Dr. Carol Swain recounts her rise from a rural Virginia shack to an Ivy League scholar, critiquing modern academia's embrace of "cultural Marxism" and critical theory which she argues suppress free speech. She defends her 2002 book on white nationalism against accusations of extremism while condemning inconsistent standards regarding identity fraud and the treatment of conservative figures like Steve King. Swain highlights failures in judicial due process during the Kavanaugh hearings, warns of national security risks from lax FDA drug inspections, and calls for a return to Judeo-Christian values to counter secularism's erosion of American principles. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, a one-on-one on stage 19 with an amazing person.
This woman was born and raised in abject poverty in rural Virginia.
She is the second of 12 that were crowded into a shack without any running water.
Her earliest views of the world were pretty hopeless and desperate.
But even as a little black girl in Virginia, she knew she had a mission.
Her story is one of the most fascinating American success stories that I have heard.
Through hard work, she earned degree after degree after degree from Yale, the University of North Carolina, and she elevated herself in the world.
She became a professor at Princeton University, Duke Vanderbilt, the girl in the shack.
She's a lifetime member of the James Madison Society.
That's an international community of scholars affiliated with the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
She has won so many different awards and honors and degrees.
She's been name-dropped by the Supreme Court two times, once by Justice Anthony Kennedy and again by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
She has authored or edited nine different books.
She's always working on something.
She's just started a brand new podcast and she has a new book coming out.
Her book, The New White Nationalism, its Challenge to Integration, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The Rebel's Purpose00:15:30
That's cool, but what's really amazing is it came out in the early 2000s and it pretty much predicted what we're going through now.
Our guest, our American success story, is a natural-born rebel and about as American as it gets.
It is an honor to sit with you.
I feel like I'm talking to an American icon and somebody who perhaps knows America from so many different sides that most people don't know.
I mean, you went from poverty to Ivy League professor.
And I'm not sure which one was worse.
But you have lived the dream.
Can we start with your childhood?
I have lived the American dream.
I was born into a family.
My mother had a 10th grade education.
My father, third grade.
And they were separated and divorced.
I don't remember them living together.
I had a stepfather and my family grew to 12 children, five girls and seven boys.
And for a while, we lived in a two-room shack.
We were poorer than the other poor people around us.
What was your outlook on life then?
I was always the odd one.
And as a child, I remember feeling like a participant observer.
Like I was always watching my family and I was very shy.
And my mother said I would be hiding behind furniture in the corner, watching everyone, peering out.
And it took me many, many years to get over my shyness.
In fact, I became a university professor during the time I was at Princeton.
I was still quite shy.
And then I would try to write out everything I was going to say for class and try to read it.
And so you can imagine what that was like.
So you were, what about your other 11 siblings?
Are any of them as successful like you?
Well, not in the same way.
Right.
We all dropped out of school after the eighth grade.
No one among my siblings, all of us.
I mean, if you reached eighth grade, I reached the eighth grade.
I started the ninth.
And it was poverty that caused us to drop out.
Because you had to go work?
I got married at 16.
Wow.
And it wasn't that uncommon in the South.
And there are parts of my story that I probably don't want to get into because there was a period, but if you maybe I can get into it.
There was a period in my early teens when I studied with Jehovah's Witnesses and they were saying the world would come to an end in 1975.
Wow.
And I believed them.
Really?
And I can't say that that wasn't a factor in my decision to get married at 16 because I was thinking that I wouldn't have, well, I wouldn't have time to grow up and have children.
But it was the poverty at home that made me feel like I needed to get out of that situation.
And marriage was the only way I saw out.
And I believed at the time, there were lots of things I believed that were not true.
I believed that you had to be rich to go to college.
I did not understand scholarships.
I did not understand that, you know, by being smart.
And if you studied and you applied yourself, you'd be able to get a scholarship.
And when I say you would understand the part maybe about me believing that Jehovah's Witnesses, I know that, you know, that you're a spiritual person.
And so I've always been spiritual in some sense.
And I've always felt that there was something I was supposed to do.
Even as a child, with my being different, I had a sense of urgency.
And as a young adult, I'd married, I had my children, never knew I would go to college.
I had that unease because I've always felt that there was something I was supposed to do.
I went through a period of suicide gestures.
I take bottles of pills and always I was very successful at getting rescued.
And at one point, I told a medical doctor that I was afraid that he would think I was too stupid to kill myself.
And so how many failures can you have, right?
And so I made sure that he knew that if I was really trying, I could.
They call those suicide gestures.
Yes.
So how did you go from how did you go from dropout, married at 16, to college professor, Princeton, Yale?
First of all, you know, I don't know, you know, who will hear or see this podcast, but I do know that I felt trapped.
I felt that things were very hopeless.
And I had no clue that there was a future awaiting me, that I would go to college, that I would have this success that I have now, that I would overcome my shyness.
And so I think that people should be encouraged, you know, when they're struggling because they don't have a clue as to what God may do in their lives and through them.
So that's part of the message.
Wait, wait, wait, let me stop here for a second.
When I was young, I had a God experience.
I was about eight.
And I felt sure that my life had a purpose.
I just knew it.
And that both blessed me and vexed me.
It gave me some arrogance younger and made me more sure of myself than I should have been.
And it has blessed me because I felt like you do, a sense of urgency.
There's something that I must do.
Well, I mean, I can say that there were times that I felt special, but I really didn't understand it.
And then when I started college and I took my psychology class, I read about delusions of grandeur as a psychological condition.
And I diagnosed myself as someone that could be leaning in that direction.
And so, but I know I never fit, and I always felt that sense of urgency.
And I've always been able to look at the world and see things that other people couldn't see.
And so we're kindred spirits in that way, I think.
And when I...
But is that what kind of pushed you the extra?
No.
No, and I can tell you that I hung out with Jehovah's Witnesses in my teens.
And by the time I was 20, I left them completely and I left religion completely.
I would not have anything to do with organized religion.
But.
Just so people know, we prayed before we went on the air.
You're a deeply religious woman.
Yes.
And is it okay to say we prayed in Jesus' name?
Yes, it is.
It's mine.
I can tell you that by the time I was in my late teens, early 20s, I was really embarrassed because I did not have a high school diploma.
And I didn't even know about the GED program.
And back then, when you had a child, you had to put down the highest age the mother completed in school.
And I think for the first child, I may have put the ninth or tenth.
I was lying.
And so for the second child, I probably put the 11th, but I was making up stuff because I was so embarrassed.
And around the time I was 19, I saw an article about the high school equivalency program, GED, that I could get a high school equivalency.
And when I checked on the program, I learned that in Virginia, you had to wait until your high school class would have graduated or whatever it was, I had to wait until I was 20 or it was probably 20.
And I got the high school equivalency.
But the turning point in my life, there were two people.
One was a medical doctor that I looked up and contacted about two years ago.
And it turns out that he was 25 and I was, you know, 20 or late teens and 20 when he was my doctor.
