Danny Jones Podcast - #62 - The KKK Consultant | Daryl Davis
Aired: 2020-11-24
Duration: 02:25:39


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[00:00:26]  Hello, world.
[00:00:27]  My guest today is such an inspiring human being.
[00:00:30]  Daryl Davis is a musician who plays blues, country, R&B, but his full-time job is actually converting racists.
[00:00:40]  He's converted something around 200 KKK members and even Nazis.
[00:00:46]  He's actually convinced them to leave their ideologies behind and in the process has developed long-term friendships with even top KKK leaders.
[00:00:54]  This man's story is gut-wrenching and his message is so inspiring.
[00:00:59]  Everyone needs to hear this podcast, especially in this country.
[00:01:02]  Please welcome Darrell Davis.
[00:01:13]  All right, Mr. Davis.
[00:01:14]  Call me Daryl.
[00:01:15]  Daryl, how are you doing, sir?
[00:01:16]  I'm hanging in there.
[00:01:17]  I just lost my phone, but hopefully it will turn up.
[00:01:21]  As soon as we finish this, we're going to help you find that thing.
[00:01:23]  I appreciate that.
[00:01:24]  So thank you for being here.
[00:01:26]  I really appreciate that.
[00:01:27]  Well, thank you for your interest in my work.
[00:01:29]  I appreciate being here.
[00:01:30]  The first time I heard your story, I was completely floored by the fact that you personally attended KKK rallies and converted, I think, over 200 members of the KKK.
[00:01:44]  Convince them to leave.
[00:01:45]  Yes, you know, but I prefer to say that they converted themselves.
[00:01:49]  I was the impetus for their conversion.

=== Converting KKK Members (13:57) ===

[00:01:50]  I gave them food for thought and reasons to think and reconsider, you know, where they were heading in their lives.
[00:01:57]  Sorry, I want to interrupt real quick.
[00:01:59]  Do you want water?
[00:01:59]  Sure, I'd agree.
[00:02:00]  Awesome, thank you.
[00:02:00]  I'm going to water.
[00:02:02]  Yeah, so, you know, rather than tell them what to think, tell them how to think and provide them with enough facts and evidence and food for thought that they can come to the conclusion, you know what, I'm heading down the wrong road.
[00:02:17]  It's always stronger that way when somebody makes their own determination to change their path and do something different rather than you try to compel them to do it.
[00:02:28]  Right.
[00:02:30]  So can you explain what was it that piqued your curiosity to start investigating this weird underworld?
[00:02:43]  Okay, well, we've got to go back to my childhood.
[00:02:47]  I'm age 62 right now.
[00:02:49]  So I grew up as a child of parents in the U.S. Foreign Service.
[00:02:53]  So I was an American embassy brat.
[00:02:56]  Starting in 1961, at the age of three, I began traveling.
[00:03:00]  And how it works is you get assigned to a country for two years, and at the end of that assignment, you come back home here to the States, you're here for a little while, and you get reassigned to another country abroad for two years.
[00:03:12]  So back and forth, back and forth.
[00:03:14]  So a lot of my formative years were spent living in foreign countries.
[00:03:19]  and returning here every two years.
[00:03:22]  And so, starting in 1961.
[00:03:26]  So, when I was overseas in school, in elementary school and stuff, my classes were filled with kids from all over the world.
[00:03:35]  My classmates were Nigerian, Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, German, Swedish.
[00:03:41]  Anybody who had an embassy in those countries, all of their kids went to the same school.
[00:03:47]  So, if you were to open the door to my classroom and poke your head in, you would say, well, this looks like a United Nations of little kids.
[00:03:53]  Right.
[00:03:54]  Because that's exactly what it was.
[00:03:56]  However, when I would come back home after my dad's assignment was over, I would either be in all black schools or black and white schools, meaning the still segregated schools or the newly integrated schools.
[00:04:10]  And there was not the amount of diversity in the classroom that I had overseas, or for that matter, that we have today.
[00:04:18]  You know, it was just either all black kids, all white kids, or just black and white kids.
[00:04:24]  Today, of course, you walk into any city school classroom and you see people from all over, but not in the 1960s.
[00:04:33]  So I didn't quite understand this, and it hit me hard, right in the face, literally.
[00:04:45]  When we came back one time in 1968, I was age 10 in the fourth grade, and we were in Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.
[00:04:55]  And I was one of two black children in the entire school, elementary school.
[00:04:59]  Myself in fourth grade, and there was a little black girl in second grade.
[00:05:03]  So I really didn't see much of her, except for like at recess and lunchtime.
[00:05:08]  I didn't play with her.
[00:05:09]  She was a second grader.
[00:05:10]  So all of my friends were like fourth and fifth graders.
[00:05:13]  And many of my guy friends were members of the Cub Scouts.
[00:05:17]  And they invited me to join.
[00:05:18]  So I joined.
[00:05:19]  And it was a good time, good things to do.
[00:05:22]  We had a parade from Lexington to Concord, Massachusetts to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere.
[00:05:29]  I was the only black scout in this parade.
[00:05:32]  The Girl Scouts, the Brownies, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, 4-H Club, whatever other organizations, right?
[00:05:38]  I'm the only black person you can see.
[00:05:40]  My den mother let me carry the American flag.
[00:05:43]  So I'm marching with my troop, you know.
[00:05:45]  People are cheering us on both sides of the sidewalk.
[00:05:48]  Streets are blocked off, yelling the British are coming and all that kind of stuff.
[00:05:51]  Everything was good.
[00:05:53]  We got to this one point in this march route, and suddenly I'm getting hit with bottles and soda pop cans and rocks and just debris from the street.
[00:06:04]  There were like about four or five people over here to my right.
[00:06:08]  And I remember it being a couple of kids, maybe a year or two older than me, and a couple of adults.
[00:06:14]  I assume maybe they're parents.
[00:06:15]  I don't know.
[00:06:16]  I didn't know them.
[00:06:17]  And they're throwing things.
[00:06:19]  And my first thought was, these people over here do not like the scouts.
[00:06:25]  That's how naive I was.
[00:06:27]  It wasn't until my den mother, cub master, and troop leader came running, and they're all white people, came running and huddled over me and escorted me out of this danger.
[00:06:37]  And I kept asking them, well, why are they hitting me?
[00:06:38]  I didn't do anything.
[00:06:39]  I didn't do anything.
[00:06:40]  Why are they hitting me?
[00:06:41]  All they do is go, shh, move along.
[00:06:43]  Hurry, hurry.
[00:06:44]  It'll be okay.
[00:06:45]  So they never answered my question.
[00:06:47]  So when I got, you know, but soon it was over as fast as it happened.
[00:06:51]  Adults were throwing rocks at a tango.
[00:06:54]  Two adults and two or three kids.
[00:06:56]  That's what I recall.
[00:06:59]  And, you know, this is 1968.
[00:07:00]  You know, this is the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
[00:07:03]  So, you know, there was a lot of tension.
[00:07:05]  Yeah.
[00:07:05]  All right.
[00:07:06]  So anyway, we, you know, we continued down the parade route.
[00:07:11]  And when I got home, my mother and father, who were not at the parade, right, they're fixing me up with band-aids and cleaning me up and asking me, how did I fall down and get all scraped up?
[00:07:22]  I told them I didn't fall down.
[00:07:23]  I told them exactly, you know, they thought I had tripped on something.
[00:07:26]  I told them exactly what had happened.
[00:07:28]  And for the first time in my life, my mom and dad sat down, sat me down rather, and explained what racism was.
[00:07:37]  Now, believe this or not, at the age of 10, I had never heard the word racism.
[00:07:44]  I had no reason to.
[00:07:45]  I wasn't experiencing that.
[00:07:47]  I was around people from all over the world.
[00:07:49]  You know, we all got along.
[00:07:51]  Maybe we didn't speak the same language, but we learned how to work together, play together, have slumber parties, all that kind of stuff, you know.
[00:07:58]  This is something totally foreign to me.
[00:08:01]  And when they were telling me why this was happening, my 10-year-old brain could not wrap itself around the idea that someone who had never seen me, who had never spoken to me, who knew nothing about me, would want to hurt me for no other reason than the color of my skin.
[00:08:22]  It just did not compute with me.
[00:08:24]  And the people over here on the sidewalk did not look any different to me.
[00:08:30]  than my friends overseas, whether they were my little French friends, my little Swiss friends, or my fellow Americans from the embassy, or for that matter, my classmates and their parents right there in Belmont, Massachusetts.
[00:08:41]  So it can't be the color of skin.
[00:08:43]  You know, that didn't make any sense because they look just like the people that I'm friends with.
[00:08:49]  So I did not believe my parents.
[00:08:51]  I thought for whatever reason, they were not telling me the truth.
[00:08:55]  There had to be a reason they weren't telling me the truth, but I would find out later on.
[00:08:59]  But they were lying to me for some reason.
[00:09:01]  That was my perception.
[00:09:04]  And a month and a half later, almost two months later, April the 4th, that same year, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
[00:09:14]  And I remember it very clearly.
[00:09:16]  Every single city in this country burned to the ground, just like we saw in this country a few months ago after George Floyd.
[00:09:25]  Right.
[00:09:25]  Right.
[00:09:28]  You know, it was, I'd never seen anything like it.
[00:09:32]  And I was 10 years old, you know.
[00:09:35]  I then realized that this phenomenon that I just learned about, this word called racism, it does exist.
[00:09:43]  My parents had not lied to me, so that was an awakening, you know?
[00:09:47]  So now I accepted that this thing, racism, does exist, but I didn't know why.
[00:09:54]  Why are people racist?
[00:09:56]  So I formed a question on my own, in my own little mind, which was, how can you hate me when you don't even know me?
[00:10:04]  And so now, for the next 52 years, Since then, I'm 62 now, I've been looking for the answer to that question.
[00:10:13]  I've bought books as a teenager on black supremacy, white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, anti Semitism, the Nazis in Germany, the neo Nazis over here.
[00:10:25]  Anybody who felt that their skin color gave them some type of superiority, I want to know about it.
[00:10:31]  Because I knew people were not born with that idea.
[00:10:34]  It came from somewhere.
[00:10:35]  So where did it come from?
[00:10:37]  Where is it going?
[00:10:38]  How can it be addressed?
[00:10:40]  All right.
[00:10:41]  This way of thinking just seemed like so foreign to you.
[00:10:44]  Yeah.
[00:10:44]  I mean, I didn't grow up with it.
[00:10:46]  Right.
[00:10:46]  You know?
[00:10:47]  And so, yeah, it was definitely foreign to me.
[00:10:51]  And I just couldn't get my head around it.
[00:10:53]  Well, none of my books answered the question.
[00:10:56]  They all talked about racism, but they didn't tell me why, why people are like that, right?
[00:11:01]  So then back overseas again, I'm, you know, back to what I call normalcy.
[00:11:08]  You know, people from all over the place, we all got along.
[00:11:12]  So come back over here, and 10th grade, we had a class.
[00:11:18]  I was in Rockville, Maryland, which is about 30 minutes outside of D.C.
[00:11:25]  So we had a class called the POTC, which stood for Problems of the 20th Century.
[00:11:31]  And we had a, it's 1974, and I was a sophomore, but I was taking it as a high school senior.
[00:11:38]  I'm sorry, it was a senior class, but I was taking it as a sophomore, 10th grader.
[00:11:43]  And our teacher, we had a phenomenal teacher.
[00:11:46]  He was always bringing in these controversial type people to address the class and we could ask questions and stuff.
[00:11:52]  Well, on this day, he had the head of the American Nazi Party come to our school.
[00:11:58]  Now, understand, you couldn't even wrap your head around that today, okay?
[00:12:04]  But it's the 1970s.
[00:12:05]  Things were different.
[00:12:06]  Jesus.
[00:12:07]  Yeah.
[00:12:07]  Okay, now, the founder and the original head of the American Nazi Party was a fellow named George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:12:15]  Just by coincidence, I had his daughter as one of my teachers a long time ago.
[00:12:21]  But, you know, she renounced her father.
[00:12:23]  She wanted nothing to do with him.
[00:12:24]  She didn't even let you know that that was her dad, but it was.
[00:12:27]  What would the head of the American Nazi Society say to a group of 10th graders?
[00:12:31]  I'm going to tell you.
[00:12:32]  Well, mostly seniors.
[00:12:34]  But George Lincoln Rockwell, he was the founder and the original head.
[00:12:41]  Vehement anti Semite and racist.
[00:12:44]  He was always getting into it with Martin Luther King.
[00:12:47]  And.
[00:12:49]  He was murdered by one of his own Nazis.
[00:12:51]  They got into an argument on the sidewalk outside his headquarters, and the guy shot him to death right there on the sidewalk.
[00:12:57]  So anyway, his right-hand guy was a guy named Matt Cole, K-O-E-H-L.
[00:13:03]  And Matt Cole and his right-hand guy took over, Martin Kerr.
[00:13:07]  So they came to my school that day.
[00:13:09]  And, you know, they're espousing all these views of white supremacy.
[00:13:14]  And I'm just sitting there listening to him.
[00:13:17]  And I'd never heard an adult talk like this before.
[00:13:20]  And there was another black guy in the class.
[00:13:23]  I mean, there were more blacks in the school, but just two of us in this particular class.
[00:13:26]  And Matt Cole pointed at me and pointed at my friend, and he said, We're going to ship you back to Africa.
[00:13:34]  And then he went like this.
[00:13:35]  And all you Jews out there, you're going back to Israel.
[00:13:39]  Now, I just sat there staring at this guy.
[00:13:42]  He wasn't scaring me, but I was like thinking, who gives this guy the right to make these arrangements for me?
[00:13:53]  And I didn't challenge him because you've got to understand my generation, we were raised to have respect for your elders.
[00:14:00]  Anybody who's older than you is your elder, whether it's the postman, the policeman, your neighbor, the librarian, whatever.
[00:14:07]  If they're older than you, they're your elder, you respect them.
[00:14:09]  You don't have to accept what they say, but you respect them.
[00:14:12]  So I didn't challenge them.
[00:14:13]  I just sat there looking at them.
[00:14:15]  And somebody piped up in my class and said, what happens if they don't go or if they don't want to go?
[00:14:21]  And Matt Cole says they have no choice.
[00:14:23]  If they do not leave voluntarily, they will be exterminated in the upcoming race war.
[00:14:29]  Now, that was the first time I ever heard the term race war.
[00:14:33]  I've heard it a thousand times since then.
[00:14:34]  But that was the first time I ever heard it.
[00:14:36]  I'm thinking to myself, What is this man talking about?
[00:14:38]  Civil War?
[00:14:39]  I mean, that was over 1865, you know?
[00:14:42]  And he went on to say that your uniform, the color of your skin will be your uniform.
[00:14:49]  Jesus.
[00:14:50]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  So then later that day, I was standing beside my locker, and Matt Cole and Martin Kerr were leaving the school.
[00:14:56]  They, you know, they'd hung around for a couple other POTC classes.
[00:14:59]  So they came down the hallway, and I'm standing there.
[00:15:02]  It's just me and those two in the Nazis in the hallway.
[00:15:05]  Right.
[00:15:06]  And they didn't say anything to me, but they paused right in front of me and sneered at me, leered at me.
[00:15:11]  And then they started laughing and they went on past me and on out the door.
[00:15:15]  Right?
[00:15:16]  So I graduated two years later as a senior and I went to Howard University and got my degree in music.
[00:15:22]  You know, music became my profession, but studying race relations on my own became my obsession.
[00:15:28]  And these two guys have propelled me into that to really, you know, dig into it a lot more.
[00:15:33]  What was that feeling like being so young and being like treated like that by two grown-ass adults?
[00:15:41]  It was weird to see them talk like that.
[00:15:45]  And they were like, you know, vehement about it.

=== Facing White House Nazis (03:23) ===

[00:15:48]  Right.
[00:15:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:49]  They were into this belief.
[00:15:54]  I just didn't understand it.
[00:15:55]  And so I even bought more books.
[00:15:57]  And I continued to buy books.
[00:15:59]  So I got this vast library on white supremacy, on black supremacy, all kinds of stuff.
[00:16:04]  And I read them all, but none of the books addressed why people became like that.
[00:16:09]  So I graduated four years later with my degree in music, bachelor's degree in music.
[00:16:17]  But I was always tuning in to all kinds of racial stuff, right?
[00:16:21]  So I found out about an unpublicized demonstration rally that the American Nazi Party was going to have.
[00:16:28]  See, their headquarters was right near me over in Arlington, Virginia.
[00:16:32]  Arlington, Virginia is about 35, 40 minutes from where I live in Maryland.
[00:16:36]  Okay.
[00:16:37]  Just on the other side of the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
[00:16:40]  Okay.
[00:16:41]  Okay.
[00:16:41]  They're going to have an unpublicized rally in front of the White House across the street in Lafayette Park.
[00:16:48]  So if you know anything about Lafayette Park, Anytime you want to protest something, you go to Lafayette Park.
[00:16:55]  There are people there 24-7.
[00:16:57]  They've been there for years.
[00:16:59]  The people, anti-nuke people, the environmental people, anti-abortion people, you name it, they're there.
[00:17:06]  And they're set up in the park facing the White House.
[00:17:09]  So whoever is in the Oval Office for whatever term can look out the window and read their billboards and whatever.
[00:17:14]  Right.
[00:17:14]  Right.
[00:17:14]  Okay.
[00:17:15]  So unpublicized means nobody knows about it except who they tell.
[00:17:19]  I'd managed to find out.
[00:17:21]  How'd you find out?
[00:17:22]  Somebody let me know.
[00:17:23]  Okay.
[00:17:23]  Okay.
[00:17:24]  And so it was going to be a 12 noon, like a 15-minute silent. protest in front of the White House.
[00:17:32]  So now back then you could drive your car up and down the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is where the White House is located.
[00:17:40]  Today you can't do that anymore.
[00:17:41]  Only law enforcement vehicles and pedestrians, you know, you can walk up and down there, but you can't drive because people have tried to ram the gates of the White House, right?
[00:17:51]  So they put up concrete pylons and stuff, you know, that fold down into the street with a remote control so cop cars can come through there.
[00:17:59]  So anyway, That thing you know you could drive there.
[00:18:03]  So I went down there, I parked my car caddy corner to the White House and I waited.
[00:18:07]  And sure enough, right up you know, just before noon, this van comes and about 13, 15 of these guys get out.
[00:18:14]  Now, this is eight years later, 1982.
[00:18:16]  Okay, I saw them in 1974.
[00:18:19]  All right, so they get out.
[00:18:23]  There's Matt Cole and Martin Kerr, the same two dudes, you know, because they're still the head of the party.
[00:18:28]  Right.
[00:18:28]  Right.
[00:18:30]  So they're lining up their little Nazis on the sidewalk.
[00:18:34]  Now, there's nothing that.
[00:18:35]  that indicated that they were Nazis.
[00:18:37]  You wouldn't know it unless you knew in advance, right?
[00:18:40]  They didn't wear Gestapo uniforms or fly swastikas.
[00:18:43]  They're all in dark black suits.
[00:18:46]  And they're standing there like this, facing the White House, right?
[00:18:49]  It's noontime, so it's lunchtime.
[00:18:51]  People are like walking back and forth, you know, not paying any attention because there are other protesters in the park too.
[00:18:57]  But nobody knew who these people were.
[00:18:58]  They're just standing there facing the White House.
[00:19:00]  The White House knew who they were.
[00:19:01]  So anyway, I went for them to get all lined up.
[00:19:05]  I got out of my car.
[00:19:06]  I felt the need to confront Matt Cole.
[00:19:09]  Because when I was 15, I did not confront him.

