Dec. 26, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
48:43
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King Wenceslas looked out on the beast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even, Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel, When the poor man came inside, carrying winter fuel. | |
| Hear the page and stand by him, I will boast it telling. | ||
| Younger peasant, who is he? | ||
| Where? | ||
| What is? | ||
| Where is? | ||
| By him lives the goodly Kent, in the loony the mountain. | ||
| Right against the forest fence, by St. | ||
| Hatter's fountain. | ||
| Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs thither. | ||
| Thou and I will see him dine when we bear them thither. | ||
| Each and all, and forth they went, forth they went together, through the moon, winds, wild lament, and the bitter weather. | ||
| Sire, the night is darker now, and the wind blows stronger. | ||
| Okay, welcome! | ||
| It is Monday, 26 December in the year of our Lord 2022. | ||
| It is Boxing Day for those of you that have been with us for many years over at Breitbart Radio and now with The War Room for the last, what, three years. | ||
| We've always done a Boxing Day special, always Raheem, and Raheem is traveling, so we couldn't get Raheem to do it this year. | ||
| He always does it because it's an English tradition, so we'd let Raheem I would do the Christmas Eve, the Christmas Day specials, and Raheem would do the day after. | ||
| Of course, it was a little convoluted this year because Christmas is on Sunday, so we did the Christmas Day specials, you guys. | ||
| I'm sure the hardcore audience saw on Saturday, replayed yesterday. | ||
| We always do the combat history of Christmas to let people know about the sacrifice. | ||
| We added Larry Swickard this year, the co-author of the Patriots' History of the U.S. | ||
| Um, to talk about other tough Christmases, about the resilience of the American people. | ||
| Because this is a tough Christmas, not like the ones we had in 1814, not like the ones in... | ||
| 1941 or during the Civil War, or certainly probably the toughest Christmas we ever had was in 1776 at the founding of the nation. | ||
| We had Patrick K. O'Donnell, the great combat historian, on to talk, as we always do as a tradition, about the Battle of Trenton. | ||
| Very honored to have Dr. Carol Swain join us today. | ||
| Dr. Swain, one of the things that I've always been most impressed with you and I know one of the favorites of President Trump is your deep knowledge of and love of American history. | ||
| How did you get that love? | ||
| How did you? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| That made American history in our traditions and understanding this Republic. | ||
| What was it about your youth or when you were coming up that really you saw your calling in life? | ||
| A part of the calling was really not just understanding American history, but also explaining it to people. | ||
| Well, first of all, when I was born, you know, 1954, I grew up at a time when America wasn't under attack by its own citizens. | ||
| And so it was very natural in the school. | ||
| Uh, we were, you know, today they would say indoctrinated, but we were taught to believe and appreciate our nation. | ||
| I always believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world, that it was a blessing to be in America, uh, that I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be. | ||
| And I was not raised to see myself as a victim. | ||
| In fact, my mother, for the longest period of time, she would not take any charity. | ||
| She would not take, you know, free books, free lunches, things that would have made her children's lives easier, because she had 12. | ||
| But we had that Protestant work ethic. | ||
| I believed in the American dream, and it became a reality for me. | ||
| Talk about that. | ||
| Talk about being in a family. | ||
| You're from the South. | ||
| Talk about being in a family of 12 children. | ||
| I can tell you that my Christmas memories was that we would always get a bag, not even a stocking, that would have oranges in it, nuts, and candy. | ||
| And that was a real treat. | ||
| And I felt deprived as a child and also for many years because I never got the two things I wanted most for Christmas. | ||
| One was an Easy Bake Oven and the other one was a paint-by-number set. | ||
| Last year, one of my friends got tired of me talking about it, so she gave me a paint-by-number set. | ||
| Where are you from in the South? | ||
| Tell us about your family, your brothers and sisters. | ||
| I'm from southwestern Virginia, a little hamlet called Chamleysburg, and it was not even a town. | ||
| It was just like a strip of the highway, probably not more than a couple of miles. | ||
| And so if you blinked, you just, you know, Went straight past it. | ||
| And the children that were first born, maybe the first six or seven, lived in a two-room shack. | ||
| And then that was expanded to be a four-room shack. | ||
| But we ended up with five girls and seven boys. | ||
| And I'm one of the girls. | ||
| I'm second from the oldest. | ||
| And there was no talk of college. | ||
| In fact, I thought you had to be rich to go to college. | ||
