Speaker 1: My name is Julie Douglas, and this is the stuff
Speaker 1: of life that noises from my coworker to Meeka Campbell,
Speaker 1: who's smashing glassware at Atlanta's Rage Room, a place where
Speaker 1: you're hand at a baseball bat and let loosen, a
Speaker 1: room full of objects with only your anger and frustration
Speaker 1: to guide you. Anger can be clarifying, helping you to
Speaker 1: hone in on a problem. It can also be liberating
Speaker 1: in that to hell with everything way. The problem with
Speaker 1: anger is its ability to mutate into something dark and corrupting.
Speaker 1: Anger is one of our innate affects, and affects are
Speaker 1: they're pre written physiological programs that all human beings are
Speaker 1: born with, and they are automatically triggers under certain condition.
Speaker 1: In this episode, psychologist Joseph Burgo explains what makes anger
Speaker 1: tick and why, untended it can be a time bomb
Speaker 1: of hatred. Heidi Bayrick of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Speaker 1: walks us through a heat map of hatred and the
Speaker 1: United States and who's perpetrating it. It is a big
Speaker 1: mistake for people to assume you know that that hate
Speaker 1: group members are sort of teeth missing clansmen, or that
Speaker 1: you know klansmen are really the only group that's represented
Speaker 1: in the white supremacist world in the United States. In
Speaker 1: his book Consolations, poet David White writes that quote anger
Speaker 1: is the deepest form of compassion for another, for the world,
Speaker 1: for the self, for a life, for the body, for
Speaker 1: a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and
Speaker 1: all possibly about to be hurt. And this anger as
Speaker 1: compassion idea was on full display on January first, two
Speaker 1: thousand and seventeen, when more than three million men, women
Speaker 1: and children across the globe participated in the Women's March,
Speaker 1: galvanized by outrage, united by a sense of purpose, demanding
Speaker 1: to be sealed, demanding to be heard, and demanding control
Speaker 1: of your destiny. State sanctioned violence fueled by racism, sexism,
Speaker 1: in punophobia, building walls that are borders, constructing jail that
Speaker 1: our communities, racial profiling of Muslim registering, and even funding
Speaker 1: cuts were more families restricting health care based on gender,
Speaker 1: and then now people will go right to control, how, when,
Speaker 1: and with who would have built their families all act
Speaker 1: to control of us, not some of us, but all
Speaker 1: of us. In Washington, d C. We met Juliana A.
Speaker 1: Retired nurse from Sikesville, Maryland. She was wrapped in a
Speaker 1: blanket stitched with sentiments like don't make America sick again,
Speaker 1: and we the people stand for the rights of all people.
Speaker 1: I'm here because I fought for all these rights fifty
Speaker 1: years ago, and I'm not allowed about to let them
Speaker 1: go down. The dream in the sixties, we fought for this.
Speaker 1: We had sit ins, we had marches, We worked very
Speaker 1: hard to get the rights, especially for women, but for
Speaker 1: all people. And that's what I'm here for. Togo, we
Speaker 1: heard this echoed over and over again. For Cathy, a
Speaker 1: former DC resident who worked for the government for thirty years,
Speaker 1: this is not the kind of legacy she imagined for
Speaker 1: her grandchildren. I'm here because I have seven little girls
Speaker 1: in my immediate family under the age of twelve, and
Speaker 1: I'm here representing them because we have come too far
Speaker 1: in the past sixty years to go back one inch,
Speaker 1: and I don't plan to do it, and I hope
Speaker 1: those little girls don't plan to do it. I just
Speaker 1: hope from here we can march forward. And I think
Speaker 1: the goal of this administration is to march us right
Speaker 1: back fifty or sixty years and we're not going there.