=== Piano and Klan Rallies (15:38) ===

[00:19:12]  And like I told you, I was a child, he was an adult.
[00:19:16]  He was my elder.
[00:19:17]  So now I needed to confront him.
[00:19:20]  He was still my elder, obviously.
[00:19:22]  But the dynamic had changed.
[00:19:25]  In 1974, it was child to adult.
[00:19:28]  Now it's adult to adult.
[00:19:30]  So I felt the need to confront him.
[00:19:32]  So I walked right up to him.
[00:19:34]  I said, Matt Cole.
[00:19:36]  And he jumped back in the line, like, oh my God, who's this black person?
[00:19:41]  calling my name.
[00:19:42]  And he says, do I know you?
[00:19:44]  And I said, well, you spoke at my high school.
[00:19:47]  And he said, what high school would that be?
[00:19:49]  I said, Thomas Wooten High School.
[00:19:50]  He looked at me and he goes, oh, yes, yes, yes.
[00:19:54]  I remember you.
[00:19:56]  That was a long time ago.
[00:19:57]  What can I do for you?
[00:19:59]  I said, yes, it was eight years ago.
[00:20:01]  He goes, I remember.
[00:20:02]  How can I help you?
[00:20:03]  I said, do you recall what you told me?
[00:20:06]  He nodded.
[00:20:06]  He goes, yes.
[00:20:07]  What can I do for you?
[00:20:08]  I said, well, I'm still here.
[00:20:10]  He said, well, I can see that.
[00:20:12]  How can I help you?
[00:20:13]  I said, well, you can tell me just who the hell gives you the authority to make permanent travel arrangements for me.
[00:20:20]  He says, well, what's your name?
[00:20:21]  I said, Darrell Davis.
[00:20:22]  He put his hand out.
[00:20:23]  He shook my hand.
[00:20:25]  I learned this technique because I would apply it later on to another white supremacist.
[00:20:29]  He took my hand and he held my hand in his hand and he did not let it go.
[00:20:34]  And he started pointing in my face with his other hand like this.
[00:20:37]  And he says, Mr. Davis, you have to understand one thing.
[00:20:41]  It is in the interest. of your race, the black race, to be a strong race.
[00:20:45]  And you cannot be a strong race unless you are a pure race.
[00:20:49]  And you cannot be a pure race if you are miscegenating with other races.
[00:20:53]  He went on and on about that.
[00:20:54]  Then he says, it's in my interest, the Aryan race, which is what he calls the white race, to also be a strong race.
[00:21:01]  And we must be a pure race.
[00:21:03]  We are committing genocide by miscegenating with mud races such as yours.
[00:21:09]  We are becoming a mongrel race.
[00:21:12]  So he calls anybody who's non-Aryan or non-white a mud race.
[00:21:17]  And then that miscegenation causes them to be a mongrel race.
[00:21:21]  So he says, the white race is committing genocide. by miscegenating with mud races, turning them into a mongrel race.
[00:21:28]  So until the races understand that they must remain separate, they cannot coexist together.
[00:21:35]  So he's going on into this stuff that I would hear a thousand times over the years.
[00:21:41]  And you were like 23, early 20s?
[00:21:42]  Yeah, I just graduated.
[00:21:44]  I see, 24, because I graduated in 1980 at the age of 22.
[00:21:48]  Okay, so it's in 1982.
[00:21:50]  Now, was that the gist of the conversation you had with him?
[00:21:54]  Yeah, and a few other things.
[00:21:56]  And he went back to the race war thing.
[00:21:58]  It's called Rahoa, R A H O W A, Rahoa, which stands for Racial Holy War, Rahoa.
[00:22:06]  And that's the white supremacist term for the race war.
[00:22:09]  And they've added a new term now, the boogaloo.
[00:22:11]  Same thing, boogaloo or Rahoa means the race war.
[00:22:14]  So, anyway, we talked about that.
[00:22:17]  And, you know, I thanked him for his time.
[00:22:19]  And I wasn't there to beat him up.
[00:22:21]  Yeah.
[00:22:21]  You have a great voice.
[00:22:22]  I want to make sure they can hear it.
[00:22:23]  Oh, thank you.
[00:22:24]  Yeah, I wasn't there to beat him up.
[00:22:25]  You know, I was just there to try to, you know, Understand, I'm trying to learn from this guy.
[00:22:31]  I'm not buying into it, I'm just trying to learn where this comes from.
[00:22:35]  So I thanked him, shook his hand again, and I left.
[00:22:39]  Well, a few months later, they had a publicized rally.
[00:22:43]  They publicized it like about three months in advance.
[00:22:45]  This is going to be the American Nazi Party recruitment rally, the national recruitment rally.
[00:22:50]  So they have Nazis from all over the country come and gather, right, to recruit.
[00:22:54]  Do you have like swastikas?
[00:22:56]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:57]  Now they have their swastikas.
[00:22:58]  Okay.
[00:22:59]  Because The first one was unpublicized.
[00:23:05]  There were no police there or anything like that.
[00:23:07]  Had it been publicized, protesters would have come and beat the crap out of them.
[00:23:11]  All right.
[00:23:12]  So this one was publicized.
[00:23:15]  Even months in advance, people were like writing letters to the D.C. mayor, you know, don't give them a permit, blah, blah, blah, on and on and on.
[00:23:22]  But, you know, you have to give them a permit.
[00:23:24]  You know, they have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and all that kind of thing, just like anybody else does.
[00:23:30]  They come this time, they got police protection because there were probably about 50 of them.
[00:23:35]  My secretary and I went down there to this thing.
[00:23:38]  You couldn't get close to them.
[00:23:39]  The police had formed a human ring circle around them.
[00:23:43]  All right?
[00:23:44]  And with their shields and their batons like this, there were no less than about 10,000, 10,000 protesters for these like maybe 50 Nazis.
[00:23:53]  And Matt Cole comes with Martin Kerr, and they all are now wearing their Gestapo uniforms, flying swastikas, going Zig Heil, High Hitler, White Power.
[00:24:02]  You know, they're taunting the crowd.
[00:24:05]  So people came with bricks and baseball bats and chains, and they rushed the police, and the police were like pushing them back.
[00:24:13]  So then they began taking their projectiles and throwing them over the heads of the police to land on one of the Nazis, you know, in the circle.
[00:24:22]  And so the police pulled up the tear gas, began tear gassing everybody, and it became mayhem.
[00:24:27]  My secretary and I were just standing there, and the police beat us with their nightsticks.
[00:24:31]  Just for standing there, it became hysterical.
[00:24:33]  I mean, it got out of control.
[00:24:35]  I said, come on, let's get out of here.
[00:24:37]  So we left.
[00:24:38]  And back then, you only had NBC, CBS, and ABC.
[00:24:42]  There was no cable.
[00:24:44]  And we were watching the news.
[00:24:47]  Now, people are like turning over police cars, bashing out the windows, kicking out the lights, setting buildings on fire, the whole nine yards.
[00:24:55]  So we're watching our local NBC affiliate for the news.
[00:25:00]  And there's Matt Cole in the studio.
[00:25:03]  Yeah, and he's saying, and they're showing footage of all the mayhem.
[00:25:07]  You know, we even saw ourselves walking by.
[00:25:09]  And he goes, you see, you see, it's the blacks and the Jews who are denying us our right to freedom of assembly, denying us our right to freedom of speech.
[00:25:18]  You don't see any Nazis turning over police cars and setting fires to the blacks and the Jews.
[00:25:23]  This country is run by ZOG.
[00:25:25]  Z-O-G, ZOG.
[00:25:26]  What does that stand for?
[00:25:27]  It's an acronym for Zionist Occupied Government.
[00:25:31]  That's their big word.
[00:25:34]  So it means everything is run by the Jews.
[00:25:36]  So they blame the Jews for everything.
[00:25:39]  And black people are the pawns of the Jews.
[00:25:41]  Because black people are not as smart as the Jews in their minds.
[00:25:46]  We're dangerous, but we're not as smart as the Jews, so they're more dangerous.
[00:25:50]  So they call it ZOG.
[00:25:52]  Okay, so anyway, I'm listening to him and I realize this guy is pretty smart.
[00:26:01]  He's shrewd.
[00:26:02]  He's smart.
[00:26:03]  Because I couldn't figure out why on earth would he have his national recruitment rally in Washington, D.C. Washington, you know, Washington, D.C. is two-thirds black.
[00:26:16]  The nickname for Washington, D.C. is Chocolate City.
[00:26:19]  Okay?
[00:26:20]  Washington, D.C. is two-thirds black.
[00:26:22]  There are no black people in D.C. that want to be recruited into the Nazi Party?
[00:26:26]  You want publicity?
[00:26:28]  Huh?
[00:26:28]  Well, I'll tell you, and certainly, you know, there are no Jews in D.C. or anywhere else that want to join the American Nazi Party.
[00:26:34]  So why would he do it there?
[00:26:37]  I got it.
[00:26:38]  Because he knew this would happen.
[00:26:40]  He knew this would happen.
[00:26:43]  And it would further his cause.
[00:26:44]  He would have official news footage of blacks and Jews wreaking havoc, turning over police cars, bashing out stuff, destroying the city.
[00:26:54]  He would take that NBC, CBS, ABC news footage.
[00:26:58]  go out to the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Montana, you know, Washington State, Oregon, right?
[00:27:05]  And say, look, you see what's going on in our nation's capital?
[00:27:07]  The blacks and the Jews are taking over.
[00:27:09]  Zog is taking over our country.
[00:27:11]  Come join us.
[00:27:11]  We're going to take our country back.
[00:27:14]  And that works.
[00:27:15]  They see that and they come and join.
[00:27:17]  It's a recruitment tool.
[00:27:18]  All right.
[00:27:19]  Because, you know, if nobody rioted, it wouldn't do any good.
[00:27:21]  Right.
[00:27:22]  Okay.
[00:27:22]  So that brought the news cameras out.
[00:27:24]  Exactly.
[00:27:25]  Exactly.
[00:27:26]  So that was that.
[00:27:28]  Then country music.
[00:27:32]  had made a resurgence in our country.
[00:27:35]  Country music had gone away for a little while, or gone underground, wasn't as popular, but now it came back.
[00:27:41]  There was a movie called Urban Cowboy with John Travolta and this mechanical bull and all these country line dances, Cotton Eye Joe and all this other stuff, two-step stuff.
[00:27:52]  So it was a major hit.
[00:27:55]  And so all the bars that were playing top footy and disco, whatever else was popular at the time, switched over the format to country.
[00:28:03]  And so a lot of bands began playing country.
[00:28:05]  So, you know, if you wanted to work full-time, you played country.
[00:28:08]  So I'm a full-time musician.
[00:28:09]  I want to work.
[00:28:11]  So I joined a country band.
[00:28:13]  And I was the only black guy in the band and usually one of the few black guys who would be in the clubs, you know, where we would play.
[00:28:20]  You play piano or keyboard?
[00:28:22]  Piano, yeah.
[00:28:24]  And the band was established in the area.
[00:28:27]  They'd been around for a while.
[00:28:30]  I, you know, I'd met them recently and I joined.
[00:28:33]  And so we played at a place called the Silver Dollar Lounge.
[00:28:36]  Which is in a town called Frederick, Maryland, which is about an hour outside of D.C.
[00:28:41]  And the Silver Dollar Lounge was an all-white bar, not meaning that black people or anybody else couldn't go in, but black people were not welcome there, so they did not go in.
[00:28:54]  And it's not a good idea to go somewhere when you're not welcome and alcohol is being served.
[00:28:59]  It's not a good combination.
[00:29:01]  So here I was in the Silver Dollar Lounge with this band.
[00:29:04]  Now, they'd played there before.
[00:29:06]  I'd never been there.
[00:29:07]  So we came off the bandstand after the first set.
[00:29:11]  and to take a break.
[00:29:12]  And I'm walking to go sit at the band table.
[00:29:15]  And I felt some guy from behind put his arm around my shoulder.
[00:29:19]  Now, I don't know anybody in this joint, right?
[00:29:21]  And I see the whole band up ahead of me.
[00:29:23]  So who was this person touching me?
[00:29:24]  I turn around to see.
[00:29:26]  It's a white guy, you know, a little bit older than me.
[00:29:28]  Well, a good, I'd say maybe 15 years older than me.
[00:29:33]  And he says, man, I sure enjoy your all's music.
[00:29:35]  I said, thank you.
[00:29:36]  I shook his hand.
[00:29:36]  I said, I appreciate that.
[00:29:38]  And he pointed at the stage and he says, I've seen this here band before, but I ain't never seen you.
[00:29:43]  Where'd you come from?
[00:29:44]  And I explained, I just joined the band, but yes, he probably did see them because they told me they played here before.
[00:29:49]  And it was an all-white band.
[00:29:51]  And he says, well, man, I sure like your piano playing.
[00:29:54]  This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.
[00:29:58]  And I wasn't offended, but I was rather surprised that this guy, being as old as he was, did not know the origin of Jerry Lee Lewis' style of piano playing.
[00:30:12]  And I wasn't trying to be facetious, but I said, well, where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play?
[00:30:17]  He says, what are you talking about?
[00:30:19]  I said, Jerry Lee learned it from the same place I did, from black blues and boogie-woogie piano players.
[00:30:24]  That's where rockabilly and rock and roll came from.
[00:30:26]  Right.
[00:30:27]  Oh, no, no, no.
[00:30:28]  Jerry Lee invented that.
[00:30:28]  I ain't never seen no black man play like that.
[00:30:30]  He invented it.
[00:30:31]  Yeah, he invented it.
[00:30:32]  Right, exactly.
[00:30:33]  And so I assured the guy, you know, this wasn't the case.
[00:30:36]  I said, look, man, I said, I know Jerry Lee Lewis.
[00:30:39]  Jerry Lee is a good friend of mine.
[00:30:40]  I said, he's told me himself where he learned how to play.
[00:30:43]  Guy didn't believe I knew Jerry Lee.
[00:30:44]  He didn't believe Jerry Lee learned anything from black people.
[00:30:47]  But he was fascinated enough with me.
[00:30:49]  that he wanted to buy me a drink, want me to go back to his table.
[00:30:51]  Now, I don't drink alcohol, but I went back to his table.
[00:30:54]  I ordered a cranberry juice.
[00:30:55]  He pays the waitress.
[00:30:56]  He takes his glass, and he clinks my glass and cheers me.
[00:31:00]  And then he says, you know, this is the first time I ever sat down and had a drink with a black man.
[00:31:06]  And now I'm like totally mystified because, I mean, again, I was not offended, but I'm just curious because that was not my world.
[00:31:14]  You know, in my world, at that point in my life, I had sat down literally. with thousands of white people or anybody else and had a meal, a beverage, a conversation.
[00:31:28]  How is it this guy who's older than me, has been around longer than I have, had never sat down with a black guy before?
[00:31:34]  So now I'm genuinely curious.
[00:31:37]  And I said, why?
[00:31:39]  He looked at me, then he looked down at the tabletop.
[00:31:42]  I asked him again.
[00:31:42]  I said, why?
[00:31:43]  He's still looking at the tabletop.
[00:31:45]  His buddy said, tell him, tell him, tell him.
[00:31:48]  Elbowed him, right?
[00:31:49]  I said, tell me, because now I'm really curious.
[00:31:51]  And he says, I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:31:55]  I burst out laughing.
[00:31:57]  I just busted out laughing.
[00:31:59]  And because I thought the guy was joking, you know, I have every book on the Klan, as I told you.
[00:32:06]  I've read them all.
[00:32:08]  And none of my books talk about how a Klansman will come up and embrace a black guy and want to hang out and buy him a drink.
[00:32:13]  It doesn't work that way.
[00:32:14]  Right.
[00:32:14]  So, you know, this guy, there's no way this guy's in the Klan.
[00:32:17]  While I'm laughing, he goes inside his pocket, pulls out his wallet, and flips through it and hands me his Klan membership card.
[00:32:25]  I instantly recognize the Klan insignia, which is a red circle with a white cross.
[00:32:30]  and a red blood drop in the center of the cross.
[00:32:33]  And I realized, oh, this thing is for real.
[00:32:35]  And I stopped laughing because it wasn't funny then.
[00:32:38]  And I gave it back to him.
[00:32:39]  And we talked about the Klan and some other things.
[00:32:42]  Really?
[00:32:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:43]  And, you know, he was very friendly, very friendly.
[00:32:47]  And so he gave me his phone number and he wanted me to call him whenever I was to return to this bar, the Silver Dollar Lounge, with this band because he wanted to bring his friends, meaning Klansmen and Klanswomen, to come see the black guy who plays piano like Jerry Lee.
[00:33:05]  I was a novelty to him.
[00:33:07]  Doesn't that freak you out when he says something like that?
[00:33:09]  Like this Klan guy wants to bring all of his friends to watch people.
[00:33:12]  Doesn't that make you be like, uh, maybe I don't want to talk to this guy?
[00:33:16]  No.
[00:33:19]  When he first showed me the card, I was a little stunned.
[00:33:23]  Like, you know, what the hell am I doing sitting here at the table with a Klansman?
[00:33:27]  But he was so friendly.
[00:33:29]  And this was your first time meeting an actual Klansman?
[00:33:31]  No.
[00:33:32]  My first time meeting a Klansman, I beat him up.
[00:33:34]  What?
[00:33:35]  Yeah, I beat him up.
[00:33:35]  But I'll tell you that story in a minute.
[00:33:37]  Okay.
[00:33:39]  So this guy was, like, super friendly.
[00:33:42]  And, you know, so it I didn't have any fear of him, in other words.
[00:33:49]  Right.
[00:33:49]  Okay, so I said, okay, I'll call you.
[00:33:51]  And we were on like a rotation with other bands.
[00:33:53]  Every six weeks, we would appear there Friday and Saturday, the weekend.
[00:33:58]  And I'd call him like on a Wednesday or Thursday and say, hey, man, we're going to be down at Silver Dollar.
[00:34:02]  Come on out.
[00:34:02]  He'd come both nights, Friday and Saturday.
[00:34:04]  He'd bring different Klan people.
[00:34:07]  And they'd, you know, watch, they'd gather around near the bandstand and watch me play.
[00:34:11]  And then they'd get out there and dance.
[00:34:14]  And on the break, you know, I'd always stop by his table, say hello to him.
[00:34:18]  And some of these Klansmen and Klanswomen, would hang there.
[00:34:21]  You know they were curious, you know they wanted to meet me and so I talked to them, but others would see me coming on the break and then i'd get up and scoot across the room.
[00:34:29]  You know it was like.
[00:34:29]  You know they didn't want anything to do with me, just to just to watch me.
[00:34:32]  But they didn't want to interact with me, right?
[00:34:34]  So you know it's okay.
[00:34:35]  So this went on until about until the end of that year, and then uh, I quit the band and I went back to playing rock and roll and other genres of music and uh, you know, i'd moved away from the from the country scene.