| And it was only later that I learned, you know, that poor people could go to college that at that time going to college had more to do with your ability than, um, you know, your financial means, because there were scholarships, there were things that I did not know about. | ||
| And one reason I didn't know about these things was that I dropped out of school after the eighth grade, married, I had three children by the time I was 21. | ||
| And so when I returned to school, I first got a high school equivalency and I did that at home. | ||
| And then I went to a community college, got the first of five college and university degrees. | ||
| I never sought to become a university professor. | ||
| I never sought to get five degrees. | ||
| There were people who came into my life who encouraged me, who steered me. | ||
| And sometimes I felt that they pushed me. | ||
| Um, in the direction that made me who I am today. | ||
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unidentified
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And most of them are white. | |
| Let's talk about how, how does somebody, um, you know, drop out of school and not, and I take it, it's not just, you didn't get a degree. | ||
| You actually didn't attend high school, have a couple of children. | ||
| And then later. | ||
| Decide, I want to get my high school equivalent in my degree. | ||
| Did you, did your mother instill a love of learning? | ||
| Was it about reading? | ||
| What was it that drove that? | ||
| There were two things. | ||
| For one thing, even though my siblings and I, my older sister in particular, we missed a lot of school. | ||
| We could be out of school, you know, for a week or two, go to school and make an A or B on a test. | ||
| And so we knew we were smart. | ||
| My mother, uh, you know, she acted as if it was natural for children to make good grades until she had more children. | ||
| And as she had more children, I think she came to appreciate that it was unusual that there was something different about us. | ||
| And she would say today that of all of her children, she knew that I was going to be the one that she would say would make something out of herself. | ||
| And so with my mother, I think she just had a natural expectation early on that you would do well in school. | ||
| And for us, we did not have books because she had to pay the rental fee. | ||
| I would do my studying at school while I was waiting on the bus to take us home. | ||
| And we were bused. | ||
| I think it took us about 45 minutes probably to get from the school home. | ||
| Well, did your parents instill your religious training? | ||
| Was religion a big part of your life coming up as children? | ||
| No, and Steve, I'm working on my memoir, and so I'll tell the whole dirty story maybe next year sometime. | ||
| But I had a stepfather, and my mother, they were pretty much alcoholics, and so there was a lot of dysfunction in my family. | ||
| But my great-grandfather had been a Methodist pastor So my grandmother was religious, but for my immediate family, we were Methodist, but we were unchurched. | ||
| We were not churchgoers. | ||
| I went a few times as a child, but I was naturally spiritual in a sense that I knew that there was something larger than me guiding my life. | ||
| And I always had this sense of urgency. | ||
| I always felt like that there was something I was supposed to do. | ||
| And I never felt comfortable in the poverty. | ||
| I never felt like a victim, but I, and I never felt comfortable in the poverty that was around me. | ||
| I grew up feeling more like a participant observer, and I felt like the people around me were not like me. | ||
| And I don't, you know, people can interpret that any way they want to interpret it. | ||
| That was how I felt as a child, that I was watching these people and they were strange. | ||
| When you said there was a higher purpose, or you felt that there was a higher purpose, is that the Holy Spirit? | ||
| I mean, what is it that you think was flowing through you at that time and obviously had a big part of motivating you to get out of these circumstances and, as your mother would say, make something of yourself? | ||
| Well, I had my Christian conversion experience in my 40s after I had been tenured at Princeton. | ||
| And before then, I was spiritual. | ||
| And I can say that I used to believe one God, many paths, because I knew that I was different and I had also a sense of urgency. | ||
| And so I don't know. | ||
| I was drawn to all sorts of, all sorts of spiritual things like Edgar Cayce's out of body experiences. | ||
| I read all kinds of books, uh, new age, Eastern religions. | ||
| And, um, All of that culminated after I had tenure at Princeton with the journey that led to my conversion experience, and I became a devout believer in 1999-2000. | ||
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unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Talk to us about Princeton. | ||
| How does one go from 12 children in a two or three room shack Well, again, it's not something I planned. | ||
| I can't remember ever aspiring to be a teacher or becoming a professor. | ||
| at probably the hardest undergraduate college to get into the nation, probably harder even than Stanford and Harvard, how does that happen? | ||
