Speaker 1: We understand.
Speaker 2: The thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 3: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 2: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because.
Speaker 4: I put my hand on a book and made a wish.
Speaker 2: And working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 5: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
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Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 5: I hear the word Nazi throwing around a lot as
we watch the rise of autocracy in this country, and
I used to resist it more than I do. There
is a rising tide of Naziism parallels to Nazi Germany,
and I thought, well, there are some there's some overlap.
But I mean, is that hyperbole these days? I mean,
I just I was so naive like neo Nazis. I
used to think that mostly today's white supremacy groups, I
don't know. They were a bunch of fringe organizations, bunch
of cranky, young white guys who were sitting around making
a lot of noise because they were terrified at their
impending irrelevance. Right, they were always going to be on
the outside. But it wasn't the fifties and the sixties.
They weren't walking around in white hoods and burning crosses
and waving the Nazi flags. And then oh wait a minute,
look there are marches, and what are they carrying. They've
got Nazi flax. It's just crazy. They make me do it.
They make me say there is a rising tide. Or
maybe they've always been there, but now they just feel
empowered to step out of the shadows the American Nazi.
Did you know that way back in nineteen thirty nine,
a Nazi rally, I mean a Hitler Nazi rally, actually
took place in this country at Madison Square Garden and
more than twenty thousand people attended. No kidding, This was
some history that I didn't know until just a few
years ago February twenty. At nineteen thirty nine, there was
a group called the German American bund Bund. They were
aligned with another organization called Friends of New Germany. And
of course this was during the rise of Hitler and
an American Nazi organization was formed, and they organized and
held this massive rally at Madison Square Garden. Obviously hugely controversial.
There were real concerns about violence on that day. They
had over seventeen hundred uniformed police officers, six hundred undercovered
detectives and cops not in uniforms scattered throughout and all
around the facility. They had firefighters there in case there
were riots and people started burning shit down. They had
bomb squads on location. I mean, it's just crazy that
it happened in this country, but it did. Over one
hundred thousand people stood outside as the rally took place.
They were protesting the whole thing, and good for them.
It gives you hope. Right one hundred thousand people in
the streets outside Madison Square Garden. There's a feature on
the whole thing that was produced by PBS. It's called
a Night at the Garden and you can find it
on YouTube if you're curious, and it will chill the blood.
So here we are nineteen thirty nine to two thy
twenty six, some thinking of last year when the Labor
Department started to post a lot of these images and
slogans that were eerily reminiscent of nineteen thirty's Germany with
these really nationalistic headlines one Homeland, one People, one heritage,
Remember who you are, Americ And one of the slogans
of Nazi Germany all those decades ago was one People,
one Country, One leader. Hitler used it to rally the
Nazi Party, and you can see this slogan posted or
listed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The two
messages not word for word, but Jesus, they sure are similar.
Donald Trump rams up his desire to take over for Greenland,
of all places. And so what happens next? The White
House shares this cartoon that shows two dog sleds at
a crossroads. One path is leading toward the United States,
the other is leading to Russia and China. And the
caption of this cartoon was which way Greenland Man? Now,
this was posted on the actual White House x accounts.
So let's jump back to a book which was published
in nineteen seventy eight, a book by William Gaily Simpson,
who was a neo Nazi, defending Adolf Hitler. His book
was titled which Way Western Man? Don't tell me that's
a coincidence. The official Department of Homeland Security online accounts
recruiting for Ice. They use the slogan We'll have our
home again. This sounds awfully similar to a neo Natzi
song called by God, We'll have our home Again. The
Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security on the
White House continue to post these very imposing, hardcore nationalistic
images and this is all messaging. Many of these things
have Donald Trump looking stern. He's lit in very contrasty
light and shadow, never smiling, never smiling. He's always hunched
over and sticking his jaw out and squinting and trying
to look like a badass. And it's very hitler esque.
This is not an exaggeration. This is some hitler esque
shit and it's all I do know. It's so nationalistic
and warlike and overtly white. Slogans like never surrender, embrace Americanism,
patriots in control, Americanism will prevail. This reminds me of
that line from V four Vendee with Adam Suttler as
the fascist leader, and the slogan for fascist England was
England prevails. Trust the plan, Globalism has failed, recapture the dream,
dominate the sea. One American heritage. I could go on
and on and on and Peppered in with all of
these images are these Norman rockwell Ish depictions of a
bunch of freaking white people. There is one, it's easily
findable online, and it's in front of a little country church.
It's very nineteen fifties. There is a family of white
people of every generation. They're at an outdoor picnic table.
