Daryl Davis and former neo-Nazi leader Jeff Schoep reveal how Davis’s non-confrontational approach convinced over 200 extremists—including Schoep—to abandon hate groups like the KKK and NSM, which Schoep led for 27 years. Schoep’s guilt over doxxing-driven family fallout and his 2016 meeting with Davis sparked a shift, while interactions with Jewish communities shattered his indoctrinated beliefs. Their work with the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Pro-Human Foundation proves ideology can change through empathy, not fear, offering a blueprint for de-radicalization in an era of rising polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
But, you know, an interesting component to that also happens because, you know, there are people who won't talk to me, you know, and they want to fight me and stuff, all the kind of crazy stuff.
I've seen it all, right?
But some of their buddies who are just as hateful as they are, you know, when they talk to me and they end up leaving, their life improves.
Hate is exhausting.
Right.
You know, and hate begets more hate.
But so when they leave, their life improves.
And then the buddy who wanted to fight me or didn't want to talk to me, he sees his buddy's life improve.
And so it's been more than 200 now, which is really amazing.
And I think just these conversations that you've had with a lot of people have sort of opened up a lot of people's eyes as well.
It's like, you know, you think of someone like that's a KKK member, neo-Nazi, or whatever it is, and you go, well, that guy's got to be a piece of shit as a human being.
And then you realize, like, well, a lot of these people just got fucked over in life and started off on the wrong foot and were with the wrong people and got indoctrinated to the wrong ideology and experienced the wrong things.
And next thing you know, they have this rigid idea of what the world is and how they fit in.
And it's all fucked up and it's all wrong.
And they just don't run into anyone that shows them a different perspective.
Like if you're in a small town and you're around just a bunch of assholes all the time, you're around the same assholes.
Like you might think everyone's an asshole.
And then you go on vacation, you know, maybe in Hawaii.
Like, God, everybody's nice here.
What's going on?
Maybe I have a totally different view of the world.
I'm ordering all these books, and it was written by a sociologist or something, and they had all these addresses of everybody that participated in the book in the back of the book.
So I'm writing, physically writing, not like emailing today, but like writing all these organizations.
Yeah, and back then the group was pretty small, but the reason that I picked that organization, I mean, it was only in a handful of states at the time I joined.
It was pretty small.
The National Socialist Movement was a continuation of the movement of George Lincoln Rockwell, who was the original founder of the American Nazi Party.
So that's why I wanted to join that particular organization because it had that history because I was a fan of history.
I always wanted to be as close to the German movement as possible.
So that was the group that I sought out.
And then there is like a vetting process.
They want to know you sign up an application.
And later on in the group, I was doing things like having people sign non-disclosure agreements and doing background checks on people and things of that nature.
It is nuts when you see it in Madison Square Garden and you see the swastika, the whole deal, and you're like, this is before anybody had connected this with evil.
Like back then, that was an ancient Hindu symbol.
Like there's a Hindu temple near my old house in California, and it has swastikas all over it.
And because the temple's from the 1800s, and they have to tell people, hey, this is a sign.
Back when the Red Cross first started collecting blood.
Okay, because you know, as you know, or you probably know, Charles Drew, you know, a black scientist, right, was the one who discovered how to give blood transfusions, right?
So Red Cross began collecting blood, and they would not take black blood.
And then when they finally took black blood, they segregated the blood.
It doesn't matter if it's black versus blood.
You know, you should segregate it by O positive or OB negative or whatever it is, right?
So I was going under the name Jeff Stevens because I wanted to separate my music career from the movement and also protect my family because I knew this was a movement that people didn't like and that could cause put them in harm's way.
And so I'm on the air and somehow the host says, you know, your name is not.
I'm spewing anti-Semitic drivel, which was pretty typical of how I behaved at the time.
And the woman that was running the show, she goes, your name is not Jeff Stevens.
You know, you would think with this kind of stuff going on in your life, you know, you would reflect on that.
But I doubled down.
And that's pretty common in that world when someone is faced with that kind of pressure is they double down, they become more entrenched.
So it's like every lash of the proverbial whip, anybody that tried to stop me from being involved in it or tried to dissuade me, it just made me more dedicated to it and more intense in that belief system.
So I'm thinking I'm going to ruin my band's career now.
So I quit the band, I shaved my head, and then I put all that energy that I had put into music into the movement.
I felt like I had no choice.
What that did, that doxing, it affected my mother's career.
So I mean, this was a hate has consequences, and hate was something that was like a downward spiral for me.
And this is very common for anybody that's involved in it.
It separates you from your family, from those you love.
It isolates you.
And what it did to my mother's career is, as I mentioned, she was a lawyer.
She wanted to be a judge.
So she had ran to be a judge.
She was elected to be a judge.
And in the state of Minnesota, there's a, at the time, anyways, this is back in the 90s.
And there was a formality, and this is the way my mother explained to me at the time.
She says, the governor called me and she said, Mrs. Scoop, your son's a leader in the Nazi Party.
Your father fought in the German army during the war.
I do not feel you are fit to be a judge in this state.
So they had reached out and they explained the show and I said, okay, you know, because any opportunity to spread the propaganda of the movement, I'm going to do it unless it was like Jerry Springer or something.
So it sounded legit.
I agreed to it.
Didn't know I was meeting Daryl.
I still would have done it, but I would have probably prepared to debate this guy because I knew who he was.
I knew he was pulling people out of the movement.
And so this was at a place called Chris's Hot Dogs in Alabama, where Hank Williams had written the song.
It was, hey, hey, good looking.
You're out there, right?
Right.
And my girl and I were sitting outside and Daryl steps out of a vehicle and I'm thinking, you know, I recognize this guy.
He comes up, shakes my hand.
We shake hands.
And he says, hi, I'm Daryl Davis.
You must be Jeff Scoop.
And I'm thinking, where do I know that name from?
Where do I know his face?
It didn't quite register because I'm just thinking about, you know, this debate that we're going to get into.
And then after we sat down, it clicked.
I was like, oh, this is the guy that gets people out of these organizations.
So at this point, I'm the head of the National Socialist Movement.
And Daryl and I are getting along great.
We're talking about music.
We're talking about all these kind of things.
And it clicks in my head, oh, wow, I'm getting along too well with this guy.
He's the enemy, you know, or so-called enemy.
You know, he's on the other side.
So I better step it up here.
So I pound my fist on the table and I said, you know, Daryl, I'll fight to the last bullet for my people.
And Howard, prior to us getting together, the producer and director of the documentary is called Accidental Courtesy.
They asked me, you know, they followed me around the country.
I was conducting interviews with KKK members, Black Lives Matter, and different people.
And they said, do you know Jeff Scoop?
And I said, I know who he is.
I've never met him.
Would you be open to talking with him and interviewing him?
I said, sure.
So they contacted him.
And then they let me know, okay, you know, we were down in Alabama at the time.
He's going to come down to Alabama.
