We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website as well. Today, I'm excited to be joined
by Body Bacam. He's the author of It's Not Like Being Black, How
sexual activists Hijacked the Civil Rights Movement, and likely a familiar name to many
of you for many other reasons. Thank you so much for joining us,
sir, it is my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Now,
for people who maybe aren't familiar with your work, could you just catch us
up a little bit on what you are up to these days. I don't
know if you can say where you are, but it's not Arizona as we
established it before. No, it's not Arizona. My family and I'm me
and my wife and seven youngest children. For the last eight and a half
years have been living and serving in Lusaka, Zambia, the capital city here.
Came to help start the African Christian University and I'm still serving there.
A lot of people get mixed up about that because I'm back in the US
three or four times a year to do two week speaking tours, and so
people people just assume that I'm around because they see me at you know,
different things. But no, we are here. We've been living here for
almost nine years now. And you know, a lot of people who follow
these issues closely will understand probably why you were inspired to write a book again
called It's Not Like Being Black How sexual activists hijack the civil rights movement,
given that you now live in one of the areas in the world in which
this has become a real flashpoint. And I don't want that to be a
leading question, but maybe if you could talk to us just a little bit
about how so many African countries are dealing with a the West and you know,
aid from the West, but also the cultural influence in the West,
but also massive conversions to Christianity. How are people dealing with this and did
that potentially inspire you to write this book? Well, I was inspired to
write this book a decade and a half ago before Obergafel. I my original
intention was to write this as a warning about what was coming and anyway,
just it was never the right time, I guess. And so now writing
an actor, Obergefeld, it's about what happened and how we got here.
So I wasn't necessarily inspired to write it by where I live. However,
that did contribute to the way that I wrote it, living here, you
know, and seeing the sort of flashpoint. Really it was the Ugandan law
that was the flashpoint for everybody, and the response to the Ugandan law and
not so veiled for it by President Biden basically threatening to remove aid from Uganda
over this law. And you know, I've often said with shekels come shackles,
and the West through the u N and you know, different world banking,
you know, extitutions and things like that really holds Africa captive in a
lot of ways. Nevertheless, on this issue, so are it hasn't It
hasn't exactly worked out that way. So it's interesting to see the different responses.
But it's also interesting to see how people who you know, in twenty
twenty on. It's this sort of anti colonial mentality, right, the neo
Marxist ideology, the woke ideology, which you know, carried with it this
anti colonial mentality, and for the West to tell Africa what it must do
on issues of homosexuality sounds incredibly colonial to people in this part of the world.
And you know, you've written a lot about the drift of American evangelicalism,
and I guess in that context, I'm also curious why you think it
is that so far Africa and African countries Uganda have not budged on this fundamental
issue of sex, sexuality, sexual orientation, despite all of the pressures from
the West. I love it has to do with tradition. It's a you
know, traditionally their disposition has been held and homosexuality has been frowned upon,
it's been illegal. So that's part of it. The other part of it
is that the way things happened in the US and in the West, it
took a long time, right, So we've got to go all the way
back to the Frankfurt School. We've got to go all the way back to
Antonio Gramscii, you know, the Italian Marxists in the nineteen thirties, to
Frankfurt School nineteen fifties and sixties, and what's often been referred to as this
long march through the institutions right where you basically take over university campuses mainly through
schools of education and journalism and political science, so on and so forth,
you basically transform people's thinking generationally. A lot of that in the US happened
as a result of this institutional work that was done. Well, a lot
of that same institutional work hasn't been done on the African continent. So the
foundations haven't been laid in the same way. That is with one exception,
and the one exception is South Africa. A lot of people don't realize this,
and I write about this in the book, but South Africa, under
Nelson Mandela, was the fifth country on planet Earth to legalize same sex marriage
number five, okay, two decades before America legalized same sex marriage. And
you know, so there's a whole bunch of other stuff, you know,
back there, But you know, with that one exception, you just don't
have the same kind of groundwork laid here that has been laid very carefully and
very intentionally in the West. This didn't happen overnight. Well yeah, and
I think maybe actually it's worth unpacking that because the again this is the title
of the book, is it's not like being black and the Gramsian Uh,
the approach that actually, as you discuss the liberalization, the liberal drift of
American evangelicalism, I actually think is probably you know, you're nodding body,
I think probably this is intertwined. Can you talk to us a little bit
about how the Gramcian sort of foundations of that ideology are are leading us down
some of these paths. Yeah. So one of the big words and I'm
not a you know, a big word guy normally when I'm talking to people
to try to use, you know, words everybody can understand. But there's
a very important word in Gramcian, you know, Frankfurt School and Neo Marxism,
and it's hegemony. And and hegemony is it's the worldview. It's the
ideology that dominates a particular culture. It used to be in classical Marxism you
talked about, you know, the bourgeois and the protariat. You talked about
people who owned the means of production and people who didn't own the means of
production. It was economic. In Neo Marxism, it's cultural and ideological.
