Distinguished Speaker Series - Dr Carol Swain

the issue we're going to explore the is critical to the future of our country in no uncertain words racism is a sin it is a form of human pride that God finds deplorable the Bible teaches there's neither Jew nor Gentile neither slave nor free nor is there male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus and I love the way the message translation puts this in Christ's family there can be no division I love it in Christ's family there can be no division into Jew and non-jew slave and free male and female among us you are all equal that is we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ we are all members of Christ's family we need to bring healing to our land to help us understand how to heal the racial divisions in our country I'm proud to introduce to you tonight dr. Carol M swing and after I'm done introducing her we're gonna watch a brief video and then she'll come up and speak she's got a very impressive background dr. Swain received her BA from Roanoke College MA from Virginia Polytechnic and State University PhD from the University of Northern Carolina at Chapel Hill and her msl from Yale University dr. Swain is an award-winning political scientist a former professor of political science and professor of law at Vanderbilt University and a lifetime member of the James Madison Society an international community of scholars affiliated with the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University before joining Vanderbilt in 1999 dr. Swain was a tenured associate professor of politics and public policy at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs dr. Swain is passionate about empowering others to raise their voice in the public square she is an author public speaker and political commentator dr. Swain is the author or editor of eight books her first book black faces black interests the presentation of african-americans in Congress when the willed Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book published in the US on government politics or international affairs in 1994 and was cited by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in some of their decisions in addition Cambridge University Press nominated her book the new white nationalism in America it's challenges to integration for a Pulitzer Prize her latest co-authored book is abduction how liberalism steals the hearts and minds of our children dr. Swain's and I want you to hold on for this it's going to get long dr. Swain's pieces have been published in CNN online the Financial Times The New York Times The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal The Washington Times and USA Today she has appeared on ABC headline news BBC Radio NPR CNN Fox News's Hannah Dee's Fox and Friends Lou Dobbs tonight judge jeanne Jeannine the PBS Newshour the Washington journal and ABC's headline news she has had a major role in that movie we saw last year Hillary's America the secret history the Democrat Party and who's seen her Dennis Prager videos she's had two of those Dennis Prager videos go viral if you haven't seen him Google dr. Swain and Dennis Prager you dr. Swain has served on the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the u.s. Civil Rights Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities and she's a foundation member of the Virginia chapter of Phi Beta Kappa friends I'm very proud to introduce to you tonight dr. Carol M Swain [Music] thank you thank you good evening good evening I think it's important for people to know where you came from and for individuals to not forget where they came from and so that's why I wanted people to see that video and to also you know there's a backstory to every story and that's where I came from and I didn't know any one that was a university professor my family was downwardly mo mobile I learned I've learned a lot about the maternal side of my family my grandmother's father and his father they were Methodist pastors and missionaries and they were free blacks and I only learned that a few months ago that they were free blacks and but in any event by the time it got to my family and my mother it was you know there's dire poverty on that side and I was one of 12 and all of us dropped out of school after the eighth grade and we dropped out because of the poverty and it's a count of poverty that most people can't imagine like nowadays we talk about poor and it might mean that you have one car or maybe you don't have a TV in every bedroom but you know in America today even the poor people are pretty affluent by the standards of the rest of the world and by the standards that I lived under but you know today in America there's still some people that live in great poverty some of them are poor whites in Appalachia and some of them are racial and ethnic minorities in Mississippi in various states that are still living in poverty that you would not think would exist and you hear sometimes a lot about affirmative action and I will talk a little bit about affirmative action in connection with what the book the new white nationalism that was published in 2002 but you can be so poor that affirmative action doesn't reach down to you and like the people in my family many of them are still in poverty and they don't benefit from affirmative action you can be so poor that it doesn't reach you you have to be in the system to be able to take advantage of what what is left of it and so that was you know that's the part of the reality that I grew up in and my family I was not raised in a church-going family and my early teens but I can say that probably my first experience with with God happened when I was I don't know maybe I was 12 or 13 I get all these years mixed up I'm trying to write a memoir and I get these years mixed up all I know is that I was in this Easter program that my grandmother had put together and there's actually a church that uh that my grandfather was connected to and and we were in that program and I had a poem to recite and I recited my poem and the Sun came down and shone on me in such a way that I knew at that second there was a God and then and I felt like I wanted to serve Him and I came off the stage and I told the people that I wanted to get baptized but I didn't end up getting baptized and I started studying with Jehovah's Witnesses and and so that was was the part of my story but by the time I was 20 I was doing the suicide gestures I met the medical doctor who I recently reacquainted myself with I contacted him and found out that he was 25 when I was 20 he wasn't he was an intern and a resident and he remembered me and he said he always wondered what happened to me and he's not on the internet he doesn't have an email and and so we planned to meet he's in Ohio and but he didn't know that he had changed my life because when I hit the car with him he reminded me of something I had forgotten and what I had forgotten was that there was a time in my life when I was smart and as a as a young child despite the poverty and missing lots of school I remember one year we missed a tee of a hundred and eighty days do you know what happens when you miss a tee of 180 days any teachers here you fail and and I had it I remember experiences of coming in to school and having a teacher say oh look look who decided to stop by today oh we have a visitor today and all of those things that some of you teachers may say to people when they don't come to school and I can also remember a case in particular where one of the students laughed and the teacher said what are you laughing at she may not come to school but she knows more than you do and you're here every day and so that was got a great for my confidence but until the doctor you know telling me I was intelligent I was attractive I had forgotten that there was a time when I was smart and and I don't think anyone had ever told me that I was attractive and that sort of stunned me and