| Well, again, it's not something I planned. | ||
| I can't remember ever aspiring to be a teacher or becoming a professor. | ||
| I was good in academics. | ||
| I graduated from my four-year college, Magna Cum Laude, while I was working a full-time job. | ||
| 40 hours a week, nights and weekends at the community college library. | ||
| And my community college degree was in business. | ||
| The four-year degree was in criminal justice. | ||
| I decided to get a degree in political science so that I could work for the government. | ||
| Like most other blacks, I wanted a government job. | ||
| It seemed like it would have the benefits. | ||
| And so I was not aspiring for more. | ||
| And this was the 1980s, when I was getting that degree, there was a recession that occurred, I applied for jobs, I couldn't get jobs. | ||
| And the professors I had at that time, pushed me to apply for graduate school. | ||
| I applied, I was admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | ||
| And I did very well there. | ||
| I did well enough that By the time I was getting my PhD, which I did very quickly, I did my master's degree in one year, and I did the PhD program in four years, I had a Harvard Press contract on my first book. | ||
| And I ended up with a short list of schools. | ||
| Princeton recruited me the way I wanted to be recruited. | ||
| At that time, they had minority positions. | ||
| And Steve, I'm sure you remember, they would advertise jobs. | ||
| Three minorities would compete against one another. | ||
| They would hire the best of the three. | ||
| There was no doubt I would be the best of the three, but I refused to apply for those positions. | ||
| I would only apply for American politics positions. | ||
| I was interested in Congress and Princeton hired me as a congressional scholar and they gave me a signing bonus of $25,000, which was a lot of money back in 1989. | ||
| That's an extraordinary story. | ||
| I tell you what, Dr. Swain, why don't you hang on? | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're here on Boxing Day. | ||
| We're going to talk about American traditions and history. | ||
| We have someone that was on the commission appointed by President Trump about American history. | ||
| Dr. Carol Swain will join us after a short commercial break. | ||
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unidentified
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In dulci jubilo, now sing we all ye old, hear our love, my brother, like in Preservio, like every sunbeam yonder, but least in Trebio, ad la rest et au. | |
| Good Christian men rejoice, with heart and soul and voice, Now ye hear a endless bliss, joy and joy, for Jesus Christ is born for this. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| We are the people, we are the people. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| Hope you've enjoyed your Christmas Eve, your Christmas Day. | ||
| It is the 26th of December, Year of Our Lord 2022. | ||
| Dr. Carol Swain joins us. | ||
| Dr. Swain, when you were doing all your studies and getting your PhD and you wanted to focus on Congress, why was it Congress? | ||
| And did you ever believe, given what you were studying up to that time, that could be as dysfunctional as it is today? | ||
| No, during the time I was studying Congress, Tip O'Neill was Speaker of the House, I was a Democrat, and Democrats and Republicans seemed to work well together. | ||
| And so I did not know that Congress would be the institution it is today. | ||
| But before we go any further, you asked me how I ended up at Princeton. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's no way to explain it except the hand of God, that someone from the kind of poverty that I came from, When I ended up at Princeton as a first job, I earned early tenure. | ||
| I won three national prizes, including the highest prize a political scientist can win, which was the Woodrow Wilson Prize for best book in the United States. | ||
| And I was totally disillusioned. | ||
| And that led to more soul searching, a journey that culminated with my having a Christian conversion experience where I became a devout believer. | ||
| I believe, That God opened up the door for me to go to Princeton so that I could be credentialed. | ||
| I'm able to speak into things and situations. | ||
| I understand the word of God. | ||
| I understand academia. | ||
| I understand the world. | ||
| And my books have been considered prescient. | ||
| And I believe that God, you know, raised me up for such a time as this. | ||
| And maybe that'll sound arrogant to some people. | ||
| Maybe it sounds like I'm not humble enough, but that's what I believe. | ||
| I give God credit for opening up the doors and giving me the platform I have today. | ||
| Most people from my background could not, um, would not have reached, you know, the level that I've reached. | ||
| And I've had political appointments from three presidents, um, Bush, Obama. | ||
| The Obama one was kind of an, it was an accident. | ||
| He sort of reappointed me to a position that Bush had appointed me to, and then President Trump. | ||
| And so I don't think that I did that on my own. | ||
