In this episode, Daryl tells the story of how a white man bought him a drink at an all-white bar in order to get to know him a little better. He explains how he did it, and how it changed his perception of race relations in America. He also explains how a man who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to pay for his drink, even though it was the first time he had ever met a Black man before. And how he handled the situation was a perfect example of how to deal with racism and white supremacy in the 21st century, no matter who you are or what you're standing next to, or how far back in history you are in history, racism is still alive and well in the United States of A.K.A. racism is alive and thriving in America today, and why it s so important to fight racism in America, even when it s in the past and in the present. This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the University of St. Thomas More, located in Baltimore, Maryland, and hosted by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located across the street from St. Martin's Medical Center, where he is a regular visitor to the annual Black History Month events. and a regular at the annual black history month event, "Black History Month, Black History Week." in Baltimore's Central Park, he sits down and talks about his experiences with racism, and what it means to him, what he's learned and what he s learned about racism in the black community, and his thoughts on racism. in the process of fighting racism and racism in American history and how he s dealing with racism in his everyday life. of being a black man in America as a black musician and how racism has shaped his life and in his career, and the impact racism has had on his career. today s experience in his life, he shares his story of overcoming racism and how that has changed his perspective on race and his views on race, and so much more. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast, Daryl talks about racism and his experience, Daryl shares some of his experience with racism as a little bit of his own experience, and shares a story of racism and the racism he s experience he s had in his own life, and gives us some insight on racism and its impact on his life and how to fight against racism in our society.
00:01:44.000And he said, well, man, I really like your piano playing.
00:01:47.000This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.
00:01:52.000And I wasn't offended, but I was rather surprised, because as I said, this guy's maybe 15 years older than me, and he did not know the black origin of Jerry Lee Lewis' style of piano playing.
00:03:36.000I'd been studying racism since I was a 10-year-old kid because of an incident that happened to me back then.
00:03:42.000And I bought books on black supremacy, white supremacy, the KKK, the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, to try to understand this mentality.
00:03:51.000And I knew a Klansman would not come up and just throw his arm around some black guy's shoulder and praise his talent and want to hang out with him and buy him a drink.
00:03:59.000So, you know, this guy's jerking me around.
00:04:01.000So I'm laughing, and he goes inside his pocket and pulls out his wallet and produces his Klan membership card.
00:04:12.000I looked at it, and I recognized the Klan insignia, which is a red circle with a white cross and a red blood drop in the center of the cross.
00:04:22.000And I realized, oh man, this thing's for real.
00:04:30.000And we chatted about the Klan and different things.
00:04:33.000But the dude gave me his phone number.
00:04:36.000And wanted me to call him whenever I was to return to this bar so he could bring his friends, meaning Klansmen and Klanswomen, to see this black guy play like Jerry Lee.
00:04:46.000I'm not sure he called me a black guy to his friends, but I said, I'll call you.
00:04:53.000So I would call him every six weeks on a Wednesday or Thursday.
00:04:58.000I said, hey man, you know, we're down at the Silver Dollar, you know, Friday and Saturday, come on out.
00:05:02.000He'd come out both nights, and he'd bring Klansmen and Klanswomen, and they'd come and gather around the bandstand and watch me play the piano, or get out there and dance to our music.
00:05:11.000Now, you know, they didn't come in robes and hoods, right?
00:05:34.000And I decided later on I would write a book.
00:05:40.000Because I'd been looking for an answer to a question that I had formed when I was age 10. My question was, how can you hate me when you don't even know me?
00:05:51.000And this was a result of having marched in a Cub Scout parade at the age of 10, being the only black scout in this parade.
00:06:02.000And while most people on the streets and sidewalks were cheering us, we were marching from Lexington to Concord, Massachusetts, to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere.
00:06:14.000And people were like waving flags and yelling and screaming, the British are coming and all a good time, except for one small pocket of people who were throwing rocks and bottles at me.
00:06:24.000And at age 10, my first thought was, oh, those people over there don't like the scouts.
00:06:35.000It wasn't until my den mother, my cub master, my troop leader all came rushing over and huddled over me with their bodies, these white people, and escorted me out of the danger that I realized I was the only target because nobody else was getting this protection.
00:06:49.000And these were adults or these were other children?
00:07:05.000And, you know, I kept saying to my scout leaders, I didn't do anything, I didn't do anything, because now I'm trying to find out, what did I do?
00:07:18.000And they kept, you know, shushing me, telling me to hurry up, move along, it'll be okay.
00:07:22.000So they never answered the question as to why this was happening.