in in this early 20s I mean I guess I was 19 or 20 because my I learned about the high school equivalency but you couldn't take it I'll tell you a 20 and you had to wait until your high school class graduated that was the law in Virginia and so I actually had to wait to take the test but I took the test and and you know it's I don't want to get too far into my testimony but I can tell you that I've always believed in the American Dream and I thought I lived in the greatest country in the world and some of the things that taken place today you know it really saddens me that America is not the country that I thought she was but I mean I believed in America and I want to believe in America again and I think that certainly the people the older generation know like when Donald Trump said make America great again that he I don't think he was talking about racism he was talking about that sense of pride that we had in being Americans and you know the patriotism like we really thought we were the greatest country in the world and a lot of us didn't know what the CIA was doing and what you know all of these agencies of government I think they've always been corrupt but most of us didn't know what they were doing and so we thought we lived in a great country and there were judeo-christian values and I can tell you that the people who encouraged me to go to college and who made me feel that I could do anything it turned out that they were white and because I was poor and black the middle class teachers they didn't take an interest in the poor kids I mean they were all focused on the teachers kids the other middle class people's kids and so people like me that came from poverty we kind of like fell through the cracks but the mentors that I had once I started the community college and then the people that pushed me to further my education and you know they tended they they were white they were more conservative and and for some reason God wired me in a way that I actually could not see my handicap I could not see any handicaps when I was going through school and it was only when I got in graduate school that I learned that I was I was black I was poor I was a woman and I couldn't do any of those things I had already done I really think that if I heard the messages that we give our young people today especially the minorities about it's so racist doesn't matter what you do everything's stacked against you every police officer wants to shoot you I just don't know you know if I had internalized those messages if I'd hurt those messages I'm not sure what the strawberry would be but I didn't hear those messages and so I was spared from that part of my experience and so continuing with the backstory I was steered never thought to get a PhD and my first degree was in business at a community college I thought I'd be a store manager when I applied for jobs I was told that I needed a four-year degree and I kept feeling like you know the job applications and they had places on the job application you know for awards and accolades and all of these things that I had made the Dean's List a couple of times but I thought okay I need a good job I need to put something in those spots and so I decided that I had to get a four-year degree and I went through the college catalog and I looked for the field that had the least amount of math and that was criminal justice which is the interdisciplinary field that includes political science and so I knew that I would be good in anything that didn't have a whole lot of math but like every college student I had to take sciences I had to take my math that I actually ended up taking as a senior and I made a decision and I went to students to listen very very carefully I made a decision that I was gonna be an honor student because I needed a job and I wanted to have something to put in those places on the applications and so I at the time I was working in the library again you know like this is my story I was working I started at the community college as a work-study student probably working ten hours a week the regular employees would call out they wouldn't show up and so I would work over whenever they had a Christ the library director and staff created a full time job for me 40 hours a week nights and weekends and so when I was getting my bachelor's degree I was working nights and weekends at the community college library in circulation do you know how many people use the library at night not only could I do my homework I could take my children to work and how's that for God knowing me before I knew God and and so I checked out books and purchased books on how to make A's in college how to take essay exams and if students if you don't know this there are books out there that tell you how to check out the exams how to do objective tests you know how to do these things and I applied those principles and you're my first semester at the four-year college I had a 3.7 and my advisor who was a conservative Republican I remember that he told me in our first meeting not to expect to do as well as I had done in the past that was like throwing the gauntlet down and and I had been told by other students that he was a racist and not to take his classes and I'm telling you I've always been wired I'm weird and I've never fed anywhere and I said that in my last talk today and a lady came up and she really we we were sisters because she never fed anywhere but I thought whenever someone would tell me a professor was a racist and stay away from them I always signed up for that classes because I was going to show them and and that professor and so the first my first quarter or semester at that college I had a 3.7 average but in his class he gave me a B+ and he said you almost made an A and I knew in my heart that I did make an A he just wasn't gonna give it to me the first time I ran and and we ended up you know becoming a close friends but he told me at some point you are a Republican it it was probably at least fifteen I can't know how many years but it was long long many years later that I actually became a Republican but he said that I was but it was just my views were different and but you know that was part of my story as a student I had role models but they did not look like me and I do believe that if I had heard the messages that we send young people today I don't know that I would have tried as hard and I also you know learned along the way that you know God was always involved in my life even as a child he was opening doors he was closing doors he was protecting me from all sorts of things because I've been the most naive person in America I mean I may have met someone like Jeffrey Dahmer and they just had mercy on me because I was just so naive they just had sympathy but I mean you can't believe how the chances I took in my young adulthood when I started doing my dissertation research and but God was so much involved in my life but I did not become a devout believer until 1999 and and there's a backstory on how that happened but um so I've been a divided believer you know 18 19 years but when I did have my conversion experience it was very dramatic and the Lord removed a lifelong fear of public speaking and I used to be so shy as a child that I would literally forget how to speak and I would want something I would need something and I would freeze up and I could not remember how to formulate words and then when I was in college students you know that class participation is part of the grid and it doesn't just mean showing up you got to say something got to do something and so I knew that I had to do something I would write out either a question or a comment and then I would read it and the paper would be shaking and my boss would be quivering and that's how I got my class participation grade I forced myself to read the question that I had written and it sounded like a reading a question that had been written or making the comment just