| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| But most importantly, even more importantly than thanking these two, I want to thank all of you for coming out tonight, sharing part of your evening and asking such great questions and engaging. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you all very much. | |
| Have a great night. | ||
| Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A. | ||
| White House trade advisor Peter Navarro went to prison in 2024, convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the January 6th Committee after being found guilty on two counts. | ||
| In his new book, I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To, Peter Navarro lays out the Justice Department's case, his arrest and trial, and what it was like for him behind bars. | ||
| People think you're in a dorm rather than a cell. | ||
| It's like everybody told me there that they'd rather be in a cell because you only have to worry about one other guy. | ||
| You know, there's a thing called the lock, lock in the sock, right? | ||
| You take a padlock, you throw it in the sock, and a lot of rough justice goes on like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
White House trade advisor and author Peter Navarro, Sunday night at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | |
| Congress returns next week from the Thanksgiving holiday recess. | ||
| The House is back Monday at noon Eastern. | ||
| Later in the week, members will vote on legislation banning those who are involved in the October 7th terror attack on Israel from entering the U.S. Lawmakers will also consider a bill to address how college student athletes are paid by setting national standards for charging for the use of their name, image, and likeness, or NIL. | ||
| The Senate also returns Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Lawmakers will vote on more of President Trump's nominations for lifetime appointments on U.S. District Court judges. | ||
| Off the floor, talks are expected to continue on healthcare reform proposals to extend healthcare subsidies, set to expire at the end of the year. | ||
| Majority Leader Thun has promised to hold a floor vote on healthcare legislation by mid-December as part of the deal to end the government shutdown. | ||
| Watch live coverage of the House on C-SPAN, the Senate on C-SPAN 2, and all of our congressional coverage on our free video app, C-SPAN Now, and our website, c-span.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine, a Navy vet, who saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced and said, wouldn't this be great if this was going to be something that we did for anyone? | ||
| Comcast has always been a community-driven company. | ||
| This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| And now on the Washington Journal, we want to introduce you to an author named Darrell Davis. | ||
| He is the author of this book, The Klan Whisperer. | ||
| But being an author is not his full-time job. | ||
| Mr. Davis, what do you generally do for a living? | ||
| Well, music is my profession, but trying to improve race relations is my obsession. | ||
| How did you get that obsession and how did it develop? | ||
| Well, I was a child of parents in the U.S. Foreign Service. | ||
| So I grew up as an American embassy kid traveling all over the world, beginning at the age of three. | ||
| And it bothered me that I was treated better across the Pacific and Atlantic than I was in my own country. | ||
| So I sought to get to the roots of it. | ||
| How can you hate me when you don't even know me? | ||
| How do you get to the roots? | ||
| By interviewing and talking to people who profess that hate towards someone who does not look like them or who does not believe as they believe. | ||
| So I began seeking out members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, other white supremacists, and just, you know, you're general racists on all sides. | ||
| So how do you begin a project like that? | ||
| First of all, you have to have a lot of nerve. | ||
| And secondly, how do you find somebody who's in the KKK and approach them? | ||
| Well, trust me, they're not hard to find. | ||
| Racists are not hard to find in this country. | ||
| But as far as nerve, no, you know, it really wasn't courage as much as it was curiosity. | ||
| I had an incident when I was 10 years old marching in a Cub Scout parade here in my own country. | ||
| I was the only black scout in the parade, and some of the spectators threw bottles and rocks at me. | ||
| And I didn't know why, because I had no precedent for that behavior. | ||
| You know, growing up a lot overseas, I did first grade, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, all in different countries. | ||
| And the thing, this is in the 1960s. | ||
| Now, get this, right? | ||
| My classmates overseas were from all over the world. | ||
| Anybody who had an embassy stationed where we had our U.S. embassy, all of their kids went to the same school. | ||
| So if you opened the door to my classroom, Peter, you would say, oh my goodness, you know, this is a United Nations of Little Kids, because that's exactly what it was. | ||
| But every time I'd come back home after my dad's assignment, I would either be in all black schools or black and white schools, meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated. | ||
| And I just didn't, you know, quite understand that. | ||
| So I sought the roots of this thing called racism. | ||
| Mr. Davis, walk us through an encounter with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| You know, I've been doing this for 45 years, so I've had many, many different ones. | ||
| And of course, a white supremacist or a Klan member, a Klansman or Klanswoman, is not stamped out of a standard cookie cutter. | ||
| You know, they come from all different walks of life, all different backgrounds, educational backgrounds, etc. | ||
| But, you know, to give you an example, you take a blood oath to join this group, and that becomes your family. | ||
| And you are surrounded by an echo chamber of people who have the same beliefs. | ||
| So you're constantly being fueled and pumped with this stuff that is simply not true. | ||
| So what you want to do is, well, let me take you to this. | ||
| Going around, I've been to 65 countries on six continents and all 50 states. | ||