And I was doing the suicide gestures and I had, you know, taken a bottle of pills.
And I remember him telling me that I was attractive, that I was intelligent, I could do more of my life.
And I was stunned because no one had told me that I was attractive.
My siblings call me fisheyes and Frankenstein because I have a scar here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so I always had a beautiful woman.
Well, thank you.
But I had that complex because I saw myself through the eyes of my siblings.
And they had plenty of names.
But that medical doctor, and he was white, he said that to me.
And then I remembered that there was a time when I was smart.
In school, I was smart.
Like we missed lots of days of school.
One year, my siblings and I missed 80 of 180 days.
And the reason we missed so many days is that we lived out in the country.
We did not have snowshoes.
We did not have warm coats.
And so if the weather was too cold or if it snowed and the snow was deep, we stayed home till the snow melted.
Wow.
And there were some winters when there was a lot of snow on the ground.
But whenever we showed up at school, my older sister and I, we would make A's or B's and we weren't there.
You know, it was like we could just walk in after having missed a lot of school and still do really well.
And so I knew I was smart and that and I got attention, you know, from the teachers because I was smart.
So it was the doctor that told you that you could have better than this.
You said there were.
He said I was intelligent.
I was attractive.
I could do it more with my life.
In 1975, that was the world, that was the year Jehovah's Witnesses said the world would end.
And life as I knew it ended in 1975.
So they were right.
My world ended in 1975.
At that time, I had three children.
And I have two sons and I had a daughter.
My daughter died of a crib death.
I got a high school equivalency.
I got my high school equivalency.
I took a job outside the home.
I filed for divorce and I left Jehovah's Witnesses.
I think I left them the year before, but all of that happened.
And so life as I knew it changed.
And I was working in a garment factory.
And that year, I believe I had seven jobs.
They were hiring that year.
Wow.
They were dead-end jobs, you know, like selling Avon, You know, working fast food for half a day, working.
I worked the longest in the garment factory, but working in a nursing home.
And in that nursing home, there was an African orderly from Sierra Leone.
And he said, I go to college with a lot of people.
They're not as smart as you are.
You ought to go to college.
And then I checked and learned that I could go to college with a high school equivalency.
And I started, I enrolled in Virginia Western Community College.
I wanted to do commercial art.
I was told to be practical.
And so I took business and I struggled through and got my first degree in business.
And to show you the hand of God, I was a work study student and working 10 hours a week in the library.
The regular employees, a lot of times, they would not show up.
And so there would be a crisis.
Who's going to work at night?
I would always say yes.
And they eventually, not long after I started, created a full-time job for me, 40 hours a week, nights and weekends.
And I used that job.
I graduated within the two years to get my degree in business.
And I struggled with math and things that if you don't show up in school, you know, you just can't wing it because of the concepts.
But I got my two-year degree.
I started applying for jobs in business and was told I needed a four-year degree.
And then I did what any bright person would have done.
I got the college catalog of the nearest four-year school, which was Ronald College in Salem, Virginia.
I went through the catalog looking for all the fields that had the least amount of math.
And I found criminal justice.
And so I got my bachelor's degree in criminal justice, but I also made a decision.
And I made the decision that I was going to graduate with honors.
I had met the dean's list a couple of times at the community college because when I first started, I was making C's and I was not putting forth a lot of effort.
Anything that didn't involve math, it was easy for me.
And so I could make a C without effort.
Once I started putting in effort, then I was making, you know, A's and B's and I was gaining confidence.
But when I was applying for jobs in business, I realized I didn't have much to put in where they had places for awards and accolades.
Earning Academic Honors00:04:54
I did not have any data for those places in the application.
So I was thinking in terms of a good job.
I wanted a good job and I thought I needed stuff to put on that application.
So I checked out books on how to make A's in college, how to take essay exams, how to take objective tests, and I applied those principles.
And my first semester at the four-year college, I had a 3.7 average.
When I graduated, by then I'd taken my math and sciences.
I had a 3.5 over that.
And I graduated magna cum laude, working 40 hours a week, nights and weekends in the community college library.
Wow.
And how much debt did you have?
When I graduated with my PhD, I had $25,000 worth of debt.
And I actually started a scholarship at Roanoke College where I got my bachelor's degree.
And it's called the Constance J. Hamler Scholarship.
And Constance J. Hamler was one of my teachers at the community college.
She was black.
And she was married to one of the town morticians, the best black mortician.
So she was the wealthiest person I knew, right?
And she passed away.
She died of cancer.
And so the scholarship is named after her.
But when I started Roanoke College, I had hoped to get an academic scholarship.
And this was the early 80s, 1980.
And affirmative action had teeth then.
I mean, at least I thought it did.
And so I thought, you know, by being a high achieving black student that I could get an academic scholarship.
And I remember talking with the financial aid office before I started because I didn't want to keep borrowing money.
I was working full time, so I was not poor.
They gave me some scholarship help, but it was not enough.
I had to borrow part of the money.
So as I remember the conversation, the financial aid officer told me that if I had a certain GPA that I could get a scholarship.
Well, then I had a 3.7 after the first semester.
So I showed up, you know, asking for a scholarship.
And I was told that the money was gone.
And then the next year I showed up.
And I can't remember what I was told, but family, someone said, no blacks have ever contributed money to Roanoke College and some of the money has restrictions.
And at that point, I said, well, I mean, this is, they were just being honest.
And at that time, there was probably 20 blacks, and most of them were on the basketball team or sports team.
At that time, I said to myself, someday I'm going to start a scholarship at Roanoke College.
But I was thinking down the road, you know, someday I would have money.
I was going to start this scholarship.
Well, in the middle of the night, it occurred to me how I could do it.
And so I thought about Constance Hamler and starting a scholarship in her honor.
And I researched it.
I was working at the library, you know, how to do a proposal.
So I did a proposal to start the scholarship.
I went to her witterer, and he was excited about it.
Then I went to the president of Roanoke College and told him that I'd spoken with Mr. Hamler.
Mr. Hamler would like to have a scholarship at Roanoke College in honor of his deceased wife.
And the president, Norm Fentel, says, I know the FinTels.
I love the Fentales.
That's a brilliant idea.
He called in his development people and he said, I like this idea, make it happen.
They were quite upset because they had a capital campaign and they did not think that they would be able to raise much money for the scholarship.
And that was a distraction.
I believe we raised maybe 100,000.
I don't know if we raised $100,000 the first month, but all I know is the scholarship is endowed.
The last time I checked, it had over $500,000 in the endowment.
And it supports seven, eight black minority students because it's open to all minority students a year.
They get $2,000 or $3,000.
It was meant to be an academic scholarship, and that was my whole purpose: to have an academic scholarship for minorities.
Someone made the comment that they didn't want a scholarship that would never be awarded.
And it became a need-based scholarship, which it is now.