| Talk to me about when you get to Princeton and, you know, you've gotten a PhD from University of North Carolina, one of the best universities in the country and one of the finest in the South, and you get to Princeton and you get early tenure, which is as people that know the politics of faculty politics, that's extraordinary, particularly a place like Princeton. | ||
| When you said you got disillusioned, you're saying, hey, I was at the place, I could see it all, I could see everything the world had to offer and I was disillusioned by it. | ||
| What was the disillusionment and what drove that? | ||
| It had a lot of, there were a lot of things about academia that bothered me. | ||
| And one is how Affirmative Action truly operated because I was there and I was hired during a time when Affirmative Action had some teeth. | ||
| The faculty members who supported me were the conservatives. | ||
| And at that time I was a Democrat, but they liked what they saw about me. | ||
| The professors who opposed me were the liberals. | ||
| In fact, one of them who's at Harvard, very prominent today, tried to block my appointment because she said I was not the right kind of black. | ||
| So I didn't expect that. | ||
| And I began to get attacks from black people who said I had sold out. | ||
| To get to Princeton. | ||
| And that was because I didn't go through their organizations. | ||
| They had a black political science association. | ||
| They had black leaders that would vet the black folk. | ||
| And all of a sudden there was this black woman that no one ever heard of at Princeton. | ||
| And so these black people who were gatekeepers, they were very upset. | ||
| And so there were a lot of things that happened that made my life uncomfortable. | ||
| And during that time, I didn't have a support network and I felt very much out there on my own. | ||
| And I can say I didn't have a support network, but I can also say that I had many friends and I had the people on the faculty who recruited me and they were very supportive. | ||
| But it was like I was an accident. | ||
| I was not supposed to have happened, but I did. | ||
| And when they gave me that tenure, they gave me tenure because they thought I was safe. | ||
| Uh, safe enough to give the good housekeeping seal of approval. | ||
| They did not know that I would end up being disillusioned, uh, having a Christian conversion. | ||
| And I did not become a devout believer while I was at Princeton. | ||
| That happened during the time I had already decided to separate myself. | ||
| Yeah, but why would you leave? | ||
| No one leaves tenured positions at an Ivy League school unless it's to temporarily take a high government job and then go back. | ||
| Why would one leave after going through all that and becoming tenured? | ||
| Was the disillusionment that great that it would lead to your leaving the tenured position, which basically is a sin of cure for life? | ||
| Well, at that time, no one left the Ivy League school. | ||
| Nowadays, it happens all the time. | ||
| In fact, at Vanderbilt University, where I ended up taking a position, I've lost count of how many people from Princeton and the Ivy League that have left the Ivy League to be on the faculty at Vanderbilt. | ||
| And like me, they accepted a position at Vanderbilt before they were really the world-class university they are today. | ||
| And so, You know, I sort of showed people the way out that there was life after the Ivy League, but you're correct. | ||
| Most people felt that if they were not leaving Princeton to go to Harvard or Columbia or Stanford, then they were going to turn down the position. | ||
| I was willing to take a lesser position because it didn't matter to me in the same way that it mattered to them. | ||
| I've never been caught up in, um, I don't know what you would call it. | ||
| Uh, The people at the Ivy League are really in love with being at the Ivy League. | ||
| They love the institutions, and I was never caught up in that. | ||
| When you said that you weren't the right kind of black and that Princeton thought you were safe, and it turns out that you weren't their type of safe, when they say safe, what were they looking for? | ||
| What was it that they thought that you were going to be safe about? | ||
| Well, they heard me because I was a good political scientist. | ||
| In fact, people who complimented my first book, which was titled Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African-Americans in Congress, published by Harvard in 1993 and updated in 1995, they would say, That was such a great book and people can't guess your race by reading it. | ||
| So there was no evidence that you could guess my race. | ||
| Well, you should never be able to guess a person's race by reading that research. | ||
| If they're doing research, the research should stand by itself. | ||
| So I accepted and I really bought into the standards of that time. | ||
| And I loved many of the things about Academia and the students but it was never a good fit for me my colleagues spoke in long paragraphs like if they were going to ask a question it had a long preface and It would take them five minutes to ask the question if I'm gonna ask a question or answer a question It'll only take me a few seconds or maybe a minute What | ||
| Talk to us about your Christian conversion. | ||