There's turkey and drinks and desserts on the table. And
oh look, right next to a picnic basket is a
little white boy in a blue shirt. He is playing
with his dog. There's a lovely young white couple in
their twenties sticking their toes in the water. Behind them,
more church going people enjoying a sunshine fellowship. Not one
person of color anywhere. This is not an accident. There's
another one, a very white family sitting in a church
pew a lah nineteen fifties with a caption a dream
worth fighting for a pristine Caucasian face in front of
even more churches, restoring the American dream. There's a guy
standing in front of the Bay Bridge of San Francisco,
Americans First, etc. Etc. Etc. National Security Advisor Stephen Miller,
who I think is a vampire. He's just a ghoul.
Speaker 6: This guy is.
Speaker 5: I'm what redeeming quality does he have As you go
back through the decades of his life, all he has
is racism, bile, hate, venom, and general awfulness. Well, a
few years ago there was a series of leaked emails
that he had sent to the conservative website bright Barts
and an email after email he was sharing white supremacist
literature links to white supremacist websites. At one point he
recommended a book called The Camp of the Saints, which
told a fictitious story about white replacement theory. This whole
idea that immigrants are coming in and the deep state
and the woke libs want to wipe out white people.
It's a big conspiracy. The antagonist in that story, The
Camp of the Saints, was an Indian born man referred
to as the turd Eater because he literally ate human feces.
This was the bad guy in the story. Stephen Miller
often shared in these emails. Thanks to something called American Renaissance,
this is a white supremacist publication. After white nationalist Dylan
Rufe murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston in twenty fifteen.
What was Stephen Miller upset about. He was mad that
Confederate flags were being removed from public spaces. Stephen like
to refer to President Calvin Coolidge, who signed the Immigration
Act of nineteen twenty four. This legislation was based on eugenics,
its severely limited immigration from certain parts of the world
into the US. Coolidge condemned the mixing of races. Stephen
Miller invoked Coolidge, the same man who said these words,
biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not
mix or blend quality of mind and bodies. Suggest that
observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to
a nation as immigration law. How many people did Stephen
Miller stay in contact with who were white supremacists? Richard Spencer, right,
arguably the most notorious racist in this country. You know,
he's the guy remember the video where somebody just sucker
punched him out of the blue and everybody was cheering, oh,
go punch a Nazi kind of thing. Well, he was
associated with Miller anyway, you get it. And then I
have to go back and talk about Donald Trump and
the Trump family. This was back in the nineteen seventies.
Trump and his real estate company, actually his father's real
estate company, were sued by the Department of Justice back
when it actually was a Department of Justice. The accusation
was that they were not leasing properties to African American renters. Now,
the Trump family never admitted any wrongdoing, but that Trump
settled this suit. Still, there were several people who said
that they were qualified, they applied, and yet Donald Trump
Senior said, hell, no, I ain't gonna rent my property
to black people. Donald Trump himself talking about immigrants Mexico
sending criminals. They're bringing drugs and crime. They're rapists, and
I suppose some are good people. The Haitian immigrants, they're
eating the dogs, they're eating the cats. What is this
if not xenophobia and straight up white supremacy. The twenty
seventeen white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, there was a
big blow up there, the marchers and the protesters. Of
the marchers. Donald Trump he saw fit to call both
sides very fine people, and on and on and on,
and then I log on and I see an op
ed published from February sixteenth in USA today. It's by
Rex Hupkey. It's titled Wow Elon Musk zure does like
white people. Well, I had to check that out. Let
me just read the article for you. Elon Musk, the
world's richest man and a guy whose social media platform
most companies still use, is a big fan of white people.
I mean, you could say he thinks white people are
super maybe even supreme. It's almost as if he supports
some kind of white supremacy or something like that. Responding
to an ex user who posted the Irish will become
a minority in Ireland because Irish men are afraid of
being called racist and upsetting people from the Third World,
Musk wrote on February eleventh, such men are pathetic traitors.
How subtle. On January the eighth, Musk reposted material from
an obviously secure and well adjusted ex user who wrote,
if white men become a minority, will be slaughtered. Remember
if non whites openly hate white men while white men
hold a collective majority, then they will be a thousand
times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority
over white's. White solidarity is the only way to survive.
Musk added a one hundred noting complete agreement to his repost.