And so the neo Marxist sees the oppressor as the person who sets the tone
ideologically in the culture and establishes the hegemony. That's how they dominate the culture,
right, And so when you look at the oppressor, you look for
the group that has established the hegemony. When you think about that in the
West, and you even see these are these things called oppression wheels. You
know, there's concentric circles with you know, the inside is less oppressed and
the outside more oppressed. Whatever. And on these oppression wheels. Around the
outside of the wheel, you always have the oppressor represented as the white,
heterosexual, cisgendered, you know, able bodied, native as opposed to immigrant,
on and on, you go on around this, and ultimately it's also
Christian, right, so the hegemonic oppressive power in the West is seen as
white Christianity at the end of the day. What this also means because again
this neo Marxism is as atheist as classical Marxism is. They don't believe in
absolute truth. So things aren't right or wrong because there's a such thing as
objective truth. Things are right or wrong because the hegemonic power declares them.
So so when you look at this, you look at the dominant group believes
thinks, you know, teaches and you see that as what's oppressive. This
explains why, you know, for example, gays and lesbians. Historically,
gays and lesbians have never gotten along. There's always been a rift between gay
men and lesbians and the l's and g's and the bees don't like to tease,
and you know, intersect people are like, why are you putting us
on that list? We have an actual medical diagnosis and problem, you know
these things. How does this make The only way it makes sense is through
this ideology that says there is no right or wrong when it comes to sexual
morality. It's just what this oppressive majority has forced on us for all this
time. And so you unite over the idea that we're all now and the
key wordy is sexual minorities. So it's really this huge ideological shift that has,
you know, kind of gotten us to where we are. And a
lot of Christians, a lot of Evangelicals have gotten caught up with this and
believe that they have to sort of denounce the hegemony. Right, they have
to, you know, deny their power. And one of the ways that
you deny your power is you acknowledge the big, bad, mean hegemonic power
and you apologize for having been born into you know whatever areas of you know,
power that you hold and hope that you know eventually through this struggle session
you'll be accepted. The problem is this beast is never satisfied, never satisfied,
and you can't apologize enough, you can't give up enough. And Christians
need to know that. Do you see this and everything you just described as
being downstream of moral relativism and you know, is moral relativism itself maybe downstream
of nihilism you wear you're talking about gram she is one thing. But then
does this go back to Mark san Hagel, to Nietzsche? What sort of
what is this downstream of? Yeah, it's it's it's all sort of wrapped
up together, right, because if you don't have any absolutes, if you
if if there is no God, if there is, if there are no
moral absolutes other than this oppress or oppressed paradigm, then then you do I
mean, ultimately you do have nihilism. Ultimately you do have you know,
relativism, and so a lot of these things they work together, you know,
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That's zapmdebt dot com, zapmidebt dot com. And that's a good,
I think point to go back to something you mentioned earlier about how you plan
to write this book before Obergefell, and things have changed a lot since Obergafel
in ways that some people were called crazy for predicting, and Zovadie, I
wanted to get your take on, you know, the trajectory of our cultural
sexual norms since obergh Well, I don't think it's been surprising to you,
but maybe you could just comment on, you know, has it gone further
than you expected or has it gone sort of exactly as you expected. It
hasn't gone further, It's gone faster, right, it's gone faster and back
in you know, two thousand and five, two thousand and six, two
thousand and seven Welms speaking on these things things I would often be chided for
talking about the slippery slope, right, and same sex marriage was the key
domino to fall in all of this, right, because if you look,
if you look at that issue, there's so much tied up in it.