You know, you can interview him tomorrow.
And we went to this place called Chris's Hot Dog Standard or Chris's Grill, whatever, where Hank Williams made famous.
And we're going to do this interview in there.
So they said, they got me a rental car, put me in the hotel, and said, we're going to get everything set up.
We'll have Jeff here.
And we're going to film you when you first come in and meet Jeff.
We want to catch that on camera.
Then you'll sit down across from him in the booth and interview him.
I said, okay, fine.
So I go to the hotel, wait for their call.
They call, I say, okay, we're ready.
So I get in this rental car and I drive to the grill.
And when I pull up, I see who looks like Jeff sitting on this bench out front with this girl.
So I'm thinking, well, that can't be him because he's supposed to be inside sitting in the booth.
So I just sat in the vehicle, you know, looking at him, just trying to figure this out.
Maybe he came out for a smoke or something like that.
I'm watching him.
He's not going inside.
So I got out.
And when I got out and started walking towards him, I think, you know, that is the dude.
I'd never met him, but I knew what he looked like.
I said, you know, I wonder why he's out here.
So I went over.
I said, hey, are you Jeff Scoop?
He goes, yeah.
I said, I'm Daryl Davis.
Shook his hand.
He introduced me to his lady friend.
And I said, I thought you were supposed to be inside.
He goes, well, I wasn't so.
I just came out or whatever.
So we walk in.
Of course, they didn't get the capture the moment that we met.
So they're like all freaked out and stuff.
And we sat down in the booth and I started interviewing him.
And as he pointed out, you know, he was getting along too well with me.
You know, just chatting, talking about music and this, that, and the other.
And he's saying, you know, he was a musician.
I said, I'm a musician.
I said, well, what kind of music do you like?
What kind of music do you play?
Well, I play rock.
And I said, well, you know, rock was invented by black musicians.
Oh, let's not go there.
You know, Elvis Presley invented rock.
So no, Elvis did not invent rock, right?
I said, Chuck Berry invented rock, right?
And he goes, okay, well, you know, you probably know more about music than I do.
You know, so but what difference does it make, you know, what color the musician is?
I said, well, it doesn't make any difference to me, but obviously it makes a difference to you because, you know, in our history books, we talk about Ben Franklin.
Who cares what color Ben Franklin is?
You know, if he invented electricity, he invented electricity, right?
And he goes, well, yeah, well, I know about the guy who invented peanut butter.
I'm serious.
And I said, okay, what's his name?
He thought about it.
He goes, Carver, Carver.
I said, what's his first name?
He said, George Washington Carver.
I said, okay, very good.
I shook his hand, right?
And so then, what did he say?
He runs the NSM, National Socialist Movement.
The whole white supremacy ideology is called the movement.
So anyway, I said, well, he goes, you know, I said, it's a racist movement.
He said, no, it's like a white civil rights movement for white people.
He goes, you know, you got the NAACP.
And I said, yes.
I said, but there are white members of the NAACP.
Can I join the NSM?
He goes, no.
And, you know, I said, well, why not?
Well, then it's a racist movement.
And then we got into it, and he goes, you know, I will fight to the last bullet for my people.
I said, you know what, let me stop reading all this stuff and find out for myself.
So I found his number that he had given me.
And fortunately, he still had the same number.
I called him up.
And he remembered me, of course, and we chatted on the phone.
And then we stayed in contact.
And then in 2020, I had a gig up in New York City.
And they booked me and said, talk about how you meet these people and what you all talk about and what they think about this.
I said, well, wait a minute.
I can tell you about how I meet them and how I go about it.
But as far as what they think about stuff, I can tell you, but that'll be secondhand.
I say, if you want, I can bring people because every now and then I bring a former Klansman that I took out of the movement or whatever to talk, you know, answer questions.
I said, well, how about if I just bring somebody?
He goes, whoa, you know, we got to clear that with the sponsors or whoever.
So they got back to me and said, yeah, you know, who do you want to bring?
I said, well, you know, let me give you some options or whatever.
So I called Jeff.
I said, you know, would you be willing to come out and talk about your experiences, what got you in, what got you out, et cetera.
And he said, yeah.
So I called him back.
I said, okay, I got this guy.
He was the commander of the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country for 25 years.
He was a 27-year member.
And they said, okay, fine.
So I called Jeff back and said, okay, you're on, man.
They're going to fly you out to New York and you'll come on.
And this is the first time we'd ever done anything together like that, where we both are on the same page, right?
And it went over very, very well.
And that was the last gig either of us had before everything got shut down for COVID.
So I broke free from the movement in early in March of 19.
But I was going through this process for several years.
So typically you want somebody in like the work that we do, we want someone to disengage from the movement and then we work on the de-radicalization part.
My journey was backwards.
So I'm de-radicalizing while I'm still involved.
Now, if somebody would have told me that while I was involved, those would have been fighting words, you know, but it was basically like the mind wasn't catching up with what was going on.
So that's when I was starting those last years when I was involved.
I'm saying this is a white civil rights group.
It's not a hate group.
You know, and from the outside looking in, you go, man, this guy's insane.
So when I was involved, every girl that I was seeing, and I was seeing quite a few different women, just about everyone that if they would come and check out the movement, they would say, whoa, this is like a cult and you're like a cult leader.
And I'm thinking in my head, what is wrong with these choices I'm making in women?
What is with these poor choices?
You know what I mean?
Like that's a serious cognitive dissidence.
But that's the thought that goes through your head.
And then not long after meeting Daryl, I met a Muslim filmmaker by the name of Dia Khan in her film, White Right Meeting the Enemy.
And I'd gotten to know Dia quite well over the course of that filming.
And there was a number of people that left the NSM from interacting with Dia.
And she has a very similar approach to how Daryl Davis approaches things.
It's about listening.
It's about being curious.
It's about asking questions and sharing different perspectives.
And that curiosity and that sincerity, it can help restructure the way someone thinks and the way they see people.
So like Dia says to me, and this is actually in the film White Right Meeting the Enemy, you can see the change.
Like I showed a clip a lot of times at my talks and I'll tell the audience, I'll say, take a look at my eyes in that clip because you can see it.
The cameraman caught it, zoomed in on my eyes.
She's saying, you know, the ideology that you, instead of telling me that I was wrong, she showed me, she says, the ideology that you stand for, the things that you believe in, they made me feel less than ugly, not worthy as a child growing up.
That's how I felt.
That's how your ideology made me feel.
And no one aside from Daryl Davis had ever approached me with anything like that.
I was told I was wrong.
But that human connection, when you dehumanize another human being, you lose your humanity in that process.
And I'd lost my humanity a long time ago.
And what Daryl and Dia did is they cracked that door open, that window to compassion, and I could see their humanity.
Daryl did something very similar.
He told me about how racism and hate affected him as a child growing up.
That hurt.
That hurt.
You know, I mean, I'm not going to say it at the time when I'm still in the movie, but on the inside, it really hurt.