Is worth noting the x user Musk deemed worthy of
highlighting to his more than two hundred million followers, has
posted racial slurs, anti semitic opinions, and this gem from
February thirteenth quote, the white simp is to blame for
feminists and Jewish supremacy. White men, who are dominated by
white women are the ultimate problem in the world. We
must teach white men to control their women, and they
will control the world. Good to know, the CEO of
Tesla the number D one car for people who enjoy
driving in shame is reading only the purest forms of
racist online commentary. Mosque owns x formerly Twitter, and has
led it morph into the online equivalent of a circa
nineteen forty one Nazi bar. While many have fled the site,
corporations and news organizations, including my own, along with all
manner of politicians and celebrities, continue to use a platform
run by a man who was unapologetically promoting white supremacist
talking points. The Guardian analyzed Musk's ex post from the
first month of twenty twenty six and found the richest
man in the world posted about how the white race
was under threat, made allusions to race science, or promoted
anti immigrant conspiracy content on twenty six out of thirty
one days in January. The newspaper report added the Teslas
CEO's most recent output displays a more consistent and explicit
engagement with white supremacist content and nativist activists than in
the past, however, lending them an impremature of the world's
richest person and spreading their ideas to his audience of
over two hundred million followers. Heidi Byrick, co founder of
the Global Project Against Extremism, told The Guardian, if you
stripped Elon Musk's name off these things and showed them
to me, I would think this was a white supremacist.
My guess is that's because Musk is a white supremacist.
That's my opinion, of course, supported by facts I've already presented.
Musk has consistently denied being racist, or anti Semitic or
any of those white supremacist e things. But if there's
one thing I found about racists in my years on
this planet, it's that they deny being racist despite saying
a lot of racist things. They seem to think the
words that fall out of their mouths make sense, and
it's the fault of others if they take them the
wrong way. The reason all this matters so much is
we're not talking about some random garbage poster spewing hate
from an anonymous social media account. We're talking again about
the richest men in the world, a man who wields
a massive megaphone and the power via money and ax
to influence the ways people think and vote. On February fifteenth,
Musk made a historically ludicrous cry for America to maintain
some form of English Scott's Irish culture, which I assume
is weird o code for white. For a country to survive,
there has to be a common culture. Nobody dies to
defend a multi cultural economic zone. Buddy, there are some
military veterans who like to speak with you about that nonsense.
And Princeton University historian Kevin Cruz responded to Musk's claim,
writing on his Campaign Trails blog. There's an extensive literature
that tracks the ways in which concepts of diversity have
stood at the hearts of the United States of America
from the founding. The founding generation believed in the ideal
so much they put it on the Seal of the
United States e plaribus unum, or out of many one.
After all these years of watching movies with billionaire super villains,
we finally have one in the flesh. But far too
many people continue to act like it's no big deal.
Companies and people and every entity I can think of
should have long ago dropped X like a bad habit
which it was. Promoting your product or your brands on
a site owned by a guy who thinks quote white
solidarity is the only way to survive several steps beyond problematic.
Musk's brand of white genocide conspiracy theory nonsense was once
found only in the darkest corners of the Internet. Now
he has mainstreamed it, and he's pulling people down a
rabbit hole that can lead to horrifically bad places. I
haven't posted on X for some time. My account there
still exists, but only because I got locked out when
I left, and I haven't been able to get back
in to delete the whole thing. Let it rot. I
say it's time to encourage Anny and all who still
use that site to consider who and what they're tacitly supporting.
It's a white guy who really thinks white people are
great like to an increasingly uncomfortable degree, and that is
the article posted just a few days ago in USA
Today titled Wow, Elon Musk sure does like white people
bio Rex hup I still have an ex account. I
go back and forth on it. It's a platform to
get the word out, to post content. But Hupkey's right,
the place is infected. What would you do? Would you
go and dump the platform and move everything? I mean,
I'm on Blue Sky, still on Facebook, but would you
dump X Now that I read that, I feel a
bit cold out. Maybe I should go and delete the
account out right. Maybe I will, Maybe I will when
I come back. I want to get more into the
pulse of white supremacy, whether it's in this country or elsewhere.
In the words of former white supremacists sang On, I
recently ran across a profile. It was kind of a
video essay that was posted on Insider. This was almost
a year ago, featuring a guy named Arnauld Mackaylis. Makaylis
was a hardcore racist, a white nationalist skinhead. He was
lead singer of a neo Nazi metal band called Centurion,
and he was a member of one of the most
violent white supremacist gangs in the United States. It was
called Hammer's skin Nation. This guy was a true believer.
He spread Nazi ideology through his music, through recruitment, and
he was engaged in street violence, but he found his
way out and now he's an anti hate activist. He's
a speaker, he is an author, and he works with
organizations like Parents for Peace trying to deradicalize extremists. If
anybody's interested. The books that he's written are called My
Life After Hate and The Gift of Our Wounds. On
the Insider profile, he explained some of what goes on
under the skin of skin heads, starting with white replacement theory.
Speaker 3: The most damaging aspect of the neo Nazi ideology is
definitely the fear anybody does look like you and doesn't
think like you. They're not only an enemy, they're the
highest order of enemy. They're a race trader. So it's
this experience of going through every waking moment of your
day thinking that everyone else in the world is not
only out to kill you personally, but ol to destroy
everyone who looks like you. And it's a miserable way
to live that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
Speaker 5: Throughout high control cultures, we will often see the vulnerable
and the marginalized targeted. We know the churches do this.