| What I have learned is this. | ||
| No matter how far I've gone from our country, the United States, whether it's right next door to Canada or right next door to Mexico or halfway around the globe, every single person I've met is a human being. | ||
| And every human being on this planet wants these five core values in their lives. | ||
| Everyone wants to be loved. | ||
| Everyone wants to be respected. | ||
| We all want to be heard. | ||
| We all want to be treated fairly and truthfully. | ||
| And we all want the same things for our family as anybody else would want for their family. | ||
| And if we can learn to apply those five core values or any of those five values when we find ourselves in an adversarial situation or in a culture or society in which we are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, I'll guarantee you that your navigation of that situation, that culture, that society, will be much more smooth and much more positive. | ||
| So that's how I would approach these Klan members or white supremacists. | ||
| I would listen. | ||
| Do I agree with what they say? | ||
| No. | ||
| But I will give them the platform, I will listen to them, and in return, they will reciprocate and listen to me. | ||
| And what happens is I look for things that we have in common. | ||
| All right, there are plenty of things we have in common. | ||
| Of course, there are plenty of things we have in difference. | ||
| When you find something in common, that gap between you begins to narrow. | ||
| And you talk for another five minutes, you found more in common. | ||
| Now you're here. | ||
| You are in a cordial relationship with your adversary. | ||
| You keep on talking. | ||
| You get even closer because you found more in common, right? | ||
| And that is what causes a cognitive dissonance in that person's mind because he or she has found much more in common with you than they have in contrast. | ||
| And then the trivial things in contrast, such as skin color, or whether you go to a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or a temple, began to matter less and less. | ||
| And they began thinking, why did I hate that person in the first place? | ||
| So that's what happens. | ||
| I don't set out to convert anybody. | ||
| I set out to give them a different perception. | ||
| And then they convert themselves. | ||
| And I end up with robes and hoods, swastika armbands, you know, you name it, I've got it. | ||
| Yeah, but what do you plan on doing with that collection of garb? | ||
| Yes, well, I have a 501c3. | ||
| I plan on opening a museum. | ||
| And for what purpose? | ||
| To educate people. | ||
| It will be an interactive museum. | ||
| And I will have lectures there, classes there. | ||
| And it will also be a place because, you know, one thing I've noticed in a lot of the lectures I give, I give lectures all over the world and all over this country. | ||
| And two to three out of every ten lectures I give, somebody will approach me after people have gone away from the podium from asking me questions or what have you, and I'm there by myself. | ||
| They will approach me and whisper to me, you know, my mother is in the Klan or my dad's a neo-Nazi, you know, and I was raised that way. | ||
| I come from wherever they come from. | ||
| And now I'm here at University of, for example, fill in the blank. | ||
| And my girlfriend is Jewish or my boyfriend is black or my best friend is gay. | ||
| I can't bring them home. | ||
| My parents will kill me. | ||
| Or I can't, you know, or disown me. | ||
| And I can't tell my friend because they'll drop me. | ||
| So they have this secret that is burning on their chest and they need somebody to talk to. | ||
| My museum will offer that kind of service. | ||
| Sort of like, you know, an alcoholics anonymous or gambler's anonymous. | ||
| I'll have like a raceaholics anonymous for those people who are dealing with racism of their parents, of their spouses. | ||
| I know women who email me. | ||
| I don't even know them, right? | ||
| They email me and they'll say, you know, can you talk to my husband? | ||
| You know, before I married him, I had all these black girlfriends and now I can't have them over to the house because of his racism. | ||
| Things like that. | ||
| So I want an outlet for people like that dealing with these kinds of problems. | ||
| Darrell Davis, in your book, The Klan Whisperer, you talk about someone named Roger Kelly. | ||
| Who is he? | ||
| Roger Kelly was the, when I met him, he was the grand dragon of Maryland. | ||
| Grand Dragon means state leader in Klan terminology, what you and I, Peter, would call the governor. | ||
| Every clan group has a grand dragon, the state leader, who oversees all the chapters within the state. | ||
| The imperial wizard is the national leader who oversees all the states in which there's a chapter. | ||
| You and I would call that person the president. | ||
| So when I met Roger Kelly, he was the grand dragon of Maryland. | ||
| A couple years later, he became an imperial wizard. | ||
| And then a few years after that, guess what? | ||
| He left the Klan because of that cognitive dissonance that resulted from our conversations and applying those five core values. | ||
| Today, I own his robe and hood. | ||
| What was that first meeting with Roger Kelly like? | ||
| It was pretty interesting. | ||
| First of all, how did you set it up? | ||
| Okay, well, I talked to a former Klansman, and I convinced him he was very reluctant. | ||
| I wanted him to introduce me to Mr. Kelly, and he was absolutely hands down, no, not going to do it. | ||
| He was fearful for his safety and for my safety of bringing a black man to the Grand Dragon. | ||
| So I persuaded him to give me Mr. Kelly's phone number and address, and I would handle it. | ||
| Well, he gave it to me on the condition that I not reveal to Mr. Kelly where I got it. | ||
| And he warned me, he said, Daryl, do not fool with Roger Kelly. | ||
| He will kill you. | ||
| And I'm like, well, that's why I need to see him. | ||
| You know, why would he kill me? | ||
| Just because of the color of my skin. | ||
| That's the mentality I'm trying to understand. | ||
| So I had my secretary give Mr. Kelly a call, and she's white, and I only mention that because it plays into the story, not because I care what color somebody is. | ||