Speaker 1: It's easy to see how at the very core, anger
Speaker 1: spirals out of caring or as David White calls, the
Speaker 1: deepest form of compassion. Something clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo echoes,
Speaker 1: anger has value in two different ways. Personally, it can
Speaker 1: signal to us that we're overwhelmed and we need some
Speaker 1: kind of respite or downtime, we need to invest more
Speaker 1: in self care. So it signals to us that, you know,
Speaker 1: we're in a state of overwhelmed. And it sometimes lets
Speaker 1: us know that we're being mistreated or abused and we
Speaker 1: need to stand up for ourselves. So if we have
Speaker 1: a non violent flare up, it can be constructive, even
Speaker 1: instructive in getting to the bottom of a problem. But
Speaker 1: when a flare up becomes rage, it can veer into
Speaker 1: the destructive. Like all affects, anger has an inherent time
Speaker 1: limit built into it. You know, it has an arc
Speaker 1: and it eventually passes away. Um. It could be a
Speaker 1: very intense response that wanes over time after we calm down,
Speaker 1: after we're able to calm ourselves. Um. But when it
Speaker 1: doesn't pass, when it becomes entrenched, intense and unrelenting, then
Speaker 1: we call it rage or we call it hatred. Um. So,
Speaker 1: while anger has signal value and be constructive, hatred tends
Speaker 1: to be a destructive force because it's it is so unrelenting,
Speaker 1: um and ongoing. It's it's as if you get stuck
Speaker 1: in the anger loop and you can't get out of it.
Speaker 1: You could even say that hate has its own algorithm.
Speaker 1: Hating is the result of persistent and enduring experiences of
Speaker 1: stimulus overload and anger that goes unaddressed and just keeps,
Speaker 1: you know, enduring. So hatred requires you know, time, It
Speaker 1: requires a lot of experience to develop for up. This
Speaker 1: is why politics can be a petri dish for hate.
Speaker 1: A lot of what is going on on the political
Speaker 1: scene these days can be understood through the lens of shame, contempt,
Speaker 1: and hatred. I've written about the profile of the typical
Speaker 1: Trump supporter these days, who is kind of been left
Speaker 1: behind by the economic revival, since the downturn has seen
Speaker 1: standard of living deteriorate, loss of good jobs. Um, and
Speaker 1: that's a humiliating experience. Eighteen months ago, we never knew.
Speaker 1: A lot of people didn't know. Some people had a feeling.
Speaker 1: A lot of people didn't give us much of a
Speaker 1: chance but we understood what was happening on the campaign.
Speaker 1: I called it the forgotten man and the forgotten woman.
Speaker 1: Well you're not forgotten anymore that I can tell you.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump really spoke to those people. He really addressed
Speaker 1: to their shame. UM. He promised to do things to
Speaker 1: alleviate that shame by bringing back jobs to focus on
Speaker 1: protecting minority rights, undoubtedly a good thing. Has made the
Speaker 1: typical disenfranchised white voter feel like, well, what about me.
Speaker 1: You're not speaking to me. You don't care about my concerns,
Speaker 1: and that can feel shaming and humiliating. UM, as if
Speaker 1: I matter less than those other people whose rights you're
Speaker 1: trying so hard to protect. I don't think that's the
Speaker 1: intent at all, but it is the experience, and I
Speaker 1: think until we developed a more unifying message that speaks
Speaker 1: to everybody's desires, you know, I think we're going to
Speaker 1: go on in this way. But to truly understand this dynamic,
Speaker 1: we're going to need to back up and find out
Speaker 1: how shame plays a significant role. Shame and hatred are
Speaker 1: uh intimately connected, particularly the sort of shame that comes
Speaker 1: with contempt from the outside. Contempt is a big stimulus
Speaker 1: for shame and a big stimulus for hateful responses in return.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the classic ways of dealing with
Speaker 1: shame um is to try and offload it onto somebody
Speaker 1: else and make that person feel bad instead of you. Hey, hey,
Speaker 1: hey said, no, I got you, because black lives don't matter.