An Endowed Legacy00:06:54
But that I've always gone places, seen something that needed to be done, waited for other people to do it, and then had to step in because no one was doing the thing.
So you left college?
You already left college.
Yeah, I know.
You never did.
But you could not have been, you were already living a life you couldn't have imagined five years before, right?
At which stage?
You're graduating summa cunladi and magna.
But here's what happened.
Here's the other part: my talent is art.
Like I'm a right-brain person in a left-brain world, and I wanted to do art.
And I would say that people steered me, like I was steered into being practical.
So I did business.
I chose criminal justice because it had the least amount of math, and I knew that I would be good at anything that didn't have a lot of math.
When I was graduating with my four-year degree, I knew I did not want a criminal justice career.
So I thought I would work for the government.
And so I would get a master's degree and I would become a civil servant.
And while I was in graduate school, the professors urged me to apply for a PhD program to become a professor.
I did not want that.
I kept applying for jobs.
I could not get any of the jobs that I applied for, even though I was well known in the city.
I had worked with business people on the scholarship committee.
I could not get a job.
And it was the 1980s.
So there was affirmative action.
I was an honor student.
And I could not get a job.
So there I see the hand of God that I was sort of steered.
I applied to graduate school because I couldn't get a job.
And I got admitted to Duke and the University of North Carolina.
No, I didn't get it.
I did not get admitted to Duke.
I applied to Duke and the University of North Carolina.
And at Duke, the graduate director called me and told me that Duke was a rich white boy's school and that I would be happier at Carolina.
And so at that point, I made them give me back my application fee, which they did.
And I went to Carolina where I was happier.
Wow.
So why?
Why is it, Carol, that, and we'll continue with the story here in a second, but why is it that you have come from real poverty, real struggle, doors shut in your face?
You're happy.
Why are so many people not willing to look at your story and say, I think I can do that too?
Why are so many people of all races so miserable about I can't make it in this?
The world's against me.
Stories like mine don't get told often enough to the people that need to hear it.
And so even this podcast, the people that maybe could be encouraged by it, a lot of them won't hear, you know, see this or hear it.
And when I think about why was I different, I've always believed in the American dream.
And so even though— Even when you're living in a shack.
I mean, my mother had that Protestant work ethic.
She was a stay-at-home mother in an abusive situation with an alcoholic husband, and she had her own struggles.
But she would not take, she would not sign us up for free books or for free lunches because there was like welfare.
She would not take it then.
She would take it later.
I mean, a few years later, she moved to the city and she would take it.
But at that particular time, you know, we were not taking welfare.
So it meant when I was going to school, I would have to do my lessons before I left school because I couldn't, didn't have the books.
So I think that America is and has always been a land of tremendous opportunity.
And what makes me different from a lot of the young people that I see and maybe some of the older people is that I lived, I guess, so isolated that I didn't get all those messages that the world was stacked against me because of my color or because of my race or because of my poverty.
I always believed that if I worked hard enough, I could be successful.
And when I started Roanoke College, my advisor, his name is Dr. Charles Hill, was a conservative.
And the black students met me.
They immediately gave me the list of all the racist professors not to take.
Dr. Hill was on the list of professors not to take because they were racist.
But I've always done the opposite of what everyone else did.
And so my attitude was, yeah, I'll show him.
So I signed up for his class, met a B plus in the first class.
He told me I almost met an A. Internally, I thought, yeah, he just didn't want to give me an A the first time.
I took several classes with him, and he was a conservative.
So I read Thomas Sowell, Glenn Lowry, Edward Banfield, Milton Friedman.
I was exposed to conservative thought.
And I don't know if I would have been Marxist had I been exposed to Marxist thought.
But it turned out I ended up with a professor that was conservative.
And I remember him telling me at some point, he said, you know, you're a Republican, don't you?
And, you know, like, you know, it took me 40 years later to become one.
But I think that it mattered, you know, that to be exposed to the ideas that I was exposed to.
But I had something going in because I had that attitude is whatever someone told me I couldn't do, I was going to show them I could.
And today, I wish I was more like that person that I was when I was younger because now I can see all the obstacles.
First of all, let me just say this.
And I hope you take this in the spirit that it's intended, and I think you will.
I put you in the category of Thomas Sowell.
I think you are one of the true remarkable intellectual leaders of our time.
You were just, I hope you take that in the right way.
I thought you were going to tell me I was a credit to my race.
Wisdom in Postmodernity00:03:07
No, no.
I'm joking.
You know, you're a fine black person.
No, I just, Thomas Sowell is just so clear and soft-spoken and just, he's just clear.
I admire him enormously.
Me too.
And Walter Williams.
Walter Williams has been very supportive of me.
Thomas Sowell, I've not been able to reach him.
I've never met him.
Really?
I've written to him, but I've never met him.
Really?
Maybe you can arrange a meeting.
But he's never talked to me either.
I'm not smart enough.
I'm not smart enough.
Okay.
Here's what I have.
I'm not brilliant.
I have common sense.
And I think that common sense is in such short supply these days that it will take you far.
And then I had, you know, I just believed in America.
I have a new understanding in the last 10 years of the scripture that the, I can't remember the exact word now.
I can't think of it.
But basically that the foolish will confound the wise because they think they're wise.
It's the common sense.
It's the ones that everyone is saying, well, you're an idiot.
Right now, the ones who are wise, they're just off the farm.
They really are.
They're just crazy.
Right.
And it is the people that they mark as foolish that are the ones going, it can't be just me, right?
Well, I mean, the scripture, I think, I should be able to quote this scripture.
I know, I'm ashamed of myself, too.
We need a Bible in here.
I think it's 1 Corinthians 26 through 29.
It's like one of the scriptures I got, the Lord gave me after I had my conversion experience.
And it has to do with, you know, God taking the lowly things to confound the wise, the weak things to confound the mighty, the things that despise.
And so that, you know, no one would glory in who they are.
I should be able to paraphrase that better too.
But yeah, Corinthians talks a lot about the foolishness of the wise.
And they are foolish.
I mean, this whole thing about the bathrooms and we don't, all of a sudden, you know, science doesn't matter.
There's just so many things that are true that all of a sudden, you know, that with the, your mind can go so far out there that you can't recognize truth, even when it's right in front of you, even the truth of who you are.
When did we, because we crossed a bridge, we crossed the Rubicon.
At some point, we crossed that bridge and burned it behind us, it seems.
Truth vs Political Correctness00:05:12
At what point did you say it's official?
We have entered the postmodern world.
We've entered a world where science doesn't matter anymore.
I think when they started all the, to me, nonsense about gender pronouns, and I can say that in academia, as a student and even as a professor at Princeton and part of my time at Vanderbilt, I was not interested in critical theory and deconstructionism and all of that stuff, the cultural Marxism.
I was not interested in it.
I should have been.
And I regret because I've had to educate myself on my own about things that matter now.
But what I see is that the political left, that they had a they were in for a long-term strategy, and they're much more persistent than conservatives.