| How did that come about? | ||
| Because it sounds like that is one of the most important things in your life. | ||
| I've always been a seeker of truth. | ||
| And I guess I've always been on a journey. | ||
| And I've been curious, very curious. | ||
| And that's why my journey sort of took me through Eastern religions, New Age, and like full circle to Christianity. | ||
| I studied with Jehovah's Witnesses for a while, like I was all over the place spiritually. | ||
| But, um, I guess 1997 was when I had an experience in a medical hospital that resulted in another experience. | ||
| And I don't want to get into all the details that people will have to wait for the book, uh, because it will have a chapter on my spiritual journey. | ||
| Uh, but that, um, I sort of came to the end of myself and I've had always struggled with depression. | ||
| In fact, as a teenager, um, I used to do suicide gestures and I never went back to the, uh, suicide gestures as an adult, but I struggled with depression. | ||
| And right after I got my tenure at Princeton, it was like, is this all there is? | ||
| Like I worked, you know, night and day, seven days a week. | ||
| And this is all there is. | ||
| And I had won, you know, the three national prizes and the book that I Published back then has been cited by the U.S. | ||
| Supreme Court. | ||
| And people would say to me, what are you going to do now? | ||
| Like you can't, uh, you've won the career award. | ||
| It's like, you can't top yourself. | ||
| What are you going to do now? | ||
| And a part of me during the time I was at Princeton, I wanted to prove stuff. | ||
| And I wanted to prove that a person from my background could go to Princeton, they could get tenure and they could get it early. | ||
| And I had proven that that was the case. | ||
| And then I sort of lost interest in that. | ||
| I went to Yale Law School, got a master's in law. | ||
| I was interested in law because my book was being cited in court cases related to voting rights. | ||
| And so that made me very curious. | ||
| And then I realized that the legal community liked my research because I didn't think like a lawyer and that I didn't want to think like a lawyer. | ||
| And so I got the master's in law after my PhD. | ||
| And decided, you know, that I had enough education. | ||
| I did not need a law degree, nor did I want to become a lawyer. | ||
| Hang on for one second. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I decided I didn't want to become a lawyer. | ||
| I didn't want to learn how to think like a lawyer. | ||
| Dr. Carol Swain, hang on for one second. | ||
| Take a short commercial break. | ||
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back to the war room special in a moment. | |
| Oh, oh, oh, oh. | ||
| Good Christian men rejoice in thee. | ||
| Now we hear of endless bliss, joy, and joy. | ||
| Jesus Christ is born for this. | ||
| He that knows the heavenly law and man is blessed evermore. | ||
| Christ is born for this. | ||
| Jesus Christ is born for this. | ||
| He that knows the heavenly law and man is blessed evermore. | ||
| Christ is born for this. | ||
| Christ is born for this. | ||
| Good King Wenceslas! | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| I hope you've had a Merry Christmas. | ||
| Now the 12 days of Christmas, one of the things I don't like about modern Christmases is that they start in October. | ||
| And of course, right on Christmas Day, everybody, you know, the music stops, everything. | ||
| We should have the 12 Days of Christmas. | ||
| When I was a kid, you decorated the tree on Christmas Eve and then kept the tree up the entire way. | ||
| Dr. Carol Swain. | ||
| So we're talking about the, you said there's got to be more than this. | ||
| You had this medical thing. | ||
| You'll talk about the memoir, but Without giving too much away for the memoir, the conversion itself, how did that build up? | ||
| It was dramatic? | ||
| It was Paul on the road to Damascus. | ||
| So it was Damascene, as we say? | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| And, you know, I always knew that there was something larger than me guiding my life, but I was not willing, you know, to say, you know, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I believe one God, many paths. | ||
| And, uh, But I was always, quote, spiritual. | ||
| And I've had many supernatural experiences over the course of my life. | ||
| And so I always knew that there was something larger than me guiding my life. | ||
| And I never found the church satisfied. | ||
| And, and, you know, I had relatives and people that were so worried about my soul. | ||
| And, you know, I looked at their lives and I thought their lives were much worse than mine. | ||
| Not, not the poverty, but the moral choices. | ||
| I in the world was living a life that in some ways was, you know, more ethical, more moral than many of the people that were trying to convert me. | ||
| And so to have that Christian conversion experience where I felt like I came face to face, you know, with myself and as a sinner, as well as with God's love, it resulted in me taking my eyes off of other people. | ||
| And really focusing on myself and my relationship with Christ. | ||
| And for churches, I am a member of a church. | ||