Speaker 1: There ain't no proof just because you say something don't
Speaker 1: mean nothing, prove it. I appreciate about hey, I'm talking
Speaker 1: for you. And as Burgo points out, hate and shame
Speaker 1: are nonpartisan emotions. There's plenty of it be found on
Speaker 1: both sides of the political divide. A Trump supporter wearing
Speaker 1: a build the Wall t shirt was assaulted by several
Speaker 1: young men. Fearing for his safety, I yelled at him
Speaker 1: to get away, get that ahead. The methode you get
Speaker 1: if you listen to the liberal left these days is
Speaker 1: pretty much one of contempt and ridicule. That's shaming, it's humiliating,
Speaker 1: it's making him look ridiculous, which is a way of
Speaker 1: kind of offloading their own sense of humiliation at loss
Speaker 1: you onto the other side. Now, a lot of that's
Speaker 1: well justified, and I'm not criticizing any kinds of political
Speaker 1: movements that are arising in response to violations of the
Speaker 1: political order. But it's just it's fascinating to me to
Speaker 1: see the way shame um is getting stirred up on
Speaker 1: both sides, and it's getting traded back and forth between
Speaker 1: conservatives and liberals. If there's one thing that Burgo wants
Speaker 1: you to take away from fleeting moments of anger or
Speaker 1: deeply entrenched rage, it's this we need to look inward
Speaker 1: and explore more deeply. Well, what's the source of this
Speaker 1: anger is? Is there some shame behind it? Is there
Speaker 1: some sense of humiliation? And might there be a more
Speaker 1: constructive way to address the anger and humiliation rather than
Speaker 1: you know, lashing out with contempt and hostility to people
Speaker 1: who you perceived to be the cause of it. I'm
Speaker 1: very scared. I see too much of the racism, the
Speaker 1: putting people down, and I've heard too many tales as
Speaker 1: already starting in certain small pockets, and I'm really scared
Speaker 1: of that. I mean, you know, I had friends, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm back from the sixties that I remember having friends
Speaker 1: whose parents were Holocaust survivors. And you know, we don't
Speaker 1: need a hat go through this again. There have been
Speaker 1: more than one thousand documented hate crimes since the election
Speaker 1: of Donald J. Trump, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, swastika vandalism,
Speaker 1: and physical attacks with African Americans, Latinos, Arabs, Jews, Muslims,
Speaker 1: and those in the LGBTQ community as the targets. A
Speaker 1: March three, a Sikh man was shot outside of his
Speaker 1: house in Seattle. In February, an Indian man was killed
Speaker 1: in a Kansas bar. Both gunmen shouted go back to
Speaker 1: your country before they pulled the trigger. He did not
Speaker 1: dissolve a dept like this in two weeks. He would
Speaker 1: have celebrated his study third body. March not is his birthday.
Speaker 1: I don't know what to say. We've read many times
Speaker 1: in newspapers of some kind of shooting happening everywhere, and
Speaker 1: we always wondered how safe. But I especially I was
Speaker 1: always concerned are we doing the right thing? Are staying
Speaker 1: in the United States of America? But he always assured
Speaker 1: me that only good things happen to good people always
Speaker 1: think good, always be good, and good will happen to you.