It's kind of a different animal, but I mean often
you'll find somebody at a low point in their life,
or they're on the fringes, or they feel ostracized, and
you give them a place to be. Long and Arnold
Michaelis talked about recruitment tactics by white supremacist organizations in
this way.
Speaker 3: Recruiting a neo Nazi was two steps. Basically, the first
step was to get this kid to identify as white. Typically,
if I have an archetype called Joe pissed off white kid.
If I'm talking to Joe pissed off white kid, the
first thing I have to do is convince him that
he's a white man and that's how he should identify himself.
In the late eighties, most people racialized as white didn't
identify themselves as white. If I asked Joe who he was,
he would say, I'm American. My family's Catholic. You know,
we're Democrats or Republicans, whatever. There's going to be all
sorts of ways that they identify themselves other than racially.
So I have to stop him in his tracks and
be like, listen, white man, whether you like it or not.
The enemies of our people identify you as white. You
don't have a choice about that. And the white races
under attack. If you don't join us and fight back,
we're all going to be wiped out. I have to
get that across to this kid, and he has to
buy into it before I can proceed the step two,
which is to make him feel persecuted because he's white.
In the late eighties, it was much more difficult to
do that than it is today. In the late eighties,
we didn't have all this talk of white privilege and
white fragility and open talk saying well, everything wrong with
the world is basically white people's fault. Back in the eighties,
it was just much more amorphous for all human beings.
We have all these different ways of identifying ourselves. It
wasn't like codified in the racial groups like it is today.
So I had to like concoct things about how white
people are oppressed, and once I could get him to
buy into that that he is white and he's oppressed
because of it, now he's a white nationalist. Now he's
a neo Nazi. Now he's ready to come up to
our drink and hal get drunk with us and get
beat up. That was the recruitment process that we went
through back in the day. If you're a teenager who
has a history of trauma in your family, if you're
living in poverty, whatever you have going wrong, the more
things wrong you have, the more opening there are for
neo Nazi ideology to take hold. And so that was
how we recruited these kids was we blamed all their
problems on Jews, and then they said, if you join us,
we're going to fight back against that, and we're going
to take our country back and take our lands back
and every and you'll have all sorts of women crawling
all over you. You'll be a white warrior. It'll be great.
Speaker 5: Earlier, I read that article about Elon Musk and we
talked about how AX has become kind of a Nazi
bar well. Arnold Michaelis had some thoughts about the online
space and how recruiters are using it. Probably most interestingly,
what are some of the worst places.
Speaker 3: There's no social media platform that is proof against hate
happening on it, and obviously neo Nazi groups are well
aware that the screen is an amazing tool for them
to connect and to recruit. It's going to be have
the potential to be extremely harmful and extremely toxic. Of
the existing platforms today, of consequence, there's four chan, eight chan,
There's all sorts of obscure things where people meet and
have these kinds of discussions and these ideologies propagate. But
of the big ones, I think X is obviously first
and foremost. It's a hotbed for people to be openly
racist and openly hateful. I happen to think the most
dangerous ones are the ones that are linked to video
gaming discord, like actual platforms that are meant for gaming
and like getting together, what Call of Duty map, where
we're going to play. These are places where white nationalists,
neo Nazis, and all sorts of other vound extremist ideologies
and propagate and recruit, and it's something that parents need
to be very aware of. I'm a big fan of
a man named Jonathan Hight who is kind of at
the forefront of getting kids to get off of social
media get back to the real world. And I think
that that's really the answer not only to diminish the
power of neo Nazi groups, but to diminish the power
of these screens entirely on the hold they have on
us as human beings.
Speaker 5: Now before the video games and the Discord crowd goes crazy,
I think the intent of what he's saying. I'm not
going to put words in his mouth, but I don't
think he was saying the platforms themselves, like gaming platforms, Discord, etc.
Are inherently racist. But I do think he was saying
that these are safer spaces where they can maybe crawl around,
and it's not quite as high profile as X and
Facebook and threads and Bluesky, etc. And because many are
more youth heavy than the market is a bit more
focused in those zones. Anyway, back before CBS News was
compromised by Barry Weiss and essentially Ramdit's head so far
up Trump sass they could check for cavities, CBS actually
had journalists doing their jobs. This was from several years
ago on CBS News a segment called Hate Rising White
Supremacy in America.
Speaker 7: So it just arrived at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It's a group that monitors hate activity in the real
world and now more and more online.
Speaker 4: In all the years that we've been tracking, we've never
seen this many of these groups everywhere. We've never seen
their ideas penetrating the mainstream in the way that they are.
Speaker 7: Heidi Byrick is the director of the SPLC's intelligence project.
CBS News is the first major network she allowed into
their secure facility where they monitor hate group activities online.