That bothered me.
It's like, this is not this noble, grand cause that I believed it was if it's causing that kind of pain and suffering to other people.
I hate to try everything, and I beat myself up over that a lot.
But I kept saying, it's a white civil rights group.
I'm telling every press outlet I'm sitting down with when they're in it, don't call us a Nazi group.
It's a white civil rights organization.
Of course, most of them wouldn't publish that because it is what it is.
But I'm going through these different changes.
I'm having rules put into the organization where the last couple years they changed from the swastika in the public view to using an old runic symbol, the Odol rune.
Today, they switch back.
They use the swastika again.
But I was doing things like that to try to change the image of the group.
As my own beliefs were shifting, I was trying to shift that into the party.
And eventually, I was like, because as a man, I thought, I'm going to fix this.
I've got to fix this, this mistake that I made, this terrible movement.
I've got to fix it.
And there's no fixing it.
All I was doing was putting lipstick on a pig, you know, dressing up the Nazi party, trying to make it look pretty.
It still is what it is.
So eventually, after 2019 rolls around, I was like, I just have to, I have to get away from this.
What I was involved in was above ground, so it was mostly legal.
You've got underground groups that operate a little bit differently.
They'll come after you and things like that.
You can leave, but if you walk away and you speak out against it, you're deemed like a traitor, basically, to that cause.
So I knew that was going to happen when I started speaking out.
So I didn't speak out immediately, but by the end of late 2019, it was August or September of 19, I started speaking out and denounced the movement, denounced racism.
Daryl and I both are helping people all the time get out.
And it's because of that presence that I had there.
A lot of people will say, you know, I knew him then or I knew of him.
So they'll feel comfortable in reaching out.
So it's kind of like street cred, I guess, you know, like if you were an alcoholic for 20 years and you have more of an ability to help other people else.
And another thing, you know, people like Jeff and people of that status, the high status, it takes, while they may change themselves, it takes them a while to figure out if they can leave because that's their job.
In Jeff's case, that was his job for 25 out of the 27 years he was a member to lead that organization and build it and recruit and bring people in.
He brought in numerous people.
So number one, how do you go back to those people and say, I was wrong?
You got all this power.
Everybody looks up to you.
You're their leader, right?
Their cult leader, your girlfriends would tell you.
I brought him to New York, had him speak to crowds.
And an interesting thing happened.
I want you to tell the story about Duke.
Show him to other people.
Let him know, hey, Daryl Davis is not an exception.
Because what I need to do, I find oftentimes is when I become friends with these people, the mentality becomes, Daryl's okay for a black guy.
It's all those other black people or all those other Jewish people, that kind of thing.
So when I feel I can trust that individual, they're not going to bring harm.
I'm not concerned about myself, but I know that they're not going to bring harm to friends of mine or other people.
Then I will invite them to my home, invite some of my Jewish friends, some of my other black friends, some of my white friends who look just like them but don't agree with them.
So that way they can see I'm not the exception.
Maybe they are the exception because now they're being exposed to people who think the same way I do.
If Werner von Braun, the head guy from NASA that got us to the moon, if he was alive today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said they would prosecute him for crimes against humanity.
So, you know, this goes to show, Joe, I mean, we all, you, Jeff, me, anybody we know, when we were kids, were told a tiger does not change its stripes.
A leopard does not change its spots.
That's who they are.
And that is true.
You know, so why would we think that a Nazi or neo-Nazi or a Klansman would change their robe and hood or their swastika armband or something?
Well, that's where we're wrong.
The stripes and spots on the tiger and lion are immutable characteristics.
They're born with those.
They can't change them.
But the Klan robe and hood and the swastika are acquired.
That's learned behavior.
And what can be learned can be unlearned.
Jeff is an example of that.
Duke Schneider is an example of that.
And when I first got into wanting to meet these people, I wasn't trying to get anybody out.
And I still don't really try to get people out.
I just want an answer to that question that plagued me from the age of 10.
How can you hate me if you don't even know me?
Just tell me that, and then you go your way, I go my way.
But what happened was, during the conversation, you start off this far apart on the ideological spectrum.
You talk to somebody for five minutes.
That gap narrows because you found something in common.
You keep on talking, now you're here.
You found more in common.
At this point, you're having a cordial relationship with your adversary.
You know, you might not be going out to dinner with him or whatever, but you're having a cordial relationship.
Keep on talking, and you found more in common.
And now it's like a friendship.
You don't agree on everything, but you have found more in common that you have in contrast.
And the trivial things that you found in contrast, like skin color or whether you go to a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or a temple, began to matter less and less because it's caused a cognitive dissonance.
And so when the first person left, I thought, well, this person, this is a fluke.
This guy probably wasn't invested in it fully.
But then it happened again and again and again.
And I thought, okay, well, now, something I must be doing when I'm interviewing these people.
This is back when I was writing my first book.
What am I doing?
And I narrowed it down to about five core values that everybody wants.
Between traveling with my parents as a child in the U.S. State Department, Foreign Service, as diplomats, and now traveling as an adult musician and lecturer.
I told you before, I've been to all 50 states.
I've been to 64 countries on six continents.
And I can tell you this, no matter how far I've gone from our country, right next door to Canada, right next door to Mexico, or halfway around the globe, no matter who I meet maybe around the world, they don't look like me or speak my language or worship as I do or not worship at all.
I've always concluded that every person I've met is a human being.
And as such, every human being wants these five core values in their lives.
Everyone wants to be loved.
We all want to be respected.
We want to be heard.
We want to be treated fairly and truthfully.
And we want the same things for our family as anybody else would want for their family.
And if we can learn to apply those five core values or any of those five values, when we find ourselves in an adversarial situation or in a culture or society in which we're unfamiliar or uncomfortable, I'll guarantee you that your navigation of that society, that culture, that situation will be much more smooth, much more positive, and much more productive.
And so that's what was happening because these people have been interviewed before, but they didn't leave.
So that, you know, is how you talk to people, more so than what you say to people and how you listen to them, you know.
And when I say respect, it doesn't mean that I respect what they're saying.
When you look back on your life and you think about the enormous amount of time that you spent in the movement and now being essentially of a completely different mindset, like what does that feel like for you when you look back on yourself?
So like a lot of times when I'll speak about that life, I'll say that was my past life.
You know, I know it's not my past life, it's still the same life.
But it is like looking back at a different person.
Like when I started doing work with the Wiesenthal Center, one of the things was after talks, a lot of people in the Jewish community were like, I don't get it.
You're such a nice guy.
I don't get it.
It doesn't make sense.
So we started showing video clips of my speeches and things that I did when I was in the movement ahead of those things.
And I was always, and then people were like, oh, now I get it.
You know, because they could see it.
They could see how different that was and how different the person is.
Not the person, nice guy that they met, but that's who I was.
So, and I and I always try to get out of showing those clips.