Speaker 1: These aren't acts born of anger, the deepest form of
Speaker 1: compassion for someone or something. These are warped actions of hatred,
Speaker 1: of shame, burning a hole in the heart until there's
Speaker 1: nothing left. Most hate crimes fly under the radar, but
Speaker 1: they're far more widespread than anyone could ever imagined, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't until the nineties when the Southern Poverty Law
Speaker 1: Center stepped in and they began to track them. We
Speaker 1: were involved in a lawsuit in civil court against a
Speaker 1: clan group that had murdered a young black man in
Speaker 1: Mobile and in the course of that case, we came
Speaker 1: to realize that there were a lot of clan groups
Speaker 1: operating across the country and people were very much unaware
Speaker 1: of that. In fact, police agencies, in particular the FBI
Speaker 1: were not tracking that activity because they had been barred
Speaker 1: from doing that in the late cig He's after it
Speaker 1: was found that the FBI had been investigating people like
Speaker 1: John Lennon, Martin Luther King. My name is Heidi Birick,
Speaker 1: and I run the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty
Speaker 1: Law Center. That's the part of the Southern Poverty Law
Speaker 1: Center that tracks some hate and extremist groups. So at
Speaker 1: that time we decided to create an organization. It was
Speaker 1: then called Clan Watch, it's now Intelligence Project, and we
Speaker 1: began putting out a map every year of where Clan
Speaker 1: groups were across the country, and nowadays we put out
Speaker 1: a list of hate groups. It's a much more sophisticated tool,
Speaker 1: and that's sort of the bedrock of our work tracking racist,
Speaker 1: anti Semitic, other forms of hatred and the groups that
Speaker 1: pushed those ideas and you know, letting the public become
Speaker 1: aware of those activities. Yeah, you may say the Clan
Speaker 1: created a blueprint for the immigrant agenda that's being pushed
Speaker 1: in the current political climate today. We should never underplay
Speaker 1: the importance of the Clan in the United States because
Speaker 1: it's actually the first domestic terrorist organization that this country burst.
Speaker 1: This was after the Civil War. The Clan was founded
Speaker 1: by Confederate general and Clan groups have waxed and waned
Speaker 1: over the years that they've been very important, for example,
Speaker 1: in murders against civil rights activists who were fighting for
Speaker 1: the vote for African Americans in the fifties and the sixties.
Speaker 1: In a few short months, five murders, alleged members of
Speaker 1: the ku Klux Klan said to be involved in the killings.
Speaker 1: When such an auta as this loose in and takes
Speaker 1: over the police power, you were all completely at their mercy.
Speaker 1: And their atrocities, and they have us can be visited
Speaker 1: on anybody that disagrees with them in any given situation.
Speaker 1: They were instrumental to restricting immigration in nine four only
Speaker 1: to what was called Nordics in the law in Northern Europeans.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to downplay the importance of the clan,
Speaker 1: but it represents a small share of what white supremacy
Speaker 1: looks like today. But what started as a joke a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago when a group of men donned bedsheets
Speaker 1: for a romp, has over the years attracted to it
Speaker 1: persons charged with acts of harassment, intimidation, and violence throughout
Speaker 1: the South. Even though the nation has been outraged for
Speaker 1: many years, the Ku Klux Klan persists with its bizarre
Speaker 1: ritual and trappings. But a hundred years is a long
Speaker 1: time for a j Your white, average white supremacist is
Speaker 1: more likely nowadays to be in a suit and tie
Speaker 1: um and present themselves almost an academic demeanor or even
Speaker 1: like a preppy look, even though what they're saying in
Speaker 1: terms of white people are superior, minorities are more criminal,
Speaker 1: more terrible things about the minorities, and that white people
Speaker 1: should run this country it's exactly the same message that
Speaker 1: the clan had for years and years and years. In
Speaker 1: the past, white supremacy was kind of a back room transaction.
Speaker 1: Then the Internet showed up, and those back rooms mushroomed
Speaker 1: coded language stand in words for racial slurs. Think of
Speaker 1: Pepe the Frog, which now doubles as an overt symbol
Speaker 1: of hatred. A popular cartoon character turned Internet mean. Pepe
Speaker 1: the Frog has been added to the Anti Defamation League's
Speaker 1: database of hate symbols, and a press release the organization
Speaker 1: wrote the character had been quote used by haters on
Speaker 1: social media to suggest racist, anti Semitic, or other bigoted
Speaker 1: notions as a hate symbol. End quote that came after
Speaker 1: the frog appeared as caricatures including Hitler and a Klansman.