| I figured if I called Mr. Kelly, he might pick up in my voice that I'm black. | ||
| And he would say, well, am I talking to you? | ||
| Click. | ||
| And my whole project would have ended before it ever got started. | ||
| My project was to go around the country, start here in Maryland, go up north, go down south, go to the Midwest, go to the West, and interview different Klan leaders and members and find out how can you hate me when you don't even know me? | ||
| What are the roots of racism? | ||
| How can we address it? | ||
| So I had her call because I knew that when he heard her voice on the phone, he would automatically know to his ear. | ||
| That's a white woman on the end of the phone. | ||
| And I knew enough about the mentality that he would not automatically think that this white woman is working for a black man, especially a black man who's writing a book on the Ku Klux Klan, because they did not exist. | ||
| My book would become the first book written by a black author on the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of in-person face-to-face interviews. | ||
| So I told her, do not tell Mr. Kelly that I'm black unless he asks. | ||
| Don't lie to him, but don't give him reason to ask. | ||
| So she understood. | ||
| She called. | ||
| He agreed to do the interview. | ||
| He didn't ask what color I was. | ||
| And so when we set up a date in a motel, and Mary, my secretary, and I got there several hours early, I gave her some money and sent her down the hall to get some soda pop out of the out of the machine, put it in the ice bucket, get it cold, fill it with ice, etc. | ||
| I had no idea what Mr. Kelly was going to do when he arrived. | ||
| Would he attack me? | ||
| Would he say, am I talking to you and walk away? | ||
| Or would he come in the room and do the interview as he told Mary on the phone he would? | ||
| I didn't know what he was going to do, but I knew what I was going to do. | ||
| I was going to be hospitable and offer him a cold beverage as I would do to you or anybody coming to visit me. | ||
| So she got all that set up and we waited. | ||
| And right on time, there was a knock on the door. | ||
| And Mary hopped up and ran around the corner to open the door. | ||
| Now you cannot see who's in the room from the hallway if you're standing in the door. | ||
| You have to enter the room, turn to your right, and walk around the corner, and then you see who's in the room. | ||
| So I was seated at the lamp table. | ||
| I removed the lamp and put a chair on either side for Mr. Kelly and myself. | ||
| And so Mary opened the door and in walked what's called the Grand Nighthawk. | ||
| Nighthawk means bodyguard. | ||
| A Grand Nighthawk is a bodyguard to the Grand Dragon. | ||
| Imperial Nighthawk would be the bodyguard to the Imperial Wizard. | ||
| So in walks his Grand Nighthawk in military camouflage, the Ku Klux Klan emblem patch on his chest, which is a red circle, white cross, and a red blood drop in the center of the chest. | ||
| Over on the other side were the letters KKK embroidered on the chest. | ||
| And on his cap, it said Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| And on his hip, he had a semi-automatic and a holster, semi-automatic handgun, that is. | ||
| So he comes in, turns the corner, and sees me, and just freezes. | ||
| Well, Mr. Kelly was on the other side of the corner and did not realize that his Nighthawk had stopped. | ||
| So when he came around the corner, he slammed into the guy's back and knocked the guy forward. | ||
| And now they both are stumbling around the room trying to regain their balance and looking all around. | ||
| And I'm just sitting there looking at them, and I can read their faces. | ||
| I knew what they were thinking. | ||
| They were thinking, did the desk clerk give us the wrong room number, or is this an ambush? | ||
| So I stood up and I displayed my palms, so I show I had nothing in my hands, and I approached Mr. Kelly. | ||
| I extended my right hand. | ||
| I said, hi, Mr. Kelly. | ||
| I'm Darrell Davis. | ||
| Well, he shook my hand, as did the Nighthawk. | ||
| So far, so good. | ||
| I said, please, please come on and have a seat. | ||
| So he had a seat. | ||
| And we began doing this interview. | ||
| I had a little bag beside me containing the Bible and some blank cassettes to record. | ||
| And every time he'd make a biblical reference, because the Ku Klux Klan claims to be a Christian organization, and they claim that the Bible preaches racial separation. | ||
| Now, I've read the Bible, and I've never seen that. | ||
| So I wanted to be able to reach down, pull up my Bible, and say, here, Mr. Kelly, please show me chapter and verse where it says blacks and whites must be separate. | ||
| So every time I'd reach down to pull out a blank cassette or the Bible, the Nighthawk would reach up. | ||
| He never pulled his gun. | ||
| He would rest his hand on the butt of the gun. | ||
| So, you know, which I understood, you know, that's his job. | ||
| He's trying to protect his boss. | ||
| So, how did the end of the meeting, how long was the meeting finished? | ||
| It went on for about three hours. | ||
| I figured it wouldn't go on for more than 45 minutes or so. | ||
| But he was fascinating. | ||
| He was learning stuff from me. | ||
| I was learning things from him. | ||
| But now we had one little tense moment. | ||
| We were talking some things we agree upon, other things we disagree upon. | ||
| And we were just casually talking. | ||
| Now, after about 45 minutes or an hour, the Nighthawk stopped reaching for his gun every time I'd reached into the bag. | ||
| He finally realized there was no threat in the bag. | ||
| But a little over an hour into the interview, there was a very strange, very quick, short noise, like a. | ||
| And we all jumped. | ||
| And because it was so out of context, the noise was so short and so fast that my ear could not discern what it was. | ||
| And I jumped up and hit the table. | ||
| I'm getting ready to come across that table and grab the Nighthawk and grab Mr. Kelly and slam them down to the ground and take away the Nighthawk's weapon because it's my job to protect myself and my secretary. | ||
| Like it's the Nighthawk's job to protect himself and his grand dragon. | ||
| I figured Mr. Kelly had made the noise because I didn't make the noise. | ||