And so that they so clearly infiltrated organizations, like professional organizations, institutions, you know, the news media.
Board of directors.
You just need a few people to work their way to the top.
And so they were able to implement all of those changes.
So it started decades ago.
And I think, you know, that's Herbert McCusa, Saul Alinsky, that they were the masterminds behind it.
But they have been so successful with their disciples that today at many universities, professors don't say I'm Marxist.
They don't, you know, label themselves, but their ideas run the institution.
And that's why the political correctness has reached the point where it is.
And you have people that have been educated in law schools that say that due process, presumption of innocence, that those things are no longer relevant, that free speech doesn't apply to everyone, only people that have the right ideas.
I guess we should have seen it coming.
But it seems to have happened suddenly.
I think when President Obama was elected, that a lot of the people that shared those leftist ideas, you know, they were able to rise in government and foster a climate where things were such that it was a snowball effect.
But I think that his election— Still under cover in many ways while he was in the presidency.
But after eight years, the masks have all come off.
I mean, now people don't have a problem saying I'm a socialist.
When I said the president has said that he thinks the Constitution should be reversed, that it should be a guarantee of certain things the government must do, not a guarantee of the things that they will not do.
He himself admits that he was hanging around Marxists, that he has Marxist and socialist friends.
He has Marxists in his own cabinet or in his own administration, and I was called a racist.
Well, also, do you remember, was his name, John Holdren?
Yeah, John Holdren, yeah.
The science czar.
I mean, that he co-authored a book that talked about putting sterilants in drinking water.
Yeah, and sterilizing people for population control.
There were some other extreme things that were in that document.
But if you actually mentioned any of that, all of a sudden you were a conspiracy theorist.
Correct.
Yeah, someday, Glenn, you'll be known as a great prophet.
I actually hope not because those are always killed.
Well, they are.
They die for the greater cause, right?
But it's amazing because I said at the time at some point they want to embrace it.
They want to say, yeah, I am a Marxist because your capitalist ideas don't work.
Right.
And they want to.
And I said, they're going to come a time where they're just going to take the mask off and say, yeah, I'm a Marxist.
I'm a socialist.
And we're there now.
We are there.
And there was a survey maybe three or four years ago that showed like maybe 30% of American students thought that socialism was a good idea.
Well, mostly they don't understand socialism.
And in a course that I took that looked at the impact of communism on American political thought, there were a few students that argued that it works.
It just hasn't been done right.
And so somehow they think that there's a way to do it, that it will be successful, even though throughout history it's never been successful.
That's what the young people believe.
And part of the problem is that they're not being fully educated on the Constitution or history.
At all.
No, they're not.
At all.
I mean, I look at the problems.
One Class at Yale00:02:02
And look, I grew up a dummy.
I didn't, I went back to college when I was 30.
I skated through high school.
I never studied.
And I thought I was a bad student.
When I got my transcript back, I was an A student, but I was just not interested at all.
And so I went back to school what little I could afford.
I took one class one semester.
That's all I could afford.
The professor, Wayne Meeks at Yale University, said to me, he asked me out for lunch because I was arguing with him because I wanted to know why he was telling me not to read the things I was reading.
He said, read these things.
And I'm so much like you.
What were you reading?
I was reading I was reading Dominic Crossan.
Okay, you know who Dominic Crossan is?
Yeah.
Okay.
So I was reading Dominic Crossing and didn't buy into any of it, but I was reading it because I was reading all these people who disagreed with each other.
Right.
And he said, don't read.
He'll screw you up.
And I said, he said, read this.
So I came back the next week and I had read what he told me to.
And I raised my hand and I asked the same question.
And he said, Mr. Beck, didn't I tell you not to read Dominic Crossan?
I said, yeah.
But I don't care what you tell me not to read.
I read what you read and we can talk about that.
I want to know why is he wrong?
Why do you think he's wrong?
He said, I'll see you after lunch.
I'll see you after school, after class.
Where were you in school?
Where did you go to college?
Yale.
Yale, one class.
Okay.
One class.
That's all I could have.
I got a divorce.
I filed for divorce the first day of college, so I had no more money left.
And I could only afford one class.
And I just wanted to go for self-education.
But anyway, he reached across the table and he said, you know you belong here.
All I needed was what you needed.
Challenging the Alt-Right00:15:02
You just need somebody to say, you can do it.
You're smart enough.
You're good.
And it seems like all.
That's what he said to you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because he said, who are you reading?
And I said, oh, I've just, I'm so lost.
I'm, you know, reading this and I'm reading that.
And I just don't know.
And he said, who's guiding you through that?
And I said, nobody.
I'm just going to the library in the bookstore.
He said, nobody does that by themselves, you know, and he could see that I was just a journey.
It is.
And it's a good journey.
Right.
But you need somebody in your life like you've had to say, you're smart enough.
You can do it.
And it seems as though all of society, all of the university experience from the outside seems as though it's now saying the opposite.
You can't make it.
You can't get past these hurdles.
No, it's telling that to certain groups of people, you know, and what it's doing to people that are, you know, the ones they're training to be the future leaders is that they're bringing them in and telling them what to think.
They're not exposing them to divergent views where they can develop new ideas.
They come in and the university is trying to impose a preset group of ideas.
I have never seen, I would have never, you said to me 20 years ago, you know, they'll burn books in your lifetime here in America.
I would have said you are nuts.
Or pull down monuments.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're nuts.
We're there now.
So somebody who is who says freedom of speech, yeah, but there's a lot of dangerous speech out there.
I defend free speech.
I do too.
I read everything and I will decide.
And I like to read both sides.
If I'm convinced of something, I want to read the other side.
Explain why it's not just freedom of speech, it's freedom of thought, it's freedom of questioning.
Why is that important?
Well, I mean, why is freedom of thought and freedom of questioning important?
I just think that for a person to be able to develop critical thought and to come up with new ideas and inventions, you have to be exposed to ideas.
And if you're in a situation where you're not allowed to explore or to ask questions, like in college, students could get in trouble for asking the wrong question about, well, I mean, they just can.
And professors could get in trouble for researching the wrong ideas.
And I can tell you that 2002.
I don't know, 2002 was when my book, The New White Nationalism, was published.
And to get data for that book that I started in the late 1980s while I was at Princeton during the time I was getting ready to leave, I commissioned interviews of white leaders that were on the extreme to less extreme, but they were, I was interested in white nationalism, you know, white supremacy.
But I commissioned those interviews because I wanted to know how people developed the kinds of thoughts they did.
So I had a white interviewer interview people about their childhood.
And two of my interviewees were Jewish people with PhDs.
And then there was Jared Taylor, who graduated from Yale University and has a degree from the London School of Economics.
And these were very articulate people that were not like, you know, the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
And, you know, out of that study, that's why I called it the new white nationalism.
I saw the rise of the alt-right.