Speaker 1: According to the group, these sorts of winks at racism
Speaker 1: proliferated under sites like bright bart, becoming aggressive news stories
Speaker 1: about how America was being destroyed by its inclusivity agenda. Nowadays,
Speaker 1: white supremacy is front and center under the banner of
Speaker 1: the more palatable term alt right, and its leaders hold
Speaker 1: prominent positions in the government or breaking news Knights and
Speaker 1: or Bernie Sanders adding his voice to a growing chorus
Speaker 1: calling President Elect Trump to cut ties with Steve benn In,
Speaker 1: his newly appointed chief White House strategist. Here's what Sanders
Speaker 1: said tonight. I call upon miss the Trump to rescind
Speaker 1: the appointment that he made of Mr Bannon. A President
Speaker 1: of the United States should not have a racist at
Speaker 1: his side. Unacceptable. The man has sparked the backlash which
Speaker 1: Chief Executive Trump's campaign before that, head of the conservative
Speaker 1: website Brightbart News. Bannett himself is called bright barted platform
Speaker 1: for the alt right, a movement associated with white nationalism.
Speaker 1: So how does someone become a white supremacist. Some people
Speaker 1: grow up in racist homes and are literally born and
Speaker 1: bred to be this way. But a lot of people
Speaker 1: grow up on racist homes and don't turn out this way.
Speaker 1: The one overriding narrative that I've heard from people about
Speaker 1: how they ended up in the movement, which is what
Speaker 1: they called the white supremacist movement, is that they come
Speaker 1: from families that have great, great difficulties, broken families and whatnot.
Speaker 1: They tend to live in neighborhoods that are rapidly diversifying,
Speaker 1: and so they feel as white kids, white young people
Speaker 1: that they're sort of under assault. Whether they are or not,
Speaker 1: this is the impression they get. The movie American History
Speaker 1: X dramatizes the life of former neo Nazi Frank Mink
Speaker 1: and the ideology that came to form his worldview. And
Speaker 1: this scene he rallies his followers before an attack on
Speaker 1: a Korean grocery store. Don't laugh, there's nothing funny going
Speaker 1: on here. This is about your life and mine. It's
Speaker 1: about decent, hard working Americans falling through the cracks and
Speaker 1: getting the shaft because their government cares more about the
Speaker 1: constitutional rights of a bunch of people who aren't even
Speaker 1: citizens in this country. Well, the Statue of liberty, it says,
Speaker 1: give me you're tired, you're hungry, you're poor. Well it's
Speaker 1: Americans who are tired and hungry and poor, and I say,
Speaker 1: until you take care of that, close the book. And
Speaker 1: they seek out empowering ideas which come in the form
Speaker 1: of racism. In a way, what you're doing is just
Speaker 1: joining another form of a gang, right, but one that
Speaker 1: pushes white supremacists belief. To be clear, white supremacists are
Speaker 1: just one of the groups that the intelligence brought tracks.
Speaker 1: What we're looking for is does the organization considering an
Speaker 1: entire other group of people, by their inherent characteristics, to
Speaker 1: be lesser. And let me explain because it sounds very general.
Speaker 1: We list, you know, neo Nazi groups because they want
Speaker 1: to exterminate Jews. They obviously consider Jews to be lesser
Speaker 1: forms of life. We list um white nationalist groups because
Speaker 1: they consider all minorities to be inferior. You know, um
Speaker 1: big white nationalist groups like American Renaissance right endlessly about
Speaker 1: black criminality or psychopathology, really ugly stuff. But we also
Speaker 1: list black groups because, as far as we're concerned, you know,
Speaker 1: hate is hate, it doesn't matter the race that's involved.
Speaker 1: And for example, we list the Nation of Islam as
Speaker 1: a hate group because their theology meaning they're base ideology,
Speaker 1: argues that all whites, and the key word here is
Speaker 1: all whites, right, all white ball are blue eyed devils.