I'm like, could I be backstage or somewhere else?
Because I don't want to look at it.
Like, it's hard to, I mean, I can look at it.
Obviously, I do it all the time, but it's tough.
It's tough because it's like, man, does it feel shame?
Shame, guilt.
You just feel terrible about it.
So I think that drives the work, a lot of the work that I'm doing now is to help others and to repair some of that damage that's been done.
Well, I think your perspective is very important for people to understand that someone can shift their mindset.
And that just because someone has a hateful, evil ideology they've attached themselves to, doesn't mean they're a hateful, evil person inherently.
It's learned behavior, learned thinking.
And this is the problem with human beings, is we're incredibly malleable.
You know, human beings are, we follow the leader and we adopt ideologies and we're also very tribal.
So you become a part of a group, whether you call it a family or a team or whatever, you hate the other people because they're the enemy now.
It's us against them and we're all in this together and that unites everybody that's a part of the movement and it makes you feel like you're a part of something bigger.
I think you're 100% right for the most part, but the tribal thing never, never came into play with me, and nor did it come into play with other people who were raised the way I did.
I was.
I first started traveling abroad overseas at the age of three in 1961.
I was born in 58, so I'm 67 now.
And my first introduction to school was abroad.
The State Department assigns you to the American embassy in some foreign country for two years.
And then you come back home at the end of the two years.
You're here for a few months, maybe a year, and then you're back over to another foreign country for two years, back and forth, back and forth.
My dad's job as a U.S. diplomat was to foster better relations between a foreign country and our U.S. government, right?
So, which is why, you know, we're overseas.
So, my first introduction to school was abroad.
I did kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, all in different schools in different countries.
The in-between grades I would do back home here, right?
My classmates abroad, now we're talking about the 1960s, my classmates abroad were from all over the world.
Because anybody who had an embassy stationed where we had our American embassy, all of their kids went to the same school.
So, this little girl sitting at this little desk here might have been from Czechoslovakia, that kid from Nigeria, that kid from Italy, that kid from Japan.
You know, if you open the door to my classroom and look in, you would say, oh, you know, this is a United Nations of Little Children.
That's exactly what it was.
That became my baseline for what school was supposed to be.
But every time I'd come home, I would either be in all black schools or black and white schools, meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated.
And just because desegregation was passed four years before I was born in 1954 by the Supreme Court, schools did not integrate overnight.
It took years and years.
And even in some places today, in 2025, this country is still struggling with integration, right?
So that became my norm, you know, this multicultural thing.
I didn't know tribes.
Everybody was part of my tribe.
And that's why I didn't understand racism.
Because, you know, now if I had grown up here my whole life and my first experience with somebody who did not look like me was having bottles and rocks thrown at me at the age of 10 in a parade, maybe I wouldn't be doing this work today.
Maybe I would be, oh, I'm going to stay away from those color of people.
In fact, even to this day, most of the bad personal experience I had with other people, I mean, I've had assassination attempts, I've got scars from attacks, all white people.
It was they infiltrated the organization, and we had went to a, and this is in my book, American Nazi, by the way, but we had went to Rochester, Minnesota, and to pass out leaflets.
And it was myself and my roommate, and then two other guys that had infiltrated.
And at the end of the night, to make a long story short, I'm reaching into the trunk of a car, and as I'm reaching down into the trunk of the car to pick up this box of merchandise from the record label, The guy pulls out a tire iron and smashes me across the back of the head and says, we're here to kill you.
And it felt like being scalped.
The whole back of my head was scalp was hanging down.
And I just, I wouldn't get knocked out.
I would have been killed if I would have been knocked out.
I just remember stumbling, putting my hand across the back of my head, and it felt like a wet sponge and just kind of staggering.
And my roommate blocked another hit because the guy tried to hit me again because I didn't go down.
And by that time, I'm just kind of, you know, stunned, staggering, concussion, whatever you want to call it, and started stumbling into traffic in the middle of the street.
And then, you know, he had gotten away from the guy and pulled me off to the other side of the street.
When you talk to other people that have left the movement, do they have, like, is there a pivotal moment in a lot of these people's lives where they realize that this was the wrong path?
Is it an accumulation of other people's experiences that they take into consideration?
It really is different for everybody, but usually it doesn't happen like a snap of a finger.
You know, like, I could, you know, like we were talking about hundreds of people that have left the movement.
I can think of just like on one hand, the people that have left over like one act of kindness or one simple thing.
Very few people do that.
It's usually a process.
So they're going through this shift in thinking, kind of like I was, and they're questioning it.
They're questioning, like, well, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance.
There's a lot of confirmation bias that takes place.
And they're having experiences sometimes with people of other races that helps, you know, where it doesn't fit the narrative of the movement, what's being spewed.
So they're fighting with this in their head for a long time.
For different people, it's different things.
Sometimes it's just seeing the humanity in the people that you once dehumanized.
Does it, I know it must feel very rewarding, but interacting with so many people that have been indoctrinated into hate, does it sometimes feel overwhelming?
And I would much rather, much rather be on stage playing my piano with my band, seeing people smiling and dancing and clapping their hands than going to a Klan rally and watching people in robes and hoods march around at Burning Cross yelling, white power.
Well, I mean, there are people who don't want me there and they resent it and they get into it with their leaders and their leaders end up banishing them and stuff.
But Jeff can tell you, you know, because he's been to a lot of Klan things as well as his own organization, it's run kind of like a paramilitary.
So you have two kinds of rallies.
You have public rallies and you have private rallies.
So a public rally is, you know, you want to have your Klan rally or your Nazi rally over here in the park on Main Street.
So you've got to go to City Hall or wherever and apply for a permit, right?
That's public rally, public park.
So anybody can come.
You can come, I can come, whatever.
Now, if there's potential for violence or whatever, there's going to be a barricade of police in between the ralliers and the protesters.
So they can't meet each other.
Right?
You can yell and scream over the police head, right?
But if it's in some rural place, like he's talking about in rural Minnesota, you know, anybody, everybody can go.
There's not a whole lot of police presence.
It's mostly white people.
But if it's a private rally, it's on private property.
One of the members might have a farm.
Okay, you know, we can have the rally on my farm.
Well, you just can't walk onto somebody's farm unless you're invited.
So you have to be invited by one of the higher-ups.
In his case, the commander, in the Klan case, the Imperial Wizard or the Grand Dragon.
And so it's like Assimon says, if the leader invites somebody, then all the members have to respect that you don't bother that person, whether you like it or not.
You all say, you know, you don't do anything malicious or whatever.
Well, show me.
Let me come see the rally.
Like, if you're going to write a book on football, you can go to the library and get tons of books and research it and write it and have never gone to a football game.
Right?
Okay, but if you really want to, you know, write an accurate one and from personal experience, you need to go see a football game.
So how am I going to write a book on the Klan from A to Z without ever seeing a Klan rally?