00:07:25.000When I got home that day, after this parade, my mother and father, who were not there, were putting mature chrome and band-aids on me and asking me how did I fall down and get all scraped up.
00:08:07.000Every two years, you go to a country, you're there for two years, come back home for a few months, and then you get reassigned to another country.
00:08:14.000So when I was overseas, In elementary school, my classes were filled with kids from all over the world.
00:08:22.000Anybody who had an embassy in those countries, all us embassy kids went to the same school.
00:08:27.000My class was full of kids from Nigeria, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, you name it.
00:08:34.000If you were to open the door to my classroom and stick your head in, you would say, this looks like a United Nations of little kids, because that's exactly what it was.
00:08:45.000Then I would come home after that two-year assignment and I would be in either all black schools or all white schools.
00:08:54.000I'm sorry, all black schools or all black and white schools, meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated schools.
00:09:01.000And there was not the amount of diversity in my classroom that I had overseas.
00:09:06.000Today you walk into a classroom, you know, you can't tell where people are from, from all over.
00:09:10.000So literally, Between 1961 and like 1968, 1970, I was living about 12 years into the future when I was living overseas because that multicultural scene had yet to come to this country.
00:09:28.000And when it did, of course, I was already prepared.
00:09:33.000Unfortunately, many of my peers were not.
00:09:54.000And I knew something was wrong because the people who did this to me did not look any different than my little French friends, my Swedish friends, or my fellow Americans from the embassy, or for that matter, my fellow Americans right there, you know, at the school where I went,
00:10:16.000In fact, when my parents told me this, I did not believe my parents.
00:10:20.000I thought for some reason my parents are lying to me because my 10-year-old brain could not process the idea that someone who had never seen me, had never spoken to me, knew nothing about me, would want to inflict me.
00:10:35.000No other reason than the color of my skin.
00:10:50.000We were in Massachusetts, same place, and nearby Boston, Washington, D.C., my hometown, Chicago, Illinois, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Richmond, L.A., all burned to the ground.
00:11:05.000With violence and destruction, all in the name of this new word that I had learned called racism.
00:11:13.000And so then I realized my parents had told me the truth.
00:11:16.000This phenomenon called racism does exist, but why?
00:11:36.000So after I met this Klansman, oh, maybe, I don't know, three or four months later, I quit that band and went back to playing rock and roll and blues and R&B. And then it dawned on me,
00:11:52.000Daryl, you know, the answer that you've been seeking since age 10 fell right into your lap.
00:12:01.000Who better to ask that question of how can you hate me when you don't even know me than to ask it of somebody who would go so far as to join an organization whose whole premise has been hating people who do not look like them and who do not believe as they believe.
00:12:20.000And this organization has been around for over 100 years.
00:12:23.000Somebody who would go that far to join the KKK Should damn sure have an answer to your question.
00:12:34.000Because I had every book, I still do, every book written on the Klan.
00:12:38.000And they all were written by white authors, obviously, because a white author would have, you know, less fear of ramifications, talking to a Klansman, or interviewing them, who would have easier access, or could join the Klan undercover.
00:12:52.000Get the story, get out and write about it.
00:12:55.000So my book became the first book ever written by a black author on the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of sitting down face to face.
00:13:04.000I decided I would go around the country, interview Klan leaders there in Maryland where I live, up north, down south, midwest, and west.
00:13:12.000And I said I would start right there in Maryland.
00:13:14.000So I got a hold of that guy and I wanted him to introduce me to the Klan leader from Maryland.
00:21:51.000Now, that does not mean that every person in Thermont is in the Klan, because they're not.
00:21:58.000In fact, most white people up there wanted the Klan gone, but that's where it was headquartered.
00:22:03.000So he said there was a bar up there where they hang out every Saturday night.
00:22:08.000And if I go to that bar, I'm sure to find Roger Kelly.
00:22:13.000And, you know, unless they're out of town rallying somewhere.
00:22:16.000He says, but I don't guarantee you that Roger will even talk to you, but you're safer to approach him in a public place than Garner's property.
00:24:15.000I would say maybe no more than six or seven people in there.
00:24:18.000A couple guys in the back playing pool, a guy or two sitting at the bar, and the guy had told me this was a Klan bar.
00:24:27.000And what he meant by Klan bar is the Klan doesn't own it, but that's where they hang out.
00:24:31.000And he described it to me, that when you walk in the door, to your left will be a row of booths, and the first two booths closest to the door where you come in are reserved for the Klan.
00:24:44.000So, you know, I looked over there and nobody was sitting there.
00:24:48.000So I'm looking around to see if I recognize Roger Kelly.
00:24:52.000And I didn't see anybody who looked like him, which did not mean that some of these people weren't Klan.