Number one, if that domino falls, then tradition means nothing. And when
I say tradition, I'm not talking about American I'm talking about human right,
I'm talking about human history. It means nothing. So it is the ultimate
score for moral relativism. But the other thing is the reason that it fell
was because we basically reduced marriage, you know, not to this relationship that
is a cornerstone of all human civilization because it's the fountain head from which offspring
comes, right, which again that ties it to male and female, you
know. But now all of a sudden, it's just a relationship about people
being acknowledged and affirmed based on whomever it is that they feel like they are
and whomever it is that they feel like they want to love. You know,
it's kind of love is love? Right? And when you do that,
I would say things like, okay, if this is the argument right
that you ought to be able to marry, you got to legally be able
to marry whomever you fall in love with. What do we do with the
man who wants to marry his twelve year old neighbor, What do we do
with the man who wants to marry his son, What do we do with
the woman who wants to marry her pet? And you know, people with
you being ridiculous, YadA, YadA, YadA. I've got a whole section
in the book about people all over the world who have married animals, like,
all over the world. I got a list of them. Right,
And so if it's just you should be able to marry whomever you are drawn
to, whomever you feel like you know you love, and the state has
to acknowledge that once that domino falls, then all bets are off. And
it's no wonder that once that domino fell, we started to see more and
more crazy stuff, all the way down to furries and everything else. Now
right, you know, pro this pronound nonsense. I mean, ultimately we
went from denying, yeah, the God who created marriage or the marriage that
got created, to denying reality itself. Right. We're denying that, you
know, God made us male and female. We're denying that a man is
a man and a woman is a woman. We're saying that men men straight.
We're saying that men get pregnant, right, I mean, it's you
know, it's insane. That to me, also, by the way,
is what makes me a little hopeful, because I think this thing has gone
too far. We see people standing up at school board meetings, we see
people standing up in Congress, we see people. I mean, it's just
gone too far. And I think the sports thing, you know, I
mean, women are losing scholarships, forget state championships, losing scholarships. It's
just gone too far. We've got you know, children being transitioned in school
and parents not being told about it. It's just gone too far. And
so I think the pendulum, though it swung far and fast, I think
it's about out of momentum. And obviously, the civil rights movement in mid
century and the United States of America was dominated by Christian voices. And it's
hard to know, you know, hard to take scoop people out of their
historical context and put them in the context of today. But Christianity was so
important to the civil rights movement. It was so important to abolishing slavery.
It's been so important to all kinds of different civil rights issues in the United
States. So why is it then that the civil rights movement opened up the
door sort of let in the radical sexual activists as you described in the book.
Yeah, where did that come from? A couple of places. One,
it came from within the civil rights movement itself. But Rustin was a
key leader in the civil rights movement. Even though most people don't know his
name. He was King's speech writer. He was an openly gay man who
he had been arrested in the fifties for sexual eleudiness, and you know all
these other things and Rustin. I have a quote from Rustin in the book,
and I can't quote it here, but basically Rustin is saying towards the
end of the Civil rights movement that that the new he uses the in word,
right, the new inWORD is is uh, it's homosexuals. And within
the civil rights movement there was all there were already the seeds of continuing this
on this you know, sexual trajectory. There was a belief within the movement
that King wasn't the guy to do it, that there were others, you
know, guys from the Harlem Renaissance and you know things like that, who
were probably the guys to do it. But so the seeds of it were
in that movement already. After that though, one of the books that I
spent a lot of time interacting with is a book called After the Ball.
The subtitle, I think is that you know how America will overcome its fear
and hatred of gaze in the decade of the nineties. It was supposed in
nineteen eighty nine two Harvard professors, one in psychology and one in marketing,
and they outline a propaganda plan to change the way Americans think about home sexuals.
Now nineteen eighty nine, this is the height of the age crisis,
and their idea was, we can use the AIDS crisis to gain sympathy for
ourselves. It's a critical moment, right, the country could turn on us,
you know, and you know we're the ones who are bringing this,
and or we could use this to gain sympathy for ourselves and present ourselves as
an aggrieved minority group. So the whole idea of gay as the new Black
right really begins to gain momentum during that time, and the idea that this
is the next phase in the civil rights movement. And people have to remember
that the civil rights movement had many phases. For example, everybody's talking about
Title nine, right, and you know Title nine is the Civil Rights Act
for women, and you know, we women's sports and stuff like that,
and everybody's worried about Title nine because you know, the Biden administration added sexual
orientation, identity whatever to that, opening the door for trends identifying people to
basically have you know, all the rights and privileges of women. But if
there's a title nine, a lot of people think that that just came,
you know, out of nowhere. It was just out a whole cloth,
right, Well, that means there's an eight and a seven, and a
six and a five. But if you go back, Title nine is nineteen
seventy three. It was the next phase in the civil rights movement. So
we have the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, Voting Rights Act of
nineteen sixty five, and then you're extending this to different groups, you know,
over time. So as this begins to be extended to different groups over
time, it just made sense to you know, sexual activists to identify themselves
as sexual minorities and to make a play for inclusion in all of this.