So that's why I want to go and I explained that to them and say, okay.
They are, depending upon the individual groups, because I don't want to say that a white supremacist of any group or even individual racist is stamped out of a standard cookie cutter.
They come from all different walks of life, all different educational backgrounds, reasons for joining, etc.
But the Nazi movements, not so much the skinheads.
The skinheads are very disorganized, disjointed.
They go off the rails.
They don't listen to anybody, within their own command or whatever, where the Klan does have some respect for their, or a lot of respect for their higher-ups, the Great Titan, the Grand Dragon, the Imperial Wizard, etc.
But the Nazi movements, a lot of the larger ones, like his, his former movement, it's very militarily run, and there are quick consequences if you step out of line.
So, you know, I don't like Joe Rogan on my rally ground, but my Grand Dragon wants him here.
I'm going to be cool.
I'm not going to say a word to him.
I'm just going to stand over there because I know if he gets in my face, I might say something and then I'm going to get banished or whatever.
In these movements, they believe that the United States government is going to collapse, whether that's through a race war or civil war or anything like that.
And this goes far right, far left.
Most extremist groups have this, or even the jihadi type religious extremism.
They have this idea that they're going to rise up and be the leaders of the future tomorrow.
So groups like this prepare.
So they do what you call militia training, I guess.
So now, interestingly enough, right, he mentioned the word militia, okay?
So when you have very subtle nuance here, when you have a bunch of white guys who go out in the woods and practice shooting and they're in their camouflage and practice survival skills and all that kind of stuff, they're called militias.
But when you have black guys, black groups that do the same thing, they're not called militias.
They're called militants.
But it's the same thing.
But the word militant has more of a negative connotation than the word militia.
Yeah, the people in Michigan where his state, they have a lot of militias in Michigan.
Timothy McVeigh, you know, was part of a militia, you know, and there are other ones.
And they have different names to cover up, like he used Jeff Stevens to cover, you know, the thing.
Like there was a Klan group out of Texas.
It was the, what was it, something, ambulance service.
You know, just a store window name to cover up the real organization.
But speak to the recruitment.
Today, I mean, these groups have always, you know, since the beginning of time, or the beginning of their inception, have always recruited law enforcement and military people into the ranks of the group.
But now it's even more concentrated where they really are going after a lot of law enforcement and military, especially those people, veterans, who've only been in the military, Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, whatever, for two years.
They feel that if somebody's in there for more than two years, they've become loyal to the government.
So you really can't.
It's harder to pull them.
And then at the two-year point, these people have training.
They have training in weaponry and bomb making, explosives, and survival skills, all that kind of stuff, which is what these people want to prepare them.
So you all served overseas and fought for the country over there.
Now, why don't you come fight for our country right here?
Because this is going on in our cities.
Look what's happening in Washington, D.C. and Chicago.
The Jews and the blacks are taking over and da-da-da-da.
Come fight for us here domestically.
And so they get lured in and then they learn these weapon skills because then they turn into lone wolves.
That's why we're seeing so many lone wolves.
But what's actually going on here, Joe, is this.
I learned this back in 1982.
All right?
Let me go back a little further than 1982.
1974.
I'm age 15 in the 10th grade, sophomore in high school.
And we had a class called the POTC, which stood for problems of the 20th Century.
Had a great teacher.
It was a class for seniors, 12th graders, but I was taken as a 10th grader.
He'd bring in different controversial speakers, talk about different abortion, you know, all kinds of controversial things back then.
And one day, he brought in the head of the American Nazi Party.
Now, as Jeff pointed out, the Nazi Party was founded by a fellow named George Lincoln Rockwell.
And by the way, one of Rockwell's daughters who long ago disowned her father was a teacher at my school.
But a lot of people didn't know that.
But anyway, George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered by one of his own Nazis, a guy named John Palter.
It was founded about 35 minutes from my house in Arlington, Virginia.
And John Palter shot and killed Rockwell out there on the street on Wilson Boulevard.
So Rockwell's right-hand guy was a guy named Matt Cole, K-O-E-H-L.
And on this day in 1974, Matt Cole and his right-hand guy, they're the heads of the American Nazi Party now after Rockwell, came to my school, to my class.
And they spoke to my class.
Now, you could never do that today, you know, but I'm glad we were able to do that back in 1974.
You know, I wish that kind of thing would happen today so people can see what's, you know, freedom of speech and all that.
Matt Cole pointed at me and pointed at another black kid in my class and said, we're going to ship you back to Africa.
And then he went like this.
And all you Jews out there, you're going back to Israel.
Now, I'm 15 years old.
I just sat there like looking at the guy, like, what on earth is this man talking about?
I didn't say anything to him, but one of my classmates, was a girl, piped up and said, well, they live here.
What if they don't want to go?
And Matt Cole said, oh, they have no choice.
If they do not leave voluntarily, they will be exterminated in the upcoming race war.
That was the first time I ever heard the term race war.
Now, I was already fascinated by racism since I was 10 years old, right?
But race war, what is this man talking about, right?
And so I began buying books and all kinds of stuff, learning different terminology for it, which will come later.
Like, for example, the white supremacists, they have two terms for the race war.
One is Rahoa, R-A-H-O-W-A, Rahoa, which are the first two letters of three words, racial holy war.
Also, they call it the Boogaloo.
So if you hear that term, they're not talking about the 1960s, you know, dance music.
So we're talking about the race war.
And so Matt Cole talked about the race war.
Well, I graduated two years later, 1976, from high school.
I graduated from college in 1980, four years after that.
And like I said, racism became my obsession.
I did not confront Matt Cole in school because, you know, my peer group back then, you know, we were raised, you have respect for your elders as figures of authority, whether you accept them or not, you still respect them.
And so, you know, I didn't confront him like that.
But now I've graduated from college, right?
And I graduated in 1980 at age 22.
In 1982, I'm age 24.
I developed contacts with different people.
I knew where some of these groups were, etc.
I found out about a demonstration, an unpublicized demonstration by the American Nazi Party that was going to take place in front of the White House.
There is a park right across the street from the White House called Lafayette Park.
24-7, 365 days a year, there is somebody in that park protesting something.
Nuclear weapons, the environment, abortion, you name it, they're there all the time.
And they face the White House with their billboards and whatever.
So I found out the American Nazi Party was going to have a silent, unpublicized demonstration, which means nobody knows about it, not even the police, right?
So I'm going to go down there and see them.
Now, back then, you could drive up and down the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is where the White House sits.
And I only live like about 30, 40 minutes from there, 15 minutes from D.C. on a non-rush hour day.
So I go down there early.
They're going to be there at 12 noon.
I park my car at Caddy Corner to the White House.
I wait.
Here comes this van.
About 13 to 15 of these Nazis get out, right?
And who do I see?
Matt Cole and Martin Kerr.
The same two guys from eight years ago who came to my school.
You never forget the face.
I mean, I can look at my hand right now and see his face right there.