00:24:58.000But I figured, you know what, and to my right was a long bar.
00:27:06.000Was A, I figured, you know, if he knew that, he may not give me the interview.
00:27:13.000But if he agreed to do the interview, then obviously he would see that I'm black when he meets me, and he could decide right then and there if he wanted to continue it or not.
00:27:24.000And secondly, if he agreed to do the interview knowing that I was black, he may have different answers prepared in the interim than he would have for a white interviewer as opposed to a black interviewer.
00:27:35.000So I wanted to be spontaneous, candid.
00:27:38.000So she understood, and she called him, and he agreed to do the interview.
00:27:43.000So we set it up for the motel above the Silver Dollar Lounge up there in Frederick, Maryland at 5.15 on a Sunday afternoon.
00:27:52.000And Mary and I got there, oh man, I don't know, several hours early.
00:27:58.000I gave her some money, sent her down the hall to get some soda pop out of the machine, put it in the ice bucket, fill it with ice, get it all cold.
00:28:22.000You know, but in the event, I wanted to be hospitable.
00:28:25.000So she got the soda pop, put in the ice bucket, set it on the dresser.
00:28:31.000Just by happenstance, the way the room is laid out, if you are standing in the hallway, in the doorway of the room, looking into the room, you cannot see who's in the room.
00:28:41.000You have to literally walk in the door and turn to your right, and the room is laid out back there.
00:29:26.000So I want to be able to pull out my Bible when he brings it up and say, here, Mr. Kelly, show me, please, in this King James Version, chapter and verse where it says blacks and whites must be separate.
00:34:26.000There are indeed more blacks in prison than white people.
00:34:30.000It's not because we're prone to crime, like you said.
00:34:33.000It's because of inequity in our judicial system, where whites in the same predicament either don't get the same jail time or don't go to jail or whatever.
00:34:49.000While we prefer to scam the government welfare system, we're looking for handouts and freebies and all that where white people, you know, they work, etc.
00:34:59.000And also, this book called The Bell Curve had just recently come out.
00:35:09.000So, you know, he jumped on that, and he said, well, you know, it's a known fact.
00:35:13.000You know, they say the world's biggest authority is they.
00:35:17.000You know, you never see who they is, right?
00:35:19.000They say that, you know, black people have smaller brains than white people, and that's why their IQ is not as high.
00:35:27.000So I guess the bigger the brain, the more intelligent you are.
00:35:30.000So now, I'm sitting there listening to this guy tell me that I'm a criminal, and I'm lazy and on welfare, and my brain is smaller than his.
00:35:42.000What he was saying was indeed offensive.
00:35:46.000But here's the difference between me and most other people.
00:36:14.000Where did you develop this kind of clarity?
00:36:16.000It's very unusual to not be offended when someone's judging you instantly and saying disparaging things about everyone that looks anything like you.
00:36:25.000Just right off the cuff, freely right in front of you.
00:36:28.000How did you develop this clarity to just not be offended by that?
00:36:32.000Because it didn't make sense what he was saying.
00:45:27.000All because some foreign, an underscore highlight circle of the word foreign, entity of which we were ignorant, that being the bucket of ice cans of soda, We're good to go.
00:46:01.000That fear in turn will escalate and breed hatred because we hate those things that frighten us.
00:46:10.000If you don't check that hatred, it in turn will escalate and breed destruction.
00:46:18.000We want to destroy those things that we hate.
00:46:36.000Had I pounced across the table and hurt one of them, or had the Nighthawk drawn his gun and shot one of us, you know, that would have been the destruction.
00:47:19.000It culminated in destruction when a white supremacist got inside his vehicle and drove full force into a crowd of counter-protesters trying to murder them.
00:47:30.000He succeeded in injuring 20 and murdering a young lady named Heather Heyer.
00:52:00.000You know, I have a band van, so they all show up at my house, get in the van, we all ride at the gig together, especially if it's far away.
00:52:07.000And sometimes I'd want to stop at some Klan rally on my way to a gig and And so my guys would say, Darryl, I'll just meet you there.
00:52:28.000So it went from this, you obviously had...
00:52:32.000You were compelled, almost obsessed, to meet this guy and get to the bottom of this thing that had been bothering you since you were 10 years old.
00:52:39.000And because my relationship with him was really growing, it was turning into a friendship.
00:52:44.000I mean, you know, I'm not going to lie.
00:55:53.000And they stand there and admire this burning cross, and then they give some speeches from the podium, and then they have hot dogs and hamburgers, and the rally is over.
00:56:22.000Now, let me explain something to you that I learned.