| In fact, I'm in a Southern Baptist church. | ||
| I never saw that coming because I was always more charismatic, you know, wanted churches that were more effusive, but I care about church leadership. | ||
| I would not be in a church where I thought the leaders were immoral, but I don't spend my time looking at my fellow believers and my fellow congregants because we're all sinners. | ||
| And I think one of the things that really helped me, uh, ex, uh, understand president Trump is that, um, I think that, now, where am I going with this? | ||
| Uh, oh, when he was being attacked. | ||
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unidentified
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I don't know, but it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty interesting. | |
| So keep going. | ||
| When people attacked president Trump for his past life and said he was a sinner. | ||
| And that, uh, how could a Christian support president Trump? | ||
| I mean, the whole message of the gospel is that we all sinners and that Jesus died on the cross for our past, present, and future sins. | ||
| And we're all imperfect. | ||
| The church is a hospital. | ||
| It's meant to be a hospital. | ||
| Without God's redeeming power, we would all be lost. | ||
| And so perfection was never God's standard. | ||
| And the people that he's used throughout the Bible were all broken people. | ||
| And not all of them were Jewish in the Old Testament. | ||
| Some of them were pagans. | ||
| God has always used all kinds of people throughout history. | ||
| And so I find it so offensive when you have these great theologians or the never Trumpers out there, you know, preaching, uh, that they are morally superior and that no self-respecting Christian could support a sinner like Donald Trump. | ||
| They don't understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. | ||
| And I say that, um, uh, because I mean, we all a mess in some sort of way we all are. | ||
| And those of us who have accepted the free gift of salvation, we're constantly working on ourselves, but we'll never be perfect as long as we own this earth. | ||
| And so we should not hold impossible standards for other people. | ||
| We become Pharisees. | ||
| And unfortunately, there are too many Pharisees out there in the world and in the church who think, you know, that they have it all together when they don't. | ||
| Given, you took a position on this commission for President Trump, I think the 1776 commission, you took a, you've got a great love of American history and its traditions. | ||
| One of the things people talk about now is the rise of, under Trump, or associated Trump, of Christian nationalism. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And other people are saying, hey, we're a post-Christian country. | ||
| Give us your assessment of that. | ||
| Are we post-Christian? | ||
| And we're seeing a rise of Christian nationalism, or are we the same country we've always been? | ||
| I think that phrase, post-Christian, I mean Christian nationalism, we started hearing it after January 6th, because the protesters were labeled as Christian nationalists. | ||
| I think that anyone who reads the Bible understands that God dealt with nation-states. | ||
| And there are scriptures that God placed people in nations. | ||
| And when the Israelites were exiled to Babylon, he told them, you know, to plant, you know, gardens, to pray for the welfare of the nations where they were being dispersed to, that if those nations prosper, they would prosper. | ||
| And if you look at America's founding, there's no way that you can dispute the fact that America was founded by people who were deeply religious, who were deeply Christian. | ||
| The Jewish part comes from the fact that Christians, you know, we celebrate the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Old Testament, which is, I believe, the Jewish Torah. | ||
| That's a part of who we are. | ||
| You don't get Christians without Jews. | ||
| And so, I think Christian nationalism is just a way to marginalize Christians to try to keep them out of the political arena. | ||
| And it's impossible to live in a society and have a culture that is as polluted as ours is and sit on the sidelines. | ||
| And so those people that are labeling Christians as nationalists, they're doing that as a way to divide and as a way to keep Christians on the sidelines so that they can dominate everything. | ||
| Do you believe Christians should not be on the sideline? | ||
| I mean, there's an element of the church that says, hey, what do you mean by that? | ||
| I mean, look what's happening to our children in the public schools. | ||
| And we have a government now that's really pushing policies that I would say are contrary to our civil rights laws and our Constitution's equal protection clause. | ||
| And I'm talking about through the diversity, equity and inclusion, the CRT, And things that they're doing with the transgender movement. | ||
| Many of the things that the government is pushing right now, I believe it's just blatantly unconstitutional and it certainly runs counter to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its various extensions and titles. | ||