I was criticized and condemned for having them interviewed and not attacking them.
Like my interviewer asked them questions and we just recorded what they said.
We didn't attack them and argue with them and try to change their minds.
I wanted to know how they became who they are.
Isn't this what they were saying?
You were giving a form to people that didn't deserve to be heard.
This is the same thing that the FBI, you probably know this better than I do, that when they started psychological profiles, people said, you don't talk to these mass killers.
And they said, we have to talk to these mass killers.
We're not excusing them.
We have to know what they're thinking because we've never seen that before.
And so we went in, researchers went in and talked to them and there was this big debate.
We know how to put together psychological profiles because of that.
If we don't talk to people and stop shutting them up, you're never going to learn what the well of the poison is.
Well, I can tell you that part of the conclusion of my book was that white identity and white interests, I have a paragraph in the concluding chapter, would be the next phase of identity politics in America.
And it had to do with the grievance, you know, that the intellectuals felt, that they felt that white people were being discriminated against and that that was against the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act that Jared Taylor argues that white people need leaders like blacks and Hispanics to speak for their interests.
And with the Jewish interviewees, you know, they were pretty upset about affirmative action.
One of them has a PhD, you know, from Princeton and he could not get a decent job.
And so as white men that were intellectuals, you know, they had grievances over affirmative action.
And in that book, I identified some policy issues.
Immigration was one.
Racial preferences, concerns about crime were among the issues I identified that a lot of people had grievances about, but they were not being addressed in a way that was satisfying and was creating an opening for more extreme voices to step in there and speak because we weren't allowing the discussions to take place.
And my philosophy has always been what you don't know can hurt you.
And I would rather know who a person is and what they believe than have someone so intimidated that they're not going to open up.
They're not going to share their ideas.
I think that's far more dangerous when we have political leaders or leaders of institutions and we don't know who they are because they've learned how to conceal their ideas.
And it's dangerous to have a learning environment for students where they cannot ask innocent questions about the realities they see around them without being ostracized and condemned and stigmatized.
I see in the Constitution that the government is supposed to ensure domestic tranquility.
And I think this is the biggest failure.
We're not doing that at all.
We're letting Antifa be the moral authority.
But it goes beyond that.
It goes to what you were saying in your book.
We're not addressing issues.
Back in 2002, I probably would have read your book.
I didn't read it back at the time.
But I probably would have read that book and went, come on, it's not that bad.
That's what some people said.
But some people saw that I was on to something and they thought the book was, you know, prescient.
I think that I think, and I kind of look for, I mean, I'm an optimistic catastrophist.
So I always see trouble on the horizon.
But I wouldn't have believed we were healing.
I felt we were healing.
You know why I knew I was on to something?
Yeah.
I realized that Jared Taylor, the way he articulated things, he could point out the racial double standards and he could say, well, pretty much like multiculturalism, every group can celebrate who they are except white people.
And it's okay, people are discriminating against white people and there are these crimes against white people and no one's speaking up for white people.
I felt like that he was making an argument that had I been white, I might have found him persuasive.
That scared me because I knew that his arguments would reach young people and it could be a slippery slope for some of them that they might start out on the intellectual end and end up, you know, with David Duke and the guy Pierce that started the National Alliance.
So I had white leaders, you know, on the spectrum of very extreme to ones that pretty much, I would say they were like the alt-right.
They were not espousing violence against blacks.
They were not saying that they, some of them were not white supremacists.
Jared Taylor said he's not a white supremacist, that Asians are smarter than whites.
And so he would say that he just goes with the science.
And he would argue that when you have diversity, multi-ethnic societies, that it's much harder for them to get along.
And then when Robert Putnam at Harvard produced a study some years ago that pretty much said the same thing, he was kind of embraced by the white nationalists because he found that countries, you know, that had a lot of pretty much the more homogenous is a great example better, usually.
So, but we have done the opposite of listening to you, listening to your book, listening to the warnings, and then listening to people.
We have, and this is happening all over the world, not just in America.
We are not only not listening, we are now saying if you feel anything, you feel disenfranchised at all, if you're white or if you're not transsexual, you can't talk about transsexual things.
You can't, you're not homosexual, you can't talk about that.
You're not black, you can't talk about that.
You're not a female, you don't dare talk about that.
You're putting people in corners to where, and this is the way extremism always happens.
But the left is so inconsistent, you know, because with Rachel Dolazar, the white lady that became the head of the NAACP and pretended to be black and took a black name.
And then now, you know, she's, I don't know, she's been indicted or.
Yeah, she was up on charges for welfare fraud.
Yeah, that's what she said.
She took $80,000 of welfare money.
I guess she was all in.
But the other thing about her is that when she was a student at Howard, she sued the university for racial discrimination because she said they would not give her a scholarship because she was white.
And I guess she decided she couldn't beat them.
She's going to join them because then later, you know, she started to pass as black.
With Elizabeth Warren, if the left, you know, was consistent, you know, they would hold her to a higher, they would hold her accountable for ethnic fraud because she obviously, you know, gained affirmative action, pretended she was something that she wasn't.
And they're not saying anything.
Like they have no standards when it comes to their own, anything that fits their current agenda.
Well, you look at the government shutdown over the border.
And at the same time, Governor Cuomo of New York is saying, I won't sign the budget for the state of New York until everyone has full, unfettered access to abortions up to the point of birth.
Well, that's so far out of the mainstream.
He's holding, at the same time he's holding the state of New York hostage, on the other side of his mouth, he's saying, how dare Donald Trump stand for the wall and hold America hostage?
And nobody has a problem with it.
And that's where I think your common sense, you know, we're the foolish, I guess.
I mean, the political, do I want to call them the political right or do I want to call them Republicans?
I'm so disappointed with them that they cave and they fall into every leftist trap.
And as far as a person being white, you're going to be called a racist regardless of what you do because that's an epithet used to silence someone.
And so if you believe in walls and borders, if you believe in the rule of law, you're going to be called names.
And so I think that it's important for people to have principled reasons for what they do, but to realize that that's a political strategy to call someone a name.
And I was very disheartened when McCarthy went along with stripping Representative King of his committee assignments because of an allegation that he had said something supportive of white supremacy and white nationalism without their actually looking at what he said and the fact that he gave a 56-minute interview,
you know, with the New York Times.
Times.
They took one sentence out of that interview where he was talking about Western civilization and its merits and used that to paint him as a white supremacist.
I believe that if they had just waited overnight for him to get a statement out, then it would have blown over.
We are in such a bad place, though, the day that really happened.
I said to my staff, I know Steve King.
We're not buddies.
I don't call him up all the time, but I know him.
And I've had conversations with him.
Right.
And I've never seen anything like that.
You know, you can think back.
Defending Credibility Online00:07:08
You hear something.
Reported Herman Kane, I think.
Yeah.
I mean, you think back and you're like, oh, wait a minute.
I do remember none of that with Steve King.