| And all I could hear in the back of my head was, Darrell, don't fool with Roger Kelly. | ||
| He will kill you, or the other former Klansman had told me. | ||
| So I was prepared. | ||
| And when I hit the table, I'm looking right into Mr. Kelly's eyes. | ||
| I didn't say a word. | ||
| He could read my eyes. | ||
| My eyes were saying to him, What did you just do? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| His eyes were fixated on my eyes. | ||
| His eyes were saying to me, What did you just do? | ||
| And the Nighthawk's back on his gun, looking at both of us like, what did either one of y'all just do? | ||
| Well, Mary realized what had happened. | ||
| She was sitting on the dresser next to me, to my left, because there were no more chairs in the room. | ||
| She began explaining it when it happened again, and we all began laughing. | ||
| What happened was the ice bucket with the cans of soda was sitting to her left, and the ice had begun to melt, and the cans of soda were cascading down the ice. | ||
| That was it, you know? | ||
| And we all became fearful of each other because of our ignorance as to what was going on. | ||
| The lesson taught that day, I won't say it was learned that day, that would come later, but the lesson taught that day is this. | ||
| All because some foreign entity of which we were ignorant, that being the bucket of ice cans of soda, I mean, yeah, we knew it was over there, but we'd long forgotten about it. | ||
| All because some foreign entity of which we were ignorant entered into our little comfort zone via the noise that it made without our knowledge, we became fearful and accusatory of each other. | ||
| The lesson taught is this: ignorance breeds fear. | ||
| We fear those things of which we're ignorant, those things we don't understand. | ||
| If we don't keep that fear in check, that fear in turn, Peter, will escalate into hatred because we hate the things that frighten us. | ||
| If we don't keep that hatred in check, that in turn will escalate to destruction. | ||
| We want to destroy the things that we hate. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they frighten us. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| At the end of the day, they may have been harmless, and we were simply ignorant. | ||
| So we saw the whole chain almost unravel to completion, the last component being destruction. | ||
| Had I pounced across the table and hurt one of them, or had they shot me or my secretary? | ||
| Fortunately, it stopped us short of that, and we continued with the conversation for another couple of hours, and we got along fine. | ||
| We disagreed on some things, agreed on others. | ||
| And over a period of time, over a few years, like I said, he became imperial wizard, but the whole time, it was causing a cognitive dissonance, and that gap was narrowing to the point where he decided he was wrong. | ||
| And not only did he leave the Klan, he did not just hand it over to his second-in-command. | ||
| He shut down 13 chapters in 13 states. | ||
| The book is called The Klan Whisperer, the author, Darrell Davis. | ||
| And now it's time to hear your voices as well. | ||
| Edward, Kalamazoo, Michigan, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Edward. | ||
| You're on with author and musician, Darrell Davis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hello. | |
| I'm glad you're on today. | ||
| Good morning, Edward. | ||
| Yes, I might buy the book. | ||
| I think we have an enormous, I think we have an enormous race problem in the United States. | ||
| I think it's worse than I had imagined. | ||
| I mean, I think this anti-immigrant fever is mostly based on race. | ||
| In other words, people don't like, you know, brown, black immigrants coming to the country. | ||
| And I think that Trump appeals to that, you know, hatred and resentment of foreigners and non-white people. | ||
| And I think that's what he's basing a lot of the presidential policies on, racism and anti-immigrant policies. | ||
| But let me just mention real quick: I didn't realize how deeply embedded slavery was in the United States until, I don't know, maybe it was 10 years ago when I heard about this project. | ||
| Is it Project 1619 or 1609? | ||
| 1619. | ||
|
unidentified
|
1619. | |
| I wasn't sure I had the right date. | ||
| Yeah, 1619. | ||
| Now, I never learned this in school, but slavery began almost immediately with the colonization of North America. | ||
| So, and I thought, how long did we have slavery? | ||
| We had slavery almost, and so, yeah, from 1619, right? | ||
| They imported slaves into, what was it, Virginia, correct? | ||
| Into the colony? | ||
| Hey, Edward, we've got to get some more calls in here. | ||
| Let's go ahead and conclude this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, I just say that slavery based on racism has been embedded into the country. | |
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| We got the point. | ||
| Darrell Davis. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And thank you, Ed, for your call. | ||
| Yes, you know, we don't learn a whole lot of things in school that we should learn. | ||
| I'm 67 years old. | ||
| I graduated high school in 76 and college in 1980. | ||
| And I went to one of the top-rated counties in this country for high schools. | ||
| And in our history book, we did not learn that we had internment camps in this country for Japanese Americans. | ||
| I did not learn that until I was in college, and I was incredulous about it. | ||
| And I said, no way. | ||
| My teacher said yes. | ||
| And I went and asked my parents, and they said yes. | ||
| Why was it not in the history books? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Because we have a lot of shameful things that we try to erase, rewrite, omit, deny. | ||
| And we need, every country has history, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the shameful. | ||
| And we need to turn those cards over, address them all, and then move on. | ||
| And that's why you didn't learn certain things when you were in school about slavery and other things, tragedies in this country. | ||
| Everett is calling in from Colorado, Republican line. | ||
| Everett, please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to you. | |
| Good morning, Everett. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Davis, you are something special, and you deserve a medal, if nothing else. | |