So it kind of came from from multiple directions. And you know, at
that point, it isn't like being black, how I mean, that's it
seems so obvious. Although it's like I was at my alma Mato George Washington
University walking through their encampment there, you know, pro pouse side encampment,
and there was a glitter they had made a sign that said Gaze for Gaza
because it's all sort of lumped into as you just described. You just described
the interesting history of how that came to be, but it's all lumped into
one giant struggle as they see it. But that seems like it should be
so offensive to the American Black community. Do you think the American black community,
the Western black community has started to pick up on that and has started
to object to it, or are we all sort of have we all been
so deeply conditioned to go with the your truth, my truth Rachel Dolozol,
Yeah, there there have been and you bring up Dolasol, I write about
her as well. Remind me. I'll come back to that. But a
lot of people have been offended by this. You know, a lot of
Black people have just and not understood how people can go along with this,
you know, how people can accept this. But on the other hand,
there have been a lot of Black people, especially in you know, upper
echelons, who have been proponents of it. You know, I talk about
them as well. There's a lot of proponents of it, and the reason
for that is this is about power, right, homosexuals, you know,
depending on numbers that you look at people identify as homosexuals one hundred three percent
of the population, you know, transgender much smaller than that. You know,
you lump all these people together, you're talking about a very small number
of people. But if you talk about the oppressed or oppressed paradigm, and
if you know, when you look at the gay pride flag, right,
not the rainbow flag, but the gay pride flag. The gay pride flag
is the rainbow flag with the chevron you know, on the on the side,
and the chevron has the white, pink blue. You know, you're
you're involving your transgender and the intersect, right, but then it has black
and brown, right, they include that in the gay Pride progress flag.
Why, because this is all about ideology. It's not about sexuality. This
is a power grap This is about you know, overthrowing the hegemonic power and
replacing the hegemonic power with us. So, yeah, because of that,
there are a lot of people who've been involved and these you know, types
of struggles if you will, for a long time, and they just see
this as more people coming on board, putting pressure on the power elitse and
helping to turn the tide and it's all about power. And now I'm of
course going to remind you to get back to the one and only Rachel Dollozol,
because I'm very eager to hear your perspective on that body. I think
it's incredibly important because my question to people is why can't Rachel Dolosol identify as
black? There is far less difference between me and Rachel Dozol ethnically than there
is sexually. Let me say that again. There's far, far less difference
between me and Rachel Dolozol ethnically, very little difference, you know, ethnically
racially between me and Rachel Dolozov. But when you start talking about sexually male
versus female, there's huge differences between us. And they're not superficial, right,
the racial differences between us, A lot of them are superficial. But
people have said absolutely not, she cannot. I don't care what she thinks.
I don't care what she believes she cannot. And the only difference between
where Rachel Dolozol is and where the transgender movement is is a listing in the
DSM right, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, right, That's the only difference
is that you know, some folks you know who went to school and have
been you know, anointed psychologists, psychiatrists, whatever, you know, they've
they've talked about, you know, jenderphoria, and they've classified it, and
we've named it and we've got you know, it's in there. But whatever
Rachel Zolzoz is dealing with, it's not in there, and therefore it's enough
thing. But I think it's incredibly important, you know, I think it's
important to press people on this because it shows the inconsistency, the logical inconsistency,
and the idiocy of all of this that we are like, absolutely not
not only can she not do that, but it's offensive for her to do
that, right, But yeah, we can get Leah Thompson the pool And
anyway, there's this raging debate about the concept of color blindness, and I
think the opponents of color blindness on the left definitely take out of context what
people mean when they say color blind. They mean legally color blind, not
that these distinctions don't, you know, generally carry some meantful differences. That
is, the experience of a black man is different than the experience of a
white woman. In the United States of America. But can you talk a
little bit about it and also the experience, also the experience of a black
man in California is different than the experience of a black man in New York.