You know, you never forget the face of somebody who tells you they're going to ship you somewhere whether you want to go or not.
And if you don't, exterminate you if you don't go voluntarily, right?
So anyway, Matt Cole gets all his Nazis lined up.
They're not wearing anything that indicates they're Nazis.
They're wearing just dark black suits.
And they're standing there like this, facing the White House across the street, like this.
It's lunchtime in D.C. People are walking by, not even knowing who they are.
I know who they are, right?
I guess maybe the White House might have known who they were.
So anyway, once he got them all lined up, I walked right over to Matt Cole and I said, Matt Cole, he like jumped, like, who is this black person calling my name, you know?
And he says, do I know you?
And I said, well, you spoke at my high school.
And what high school would that be?
I said, Wooten High School in Rockville, Maryland.
So he, you know, I talked to him for about, you know, maybe 20, 30 minutes.
I wasn't there to beat him up or cuss him out.
I just want to understand where he's coming from, right?
And so a few months later, they applied for a permit.
They had their national American Nazi Party recruitment rally in Washington, D.C. So people came from all over the country, right?
And now this time, it was publicized.
So you had about 50 of them show up, and there were tens of thousands of people that came to protest from New York, Richmond, Virginia, Baltimore, all over.
So you had every police department was there to, and there was rioting, all kinds of craziness going on, right?
You could not get to, I went there with my secretary.
You could not get to the Nazis.
I saw Matt Cole and them, and now, of course, they're wearing their Gestapo uniforms with the SS insignias, flying swastika flags, and all that kind of thing.
But you couldn't get to them because if the police have their shields and their batons and pushing people back, right?
So then people, they came with bricks and all kinds of stuff and began throwing them over the heads of the police to land on the Nazis gathered in this opening in the park.
And so the cops began tear gassing everybody, and then it came a full-blown riot.
People were turning over police cars, breaking out the windows, kicking out the headlights, setting buildings on fire in Washington, D.C. You can find it on YouTube.
And so anyway, this is before internet, right?
1980s.
My secretary and I go home, we watch the news.
And there's Matt Cole sitting in the studio of one of the network TV stations, NBC, CBS, ABC, whatever it was.
And he's talking to the anchor person, and they're showing footage of the riot in D.C. that day.
He goes, you see, you see, it's the blacks and the Jews who are turning over the police cars and trying to attack us.
You don't see the Nazis turning over the police cars.
It was then that I realized what he was doing because he was a pretty smart guy, just smart in the wrong direction.
I couldn't figure out why would he have his national recruitment rally to recruit people into the Nazi Party in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. is two-thirds black.
There are no black people in D.C. who want to join the American Nazi Party.
There are no Jews in Washington, D.C., or Jews anywhere who want to join the American Nazi Party.
So why D.C.?
Because he knew that would happen.
And he has the official footage from CBS, ABC, NBC.
He takes that footage, goes out there to Cordelia in Iowa, Idaho, or Washington State, the Pacific Northwest, and says, you see what's going on in our nation's capital?
Our country is being run by Zog.
Zog is a very common term in white supremacy, Z-O-G.
And so he shows this rioting of all these people who he alleges are blacks and Jews destroying and denying people their right of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech.
So then it's a recruitment tool.
So I learned that.
And I realized what he was doing.
And I've seen the Klan do the same thing.
They will go somewhere where they know there's going to be some kind of a riot.
That's why they want to march in Skokie, Illinois, which was an all-Jewish neighborhood, because they knew it was going to create a disturbance.
And the first thing, and going back to the fear factor of that, like we did the exact same thing.
Every time there was violence, when we clashed with Antifa or something like that, we had people out there filming.
Like NSM had its own media arm.
So they're out there filming that, and we would put out those clips.
So immediately, especially if there was violence, if there was actual clashes and the police weren't keeping people separated, those always turned into recruits.
That's how these groups would utilize that stuff.
So you'd have people that were being like, oh man, I'm sorry, I missed it.
I didn't know we'd be fighting with the Reds.
I'll be at the next one.
And then you'd have applications coming in from new recruits that would see it on the news.
So these groups are always manipulating the media.
Some of the rallies that I organized were at places like Valley Forge, Yorktown, Virginia, historic places that you could use those elements and it would guarantee the press, or downtown LA at the city hall, or marching on D.C., places that would guarantee a lot of press.
And just like Daryl said, it wasn't necessarily to recruit people in those areas.
It was to whip up chaos because that would benefit these groups.
Nowadays, it's a double-edged sword, the media, because these groups before, like I was discussing earlier, you had to kind of search them out or a recruiter had to find you or something like that.
It wasn't easy to find.
Now, a fourth grader can click on a website and go find these groups.
They're easy to find online.
And so sometimes they're very overt, but a lot of times there's different censorship things that are in place.
So they'll change the cover of the book.
So the propagandists that we had in the group were making stuff look less innocuous, not using swastikas or things like that.
So some groups are very prolific at that, and they'll use podcasts, they'll use videos.
Does it grow based on like the things Daryl was talking about, like riots and stuff like that, where they'll use that, maybe Black Lives Matter riots from the 2000s or 2020s rather?
Well, one of the things that's causing it to grow also, which I was going to leading up to when I talked with Matt Cole, what I learned in 1982, was that these people, meaning the movement, the white supremacy movement, are fearing.
He told me this in 1982.
They are fearing the year 2042.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's for real.
The U.S. Census is taken every decade.
I'm 67.
When I was, it doesn't matter how old you are, how old he is or whatever, when we all were children, the black population in this country was 12%.
Native Americans, 1%, right?
Latino, Hispanic Americans, almost 2%.
Asian Americans, Pacific Islander Americans, almost 3%.
Whites were like around 86, 87%.
This is back in, I was born in 58.
So every decade, this is happening.
And this is what Matt Cole was telling me, that they were fearing.
He used the word fear.
He said it has to be stopped.
He said, in the year 2042, if this trend continues, this country will be 50-50, meaning 50% white, 50% non-white.
The last census taken in our country was 2020.
Guess what?
Whites went from like 80-some percent from the time I was a kid and you were a kid, now 59%.
That was in 2020.
It's less than that right now in 2025.
So in 2044, it's going to be this.
It's predicted between 2045 and 2050, it's going to flip.
And for the first time in the history of the United States, whites will become the minority.
And while there are plenty of white people who say, hey, that doesn't bother me, no big deals, evolution.
What's the big deal?
There is a slice of our population, the ones that I deal with, who think it is a big deal, and they're trying to stop it.
And that's why when I first started, I've been doing this, like I said, for 45 years.
When I first started doing this, there was just the KKK, white power skinheads, and some neo-Nazi groups.
That was basically it.
Today you got the KKK, the neo-Nazis, the skinheads, the Patriot Front, the Vanguard, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the National Alliance, on, on and on, whole slew of groups.
And they're all saying, come join us, come join us.
We're going to take back our country, right?