for the grade and then as a professor at Princeton that's where I started my career which shows you God has a sense of humor imagine taking someone from the poverty you saw and starting them off at Princeton and so that was and by the time I was on the job market I was known across the country I mean I was a hotshot and I ended up with a signing bonus and how did that happen I always mentored well young people listening I mentored well which meant that when I saw someone doing the job that I at that time I was in the track to become a professor that I was going to do whatever they told me I need to do to be successful I did and so in political science they said you have to write papers you have to go to conferences you know you have to come up with ideas whatever they said I needed to do that's what I did and so I was given conference papers as a student by the time I was on a job market I was known across the country I had my own short list of schools and I got a 25,000 dollar signing bonus that doesn't sound like a lot of money today but back in 1989 that was a lot of money and when I took my first job the tenure track position at Princeton well I mean that was the most point I had ever earned but up until that time I'd had one year well well one year while I was visiting at Duke that I earned 30,000 but up until then if you look at my Social Security earning statements you know it's just pitiful but that was you know part of my experience part of my story and so I started my career at Princeton just full of confidence I'd never crossed my mind I wasn't gonna get tenure and I knew that I was gonna get it early in fact I'm asked when they hired me that I was going to do it in three years and and I shared with the other group I knew I could do it in three years because John do you leo the guy that was the head of my search committee he had done it in one year and he came from blue car called a family and I figured that if John could do it in three years I could do it in one now where if he did it in one year I could do it in three and so I went up in the third year I got it in the fourth year and it was all but most of what drove me was I was going to prove to people this I was gonna prove that and it's all about proving stuff and my success all of those prizes it gave me no satisfaction because a lot of times I had already anticipated the prize I was I had set myself up for disappointment because the only thing could happen is either get it or I wouldn't and if I didn't get it I would have been disappointed and so um it was just a relief and you know it's a terrible way to live your life if you just you know if your identity is just caught up in your geo job or you know recognition I was very very miserable but I got my early tenure and then God said in motion the circumstances that sent me on this spiritual quest that took me through New Age in Eastern religions and all around the circle before having a Christian conversion experience but when I had that Christian conversion experience the Lord removed my fear of public speaking and it was like gone almost overnight because he impressed on me that he had given me a message bigger than me and if I focused on the message and the fact that I only had to please him I could deliver it and all of a sudden I wasn't worried about I might make a mistake and someone might laugh at me or what would these people think it relieved me from that burden and so this book the new white nationalism in America it's challenged integration that was the first book I wrote after I had my conversion experience and I started it while I was in at Yale and I became a devout believer between the time I accepted my job at Vanderbilt and before I actually showed up and so I accepted that job in 1998 I negotiated my sabbatical up front and went to Yale to get another degree in in law because I thought made I wanted to be a lawyer but it was a one-year program and while I was there I became a divided believer and so I showed up as a very different person than the person that Vanderbilt Hart and yeah they hired one person a different one showed up God has had a lot of fun with my life and you know he does have a sense of humor because I mean again think about the poverty that you saw depicted in that Coral Ridge video and and that person starting at Princeton and so it means that I'm with the most affluent of the affluent and and so it's not just knowing my subject matter but it's also trying to learn the adequate you know of all of these things I mean it was it was just you know like I don't know why God did it that way but that's what happened and and then with Vanderbilt Vanderbilt they got more than they bargained for and so when I what times I've been critical I have to realize that neither one of us knew what we were getting and for myself when this book was published it was published in 2002 I physically moved to Nashville in 2000 because there was when my job started I guess my job started the fall of 2000 so that's when I moved there but I came as a divided believer and I thought that once this book was published that the Lord was going to move me out of academia and I was going to move more towards the ministry have any of you ever heard of this lady named Joyce Meyers okay well I thought that I was gonna be the next Joyce Meyers I was gonna be traveling all around the world you know just talking and you know sharing stuff you know related to the Lord and so I thought okay as soon as I finish this book the Lord's going released me from academia and so I was so bold in this book I talked about homosexuality I talked about all the policy issues I solved all of America's problems in this book and that's why it's so fat and guess what God didn't do that he didn't move me out of academia and if you have followed the events of the last two or three years of my career that has really boosted me to make me visible I don't know if it was God you know like the eagle when he pulls out the padding because being a tenured professor is a pretty comfortable kind of position right and so I don't know that I would have had the courage to leave if things didn't sort of go sour and things started changing and eventually I took early retirement and so you're looking at a retired lady here I took early retirement as of August 2000 ggest this year and and I felt you know that I was released to do that but I also very much feel like the Lord said the world is your classroom and that part of this retirement gives me the flexibility to go around you know I've been speaking for young America's Foundation I've been going many places to share a message that I believe that God has given me I believe that he uniquely credentialed me and that I have been called for such a time as this and so with that as your background I'll talk about race relations because this book published in 2002 predicted the rise of the alt-right and if anyone saw the interview that I had with judge Jeanine right after the charlottesville she started that interview off by saying professor Swain you prophesied 15 years ago about this and this book was a warning and it talked about the rise of a new kind of nationalism that was not the KKK or the neo-nazis something that I thought would spray it and that was one of the reasons why I felt like it was so important for me to get over my shyness and that was when I started doing the media interviews and that's how it all got started but as far as race relations things are as bad as you can imagine and it's not been good for some years and if you look at the public in 2014 the server the Gallup ask people if they worried about race relations at that time only 17% of Americans told Gallup they worried about Americans by March of this year it was 42% now March of this year that was before Charlottesville can you imagine what the numbers might be now and when it comes to satisfaction with race in 2014 50 I see you're 55% of