The day that happened, I went to my staff and I said, call Steve up.
Ask him, I'm not going to take a side.
I'm going to say, I've known you.
I can't believe this.
Lay out what's happening.
Please tell me what's going on.
And everyone said, no, he's been abandoned by everyone.
You will be alone.
And there's this piece of you that says, wait a minute, I don't want to be alone because then I'm just, I don't know.
I don't know the answer.
But wait, I went on Twitter immediately and said the Republican should have defended his rights of free speech.
Yes.
Because even with the sentence that they were using, it was clearly a sentence.
And I said, and they should have given him time to explain.
Or at least even contain the rest of the sentence.
It left off the first part of the sentence.
I didn't even know at the time what he had completely said.
But I mean, like, even with the Kavanaugh hearing, for a while, it seems like the Judiciary Committee, they didn't know what to do because it was women involved.
It was obvious to me what they could have done and what they should have done.
First, they should have trotted out female members of Congress that were Republican, and they should have defended the judicial process, due process, rule of law.
Those principles, and those principles have nothing to do with whether the person in front of you is guilty or innocent.
It has to do with in America, we are a nation of laws, we had these processes, we have this constitution.
All they have to do is defend the Constitution, and yet they go along with the political left.
But people will say that this isn't a court of law.
This was the law of public opinion.
This is a court of public opinion.
And they're wrong.
And if it's a court of public opinion, tradition and conservatives will always lose because the media, for the most part, is controlled by the political left and the cultural Marxists.
And so everything is stacked against anything that's traditional.
And so I think that the most important thing that we can do as Americans for our young people and for ourselves is to argue for our Constitution.
You know, that's our rule book.
And when it comes to the judicial process, the rule of law, that we have to stand on that.
And we have to stand for the principles outside of the rule of law.
I was shocked that I came home and my wife, she's not real political.
She was following that.
And I came home and she said, almost in tears, what's going to happen to our son?
What's going to happen to our son?
You don't think that in 20 years he's going to say something stupid?
He's going to do something stupid on Facebook and that one thing taken out of context and no chance of defending yourself on it?
Well, wait a minute with the Republicans with the Rory Moore accusations.
Again, like, I don't care what people say about me because once you're over 60, it is what it is.
But I defended Rory Moore.
I defended his right to due process and the presumption of innocence.
And I knew that if they allowed these women to step forward with vague memories of things they said happened, you know, 40 years ago when they were teenagers, that if you could destroy a person's life with that, no one would be safe.
And there were Republicans that lined up behind, lined up with Democrats against Rory Moore.
They bought into the fake news.
And now we know because of a New York Times article about this secret experiment that there were people that were hired to create a fake news And to target Alabama to see if it could be turned blue for that senator.
I knew that if they allowed that to stand, that the left would continue to use that tactic.
And Kavanaugh, you know, once he got through that hurdle, I think he should have filed charges against Ford because it's pretty clear that she was used, she was positioned.
I mean, that she was not credible.
And people need to be held accountable for what they do.
But it started with Rory Moore.
And because we didn't do the right thing as conservatives to stand up, you know, for principles, the judicial process, that same tactic was used against Kavanaugh, and it will be used again and again.
And there is an endless supply of women who are willing to be trotted out until there are enough lawsuits that people see that there's a cost involved to lying.
That was the thing that really bothered me because I watched that, the Kavanaugh hearing.
And at first, I didn't know.
You know, I was like, I'm going to go open mind.
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
Let me listen to her.
I listened to her and I did not find her credible.
I just didn't.
Some people would.
I didn't find her credible.
I found him incredibly credible.
It's exactly how I would have reacted if I had been told, shut your mouth for two weeks, while my children, for the rest of my family history, they will look back at me as their relative, their father, their grandfather, their great-great-grandfather.
And I'm the guy who raped this woman and you haven't allowed me to say word one.
Oh my gosh, I would have lost my mind in that situation.
So I found him credible.
But what I said was, we'll know because after he's appointed, if everybody goes away, they didn't find her credible either.
Notice she hasn't gone away.
And in fact, we found out since that the FBI invented spoke to her friends on the beach and it was concocted and put there just for that.
And nobody corrected it.
She didn't go to jail.
No one served any time.
How can you not?
I'm not even talking, I don't care about Congress lying to Congress, please.
That's like, you know, clowns laughing at clowns.
You've noticed conservatives are the only one that get in trouble for lying to Congress.
Principles Over Politics00:15:38
Correct.
So, but it matters that you have the power to destroy someone's life with a lie and you pay no price.
That's wrong.
And I think we're, I think what has to happen with conservatives, with the Constitution, is we have to find ways to take it out of the old dusty powdered wig talk and actually apply it to real things and say, look, this is due process.
This is due process.
Well, some law schools are not even teaching the Constitution, or if they're teaching it, they're teaching it as the living Constitution.
It means whatever you want it to mean, or whatever I say it means.
But isn't that what case law says anyway?
In that case law, it's what somebody has said most recently about that.
That's case law.
But I mean, there were some things that I thought we could take for granted, and that would be freedom of speech and our First Amendment rights.
And that no longer seems to be the case.
And one of the things I find most troubling now is the fact that in the mainstream media, there seems to be just no very little that's reliable.
And, you know, like whatever is reported, for well, one thing, the mainstream media keeps the population ignorant by not reporting on things because there are some individuals that if it wasn't in the New York Times or on CNN, it didn't happen in the world.
Oh, I know.
And so, I mean, that's scary.
I just thought of this the other day.
I used to joke when I was years ago when I was in New Haven.
New Haven had the New Haven Register, which was extraordinarily left, and it was just horrible.
And I used to joke: well, if it wasn't in the New Haven Register, it didn't happen.
Okay.
But I thought of that now.
So many important, I'm focused this year, I'm trying to stay focused on the politics of meaning.
All you're seeing are the politics of nonsense, literal nonsense.
And nobody's talking about the things that actually will solve things, will actually move the needle, will actually save people, will push us forward.
Well, we seriously have to do something about Congress.
And when I say Congress, I'm not saying just the Democrats or just the Republicans.
You know, some of the things that I've learned recently that the average American probably doesn't know is that 90% of our prescription drugs are made in China and the drugs that are supplied to the U.S. military.
And that had to do with Congress, you know, crafting, you know, they made it so that American businesses go out of business because they can't compete.
And so that's a very dangerous situation to have a rival nation that we know is unreliable.
And when the FDA wants to inspect a drug plant in China, they have to give two weeks' notice.
They can't just run in and surprise them.
Sounds like Syria and weapons of mass destruction.
But there's been a situation with blood pressure medicine that was laced with carcinogens, and it was medicine that was made in China.
And heparin, I think it's a blood thinner.
There have been several cases where people have been taking these drugs for years, not knowing that they were made in an unsafe manner.
And to me, that's a national security issue.
Most Americans are not aware of it.
I believe our members of Congress, they are aware of it.