How worried should Americans be looking at this map of activity?
Speaker 4: Well, I would say most Americans don't realize how much
there is of this. There's more than nine hundred hate groups.
Speaker 7: They define hate groups as organizations with beliefs that attack
an entire people. Two thirds of the groups they are
watching subscribe to ideals of white supremacy, and last week's
rally in Charlottesville is considered the largest white supremacy march
in decade. The idea that white America is discriminated against
is growing. In fact, nearly seven in ten white American
workers without a four year college degree or salary job,
along with a majority of the public overall, believe the
US is in danger of losing its culture and identity.
Speaker 4: Anytime a country goes through demographic change, it's difficult. We
had a hard time in this country digesting people that
we now consider white, but we didn't back in the
nineteen hundreds. It is entirely possible that that's what we
could face here right, a full racist backlash in terms
of policy and everything else against people color in this country.
Speaker 7: Do you think we're going to see white nationalists openly
running and potentially winning office.
Speaker 4: Maybe I expect more of these people are going to
pop up. They're interested in politics. They didn't care before.
They thought Republicans were as bad as Democrats. Nobody wanted them,
and they couldn't influence the political system. Now they don't
feel that way.
Speaker 5: Interesting to hear that conversation from a CBS News report
from eight years ago. They're more interested in politics. They
used to reject the Republican Party. Now they probably find
it useful. At the very least. That's kind of chilling.
You want to talk about how normalized white supremacy has
become in Trump's America. There's a guy in Tennessee. His
name is Eric Orwall, and he wants a white only community,
like no non whites allowed an entire neighborhood. What This
is part of the report that was filed in late
last year on news Channel five. Check it out.
Speaker 6: How do you describe yourself? Are you a white supremacist,
white nationalists, neo Nazi, any of the above.
Speaker 1: None of the above. I'm a white identitarian. I think
that ethnic identity. Racial and ethnic identity is a big
part of who you are.
Speaker 6: Well portraying himself as someone mainly interested in preserving white heritage,
Orwal has developed a closer relationship with the white nationalist
Patriot Front, which wants to turn the US into it
Ethno state for whites only. What is your relationship with
the Patriot Front.
Speaker 1: I believe that they are good faith actors. I think
their ambitions for seeing political change are noble, even if
I don't completely agree with their strategy or perhaps ultimate objective.
Speaker 6: But photos posted by Patriot Front show Orwall was one
of the speakers recently at the group's first national conference,
alongside Neil Nazi Robert Rondo. This is Rondo at hecking
a counter protester at a Trump rally in twenty seventeen,
and here at the Patriot Front conference. That's Rondo on
the left. To the right is or Wall giving the
fist over hearts salute Life Victorie, the official salute of
Patriot Front. You had a post on x on September fifteenth,
that said, folks are willing to call for violence, but
unwilling to join one of the few groups on our
side that know how to organize and deploy men. Who
is that group that you were referring to.
Speaker 1: I was indirectly referring to Patriot Front.
Speaker 6: As our news General five investigation has revealed a Patriot
Front has built a compound in East Tennessee where it
trains men to fight.
Speaker 5: Okay, let's talk about some of these hate groups, and
I'll get into Patriot Front specifically in just a second.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, we are seeing
a dip in membership and the actual groups. I think
they listed fourteen hundred and thirty groups in twenty twenty three.
There was about one hundred lesson twenty twenty four. Now.
It is speculated one of the reasons for this is
that white supremacists are seeing more and more of their
own beliefs in the mainstream, so they don't necessarily feel
the need to go out and join the Proud Boys,
the Three per Centers, Patriot Front, etc. Because society in
general validates them. They feel like, from the top down
they are already part of a major white supremacist organization
Patriot Front itself. This is of course a white nationalist
and an overtly fascist organization. They are advocating for quote
the preservation of white European culture, so immigrants bad, multiculturalism bad,
diversity bad. These are existential threats to the United States.
They're big proponents of the Great Replacement or white replacement
conspiracy theory. The group is formed by a guy named
Thomas Rousseau. This was right after Charlottesville, and they unite
the right rally and these guys distribute literature, they hang banners.
They commonly vandalize or deface public displays. They have marches,
including what they call flash marches. They just show up
quickly and they parade through streets with signs and banners
and flags and chants and bullhorns, et cetera. At their
first official protest in public September twenty seventeen, this happened
in Houston, Texas. They brought banners that said things like
for race and Nation, and they were chanting blood and soil.
They use a lot of Americana type imagery. They've got
the Betsy Ross flag. They've got red, white and blue
in their logo. The whole idea is true. America is
white America. What do we do with these people? Well,
you've heard me mention on this broadcast, asked Dia Khan.
She's a human rights activist and she produced and directed
a documentary that won several Emmy Awards. It's an hour long.