Americans were satisfied you know with race relations today in January 2017 it was 17% and if you there's been a steep decline in the percentage of Americans we would say that race relations are good and when it comes to patriotism the number of people who are proud to be Americans that number has declined quite a bit and so we ashamed of ourselves as being Americans we're not getting along when it comes to race relations and you can see just how it's you know it's it was it was moving in the wrong direction and just all the things that have happened you know since president Trump's election in 2016 and this is not about President Trump and so far the one I took part about as part of what I'm going to say tonight when I talk about the new white nationalism is that most people get it wrong like I would say that many people on the political left and just not just the political left that many people are painting with a broad brush and so they are labeling you know anyone who's conservative anyone who disagrees with them anyone who may have voted for Donald Trump as a white supremacist and it's much more complicated than that and when I wrote the book the new white national is in America I called it the new white nationalism to distinguish it from the old-style white supremacy the neo-nazis and some of the more extreme groups of that era and what I drew attention to were seven conditions that I thought were converging to create a Devil's brew for racial and ethnic unrest and I'm going to read to you at times from the book and also the conditions that I felt back in 2002 were creating a devil's brew for racial unrest and any of these things individually might not amount to much but then when you put them together converging then you get this Devil's brew and one is was one of the conditions was the concerns that Americans had about immigration legal and illegal and how immigration was changed in the Democratic Democratic of the nation and back then the estimates were or the projections were that by 2050 the country would be majority minority that's going to happen before 2050 it may happen or before 2045 but it's going to happen before 2050 and by 2020 a majority of the children in public schools will be a racial or ethnic minority and then the white population itself is aging and so one of the first issues identified was the immigration the demographic changes that were reshaping America and back then there was some kind of some cities and states that were that were becoming majority minority and now they've already become majority minority and even as that trend continues it's likely that minorities will be concentrated in maybe eight or nine states and then the rest of the states will be majority white but and that has to do with just how people live and during the time that I was looking at doing this research there was a demographer at the university of michigan named William Frey and he and this journalist named Jonathan tal love had pointed out that people were naturally resegregate intone race and that the Americans were redistributing themselves and so people that used to flee our racial ethnic minorities by moving to the suburbs they were moving to our they were moving to states that were majority white they were moving to whole you know they're moving across country and then the racial and ethnic minorities like Asians were you know moving to California you know Jews were moving you know where their group had a majority blacks were returning to the south and so we were just naturally resegregate announced sales and that was a trend that they thought were was worth reporting because it was a different kind of choice that people were making at the time you know people were not choosing to live among people of other races and ethnicities and everyone was doing it and so you know the whole story about racism and all of this I mean it's not just a white story I mean it's disturbing maybe about human nature you know maybe something about us this tribal but that was taking place there were structural changes in the global economy that was causing the loss of high wage production jobs and so you had a lot of people that had low levels of education whites blacks everyone you know they were working those jobs they were losing jobs and then anyone here from North Carolina okay well I mean North Carolina is a state where they had a lot of textile plants and various kinds of plants in Virginia had Mohawk rubber they had all these places where people could get a job they could raise a family they could stay there with those jobs especially after NAFTA you know those jobs were gone and so people were concerned about that there was the white resentment and hostility over affirmative action and part of what I didn't tell you is that before I had my conversion experience I was writing a book on a firm action and was called when whites and blacks agree and the story that I was telling in my book was that if you gave people concrete situations vignettes whites and blacks would always agree on what was fair even if it applied to someone of a different race and I had survey data where you randomly randomized the race or the gender or the social class of the person in the vignette and whites and blacks would always pick the same person usually the underdog which meant sometimes the majority of blacks would choose the white underdog and the majority of whites would choose the black underdog and so I had this positive story that I thought I would be telling about our race relations but then some things started happening in the late 1990s that made that story less important and some of it had to do with high profile crimes that involved interracial violence and so it's a long story how that research got folded into this book on white nationalism but the affirmative action always been a grievance and not and has not been as accepted among you know blacks as you might think and it's never worked the way many people thought it worked you know like I've seen it up close and it doesn't work the way people think it works that was concerned about that was concerned about how black on white crime so I've given you immigration structural changes in the global economy affecting high wage production drop jobs white resentment and hostility of affirmative action concerns about high black-on-white violent crime rates the growing push and acceptance of multiculturalism and identity politics and you might ask well how does that fit in it fit in because on the college campuses there was so much focus on the ethnic studies and the multiculturalism and you know the ethnic pride that that was I say in the book and I read to you parts of the book how that was fueling quite identity and white people were starting the young people sudden to think in terms of okay if everyone asks can celebrate you know their unique background and their heritage then what about us and so everyone wanted the hyphenated identity and so you know you could be african-american or you could be Latino well there were some whites that wanted to be European Americans or of whatever they wanted to hyphenated identities to that was taken place and I saw that the language of multiculturalism and identity politics was providing the justification for white identity and white interests and I say I say in this book that that would be the next stage of identity politics in America because there were people that were very upset about racial double standards and there was like a grievance and the people that I call the new white nationalists they called themselves now the alt-right but they were they didn't just happen you know they may call themselves the alt-right they have rebranded themselves but these were people who were well educated many of them have college degrees Ivy League degrees and they were using that language to make a case for white people to organize for white self-interest and and so that's