And it all has to do with changes.
They set the stage for that in 1987 when they were reforming the Medicare Act.
And they put in a safe harbor that ended up exempting certain group purchasing organizations.
And then now they have pharmacy benefit managers.
And the big drug companies in the U.S., there are a lot of drugs that they're not making anymore.
Those drugs are being made overseas.
And that's a danger to the American population.
And we have Congress to blame.
Ted Cruz is pushing a congressional, I mean, sorry, a constitutional amendment for term limits.
And people are scoffing at it and saying, oh, they'll never pass term limits.
Well, Congress wouldn't, but there are other ways.
I wonder, I mean, look at how long the government was shut down and didn't seem to be a problem with most people.
There is a contempt.
I mean, this border wall thing, I think the average American on the border wall says, look, I just want to know who's here.
I want to make sure MS-13 is not in my neighborhood.
I want to make sure that bad guys aren't here.
I want to make sure the good people that just want to make us better and want to become American can come through the front door, make that easier.
I'm fine with that.
But I just don't want people here.
The reason why they're demanding a wall is because they don't trust government.
They say, I want something permanent because you'll pass it.
You won't build it.
And if you do build it, you'll stop doing whatever it was you said you were going to do the minute we turn around.
That's why people want a wall.
So we're looking at this time where I think somebody like Donald Trump could say, you know what?
You know why this border wall is in the mess that it is?
Because nobody in the Republican Party actually mean it when they tell you border wall.
Nobody in the Democratic Party actually mean it.
They were fighting for it 10 years ago.
Now it's immoral.
And I think he could make the case to both sides.
Well, I can see that this has to stop.
My latest, most recent academic book is an edited debating immigration.
And it was released August of last year.
So I've given a lot of thought to immigration.
Immigration has not been reformed since 1986.
And we've done piecemeal.
And there's no incentive by either political party to make the reforms that we need.
And so we're talking border wall when immigration itself, the whole thing needs to be reformed.
And the wall, I believe, is needed because, I mean, there's another caravan coming from Honduras on its way to the U.S.
And, you know, they do get across the fence.
And you may have seen the photograph of someone, they know how to drive cars.
They have tracks where they can drive a car over the fence, which means we need to make our fences better.
But we definitely need something so that you just can't have thousands of people that just walk across the border or rush the border.
Or they are in one group whereas you're focused on the 2,000 when the 200 are a mile down walking across the border.
So I think the border wall, all of our attention is on that when it should be on comprehensive immigration reform.
And by comprehensive, I don't mean amnesty as a code word.
I mean comprehensive in that you look at the whole picture, legal as well as illegal immigration.
And it is impacting American citizens in adverse way, in adverse ways.
And the ones that are coming here are being released in Texas and cities, they have to be housed somewhere.
That's housing that American citizens are not going to get because they tend to, in some cases, have more benefits, able to get more benefits from certain pots than American citizens that are struggling.
I find it insulting that the country that was built by immigrants, we're all immigrants one way or another.
Most of us are all immigrants one way or another at some point.
We saw the racism against the Chinese, against blacks, against the Irish, white, black, didn't matter.
If you were different, you were bad.
Right.
But we saw the America that it built.
And it built a country because those people came here wanting a promise.
To be Americans.
To be Americans.
I don't know, and I'm sure there are tons of them.
I shouldn't say tons.
Maybe 5% of the American population is somebody who says, I don't want any of these foreigners here.
Maybe there are.
Maybe it's 10%.
I don't know.
But 90% aren't like that.
Right.
If you come here and say, I can make you better, it's to accuse conservatives or to accuse people who say, look, I need people to watch this border because there's bad things happening.
To say that they are racist somehow or xenophobic when you're talking to a group of people who say, books and people are the same.
I want diversity.
I want a diversity of ideas.
That's more important than skin color.
I want people coming in.
It makes us better.
I know, but as long as epithets can be used to intimidate people and silence them, then they'll be hurled.
And I think that in some cases, the reaction should be to embrace the epithet, just laugh at it and keep going with the conversation.
I thought I saw somebody.
I won't address who the two candidates are.
But I saw somebody and they had such a natural sense of humor.
Just they were just natural and a really natural, almost infectious laugh.
And somebody who didn't.
Right.
And one person is looking and saying, they're saying, oh, that person's going to, that person will do well against Donald Trump because they'll bash him.
The other person is, they're not talking about.
And I thought if the other person runs against Donald Trump and Donald Trump does what Donald Trump does and he, you know, he makes up a name for everybody and everything else, if they are honest, if it's not, if it's their personality.
You are a kind, gentle, thoughtful woman.
There's no way you can't see that in you.
If this is the kind of person they are and they laugh and go, aha, that's me, it could diffuse it and that could win.
That is a problem that we are all taking things so seriously and we're getting so mad and stop calling me that.
It doesn't matter what they say.
It doesn't matter, does it?
Not to me.
Not to me.
I refuse to be silenced because America means a lot to me.
And I think about my children, my grandchildren.
And when I say my children, I'm not thinking just about my biological children.
I'm thinking about all of those thousands of students that I've taught over the years.
And it troubles me what I see taking place.
And it troubles me when I see racism against white people.
The argument is that white people can't be victims of racism because racism only applies to people that don't have power and all whites have privilege.
Well, that is really, I'll say hogwash because I don't want to say the other word.
I think that we need to stand for principles.
And if the principle is non-discrimination on the base of race, gender, national origin, then it includes everybody.
Non-discrimination has to be against every group.
And so it can't be one group that is safe to discriminate against, you know, that they have less rights.
I think that isn't this what King really was talking about?
I think so.
I think so.
And we have lost his message.
And he's out of vogue nowadays, and people would prefer to embrace other leaders that are more divisive.
And if we don't start to turn things around in America, I think that we will see our nation fall and maybe in our lifetimes.
If I had to ask you what the thing that keeps you up at night, because we started with urgency, you had a sense of purpose and a sense of urgency.
So if I said to you, Carol, it's your last week, and this is your last interview, and you have a chance to talk to Americans and they actually hear you.
What would your message be?
My message would be that we need to return to our Judeo-Christian values and principles.
I think that a lot of the confusion that we have in America, a lot of the violence and the hopelessness, has come as we have become increasingly secular.
I think that America is a nation that was founded on Judeo-Christian values and principles.
We had the civic religion, you know, that many people, they were not necessarily deeply religious, but there were certain values and principles that made us Americans.
We've lost that.
And if we don't regain our footing, you know, spiritually, which ties into truth and knowledge, then I think we're doomed.
So let me play, let me just push back.
Let me play devil's ass.
All right.
Play the average person that hears that, and they're like, oh, geez.
Well, those Judeo-Christian values created slavery.
Those Judeo-Christian values were on display with fire hoses and dogs.
Those Judeo-Christian values have slaughtered people all over the world.
I would say that that is, again, I mean, I can't find a ladylike word to say what my reaction would normally be.