| I grew up in western Colorado. | ||
| So, you know, it was primarily a white area. | ||
| But I grew up in a Catholic school, and the nuns would teach us, you know, basically not to judge the other people. | ||
| And so I've always carried that with me. | ||
| Don't judge a book by its cover. | ||
| Try and find out what's on the inside and learn from that person or book. | ||
| I tried to study and learn about the Tuskegee Airmen, and I had a chance to meet Roosevelt Greer one time at a youth sports event that was going on here in Grand Junction, Colorado. | ||
| And that man was amazing. | ||
| He was a huge, huge man. | ||
| And I had a chance to shake his stick, and he gave me a little piece of paper, you know, because I was having problems with maybe my religious orientation or whatever. | ||
| And he gave me this little piece of paper. | ||
| I still cherish that more than anything. | ||
| I'd love to meet you. | ||
| You're welcome in my house anytime you can reach Western Colorado. | ||
| I appreciate that, Everett. | ||
| Grand Junction, Colorado. | ||
| Any comment for that caller? | ||
| Do you hear that a lot from people, Darrell Davis, when you get a chance to speak? | ||
| I do, but I also have my share of detractors, but I certainly appreciate Everett's comments. | ||
| And I've played and lectured all over Colorado, including Grand Junction. | ||
| So next time I'm out there, I hope he will come out and we can shake hands and perhaps grab a meal together. | ||
| So what would a detractor say to you? | ||
| Well, how can you sit? | ||
| Well, it depends upon who they are. | ||
| They don't understand why I would sit down with a Klansman. | ||
| You know, they work hard to get 20 steps forward and I put them 40 steps back by sitting down with the enemy. | ||
| No, I sit down with the enemy and we become friends and they end up relinquishing their memorabilia, their paraphernalia, their regalia to me. | ||
| And now they come out on my stage and lecture with me against their former group. | ||
| And they attempt to de-radicalize people still in that movement and prevent young people from going down that road. | ||
| So when people say to me, you know, why are you sitting down with the enemy? | ||
| You know, you're a sellout. | ||
| You're a traitor to your own race and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I say to them, well, how many clan robes have you collected? | ||
| And then they shut up. | ||
| Next call, Tom, Richmond Hills, Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
| Please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Mr. Davis. | |
| Hi, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm very impressed with your understanding. | |
| And I wish you'd come to Savannah sometime and give us a talk here. | ||
| Now, I just wanted to make the point that, you know, the laws of this country have not been racist for a long time. | ||
| The racism that exists, with little exception, resides with the race-obsessed in the Democratic Party and media who use the injustices of the distant past for purely political purposes. | ||
| In a country of 350 million people, you're always going to find some pretty crazy people. | ||
| It just takes a lot of people to make a world. | ||
| But, you know, the attitudes change slowly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, you're right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tom, I appreciate your call. | ||
| It's not just the fact that we need to change people. | ||
| We also need to change the culture that produces that mentality in people on all sides. | ||
| Daryl Davis, we've been talking about the Ku Klux Klan, but how prevalent is the KKK today, and are there other groups out there? | ||
| Yes, there are plenty of other groups. | ||
| You know, Peter, when I first started this work, about 40, it would be 46 years next, you know, next year in a few months. | ||
| But when I first started that, there were basically three groups around. | ||
| There was the KKK, neo-Nazis, and what were called white power skinheads. | ||
| Today you have a whole plethora of them. | ||
| You know, the alt-right, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Vanguard, the National Alliance, in addition to the ones I just mentioned. | ||
| And all of them are saying, come join us, come join us. | ||
| You know, we're going to take back our country. | ||
| Well, people who are afraid of their identity being erased because of the demographic shift in this country, they run and join these groups. | ||
| And when the group fails to take back our country, some of them get antsy and they say, you know what, if the Klan can't do it or the neo-Nazis can't do it, I'll do it myself. | ||
| And they walk into a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murder nine people doing Bible study. | ||
| They walk into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, murder 11 Jewish people, into the Walmart in El Paso, Texas, murder 23 Hispanic people, the Buffalo grocery store, on and on. | ||
| The Oak Creek Sikh Indian Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, murder seven Sikh Indians doing their religious services. | ||
| These people are called lone wolves. | ||
| And here's what's going on in our country, Peter, and everybody listening. | ||
| I learned this back in 1982 from the then head of the American Nazi Party. | ||
| He took over after George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder and original head, was murdered by one of his own Nazis. | ||
| But Matt Cole, K-O-E-H-L, became the commander of the American Nazi Party. | ||
| And I had a couple conversations with him, once when I was 15, and then again later on as an adult. | ||
| And he told me something. | ||
| He told me a lot of lies. | ||
| But one thing he told me was true. | ||
| They, white supremacists, are very concerned about the year 2042, which is only 16 years from now. | ||
| Because, you know, if you look, the U.S. Census is taken every decade. | ||
| Like I said, I'm 67. | ||
| When I was a kid, the black population in this country was 12%. | ||
| Native Americans, 1%. | ||
| Latino, Hispanic Americans, 3%. | ||
| Asian Pacific Islander Americans, almost 6%. | ||
| Whites, 86% to 87%. | ||
| This is happening every decade. | ||
| The last census was taken in 2020, and white people are at 59% today. | ||