| This movement, particularly the transgender, what I would call the gender ideology, It came out of the not-for-profits, it also came out of the universities. | ||
| Did you see, because right now it's so much more radical than it's ever been, and it's aggressively radical. | ||
| Did you see this coming out of your university setting? | ||
| Because you've been associated with universities for, what, 30 or 40 years? | ||
| Did you see this brewing in other elements outside, let's say, the political science or history department? | ||
| No, I did not see it being mainstreamed in the way that it has I did not see how it would take over K-12 education. | ||
| And during the time I was at Princeton and at Vanderbilt, at Princeton for sure, and at Vanderbilt for most of my career, I was not interested in critical race theory or Marxism. | ||
| And I was just busy doing my thing. | ||
| And I had no idea how it would impact the university. | ||
| And it has been so mainstreamed. | ||
| And it is destructive. | ||
| And there's so many dangerous ideas that have come out of academia. | ||
| And I find it very troubling. | ||
| I believe that parents should think long and hard about sending their children off to most universities, because those universities are geared towards taking the young people who enter those doors, breaking down their values, and then remaking them into whatever the institution sees as its values. | ||
| And with the Transgender movement, there were many people that thought, you know, if you support gay rights and like for myself, all of my life, like I have believed in non-discrimination. | ||
| And so non-discrimination, I certainly didn't want gays discriminated against. | ||
| I did not support gay marriage because I believe that a marriage is a union between a male and female. | ||
| But once that became the law of the land, it was clear that progressives had a much larger agenda, that that was just cracking open the door to the things that you're seeing today. | ||
| And I don't believe that the state of affairs today with the transgenderism, the pedophilia that's being pushed in some elements, I think, in the gay community, that doesn't represent the older gay people that I have known. | ||
| They are probably as appalled as we are about what's happening. | ||
| Not enough of them are speaking up about it. | ||
| But to have an administration like the one we have in government, and we can go back now to my religious understanding of the Old Testament and God, is that God deals with nations. | ||
| He judges nations. | ||
| And so if he holds the same standards for America as he did for ancient Israel, Then America is doomed. | ||
| I believe that America could easily fall, if the nation has not already fallen, to China or North Korea. | ||
| And we would have done it to ourselves, that God has sort of given us over to our sin and to the things that we've chosen. | ||
| And I think because our nation is one where we elect our leaders, they enact their policies on their behalf. | ||
| And we pay taxes for things that are reprehensible to God that we all have guilt because these are our leaders. | ||
| We put them in place. | ||
| We are supporting their policies and I expect America to fall and it could easily happen in my lifetime and yours. | ||
| Why do you say that? | ||
| Because you think we're so far off track of what are the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West? | ||
| I think that For a Bible-believing Christians, and there's some Christians that have made alliances, you know, with the worst of the culture, they've been able to excuse that. | ||
| I think that if God holds us to the same standard He's held other nations, we are doomed. | ||
| And I believe that the only thing that could turn around the situation for America would be another Great Awakening, some kind of revival. | ||
| I'm not sure that will happen. | ||
| And absent that happening, we are destroying ourselves. | ||
| And I have this deep down feeling that China is the dominant world power that's controlling us in America, that our leaders are sold out to the Chinese government, the Chinese dollars, that they control, you know, so much of our food supply, our prescription medicines, and that we have put ourselves in a situation that We are the lesser. | ||
| And when I look at the Ukraine, that situation that President Obama and Biden have set up, that is actually causing the suffering and death of the Ukrainian people. | ||
| And this is something that our government instigated, the conflict between Putin and the Ukraine. | ||
| They knew exactly what they were doing. | ||
| Just hang on for one second. | ||
| No, no, this is great. | ||
| You're on a roll. | ||
| But we've got to take a commercial break. | ||
| No, you're good. | ||
| Man, I get my coffee here on a day after Christmas. | ||
| This is fantastic. | ||
| Dr. Carol Swain from Vanderbilt, formerly of Princeton. | ||
| She's got a degree at Yale University, or PSU, University of North Carolina. | ||
| She'll join us on the other side. | ||
|
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♪ With heart and soul and voice ♪ ♪ Now we hear a endless bliss, joy, joy ♪ ♪ Jesus Christ is born for this ♪ ♪ He hath taught the heavenly law ♪ ♪ And man is blessed evermore ♪ ♪ Christ is born for this ♪ ♪ Christ is born for this ♪ | |