=== Robin Hood Banished (03:26) ===

[00:34:50]  So I really had no reason to stay in contact with him.
[00:34:53]  I lost touch with the guy And much, much later, it dawned on me, Daryl, you blew it, man.
[00:35:02]  The answer to your question that's been plaguing you since age 10, how can you hate me when you don't even know me, the answer fell right into your lap and you didn't even realize it.
[00:35:14]  Who better to ask that question of than someone who would go so far as to join an organization that has over a hundred-year history of practicing hating people?
[00:35:26]  that don't look like them and who don't believe as they believe.
[00:35:30]  Get back in touch with that guy and get him to fix you up with the Klan leader for the state of Maryland.
[00:35:35]  Start there.
[00:35:36]  Interview that guy, you know, and then go up north, go down south, go to the Midwest, go to the West and interview different Klan leaders and different members and find out the answer to those questions and write a book.
[00:35:47]  There have been no books written by black authors on the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of sitting down face to face with them and interviewing them.
[00:35:55]  Wow.
[00:35:55]  There have been two books written by black authors dealing with the Klan, but each one detailed.
[00:36:00]  how he escaped a lynching, one in the 1930s and one in the 1940s, but not from talking with their would-be lynchers, right?
[00:36:08]  So fortunately, I still had that guy's number.
[00:36:13]  I found it.
[00:36:14]  I called it.
[00:36:14]  It had been disconnected.
[00:36:15]  It took me two weeks to track him down.
[00:36:17]  Turns out he had moved, and he didn't have a phone, but he had an address.
[00:36:23]  So I said, okay, I'm going to go pay him a visit.
[00:36:25]  But I had no way of letting him know I'm coming over because he didn't have a phone.
[00:36:30]  So I stopped by this apartment where I was told he lived one evening.
[00:36:35]  Knocked on the door.
[00:36:36]  He opens the door.
[00:36:37]  He said, Daryl, what are you doing here, man?
[00:36:40]  He like steps out into the hallway.
[00:36:42]  He like looks up and down the hallway to see if I brought anybody with me.
[00:36:45]  Well, when he stepped out of his apartment, I stepped into it.
[00:36:48]  So he turns around, he comes back in, he goes, what's going on, man?
[00:36:51]  Are you still playing?
[00:36:52]  What's going on?
[00:36:53]  I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm still playing.
[00:36:54]  I said, but I need to talk to you about the Klan.
[00:36:58]  He says, the Klan?
[00:36:58]  I said, yeah, you're a member, right?
[00:37:00]  He goes, well, I was.
[00:37:02]  And then he went into this long dissertation, which is pretty funny, too, as to why he had quit the Klan.
[00:37:09]  And what actually happened was he'd gotten banished.
[00:37:13]  He got kicked out.
[00:37:14]  Banished?
[00:37:15]  Yeah, they called it a banishment.
[00:37:17]  Yeah.
[00:37:18]  So he'd been banished from the clan.
[00:37:19]  How'd he get kicked out?
[00:37:21]  I'll tell you that in a second, too.
[00:37:22]  It's pretty funny.
[00:37:23]  But he said that he quit because he came to find out that they didn't believe in the true Christian things that he believes in.
[00:37:33]  But actually, he got banished.
[00:37:35]  So I said, well, where's all your clan stuff?
[00:37:39]  He says, what do you mean my clan stuff, my Robin Hood?
[00:37:41]  I said, yeah.
[00:37:42]  He goes, well, they came and got it.
[00:37:43]  I said, what do you mean they came and got it?
[00:37:45]  Don't you own your Robin Hood?
[00:37:47]  And then he explains to me, which I later found out to be true, that when you join the clan, if you can afford it right then and there, you can pay for everything outright.
[00:37:56]  Your Robin Hood, your manual, your Constitution handbook, all that kind of stuff.
[00:38:03]  And it's yours to keep forever.
[00:38:06]  If you cannot afford it, you can still take everything, the Robin Hood and all that, and the book.
[00:38:11]  But you put extra money in every time you pay your dues until you pay off the things.

=== The Grand Nighthawk (14:41) ===

[00:38:16]  Got it.
[00:38:17]  Okay.
[00:38:17]  So he had not paid off his robe and hood.
[00:38:20]  So they came and repossessed it.
[00:38:23]  But he could not find the mask that attaches to the hood.
[00:38:27]  You know, the hood is the pointy thing.
[00:38:28]  And there's this mask that hangs down with eye holes in it.
[00:38:31]  So if they want to cover their faces so you don't know who they are, they wear the mask.
[00:38:35]  Otherwise, they unsnap the mask, pull it off.
[00:38:38]  Some people feel like ballsy enough to just not wear the disguise.
[00:38:41]  They just let people know who they are.
[00:38:42]  But some people are like yeah, some people have they want to be anonymous.
[00:38:46]  Well, they want to be anonymous because they have important jobs and their job were to find out they were you know, they belong to some subversive group They probably get fired.
[00:38:53]  Oh, yeah school teacher, you know things like that One one lady that I know worked for the phone company, you know, so she would definitely get fired.
[00:39:02]  Oh, yeah, yeah, so anyway and they work in the at the MVA, you know with some work of the Safeway supermarket whatever but anyway So he could not find the mask when they came to get it And he has since found it.
[00:39:17]  He needed to return it.
[00:39:18]  I said, well, let me see it.
[00:39:20]  So he went down the hall to his room or somewhere, and he returned with this mask and hands it to me.
[00:39:25]  So I'm looking at this thing.
[00:39:27]  And I said, do you know Roger Kelly?
[00:39:29]  Yeah, I know Roger.
[00:39:30]  Roger was my grand dragon.
[00:39:32]  Grand dragon means state leader.
[00:39:34]  Anybody grand is state level.
[00:39:37]  Okay.
[00:39:37]  Dragon being the top.
[00:39:39]  A grand dragon would be our equivalent of a governor.
[00:39:42]  Okay.
[00:39:43]  A grand caliph would be like a lieutenant governor.
[00:39:47]  All right, so anybody prefixed with the word grand means they're on the state level.
[00:39:53]  Dragon being the highest.
[00:39:54]  All right, and then a national leader is known as an imperial wizard.
[00:40:00]  We would call that a president.
[00:40:02]  All right, so anybody imperial is on the national level.
[00:40:06]  Imperial wizard would be the top president.
[00:40:08]  Imperial clayliff would be like a vice president.
[00:40:10]  Who came up with these goofy things?
[00:40:11]  Well, they got that from your original clansmen when it was first formed had been with the Scottish Rite, the Masons.
[00:40:22]  So the Masons had these grand poobahs and all this other kind of stuff.
[00:40:26]  Not the exact same names, but they do have the grand so-and-so and the exalted so-and-so and all these secret names.
[00:40:33]  So they borrowed that from that.
[00:40:35]  Not to say that all Masons are clansmen because they're not.
[00:40:38]  They're not.
[00:40:38]  They're not.
[00:40:39]  No, no, no.
[00:40:41]  But they appropriated.
[00:40:44]  that idea of secrecy and weird mystic names.
[00:40:49]  Okay.
[00:40:50]  Okay.
[00:40:50]  So anyway, Imperial is national.
[00:40:54]  Grand is state level.
[00:40:56]  State, okay.
[00:40:56]  Okay.
[00:40:57]  Great is county level.
[00:40:59]  A great titan would be the county executive.
[00:41:02]  Is that like where you start?
[00:41:03]  You start county level and you work your way up?
[00:41:05]  No, no, no.
[00:41:05]  You start as rank and file.
[00:41:07]  Just plain white robe.
[00:41:09]  Okay.
[00:41:10]  Just a regular member.
[00:41:12]  All right.
[00:41:12]  And then, so you got Imperial, Grand, Great.
[00:41:17]  And then exalted and then regular level.
[00:41:20]  Okay, exalted is just like a district leader, like a mayor, a councilman, something like that.
[00:41:24]  How long does it take before you reach like grand or imperial level?
[00:41:29]  You got to be voted in, voted in.
[00:41:31]  You know if you run for for that, for that position okay or or, or you're one of your higher ups appoints you, okay.
[00:41:39]  So Roger Kelly was the grand dragon for Maryland.
[00:41:42]  He would later go on to become an imperial wizard.
[00:41:44]  All right anyway, he says yeah, I know, Roger Roger was my grand dragon.
[00:41:49]  I said, listen man, I need you to hook me up with Mr. Kelly.
[00:41:53]  I'm going to write a book on the Klan, and I want to interview him.
[00:41:56]  Oh, Darryl, I can't do that, man.
[00:41:57]  I said, why not?
[00:41:58]  You're not in the Klan anymore.
[00:41:59]  He goes, I can't bring a black man to see the Grand Dragon.
[00:42:02]  You know, we'd both be in trouble.
[00:42:04]  I said, but you're not in the Klan anymore.
[00:42:05]  He goes, it doesn't matter.
[00:42:07]  He did not want to do it.
[00:42:09]  I begged and pleaded with him to give me Roger Kelly's address.
[00:42:14]  I said, look, you said that you've got to return this mask.
[00:42:17]  He said, yeah.
[00:42:18]  I said, give me his address and phone number.
[00:42:20]  I'll go to his house.
[00:42:21]  I'll return it for you.
[00:42:22]  He snatched that thing right out of my hand.
[00:42:24]  He said, no way.
[00:42:25]  I mean, he was dead serious.
[00:42:27]  And so I said, well, look, just give me his address.
[00:42:30]  I will meet with him on my own.
[00:42:32]  He didn't want to do that.
[00:42:34]  Finally, after 20 minutes of begging and pleading, he consented to giving me Mr. Kelly's personal information, provided I not tell Mr. Kelly where I got it from.
[00:42:44]  I said, okay.
[00:42:45]  So then he told me about this bar up in Thurmont, Maryland.
[00:42:49]  Now, you know Thurmont, Maryland because it's the home of Camp David, the presidential retreat.
[00:42:54]  It was also one of the headquarters for the Klan.
[00:42:56]  It's just a little tiny town right outside of Frederick.
[00:42:59]  And it's still in Frederick County.
[00:43:02]  And anyway.
[00:43:05]  It's the national headquarters?
[00:43:08]  No, it was the Maryland headquarters for that faction.
[00:43:12]  And so anyway, he says, you know, there's a bar there.
[00:43:18]  It's a Klan bar.
[00:43:19]  Not meaning that the Klan owns it, but they hang out there.
[00:43:21]  And they gather there every Saturday night unless they're out of town rallying somewhere or something like that.
[00:43:27]  They'll be there.
[00:43:27]  He says, you know, when you first walk in, now the Klan doesn't own it.
[00:43:30]  You just hang out there.
[00:43:31]  He describes it to me.
[00:43:33]  When you first walk in, there'll be a row of booths off to the left.
[00:43:37]  The first two booths closest to the door where you come in are reserved for the Klan, right?
[00:43:44]  He says, you know, you'll probably find Roger Kelly there on a Saturday night.
[00:43:46]  He says, I don't guarantee you that he'll talk to you, but you're safer to approach him in a public place because anybody can go in a public place rather than try to go on his property.
[00:43:57]  I said, all right.
[00:43:58]  So he drew me a little map how to get there.
[00:44:00]  Now, I'm a full-time musician, so I can't be giving up a Saturday night to go chase the Klan around.
[00:44:06]  And so my secretary books my band.
[00:44:09]  And so I asked her, I figured, you know, well, Sunday's still part of the weekend.
[00:44:12]  You know, I knew I had some gigs on some Sundays, but some Sundays I had off.
[00:44:16]  I asked her, you know, what Sundays do I have off?
[00:44:18]  She named me a few.
[00:44:19]  I picked one.
[00:44:20]  I said, okay, I'm going to go find Roger Kelly.
[00:44:22]  Maybe he'll be there on a Sunday as well.
[00:44:24]  So she wants to go.
[00:44:25]  Now, Mary is white.
[00:44:27]  I said, no.
[00:44:29]  That's all I need, right?
[00:44:30]  Walk into a clan bar.
[00:44:31]  Black guy walks into a clan bar with a white lady.
[00:44:34]  You're sure to find the clan.
[00:44:35]  You're not asking for trouble, yeah.
[00:44:36]  Right, exactly.
[00:44:37]  So I said, no, you know, not for your safety, not for mine either.
[00:44:41]  But she insisted upon going.
[00:44:43]  So I said, all right, but you know, you're coming at your own risk.
[00:44:46]  I said, all right.
[00:44:47]  So we found that Sunday.
[00:44:49]  She and I drive up there to Thermont.
[00:44:51]  And the guy gave me perfect directions.
[00:44:53]  Boom, boom, boom, boom.
[00:44:54]  There it was.
[00:44:55]  So we're like right across the street from it.
[00:44:57]  We're looking at it.
[00:44:57]  There are like four or five little steps onto the stoop.
[00:45:00]  And then you go through the door.
[00:45:03]  So I said, okay, you know, I'm trying to think, how am I going to walk in this place?
[00:45:09]  It's on a Sunday with this white lady.
[00:45:13]  You know, we need a plan.
[00:45:16]  So I said, okay, let's get out.
[00:45:19]  I'm going to walk in first.
[00:45:20]  I want you to walk in right behind me.
[00:45:23]  If I turn around and face you, start running and I'll be behind you.
[00:45:28]  And she says, okay.
[00:45:30]  So we got out, locked the car, we walked right in.
[00:45:33]  As soon as I walked in, all I saw on the back wall was this big Confederate flag.
[00:45:39]  Off to my right was this long wooden bar and a long mirror behind the bar.
[00:45:45]  And scotch taped to the mirror was an article from the Washington Post, which is our big paper around there, with a picture of Roger Kelly.
[00:45:53]  You know, I never met him, but, you know, I knew what he looked like.
[00:45:55]  I've seen him on TV and I've seen him in the papers because I collect all that stuff.
[00:45:58]  Right.
[00:45:58]  So the Washington Post had interviewed him about something and somebody had cut it out and put it up there.
[00:46:04]  And I had the same article.
[00:46:06]  So I knew I was in the right place or the wrong place, depending on how you want to look at it.
[00:46:10]  And then over here were the booths.
[00:46:13]  And there are those first two booths.
[00:46:15]  You know, the guy told me were reserved for the Klan and then other booths behind them.
[00:46:19]  And nobody was in any of the booths.
[00:46:22]  You know, and there may be no more, I would say, six or seven people in the whole place, including the bartender.
[00:46:28]  A couple guys in the back playing pool, a couple guys just milling around, some guys sitting at the bar.
[00:46:33]  And so, you know, I didn't know if anybody there was Klan or not Klan.
[00:46:38]  You know, they're all white.
[00:46:39]  But that does not mean that they're all a Klan because Thermont is an all-white town, but not every white person there is in the Klan.
[00:46:47]  In fact, most white people in Thermont wanted the Klan out of there.
[00:46:49]  You know, they didn't like the Klan.
[00:46:51]  Right.
[00:46:52]  So anyway, I knew what Roger Kelly looked like.
[00:46:56]  So I'm like, you know, I'm looking at each person in there.
[00:46:58]  No, that's not him.
[00:46:58]  That's not him.
[00:46:59]  That's not him.
[00:47:00]  He wasn't there.
[00:47:02]  So, but I figured, okay, well, you know, we drove all the way up here to Thurmont.
[00:47:06]  I don't want to leave empty-handed.
[00:47:07]  You know, I want to talk to some Klansmen, and maybe they can tell us how to get a hold of Roger.
[00:47:12]  I mean, I had Roger's address and phone number, but, you know, I wanted to meet him that night.
[00:47:17]  So I said to Mary, I said, come on, let's go over here and sit one of these first two booths.
[00:47:22]  Because if the Klan is in here, they'll come to us to get us out of their booth, right?
[00:47:26]  Right.
[00:47:26]  So she's like, all right, so we go in, we sit in the booth.
[00:47:29]  Nobody bothered us.
[00:47:30]  Everything was cool.
[00:47:31]  Nobody said a word.
[00:47:32]  We stayed there for a little while.
[00:47:33]  We migrated over to the bar, sat there.
[00:47:35]  I chatted with the guy sitting next to me, like I was lost looking for the highway.
[00:47:39]  He gave me directions, very polite, and we left.
[00:47:42]  So I did not accomplish what I set out to do that night.
[00:47:45]  Mary was working out of my house.
[00:47:47]  So she came down the next morning, Monday morning.
[00:47:50]  I said, here, here's Roger Kelly's phone number.
[00:47:52]  You give him a call.
[00:47:54]  and tell him that you're working for a man who's writing a book on the Klan.
[00:48:00]  Would he consent to sitting down and giving your boss an interview?
[00:48:04]  However, do not tell Mr. Kelly that I'm black.
[00:48:08]  If he asks, go ahead and tell him.
[00:48:10]  Don't lie to him.
[00:48:11]  I said, but don't allude to it.
[00:48:12]  Don't give him reason to ask.
[00:48:14]  The reason why I didn't want him to know, see, I could have called him myself.
[00:48:18]  I'm the one who had the phone number.
[00:48:20]  But I did not want him to pick up in my voice that I'm black.
[00:48:23]  I said, I'm not talking to you.
[00:48:24]  Click.
[00:48:26]  And my whole project would have ended before it ever got started.
[00:48:29]  But I knew that if she called, he would know by her voice that this is a white lady.
[00:48:35]  And I know the mentality well enough to know that he would not automatically think this white woman is working for a black man, especially a black man who's writing a book on the Klan, because they did not exist.
[00:48:47]  My book would become the first.
[00:48:49]  All right, so she called him, and another reason was this.
[00:48:53]  Even if he knew I was black and agreed to do the interview, he might have different answers prepared in the interim for a black interviewer than he would have for a white interviewer asking the same question.
[00:49:04]  So I wanted to make sure it was spontaneous, very candid.
[00:49:07]  So she got it, she called him, and she got a hold of him, and he agreed to do the interview.
[00:49:12]  He didn't ask what color I was or nothing.
[00:49:15]  So we set it up.
[00:49:16]  In fact, he invited us over to his house, and then something came up that day we had to reschedule.
[00:49:20]  So I said, look, let's just set it up for the motel above the Silver Dollar Lounge.
[00:49:24]  You know, that would be on neutral territory.
[00:49:26]  She said, all right.
[00:49:28]  So we rescheduled, and Mary and I got to the hotel several hours early, because oftentimes they will send out scouts to check out the place.
[00:49:38]  And check out who they're meeting with, and then word gets back to the uh, grand dragon or the Imperial Wizard or whoever you know.
[00:49:46]  I don't want anybody to know that I was black and was he, he was, at that point a grand dragon.
[00:49:51]  A grand dragon, okay.
[00:49:54]  So got this super early.
[00:49:57]  I had Mary go in and get the room.
[00:49:59]  I stayed out of the lobby and then um, I would just call the hotel from across the parking lot, from the payphone over there, find out what room i'm in from her, and then um, I just go through the outside, up the stairs to the room.
[00:50:13]  So we did that, and I gave her some money, and I sent her down the hall to get Soda Pop out of the machine and put it in the ice bucket, fill it with ice, get it cold.
[00:50:23]  I wanted to be hospitable when Mr. Kelly arrived, offer him an ice cold beverage.
[00:50:28]  I had no idea what this man was going to do.
[00:50:29]  Would he come in the room?
[00:50:31]  Would he look at me and say, no, I'm not talking to you, and walk away?
[00:50:34]  Or would he attack me or whatever?
[00:50:36]  In any event, I was going to be hospitable and say, you know, would you care for a cold beverage?
[00:50:41]  So she set it on the dresser.
[00:50:44]  And the way the room happened to be, if you're standing in the hallway right there by the door looking into the room, you cannot see who's in the room.
[00:50:54]  You have to walk into the room, turn to your right, and go around the corner, and the room is like laid out back there.
[00:51:00]  As soon as you walk in the door, there's a wall right there, and the bathroom right here.
[00:51:05]  So you go around the wall, and then you see the room.
[00:51:09]  It just happens to be how it was designed.
[00:51:12]  So I took advantage of that.
[00:51:13]  I took the little lamp table.
[00:51:15]  Took the lamp off and put it over here in the far corner of the room.
[00:51:19]  Lamp table no bigger than that thing.
[00:51:22]  Okay?
[00:51:22]  Right.
[00:51:23]  And, you know, they don't have big tables in hotel rooms, right?
[00:51:25]  Just like that.
[00:51:25]  Yeah.
[00:51:26]  I put a chair on one side and a chair on the other side, one for me, one for him.
[00:51:31]  And I'm in the most obscure corner of the room, so you don't see me until you come halfway into my room.
[00:51:37]  And I had a black canvas bag by my chair, which I had a cassette recorder.
[00:51:43]  I put it in the middle of the table, all in hopes that he would come in the room.
[00:51:47]  And he would allow me to record our interview.
[00:51:50]  And I also had some blank cassettes, and I had a copy of the Bible, because the Ku Klux Klan claims to be a Christian organization.
[00:51:59]  They claim that the Bible preaches racial separation.
[00:52:02]  Now, in my reading of the Bible, I've never seen that in there.
[00:52:05]  So I wanted to be able to, you know, pull out my Bible and say, here, Mr. Kelly, please, show me chapter and verse where it says blacks and whites must be separate.
[00:52:14]  So I'm all prepared, right?
[00:52:16]  Right on time, 5.15 was the time.
[00:52:19]  Mary hops up and runs around the corner to open the door.
[00:52:22]  I'm seated at my table where you can't see me until you come in the room.
[00:52:26]  She opens the door, and in walks the Grand Nighthawk.
[00:52:30]  Nighthawk means bodyguard, security.
[00:52:32]  So a grand Nighthawk.
[00:52:34]  I'll teach you all the names.
[00:52:36]  So a grand Nighthawk is the bodyguard to the grand dragon.
[00:52:40]  An imperial Nighthawk would be the bodyguard to the imperial wizard.
[00:52:42]  Okay.
[00:52:43]  So in walks this grand Nighthawk.
[00:52:45]  He's wearing military camouflage with that Ku Klux Klan patch right here, that red circle, white cross, blood drop.
[00:52:52]  Over here are the letters KKK.
[00:52:54]  And embroidered on his barrette, it said Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