Speaker 1: In other words, all white people are are Satanic, and
Speaker 1: that gets them on our list. So what we're looking
Speaker 1: for is do you to fame an entire group of
Speaker 1: people um and propagandize against them in some sort of
Speaker 1: deleterious way. That's how you get on our list. The
Speaker 1: reports coming through the intelligence projects, hate watch website, law
Speaker 1: enforcement sources, and media. Then they're vetted to make sure
Speaker 1: that the incidents took place. The reason why this information
Speaker 1: is so important is that hate crimes are meant to silence,
Speaker 1: to cow to make people feel as though they should
Speaker 1: not be seen or heard. It tries to make you
Speaker 1: scared to stand up for yourself and stand up for
Speaker 1: your rights and those of your community. Right and and
Speaker 1: you're already talking about minority groups. When you attack someone
Speaker 1: who's in a minority community, you are trying to say
Speaker 1: to them, you're not part of this society. You need
Speaker 1: to keep your head down, you need to stay out
Speaker 1: of this. And because so many of the cases involved Trump,
Speaker 1: it was almost like punishment from some people who seem
Speaker 1: to think that the way forward is through this kind
Speaker 1: of hate, violence and expressions of hatred. And God knows
Speaker 1: we don't want that in this country. And if you
Speaker 1: think that hate crimes are a minor problem, just sporadic
Speaker 1: outbursts responding to current political ideology, I think again. The
Speaker 1: FBI every year reports about five to six thousand hate crimes,
Speaker 1: and there are billion problems with that reporting system, starting
Speaker 1: with the fact that it's voluntary some states don't have
Speaker 1: hate crime laws, etcetera, etcetera, which is all self admitted
Speaker 1: by the FBI and those collected data. The Department of
Speaker 1: Justice has done three sets of studies looking at survey
Speaker 1: data from crime victims, and those three studies have concluded
Speaker 1: there was one and o five, one and eleven, one
Speaker 1: and thirteen. They've concluded that the level of hate crime
Speaker 1: in the United States is actually about two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty hate crimes a year. That's in a regular year.
Speaker 1: So the FBI data is grotesquely underreported. And if people
Speaker 1: understood that there's that much hate violence going on, hate
Speaker 1: crimes literally, we would understand that hate in the society
Speaker 1: is a much bigger problem than more aware of, and
Speaker 1: we wouldn't be so surprised with what's, for example, happened
Speaker 1: since the election. The campaign, of course emboldened people with
Speaker 1: views that are racist. That's just a fact. We saw
Speaker 1: hate groups grow over the course of this last year,
Speaker 1: hate forums grow, and so this outburst is a manifestation
Speaker 1: of those emboldened people. But in general, the United States
Speaker 1: has a hate violence problem that it's not really addressing,
Speaker 1: and many people aren't even aware about. And we shouldn't
Speaker 1: be surprised by that, because it's not that long ago
Speaker 1: that black people were by law treated as second class citizens,
Speaker 1: subjected to state violence and all those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: You know, we're talking until the mid sixth So here
Speaker 1: we have a social issue that's vastly underreported and yet
Speaker 1: fueled by the tendrils of social media. We have allowed
Speaker 1: white supremacists to essentially colonize many of these social media
Speaker 1: sites to push out their message, and it led to
Speaker 1: some intense moments of harassment. Some prominent Jewish journalists, you know,
Speaker 1: being tweeted at with pictures of Jews being killed. For example,
Speaker 1: one of the journalists, David French, suffered a personal onslaught
Speaker 1: so chilling that the details read like a horror movie.
