’ll Learn In Clueless Star-Turned-Conservative Commentator Stacey Dash’s New Book

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Stacey Dash Fox News Contributor
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Adapted from her recent book, There Goes My Social Life: From Clueless to Conservative.

You’ve seen her in her most famous role as ‘Dionne Davenport’ in Clueless, and perhaps as a regular panelist on Fox News’ Outnumbered, but now Stacey Dash has opened up like never before in her tell-all new book There Goes My Social Life.

From a heartrending childhood growing up in the South Bronx to a pair of drug-addicted parents, to abusive relationships and her “coming out” as an anti-Obama conservative, Dash reveals numerous fascinating and at times shocking tidbits about her life and political beliefs.

Here are just 10 of them:

  • Dash was a member of a violent gang while in junior high school

As Dash describes it, she and her fellow classmates at a Los Angeles-area school were effectively required to join either the Crips or Bloods. Having cultivated a reputation as a brawler that began during her days as a schoolgirl in the South Bronx, Dash was accepted into a gang without having to go through a violent and likely criminal initiation. Recognizing the dark hilarity of the situation, Dash writes that, “After I chose my colors, I had to dress differently. I had to start wearing khakis and big white tee shirts and a certain color rag … The first morning that I was a gang member, I took one look in the mirror and laughed. I looked like an inmate at Rikers Island.”

Dash would continue brawling subsequent to her gang membership. Luckily however, her mother would move her to a Catholic school in Burbank, CA for high school, after finding out that Dash had broken a finger punching a fellow classmate.

  • Dash’s own mother offered her her first line of cocaine

At sixteen years old, it was Stacey’s cocaine-addicted mother who offered her her first line of the drug. Dash accepted, leading her down a path of drugs, promiscuity and almost to the abyss.

  • Dash attempted to commit suicide

Having started abusing drugs and living the life of a rebellious punk rocker during her final year at high school, Dash describes an episode in which she tried to kill herself by ingesting a large quantity of pills. By chance, a friend showed up just before Dash passed out, waking up to find herself in the hospital, her life saved. Upon waking, Dash’s mother tragically threatened to check her into a mental hospital. Ultimately she would run away from home, a decision that would lead her to an appearance on The Cosby Show, and then on to Hollywood.

  • Dash was sexually assaulted at gunpoint

Among the more eye-opening and tragic parts of There Goes My Social Life are the descriptions of the regular beatings and sexual abuse that Dash underwent throughout her life in several tumultuous relationships. Most disturbing of all is Dash’s description of being held up at gunpoint and raped by a stalker ex-boyfriend Axel, while trying her best to remain silent so as not to subject her newborn baby lying in a crib near the bed to the horror that was occurring. Stacey would put an end to this nightmare however, as…

  • Dash believes the Second Amendment saved her life

Stacy found no recourse but to defend herself with a weapon, given continued run-ins with the aforementioned Axel. On what would turn into the last of these occasions, Axel broke into Dash’s house and began pummeling her, not knowing she had a gun and ammo in the house. Stacey was able to free herself of Axel however, and driven by the need to protect her three-year-old son upstairs not to mention survive herself, ran for her gun and fired several errant shots as Axel lunged for her. While Dash missed her target, Axel ran for the door, never to harass Stacey again. As Dash writes, “I’m only alive today because I had a gun—and I used it.”

  • A video of National Review founder William F. Buckley from 1965 had a tremendous impact on Stacey’s political beliefs

As Stacey writes:

I was greatly influenced by a YouTube video of National Review’s William F. Buckley debating author James Baldwin in 1965 at Cambridge University. Buckley said to Baldwin, “The question . . . is not whether we should’ve purchased slaves generations ago, or ought the blacks to have sold us those slaves. The question rather is this: Is there anything in the American dream which intrinsically argues against some kind of deliverance from the system that we all recognize as evil? What shall we do about it?”

In other words, slavery happened. It’s time to move on and go beyond what those evil men had in mind when they put shackles on us so long ago. There’s no instant cure for our race issues, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of renouncing the American dream, Buckley said that blacks should address their “own people and urge them to take advantage of those opportunities which do exist and urging us to make those opportunities wider. . . . If it finally does come to a confrontation between giving up the best features of the American way of life and fighting for them, then we will fight the issue.”

Buckley was right. Instead of giving blacks cynicism and despair, we should offer people the tools to succeed, point people to the American dream, and see what enterprising Americans can do.

Stacey makes a compelling argument in There Goes My Social Life in fact that most black people are Republicans based on their core beliefs, though they fail to recognize it.

  • Dash is such an avid fan of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead that she named one of her children after one of the novel’s characters

Stacy’s son Austin, born in 1991, is named after the fictional character Austin Heller, a journalist and patron of the book’s hero, architect Howard Roark.

  • Dash does not think Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner are heroes

Stacey writes:

…[T]his “courage” word is used too much when it applies to people like Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner for undergoing plastic surgery and hormone treatment because they ‘accept themselves for who they are.’ Does that make sense to anyone? If they accept themselves for who they are, why did they have to undergo such radical self-mutilation? It’s not ‘courageous’ to have plastic surgery . . . and using that word in that way does a real disservice to people like our American soldiers who have shown true, selfless bravery…”

  • Nor does Dash have much love for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton

In There Goes My Social Life, Dash writes that, “We’ve been deceived by race-mongers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who profit from pretending it’s still 1965.” Dash believes that “our black brothers and sisters fought too hard for equal rights for us to sit back and let black people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson tell us how to vote.”

  • Dash is maintaining a vow of celibacy until marriage

After three failed marriages, Dash has made a conscious decision to do something unpopular in Hollywood: Maintain a vow of celibacy until she next weds. As Dash writes:

After all of these years of bad romantic decisions, of giving myself to men who turned around and hurt me, I’ve decided to be celibate until marriage. I’m not going to continue doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

I’m going to do things the way God intended.

Better late than never.