It used to be on Netflix, but regardless of where
it is, find it, rent it, watch it. It's called
White Rights. Da khn deeeya A. Six years ago, she
screened her documentary at the United Nations and then afterwards
she sat on stage with some interviewers and talked about
her experience. I found one of her answers most interesting
when she was dealing with the media and how the
media has presented white supremacy.
Speaker 8: The media's responsibility is so so severe in this. It
doesn't matter if a young man has joined ISIS or
has joined some sort of you know, neo Nazi organization.
Part of the reason they're doing this is to be seen.
It is to be I mean, I would say that
the media ends up glamorizing them by showing how bad
and tough and violent and horrific they are, because that
speaks to there, that gives them the cover that covers
up for the fact that he is insecure. It covers
up for the fact that he is suffering or struggling,
or in pain, or is broken in some way. What
extremism provides for all these men, regardless of what type
of movement that they subscribe to, is that it provides
the perfect escape and the perfect facade for everything else
that's wrong in their life. It's very easy to say
that what's wrong in my life is the fault of
someone Muslim or someone brown or black or Jewish, rather
than self reflecting and looking at your own faults and
your own brokenness. And so these movements are providing these
incredible outlets for these young men, and then the media
is completely and utterly feeding into what it is that
they're so desperately craving and the reason for why they're
doing it in the first place. Imagine being small and
insignificant and powerless and invisible, somebody that nobody cares about,
but then they care about once you do something absolutely monstrous.
And again that goes back to that says something about
us as a society more than it says about these
young men.
Speaker 5: I go back and forth on my own approach to
white supremacists. The nerves are dead. My empathy well is dead.
I have no more fucks to give. I have surrendered
to that, and I will admit am I giving up
on some people who might be reachable. I mean, we
have to see it in this way. And this is
not popular. This is not a popular opinion. But I
think if you look at it with nuance, it does
hold up. The people who are the victims of hate
are victims of hate. I also think the people who
are the perpetrators of hate are victims of hate. Now now,
hang on, hang on, Let's talk about an Islamic extremist
right the suicide bomber, the person who goes out and
murders dozens of people. This is an agent of hate,
a person who has surrendered to inhumanity and must be stopped,
even crushed, at all costs for the safety of the
rest of us. But if we look at the precursors,
how did someone get there? They might have in other circumstances,
had they been raised in an environment where they were
taught to love people, where they were educated about the
value of all life, where they were not indoctrinated with
radical Islamist ideas. You know, cult thinking, if they had
been introduced to the beauty of the rest of the world,
to their fellow travelers on this planet, imagine what pro
social things they might have accomplished. But instead, all of
those energies and all of that focus got sort of
boxed in and it got distorted, and then they were
put on this path where they became the agents of
destruction in this world. So not only were the lives
lost to the people that they murdered, but there their
own life, their own potential, is totally gone. And I
think that's how Diacon sees white supremacist people who for
a number of reasons, but obviously disenfranchisements, programming in group reinforcement,
the hero narrative, fear insecurity, ignorance about everybody else, blah
blah blah. All of these things create a perfect storm
where someone then can go out. They have a sense
of belonging, they have a sense of purpose. They get
to be the heroes in their own story. And the
more other people try to punch them or crush them,
or throw bottles at them or call them every name
in the book, the more they feel empowered that it's
us versus them. Now, let me say it this way,
like with Maga, I've come to the place in my
life where my days of trying to reason with Maga,
those days are over. Maybe a few years ago I
had some something left in my empathy. Well maybe I thought, well,
there's a chance I'm saying that they're not reachable. But
I myself, I've just come to a point when I
just can't do it. I've just my energies are going
to go elsewhere. I think we're gonna have to steamroll
over or pass them to build the better world. It's
been ten years of jaw dropping awfulness. You know what's
it going to take. And I'll admit that I've come
to that point. And I feel much the same way
if there is a neo Nazi or someone. But then again,
I also admire somebody who can go in and do
what Diacon is doing, and she's doing it with some success. Okay,
I got a hand it to her. Hats off, high five.
I've got to give props where they are due, because wow.
In fact, she told the audience at the un that
after the documentary White Right was released, she got a
call from a former white supremacist that she had interviewed
only months before.
Speaker 8: You know, the young man with the Swaska tattooed on
his chest. Ken He called me a few months months
after the film and said he's left. He's completely renounced
every and that tattoo. He's now in the process of
having it removed. And remember he said he's never going
to break bread with a Jewish person. He's done that.
He's joined an all black congregation. We've become very good friends.