why I called them the new white national national is because they were using ideas social science data FBI statistics science they were making an intellectual case for white people to do as racial and ethnic minorities had done and one of the persons that I had interviewed like for part of this book I commissioned interviews and this started while I was at Princeton and it was completed at Vanderbilt but I commissioned interviews of people that I thought represented the spectrum of the white leadership that I would call white nationalists and let me reach you that backgrounds and I had a white interviewer who was a Princeton perceptor middle-aged Italian who had a doctorate the one that I found most fascinating his name is Jared Taylor he's the editor of American Renaissance magazine which is an online magazine and and also the founder of the new century I think it's called a new century foundation but what I noticed was that the new organizations that these people were affiliated with there was nothing in their name that would identify that they were anything about white advocacy they had names that sounded quite innocent like American Renaissance new Century Foundation and Jared Taylor fascinated me because he was the child of Christian missionaries and he had been raised in Japan and a lot of his family I've learned are evangelicals and but he has a bachelor's degree from Yale and a master's degree from the London School of Economics perfect gentleman someone that I would never imagine using racial epithets and he put forth a very intellectual case about racial double standards and and using a lot of history using a lot of science to make his case and I knew that someone like that could be persuasive another person was Rena Wolf's director of the National Association for the Advancement of white people I mean David Duke started it back in the 1970s I think when he was in college and he started it in reaction to the National Association for the Advancement of white people and let me read a quote from RINO wolf and in the interview you know he seemed like a very nice person now I didn't meet any of these people and we got informed consent from them in fact they signed three releases and would you believe not a single one of them asked my interviewer who are you working with he told them that he was working with a Princeton professor they never asked and one of the interviewees was we improve out the Turner Diaries and some other books and he started the National Alliance he had a policy of not giving interviews to Blacks and Jews and and he was possibly quite dangerous he died within a couple of months of the book being published how unfortunate he was the only one that I was actually afraid of when you turn down a lot of pages that may not always be a good idea I find the arena Wolf quote later so rental wolf working class kind of guy directing this organization Michael Evan professor philosophy at the City University of New York he Jewish a white nationalist David Duke I mean how can you do a book on white nationalism without including David Duke he was one of the interviewees a guy named Don black who started an organization named storm front and Don black sent his son Dillon who was active in that movement as a teen he made the mistake of sending him off to college and you know what happened he got converted he renounced the racism he became he announced he renounced everything he actually I mean I mean it had a happy ending he was embarrassed he was ashamed he renounced his father he renounced everything now that's not good if you're sending your Christian child off to college and your chair announces everything you know because of what he gets but Dylan is not part of the white nationalist movement anymore Michael Hart another Jewish professor both of them had PhDs he was retired astro physicist with a PhD from Princeton he developed a plan for petitioning off the u.s. in two different states he would argue that you know blacks already behaved as a separate nation and that we would all get along better if you had a black state a Jewish state a multiracial state you know a Hispanic state and you know he's serious I mean he had a plan for dividing off the US and before you laugh too hard some of the black nationalists have talked about creating a separate black nation within the United States and there have been meetings between Klansmen and members of black separatist groups and so they actually agree on a lot of things and so it's not you know just just about white nationalists there's a lot of agreement among people who are separatists who are racial separatists this guy Dan Gaiman pastor of a Missouri based Church of Israel he was the leading advocate of the Christian identity movement in one heard of Christian identity okay what do you know about it well I mean part of a part of it is that Adam was the first white man and that Cain took his wife from some of the other sub races and so Jews and people of color would be sub races well and you know so I mean this person was interviewed Matthew Hale the leader of the World Church of the Creator we had one woman she called herself Lisa Turner we don't know if that was her real name or if she picked that name because of the children Diaries and and then we imperious he was the head of a neo-nazi organization the National Alliance author the Turner Diaries which the FBI called the Bible of the racist right and so I interviewed those individuals because I was curious about what causes someone to hate another person to the point that they'd want to take their lives and and I became interested in that because there were some high profile crimes that took place during this era and one involved a young man there was a college student named Benjamin Nathanael Smith and he was raised in a middle class family or upper classes mother was a realtor his father was a physician he went to a top high school in the Chicago area he had a Korean girlfriend while he was in college he had Jewish friends he went on a shooting spree and he shot nine people and he killed two and one of the persons killed was Ricky birdsong who was a black coach of at Northwestern University at the time and when he started shooting people he targeted blacks and Asians and people like that and people when they tried to figure out okay what went wrong in this young man's life he was upset about foreign aid going to people from other countries and then the two Jewish people that we interviewed with the PhDs they were upset probably one because he was at City University and the other one I think he taught at a community college they were all upset about affirmative action and so with the interviews my interviewer you know just started off asking them where they grew up and and then he would get to the point of which policies do you like or dislike and so people just chatted and that was controversial that first that we interviewed them or that I interviewed them because people would argue that they don't deserve to be heard that it was given a platform to people who shouldn't be heard and and so that was something that affected how the book was received there were people that didn't review the book I didn't want to review the book because they didn't believe that those people deserve to be heard and as I say in the book I believe that what you don't know can hurt you and that that we needed to know what was taken place and more seriously I saw had that how there were policy issues many of them were legitimate issues that were not being addressed by mainstream politicians if you go back and look at the debates of 2000 and 2004 immigration I don't think he came up at all in 2000 and in 2004 it was mentioned twice but it was not on the horizon of the politicians they were both political parties avoiding it even though the surveys showed that the American people cared a lot about it and they were being affected by the in adverse