Speaker 1: In an interview with MPR, he said, quote, the more
Speaker 1: you are against Donald Trump, and the more that people
Speaker 1: feel like people are reading you or listening to what
Speaker 1: you have to say, then the alt right comes down
Speaker 1: on you even harder because they really are sort of
Speaker 1: like the online shot troops of the Trump movement. I
Speaker 1: mean they are the most aggressive, the most vicious, the
Speaker 1: most threatening, the most targeted. I mean, it was really
Speaker 1: notable how much violence was expressed on social media over
Speaker 1: over the last year. And you know, I know Twitter
Speaker 1: has um cracked down on certain forms of hate speech,
Speaker 1: but it's true that the social media companies essentially don't
Speaker 1: follow their own terms of service on issues of racism
Speaker 1: and anti semitism and harassment and so on. And it's
Speaker 1: not just social media, it's the Internet itself and the
Speaker 1: way it's structured. The more information that's published about something,
Speaker 1: the more it's pushed to the top, no matter if
Speaker 1: the content is incorrect. So, for example, I visit Google's
Speaker 1: headquarters last February to show them that if a student
Speaker 1: were searching Martin Luther King, let's say they're writing a
Speaker 1: paper on him, on the first page of results of
Speaker 1: a Google search on Martin Luther King, third there was
Speaker 1: only one link to a legitimate thing, to a biography
Speaker 1: site about Martin Luther King. Everything else on that page
Speaker 1: was coming from hate sites, and so a student would
Speaker 1: have no clue. They would be reading about how they
Speaker 1: wouldn't hear about Martin Luther King and the amazing things
Speaker 1: he achieved in the civil rights era. Um they would
Speaker 1: be reading about how he was a communist or a womanizer,
Speaker 1: and all kinds of crazy racist stuff. And since nine
Speaker 1: people don't leave the first page of a Google search,
Speaker 1: that's what most people see when they search for him.
Speaker 1: And this is anywhere around the world. So it's not
Speaker 1: just social media has got a hate problem. It's also
Speaker 1: the way algorithms at Google and being in these places work.
Speaker 1: They're they're serious problems there that need to be addressed.
Speaker 1: So what if you have someone who's young, full of
Speaker 1: hatred and impressionable, someone who's looking for a shred of
Speaker 1: evidence to confirm his beliefs, no matter the source. Dylan Ruth,
Speaker 1: the young man who shot all those people in the
Speaker 1: church in Charleston, South Carolina, he came to see that
Speaker 1: black people were murdering whites out of control through Google searches.
Speaker 1: He had. It's that in his manifesto. He went online
Speaker 1: not too long after the Trayvon Martin shooting, started looking
Speaker 1: into it, began searching for black on white crime, which
Speaker 1: came up, and he went down a rabbit hole of hate.
Speaker 1: That is a met Dylan Roof posted a manifesto on
Speaker 1: the web a few months before his murderous rampage. He
Speaker 1: said that he didn't grow up in a racist home
Speaker 1: or environment. The event that awakened him to racial issues,
Speaker 1: he said, was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing
Speaker 1: and seeing his name and eventually decided to look him up.
Speaker 1: I read the Wikipedia article, and right away I was
Speaker 1: unable to understand what the big deal was. It was
Speaker 1: obvious this Immerman was in the right. But more importantly,
Speaker 1: this prompted me to type in the words black on
Speaker 1: white crime into Google, and I have never been the
Speaker 1: same since that day. The first website I came to
Speaker 1: was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon
Speaker 1: pages of these brutal black on white murders. I was
Speaker 1: in disbelief. At this moment. I realized that something was
Speaker 1: very wrong. How could the news media be blowing up
Speaker 1: the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on
Speaker 1: white 's got ignored. Had Roof first come to another website,
Speaker 1: history might have been different. He might have learned the
Speaker 1: truth instead of the racist lies pushed by the Council
Speaker 1: of Conservative Citizens. And the truth is that the vast
Speaker 1: majority of white people who are murdered are killed by
Speaker 1: other white people, not by black people, as the Council's
Speaker 1: website suggests, and My position on this to Google essentially
Speaker 1: is if you're going to be the library of the world,
Speaker 1: you need librarians. You know, nobody would walk into a
Speaker 1: library say I'm looking to write a report about Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King and be handed a hate track from stormfront
Speaker 1: dot org, the largest hate site on the Internet. There
Speaker 1: would be some judgment there, but there is no judgment,
Speaker 1: and that's how we get things like what Dylan Roof
Speaker 1: did I mean? And and that kind of violence. It's
Speaker 1: literally a direct result of these processes, and it has
Speaker 1: to be acknowledged as such, and somehow this has to
Speaker 1: be fixed. All of this is dark and horrific and
Speaker 1: feels like it's spinning out of control. But putting a
Speaker 1: dent in it is as simple as speaking up in
Speaker 1: the least. What you get is someone may feel less
Speaker 1: emboldened to make bigoted statements and then hurt somebody else
Speaker 1: right down the road. You might get them to think
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of work by victims advocates as well,
Speaker 1: that you can make a powerful statement as a bystander.