00:56:26.000There are two times, two occasions upon which they set the cross aflame, as they put it.
00:56:32.000They have a cross burning and a cross lighting.
00:56:35.000The difference being, a cross burning is when they take a 5 or 10 foot cross wrapped in that burlap soaked in kerosene and put it in your lawn because you're an interracial couple, you're gay, you're Jewish in a white neighborhood, whatever the deal is.
01:01:15.000I'm saying to him, look, Mr. Murray, anytime you want to prove something, you find something that fits your narrative.
01:01:23.000You can find some black person who has a very low IQ. If I work for Ford and I want to prove that my car is better than Chevrolet, then I'm going to find a Chevrolet that doesn't run very well.
01:02:17.000He said, well, you know, we all know they say that, again, that they, authority, say that black people have a gene in them that makes them violent.
01:02:30.000And I'd heard that before from other Klan people.
01:04:21.000I said, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, Son of Sam.
01:08:29.000When I first heard of Bob White, I was in my late teens, and I heard about him on the news.
01:08:38.000He had been busted, arrested, and put in jail for conspiring to bomb a synagogue in Baltimore up on Liberty Road, the Liberty Road's synagogue.
01:09:23.000That's what causes these splinter groups.
01:09:26.000If you're a leader, like a wizard or a dragon, you might get like a small stipend out of the dues, but not enough to pay your rent or put food on your table.
01:12:45.000And when you are dealing with somebody with that kind of tie, you know, that generational thing, it may take a little longer for them to come out, because it's hard to break family tradition, right?
01:13:01.000Another reason why people would join You take a depressed town, like a coal mining town in West Virginia or Scranton, Pennsylvania or something like that, where people who are not racist They're hard workers.
01:13:39.000But then the company gets greedy and decides, hey, you know what?
01:13:44.000We can save money, make a lot more money if we lay off our employees and hire some of these immigrants, whether they're illegal or illegal, because they'll work for less than half of what we're paying our people,
01:15:07.000So they're like, you know, coercing into this group.
01:15:12.000They may be a little easier to come out, you know, talking with them.
01:15:16.000Then a third reason why people would join, if somebody relocates to a town that is very clan-oriented, a lot of people who kind of live there and stuff, if you want to do business in that town, you've got to assimilate.
01:15:31.000You join the local country club, the local chamber of commerce, and the local KKK. So those are different reasons why people will join.
01:15:40.000And again, depending upon how strong the ties are or why they join can determine their longevity or their hold on it.
01:15:53.000What is the one that took you the longest to crack?
01:16:37.000Because what would happen would be this.
01:16:41.000It's like, you know, when you believe in something, some people just believe in it just because it's that person saying it.
01:16:52.000Like, you know, we have a current president where no matter what he says, some people are going to believe and others are going to disbelieve.
01:17:02.000And that can go for any president, really, if you're a big fan.
01:17:05.000No matter what you do, what you say, you have a base that's going to believe you.
01:17:10.000So I would tell these people when I saw fault with what they were saying in their ideology, I said, well, let me tell you why I think this is incorrect.
01:17:25.000Now, they may not concede right then and there, but when they go home, they check it out, and it rolls around in their head, and they begin thinking, you know, Daryl does have a point, but he's black, but he does have a point, but he's black.
01:17:39.000So even though they know it's true, they don't want to believe it because I'm black.
01:17:44.000So it's like that cognitive dissonance thing going on.
01:17:47.000So they have an internal struggle, and they have to make up their own mind Do I continue living a lie?
01:17:57.000Or do I turn my life around and live the truth?
01:18:02.000You're a very articulate guy, and I'm sure a lot of these people are not very educated, so the continued exposure to you is probably confusing to them as well.
01:18:10.000Because you're so good at forming sentences and speaking and calm, and the words flow so smoothly out of your mouth, and you have this wonderful grasp of the English language.
01:22:37.000Our country—I'm going to tell you where it's headed so you understand.
01:22:42.000Our country can only become one of two things.
01:22:46.000It can become number one, that which we stand up, I'm sorry, that which we sit back and let it become, or number two, that which we stand up and make it become.
01:23:03.000Do I want to sit back and see what my country becomes?
01:23:08.000Or do I want to stand up and make my country become what I want to see?
01:23:12.000And I've chosen the latter because I don't like the direction it's going in.
01:23:16.000Well, you've chosen a very noble, not just the latter, but a very noble path.
01:23:21.000I mean, what you've done is pretty incredible in the amount of time and energy that's required for you to get close to these guys and the fact that you could be doing a lot of other things.