| ♪ He wends us lost of doubt on the feast of Stephen ♪ ♪ When the snow there upon his feet and crisp and cold ♪ Dr. Carol Swain was on a roll. | ||
| By the way, you're at the Texas, you're a distinguished, what, senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Institute today, ma'am? | ||
| I am. | ||
| It's a foundation. | ||
| And on this show, I'm expressing my views, not theirs. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Amen to that. | ||
| Let's talk about, we only got a few minutes left. | ||
| Let's talk about the Great Awakening. | ||
| What is needed for a Great Awakening in your mind to wake up the American people, ma'am? | ||
| Well, first of all, the surveys that I see show that the overwhelming majority of Americans say that the nation is headed in the wrong direction. | ||
| So that they know that there's something terribly wrong. | ||
| Yet the leaders that we have in the Democratic and Republican parties, they're not really responsive to what the American people want. | ||
| And so we get same old, same old. | ||
| I don't believe that there is a political solution to what ails America. | ||
| And so what I think needs to happen is people need to return to Those Judeo-Christian values that helped make America great. | ||
| And I'm not saying this, you know, as a Trump supporter, I have not picked a candidate for 2024. | ||
| I'm out there listening because I don't know what God wants to do in 2024. | ||
| So I'm listening very carefully and I'm watching all the candidates. | ||
| But I believe that prayer is important for those of us who are Christian believers, that we need to pray for revival. | ||
| I believe that we need to stand up for righteousness, that there is good and evil in the world. | ||
| And when we are silent and we turn our eyes away from things that we know shouldn't be taking place and we don't speak up, then I think we're complicit in the things that are taking place around us. | ||
| So we need to sort of go back to first things. | ||
| And there are values and principles, and there is a truth. | ||
| And with the political left, they argue that there is no truth. | ||
| And they believe that they have lost all sense of common sense, in that we know that among them, they believe that males can have babies. | ||
| They believe that you can change your sex. | ||
| They believe things that are ludicrous, but not enough of us are willing to stand up and say that that doesn't make any sense, that's ludicrous. | ||
| Not enough of us are willing to stand up when we see children being mutilated, or when we see child abuse. | ||
| And I think that for us to have a revival, we have to know right from wrong, truth from lies, we have to be bold enough to speak, and we have to, those of us who are Christian believers have to pray Pray for our fellow believers. | ||
| Pray for our nation. | ||
| Pray for a miracle. | ||
| Pray for revival. | ||
| Dr. Swain, how do people get to your writings, your website, everything, your social media, all of it? | ||
| How do people make more contact with Dr. Carol Swain? | ||
| Well, I am on Twitter. | ||
| It's Carol M. Swain. | ||
| I'm on Facebook, as well as Gitter. | ||
| I hope I'm saying that right. | ||
| Truth Social. | ||
| And Instagram. | ||
| And I have a website, Be The People, BeThePeopleNews.com, CarolMSwain.com, and Be The People Nonprofit. | ||
| And so many different places. | ||
| And I do like to connect with people. | ||
| And I believe in America. | ||
| I believe that it's possible we could turn things around. | ||
| It's not very likely we continue electing the same kinds of leaders we do, and if we continue putting our faith in politics rather than in God as the Creator. | ||
| Dr. Swain, thank you very much for joining us with our Day After Christmas, the Boxing Day special. | ||
| Really appreciate you coming on. | ||
| We look forward next year to the memoir. | ||
| I know it's going to be very exciting, so thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Honored to have you on here. | ||
| Okay, we're going to finish. | ||
| Yesterday we talked about, excuse me, on our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day show, talked about White Christmas, the writing of the song and then the actual performance of it by Bing Crosby. | ||
| We're going to leave you, take a short commercial break, be back for the second hour. | ||
| We're going to end this segment with Bing Crosby and White Christmas. | ||
|
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I'm dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones I used to know | |
| Where the tree tops glisten and children play Listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow. | ||
| I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. | ||
| With every Christmas card I write, May your days be merry and bright. | ||
| And may all your Christmases be white. | ||
| I'm dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones I used to know Where the treetops glisten and children listen | ||
| To hear sleigh bells in the snow. | ||
| I'm dreaming of a white Christmas With every Christmas card I write. | ||
| May your days be merry and bright. | ||
| And may all your Christmases be white. |
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