Can you talk about how people should think about these things. Yeah,
So when we talk about, you know, colorblindness, as you've said,
what if we're being honest, right, if we're not trying to play gotcha
and you know or whatever. If we're being honest, we recognize that what
people are arguing for is for us not to be prejudiced, right, for
us to not be racial essentialists and say, I see what color you are,
therefore I know your story, Therefore I know your intentions, therefore I
know your heart. Right, Yeah, that's racism. And so color blindness
is arguing against that. Color Blindness is not arguing for us to ignore this
beautiful mosaic that God has given us in humanity. Right, it's a wonderful
thing. And so, yeah, color blindness is not is not saying that,
you know, we fail to recognize and or appreciate the wonderful differences and
distinctions you know, between between people. Color Blindness says that we don't essentialize
people and judge them based on that. Andy Before we wrap, I just
have to get your perspective of on the creep of I shouldn't say creep because
it's understates it the clashes between Islam and Christianity that are starting to overcome so
many different Christian communities in Africa. What that means for the future. Maybe
you could just speak to speak to that a little bit from your perspective right
now. Yeah, these I mean, these things are not These things are
not new, and there are parts of the African continent, especially in East
Africa, Northeast Africa, where more Christians are dying for being Christians than its
just about any other time in the history of the Church. And unfortunately most
people are unaware of that. Right, you'll hear a story when when you
know, something significant happens and some girls are taken from a Nigerian school,
and you know, you'll hear about it then. But we're not hearing regularly
about these things that are happening. And there's a number of reasons for that.
One reason we're not hearing about it is because it's it's remote, right,
And when I say remote, I mean in two senses. One,
it's remote from the West, right. But secondly, these places tend to
be rural, these places where these clashes are going on, right, they
tend to be rural, not you know, in the places that we often
hear about. That's one reason that we don't hear about it. Another reason
that we don't hear about it is because, for whatever reason, while Christianity
is the hegemonic boogeyman and it is completely acceptable to attack, demean, slender
and anything else you want to do with Christians, there's this unwritten rule,
often unspoken rule, that you don't mess with the Muslims, and a lot
of times it's out of fear, you know, a lot of times it's
out of fear. So you put those two things together and we just don't
get a lot of information about what's going on, but it is going on.
Is that also possibly because of what you were discussing in the left sort
of hegemonic approach to hedge of money. Actually that if you see, and
this has been a big part of the conversation about Gaza frankly, that if
you see Jews or Christians as the oppressors, you are hesitant to criticize the
oppressed. Yeah, I mean, that's that's part of it, you know,
that's part of it as well. You know, it's really interesting,
and this is a whole other can of worms. But living here, one
of the things that I've just become more and more aware of and then dug
into a lot because I just didn't hear about it, you know, being
an American. It's the Arab slave trade. The Arab slave trade started before
the European slave try. I'm talking about the African slave trade. Right.
Slavery has been in every culture throughout the history of the world, but when
I'm talking about the slave trade, I'm talking about the African slave trade.
Arabs started trading African slaves long before the Europeans did, and they did it
long after and didn't stop until they were forced by military power to stop it.
And so it's really interesting even from the perspective of the oppressor oppressed,
because you know, one of the big, you know, defining characteristics of
the oppressor in the West is the enslavers. Right, That's one of the
big ways that we that we categorized is that, you know, by the
enslavers and what by that token, the Arab slave trade lasted longer it happened
in far larger numbers. It was much more brutal and deadly. And yet
and yet because we're not trying to overcome you know, the hegemony and take
over the Middle East, well, you know, it's it's as one you
know, recent book called, you know, the War on the West.
This is the war on the West, you know. And so it's really
interesting, the the the the irony, not only the you know, gays
for Gaza irony, right you go over there to throw you off our roof.
Yeah, but but the irony is it's unmistakable. Vadi Bacham is the
author of the most recent book, It's Not Like Being Black House Sexual activists
Hijacked the Civil rights movement. That book is out on June fourth. Body,
thank you so much for sharing your perspective on this and for all of
your time today. It's my pleasure. But you have to say June fourth,
just in time for Pride month, just in time for there you go.
Here's here's if you if you have someone who you need to give a
gift to during Pride Month, you can go It's Not Like being Black by
Body, Bogum Boddie. Thank you so much. Been my pleasure. Thank
you you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist or radio Hour. I'm
I'm Eli Tashinski, culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you
can email the show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on
exit fd r L s T. We'll be back soon with more. Until
then, be Lovers of freedom, Fray