=== Eyes Speaking Loudly (07:51) ===

[00:52:57]  And he has a semi automatic handgun in his holster right here.
[00:53:01]  He comes in.
[00:53:02]  And Mr. Kelly is walking directly behind him in a dark blue suit and tie and carrying a briefcase.
[00:53:10]  Well, the Nighthawk turned the corner and saw me and just froze, stopped dead in his tracks.
[00:53:16]  And Mr. Kelly did not realize that his guy had stopped short and slammed into his back and knocked him forward.
[00:53:22]  So now they both are stumbling around, trying to regain their balance.
[00:53:26]  And they're like looking all around the room, in the bathroom, you know.
[00:53:30]  And I'm just sitting there at the table, like, you know, looking at them.
[00:53:32]  They think they're being set up.
[00:53:33]  Yeah.
[00:53:34]  I, you know, I could read their faces.
[00:53:35]  You know, they were thinking.
[00:53:37]  You know, did we misunderstand the room number from the desk clerk or is this an ambush?
[00:53:42]  You know, and so I realized that apprehension So I stood up and I displayed my palms You know in order to say I don't have anything on me, you know and I walked forward.
[00:53:51]  I said hi, Mr. Kelly.
[00:53:52]  I'm Darrell Davis and he shook my hand and the Nighthawk shook my hand I said come on in please come on in They came in I said have a seat, Mr. Kelly and he sat down and the Nighthawk stood at attention to his right and Before I could sit down Mr. Kelly says Mr. Davis, do you have any form of identification?
[00:54:11]  I said, sure.
[00:54:13]  Gave him my driver's license.
[00:54:15]  He goes, oh, you live on such and such street in Silver Spring.
[00:54:20]  Well, now that had me concerned.
[00:54:21]  Why is he looking at my street address?
[00:54:24]  Is he going to come burn a cross on my lawn or what?
[00:54:26]  All he needs to do is look at my picture, look at my name, match it up to me, and give me back my license.
[00:54:31]  Here he is reciting my street, right?
[00:54:34]  I wasn't quite sure how to handle that because that had unnerved me a little bit.
[00:54:39]  He was trying to threaten you or something.
[00:54:41]  Well, I didn't know.
[00:54:42]  Why is he calling off my street?
[00:54:45]  And so I said to him, I said, yes, Mr. Kelly.
[00:54:47]  I said, that is where I live.
[00:54:49]  I said, and you live at?
[00:54:51]  And I named his house number and his street.
[00:54:53]  That way he knew that I knew where he lived too.
[00:54:56]  So I'm leveling the playing field.
[00:54:57]  If you come visit me, I'm going to come visit you.
[00:55:00]  So he smiled.
[00:55:01]  He nodded his head like he understood.
[00:55:04]  Now, I did not find out that day.
[00:55:06]  It was many, many months later that I had been presumptuous.
[00:55:10]  I had no reason to fear Mr. Kelly coming to my house.
[00:55:13]  What it was, was one of his members.
[00:55:16]  I didn't even know this at the time.
[00:55:18]  One of his members lived right down the road from me.
[00:55:20]  And Mr. Kelly would have to travel down my street because my street goes through my neighborhood and goes two neighborhoods over where this other guy lived.
[00:55:29]  So Mr. Kelly recognized my street.
[00:55:31]  That's all.
[00:55:32]  So it's a long street that runs down there.
[00:55:33]  Wow.
[00:55:34]  So he lives like an hour and a half from me.
[00:55:36]  Mr. Kelly does.
[00:55:38]  But he has members all around, you know.
[00:55:39]  Is he still alive?
[00:55:41]  Mr. Kelly?
[00:55:41]  Yeah.
[00:55:42]  Yeah.
[00:55:42]  Oh, okay.
[00:55:42]  Yeah.
[00:55:43]  So anyway, he recognized the street name.
[00:55:47]  Now today, that same member is in a federal prison.
[00:55:50]  He is there for a long time for committing a hate crime.
[00:55:54]  So that would happen later.
[00:55:56]  Anyway, we got on with this interview.
[00:55:59]  And, you know, he would make statements that were biblical or whatever.
[00:56:06]  You know, when he did, I'd reach down and pull out my Bible to make him prove it.
[00:56:11]  And if my cassette ran out of tape, I'd reach down and get a fresh cassette.
[00:56:15]  Every time I reached like this, the Nighthawk reached like this.
[00:56:20]  But that's his job.
[00:56:21]  You know, he has no idea what's in my bag.
[00:56:23]  You know, he doesn't know me.
[00:56:23]  I'm the enemy.
[00:56:25]  And so so every time you reach down and grab a cassette out of your bag, he's reaching up, he'd reach up for his gun.
[00:56:30]  Yeah, now he never pulled it, but he put his hand on the butt of the gun, okay?
[00:56:35]  Right?
[00:56:35]  So he's doing his job.
[00:56:36]  I mean, that's his job to protect his boss.
[00:56:38]  He doesn't know me, he has no idea what's in my bag.
[00:56:41]  Well, after a while or so, he realized you know there was nothing threatening in the bag and he relaxed.
[00:56:46]  Okay, and I went in and out of the bag, he didn't move.
[00:56:48]  All right, a little over an hour into this interview, um, we were just talking like you and I are right now, and out of nowhere.
[00:56:58]  This random noise happened.
[00:57:01]  It was very short but very fast.
[00:57:02]  I got that was it.
[00:57:04]  That was it.
[00:57:05]  And you know, I flew out of my chair and I hit the table and we all jumped.
[00:57:14]  But it happened so fast and was so short that my ear could not discern what it was, you know.
[00:57:22]  But I knew that mr Kelly had made the noise.
[00:57:25]  And how did I know that?
[00:57:26]  Because I didn't make it, so process of elimination, if I didn't do it, he had to have done it right right.
[00:57:32]  And because I couldn't figure out what it was, I perceived it to be an ominous, threatening noise.
[00:57:39]  And understand the tension.
[00:57:41]  I'm a black guy.
[00:57:42]  He's the head of the Klan.
[00:57:44]  And we're sitting here in this room.
[00:57:45]  I've already been told by some former Klansman he would kill me, not to fool with him.
[00:57:50]  So I'm on high alert.
[00:57:52]  And now he's making some weird noise for no reason.
[00:57:57]  So I feared for my life.
[00:57:59]  I had gone into what you call survival mode.
[00:58:02]  And when you go into survival mode, People will generally do one of four things.
[00:58:07]  Some people, they will just pass out.
[00:58:09]  They'll faint because the fear is so great their brain cannot process it and just shuts down.
[00:58:15]  They pass out, right?
[00:58:17]  It's like somebody saw a ghost and they faint.
[00:58:20]  They can't process that.
[00:58:23]  Another thing people will do is their muscles will tighten up and they'll constrict and they can't move.
[00:58:28]  They're like this.
[00:58:30]  You ever seen anybody get into a fight and they curl up into a fetal ball and people can be hitting them and kicking them and they're not even deflecting the blows.
[00:58:37]  They're like this.
[00:58:39]  because their muscles have become paralyzed.
[00:58:41]  That's called paralysis by fear.
[00:58:44]  They just constrict.
[00:58:46]  I don't do that either.
[00:58:47]  The third thing that people will have an option to do is to run away, which is the best option.
[00:58:54]  It's the option that I would have taken had it been available.
[00:58:57]  As quickly as you can, separate yourself from the source of the fear.
[00:59:03]  Run away.
[00:59:05]  Or put as much distance between yourself and the fear as you can as quickly as you can.
[00:59:10]  That was not an option for me because how am I going to outrun a bullet in a motel room?
[00:59:15]  I'm not armed.
[00:59:17]  Mary is not armed.
[00:59:18]  The only person who I know for sure is armed is the Nighthawk.
[00:59:22]  I can see his gun on his hip.
[00:59:24]  I did not know if Mr. Kelly had a weapon up under his suit jacket or not.
[00:59:28]  So the next option you have is to do a preemptive strike.
[00:59:32]  Get them before they get you.
[00:59:34]  And that's what I was about to do.
[00:59:35]  When I came out of my chair, I was going to dive across the table, grab the Nighthawk, grab Mr. Kelly, and slam them down to the ground and take away the Nighthawk's gun to immobilize.
[00:59:45]  Well, I didn't want to die that day.
[00:59:47]  You know, you're in survival mode.
[00:59:51]  You would do whatever you have to do to survive.
[00:59:54]  And it's my job to protect me and protect my secretary, like Mr. Nighthawk's job to protect himself and his boss.
[01:00:02]  So I was going to immobilize the situation.
[01:00:06]  But when I hit the table, I was looking right into Mr. Kelly's eyes.
[01:00:10]  And I didn't say a word to him, but my eyes were speaking loud and clear.
[01:00:14]  My eyes were saying to him, and I knew he could read my eyes, were saying to him, what did you just do?
[01:00:21]  But the thing was, his eyes had fixated on mine and I could read his eyes too, and his eyes were saying to me, what did you just do?
[01:00:30]  And the night hawk, he's standing there like this, looking back and forth between both of us, like what did either one of y'all just do, right so?
[01:00:39]  So Mary was sitting to my left on top of the dresser because there were no more chairs, and she realized what had happened and she began explaining it.

=== Education Cures Hatred (07:01) ===

[01:00:49]  When it happened again, the ice in the ice bucket had begun melting and the cans of soda were shifting down the ice.
[01:00:57]  Oh my god, that was it.
[01:01:00]  How ridiculous is that?
[01:01:01]  Somebody almost got shot over a damn ice cube.
[01:01:04]  Seriously, that's how crazy it was.
[01:01:07]  It's all right.
[01:01:07]  Tension was that thick in that room the whole time, even after an hour of talking.
[01:01:12]  Yeah, and because because of that random noise okay, but this is, but there was a lesson learned here.
[01:01:18]  Well, i'll put it this way, it wasn't learned at that moment.
[01:01:20]  It was taught at that moment.
[01:01:22]  Be learned later okay um, But you know, we all began laughing when she began explaining it.
[01:01:31]  Right.
[01:01:31]  And we were laughing at how ignorant we all had been, which in a sense made us all human beings.
[01:01:39]  Yeah, he's in the Klan, I'm a black guy, but we're human beings.
[01:01:43]  We're laughing at the same stupidity and same ignorance that we all experience.
[01:01:47]  We all experience fear.
[01:01:49]  We all experience that ignorance, you know, and we all experience laughter all in the same moments, right?
[01:01:56]  So, you know, we humanize one another in that sense.
[01:02:00]  So the lesson taught is this.
[01:02:03]  Ignorance breeds fear.
[01:02:07]  All right?
[01:02:08]  All because some foreign, and underscore, highlight, circle the word foreign, entity of which we were ignorant, that being the bucket of ice, cans of soda, had entered into our little comfort zone via the noise that it made, we became fearful of each other.
[01:02:29]  Okay?
[01:02:29]  We knew the bucket was over there, but we'd long forgotten about it.
[01:02:31]  Right.
[01:02:32]  So, you know, we were ignorant to it.
[01:02:34]  And it made its presence known by making some weird noise that we didn't understand.
[01:02:39]  So ignorance breeds fear.
[01:02:42]  We fear those things we don't understand.
[01:02:45]  And we didn't understand what that noise was.
[01:02:47]  So we feared it.
[01:02:49]  If you don't keep that fear in check, that fear will escalate and breed hatred because we hate the things that frighten us.
[01:02:59]  If you don't keep that hatred in check, that will escalate into anger and then breed destruction.
[01:03:05]  We want to destroy the things that we get angry about and hate.
[01:03:09]  And why do we hate them?
[01:03:10]  Because they frighten us.
[01:03:11]  But guess what?
[01:03:12]  At the end of the day, they may have been harmless and we were just ignorant.
[01:03:16]  So ignorance breeds fear.
[01:03:18]  Fear breeds hatred.
[01:03:19]  Hatred breeds destruction.
[01:03:21]  And we saw the whole chain almost unravel to completion, the last component being destruction.
[01:03:28]  It stopped just short of that.
[01:03:29]  You know, had the Nighthawk pulled out his gun and shot somebody, namely me or my secretary, doing his job, or had I pounced across the table, and hurt one of them doing my job.
[01:03:41]  However, you did see exactly, exactly what I'm talking about.
[01:03:47]  The whole chain unraveled to full completion three years ago on August 12th, 2017, in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, two hours from where I live, where they had that major white supremacist rally.
[01:04:02]  Right.
[01:04:03]  I know all those people.
[01:04:04]  I know the guy who put on that rally.
[01:04:06]  Really?
[01:04:06]  Yeah, I know them all.
[01:04:08]  I know all the people who spoke there.
[01:04:10]  I just had dinner with one of the guys the other night in Detroit.
[01:04:13]  Anyway, I'll get to that.
[01:04:17]  On that day, August 12th, 2017.
[01:04:21]  There was a lot of ignorance in Charlottesville.
[01:04:25]  There was a lot of fear in Charlottesville.
[01:04:28]  There was a lot of hatred in Charlottesville.
[01:04:31]  And what did it culminate in?
[01:04:33]  It culminated in destruction when a white supremacist got inside his vehicle and tried to deliberately murder as many counter-protesters as he could by driving his car full force into the crowd.
[01:04:47]  He succeeded in injuring 20 people and murdering one young lady named Heather Heyer.
[01:04:54]  Ignorance breeds fear, breeds hatred, breeds destruction.
[01:04:59]  So if we want to fix this problem of racism, individual type racism, we fix the system other ways, different ways to do it.
[01:05:10]  But people are trying to address it the wrong way.
[01:05:14]  They're trying to do a top-down approach, which works in a corporate structure or departmental, like say a police department or a company, something like that, where you have management at the top.
[01:05:26]  and the subordinates down on the floor or out on the street at the bottom.
[01:05:30]  Say like a police department.
[01:05:31]  You have, you know, your lieutenants, your captains, you know, your colonels or whatever chiefs up top, right?
[01:05:37]  And then the officers out on the street.
[01:05:40]  Or if it's a company, you have the upper echelon and the people who work the floors.
[01:05:45]  Right.
[01:05:45]  Okay.
[01:05:46]  If the top level is tight, everybody down below is going to be tight.
[01:05:52]  If the top level is loose and screwing up up there, they're going to be loose and screwing up down below.
[01:05:56]  All right, so you tighten up the top it trickles down people tighten up down below you act stupid up there They're gonna be stupid down here, too Okay, that works like I said in a corporation in a department But when you're dealing with something like racism with individuals and things like that It's got to be bottoms up.
[01:06:14]  We've been addressing it the wrong way Forget about the top level forget about destruction That's just a symptom of the racism Forget about the next level down hatred.
[01:06:28]  That's another symptom Anger, another symptom.
[01:06:32]  Next level down, fear.
[01:06:35]  A symptom, forget about it.
[01:06:37]  Don't waste your time trying to address that.
[01:06:39]  Go to the bottom.
[01:06:41]  What's at the bottom?
[01:06:42]  Ignorance.
[01:06:43]  Ignorance is the root cause.
[01:06:46]  If you cure the ignorance, then there's nothing to fear.
[01:06:51]  We fear that of which we are ignorant.
[01:06:53]  We fear what we don't know.
[01:06:55]  We don't fear what we do know.
[01:06:57]  So if we cure the ignorance, then there's nothing to fear.
[01:07:00]  With nothing to fear, there's nothing to hate.
[01:07:04]  With nothing to hate, there's nothing to get angry about and nothing to destroy.
[01:07:08]  So let's fix the ignorance.
[01:07:10]  And the good thing is there is a cure for ignorance.
[01:07:14]  That cure is called education and exposure.
[01:07:18]  When you educate somebody as to what they don't know, then they do know.
[01:07:23]  You expose them to things that they don't know, and now they do know.
[01:07:27]  And they're no longer ignorant, therefore they don't fear that thing anymore.
[01:07:31]  So we should focus our energy on the root cause.
[01:07:35]  Like, you know, if you have cancer in your bone, you can't rub a topical cream on top of your skin and think it's going to cure the cancer.
[01:07:43]  You've got to hit that thing with radiation or chemo right down to the bone, you know, instead of put a band-aid on top and think it's going to fix it now.