01:23:33.000But you chose to spend an extraordinary amount of time pursuing I would much rather be on stage playing music and making people happy and causing them to jump up and dance and carry on and sing along than attending Klan rallies.
01:23:46.000But I find it more and more necessary because we have dropped the ball.
01:23:51.000You know, the topic that you and I are discussing right now...
01:23:54.00020, 30 years ago, it would have been taboo talking about it on radio or whatever.
01:25:58.000Did not like black people or did not like Jewish people.
01:26:01.000They did not want to participate in this night riding, you know, lynchings and murder and all that kind of stuff, either for moral reasons or legal reasons, whatever.
01:28:01.000Because I knew that it still existed, but I didn't think they would show themselves publicly like that in the age of the internet and walk down the street with tiki torches.
01:28:34.000I just had probably heard it on the news or something like that that was going on.
01:28:37.000And then when I saw the KKK showing – were those guys, the Charlottesville guys with the torches, were those KKK or was it another white supremacy movement?
01:29:27.000And I had a conversation with somebody about it that those statues, most of them were very cheaply made and they were actually put up during the Civil Rights Movement.
01:30:15.000The white supremacists have been predicting and have been preparing for a race war.
01:30:20.000Just like Dylann Roof was trying to start the race war, that's what he said, when he went to that black church and gunned up the place.
01:30:26.000The guy who shot all those people in El Paso, he said the race war.
01:30:37.000Anytime you want to occupy a piece of public property because you want to have a rally, a demonstration, or even if you want to set up a lemonade and hot dog stand, if it's going to be on public property, you must have a permit, right?
01:30:49.000You go down to the city, get an application, fill out your name, and state your purpose.
01:30:55.000You cannot very well say on the application, I want to start a race war.
01:33:33.000So here, you know, we're fighting to free slaves, and the Confederate Army has blacks and Jews and whites fighting together, and the Union has them all segregated.
01:33:44.000It doesn't make sense, but it does, because it's all so ridiculous, because that's what humans are.
01:33:56.000If blacks and Jews and whites could fight together 150 years ago, Why can't they march together in 2017?
01:34:10.000Wouldn't it make more sense and give more credibility to your cause?
01:34:15.000If your cause was truly to preserve those statues, why not invite descendants like yourselves of blacks and Jews to march with you in Charlottesville and say, hey, that's my heritage too.
01:34:43.000But instead, so they're claiming this is their heritage.
01:34:48.000Instead of inviting or including blacks and Jews, they excluded them in 2017. So if blacks and Jews wanted to march, they would not let them?
01:35:28.000The Confederacy was simply a reflection of the South, okay?
01:35:34.000So instead of including them, they excluded them, and they marched through the University of Virginia campus with their tiki torches and the streets of Charlottesville yelling and screaming anti-Semitic and racial epithets.
01:36:17.000But how do you honor your great, great, great ancestors in the Confederacy?
01:36:24.000And at the same time, you dishonor the very ancestors who you do know, the very ones who raised you, your fathers, your grandfathers.
01:36:35.000And if you're lucky enough, you may have met your great-grandfather.
01:36:39.000These people, many fathers of these people in Charlottesville, many fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers lost their lives fighting, not in the Confederacy, but fighting in World War II. And who were they fighting in World War II? The Nazis.
01:36:57.000So how do you tell me you're going to honor your great-great-great ancestors and you're going to walk down the streets of Charlottesville side by side with people wearing swastikas?
01:37:39.000And that's what the media failed to tell us, because what the media did was they went to City Hall, because it's a public record, just pulled the permit and read, oh, they're there to protest the statues.
01:37:50.000They took it verbatim and reported like that.
01:39:50.000Today, you know, I'm helping an organization as an advisor.
01:39:55.000In fact, we're putting on a festival of ideas this year in June.
01:40:00.000We've already got Cornel West and Tim Pool, Bill Oppmann, and several other people who have already committed to doing this festival of ideas to de-radicalize the Internet.
01:40:17.000And there's a new internet platform that's been around just for over almost two years.
01:40:24.000It's already gotten two million members called Minds.
01:42:26.000So now you have formed a relationship.
01:42:29.000You've gone from here to a relationship.
01:42:32.000And now you begin nurturing that relationship, and you're closing it in.
01:42:36.000And when you get about to here, you found a lot of commonalities.
01:42:40.000And now you've made a friendship, all right?
01:42:43.000And when you get there, the trivial things that you have in contrast, such as the color of your skin, or whether you go to a church, a temple, a mosque, or a synagogue, begin to matter less and less.
01:44:48.000And today as a professional musician, playing all over this country and around the world, when you combine those travels together, I have been in a total of 57 different countries on six continents.