| Blacks remain at 12%, 12.9, so they say 13%. | ||
| Native Americans remain at 1%. | ||
| Asian Pacific Islanders have almost doubled to 6%. | ||
| So if you take 12% black, 17% now of Latino Hispanic people, that right there by itself is 29% non-white. | ||
| This is happening. | ||
| And what people who I deal with tell me, Daryl, I don't want my grandkids to be brown. | ||
| They call it the Browning of America or white genocide through miscegenation. | ||
| Now, while there are plenty of white people in this country who don't care about that, say, hey, that's evolution doesn't bother me, no big deal. | ||
| But when 2042 hits, it's going to be 50-50 for the first time in this country. | ||
| 50% white, 50% non-white. | ||
| Between 2045 and 2050, it's going to flip. | ||
| And for the first time in the history of this country, whites will be the minority. | ||
| And that is very troubling to some people, which is one reason why Donald Trump wanted Canada to become the 51st state in order to get that gap there again. | ||
| Deborah, Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| What a privilege to speak with you, and thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| Good morning, Deborah, and thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I have an experience I'd like to share. | |
| I lived in a basically mostly white middle-class neighborhood. | ||
| It just so happened that my neighbors were African-American. | ||
| So they had little boys, two little boys the same age as my one son. | ||
| And so, you know, my husband and I just didn't believe in explaining to a young child differences. | ||
| We just believe that you should allow children to experience friends and people and let them ask you questions. | ||
| So my son played with this little boy. | ||
| They did all the things little boys do. | ||
| Went in and out of the house. | ||
| We went to the movies, did pizza, all of that. | ||
| Not once did my son, five years old, ask me why his friend had black skin. | ||
| So then my son goes to first grade the next year. | ||
| And of course, he seeks out his neighbors to play with during recess. | ||
| And some child told my son that his friend had been a slave, you know, or something like that. | ||
| Well, my son was so upset. | ||
| He was so upset because he felt, you know, it was hurtful to my son that somebody would talk bad about his friend. | ||
| And so what I explained to my son when he came home that day was that some people believe that there's a difference, you know, that that makes a difference. | ||
| But your dad and I do not believe that. | ||
| And I just told my son, you get to pick your friends, and you pick your friends based on how well you all play together. | ||
| And that's how you decide who your friends are. | ||
| But you get to choose. | ||
| Thank you for sharing that story, Deborah. | ||
| And a response, Mr. Davis. | ||
| Yeah, thank you, Deborah, very much. | ||
| And I've seen that happen. | ||
| And I get it, you know, where we allow children and discover things because, you know, people are not born racist. | ||
| It's an acquired thing. | ||
| It's something that is learned. | ||
| And what can be learned can be unlearned. | ||
| So, yes, you let your kid pick and choose their friends, you know, regardless of color, religion, disability, what have you. | ||
| And then when they began questioning, you answer them. | ||
| But in terms of your child being hurt, what happened there, apparently, from what I gather from your conversation, is that the other kids' parents planted this information in their child who then told your child about his friend being a slave. | ||
| Because, you know, some five or six-year-old kid doesn't come up with that. | ||
| So that comes from home. | ||
| And, you know, we all need to address these things in school. | ||
| While we're in school, we all pretty much are treated the same. | ||
| But when we graduate and we get out beyond the perimeter of our school campus, whether it's high school or college, things are different. | ||
| Women are being mistreated or being considered second-class citizens, or because you're Muslim, or because you're Jewish, or because you're white or black or whatever. | ||
| We all experience these things that we did not experience in our school. | ||
| So we have to kind of balance where we let our children find out things on their own and answer questions, but also where we prepare them to deal with things they may not have experienced in school, but they certainly will encounter once they graduate. | ||
| Darrell Davis, has your life been threatened? | ||
| Yes, it has. | ||
| Can you give an example? | ||
| I don't want to get too much into it because some people had to get hurt. | ||
| And, you know, don't want to get too much into that. | ||
| But it happens every now and then. | ||
| Fortunately, fewer than, you know, fewer and far between for me. | ||
| But, you know, when you're going into a situation like that, you can expect that to be in the air. | ||
| And sometimes it will manifest itself. | ||
| And I've seen it a few times. | ||
| But it has not deterred me because I get rejuvenated, I get elevated. | ||
| You know, I love it when I see the light bulb come on in someone's mind and they renounce and denounce that ideology and are willing to come out and talk about it and how wrong they were and try to bring some of their former members out of that ideology and prevent young people from doing it. | ||
| So I'm willing to take those risks. | ||
| Have any of these members or people that you've met with of the racist groups ever attended one of your concerts later on? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| In fact, I've met a few of them before I knew they were racist or whatever at my concerts. | ||
| But yes, everybody likes music, Peter, even racists. | ||
| So yes. | ||
| Richard, Augusta, Georgia, Democrat, please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning and the guests. | ||
| You notice the subliminal message? | ||
| If you watch football sports like I do, you saw the pregame story about the biracial couple and the grandparents having Thanksgiving dinner together last night. | ||
| And the problem I have with sports announcers, they're saying there's a jailbreak on that fantastic play. | ||
| What kind of subliminal message is that? | ||