=== Ignorance Breeds Violence (15:42) ===

[01:07:51]  Right, right.
[01:07:52]  So forget the symptoms, go to the root cause.
[01:07:55]  And that's where we falter.
[01:07:57]  You know, we spend way too much time in this country talking about the other person.
[01:08:03]  or talking at the other person or talking past the other person.
[01:08:07]  Why don't we sit down and talk with the other person?
[01:08:11]  That's how things change.
[01:08:13]  Now, I've been doing this for 37 years.
[01:08:15]  It will be 37 years next year in 2021, so 36 years now.
[01:08:20]  And I can tell you, this is what works.
[01:08:22]  This is how it happens.
[01:08:24]  Because I've heard time and time and time again from people who have renounced that ideology and given me their robes and hoods, including Roger Kelly and different other people.
[01:08:33]  After he became an Imperial wizard, he was there for a while, and then he changed, and he renounced it.
[01:08:41]  Like, when I asked him in the beginning, how can you hate black people?
[01:08:49]  You don't even know them, you know?
[01:08:50]  Right.
[01:08:51]  Well, Mr. Davis, black people are criminals.
[01:08:54]  Y'all are prone to crime, and that is evidenced by the fact that there are more black people in prison than white people.
[01:09:01]  Well, what he is saying is true.
[01:09:04]  There are more black people in prison than white people.
[01:09:06]  So that is true.
[01:09:08]  But it's a half-truth because he's not taking into consideration the imbalance in our judicial system and also the fact that there are plenty of poor white people and poor black people in prison who could not afford legal, proper legal, adequate legal representation.
[01:09:27]  And so they take a plea deal to something they didn't even do, and now they're stuck in prison for a bunch of years.
[01:09:32]  Right?
[01:09:33]  Right.
[01:09:33]  So one's perspective is one's reality.
[01:09:37]  So if you see more black people in prison than you see white people, that your perspective is, oh, there must be more black crime than white crime, that kind of thing.
[01:09:48]  Then he goes on to tell me that black people are inherently lazy.
[01:09:54]  We don't want to work.
[01:09:56]  We prefer to scam the government welfare system and try to get all the free handouts we can because we simply don't want to work.
[01:10:02]  We're lazy.
[01:10:04]  And then he says that black people are born with a smaller brain than white people.
[01:10:11]  The larger the brain, the more capacity. for intelligence.
[01:10:15]  So black people have very low IQ because we can't help it because we're born with a smaller brain.
[01:10:22]  And that is evidenced by the fact that year after year, black students consistently score lower than white students on the SATs.
[01:10:32]  Again, this is true.
[01:10:34]  All right, this is true.
[01:10:36]  But again, it's a half-truth because he's not taking into consideration the facts behind this.
[01:10:44]  Where do most black kids go to school?
[01:10:47]  Most black kids go to school in the inner city.
[01:10:50]  The inner city school system is not as good as the suburban school system.
[01:10:56]  That's a fact, all right?
[01:10:58]  And I can tell you something.
[01:10:59]  That's also a fact.
[01:11:01]  Black kids who go to school in the suburbs score just as high, if not higher, than many white kids on the SATs.
[01:11:10]  And white kids who go to school in the inner city score just as low, if not lower, than some black kids there.
[01:11:17]  It has nothing to do with brain size or color of skin.
[01:11:21]  It has to do with the quality.
[01:11:22]  Of the educational system.
[01:11:24]  But he's not.
[01:11:25]  He's not looking at that.
[01:11:27]  He sees the scores.
[01:11:30]  Oh well, you know, black kids are just dumber than white kids.
[01:11:32]  That's his perspective, and one's perspective is one's reality.
[01:11:37]  He's picking, he's almost like he's just like picking the facts like that are convenient just to support what he already believes precisely and it's not real.
[01:11:47]  But it's his perspective, so therefore it becomes his reality.
[01:11:52]  You cannot change somebody's reality.
[01:11:54]  What you can do is you can give them information so that they change their perspective.
[01:11:59]  When they change their perspective, then their reality changes.
[01:12:03]  All right?
[01:12:03]  So.
[01:12:04]  Paradigm shift.
[01:12:05]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:12:07]  So now here's how it works.
[01:12:10]  This is what I'm telling you that I've heard time and time again, well, from these people when they renounce.
[01:12:16]  Like when they first walk into the room and see me or encounter me, wherever, their wall goes right up.
[01:12:23]  I am the enemy.
[01:12:25]  I am inferior to them and they want to radiate hate towards me.
[01:12:30]  That's what makes them a supremacist because I'm inferior.
[01:12:34]  So they're going to be on the offense.
[01:12:39]  And is what that guy telling me that I'm a criminal and that I'm lazy and my brain is small so I'm dumb, is that offensive?
[01:12:50]  Of course it's offensive.
[01:12:52]  Am I offended by it?
[01:12:54]  Absolutely not.
[01:12:55]  Most people would be offended by that, but I'm not offended by it.
[01:12:59]  Not because it's true.
[01:13:00]  The reason why I'm not offended by it is because it's not true.
[01:13:04]  Why should I be offended by a lie?
[01:13:06]  This guy doesn't know me.
[01:13:07]  He only met me five, 10 minutes ago, and he's telling me, based on the color of my skin, that I'm dumb and that I'm prone to crime and that I'm lazy.
[01:13:16]  Now, if my parents told me that, I might have some concerns because they brought me into this world.
[01:13:20]  They know me better than anybody else.
[01:13:22]  Daryl, you're kind of dumb.
[01:13:26]  Okay, well, maybe I am, right?
[01:13:28]  but not some guy who just met me 10 minutes ago.
[01:13:31]  So don't let your emotions get in front of you.
[01:13:35]  All right?
[01:13:35]  They don't know you.
[01:13:36]  So why believe them?
[01:13:38]  Don't be offended by a lie.
[01:13:40]  All right?
[01:13:41]  So what I did was I threw them off their game.
[01:13:43]  Their wall is up.
[01:13:45]  And normally, when you tell somebody all this vitriol, they're going to start pushing back.
[01:13:54]  Right?
[01:13:54]  Because they're not going to put up with that.
[01:13:56]  Because they're offended now.
[01:13:58]  Their emotions have gotten in front of them.
[01:14:01]  These people are used to that.
[01:14:02]  They're used to offending people.
[01:14:03]  That's why they're in the Klan.
[01:14:06]  But you're not used to being offended.
[01:14:08]  So they are the experts at this.
[01:14:11]  And so don't let them push your buttons.
[01:14:17]  Sit back.
[01:14:18]  Now, here's something that I've learned.
[01:14:21]  As a kid, I told you I traveled a lot.
[01:14:24]  As an adult, I travel a lot, performing or giving lectures around the world.
[01:14:29]  When you combine my childhood travels with my adult travels, To this date, I've been in a total of 57 different countries on six continents.
[01:14:39]  Wow.
[01:14:39]  I've been exposed to a multitude of cultures, colors of skin, religions, beliefs, you name it, I've seen a lot of them.
[01:14:49]  All right?
[01:14:50]  And when I come back home and I think about the people I've met, the places I've gone, the things I've seen, I conclude one thing.
[01:15:01]  No matter how far I go or how close I go, whether I go right next door to Canada or this side to Mexico or whether I go to the other side of the earth, when I get back home, I conclude one thing.
[01:15:15]  Everybody I've seen, no matter how different, what language they speak, who they worship or whatnot, we all are human beings.
[01:15:23]  And as such, we all want the same basic five things.
[01:15:29]  We want to be loved.
[01:15:31]  We want to be respected.
[01:15:33]  We want to be heard.
[01:15:35]  We want to be treated fairly.
[01:15:37]  We want the same things for our family as anybody else wants for their family.
[01:15:41]  As long as we understand that and keep those five core values there and apply them wherever we go, we can navigate any society.
[01:15:51]  The Klan is just another society to me.
[01:15:54]  They want the same things I want.
[01:15:56]  you know, for their family.
[01:15:58]  They want to be heard.
[01:15:59]  They want to be respected.
[01:16:00]  They want to be treated fairly, all this kind of stuff.
[01:16:03]  So if I apply those things, I can get along.
[01:16:07]  We may not agree on certain things, obviously.
[01:16:10]  I don't respect what they say.
[01:16:13]  I will never respect what they say.
[01:16:15]  But I will respect their right to say it because we do have the right to freedom of speech.
[01:16:21]  So I give them that.
[01:16:23]  People want to be heard.
[01:16:24]  I'm allowing him to be heard.
[01:16:25]  He's telling me I'm a criminal and I'm lazy.
[01:16:28]  I'm on welfare.
[01:16:29]  and my brain is small, I'm allowing him to be heard, let him be heard.
[01:16:33]  So what I'm doing is I'm not pushing back, but I'm not kissing his butt either.
[01:16:39]  I'm just giving him that respect.
[01:16:42]  I'm lowering that wall.
[01:16:45]  That wall is coming down because normally within 45 seconds, somebody's going to be pushing back on them.
[01:16:50]  What do you think that is about you that makes you able to have the conversation with somebody who's blatantly insulting you?
[01:17:00]  and to be able to keep that sense of calmness and maintain a civil conversation and discourse.
[01:17:09]  Because I view racism as a disease.
[01:17:12]  It's a disease of the mind.
[01:17:17]  And we can't always fault somebody if they're sick.
[01:17:20]  There's no way in hell this guy has seen as much as I've seen.
[01:17:24]  He hasn't been to 57 countries.
[01:17:27]  He hasn't even been to 50 cities.
[01:17:30]  He hasn't probably even been 50 miles from where he lives.
[01:17:33]  You know, he lives in a bubble.
[01:17:35]  That's a really good point.
[01:17:36]  Yeah.
[01:17:37]  That's a really good point.
[01:17:38]  I try to understand that.
[01:17:42]  He's wrong, you know, but I try to bring him what I've seen vicariously and realize he's not had the same exposure that I have.
[01:17:53]  One of my favorite quotes of all time is by Mark Twain, and it's called the Travel Quote.
[01:18:00]  And Mark Twain said, Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.
[01:18:05]  And many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
[01:18:08]  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
[01:18:17]  That is so true.
[01:18:19]  You know, had I grown up here in this country my whole life, would I be doing this work today?
[01:18:23]  Probably not.
[01:18:24]  I'd probably stay as far away from those people as I could.
[01:18:27]  But because I've seen things, I've been around different people, I got along with different people from all over the world, I know it can work.
[01:18:34]  He doesn't know that because he hasn't had that experience.
[01:18:38]  Again, one's perspective is one's reality.
[01:18:41]  You know?
[01:18:41]  Right.
[01:18:42]  Okay, so.
[01:18:43]  Real quick, before you veer off, I'm interested to know, you came so far from meeting this man and having the conversation in the hotel room from the point where you mentioned that the first time you met a Klans member, you said you beat him up.
[01:19:01]  Can you tell that story?
[01:19:03]  Yeah, let me just finish this one real quick.
[01:19:05]  Okay, so I'm lowering the wall by allowing him to be heard.
[01:19:11]  Get it all out.
[01:19:13]  I'm showing him that respect.
[01:19:15]  Of listening to him.
[01:19:16]  I'm treating him fairly.
[01:19:17]  You know, it's your turn to talk.
[01:19:18]  Go ahead.
[01:19:19]  You know, he's insulting me and whatever else that wall is coming down.
[01:19:25]  Now that he has exhausted all his vitriol and I've listened to him and I've shown him that respect, he feels compelled to reciprocate and allow me to present my platform.
[01:19:37]  You know, what I have to say.
[01:19:39]  Now it's my turn to talk.
[01:19:42]  I could go on the offense and attack him for attacking me.
[01:19:46]  and I would be well within my right to do so, I could say, no, you're the one who's a criminal.
[01:19:52]  You're the one who's hanging black men from trees and bombing black churches and dragging black men behind pickup trucks and so forth and so on.
[01:19:59]  I could attack him because everything I just said is true.
[01:20:02]  All of those things have happened with the Klan, right?
[01:20:05]  So I would be right to say that.
[01:20:07]  But if I attack him like that, the wall go right back up.
[01:20:11]  I want to keep the wall down so I can plant a seed.
[01:20:15]  When the wall is up, you can't plant a seed.
[01:20:17]  The seed hits the wall and falls back on your side.
[01:20:20]  When the wall is down, you can plant a seed over the wall into his turf.
[01:20:24]  All right?
[01:20:25]  So now the wall is down.
[01:20:26]  Rather than go on the offense, I go on the defense.
[01:20:32]  And my defense is an offense in a way.
[01:20:36]  I'm subtly planting the seed.
[01:20:38]  Instead of attacking him, I say, you know, I hear what you're saying.
[01:20:43]  However, I don't have a criminal record.
[01:20:47]  Nobody in my family has a criminal record.
[01:20:50]  I've never been on welfare.
[01:20:52]  Nobody in my family has ever been on welfare.
[01:20:55]  As far as brain size goes, I've never measured my brain, but I'm sure it's the same size as anybody else's.
[01:21:02]  And as far as SATs go, my SAT scores were high enough to get me into college.
[01:21:08]  I have a bachelor's degree.
[01:21:10]  Both my mother and father had master's degrees.
[01:21:14]  My dad was working on his PhD before he passed.
[01:21:17]  So I'm saying all this defending myself, but I'm letting him know that.
[01:21:23]  We have education.
[01:21:25]  We're not on welfare.
[01:21:26]  We don't have any criminal record, right?
[01:21:28]  I could throw it in his face because I know he barely made it out of high school, all right?
[01:21:34]  But if I throw that in his face, knowing that I have more intelligence in my little finger than he and his whole clan put together, that would just cause the wall to go back up.
[01:21:43]  So here's what happens.
[01:21:45]  When the wall is down, he hears.
[01:21:48]  When the wall is up, it's like this.
[01:21:50]  He doesn't hear anything you say.
[01:21:51]  So he's heard me.
[01:21:53]  He goes home.
[01:21:55]  And he reflects upon what transpired that day.
[01:21:59]  Damn, you know, I had a conversation with a black guy for three hours.
[01:22:02]  You know, and we didn't come to blows.
[01:22:04]  That's never happened before.
[01:22:07]  And what that Daryl guy said about such and such, it makes sense.
[01:22:10]  But he's black.
[01:22:12]  But what he said was true.
[01:22:13]  But he's black.
[01:22:14]  So he's having a cognitive dissonance.
[01:22:16]  You know, he knows what I said to be true, either because he researched it and found out that it was true, or he already knew it to be true.
[01:22:23]  But he does not want to accept the fact that the truth came from a black source.
[01:22:27]  That just does not compute.
[01:22:29]  Right in his world.
[01:22:30]  Okay, but so he struggles back and forth.
[01:22:33]  So he's left with this dilemma.
[01:22:35]  Do I disregard that guy's skin color and believe the truth because I know it's true and change my direction?
[01:22:43]  Or do I consider his skin color and know he's telling me the truth but go on living a lie?
[01:22:48]  That's his dilemma.
[01:22:50]  So in most cases, these people will opt for the truth.
[01:22:53]  But there are times, though, and people who will never change.
[01:22:59]  They will go to their grave being hateful, violent, and racist.
[01:23:03]  All right?
[01:23:05]  I've met some of those people, too.
[01:23:06]  But anybody who even has those feelings, if they're willing to sit down and have a conversation with you, there is an opportunity to plant that seed.
[01:23:14]  But you've got to do it the right way.
[01:23:15]  You can't attack, attack, attack.
[01:23:17]  You do a subtle attack by defending and then let him reflect on what you've done, what you've said in your defense.
[01:23:25]  And then that makes him think.
[01:23:26]  Because he hears that.
[01:23:28]  When you're attacking him, he's not hearing it.
[01:23:30]  The wall is up.
[01:23:31]  He's blocking it out.

=== Police Encounter Details (08:09) ===

[01:23:33]  So back to the first class when I met.
[01:23:37]  I played a gig and I'd gone to this all-night.
[01:23:41]  A truck stop restaurant and 24 hours.
[01:23:45]  And it was like 2 o'clock in the morning, 1 30, 2 o'clock in the morning.
[01:23:48]  As I pulled my car into the parking lot, this guy was sitting on top of this woman.
[01:23:55]  She was lying on her back.
[01:23:57]  He was straddled across her.
[01:23:59]  He was banging her head into the sidewalk and punching her in the face.
[01:24:04]  And there were several other guys standing there watching, watching, not doing anything but watching, right?
[01:24:12]  And i'm pulling in the park.
[01:24:13]  I'm seeing this.
[01:24:14]  I'm like what the hell?
[01:24:16]  I got out of my car when I slammed my door.
[01:24:19]  It got the guy's attention.
[01:24:21]  He like looks up, you know, I had no idea who he was, what he was, anything like that.
[01:24:26]  And um, i'm looking at him, i'm going to walk over there.
[01:24:29]  He goes.
[01:24:29]  What you want a piece of me?
[01:24:32]  Well, that was to me.
[01:24:33]  That was open invitation.
[01:24:33]  Oh my god.
[01:24:35]  I said yeah.
[01:24:36]  So he got up and he came at me and I I beat the crap out of him.
[01:24:40]  I beat him up pretty bad.
[01:24:41]  Now, How do you know he was a Klansman?
[01:24:44]  I didn't know that at the time, but it wouldn't have mattered to me anyway.
[01:24:46]  Right.
[01:24:46]  Okay, so then these idiots that are standing around watching him beat up this woman, then they go and call the police.
[01:24:55]  They don't call the police when he's beating up some lady, but then when some black guy beats the crap out of him, they go call the police.
[01:25:01]  Right?
[01:25:01]  So these two cops show up, and they're talking to him, and something was very strange.
[01:25:09]  I could not put my finger on it at the time, but something just did not add up right.
[01:25:14]  And I wanted him arrested.
[01:25:16]  Now, I didn't get hurt.
[01:25:16]  He got hurt.
[01:25:18]  And I wanted him arrested, but they would not arrest him.
[01:25:21]  They told him to vacate the premises, and if he came back within 24 hours, they would have to arrest him for trespassing.
[01:25:28]  Right?
[01:25:29]  So I made sure that I got his information from the police.
[01:25:33]  They had to give it to me before they let him go.
[01:25:36]  Right.
[01:25:37]  So I got his information, and I went inside the restaurant.
[01:25:40]  I got some ice, held it to this lady's head, took care of her.
[01:25:43]  I said, listen, you know, if you want me to go to court with you, I'll be happy to go to court with you.
[01:25:47]  She said, okay.
[01:25:48]  And she said, you know, she would testify on my behalf as well that, you know, he had attacked me or whatever.
[01:25:53]  I said, okay.
[01:25:53]  So we exchanged phone numbers.
[01:25:55]  All right.
[01:25:55]  So then it turns out she was his ex-fiancé.
[01:26:00]  And she had dumped him because he was seeing somebody else and he'd gotten some other girl pregnant or whatever.
[01:26:05]  And so he was upset because he still wanted her as well.
[01:26:09]  He wanted his cake and eat it too.
[01:26:11]  So it was like, if I can't have you, nobody will.
[01:26:14]  Bam, That kind of thing.
[01:26:16]  Goddamn.
[01:26:17]  Okay.
[01:26:17]  Yeah.
[01:26:18]  So.
[01:26:19]  He left the premises, right?
[01:26:21]  I'm taking care of her head.
[01:26:23]  And then I said, you know what?
[01:26:24]  I'm going to go down.
[01:26:25]  Since these cops would not arrest him, I'm going to go swear out a warrant for him and a complaint.
[01:26:33]  So I said, you okay?
[01:26:34]  You know, you're going to be okay?
[01:26:35]  She said, yeah.
[01:26:36]  So I left.
[01:26:37]  I went down to the police station.
[01:26:39]  And I'm filling out this complaint to have him arrested, a warrant.
[01:26:44]  I'm sitting there with the commissioner.
[01:26:47]  I'm just about finished.
[01:26:49]  And I said, how long before this guy will be served?
[01:26:53]  He said, oh, probably about three days.
[01:26:55]  You know, I'll sign off on it.
[01:26:57]  Send it down to the sheriff's department, and one of the deputies will serve him probably two or three days.
[01:27:01]  I said, okay.
[01:27:03]  And then right about then, in walks the guy that I beat up.
[01:27:07]  In walks him in handcuffs.
[01:27:09]  He's cuffed behind his back.
[01:27:10]  This time, when the cops first came, it was two Frederick County cops.
[01:27:16]  All right?
[01:27:17]  This time, it's two Maryland State troopers.
[01:27:21]  They don't play.
[01:27:22]  Troopers do not play.
[01:27:23]  County cops, they play.
[01:27:25]  Okay.
[01:27:25]  Okay, so troopers don't play.
[01:27:27]  You mess up, they got you.
[01:27:29]  So anyway, they got this guy.
[01:27:31]  And I see him through the big, you know, picture glass window.
[01:27:35]  I said, that's him right there.
[01:27:36]  That's him right there.
[01:27:37]  And the guy says, sign it and I'll serve him right now.
[01:27:40]  So I signed it, commissioner rolled it up, walks out and takes it and sticks it in between his arm because his arm is cuffed behind his back.
[01:27:46]  Says, you know, you've been served.
[01:27:48]  So it turns out, long story short, after the county cops left, he came back looking for me because he figures I'm in the restaurant eating, right?
[01:28:00]  And he's going to settle the score because I beat him up.
[01:28:03]  So he came back to finish up.
[01:28:06]  And he couldn't find me.
[01:28:07]  He picked a fight with some other black guy in the restaurant.
[01:28:11]  So this time the Maryland State Troopers came.
[01:28:14]  I guess they were closer by than the county cops.
[01:28:17]  And they arrested him and brought him in, right?
[01:28:20]  So then, long story short, the day came for the hearing.
[01:28:28]  And I go pick up his ex-fiancé and we go to court together in my car.
[01:28:35]  And on the way there, she tells me that he's a Klansman and that he is a fireman, Frederick County fireman.
[01:28:46]  And that explained the whole thing to me because that's why the cops let him go.
[01:28:49]  You know, county cops know county firemen.
[01:28:51]  You know, they appear on the same scenes.
[01:28:54]  Right.
[01:28:54]  You know, so they know each other.
[01:28:56]  And so, you know, they, you know, let him go.
[01:29:01]  But the Maryland State Police, the troopers, you know, they don't know him.
[01:29:05]  So I can say, you know, they don't play.
[01:29:07]  So anyway, he was a fireman.
[01:29:11]  And I show up there in the court with her.
[01:29:15]  And when he saw me walk in with his ex-fiance, man, he turned all kinds, turns red at that curtain over there.
[01:29:22]  And his new fiance was there too, right?
[01:29:25]  She's sitting on the bench pregnant, and she had a sweater that she had taken off and rolled it up and set it next to her on the bench.
[01:29:33]  So now we're sitting on the other side, they're on this side, and a few more cases get called, and then our case gets called.
[01:29:40]  And then, so we all go up front.
[01:29:43]  And so his defense attorney, tells the judge that he was celebrating that night.
[01:29:52]  He had been promoted from sergeant to lieutenant in the county fire department.
[01:29:58]  And so he'd had a little too much to drink, and he mouthed off and got into an altercation with Mr. Davis, the plaintiff.
[01:30:08]  The attorney said nothing about him banging this woman's head into the sidewalk.
[01:30:13]  All he friended was as just some little, you know, tussle in the parking lot.
[01:30:18]  And so, you know, man, you know, you missed half the story.
[01:30:22]  So I didn't say that.
[01:30:23]  In my turn to testify, I said exactly what happened.
[01:30:27]  Well, the new fiancé did not realize he was still seeing or trying to see the old fiancé.
[01:30:34]  She wanted nothing to do with him, the old one.
[01:30:36]  Right.
[01:30:37]  This new one got pissed.
[01:30:39]  Now, he's standing up front facing the judge at the defense table.
[01:30:43]  She's sitting behind in one of the benches.
[01:30:46]  She took her sweater and threw it and hit him in the back and walked out of the courtroom, right?
[01:30:54]  So after I told her, told the judge, you know, what I saw.
[01:30:59]  Was going on when I pulled in the parking lot, and then what I subsequently found out.
[01:31:04]  So he's all beat red again because now he's lost his new fiancee, he lost that one, and now a new side of the story is coming out.
[01:31:16]  So the judge found him guilty and sentenced him to like a weekend in jail, some trivial sentence, and he had to do like 200 hours community service, something like that.
[01:31:29]  No, that was the first Klansman I encountered.
[01:31:32]  Oh, shit, man.
[01:31:33]  I mean, I didn't know he was a Klansman at the time, but again, it wouldn't have mattered to me.
[01:31:38]  Good Lord.
[01:31:40]  So, Mr. Kelly, right?