ways and when by 2006 you know it was something that was a big public discussion in 2006 and in 2007 there was a bill that did not pass we have not passed the immigration bill since 1986 and but with immigration would lead politicians to finally get involved was the rise of the Minutemen and women do you all remember them these were people like grandmas and grandpas and lawn chairs calling themselves patrolling the border you know they were sitting out there you know calling the Border Patrol when they saw people that was very dangerous and so then the government had to get involved but up until that time the government was quite content to saw they ignore who was taking place I want to read a quote to you from this guy Don black black he was the founder of stormfront and that is one of the more extreme I would not put this person among the alt-right but this is how he described himself he said I think the term white supremacist isn't an accurate description of most of the people that are part of our movement because white supremacy implies a system such as we had throughout most of the 50s and 60s in which there was legally enforced segregation and in which whites were in a position of domination we did have a supremacist type government in most states but today the people who are attracted to the white nationalist movement want separation we are separatist we believe that we as white people as European Americans have the right to pursue the distant to pursue our destiny without interference from other races we believe segregation certainly didn't work and that the only long-term solution to racial conflict is separation and then with Michael Hart he argued that a multiracial state turns all of us and it hurts White's in particular White's he says have to put up with higher crime rates because of the presence in America of large numbers of non-whites and so he's the Jewish professor that wanted to petition the u.s. south rina woof this quote and you know he's the blue-collar kind of guy head of the National Association for white people the National Association for the Advancement of white people was set up to get us back to the point where everyone is seen as created equal where everyone has equal opportunity and where everybody is judged under the same guidelines and the same set of standards the National Association for white people does not wish to convey the idea that we are a white supremacist type of organization or that we want to advance beyond other groups we want to return to the ideal in which racially based politics of affirmative action and special privileges and special programs of any kind which are given to anybody no matter what that race are viewed as contrary to the best interests of race relations in America and so again he's talking to a white interviewer they don't know that a black woman commissioned the interviews and when I talked about the new white nationalists that that are calling themselves today the alt-right and I would say they repackage you know there's there's a new spin some of them some of them are separatists and some are not some of them are just people that are saying that white is like any other group that if other groups have interest in white people do too I say in this chapter first white nationalists use the language of the civil rights movement to frame their demands for the abolition of racial preferences in employment and college admissions and they use the language of multiculturalism to advocate wider acceptance of the notion of a distinct white identity white interest in white need for self-determination in both cases there appears to be a logic to their argument changing economic and demographic conditions work to the advantage of white nationalists as the white population shrinks white Americans can be expected this is me predicting to behave more and more like other racial and ethnic groups given the human preventing the human propensity for self-interested action it is likely that whites will increasingly tend to frame their demands around a shared group identity and group consciousness the change in economy racial preferences for non-whites the impending minority status of white Americans and minority emphasis on multiculturalism provide white nationalists with the language and grievances needed to make effective appeals about the need for whites to organize if they are to compete effectively with the demands of racial minorities now I'm skipping over to my conclusion and this is a 15 book chapter and again it has 15 chapters because I was putting all my knowledge in it and and I thought it was gonna be my last academic book so concluding observations and policy recommendations I say we in America I believe are increasingly at risk of large-scale racial conflict unprecedented in our nation's history which is being driven by the same simultaneous convergence of a host of powerful social forces these forces include change in demographics the continuing existence of racial preference policies the rising expectations of ethnic minorities because a lot of minorities you know they do have the expectations of better income better jobs you know better everything so they have rising expectations the continued existence of liberal immigration policies growing concerns about job losses associated with globalization the demands for multiculturalism and the Internet's ability to enable like-minded individuals to identify each other and to share mutual concerns and strategies for impacting the political system this combination of factors in addition to others mentioned in Chapter 1 contributes to a social dynamic that can serve only to nourish white racial consciousness and white nationalism that makes logical states for identity politics in America there now exists an emergent white interest that is parallel with and structurally akin to a black and brown interest which increasingly sees itself in need of protection from public and private initiatives that are said to favor minorities at the expense of more deserving whites and so that's how I concluded this book back in 2002 it's not how I included it concluded it but that's how I sought that chapter and and then the rest of the chapter I have policy recommendations for America as a whole and then recommendations for the black community in particular and part of the message of the book is you know that there was something out there that we needed to take steps or otherwise it was going to grow and I saw the appeal that it would have for younger people because they're being educated in an environment where you're really pushing identity politics and so everyone wants to have an identity you see everything is about identity politics and so you could see that whites would also adopt that same mode and so that was clearly taking place and so part of my solution was that we needed to move away from so much identity politics towards the American national identity and as far as my ideas for improving American society I felt that we needed to open up free speech and that we needed to allow the voices of people who have grievances even if these people are white that their voices needed to be heard and to the extent that there was some legitimate public policy issues that were not being addressed and some of the issues related to immigration is it affects everyone and it probably affects blacks low-skill whites and legal Hispanics more than any other group and so I was seeing and I have a book on immigration immigration has not been a win-win for everyone you see these studies where they say that immigration you know it's so great for the economy but then it always has that footnote that little footnote that says only a tiny percentage of the population you know this may not apply to them and that tiny percentage tends to be low wage low skill Americans that have lost quite a bit and if you did not have you know the surplus labor you would have higher