So people out of fear of their identity being erased, as they're saying, because they're trying to keep the races pure, because what they tell me is, Daryl, I don't want my grandkids to be brown.
They call it the Browning of America, or white genocide through miscegenation.
So these people out of fear of their identity being erased, because they truly believe that they are patriots, and it's their job to save this country.
We built this country, we wrote the Constitution, and now people are coming into our country who don't look like us and squeezing us out of our own country.
That's the mentality.
And as Jeff points out, they're surrounded by an echo chamber that keeps repeating that, so then it becomes the truth to them, right?
So they run and join these groups to take back the country.
But when the group does not act fast enough to take back the country, they get antsy and get frustrated and say, you know what?
If the Nazis can't do it or the Klan can't do it, I'll do it myself.
And they walk into a black church in South Carolina, boom, boom, boom, boom, and murder nine black people doing Bible study or the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, kill off 11 Jewish people.
The Buffalo grocery store in New York.
The Sikh Indian Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin murders seven Sikh Indians doing religious service.
The Walmart in El Paso, Texas, 23 Mexican people were murdered by white supremacists a few years ago.
These people are called lone wolves.
And every time one of them gets taken out by law enforcement or gets arrested and their property gets searched, law enforcement always finds a cache of automatic weapons that are being stockpiled for Rahoa or the Boogaloo because they're looking to have this redo of the Civil War to preserve their lifestyle.
And so 2042 is going to be a pivotal year.
And we're only, what, 16, 17 years away from that right now.
It's just such a disturbing aspect of society that you would think there's going to come a point in time where there's enough education, enough understanding, especially with the access to information we have with the internet, that this would all go away.
But it doesn't seem like that's helping because it seems like the more access to information, the more people settle into these echo chambers.
That and also a lot of the old guard realize, you know, this is happening, and if we want to preserve Our culture, our whatever, we need to pass this on to young people.
We need to get more young people involved.
And they began recruiting young people to disseminate this information and galvanize more of their peers into this ideology.
And back to the recruitment of military and law enforcement because they know this is going to happen and they're going to want those people on board to be on that side.
And I mean, you can probably talk about military and law enforcement inside your organization.
Well, on their applications, we were asking what branch they were in, what rank they achieved, because we were looking at all that for potential leadership.
So anybody that had military experience, especially in the higher ranks, those people would be naturally looked at for leadership positions in the party because they had those.
So using the same tactics as everybody else, but as far as the organization specifically, having that military structure, like we discussed earlier, having that structure gave them, so somebody that was coming out of the military that was retired or something like that, it would provide that structure that they were missing.
So a lot of times for people that are involved in this stuff, it's fulfilling a psychological need.
It's being part of a mission.
It's having that something that's driving them and a driving force that's behind their ideology.
So finding a place to fit in, having a mission, a sense of purpose.
I think it's a lot of things.
A lot of times people miss that aspect of it.
And I explain it not to excuse it because there is no excuse for it.
These are choices that people make.
But if you understand the psychology of it and like why someone's involved in it, that's helpful to help pull them out.
And also when someone's coming out of these organizations to have a new mission, have something else.
So for a lot of people that might be learning to play guitar or doing an extreme sport or getting involved with the church or just, it could be anything, but there has to be something because if they're missing that, that's when they really struggle.
A lot of times just kind of asking them questions, you know, asking a lot of questions and seeing what they're interested in and finding those things, trying to help them find that sense of purpose and that because that's missing.
So I've had a lot of people say, like, when they've left, they're like, I don't have that.
I don't have that.
So a lot of times we'll talk through that.
Well, what interests you?
What are you interested in?
And a lot of times we try to keep them kind of steer clear of politics.
But for some people, it might be okay.
But typically, that's kind of probably one they should stay away from for a little while.
So even though these people might have been friends with somebody who later became a white supremacist or whatever, the stigma of it, even now that they're out, they still are a little leery and want to stay clear because you're judged by the company you keep.
So it's always, you know, ex-con, you know, blah, blah, blah.
You know, instead of just saying so-and-so is working here.
Yeah, and it's crazy because I had a reporter one time, and I won't say who or anything like that, but he had said, you know, I visit a murderer in prison, and I'm okay with that, but I'm not so sure about your journey.
Like, I mean, like, he, basically what he was saying in so many words was he was more comfortable with the murderer than somebody, and this is a reporter, you know, somebody, a journalist.
And they were more uncomfortable speaking with a former neo-Nazi.
I mean, you know, prison is a penal institution, not a reform institution, which is why this country has the highest recidivism rate of any country in the world, right?
People go in there and they don't get reformed, and they learn from better people than they were at their crime, and they go back out and they do it again, and people don't accept them because they have that stigma that follows them.
Well, I can't hire an ex-con, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
An interesting side note on that, you know, we talk about like some of the hate that I had, and I was a raging anti-Semite, more than a racist by all points.
And the irony of today working with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, I mean, there's just so much irony there.
And like the Jewish community was the community that I dehumanized and villainized the most.
And Joe, they have been the most accepting and welcoming as far as since the change has happened.
And that just blew my mind.
Because the first time I went to speak at a synagogue, I thought, man, these people are going to want to stone me to death.
What should I say?
How am I going to, you know, what is this going to be like?
I'd never been in a synagogue before, and this took place in Skokie, Illinois.
And I tell you, after speaking there, I got more hugs and more love and compassion than I'd probably any other place I could ever remember being.
So it's like when I speak with kids at schools, you know, I said, you know, you guys remember in elementary school when you had opposite day and your shirts backwards and all that kind of stuff?
I said, that was my life.
Like everything that I thought that I knew about the Jews and the movement, I was an expert on the Jews, the Jewish question.
And, you know, for the longest time, you know, Jews have been blamed for everything.
Things, you know, they had nothing to do with.
They say, you know, the Jews run the media.
They own the media.
They run the banking systems and all that kind of stuff.
And so people begin believing in that.
And they become persona non grata, even though they may not even know any Jewish people.
And that's why I say, you know, when I feel I can trust some individual who trusts me or whatever around my friends, I will invite them over or whatever, and I bring in some Jewish friends of mine and other black friends or white friends so that they can see something outside the echo chamber.
Another former neo-Nazi, who's a very good friend of mine, was telling me that when he was in— That's a funny sentence.
Okay, so, you know, we have a unique thing here called slavery.
And Jewish people have a unique thing called the Holocaust.
So if you're a white guy and you're walking down the street, the sidewalk, and some other white guy is coming up the sidewalk, you don't know him, just a stranger, you know.
You guys are going to pass and not say a thing to either one of them.
Just go on by, right?
If it's a black guy, two black guys passing, they're going to go, yo, man, what's up?
They're going to acknowledge one another because they have a shared experience.
They both are descendants of slaves.
They both have experienced racism at some point in their life or whatever.
If two Jews pass who don't know each other, they're going to go shalom because of that commonality, that experience.