=== Judge Sentences Klansman (07:23) ===

[01:31:43]  He was, at that time, he wasn't quite an Imperial Wizard yet.
[01:31:47]  Yeah, he would later on go on to become an Imperial Wizard.
[01:31:49]  Right.
[01:31:52]  And then, you know, he would invite me to some of his rallies.
[01:31:55]  I'd go watch them light up this cross and all that kind of stuff.
[01:31:58]  So, you guys, after that first meeting in the hotel room, that however long it was, a couple hour meeting you guys, or interview you did with him in the hotel room.
[01:32:06]  I'm good, thank you.
[01:32:08]  In the hotel room, you guys exchanged numbers.
[01:32:11]  You visited back and forth for a while.
[01:32:13]  Yeah, invited me down to my house.
[01:32:15]  And he didn't get any kind of blowback from the rest of the clan?
[01:32:18]  He got a little bit, and he really got some, you know, as he and I got closer and he began inviting me to the rallies.
[01:32:27]  You know, some of them couldn't understand that.
[01:32:29]  Right.
[01:32:29]  Now, most of them could because they're followers.
[01:32:32]  It's like a Simon says, oh, you know, the Imperial Wizard wants to do it.
[01:32:35]  Okay, so I'm cool with it.
[01:32:36]  You know, it's like, you know, whatever he does, I'm good with.
[01:32:39]  Okay.
[01:32:39]  But others were like real hardcore.
[01:32:41]  He was a lower level guy.
[01:32:42]  It wouldn't have been very difficult.
[01:32:44]  Yeah.
[01:32:45]  So, and then when he quit and renounced it and gave me his robe and stuff, oh, some of them went off.
[01:32:52]  They began sending him hate mail anonymously.
[01:32:55]  The same kind of hate mail he used to send out.
[01:32:58]  Now he's on the receiving end, you know, and not knowing who's sending it.
[01:33:01]  I mean, he suspected who was doing it.
[01:33:03]  You know, he knew who didn't like it and stuff.
[01:33:05]  But, uh, He began seeing how ridiculous it was.
[01:33:09]  Right.
[01:33:10]  So, what was that experience like the first time you went to an actual rally?
[01:33:16]  Did that freak you out?
[01:33:17]  Were you nervous?
[01:33:18]  No, I wasn't surprised by anything.
[01:33:20]  No.
[01:33:22]  You know, it's a little surreal.
[01:33:25]  You know, you see a bunch of grown men and women walking around in different color robes and hoods and carrying a torch.
[01:33:33]  And what happens is they have this big 20 to 30 foot cross.
[01:33:39]  Okay, now.
[01:33:40]  Let me explain.
[01:33:40]  You have a cross lighting and you have a cross burning.
[01:33:43]  Two different things.
[01:33:45]  A cross burning is when they come and take a five or ten foot cross and stick it in your yard and set it on fire in the middle of the night.
[01:33:53]  Okay?
[01:33:53]  That's meant as a threat, intimidation.
[01:33:56]  We know who you are.
[01:33:58]  Move out.
[01:33:58]  Cease and desist.
[01:33:59]  We don't want you.
[01:34:00]  If you don't, the next time we come, we mean business.
[01:34:03]  They might blow up your house or whatever.
[01:34:05]  Okay?
[01:34:05]  Blow up your house?
[01:34:06]  Yeah.
[01:34:07]  That is called a cross burning.
[01:34:09]  It's your first and only warning.
[01:34:11]  Cease and desist because we will be back.
[01:34:13]  Did they ever actually blow up houses?
[01:34:15]  Yes, absolutely.
[01:34:17]  Absolutely.
[01:34:19]  They tried to blow up Martin Luther King's house with a grenade.
[01:34:23]  One guy whose robe I have, he tried to blow up a synagogue, and he was a police officer in the Klan.
[01:34:30]  Yeah.
[01:34:31]  He was a police officer.
[01:34:32]  Baltimore City cop.
[01:34:33]  At the same time that he was in the Klan?
[01:34:35]  Yeah.
[01:34:36]  Yeah.
[01:34:36]  In fact, look it up.
[01:34:40]  Not this guy, but another guy.
[01:34:41]  Do you know where Fruitland, Florida is?
[01:34:44]  Fruitland.
[01:34:44]  Uh-huh.
[01:34:46]  I'm not sure.
[01:34:47]  A couple years ago, about two, three years ago, the police chief of Fruitland, and his assistant deputy chief were Klan members.
[01:34:56]  And so the mayor found out and fired them.
[01:34:58]  How long ago?
[01:34:59]  About two or three years ago.
[01:35:00]  Really?
[01:35:01]  Yeah.
[01:35:03]  Google Fruitland Police Chief KKK.
[01:35:07]  I had a guy on here recently who is a stand-up comic, and he went on tour to a comedy club about maybe an hour and a half away from here in a town called St. Cloud.
[01:35:21]  And he said there was a Klan there.
[01:35:22]  There's a Klan there.
[01:35:23]  Yeah.
[01:35:23]  He said that that place that he was at, he said there's Klan meetings right there all the time.
[01:35:27]  Yeah.
[01:35:28]  I was like, holy shit.
[01:35:29]  Yeah, St. Cloud's big too.
[01:35:30]  Because the South, when you think of the South, the South is really north of Florida, right?
[01:35:34]  Like the traditional South.
[01:35:36]  Yeah.
[01:35:36]  You think of like Georgia.
[01:35:38]  You don't think of.
[01:35:38]  Mississippi, Alabama.
[01:35:39]  Right.
[01:35:39]  Oh, but Florida's big on Klan.
[01:35:41]  It's very big on Klan.
[01:35:43]  Really?
[01:35:43]  Yeah.
[01:35:45]  Have you been to any rallies in Florida?
[01:35:47]  I know.
[01:35:48]  I've not been to the rallies, but I know some of the Grand Dragons of Florida.
[01:35:51]  Yeah.
[01:35:52]  I've met a few of them.
[01:35:54]  Do you stay in touch with these people?
[01:35:55]  Yeah.
[01:35:55]  Yeah.
[01:35:56]  I mean, if we become friends, sure.
[01:35:59]  How many clan members have you become actual friends with that you keep in touch with them and you actually consider them a friend?
[01:36:08]  They're probably a good, I say, between 25, 35.
[01:36:15]  Wow.
[01:36:16]  Yeah.
[01:36:18]  Some of them even come out with me on my lecture tours and come up on stage with me and renounce the clan and all that kind of stuff.
[01:36:27]  And so 25 or 35 of them that you're still friends with, they left the clan.
[01:36:31]  Yeah, they're done.
[01:36:32]  And that includes some neo-Nazis as well.
[01:36:36]  Holy shit, man.
[01:36:37]  That's fucking wild.
[01:36:39]  In fact, the Grand Dragon of Florida, he was over in Jacksonville.
[01:36:42]  He lived in Jacksonville, this last one.
[01:36:46]  And now he's out.
[01:36:48]  He was also a neo-Nazi.
[01:36:49]  He's a good friend of mine.
[01:36:52]  So explain to me, okay, the burning of the cross is when they're trying to intimidate somebody who's in a neighborhood.
[01:36:58]  They don't think they should be there.
[01:36:59]  They don't want to threaten them.
[01:37:00]  This is your first and last warning before we blow up your house.
[01:37:03]  Before we blow up your house or do something to you.
[01:37:05]  Yeah.
[01:37:05]  And a lighting is what?
[01:37:07]  A cross lighting is for a ceremony when they have a rally.
[01:37:09]  Okay.
[01:37:10]  So they take a 20 or 30 foot cross.
[01:37:11]  Okay.
[01:37:12]  And the cross is wrapped both for the burning and for the lighting.
[01:37:16]  The cross, the wooden cross is wrapped in, or metal, whatever, is wrapped in burlap.
[01:37:21]  The burlap has been soaked in what they call clan cologne, which is actually diesel fuel, kerosene.
[01:37:28]  Okay.
[01:37:30]  Oh, that's fucking hilarious.
[01:37:31]  Clan cologne.
[01:37:33]  Yeah.
[01:37:34]  And so.
[01:37:36]  So they all have these torches, and they make this big, wide circle around this unlit cross, at the route, the lighting.
[01:37:46]  And they parade around clockwise with their torches, going around, and either the Grand Dragon or Imperial Wizard, whichever one is there, will bark out orders, clansmen halt, and they'll all stop in the circle.
[01:38:03]  Clansmen face the cross, and they'll all turn inward to face the cross.
[01:38:08]  Then he'll say, you know, for my God, and they all repeat, for my God, and they bow.
[01:38:13]  For my race, for my race.
[01:38:15]  For my country, for my country.
[01:38:17]  For my clan, for my clan.
[01:38:19]  White power, white power.
[01:38:21]  Clansmen approach the cross, and they all close in to the base of the cross.
[01:38:26]  So now it's a small circle.
[01:38:28]  He'll say, clansmen, light the cross.
[01:38:30]  And they drop their torches at the foot of the cross, and then goes, whoosh, because it has all that kerosene on it.
[01:38:35]  They're all in the cologne.
[01:38:36]  Right.
[01:38:37]  And lights up.
[01:38:38]  And then they stand there and they admire it for a while, give some speeches, and then the rally is over and they have hot dogs and all kinds of crap.
[01:38:46]  Jesus.
[01:38:48]  What a scene.
[01:38:49]  If I had my phone, which I hope I do find, I would show you pictures and stuff of me at the rallies.
[01:38:57]  What was the purpose of inviting you?
[01:39:01]  What was the purpose of what?
[01:39:03]  Inviting you.
[01:39:04]  Because I wanted to go and see it.
[01:39:05]  Did you request to go to him?

=== Public vs Private Rallies (02:59) ===

[01:39:06]  Well, okay.
[01:39:06]  Now, you have two kinds of rallies you have public rallies and you have private rallies.
[01:39:10]  Okay, you have to be invited to a private rally.
[01:39:12]  I've been to both.
[01:39:13]  Okay.
[01:39:13]  Now, okay, so for example, you know, let's say there's a park over here, a county park, right?
[01:39:20]  You know, kids go there and play.
[01:39:21]  You can go there and do it, you know, read a book or whatever.
[01:39:25]  If the Klan wants to have a rally in that park, that's a public park.
[01:39:29]  All right?
[01:39:30]  You know, so the public can come, right?
[01:39:33]  Now, usually there's going to be a bunch of police there, unless it's like a Klan town where, you know, people don't dare go there or something.
[01:39:41]  So if it's a public park, Anybody can come.
[01:39:44]  But the police will generally try to keep the protesters away, keep a division.
[01:39:49]  So there's a lot of yelling and screaming and going back and forth, but nobody gets to clash.
[01:39:54]  If it's a private rally, it's on somebody's private property.
[01:39:57]  Like some of these Klan people own farms or whatever, or some acreage.
[01:40:01]  So they have it there.
[01:40:02]  So the only way you can go on private property is to be invited.
[01:40:06]  So I've been to both public ones and private ones.
[01:40:08]  Are there any really wealthy Klan members?
[01:40:10]  Yeah.
[01:40:10]  Like rich guys who are still in the Klan?
[01:40:12]  Because I got the impression that a lot of them were just kind of like like you would say, they were working as firemen or cops where they had like four different jobs they're juggling.
[01:40:21]  Let's be clear.
[01:40:22]  A Klansman or Klanswoman is not stamped out of a standard cookie cutter.
[01:40:27]  They come from all different walks of life, all different educational and financial backgrounds.
[01:40:33]  You're used to seeing these knuckleheads on Jerry Springer or throwing chairs and acting all stupid.
[01:40:40]  And yes, there are plenty of those.
[01:40:41]  I know a lot of those too.
[01:40:42]  Third grade dropouts?
[01:40:43]  Third grade dropouts, exactly.
[01:40:45]  But they go from third grade dropout to president of the United States.
[01:40:49]  President Warren G. Harding was sworn into the Ku Klux Klan in the green room of the White House while he was a sitting president.
[01:40:58]  Harry Truman, before he became President Truman, he joined the Klan for a short time.
[01:41:04]  He did not like it.
[01:41:04]  He got out.
[01:41:07]  Senator Robert Byrd, who just died a few years ago, he was the Grand Clegal of West Virginia.
[01:41:12]  Clegal means recruiter.
[01:41:14]  Grand, of course, state.
[01:41:16]  Also, King, you know, King Clegal, Grand Clegal, means state.
[01:41:22]  Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was in the Klan when he got the appointment to the Supreme Court.
[01:41:29]  He had to leave the Klan in order to be on the Supreme Court.
[01:41:33]  So, you know, they range, you know, in different educational backgrounds.
[01:41:39]  But, you know, we're used to seeing the ones who are mostly uneducated.
[01:41:43]  A lot of the ones who are educated, some of them are what you call silent members.
[01:41:49]  You know, you don't know that they're in.
[01:41:52]  Their membership is secret.
[01:41:54]  So only the top echelon know, you know, this guy is with us.
[01:41:59]  Right.
[01:42:00]  Because it could compromise their job or people they associate with.

=== White-on-White Crime Myth (07:29) ===

[01:42:06]  Exactly.
[01:42:08]  What was the story of?
[01:42:11]  I remember hearing something about you driving in a car with a clan's member and him trying to have a conversation with you and convince you that you had a certain gene in you.
[01:42:24]  Yeah.
[01:42:25]  A violence gene.
[01:42:26]  Yeah.
[01:42:26]  This was an exalted cyclops, which means district leader.
[01:42:31]  Exalted cyclops.
[01:42:32]  Yeah.
[01:42:34]  Okay.
[01:42:34]  What is the fuck is a cyclops?
[01:42:36]  I know what the I is.
[01:42:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:42:38]  But what is.
[01:42:38]  Okay.
[01:42:38]  Well, it's just a name for this.
[01:42:40]  particular position.
[01:42:41]  Okay.
[01:42:42]  It's a district leader.
[01:42:43]  They call their districts claverns.
[01:42:45]  We would call a district leader a mayor, a councilman, an alderman, you know, somebody who's like a little area.
[01:42:52]  Yeah.
[01:42:53]  Okay, so the Cyclops is exalted Cyclops.
[01:42:56]  He's in my car and we're riding around and we got to talking and somehow he got on black on black crime, which is a misnomer by the way.
[01:43:10]  Black on black crime does not really exist.
[01:43:12]  All right.
[01:43:14]  Sure, black people commit crimes against black people, but it's not a thing, it is a crime of opportunity.
[01:43:22]  It's what it is.
[01:43:24]  Where, where did where do most of these black on quote, black on black crimes occur mostly in black neighborhoods right right, okay.
[01:43:30]  Robbing stealing yeah, okay.
[01:43:33]  So, gang stuff yeah, if I, if I need, let's say um, I live in one of those neighborhoods and i'm a druggie and I need some money to get some drugs, I'm not going to go all the way across town to my neighborhood.
[01:43:46]  Right.
[01:43:46]  Your dealer is probably a black guy, right?
[01:43:48]  Yeah.
[01:43:48]  So I'm going to rob somebody next to me, somebody close by.
[01:43:51]  I need my drugs now.
[01:43:53]  So it's a crime of opportunity.
[01:43:55]  You know, this black guy is a lot closer to me than some white guy halfway across town.
[01:43:59]  Right.
[01:44:00]  So that's why, you know, they call it black-on-black crime.
[01:44:04]  But, yeah, but, you know, white people rob white people.
[01:44:06]  You know, you go to some trailer park or whatever and see all this crime over there.
[01:44:10]  They don't call it white-on-white crime.
[01:44:13]  You ever heard the term white-on-white crime?
[01:44:15]  No, I don't think I ever.
[01:44:16]  Exactly.
[01:44:16]  That's why I say it's a misnomer.
[01:44:18]  It's a crime of opportunity.
[01:44:20]  You know?
[01:44:20]  So, I mean, you do know that white people do commit crimes against each other.
[01:44:25]  Right.
[01:44:26]  Right?
[01:44:27]  If you're in an all white area and there are white people who are on drugs and they need money and they want to do whatever, they're going to rob the white guy next to them rather than go all the way over to Blacktown and rob some black guy.
[01:44:41]  It's a crime of opportunity.
[01:44:43]  But they don't call it white on white crime.
[01:44:45]  You know, they always want to apply some name that has a negative connotation or bearing on somebody black.
[01:44:54]  For example, what do you call a white group of mostly men, some women sometimes, but mostly men who dress up in camouflage and go out in the woods and practice survivalist tactics and they're anti-government usually, paramilitary type groups?
[01:45:11]  What do you call those kind of groups?
[01:45:14]  What do you call them?
[01:45:15]  You know, you know.
[01:45:16]  There was one just a couple weeks ago that was going to kidnap the governor of Michigan, like a private militia or something exactly.
[01:45:25]  Militia okay okay, that's the term.
[01:45:27]  Okay militia, all right, but now what do you call a group of black people who do the same thing?
[01:45:33]  Black panthers?
[01:45:36]  Uh, what?
[01:45:37]  What were they considered?
[01:45:42]  I mean, the Black panthers, that's a particular name of one of those groups.
[01:45:46]  So there are other groups like the Black Panthers, Right?
[01:45:49]  Okay.
[01:45:49]  The Black Panthers is just a name.
[01:45:50]  It's like, you know, the Michigan militia, you know, or the rebel militia or whatever.
[01:45:56]  That's a particular name.
[01:45:57]  Okay.
[01:45:57]  The overall is called, it's a militia.
[01:45:59]  Right.
[01:46:00]  Okay.
[01:46:00]  The Black Panthers is a black militia called the Black Panthers, but there are other militias too, other black militias.
[01:46:07]  But they're not called militias when it's black.
[01:46:09]  What are they called?
[01:46:10]  Militants.
[01:46:11]  Militants?
[01:46:11]  Uh huh.
[01:46:12]  I didn't know that.
[01:46:13]  It's a militant group.
[01:46:15]  Okay.
[01:46:16]  Black people are considered militant when they do this, but white people are considered militias when they do that.
[01:46:22]  Militant has more of a negative connotation to it than a militia.
[01:46:26]  They both are paramilitary, they both are anti government, you know, but one has more of a negative connotation.
[01:46:33]  So, anyway, I lost my train of thought there.
[01:46:39]  The Cyclops, you're in the car with the Cyclops.
[01:46:41]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:46:42]  So the Cyclops, you know, talking about this crime.
[01:46:46]  And he says, well, you know, we all know that, you know, they say that black people have a gene in them that makes them violent.
[01:46:53]  Now he's sitting over here in the passenger seat.
[01:46:54]  I'm driving.
[01:46:56]  I said, you know, what are you talking about?
[01:46:58]  He says, well, who's doing all the drive-bys and carjackings in Southeast?
[01:47:03]  He was referring to Southeast Washington, D.C. which is predominantly black, high crime.
[01:47:08]  There's some white people who live there, but it's predominantly black, a lot of high crime.
[01:47:12]  I said, okay, black people are doing it.
[01:47:16]  I said, but that's what lives there.
[01:47:18]  I said, you know, you're not considering the demographics.
[01:47:20]  Who's doing all the crime up in Bangor, Maine?
[01:47:23]  You know, white people, because that's what lives there.
[01:47:26]  He goes, no, no, no, it has nothing to do with that.
[01:47:28]  You know, you all have this gene in you that makes you violent.
[01:47:34]  I said, look, man, I said, I'm as black as anybody you've ever seen.
[01:47:38]  I have never.
[01:47:40]  Done a carjacking or a drive-by?
[01:47:43]  How do you explain that?
[01:47:45]  He didn't hesitate.
[01:47:46]  He answered me like that, right off the bat.
[01:47:48]  Didn't think about it.
[01:47:49]  He said, Your genus latent hasn't come out yet.
[01:47:52]  What?
[01:47:53]  Yeah.
[01:47:55]  And I was so caught off guard, I didn't know how to respond to that.
[01:47:58]  I mean, how do you bite into something like that with so far out in left field?
[01:48:03]  My genus latent hasn't come out yet.
[01:48:04]  I mean, he almost made it come out, but, you know, I didn't know what to say.
[01:48:11]  So he's sitting over here all smug and.
[01:48:13]  You see, you got nothing to say.
[01:48:15]  So I thought about it for a moment, and then I used his analogy against him.
[01:48:20]  I said, well, you know, they say, you know, the biggest body of authority in the world is they.
[01:48:26]  Right.
[01:48:27]  And we don't know who they are, but they say, okay.
[01:48:30]  So I said, you know, they say that all white people have a gene within them that makes them a serial killer.
[01:48:37]  He's like, well, how do you figure?
[01:48:39]  I said, well, name me three black serial killers.
[01:48:43]  He couldn't do it.
[01:48:44]  He thought about it.
[01:48:44]  He couldn't do it.
[01:48:45]  I said, here, I'm going to give you one.
[01:48:48]  I named one for him.
[01:48:49]  I said, now just give me two.
[01:48:51]  He couldn't do it.
[01:48:53]  I said, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahler, Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, son of Sam, on and on.
[01:49:06]  I said, they're all white, man.
[01:49:08]  I said, son, you're a serial killer.
[01:49:11]  He said, Darrell, I've never killed anybody.
[01:49:13]  I said, you're James Layton.
[01:49:14]  It hasn't come out yet.
[01:49:15]  Oh my God.
[01:49:18]  He goes, well, that's stupid.
[01:49:20]  I said, well, duh.
[01:49:22]  Yeah, it is stupid.
[01:49:23]  But I said, it's no more stupid for me to say that about you than what you said about me.
[01:49:28]  And he got very, very quiet.
[01:49:31]  But I could tell his wheels were like spinning because he didn't know what to say.
[01:49:34]  The gears were grinding.