Speaker 1: You may not be the person who is, you know,
Speaker 1: having slurs thrown at them or racist statements, whatever the case.
Speaker 1: Might be anti semitism, But if you're there and you
Speaker 1: hear it, you stand up, you can make a big
Speaker 1: difference in this situation. First of all, you're supporting the
Speaker 1: victim and also you're letting this person know that this
Speaker 1: is unacceptable behavior. The other thing is people really do
Speaker 1: need to report this stuff to law enforcement. That can
Speaker 1: be very hard. Oftentimes people are scared, right they think
Speaker 1: that maybe they're they or their communities because you know,
Speaker 1: eight incidents make you feel not just for yourself, but
Speaker 1: for everybody who you're related to might be targeted. But
Speaker 1: we need to at least know how much of this
Speaker 1: is going on before we can really address it. David
Speaker 1: White says anger truly felt at its center as the
Speaker 1: essential living flame of being fully alive and fully Here,
Speaker 1: he goes on to say, what we call anger on
Speaker 1: the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality
Speaker 1: by being a complete but absolute mirror opposite of its
Speaker 1: true internal essence. I take that true internal essence to
Speaker 1: mean love, and in this way it really is a
Speaker 1: thin line between love and hate. But that we care enough,
Speaker 1: are passionate enough, is the thing we should recognize, the
Speaker 1: thing we should use to figure out what's at the
Speaker 1: bottom of that well of anger that signal that there's
Speaker 1: something inside of us we need to tend to before
Speaker 1: it burns out. In the next episode, Escape, we hit
Speaker 1: the eject button on reality and look for a different
Speaker 1: way to live our lives. Then we're trying to teach
Speaker 1: people to be childlike and play with their bodies from
Speaker 1: their bodies, and so we do silly exercises like, uh,
Speaker 1: would you like to see a demonstration? So we were
Speaker 1: tending like we're making milkshake and then we were like,
Speaker 1: we're drinking it. We laugh, it looks like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'd like to thank to make a Campbell for letting
Speaker 1: us eavesdrop on her destruction of property. And we'd like
Speaker 1: to thank Rage Room Atlanta for providing us with the
Speaker 1: opportunity to legally destroy that property. You can find out
Speaker 1: more about Rage Room at their website Rush Escape Room
Speaker 1: dot com and many thanks to Heidi Byrick of the
Speaker 1: Southern Poverty Law Center. You can find out more at
Speaker 1: spl center dot org. Forward slash Hate watch audio from
Speaker 1: the video The mis Education of Dylan Roth is from
Speaker 1: the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Stuff of Life is
Speaker 1: written an executive produced by me Julie Douglas and co
Speaker 1: produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by Noel Brown.
Speaker 1: This a eisode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron
Speaker 1: Grubbs and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight is provided by
Speaker 1: contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of Production Jerry Rowland.
Speaker 1: Find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and
Speaker 1: email us at the Stuff of Life at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. We'd like to hear your thoughts and
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