01:45:00.000So I've been, you know, three years old all the way to, I'll be 62 in March.
01:45:06.000I've been exposed all my life to a wide variety of Of religions, cultures, traditions, ethnicities from all over.
01:45:16.000And no matter how far I've gone from the United States, no matter how many different people I've met, I can conclude at the end of the day, we all are human beings.
01:45:25.000We may practice different things, have different cultures, different beliefs, but we all are human beings.
01:45:31.000And one of my very favorite quotes of all time is by Mark Twain, and it's called the travel quote.
01:45:39.000And Mark Twain said, Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
01:45:50.000Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
01:46:08.000But I think the future of this are things like what Bill Oppmann has put together, this Minds.com.
01:46:15.000People should check it out at Minds.com or also go to change.minds.com.
01:46:20.000They can follow me there at Daryl Davis, where it's a platform for free speech, free speech, and where you can come and express your ideas, not be kicked off and all that kind of stuff.
01:46:35.000There's going to be protocol where you're not going to be able to threaten people and cause them harm and things like that.
01:46:42.000But you allow people with some of these toxic ideologies to come on and speak their mind and then you engage them?
01:47:09.000That probably helped them get closer to you and get to appreciate you.
01:47:14.000That's the credibility that I'm talking about because You know, if, like for example, I don't meet somebody one time and next thing you know they're stripping themselves of their robe and hood.
01:47:24.000It may take repeat visits and things like that.
01:47:27.000But it's in person is what I'm saying.
01:49:15.000I mean, you know, they won't allow you to threaten somebody.
01:49:18.000But does minds have the same sort of algorithm that directs things towards you that you're interested in that could facilitate people getting upset?
01:49:26.000You know, Facebook does that, and it turns out that most of what people are interested in is what upsets them.
01:49:40.000I'm getting off Facebook because I hate all this arguing and so on.
01:49:43.000And you can come here and talk to some.
01:49:47.000Listen, people have a hard time getting together for Thanksgiving.
01:49:51.000Because of our current political climate, where somebody, you know, voted for our current president and some other family member did not vote for that person.
01:49:59.000People should be able, families should be able to talk about that and respect the fact that your brother or sister voted for our president and you didn't.
01:50:35.000When I first started this podcast 10 years ago, I wasn't very good at it.
01:50:40.000I didn't really have any experience doing it.
01:50:42.000Mostly what I was doing was me talking.
01:50:45.000I was doing stand-up comedy or I was talking to my friends.
01:50:49.000The social, civil discourse, like being able to sit down with people and calm each other down and have genuine compassion for each other and just listen to each other, is one of the lost arts in human interaction.
01:51:04.000Because, you know what, it's because we see only what the person did.
01:51:10.000We don't, you know, in terms of who they voted for or what they believe in, what they did, you know, what group they joined.
01:51:18.000We don't see what led them to that because we don't talk to them.
01:51:24.000You know, we're only interested in the result.
01:52:02.000Yeah, I mean, it's one of the worst times for interaction face-to-face.
01:52:07.000I mean, I've never seen a pie chart on the difference between the way human beings talk, but there is no question that the amount of people per capita that communicate through electronics versus the way just talking person-to-person over the last ten years has radically increased.
01:52:24.000And so has our hostility towards each other in a lot of ways, particularly through those electronic mediums.
01:52:31.000Hostility through social media is a relatively new thing.
01:53:08.000What is that, the wizard dragon fellow, what's that guy doing these days?
01:53:13.000He has to work like two or three jobs.
01:53:17.000Because unfortunately, you know, when you have that kind of stigma, and you work for a company where the public sees you, and they go, oh, that's that guy.
01:54:05.000And there are a lot of those formers who do that, especially if they don't have a young family, because oftentimes they can get ramifications, you know, for speaking out against their organization.
01:54:19.000You know, you take an oath to join those organizations, and they'll come after you, or come after your family, things like that.
01:56:45.000As soon as I got the pitch, I was like, I need to talk to you.
01:56:48.000Like, what you're doing is insane and amazing and very, very unusual for someone to have that kind of patience and commitment to something like that and to convert these people and without judgment and to be able to rationalize with them and talk to them reasonably.
01:57:59.000But then the argument, the other way, is that you're radicalizing young people.
01:58:02.000The argument is there's a lot of young people that would go on these social media sites and they're impressionable and they don't know any better, particularly YouTube.
01:58:11.000They worry about that because these YouTube videos, they have music and it's a multimedia experience.
01:58:16.000It's going to be compelling and with a really good narrator.
01:58:19.000You can get people to be like, look at this fucking flat earth movement.
01:58:56.000I can't believe they're fucking lying to me.