=== Changing Demographics Shifts (17:31) ===

[01:49:35]  Yeah.
[01:49:36]  And then he changed the conversation.
[01:49:39]  But it wasn't more than, I say, maybe five months later, he quit the Klan based on that conversation.
[01:49:46]  Really?
[01:49:47]  Yeah.
[01:49:48]  It was a stupid conversation, but sometimes, you know, you can't convince somebody with a stack of books this high written by PhDs, but you can talk to them at some dumb level and they get it.
[01:50:00]  Right.
[01:50:01]  You know?
[01:50:03]  So how many people have actually given you their robes and their hoods?
[01:50:09]  I have, I believe, between 54 and 57 robes and hoods.
[01:50:14]  But I have all kinds of other stuff.
[01:50:15]  I got clan flags, clan belt buckles, medallions.
[01:50:19]  all kinds of stuff.
[01:50:20]  I got some in my pocket right here.
[01:50:22]  I got a Nazi medallion and a KKK medallion.
[01:50:28]  You know, these are their, this is their uniform.
[01:50:34]  And when they give that to you, they're done.
[01:50:37]  They're done, which is a good thing.
[01:50:40]  You know, you don't give up something that you take pride in and give it to somebody who was your enemy.
[01:50:47]  So, you know, that says something.
[01:50:50]  And I tell you, I'm going to loan a lot of my stuff to the Orlando Holocaust Center.
[01:50:57]  They're going to put on an exhibition.
[01:50:59]  Oh, really?
[01:51:00]  Yeah, they'll be open up probably in maybe February or something.
[01:51:04]  I think it's going to open up virtually first, and then maybe by spring people will be able to come there and see it.
[01:51:09]  Oh, that's good.
[01:51:10]  Yeah, so it'll be there for a year, and then it will tour the country and come back to me.
[01:51:15]  There's also a really big Holocaust Museum right here in St. Pete, right downtown.
[01:51:18]  Okay, well, it'll probably come here too, because they all are connected.
[01:51:22]  Okay.
[01:51:22]  So it'll start in Orlando.
[01:51:25]  It'll be there for a while, and then it's my tour.
[01:51:28]  So what kind of conversations, how has the mood shifted lately or like the types of conversations you've been having lately?
[01:51:38]  Because obviously right now in 2020, I feel like this is, it couldn't be a more perfect time for us to be having a conversation like this with all the divide in the country and an election coming up next week.
[01:51:51]  This is, The best thing that has happened, I mean, there's a lot of bittersweet, you know, this year.
[01:52:00]  The death of George Floyd, the COVID-19, a lot of white supremacy things going on.
[01:52:10]  But you know what?
[01:52:10]  This is the best thing that has happened because now we're having to confront this.
[01:52:15]  It should have been confronted decades ago.
[01:52:18]  You're saying it's good that this stuff is happening now.
[01:52:20]  Yes.
[01:52:21]  Yeah.
[01:52:22]  Because people are now addressing it.
[01:52:26]  rather than shoving it under the carpet and lock it in the closet.
[01:52:29]  Because in the past, it was always taboo to talk about these kinds of things.
[01:52:34]  People didn't want to talk about racism and supremacy and all that kind of stuff.
[01:52:38]  And now we're having to confront it because it's in our face.
[01:52:44]  And I'm going to tell you what's happening that the media knows but they don't talk about.
[01:52:53]  This country was built on a two-tier society.
[01:52:57]  white supremacy and slavery.
[01:53:01]  And over the years we progress like this.
[01:53:04]  Maybe like this, but never like this.
[01:53:10]  Not on an equal basis.
[01:53:11]  All right?
[01:53:13]  When I was a child, the black population in this country was 12%.
[01:53:20]  Native Americans were only 1%.
[01:53:23]  Hispanic people, Latino people, around 2%.
[01:53:26]  Asians, around 4%.
[01:53:29]  White people were like 84, 86%.
[01:53:33]  So the racist people, their biggest nemesis were black people at 12%.
[01:53:38]  That's way too much.
[01:53:39]  They didn't care about 1% Native American.
[01:53:43]  The attitude was, oh, just take them, put them on a reservation, forget about them.
[01:53:46]  They didn't care about 2% Hispanic or Latino.
[01:53:50]  But 12%, oh, no, no, no, we can't have that.
[01:53:52]  All right.
[01:53:53]  So today, black people remain at 12%.
[01:53:58]  We're like 12.9% or something now.
[01:54:00]  We really haven't grown.
[01:54:02]  So we're almost at 13%.
[01:54:05]  Hispanic people have grown to like 17 point something percent.
[01:54:09]  So, and Asians, I believe, have grown to like 6%.
[01:54:14]  If you take just black people at 12% in this country, and 17% Latino Hispanic, that right there is 29% non-white.
[01:54:27]  This is happening.
[01:54:29]  Okay?
[01:54:30]  And if you want to prove it to yourself, Google the census, U.S. Census Bureau.
[01:54:35]  The census is taken every 10 years.
[01:54:38]  All right?
[01:54:40]  Look, watch the census every 10 years from 1960.
[01:54:44]  Black people have remained at 12%.
[01:54:47]  Other things like Hispanic, Latino have grown.
[01:54:50]  and the white population is coming down.
[01:54:52]  It is well predicted that in the year 2042, that's going to be a shift.
[01:54:59]  For the first time in the history of the United States, it will be 50-50.
[01:55:04]  50% white, 50% non-white.
[01:55:08]  That includes black, Latino, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, Native American, etc.
[01:55:15]  Between 2045 and 2050, it's going to shift.
[01:55:21]  Whites will become the minority in this country.
[01:55:23]  Now, yep, and there are plenty of white people in this country, plenty of white people in this country who embrace that.
[01:55:31]  They say, Hey, I'm cool with that.
[01:55:33]  You know, evolution is what happens, no big deal.
[01:55:38]  There's another percentage that are not happy with that.
[01:55:41]  Those are your white supremacists, all right, which includes the KKK, the neo Nazis, the alt right, whatever else, and individuals.
[01:55:51]  When you have sat on the power, I mean, sat on the throne of power.
[01:55:56]  For 401 years.
[01:55:58]  You don't want to get off.
[01:56:00]  I have been here for 401 years as a descendant of slaves.
[01:56:05]  The first slaves came here in 1619, that's 401 years ago.
[01:56:11]  And i'm a descendant of slaves.
[01:56:13]  Okay, and when you've held that kind of power for for that long over somebody like me, you don't want to give it up.
[01:56:23]  Look at our current presidency.
[01:56:25]  He has power.
[01:56:25]  He doesn't want to give it up.
[01:56:26]  Right right, You know, when you have power, you don't want to give it up.
[01:56:30]  So they're seeing their thrown legs being whittled down, and now their butts are coming down to the level of the inferior people.
[01:56:37]  You know, they don't want that.
[01:56:41]  I said, I'm a musician.
[01:56:42]  Just like, you know, if I had a hit record, you know, number one on the charts, I don't want to get off of number one.
[01:56:47]  I don't want to fall down to number 10, number 99.
[01:56:50]  Now I'm off the top 100.
[01:56:52]  Yeah.
[01:56:52]  You know, you want to stay at the top, right?
[01:56:55]  Okay.
[01:56:55]  So this is why you're seeing all these groups.
[01:56:59]  Popping up, trying to recruit.
[01:57:01]  Come join us.
[01:57:02]  We're going to take our country back.
[01:57:04]  We're going to make America great again.
[01:57:06]  We're going to build that wall, send those people back to wherever they came from, and so on.
[01:57:12]  Do you know what white flight is?
[01:57:14]  White flight?
[01:57:15]  Yeah.
[01:57:15]  No, I've never heard of it.
[01:57:17]  Really?
[01:57:17]  Never.
[01:57:18]  How old are you?
[01:57:19]  I'm 33.
[01:57:20]  Okay, that's why.
[01:57:24]  White flight was very big back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, but now.
[01:57:31]  There is no more white flight.
[01:57:33]  White flight.
[01:57:33]  You ever heard of white flight?
[01:57:35]  No.
[01:57:35]  Okay.
[01:57:36]  How old are you?
[01:57:37]  I'm 23.
[01:57:38]  Oh, that definitely explains that.
[01:57:40]  Okay.
[01:57:42]  You have a neighborhood that's all white.
[01:57:46]  And eventually people who were not white began moving into the neighborhood.
[01:57:52]  Okay.
[01:57:52]  And then the white people, they move out.
[01:57:55]  And they go to somewhere else where it's all white.
[01:57:57]  Okay.
[01:57:58]  And then gradually that becomes integrated and they fly again.
[01:58:03]  They keep flying to, they want an all-white neighborhood.
[01:58:06]  Right.
[01:58:07]  That's called white flight.
[01:58:08]  Okay.
[01:58:08]  Okay.
[01:58:09]  There is no more white flight because they can't fly anywhere anymore.
[01:58:12]  There's nowhere to go now.
[01:58:13]  Nowhere to go now.
[01:58:14]  Exactly.
[01:58:15]  Exactly.
[01:58:15]  Everywhere you go, there's somebody who does not look like you.
[01:58:17]  Right, right.
[01:58:18]  Okay, so white flight is over.
[01:58:20]  Unless you want to leave the planet.
[01:58:21]  Exactly, precisely.
[01:58:22]  Then you've got greedy people.
[01:58:23]  There's no white people anywhere on the planet.
[01:58:24]  Yeah, you think you've got greedy people.
[01:58:26]  Yeah.
[01:58:26]  Elon Musk is going to make that happen.
[01:58:27]  Oh, the funniest thing I ever saw went to this Klan rally, a public place.
[01:58:32]  It was in front of the governor's mansion in Maryland.
[01:58:36]  All these white supremacists in Klan robes and stuff, they kept yelling, white power, white power.
[01:58:44]  And these three or four college kids showed up.
[01:58:48]  With their bodies painted green.
[01:58:50]  And every time the clan would yell, Hua Power, they'd go, Green Power, Green Power.
[01:58:55]  I got a picture of them in my book.
[01:58:57]  That is hilarious.
[01:58:58]  Anyway, so this is why all these groups are trying to recruit because the landscape is changing.
[01:59:09]  Right.
[01:59:09]  It used to be mostly white landscape.
[01:59:12]  Now you're seeing people from all over.
[01:59:14]  You know, you call Miami a little Havana.
[01:59:17]  Right.
[01:59:18]  You know, and a little Chinatown and a little, you know, you know, Hispanic town and so on, you know, or little Ethiopia or whatever, different places, right?
[01:59:29]  Those names didn't exist, you know, 20, 30 years ago, right?
[01:59:32]  So people are freaking, some people are freaking out about that.
[01:59:37]  So they go and join these groups that promise to take the country back, all right?
[01:59:42]  And when that doesn't happen, they get frustrated.
[01:59:47]  They say, you know what?
[01:59:48]  If the Klan can't do it or the Nazis can't do it, I'll do it myself.
[01:59:54]  And they go out on their own and walk into a black church, boom, boom, boom, boom, or into a synagogue, boom, boom, boom, boom, or the Walmart in El Paso, boom, boom, boom.
[02:00:03]  These are lone wolves.
[02:00:05]  Now, we have intelligence agencies, FBI, that kind of thing, right?
[02:00:11]  Who have operatives that can blend in.
[02:00:14]  They can go and join these groups.
[02:00:16]  They have the look, and they talk the talk, and they go in undercover, and they become one of those people, and they gather intelligence.
[02:00:24]  and report it back and we foil those plots.
[02:00:27]  Like we had intelligence operatives in this group that was going to kidnap the governor, right?
[02:00:33]  That's how they got busted.
[02:00:35]  But you cannot infiltrate a lone wolf.
[02:00:37]  It's only one person.
[02:00:39]  You follow what I'm saying?
[02:00:41]  You can infiltrate a group, you can't infiltrate a lone wolf.
[02:00:43]  As we get closer and closer to 2042, unfortunately, we're going to see more and more lone wolves because they feel their country is being taken over and they feel it's their patriotic duty.
[02:00:58]  This is a white homeland.
[02:00:59]  This country was built by white men and the Constitution was signed by white men.
[02:01:04]  They forget the fact that it was built off the backs of slaves.
[02:01:07]  It's all white in their minds.
[02:01:10]  So they're going to take it upon themselves to defend this country.
[02:01:16]  That's what they're doing.
[02:01:17]  In fact, you saw a lone wolf a couple weeks ago.
[02:01:20]  That 17-year-old boy who came from Illinois into Wisconsin, Kyle Rittenhouse.
[02:01:25]  Right, right.
[02:01:26]  He shot three people, killed two of them, blew off the third guy's arm, and then went home with his gun.
[02:01:32]  That's a lone wolf.
[02:01:35]  You're going to see more and more of those people as we get closer and closer to 2042.
[02:01:40]  They are becoming unhinged.
[02:01:43]  So you said you're 33.
[02:01:45]  So do you remember 1999 pretty well?
[02:01:48]  No.
[02:01:49]  No?
[02:01:49]  Not really.
[02:01:51]  I wasn't paying attention to anything except for surfing and skating around town and just being an idiot.
[02:01:57]  Well, in 1999, people were really having high anxiety because the year 2000 was coming.
[02:02:06]  Oh, yes.
[02:02:06]  I remember that.
[02:02:07]  It was called Y2K.
[02:02:08]  Yep.
[02:02:08]  They thought the world was going to end.
[02:02:10]  The world was going to end.
[02:02:11]  My VCR won't work anymore.
[02:02:13]  Wasn't that something new?
[02:02:13]  The Mayan calendar ended there or something?
[02:02:15]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:02:16]  People were like freaking out, man.
[02:02:18]  They were taking all their money out of banks and hiding it in their mattress because they figured their banking system was going to shut down.
[02:02:24]  You know, the calendar was going to go crazy.
[02:02:26]  Electronics weren't going to work anymore.
[02:02:28]  The coffee maker wasn't going to work because you had to program it differently.
[02:02:32]  So they were on high angst.
[02:02:37]  What the year 2000 Y2K was to all of us or whatever, 2042 is the white supremacist Y2K.
[02:02:46]  Really?
[02:02:46]  Yeah.
[02:02:47]  And 2042 is only 22 years from now.
[02:02:50]  So do you think the farther we go, like the closer we get to 2042, the more radicalized people are going to get on that side?
[02:02:59]  Unless.
[02:03:00]  Like that we're going to see?
[02:03:01]  Yep.
[02:03:01]  unless we start addressing it now.
[02:03:04]  We have been reactive for so long.
[02:03:08]  We need to be proactive.
[02:03:10]  We need to be more proactive.
[02:03:11]  This country is changing, and it's going to continue to change.
[02:03:15]  You can't stop evolution, all right?
[02:03:18]  But you can teach people how to deal with it, how to get over their anxiety, how to accept it.
[02:03:23]  It's going to be okay, you know?
[02:03:26]  So what if you open your front door and this neighbor looks different and that neighbor looks different and that one looks different?
[02:03:32]  No big deal.
[02:03:34]  Earlier, you mentioned that you think it's somewhat a good thing what's been happening in this country in the last year.
[02:03:45]  Let me explain that to you.
[02:03:46]  I also want to finish this thought.
[02:03:51]  What I think you're trying to say is by the fact that these things are happening and they're being exposed, they're coming out from under the rug, we're realizing that they do exist.
[02:04:02]  We're realizing that there are weeds in the garden that have to be pulled.
[02:04:05]  We've always realized it, but we've never wanted to deal with it.
[02:04:09]  We, not black people, white people, you know, they don't want to address it.
[02:04:15]  Do you think that Donald Trump becoming president is also somewhat a good thing in that respect that he has kind of sparked kind of an uprising?
[02:04:29]  Donald Trump.
[02:04:30]  Would you say that all KKK members would be Trump supporters?
[02:04:35]  Yes, they are.
[02:04:36]  Right.
[02:04:36]  Yeah.
[02:04:37]  So what I say is not every Trump supporter is a racist.
[02:04:45]  I have a lot of friends who are Trump supporters who are not racist at all.
[02:04:49]  Me too.
[02:04:49]  Yeah.
[02:04:50]  Okay.
[02:04:50]  So not all Trump supporters are racist, but every racist is a Trump supporter.
[02:04:55]  Right.
[02:04:55]  So there's a difference.
[02:04:56]  And here's the thing.
[02:05:00]  I would say that Donald Trump is the worst president we've ever had, but he is the best thing that's happened to this country.
[02:05:08]  That's the bittersweet part of it.
[02:05:12]  Strong statement.
[02:05:12]  Yeah, as a result of Donald Trump, we now have the Me Too movement, which is good for women.
[02:05:20]  We didn't have the Me Too movement before him.
[02:05:22]  And he sort of activated all that with all his misogyny and all that.
[02:05:27]  We have a lot more conversations about race that we were not having before, that we should have had a long time ago.
[02:05:33]  Donald Trump did not invent racism by any means.
[02:05:36]  Neither did Obama or George Bush or Bill Clinton or any of those people.
[02:05:40]  It's been around for a long time.
[02:05:42]  But we as a nation have failed to address it properly.
[02:05:45]  And now we're having to because we failed.
[02:05:49]  And now we're having to address it violently even, like with Charlottesville.
[02:05:55]  Or now you're having all these groups with these armed militias and all this kind of stuff, you know, getting ready to confront each other in the streets.
[02:06:02]  They're all concerned about that 2042, you know?
[02:06:06]  And this is why I said we have to be proactive and not reactive.
[02:06:11]  Yeah.
[02:06:13]  I think it's interesting also what you mentioned about a lot of the Klan members that you met have never left their town or their township or they've never been to one of the neighboring states even, let alone another country.
[02:06:25]  A lot of them have not.
[02:06:26]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:06:27]  And I think that's very interesting because that's very relevant to the internet and social media right now.
[02:06:33]  It's the way the algorithms work on these websites like Facebook and Twitter, they just feed you the content that's going to make you react, right?
[02:06:42]  Click, and just so they can earn more ad dollars.
[02:06:47]  And it keeps you in this bubble or this echo chamber that riles people up, especially I've noticed older people that don't understand this process and don't understand the way these social media companies operate.
[02:07:00]  And they think that.
[02:07:01]  This little echo chamber they're living in on Facebook is the real world.