I'm going to see him soon, actually, I mean he
left me a message last night, so I was terrified
of him, you know, but that capacity existed within him,
and he said, look, yeah, I just wanted to tell
you thank you for not giving up on me, and
thank you for being kind to me even when I
didn't deserve it. That to him, was the starting point
of it falling apart. And then other people, you know,
this black congregation that he's joined. He went there and said,
I used to be a part of the you know,
I've been a part of the Ku Klux Klan. I
am now a Nazi and I believe this and this
and this, And apparently the people within the congregation came
up to him and hugged him afterwards and said, look,
we don't like what you stand for. We completely disagree
with it, but it takes a lot of courage for
somebody like you to stand here and say what you've said.
And that was the last STU for him. Him being
shown kindness and compassion and respect by people who he
thinks are not even human, showing more humanity to him
than he's worthy of. That made him start questioning, well,
then what does that say about me? What kind of
a human being am.
Speaker 5: I agree or disagree? You got to hand it to
diacon I mean, she's got to be frustrated and depressed
and occasionally filled with rage, and yet she continues to
put herself right there in the crossair. She walks into
the lion's den, and her method is producing results. I
don't know that I could do it, but I certainly
do admire that she is doing it. We've talked so
much about the problems. Let me leave you with just
a sliver of hope, a tiny ray of light, as
I share with you the story of an anti racist
who is also out there spreading some love, a man
named Darryl Davis, and I will tell you his story next.
The Guardian did a profile on Daryl Davis. He is
a musician who is out there engaging and helping to
dprogram members of the gay Gay Gay Darryl Davis an
African American man who is just His story just blows
my mind. The Guardian wrote a profile on him a
few years ago. Let me just read this because I
like the way they framed his story In the first place,
it says Daryl Davis is a musician, a pianist to
be exact. He's jammed with the likes of Chuck Berry,
Jerry Lee, Lewis, Bbee King and even Bill Clinton. Loyal
to music but not too genre. He plays jazz, blues,
rock and roll, country, boogie woogie, swing, big band, and beyond.
No matter his musical style, Davis will play it because
he believes that music, in all its variations, is a
great equalizer. So when he entered the Silver Dollar Lounge
in Frederick, Maryland for a country gig one Fateful Night
in nineteen eighty three, being the only black man present
did not perturb him at all. While this was not
his first country gig at the Silver Dollar Lounge, it
was his most significant. After he and his band finished
their set, Davis was approached by a patron, who was
around fifteen years his senior, not an unusual occurrence for
a working musician. However, while praising Davis on his performance,
the patron candidly noted that he had never seen a
black man who could play like Jerry Lee Lewis. More
curious than offended, Davis used this encounter as an opportunity
for friendly discourse rather than outrage. I explained to this
older white guy that Jerry Lee Lewis was influenced by
the same black boogie woogie and blues piano player as
I was, Davis says with a chuckle, he didn't believe me.
Then I told him that Jerry Lewis is a good
friend of mine, and well, he didn't believe that either,
but he was fascinated. So he asked me to join
him for a drink. He continues, So I don't drink,
so I had a glass of cranberry juice, and then
he took his glass and cheered me, and then he said,
you know, this is the first time I ever sat
down and had a drink with a black person. I
was instantly curious, and I thought, what's going on here?
So I asked him why he didn't answer it at first,
but eventually admitted that he was a member of the
Ku Klux Klan. This is a story that Davis shares
on lecture stages and in classrooms, both nationally and globally.
It's an important anecdote as it marks a catalytic moment
in which Davis's trajectory pivoted from working musician to race
relations crusader. What began as a hobby gradually transformed into
a car. As his music career continued to flourish, Davis
also became enmeshed in quite arguably the world's strangest side hustle,
meeting with KKK members of various ranks and attending so
called cross lighting rallies. Some of these klansmen became close
friends of Davis's. The aforementioned Silver Dollar patron included their
long conversations untangling a nod of hate that had coiled
for decades. In many cases, these civil dialogues led them
to quitting the organization because they no longer believed in
its tenets. While some say Davis converted these men, he
prefers to say that they converted themselves and that he
merely provided the impetus for them. To do so. Over
the past thirty years, Davis has become well versed in
the organization's ethos and hierarchy, which led him to becoming
the first black man to write a book about the KKK,
entitled Clandestine Relationships of black Man's Odyssey in the Ku
Klux Klan, which was published in nineteen ninety eight. The
Ku Klux Klan was formed in eighteen sixty five by
a group of Confederate soldiers at the end of the
American Civil War in an attempt to keep the newly
emancipated slaves suppressed. Having seen several iterations, what remains consistent
across all chapters of the group is its hate toward
people of color, sometimes resulting in assault and murder. In
twenty eighteen, one hundred fifty years later, a record high
of more than one thousand hate groups, including the KKK,
were documented as active in the United States by the
Southern Poverty Law Center's Civil Rights Group. Davis said recently
on the Joe Rogan podcast, our ideology needs to catch
up to our technology. So why would a successful musician
like Davis willingly meet with high ranking KKK members in
his spare time. The journey to that answer begins long
before his Silver Dollar Clan encounter in nineteen eighty three.