So unless you've had that experience, you don't react to it.
So when I lived in Africa, on the continent of Africa for 10 years, I lived in Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal, and visited many other countries in between because of my dad's job.
So I can tell you, all black people don't look alike.
Well, this is the only way these movements like the neo-Nazis work is if you don't know a lot of people from all over the world and realize we're all just people.
This is, you know, and it is very fear-based, right?
But that has no bearing on your character, no bearing on your intellect, no bearing on any of the things that we find fascinating and attractive about people.
It's just the color of your skin, which is the dumbest fucking thing on earth.
And, you know, and we all may engage in it somewhat.
Like, for example, if I like Chinese food, and if I go to a Chinese restaurant, I don't want to see a bunch of white college kids or black college kids for that matter in the kitchen cooking it for me.
They found something that is a Homo sapien that's 500,000 years older than when they thought Homo sapiens existed.
This is very recent.
And so it was likely that this was taking place in multiple areas of the world.
Just like there's different animals in multiple places of the world.
There's different primates in multiple places of the world.
And there's a bunch of different kinds of human beings, of course, right?
There's Denisovans, which have just recently discovered.
And then there was the Hobbit people on the island of Flores.
When it comes to the evolutionary history of human beings, it's very, very odd.
But when you talk about the cultural history of human beings, that's when things get really crazy because it was just a lot of people traveling all over the place and just settling into the climate.
And the reason why white people are white is just because there is no sun.
It's that simple.
And they had to develop essentially like a giant solar panel to suck up vitamin D because they weren't getting any vitamin D from the sun.
I think that thing too, that exposure that you had to that Nazi coming to visit you, even though it's negative exposure, it's probably good to see.
You know, like when I was a kid, I was in high school and I was 14, Barney Frank, who wasn't openly gay then, but he was like one of the first openly gay members of Congress.
So he was debating a member of what at the time was the, I believe it was the moral majority.
And it was this really goofy guy who came out and he had like an American flag on his lapel.
And I remember I was 14.
And, you know, when you're 14 and you see someone who's got this very, like, he was very anti-gay marriage, very anti-a lot of things.
But he was a clumsy, wasn't very eloquent, not a very compelling speaker.
And then Barney Frank went up, you know, so they both spoke.
This guy spoke, and then Barney Frank.
And Barney Frank was so much smoother, so much more articulate.
It was like, and for every, all the kids that I was in school with who left, they're like, that guy made more sense.
Like, this is a good thing to say.
It's good that they see someone with a very narrow-minded, bigoted perspective, and then someone who is more intelligent, has a much better vocabulary, smoother in their ability to disseminate information and to dissect the bad arguments of the other person.
So we all walked out of there.
We're like, okay.
And then, you know, I remember talking about it with my friends, like, yeah, that guy's a fucking moron, that first guy.
But nowadays, instead of that, you would only get one.
You would only get the one person talking.
But the one person talking without the other person talking is not as good.
And this idea of protecting kids from bad ideas because they don't want these kids to be indoctrinated by bad ideas, it doesn't work with human beings.
The way to get rid of bad ideas is to confront them with better ideas.
And the fear of having these kind of debates in schools is really dangerous.
It's dangerous for discourse.
It's dangerous for the development of the ability to have arguments and ideas and to be able to debate.
You have to see it done.
You have to see bad thinking, good thinking.
Ah, I get it.
I get it.
This guy's, he's more, he's more clever, he's thinking better, he's got more information.
This makes sense.
And if you don't allow people to make those distinctions on their own, if you just baby them and treat them like you can't expose them to these negative ideas, you miss out on the possibility of accepting nuance and an understanding of how a less sophisticated, less educated person can fall into these traps of these stupid ideologies.
So in order to, and if you start escalating stuff, that blockout becomes even greater.
So you want that person's wall to come down.
And by not reacting, that person becomes curious.
He's like, where's this guy coming?
What's up with him?
He's not reacting the way most black people would react when I say whatever.
So as the wall comes down, the curiosity on his end rises.
And so now his ears are unblocked and he's ready to hear what I have to say.
But if I'm escalating and telling him my story while I'm escalating about getting thrown rocks, he'll probably say, oh, well, it wasn't me that did it, you know, so what's the deal?
You know, you're driving down the highway, you know, speed limits 55 miles an hour.
You're doing 75 miles an hour, right?
And you're getting ready to go over this hill and the oncoming traffic.
You know, some guy comes over the hill before you crest it, and this person is flashing the lights.
You don't know who's in that car, but they're flashing the lights.
So that means usually there's a cop on the other side working radar.
Or it could be construction or an accident.
Something, you need to slow down, something like that, right?
So you hit your brakes before you go over the hill.
And as soon as you crest the hill, oh, there's a cop with the radar gun.
Man, you know, you're going to have a $150 ticket, right?
Ruin your day.
And that stranger, total stranger, who you don't know what color he was, what religion he is, who he voted for, who his daddy was, whatever, that person saved you from getting that ticket, right?
So as you slowly cruise by the cop, he doesn't pull you over or whatever, you know, you're going to start flashing your lights at the oncoming traffic to save them.
But let's say, you know, you're coming up the hill and people are coming over the hill and nobody's flashing the lights.
You go over that hill, right?
There he is, pulling you over, you know, license registration, remain in your car, be with you in a moment, comes back, gives you that $150 ticket until you have a nice day.
You're ruined.
You lost $150.
Your insurance goes up because you got points on your license now.
All kinds of crap.
Your day is ruined.
So now as you continue down the street, you don't flash your lights either.
That's their problem.
So, you know, misery loves company.
Negativity promotes negativity.
A random act of kindness from a stranger, all right?
The guy could have been having a bad day and you flashed your lights and you saved him $150.
Are you hopeful with all the work that you've done and all the people that you've removed from the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan and seeing how your message resonates with people?
And like, I know every time I have you on, I get all these messages from people who go, wow, that guy's amazing.
Like, what an incredible journey.
And it's like, I know it resonates with a lot of people, but there's still so much fucking hatred in the world.
Do you feel hopeful?
Do you think things are moving in a generally good direction?
If you use it in terms of a noun, the racist being a noun, I'm not anti-the person.
I am anti-the person's ideology.
I'm not anti-racist.
I'm anti-anti-racism.
I'm anti-the-ism.
I am pro-human is what I am.
So I want to talk about what I'm for.
It's all, oh, yeah, that makes sense.
So contact the prohumanfoundation.org.
Contact Beyond Barriers, Parents for Peace, which I'm a part of as well, you know, and we'll talk about how you can get involved in being pro and dispel.
You know, don't be against the person, be against the message, you know, if you want to disagree with something.
And Jeff, thank you for, you know, first of all, just spreading this message and having the courage to accept these bad decisions that you've made and how you got trapped and just to let people know how a person like yourself, who does seem like such a nice and intelligent guy, could get sucked into such an awful ideology.