| And also to the guest host, remember in April last year, I talked to you about the dictator in the White House. | ||
| And now we have the dictator Supreme Court that eroding the civil rights laws such as the voting rights bill, Section 5 and Section 2, and affirmative action laws, education. | ||
| And we have, again, like I said, the subliminal messages that I saw, it was great that before the Baltimore game last night, they showed the Thanksgiving dinner between the biracial family and the grandparents of the daughter who was white there with the black families and all breaking bread together as one should be able to do in a homogeneous society in America. | ||
| To the guest host, again, last April, you had Mr. Cohen on the show, and I told you about the dictator in the White House. | ||
| That's Richard in Augusta, Georgia. | ||
| Let's move on to Steve in Charlotte, North Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I grew up in Memphis when King was killed, and it's still one of the most tumultuous periods of my life. | ||
| And I learned about racism through the schools, really. | ||
| I mean, they were segregated at that time. | ||
| So I just, I'm trying to figure out all this stuff because I know I wasn't taught to be a racist, and I know it's learned, but when it comes down to the absolute animosity and hate to kill someone like King, I still don't understand. | ||
| Possibly you have some insight on that. | ||
| Well, yeah, thank you. | ||
| It boils down to pure hatred, as you said. | ||
| And consider the fact this, that you said that schools were segregated when you were in school in 1968 when Dr. King was killed. | ||
| He was killed, murdered, assassinated on April 4th, 1968. | ||
| Consider this fact. | ||
| Desegregation was passed by our U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, 1954. | ||
| So, and still, in 1968, schools were still segregated. | ||
| Yes, things did not integrate or desegregate overnight. | ||
| Even today, in 2025, in some parts of our country, some places are still struggling with integration. | ||
| In Prince Edward County, Virginia, when desegregation was passed, Virginia has over 100 counties. | ||
| Prince Edward County refused to integrate. | ||
| They shut down every public school in Prince Edward County, not for five days, not for five weeks, not for five months, for five years. | ||
| Just Google Prince Edward County, Virginia desegregation. | ||
| Think about missing five years of school. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Think back to just a couple years ago when your kids or your friend's kids had to go to Zoom school for two years. | ||
| We're lucky we had Zoom. | ||
| Some kids did okay. | ||
| Some kids, not so good, right? | ||
| But at least we had Zoom. | ||
| Back then in 1954, you didn't have Zoom and schools shutting down for five years. | ||
| When I go down to Prince Edward County, I meet a lot of people my age and some younger and older, et cetera. | ||
| But they missed five years of education, people who grew up there. | ||
| So you're finding a deficiency in mathematical skills, in English, grammar, reading, and writing, et cetera. | ||
| So why is it that our country takes so long to integrate when we all are here together to make this a great country? | ||
| We cannot deny the contributions of every person in this country, every background of every person in this country. | ||
| Jeff's in Indianapolis. | ||
| Jeff, please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, gentlemen. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Davis, I'm a big fan of yours. | |
| And keep up. | ||
| I understand there's a movie in the works. | ||
| I don't know if that's coming through or not, but I heard talk that there's a movie being based on your life. | ||
| So anyway, I will respond to a caller. | ||
| I think he's from Georgia, and he said that the Democrats were the party of racism. | ||
| You know, Dr. King, since we're speaking about Dr. King, once said that there's 51 states in America, the 51st state being the state of the now. | ||
| And that caller from Georgia is a great example of that. | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| History is important. | ||
| And the great nations don't run from their past. | ||
| History is about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the shameful. | ||
| And the reason we teach history is to make sure we don't repeat those mistakes again. | ||
| You know, I hear this talk, especially from the far right, come up, well, we're making white kids feel guilty about slavery and the genocide against Native Americans. | ||
| No, it's about education. | ||
| In Germany, they're taught to learn about the Holocaust. | ||
| And German kids are not feeling guilty. | ||
| They feel very enlightened and say, you know what? | ||
| And next time a clown like Adolf Hitler shows up, maybe we shouldn't listen to him, you know. | ||
| Also, you know, and history is important because I learned recently that Columbus Day is rooted in racism. | ||
| At one time, they did, you know, because of a lynching that took place in New Orleans, and it closed white Anglo-Saxon Protestants didn't consider Italians white. | ||
| Mr. David, what do you think about it, Nick Powinter, who is this biracial neo-Nazis? | ||
| I know that is there like an affirmative action thing going on? | ||
| Jeff, thank you. | ||
| We'll get an answer from Darrell Davis on that. | ||
| Okay, I don't agree with anybody of any background who promotes supremacy of any kind, whether it's white, black, or otherwise. | ||
| So I hope that answers that question. | ||
| And yes, you know, Columbus Day is rooted in racism. | ||
| You know, we had to fight for decades, decades, to get Martin Luther King Day to become a federal holiday. | ||
| And when you consider this, there is only one American man who has a holiday to himself today, and that man is black. | ||
| That's Martin Luther King. | ||
| And that's why it took so long to get that holiday. | ||
| When I was growing up as a child, as a kid, in school, we had two white guys. | ||
| Each one had a holiday to himself. | ||
| Young people won't remember this. | ||
| We had George Washington Day and we had Abraham Lincoln Day. | ||
| And so two white guys each had a holiday to himself. | ||
| And then the government figured we had too many holidays. | ||