wages for low-skilled jobs except man we have computers since I don't know we have the robots I don't know if any low skilled labor is gonna be needed soon so we don't know how that's going to turn out but pretty much that's an overview of my book on white nationalism that was written fifteen years ago and some of the things that we see taking place on the college campuses I think that that's very dangerous has to do you know with the activism and Tifa I think with the black lives matters that that a lot of that is being driven by people that are totally marxist and everything is about race and I think that we have to be careful that we don't allow the racism you know that we know what's wrong and we're reaping you the effects of the racism that goes back to slavery and I mean it's like it's a a betrayal surround America we never seem to get away from it but we have to come to the point especially as Christians where we do see each other as brothers and sisters and so I think that on some college campuses all sorts of things are taking taking place and a lot of it I would say that there's almost like a reverse racism against people who are conservative people who are Christian and a lot of people you know who are white will fall to talk about white supremacy and you know the white race needs to be destroyed and a lot of this is coming from white liberal professors that believe that how you bring about a better world is that you have to abolish any form of whiteness that whiteness is evil it's the root of all evil and a lot of that's being spoken on college and university campuses and when it comes to our Christian children that go off to college there's a lot of shaming that takes place to an orientation and they're shaming about race they're shaming that takes place about being Christian they're shaming that takes place about being conservative and I think it's important that we and up to it and that we cooperate I mean people are already standing up to it like David Horowitz has been at this for a long time but there's a college fix and this is the organization of conservatives where they have reporters on almost every campus and these reporters record what's taking place in the classroom the syllabi and they reported it gets national attention the campus reform they have publicized a lot of things that have taken place against Christians against conservatives or things that are taking place with regard to classes I mean just things that you would never think would be taking place in America and what I have found on college campuses is that it's no longer anything about being a marketplace of ideas that when they come in for orientation they're being taught what to think not how to think and I think that on a lot of campuses the conservative students are getting the better education if they survive because they have to be so strategic they have to know the arguments of the political left they have to know what they believe either they will be won over or they will come out you know much stronger because they have to navigate in those waters what I find with many of the liberal students on campus is that they have they come in as freshmen and they know everything they've memorized the answer to all the great issues of the world and they can go through some if they take the right courses all they have to do is regurgitate those answers and for the conservative students that's not the case they really do have to be better and and so but everyone's getting shortchanged in the process and I think that we have to be careful about where we spend our money and in Christian universities like this if they're teaching a biblical worldview I mean it's a great foundation for your child but your child may want to go to law school and they may want to go to medical school or some other professional school there being that different environment but hopefully they will be trained enough in worldviews in what they know that they will be able to survive what comes at them but they have to be strategic and and so it's about race it's about you know class it's about religion especially when it comes to Christianity and I'm not sure you know how everything I know how everything is in the Bible but I'm not sure how everything ends with America and academia but I do think it's important for us to be aware of what's taking place and and so with that I will stop and I'll take your questions [Applause] well thank you for coming and for all the that you're doing to help America I've already anticipated part of what you talked about because I've created my own victim class my nickname is pigment challenged Pete so you know I can cover both identifies anything and that's very dangerous because if all white people start identifying as minority and apparently they encourage in it if whatever you think you are today and so that means you can check the box and affirmative action collapse if enough white people start checking the box I don't think people thought it through well and and I checked that box as a satirical statement on on the trends that are that are going on in America but what I find disturbing is that this alt right which I had no idea existed so I appreciate that you wrote about it what it didn't just happen it's been around long what I mean you know I didn't I don't think that way I have I don't know anybody that thinks that way and so but I get labeled that being a white conservative I get associated with no you brought to get called a white supremacist and I'm saying that the all right and they Ulster white supremacist that these are not exactly the same groups and I think that the larger body of white people who may have voted for Donald Trump or may not have voted for Donald Trump that's different too and I think you know you have you have whites that are intercept hatred you know you have whites that just many different groups of whites but I think that right now the media and a lot of people are using a broad brush to paint everyone as a white supremacist the white supremacists that I think are dangerous the ones that actually hate and want to kill you know the I would say that they are tiny percentage of the population but this alt right you know these ones that are well educated that actually growing you know on college campuses those are people that are well educated and they have grievances they feel like they need to be organized and I think that the way you would neutralize that is that you listen to people because the worst thing you can do and I talk about this in my book is to have a situation where like-minded people only talk to people who agree with them the more people talk with other people who agree with them the more extreme they become well so I'll get I'll get the my question is how do you feel about state I'll make statement that it's my impression that the left in this country and the professors and universities that are well invested in creating this divide and that that has a result of encouraging people like the alt-right I mean they it helps them and it could they created them they have more they call themselves the alt-right which means alternative right but if you actually look at what they believe and how they were founded and how they operate they have more in common with the left because they're doing identity politics and so that's what but I mean that's that's a man I mean America this is America and that's what they're doing and it can be traced back to cultural Marxism and for people that really want to understand what's taking place there are some books you know that I would recommend I mean there's some things that many of you may have read in high school George Orwell's 1984 and you may have rated years ago I always had my students in political culture read it because when you read it a second time you read it today it takes on a whole new meaning because you actually see that we're living through an Orwellian