01:58:58.000So there's hundreds of thousands of people that believe in the flat earth now because they've been radicalized, because they've been converted by these multimedia things like YouTube.
01:59:08.000This is what people worried about in terms of radicalizing them towards hateful ideologies as well.
01:59:14.000And I'm glad you're using that word, radicalized.
02:03:23.000And now, check out Martin Luther King, all right?
02:03:27.000We had to fight, fight for decades to have Martin Luther King Day.
02:03:35.000There was a lot of resistance to that.
02:03:38.000Do you realize that, and a lot of the resistance was the fact that Martin Luther King is the only American man in this country to have a holiday all to himself.
02:04:28.000Well, not only that, like, why did it take until basically the latter half of the 20th century before people came to grips with the fact that he was an atrocious human being?
02:04:38.000Like, when we were kids, when I was in, I'm a little bit younger than you, I'm 52, when I was in high school, it was Columbus, sailed the ocean blue, the Pinta, the Santa Maria.
02:06:51.000But there are people who will agree with me also.
02:06:53.000And I've been saying this now for 22 years.
02:06:57.000One of the things that will help us to advance into the 21st century, because we are behind the times, we need, at this point, To get rid of Black History Month.
02:07:13.000Now, I know a lot of people listening are going to freak out.
02:07:20.000For the longest time, we needed Black History Month.
02:07:25.000Black history was not being taught in our schools.
02:07:28.000Now, you remember when you pointed out a moment ago that when you were in school, Columbus was a hero, looked up to him, et cetera, and then you go to college and you learn otherwise.
02:07:38.000When I was in high school, it was not in our textbooks that we had interment camps with Japanese Americans.
02:07:47.000I did not learn that until I got to college.
02:12:32.000I don't know the exact year, but I guess it was back in the 70s sometime, opened its doors to all American women, regardless of their ethnicity, color, or whatever.
02:12:45.000As long as they were American, they could compete.
02:12:47.000And since that time, we've had more than one Miss America who's been black, starting with Vanessa Williams, and then Debbie Turner, and I think maybe one or two other ones since that time.
02:12:59.000So now, because Miss America has come into the time, we can get rid of Miss Black America.
02:14:07.000We invented the technology to carry that man to the moon safely and allow him to walk around, get back in his lunar module, and come back to Earth safely.
02:14:20.000Not only that, when Neil Armstrong was up there walking around and made that famous one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind quote, We were able to talk with them live all the way from Earth,
02:14:36.000NASA headquarters, all the way to the moon, live via satellite radio phone.
02:14:42.000We invented that technology, Americans.
02:15:05.000So how is it that we as Americans can talk to people as far away as the moon or anywhere on the face of this earth, yet so many of us have difficulty talking to the American who lives right next door because he or she is a different color,
02:15:25.000a different religion, a different ethnicity, a different persuasion, a different whatever?
02:15:30.000It seems to me that before we can call ourselves the greatest, Our ideology needs to catch up to our technology.
02:15:39.000And when we get ourselves up there, both of them up there, then we can truly brag about how great we are.
02:15:45.000Because we are living in the 21st century.
02:15:48.000We are living in space-age times, yet there's still so many of us thinking with Stone Age minds.
02:15:54.000What is this doing in the 21st century?
02:16:09.000And the solution to education is ignorance.
02:16:13.000And this is sort of the same thing when it comes to radicalizing young people online, right?
02:16:19.000One of the reasons why that works at all is because these young people are susceptible to other ideas because their intelligence immune system is very low.
02:17:42.000So these people are willing to help on minds and help point out these different things, these little telltale signs as to what to look for, you know, so parents can spot, oh, this doesn't sound right, blah, blah, blah.
02:18:06.000See, that is for better, I mean, whether it's correct or not, that's apparently the people that are really worried about people being radicalized online, they're more concerned with that than anything else.
02:20:55.000And it's well predicted by 2042, which is 22 years from now, this country, for the first time in history, will be 50% white and 50% non-white.
02:21:59.000They're getting on a legitimate bandwagon.
02:22:01.000But when they say illegal immigration, it's a code word.
02:22:04.000It's a code word for people from South America, Mexico, West Africa, because there are plenty of people here in this country right now We're here from Canada.
02:22:14.000Nobody gives a fuck about Canadians coming in here.
02:23:23.000Now, we have intelligence agencies or whatever that can infiltrate some of these groups and get in there and get all the stuff and foil those plots, you know, gather intelligence.
02:23:35.000But you cannot infiltrate a lone wolf.
02:25:35.000They didn't want their kid going to school and learning about sex, but yet these parents were not teaching their kid about sex at home either.