| So they combined Lincoln Day and Washington Day into one day and called it President's Day. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But they did not want to give Martin Luther King a holiday to himself. | ||
| But yet, Christopher Columbus, who is not an American, has a holiday all to himself. | ||
| Christopher Columbus was a murderer, a pillager, and a rapist. | ||
| And so were his crew, the Nino, Pinto, and Santa Maria that came across the ocean to discover the new world or what have you. | ||
| How do you discover someplace when you get there, people are already there? | ||
| It's beyond me. | ||
| But nonetheless, we gave that holiday without any reservation, without any problems, anything like that, to somebody who committed those crimes against humanity, but yet we tried to deny for decades to give a holiday to Dr. King, who neither raped, pillaged, or murdered anybody. | ||
| He gave his life bringing everybody together. | ||
| Darrell Davis, what's your take on the removal of Confederate monuments and, in some cases, the putting back up of Confederate monuments? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm only speaking for myself. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I don't speak for anybody else. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| We went to war against Great Britain, and we beat Great Britain, which is why we celebrate the 4th of July. | ||
| Now, the second highest percentage of white people in this country, white Americans, are of British descent. | ||
| The first highest, the highest number of whites, are of German descent. | ||
| Now, these white Americans of British descent, they don't run out and build statues to King George III or fly the Union Jack. | ||
| We love Great Britain. | ||
| They're our allies, and they can go there and see their third cousin removed. | ||
| We're all friends now, right? | ||
| But the loser does not get to build his statues or fly his flag on the winner's property. | ||
| In 1941, we went to war with Japan, all right, because they bombed Pearl Harbor. | ||
| There are plenty of Japanese Americans in this country. | ||
| They are as American as you and I or anybody else, right? | ||
| Yet we treated them wrong. | ||
| We put them in internment camps. | ||
| They gave up their Japanese citizenship and became Americans. | ||
| Now, today we are allies with Japan, but these Japanese Americans do not run out and build statues to Emperor Hirohito and fly the Japanese flag. | ||
| We went to war against Germany in World War II. | ||
| The majority of white Americans are of German descent. | ||
| They don't run out and build statues to Adolf Eichmann or Joseph Goebbels or Joseph Mengele or Adolf Hitler for that matter, or fly swastika flags unless they're neo-Nazis. | ||
| The loser does not get to build his statues or fly his flags on the winner's property. | ||
| Now, to your question, I believe those things should be taken down. | ||
| The flags, the monuments, etc., they should not be ripped down and destroyed. | ||
| They should be put in a Confederate memorial museum or a Confederate memorial park, and people who want to honor them can go there and do whatever they want to do, plant flowers, kneel, whatever they want to do, and honor their ancestors. | ||
| Okay, my ancestors, okay, I'm a descendant of slaves. | ||
| My ancestors fought in the Confederacy. | ||
| My parents are from Virginia. | ||
| My grandparents are from Virginia. | ||
| My great-grandparents were from North Carolina, and their parents were slaves. | ||
| All right, so slaves had to fight for their slave masters. | ||
| So those in the southern states fought for the Confederacy. | ||
| Do I honor the Confederacy? | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| Okay, but I honor my ancestors. | ||
| And it's your prerogative. | ||
| If you want to fly that flag, go ahead and fly it. | ||
| But it should not be flown in a public place, nor should statues be erected. | ||
| In fact, at the end of the Civil War, which ended in 1865, there were no statues, no statues to Confederate soldiers. | ||
| The first ones appeared in the 1920s, and there were only a handful of them. | ||
| The majority of statues that you see today of Confederate soldiers were made in the 1960s as a slap in the face to integration. | ||
| So they weren't even, you know, statues from the Confederacy era. | ||
| Daryl Davis has been our guest. | ||
| His book is The Klan Whisperer. | ||
| If you want to find out his music schedule as well, DarylDavis.com. | ||
| Mr. Davis, pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Please come back. | ||
| Peter, thank you very much, and I will do that. | ||
| And happy Belay to Thanksgiving to all of you all out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sunday night on C-SPAN's QA. | |
| White House trade advisor Peter Navarro went to prison in 2024, convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the January 6th Committee after being found guilty on two counts. | ||
| In his new book, I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To, Peter Navarro lays out the Justice Department's case, his arrest and trial, and what it was like for him behind bars. | ||
| People think you're in a dorm rather than a cell. | ||
| It's like everybody told me there that they'd rather be in a cell because you only don't have to worry about one other guy. | ||
| You know, there's a thing called the lock, lock in the sock, right? | ||
| You take a padlock, you throw it in a sock, and a lot of rough justice goes on like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
White House trade advisor and author Peter Navarro, Sunday night at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | |
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| Scroll through and spend a few minutes on C-SPAN's point of interest. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Next, this week's edition of C-SPAN's Ceasefire, where the shouting ends and the conversation begins. | ||
| Our guests this week are Cornel West and Robert George. | ||
| Welcome to Ceasefire, where we seek to bridge the divide in American politics. | ||
| I'm Dasha Burns, Politico White House Bureau Chief, and joining me now, two guests who have agreed to keep the conversation civil, even when they disagree. | ||
| They're both very good at this. |