Davis recalled with conviction. In nineteen sixty eight, when I
was the age of ten, I had a racist incident.
I was in the Cub Scouts and we were in
a parade when people started throwing rocks and things at me.
I didn't understand why people would do that, and I
formed a question, how can you hate me when you
don't even know me? The answer was always there's some
people who were just like that. Davis ads, well, that
wasn't good enough for me. What does just like that mean?
Where does that come from? You're not born just like that?
I was curious about racism ever since, but even still
nobody can seem to answer the question. One of Davis's
first and most fabled encounters was with the Grand Dragon
Robert Kelly, who had been eventually became the Imperial Wizard
of Maryland. After having his secretary set up a meeting
with Kelly under the pretense of including him in a
book about the KKK, Davis knew he was entering new territory.
Kelly was unaware that Davis was black, so the grand
reveal was a shock. After a few tense hours of conversation,
the two parted ways, but their relationship did not end there. Eventually,
Kelly began inviting Davis to his home and then to
clan rallies, in which ritualistic chants were intoned, giant crosses
were burned, and beer and hot dogs were served. Kelly
shared everything with him, including the deeply racial stereotypes that
helped form the foundation of the clan's hatred. All the
while Davis listened, asked questions, took notes, and through his actions,
slowly dispelled each stereotype one by one. With each other conversation,
the gap between them narrowed and they were able to
become friends. Finally, Kelly quit the clan, shut down his
entire chapter, and as a trophy of sorts, gave his
robe to Davis. That was not the last ku Klux
Klan robe that Davis would be gifted, nor was it
the last clansman he would befriend. I still perform sometimes,
and though I would much rather be on stage playing
happy music all the time and seeing people dance than
be talking about the KKK and neo Nazis, Davis says,
I found that lecturing and talking and educating people is
by far more important and necessary today. Davis has lived
through several eras of hate, from the assassination of Martin
Luther King Junior in nineteen sixty eight to the Unite
the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in twenty seventeen. Though
he has convinced hundreds of white supremacists to radicalize and
join the Land of the Loving, he does not deny
that some are beyond saving. However, that acknowledgment does not
deter his mission, as he continues to focus on those
who are open to conversation, open to civil discourse, open
to friendship, and ultimately open to change. Most recently, Davis
partnered with minds dot com, an open source social networking
platform that uses blockchain to reward the community with ERC
twenty tokens. I'm guessing this is crypto. Davis hopes to
utilize this platform, founded by Bill Ottman and John Otman,
to educate people on how to conduct civil discourse beyond
the world of white supremacy. The idea is to help
individuals navigate through opposing perspectives, be it at a political protest,
in a classroom, on social media, or at the dinner table.
People must stop focusing on the symptoms of hate. That's
like putting a band aid on cancer. Davis says, we've
got to treat it down to the bone, which is ignorance.
The cure for ignorance is education. You fix the ignorance.
There's nothing to fear. If there's nothing to fear, there's
nothing to hate. If there's nothing to hate, there's nothing
or no one to destroy. Daryl Davis interesting guy. You
know there's something about these conversations with people like him
and Dacan and others. The love conquers hate. We have
to de escalate, go and engage, rehumanize, try to break through.
I think these are meritorious ideas. I think these are
worthy conversations and approaches, But there's an element that I
find is missing when I hear many of these people
talk about how hate is taught. Right, you don't grow
up hating people. You have to be taught or trained
to hate people. And I'm not convinced that is accurate,
or at least it's not complete, because it ignores the
tribalistic tendencies that primates have. And we are animals. We
are primates, and so you know we see throughout nature
in grouping and out grouping, based on any number of factors,
we are much more inclined to favor kin those who
look and sound like us, those who validate us, those
who are or appear more closely related to us, And
then we start to build walls to divide us and
them in grouping, out grouping, tribalism. This is a big
part of the conversation that I wish was dealt with more,
because once we understand how it has worked in our
evolutionary past and how we've dragged a lot of this
into our present, I think we can overcome it and
better educate ourselves. You know, Darryl Davis is right right,
You've got to get rid of the ignorance, and with
that you can then get rid of all the baggage
that comes with it. But in any case, I'm so
thankful for the agents of kindness and humanity and humanism
out there, Darryl and Dia and so many other human
rights activists, and I think people here in this community
and beyond, we resist the hate. We hate the hates.
We don't want to live in that world. We want
to celebrate the diversity that makes us all unique, even
as we share this planet as brothers and sisters. Thank
you so much for listening to the broadcast today. Be
safe out there, and I'll see you next time.
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