02:25:43.000They don't want their kid learning it.
02:25:45.000How are you going to stop a kid from learning about sex?
02:25:47.000If you don't let your teachers in school educate them properly and you're not willing to do it at home, your kid's still going to learn it.
02:25:54.000And where is he or she going to learn it?
02:26:10.000Okay, and then you had like a little small class of five or six people taking sex ed.
02:26:15.000Today is part of the regular curriculum.
02:26:18.000And as a result, kids today are better informed about venereal disease, STDs, family planning, contraception, and all these kinds of things.
02:27:15.000If your kid, for example, you send your kid to school and you find out your kid is not learning what you think he or she should learn, what do you do?
02:27:25.000You take him out of that school and put him in another school.
02:27:28.000If they don't learn it there, you put him in a private school.
02:27:30.000If they don't learn it there, you take him home and you homeschool him.
02:27:34.000And so, you know, a lot of schools are very loathe to step on eggshells with parents.
02:27:42.000You know, they don't want to upset the parents, whatever.
02:27:50.000Well it seems that if you could explain to kids how people get radicalized, if you could explain to kids what happens online, how they draw you in, what's the appeal of being a part of a tribe, which is a big part of it, right?
02:28:04.000A big part of it is being like a gang.
02:28:56.000Whether you're Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, whatever, you have some form of Sunday school.
02:29:02.000And so you go down in the basement in your facility, in your church or temple or whatever, and your Sunday school lesson, when you're four or five years old, they teach you that we're all God's children.
02:30:15.000But the priest does not say that or the reverend does not say that anymore because he's afraid of walking on eggshells and stopping the flow of money coming in the tithes and offerings in that collection plate.
02:30:26.000People would be changing churches or firing him, right?
02:30:30.000And then your kid is, let's say I'm Catholic, and now I'm in 12th grade, and I'm going to the senior prom.
02:30:42.000So my mom says, so, Darrell, who are you taking to the senior prom?
02:30:47.000I say, I'm going to take Susan Goldberg.
02:30:55.000Yeah, you know, Susan's a nice girl, but don't you think you should take a nice Catholic girl?
02:31:01.000Well, yeah, Mom, but I thought we were all God's children.
02:31:15.000If we are to believe in the concept of God, then we are to believe that God did not make any exceptions and buts and mistakes, et cetera, little loopholes.
02:32:42.000They have churches called ethical societies.
02:32:46.000And I've spoken, and many of them before, you know, they don't believe in God, which is not something that I advocate, but I'm saying that they know right from wrong.
02:32:55.000And you find less controversy and racism and more acceptance in these places, because it's about ethics and morality, more so than division.
02:33:10.000Why do you have a white Baptist church and a black Baptist church?
02:33:49.000I don't go to church, so that's an alien concept to me, but it's sad if that's the lesson, if that's the way they're structuring their lessons in a church or a synagogue or a temple, that that's how they're doing it.
02:34:04.000They're structuring their lessons to achieve more donations.
02:34:53.000And what you're doing by your amazing accomplishments is showing that even in the most radicalized of people, the KKK and the National Socialist Movement, you're converting people.
02:35:05.000Well, I'm going to hook you up with some friends of mine, like Jeff Scoop, who was the recent leader of the NSM, Arno Michaelis, who co-founded Life After Hate, and he spends his whole life dedicated to de-radicalizing people.
02:35:27.000What got them in, but more importantly, what got them out?
02:35:31.000What were the triggers that got them out?
02:35:34.000After years of hating people and doing this, what made them see something differently?
02:35:40.000And how can that be parlayed into other entities?
02:35:44.000Well, I'm hoping that just hearing it from someone who's maybe struggling with that, maybe they live in a very tribal community or they're in some sort of a toxic environment, their family dragged them in, and they're really trying to figure out how long they can do this and how they can get out and what's the steps to get out.
02:36:03.000Well, it's not only getting out, but, you know...
02:36:06.000There has to be—and here's another thing that I provide for these people when they come out.
02:36:11.000I provide support because oftentimes, you know, these people, if they come from a family that belong to these groups, you know, and they decide to leave the group or whatever, you know, they still got their family or whatever.
02:36:27.000But— If they come from a family that was not racist, for example, there may have been some dysfunction or they just read the wrong book or made friends with the wrong person and went down that rabbit hole or whatever, and they give an oath and they join these groups,
02:37:42.000He belongs to all kinds of different white supremacist groups, but whenever you see him listed in the media, so it's ex-Klan leader David Duke, blah, blah, blah.
02:37:52.000It's never just David Duke, that title ex-Klan leader.