period of history you know with the media being taken over and even with all these attacks on males and females you like for y'all young women I'm not sure how you gonna find husbands because I think a lot of men are gonna be afraid to approach you they shouldn't be approaching you on a job anyway and so I think we don't take place take care of workplace harassment because I don't think people need to be you know looking for that mates on the job so if you're interested in someone someone has to quit their job but yes first thanks so much for for coming you said a lot of things that that are probably making a lot of people think the question that I have I'm listening to everything you're saying about the alt-right and I'm listening to how it's a problem but we're Christians so we're called to see past that how do evangelical Christians how does the Christian community how does the Christian Church do a better job of making these things making these movements whether it's the alt-right are anta fide because i think the two are pretty synonymous how do we make it where they don't their voice is not necessary because we don't know that that voice is necessary because they are part of the same movement a lot of that is its I mean I think that if we had a society you know just looking at the college campuses where you had real dialog where when speakers were brought in to speak you had a panel and on that panel was not people that all agreed with one another that you had one or two people on a panel that may disagree and so they would Thresh out you know their ideas the audience would listen and you know they would decide who won whether was the debate or who won the discussion but you would have people are airing that differences I think that if you had that it would be better for young people I don't know that it's necessarily you know the greatest way the greatest thing the way we do it now is that if you have conservative groups on campus they bring in that speaker and hold you know maybe the room is filled with people who agree with that speaker and then the protesters who are drowning them out that's not ideal ideally you'd want to bring in speakers and the whole campus or everyone would hear that speaker and then they would ask questions and those questions will get answered I don't think the church owns racism I think that sysm is the biggest society societal problem and and that it's not just one group i mean you've heard the argument that black people can be racist because to be racist you have to have power have you heard particulars but that's yeah I get what you're saying I guess for me I'm sitting here and I'm listening to what you're saying and I find a lot of value to what you're saying but then I listen to the evangelicals that we hear and what their messaging is and it's not what you're saying I don't understand what I'm saying I very rarely hear anyone say what the first speaker had to say which is racism is absolutely the antithesis of what Jesus came for I very rarely hear that said a lot of a lot of what I hear and a lot of what the left is hearing which is causing them to reject a lot of what we need them to hear about us a lot of what they're hearing is placating a lot of what they're hearing is justifying well yes they did that and they said that and that's bad but I'm gonna be ok with that because they're going to vote or they're going to say what I need to support my conservative value I was raised with conservative values I served my country I still served my country and I'm proud to do so and I'm proud to be an American at the same time I'm a black woman in America and I and I recognize that there's a difference for me versus other people that I went to school with and I grew up with and it's not about me owning that I don't own that in much the same way you are I'm ready to prove anybody wrong who thinks that I can't but I recognize what I'm looking at and what I'd like to be able to to get to here is how do we as a group of Christians not black Christians not white Christians but Christians why is our messaging not the same but I mean because in some I would say that in the Christian world there are some Christians that are more into politics than they are in to the gospel of Jesus Christ and you know it is the case that the last time I checked you know that God didn't have a political party but I happen to believe that if he did have a no party it wouldn't be the Democrats because because I don't think that he would be in a party that would support you know abortion that would support you know the homosexuality and they're just so many things that are unbiblical and there's just the fact at that convention they booed God and they wanted to take out any references to God out of their their platform and this was that that the convention before last and so you know like I think that I don't believe that one particular group owns racism I see a lot of racism you know within the black community and within the Democratic Party and within the liberal left and a lot of the things that the liberal left you know that they have pushed for racial ethnic minorities it's not mad anyone but that all this many people were solved and when it comes to welfare reform and what are you going to do about people like my relatives that are mired in poverty there has to be a new approach because what we've been doing over the last you know fifty or sixty years it has not worked and you know there's a place for more creative compassionate thinking and when in my church and I've been in black in the city churches and I go to a Baptist Church now this predominantly white I see working in the inner city in the projects they're the older white people that are working in the projects they are Youth for Christ you know they are the ones that are working with Teen Challenge and I don't see many black people or the black churches working in those places with the poor and I don't know what that's about and I also know that and I'm so part of it is like there's not one group that owns this there's not one group that owns racism and when the Baptist's at that last convention you know they were there was a floor fight and they ended up putting out this resolution condemning white supremacy and white nationalism I think that there was a mistake I think it was a mistake because the Baptist's don't own white supremacy and white nationalism that that is a problem for our country it's not owned by one particular group it's not owned by one particular group and I felt like that what was taking place was very political and and that that was inappropriate you know my understanding of what a church convention would be about it would not be a place where you would be pushing those political social agendas I mean that's just my take on what should take place at a church convention and so other people obviously feel differently and so I mean I I don't know what to say other than I think that we have a race problem and it's cutting many ways and I think that we're reaching a point where it's very very dangerous there's a lot of hatred taking place you know there are these knockout games where young people will come and they're finally elderly person you know and what would we see issues with some elderly white person and you know just knock them out out of hatred and and then this narrative that's being fostered that white police officers you know they get up every morning wondering how they're going to shoot someone you know that's not healthy for our young people to believe that but I think a lot of young minorities believe you know that the police are the enemies that they out to get them I think that we all have a stake in trying to change that [Applause]

Channel: Centennial Institute

Views: 13,078

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Id: 6NLVD-K-21U

Length: 75min 29sec (4529 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 17 2018