There were always Christians that fought for abolition, that protected the slaves and helped them, you know, get to freedom, that set up universities back in the 1800s.
Awakening to Cultural Decay00:10:40
And if you look at all the billions of dollars to philanthropy that has come from white people throughout the ages.
Specifically, Americans, I think.
No, I'm talking about Americans.
I'm talking about Americans.
You know, there have been universities going back to the 1800s that were educating blacks.
And there were universities in New England that never discriminated and they were educating blacks.
And so a lot of the positive things that have taken place in America, we have always been a nation that we eventually acknowledged our wrongs.
But even when those wrongs were there, there were always Christian people who were fighting for what's right.
And so for me, I'm glad that I'm an American and I'm a descendant of slaves on at least one side of my family.
I'm a descendant of slaves.
And when I look at divine providence, you know, we don't know why things happen the way they do, but I'm glad that my ancestors made it to America because I believe America is the greatest country in the world.
Blacks in America, whether they know it or not, are better off than blacks anywhere else in the world.
It's a blessing to be an American.
And so if I look at white people, I see people that have always tried to improve the lot of people around the world.
And they've sent missionaries.
I go to a church where wealthy white people work in inner-city ghetto, that they spend their time and their resources working among in neighborhoods where I am uncomfortable to go at times, but they're not.
And so I just think that when you have secularism and a devaluation of human life that we see in abortion, the fact that we don't value as Americans life at any stage, we don't value the life of the unborn or the lives of the elderly or the lives of people that are born with some type of handicap.
I mean, that makes us, we know better than the people doing, you know, Hitler, you know, and the Nazis, because a lot of what we do is very similar.
And I'll tell you that I think we're actually worse than the people of Germany that voted for Hitler.
And here's why.
Because we have more knowledge.
A, we have more knowledge.
But B, when they found out that the state was committing infanticide, It was killing children because they were different.
They stood up and were clear Hitler overruled them.
I mean, he actually didn't.
He said, yes, you're right.
We're going to stop that.
And then just hit it.
But when they found out that we were killing children, they stood up and said, that's an abomination.
We're now shout your abortion.
We're now.
I know.
I mean, we're now saying if you have Down syndrome.
I know.
I mean, I think we're actually on the path of being worse.
But maybe we are worse.
And, you know, like as a Christian, and in America, I think the numbers are still a majority of people profess to be Christians.
They're not really, but they profess it.
If you believe the Bible, and, you know, some people do, some people don't, but God judges nations.
And ancient Israel and some of the nations in the Old Testament that were judged, they did far less than what we're doing now.
And if you believe that there is a God throughout the ages, that there is a God, and you're a Christian, you're supposed to believe.
If you do believe there is a God, why do you think America would get a better deal than ancient Israel or other nations?
So I think we are poised for God's judgment.
And that the only way to save America is to pull back from the nonsense that secularism has brought.
And I think that we have become so intellectual that we are foolish.
And that foolishness is seen in the fact that there's some people saying there's 64 genders and that we're not born male or female.
We are assigned our sex at birth.
And some of the things that are coming from the intellectual world, it's total nonsense.
And I'm just hoping that there will be an awakening that people will be able to see through what's happening and that they will pull back.
And that our young people, that somehow they get truth, even if it's not readily available in the public schools, that there will be enough truth that comes through people's intellect that they will be able to see.
And so I think that our nation is headed in the wrong direction.
Our churches are failing us because there's so many pastors that will play to public opinion as opposed to the biblical standards.
And as a consequence, we're worse off because of that.
And there's a lot of fear.
People are afraid of speaking truth.
They're afraid they'll lose their job or they'll be punished the way you were punished, you know, by the by a lot of the people in the mainstream or ostracized.
You have been punished?
Yes, I have.
You have been punished.
You paid a very heavy price.
But it's okay.
Mine is too, but it's not fun.
It's not fun, but for people who are followers of Jesus Christ, you know, he tells us that we're going to be persecuted and none of us should think that we're going to get a better deal.
In fact, we're supposed to count it as joy when we are persecuted.
I'm still working on that part, counting it as joy.
But, you know, like I refuse to be intimidated.
And, you know, if people want to laugh at me, if they want to laugh at you, then let's laugh with them.
But at the end of the day, I think that truth will stand and that we need to keep doing what we are doing because there are people that have ears to hear.
There are people that hear your message.
They hear my message.
And to the extent that we keep talking, other people will start talking and will start pushing back.
And what I want, like my whole thing now, my brand is Be the People.
Be the people.
It's the name of your podcast.
It's the name of my podcast.
And it was the title of a book that I published in 2011, Be the People, A Call to Reclaim America's Faith and Promise.
I thought that book was going to change the world.
It was published in 2011, and it was supposed to awaken the American public.
And they were supposed to do something different than elect Barack Obama to his second term.
It didn't work out that way.
But it's all about awakening the we the people mentioned in the preamble of the Constitution to awaken us because we are responsible for everything around us.
In America, we elect the politicians.
All of those policies, including abortion, they enact on our behalf.
And so if we don't want to pay for it, then we need to stop electing politicians that have allowed or putting in place policies that run counter to our core values and principles.
You said a couple of times now that you just think that maybe people intellect or I used to believe the first line, first paragraph.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
I don't think there is anything as self-evident truth.
I can go to China and I can talk to the people in the rice patties who have been oppressed for generations and say, hey, by the way, should you have the right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness?
And I think a lot of them would say no because they've never experienced it.
They're culturally dependent in some ways.
And so my message is for America.
I know.
So, but what I'm asking you is, you said Judeo-Christian values and principles.
Those aren't being taught.
Those are the golden rule.
Those are basic things that are not being taught anymore.
But guess what?
The reason the political left silences voices like yours and mine and people that are more conservative is that they know that if those things are taught, they lose the advantage that they have.
And the only reason that the political left seems to be winning the cultural war is that they have to strip everyone else of their rights and silence them.
Because if the truth were known, even if the truth were known about President Trump and his successes, like he's been enormously successful in a number of different areas, especially African Americans.
You would not know that through the mainstream media.
And so if they told the truth about what President Trump has accomplished, he would be elected.
His popularity would be 65% now.
If he got half the coverage that Obama got on the bad things that Obama did, he would be wild.
Well, the thing about it is the left's ability to maintain power depends on keeping the population ignorant.
And it's up to us to educate as many people as we can to counter that.
But if people ever start thinking, if there's ever an awakening in America where people, the scales fall off their eyes, they're able to see, then it's over for the political left and its radical agenda.
I think it's over for most politicians.
Yeah, and it's not a Democrat-Republican thing.
It's like the elites of both political parties get together and they decide what they want, and they are working against the American people.
Carol, I don't know why we haven't spent more time together.
I've so enjoyed this.
Well, thank you.
I've enjoyed it too.
We could talk all day.
You'll have to come back.
Thank you.
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