=== Social Media Echo Chambers (02:07) ===

[02:07:06]  And they're not having one's perspective is one's reality.
[02:07:09]  Right.
[02:07:09]  Yeah.
[02:07:09]  And there's no outside perspectives to bounce anything off of.
[02:07:13]  Right.
[02:07:14]  Exactly.
[02:07:15]  And then they're being told that any source of outside perspectives are evil.
[02:07:25]  So, you know, don't watch CNN, just watch Fox News.
[02:07:29]  Or, you know, just watch CNN, don't watch Fox News.
[02:07:31]  Right.
[02:07:32]  You know, either way, you know, you.
[02:07:35]  And what's happening is, see, you don't remember a time when the news was the news.
[02:07:40]  I do.
[02:07:41]  When I was a kid, newscasters gave the news.
[02:07:46]  Today, it's called news, but it's not the news.
[02:07:49]  It's opinion.
[02:07:50]  Newscasters are giving their own opinions because they think we're too stupid to figure out for ourselves.
[02:07:57]  So they're telling us what to think.
[02:07:58]  Yeah, I mean, you have one news station who can look at the KKK and call it the KKK, but then you have Fox News.
[02:08:07]  They have.
[02:08:08]  basically labeled BLM as the KKK.
[02:08:12]  Like Black Lives Matter, they paint that as like the left's KKK.
[02:08:18]  And it's just bonkers.
[02:08:21]  The idea, here's my, I'm speaking for myself, you know, my take on BLM.
[02:08:33]  The idea behind its creation, I feel was a great idea by the founders.
[02:08:39]  They co-opted the idea from Martin Luther King, is what they did.
[02:08:45]  Martin Luther King wanted to put the national spotlight on the plight of black bus riders in Montgomery, Alabama, with Rosa Parks and the bus drivers and all that kind of stuff, making people sit in the back of the bus and be mistreated.
[02:09:02]  Because that kind of thing was going on in Montgomery for a long time and in southern states for a long time, but the rest of the country was not aware.
[02:09:10]  So Martin Luther King came up with the idea of, let's make sure everybody sees this.

=== Black Lives Matter Origins (12:00) ===

[02:09:14]  We're going to do a major boycott.
[02:09:16]  of the bus system and put it in the national spotlight and maybe that will help change it.
[02:09:22]  And it did.
[02:09:23]  So the founders of BLM decided, hey, you know, let's do that same thing.
[02:09:27]  Let's put the plight of black men in the national spotlight because what was happening was black men, for lack of a better term, were being murdered by white police officers for holding their cell phone, their wallet, or whatever.
[02:09:44]  Whether they were innocent or guilty, black men got to go to their grave.
[02:09:48]  White men in the same predicament either got to go home or go to jail.
[02:09:55]  Some got to go to jail via Burger King.
[02:09:58]  You know, Dylan Roof, right?
[02:10:00]  Dylan Roof.
[02:10:01]  Dylan Roof was the white supremacist shot at the black church.
[02:10:05]  You remember him being taken to Burger King?
[02:10:07]  Yes, I do remember that now.
[02:10:08]  Yeah, what's up with that?
[02:10:10]  You got somebody like Eric Garner.
[02:10:12]  Remember Eric Garner?
[02:10:13]  Eric Garner was the original I Can't Breathe guy up on Staten Island, New York, who was selling loose cigarettes, and they threw him on the ground and choked him on the camera to death.
[02:10:24]  A guy did the same thing?
[02:10:26]  Like that same thing that happened to George Floyd selling loose cigarettes?
[02:10:29]  Yeah.
[02:10:30]  Okay.
[02:10:31]  Eric Garner.
[02:10:32]  Look him up.
[02:10:32]  Eric Garner.
[02:10:33]  Okay.
[02:10:33]  All right.
[02:10:34]  He was on the sidewalk of Staten Island selling loose cigarettes.
[02:10:38]  It's illegal to sell tobacco without a license.
[02:10:40]  Right.
[02:10:41]  Just like you can't sell liquor without a license.
[02:10:42]  Right.
[02:10:43]  All right.
[02:10:44]  So he's selling loose cigarettes for 50 cents or whatever he's selling them for.
[02:10:47]  And the cops bust him.
[02:10:49]  And six of them like jumped on him, slammed them down to the ground, sat on his back, and choked him to death.
[02:10:55]  With their hands.
[02:10:56]  With his hand, yeah, the one cop.
[02:10:58]  And he kept saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe.
[02:11:01]  It just kept choking him while somebody was filming it on the cell phone.
[02:11:06]  It choked the life right out of him, right on camera.
[02:11:08]  All right?
[02:11:10]  And the cops got acquitted.
[02:11:13]  Okay?
[02:11:15]  Should Eric Garner have been arrested?
[02:11:19]  Sure.
[02:11:20]  He's breaking the law.
[02:11:21]  Right.
[02:11:21]  You know, give him a citation or arrest him, whatever.
[02:11:24]  All right?
[02:11:25]  And then let the court decide what the punishment should be.
[02:11:28]  Not the cops.
[02:11:30]  George Floyd.
[02:11:32]  Well, Eric Garner was not committing a violent crime.
[02:11:36]  He was breaking the law, yes, but it was not a violent crime.
[02:11:40]  You understand?
[02:11:41]  It wasn't like shooting anybody or raping anybody.
[02:11:43]  Right.
[02:11:44]  Right?
[02:11:44]  It was a nonviolent crime, just selling loose cigarettes.
[02:11:47]  Right.
[02:11:47]  All right?
[02:11:48]  Sort of like stealing a newspaper out of the newspaper box.
[02:11:51]  It's a nonviolent crime.
[02:11:52]  Okay.
[02:11:54]  George Floyd.
[02:11:55]  He is accused of allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill.
[02:12:02]  We will never know if that's what he was doing or not because he never had his day in court.
[02:12:11]  Did he know that he had a fake 20?
[02:12:14]  It's the clerk's job who called the police.
[02:12:17]  He did the right thing the clerk did to look at the money and recognize something that's counterfeit.
[02:12:23]  Now, we never saw the $20 bill, so we don't know if the clerk made a mistake or didn't make a mistake.
[02:12:27]  But in any event, the clerk thought this $20 bill looked odd, like it was counterfeit.
[02:12:32]  So he did the right thing.
[02:12:34]  He called the police.
[02:12:35]  All right.
[02:12:36]  The police came and killed George Floyd for passing a $20 bill.
[02:12:44]  If let's say the $20 bill was fake.
[02:12:47]  All right.
[02:12:47]  Let's say it was fake.
[02:12:49]  The question then becomes, did George Floyd know he had a fake $20 bill on him?
[02:12:56]  We don't know that.
[02:12:57]  Okay.
[02:12:58]  He could have.
[02:12:59]  Look here.
[02:13:01]  Here's my wallet.
[02:13:05]  I got some money here.
[02:13:07]  Here's a 50.
[02:13:08]  Here's a 100.
[02:13:11]  Here's some 20s.
[02:13:12]  Right.
[02:13:12]  All right.
[02:13:13]  I don't know if this is a fake 20 or not.
[02:13:15]  Okay, if I go to 7-Eleven and let's say I don't have this money, all I got is a hundred dollar bill here.
[02:13:21]  Right.
[02:13:22]  And I buy some whatever.
[02:13:24]  When I get my change, I'm going to have some 20s, right?
[02:13:27]  Right.
[02:13:27]  Out of this hundred.
[02:13:28]  Of course.
[02:13:29]  I'm going to put it in my wallet.
[02:13:31]  I don't know if one of those 20s is a fake or not.
[02:13:34]  So then a couple of days later, I go to another store and I give the clerk, he goes, ooh, this is a fake.
[02:13:39]  I'm going to call the cops.
[02:13:41]  Okay.
[02:13:41]  Now, if I knew it was a fake and I'm doing it, yeah, I'm wrong.
[02:13:45]  But if I don't know, You know, it's not my job to know what to look for on a $20 bill to know if it's fake or not.
[02:13:53]  All right.
[02:13:53]  But it is a clerk's job.
[02:13:55]  So he did the right thing if he thought it was fake.
[02:13:58]  But the court would have determined if I was doing this intentionally or did I really not know?
[02:14:04]  And I'm and I'm passing the $20 bill.
[02:14:06]  Right.
[02:14:07]  Just like I don't know if anything in here is fake.
[02:14:09]  That $100 bill might be fake as far as I know.
[02:14:12]  Okay.
[02:14:13]  That's why, you know, when you go to the store, you know, they pulled it up to the light and they put a mark on it or something.
[02:14:18]  Right.
[02:14:18]  I don't do that with my money.
[02:14:19]  Right.
[02:14:20]  I don't know what to look for.
[02:14:21]  Okay, did George Floyd actually know that he had a fake $20 bill?
[02:14:25]  We don't know that.
[02:14:27]  We will never know that because he's dead.
[02:14:31]  We could have given him a polygraph test.
[02:14:33]  Did you know that that money was fake?
[02:14:36]  Or we could have determined that in court.
[02:14:41]  But he never got that chance.
[02:14:43]  What he did was he committed, if that thing was fake, it was a nonviolent crime.
[02:14:51]  He did not deserve to die for that.
[02:14:53]  He should have been cited or arrested or whatever and then let the court determine.
[02:14:59]  Did he know that he was making a mistake?
[02:15:03]  Or was he doing this intentionally trying to get away with laundering money or something?
[02:15:08]  Right.
[02:15:09]  But they killed him for a nonviolent crime that we will never know what he knew.
[02:15:15]  But yet, these nonviolent crimes send black men to their graves.
[02:15:22]  But somebody who walks into a black church. armed to the teeth and murders nine black people conducting Bible study gets to go to Burger King.
[02:15:33]  That's why things like Black Lives Matter exist.
[02:15:37]  So everybody can see the difference.
[02:15:39]  Put the national spotlight on that.
[02:15:41]  Oh, you sell loose cigarettes, you get choked to death.
[02:15:44]  You possibly pass a fake $20 bill, you get choked to death.
[02:15:49]  You hold your wallet up in the air, you get shot because the cop thinks it's a gun.
[02:15:54]  But you kill nine black people, And you tell the cops you're hungry, they take you to Burger King.
[02:16:01]  You know, that's what we see as black people.
[02:16:05]  That's why Black Lives Matter is created.
[02:16:08]  Now, my problem, which is a great idea, my problem with Black Lives Matter is they should have centralized.
[02:16:16]  They are decentralized.
[02:16:18]  There is no central Black Lives Matter.
[02:16:21]  You called it right.
[02:16:22]  It is a movement.
[02:16:23]  It's not an organization.
[02:16:24]  An organization you pay your dues to, you become a member, et cetera, et cetera, right?
[02:16:28]  Have meetings.
[02:16:31]  Black Lives Matter is a decentralized movement.
[02:16:36]  There is no one president.
[02:16:38]  There are no chapters of Black Lives Matter.
[02:16:40]  There are factions.
[02:16:42]  Chapters all belong to the same headquarters.
[02:16:44]  Okay.
[02:16:45]  Okay.
[02:16:45]  Like, for example, you take the NAACP, the Boy Scouts of America, the Red Cross.
[02:16:53]  These are all centralized organizations where there's one president, there's a headquarters, and policy is created at headquarters and disseminated to all the chapters all over the country.
[02:17:05]  So every chapter is on the same page, right?
[02:17:09]  You have policy.
[02:17:10]  Everybody adheres to that policy.
[02:17:13]  Black Lives Matter is not like that.
[02:17:15]  There is no headquarters, one president.
[02:17:18]  There are all these different factions because the founders did not want to centralize.
[02:17:23]  They wanted it to be organic.
[02:17:25]  They didn't even trademark the name.
[02:17:27]  So they don't have any ownership of the name Black Lives Matter.
[02:17:31]  You can walk out right now and start your own Black Lives Matter.
[02:17:35]  So could I. All right?
[02:17:37]  And you have certain factions that consist of black supremacists.
[02:17:43]  You have certain factions that you got blacks and whites working together.
[02:17:46]  You got some that have more white people than black people in the thing called Black Lives Matter.
[02:17:52]  Some factions, they want to just go out there and tear stuff down and spray graffiti all over the place, BLM.
[02:17:59]  And then the others who want to sit down with the state legislature and try to work things out and say, hey, look, we need a bill to pass this and this, and we want to work this out.
[02:18:09]  So you got different ideas going around.
[02:18:12]  Nobody's on the same page.
[02:18:13]  And then here's what happens with the media.
[02:18:16]  Let's say we're here in Seminole.
[02:18:20]  So let's say you have your Black Lives Matter chapter and you're doing things the good way.
[02:18:28]  You're sitting down with your county legislature trying to get some bills passed and amend some laws that will give equity to more people, all right, which is good.
[02:18:39]  But then the Largo chapter or faction of Black Lives Matter, they're tearing up stuff, bashing up stuff and putting graffiti all over the place.
[02:18:48]  The media is going to cover that and they're not going to say the Largo chapter of Black Lives Matter is doing blah, blah, blah.
[02:18:57]  They're going to say Black Lives Matter.
[02:19:00]  So it paints a broad brush across all the factions rather than distinguish each one.
[02:19:07]  You see what I'm saying?
[02:19:08]  Definitely.
[02:19:09]  So we need more cohesion.
[02:19:12]  And when you have all these different factions and each faction has its own little leader and each little leader has different ideas.
[02:19:19]  It's like having too many chefs in the kitchen trying to fix the same recipe.
[02:19:23]  It doesn't work.
[02:19:24]  Black Lives Matter is not saying, they try to accuse it of meaning only black lives matter.
[02:19:31]  No.
[02:19:33]  You say black lives matter, and they say no, all lives matter.
[02:19:38]  Well, yes, all lives do matter, but why do black lives matter less?
[02:19:45]  And here's the interesting thing.
[02:19:52]  They want to criticize Black Lives Matter, the saying, because they feel it does not include white lives, which is why they come back with all lives matter, meaning my life matters too.
[02:20:08]  Yes, your life does matter too, but they say that they don't want to say Black Lives Matter because it doesn't include white lives.
[02:20:16]  So they say all lives matter.
[02:20:19]  So you support All Lives Matter?
[02:20:21]  Yeah, absolutely.
[02:20:23]  You support Black Lives Matter?
[02:20:24]  No.
[02:20:25]  Why?
[02:20:26]  Because it does not include white lives.
[02:20:28]  Okay, so do you support Blue Lives Matter?
[02:20:32]  Well, yeah, of course.
[02:20:33]  Back to Blue, yeah.
[02:20:34]  Yeah.
[02:20:35]  Well, wait a minute.
[02:20:37]  How can you support Blue Lives Matter?
[02:20:39]  It doesn't say anything about white lives either.
[02:20:43]  So your complaint is that the same Black Lives Matter says nothing about white lives.
[02:20:50]  So, therefore, you don't support it.
[02:20:52]  But where does it say anything about white lives when it says blue lives matter?
[02:20:58]  What's the difference between black lives and blue lives?
[02:21:00]  Right.
[02:21:01]  Neither one of them mentions white lives.
[02:21:03]  So, how can you say you're going to support this one?
[02:21:06]  Yeah.
[02:21:06]  And I think that's the point of all of this, right?
[02:21:08]  I mean, that's the basic moral of your story is that there needs to be conversation.
[02:21:13]  There needs to be open discourse.

=== Blue Lives Matter Debate (02:31) ===

[02:21:15]  There needs to be the walls brought down.
[02:21:18]  And people need to be able to have this back and forth so they can eliminate their false beliefs or their beliefs that don't hold up to something that's better or something that's more true.
[02:21:30]  And I think that's also, you know, it goes right along with all the things that are happening in this country.
[02:21:35]  You know, unfortunately, some of the bad things that are happening, They're happening, but people are realizing that holy shit.
[02:21:42]  We need to do better than this because this is real and we need to do more better things to counteract this and make this place better.
[02:21:53]  Unfortunately, most Americans do not well, first of all, most Americans do not travel, right?
[02:22:04]  Okay, less than 50% of us even have passports, you know, and We are the laughing stock around the world.
[02:22:15]  We're always trying to tell other countries how to get along civilly within their own country or with the country that borders them.
[02:22:23]  Anytime we know some kind of war is about to break out within a country or between two countries, we're the first ones to intervene and say, hey, let's call a summit and bring the leaders together and have peace talks, all that kind of stuff.
[02:22:37]  But yet we don't apply these same things in our own backyard.
[02:22:41]  It's hypocritical.
[02:22:43]  And so.
[02:22:44]  I tell you what, like I said, I've been around the world.
[02:22:48]  And there was a time when we were the most revered nation on the face of this earth.
[02:22:55]  People said, oh man, he's an American.
[02:22:57]  They were happy to see you.
[02:22:59]  What's it like in America?
[02:23:00]  I always want to come to America, blah, blah, blah.
[02:23:02]  And now when I travel overseas, not so much during lockdown, of course, but before that, I play festivals in France and Switzerland and Italy and different places.
[02:23:10]  People are like, what's wrong with your president?
[02:23:13]  I'm serious.
[02:23:14]  They think he's crazy.
[02:23:15]  Well, he is.
[02:23:17]  But we are the laughingstock.
[02:23:19]  You know, they don't respect us anymore.
[02:23:22]  And why should they?
[02:23:25]  And it's almost as though we don't care what anybody else around the world thinks.
[02:23:31]  It's as though we are the nucleus of the world.
[02:23:33]  We're not.
[02:23:35]  We're not.
[02:23:36]  We may be one of the most powerful nations in the world, but we're also the laughing stock of the world.
[02:23:42]  Yeah.
[02:23:43]  We're a giant reality TV show on the map of the world.

=== New Book in Editing (01:52) ===

[02:23:47]  Yeah.
[02:23:47]  Now, you have a book, right?
[02:23:49]  I have a book called Clandestine Relationships, spelled with a K.
[02:23:53]  Now let's see.
[02:23:54]  And it's out of print now.
[02:23:55]  It came out in 1997-98.
[02:23:58]  And I took it out of print in 2014.
[02:24:03]  I just finished writing a second book.
[02:24:06]  And the second book is called The Klan Whisperer.
[02:24:08]  It's going through the editing process right now.
[02:24:10]  So it'll be out next year.
[02:24:12]  And it will have all the stories from the first book, plus updates and new stories.
[02:24:17]  Because when the first book came out, we didn't have a black president.
[02:24:23]  We didn't have Charlottesville.
[02:24:25]  We didn't have Donald Trump.
[02:24:26]  We didn't have as much immigration as we have now.
[02:24:30]  So I want to update everything.
[02:24:33]  That's amazing.
[02:24:34]  Your story, I mean, the things that you've experienced, the story, the lessons that you've learned, that you've been able to teach and bring around the world, they're so profound and they're so relevant and meaningful, especially in today's world.
[02:24:48]  Where can people go online and find you and learn more about what you're doing?
[02:24:53]  Sure.
[02:24:54]  And listen to more of your talks and even find your book.
[02:24:58]  Yeah, okay.
[02:24:59]  They can go to my website, daraldavis.com, D-A-R-A-Y-L, only one R, daraldavis.com.
[02:25:08]  They can also check out some of my TED Talks on YouTube and the Joe Rogan podcast that I did.
[02:25:16]  I also have a podcast.
[02:25:18]  It's called, and you can find it on all your favorite podcast places, called Changing Minds with Darrell Davis.
[02:25:25]  You've got to put in the with Darrell Davis because apparently Changing Minds is a very popular name.
[02:25:30]  So a lot of people have their own podcast called Changing Minds.
[02:25:34]  Thank you so much, Jill, for being here.
[02:25:36]  Thank you for having me.
[02:25:36]  I appreciate it.
[02:25:37]  Let's do it again sometime.
[02:25:38]  Absolutely.
[02:25:39]  We will.