The September 4, 2020, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with SPLC’s Heidi Beirich about white supremacist violence, which originally aired June 2, 2017. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: We are in troubling times, listeners know, with people being attacked for simply saying that Black Lives Matter and a president encouraging those attacks. It’s what many feared when Trump came into office. But at the same time, we acknowledge that Trump didn’t create the phenomenon of white supremacist violence. There’s a whole history there that media should be using to shape their recording of present day events, give them context–and hopefully put an end to the “troubled individual” trope to describe people who are, in fact, part of something larger. CounterSpin talked about this in June of 2017 with Heidi Beirich, who leads the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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JJ: The last time we had you on, we talked about how, when then‒candidate Donald Trump was slow to disavow the Ku Klux Klan, media called it a “stumble”—as though Trump had misspoken, or was confused about the existence of white supremacy and its role in campaigns like his own. Now Donald Trump is president, and Southern Poverty Law Center, I understand, tracked some 900 attacks in his first ten days [after the election]. Well, no one thinks Trump invented right-wing extremism, but are we seeing, maybe, a new strain of an old disease?
HB: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any question but that we are seeing a new strain of an old disease, and it was encouraged, certainly, by the Trump campaign. And the hate incidents that broke out—there’s almost 900 of them, like you said, right after the election—were the result of the rhetoric in the campaign. I don’t think anybody nowadays thinks that you can simply bash a population like Mexicans, as Trump did, or Muslims, and not get a result that ends up in violence in some cases. And so that’s the situation we find ourselves in, and we have revitalized white supremacist groups, white supremacist thinking in the mainstream. It’s really been a horrible turn of events that’s occurred over the last 16 months.
JJ: I know that you are not in the business of quantifying who is more violent than whom. That’s kind of a mug’s game, and more a deflection from a conversation than anything. But you have suggested that white supremacy is an “unusually combustible mental framework.” What do you mean by that?
Heidi Beirich: “I don’t think anybody nowadays thinks that you can simply bash a population like Mexicans, as Trump did, or Muslims, and not get a result that ends up in violence in some cases.”
HB: What we find again and again, in particular with domestic terrorist acts or heinous hate crimes, like what happened in Portland, is that people exposed to white supremacy, people who suck it in, the Dylann Roofs of the world, the Jeremy Christians of the world, often go on to commit violent acts. If you just look at the list of domestic terrorist attacks, let’s say since Timothy McVeigh in 1995, there’s a handful that are the result of people who have radical interpretations of Islam. But the bulk of the incidents involve people who have come to view whites as superior, and who view this country as essentially undergoing a race war, and they make these violent acts, they do these things, in their minds, to save the country, in particular for white people. It’s a very insidious mode of thinking that justifies things like genocide, ethnic cleansing. And so it’s not surprising that we would get violence out of people who come to believe in these ideas.
JJ: Well, if media were really concerned about domestic terror attacks per se, it seems that we would hear the name you just mentioned, Tim McVeigh, that we’d be hearing that night and noon, wouldn’t we, because, in fact, that attack was back in 1995, but Tim McVeigh is still sort of a figure in some of these circles.
HB: Yeah. Look, Jeremy Christian had a poem or a tribute to McVeigh on his Facebook page. The cell of neo-Nazis which ended up with internecine battles and two men killed that was in Tampa a week and a half ago, they had a picture of McVeigh in their office. And people seem to have forgotten, some sort of amnesia after the 9/11 attacks, which of course were horrific, but up to that point, McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City was the largest loss of life ever in a domestic terrorist incident. Some 180-plus people were killed, including children.
And after 9/11, it was as though—this type of terrorism of course continued to occur, but it was though it didn’t matter, right? All the focus was on the Muslim community, on radical interpretations of Islam, and there was just a reluctance to understand that terrorism comes in more than one form. And of course it’s much easier to point the finger abroad or to a community that you can easily “other” and say is not part of “us”—meaning, in recent years, the Muslim community. When you talk about white supremacy, you’ve got to take a hard look at our culture, because it is endemic, and it was here from the day this country started—even before, actually, with English settlers and so on. And there just seems constantly to be a reluctance to treat that kind of terrorism—and hate crimes, I might add—as seriously as what is influenced by groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda.
JJ: And any thoughts on media? When I was booking you, I said I knew you’d be very busy, and I’m sorry for that, in a way. I think that US reporters should have a deep bench right now on white supremacist violence. It shouldn’t be a concept that sort of springs up anew, and then is forced on them and they need to look into it. It really is, of course, as a story, something that could keep a journalist busy every day.
HB: Sure. Well, I have to say, given the state of the media, where there’s been high turnover in newsrooms and new people coming in, that a lot of folks don’t really have this more historical perspective on white supremacy, let alone to the 1990s. But we’ve got to remember, it’s only the mid-’60s when we dismantled the legal framework that kept segregation, Jim Crow and Black oppression in place. So we are not that far from having written in law that Black people should be treated worse than white people.
And so I think that nowadays, if you’re involved in covering American politics, you have got to know the history of the civil rights movement, and something about American history, and you need to know the violence that has been coming out of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and others inspired by hate ideas, almost since the founding of the country to today, and it’s sort of a fundamental thing to know about.
I am somewhat happy, because I’ve seen in certain newsrooms more specialization on these issues, largely in response to the Trump campaign, because they keep coming up, and because there’s so much domestic terrorism, but we could use more expertise in the media ranks about these issues.
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Janine Jackson: That was Heidi Beirich of Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Intelligence Project, speaking with CounterSpin in June of 2017.
The white race is in no way exceptionaL Having been a white person forever, and growing up in an all white community——–it is perfectly clear that no race, nor any religion is exceptional. All nations have risen and fallen and all leave intriguing histories based on their geography and the natural resources provided to each. Those providing the most supposed “facts, ” about their untruths are common to humans everywhere. ALL can aim for an exceptional society which would hopefully produce exceptional people. But truly , the individual family affects humans more than any religion or skin color. Look through history and find the errors all have made–and then try to provide that missing element as a member of the human race——-the true test is the ability of each individual to try to be as human in the best way possible.
Your comments are true both ways: Whites are not exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.
Be sure to check out Beyonce’s “Black Is King” video album on Disney+
i’m so sorry you hate yourself and your life sucks.
Couple of points:
First Point: Compared to other developed countries, US is actually very tolerant. In Europe, soccer fans throw bananas on the field when a black player enters the game. In Japan, Korean descendants of people what were brought to Japan as slaves still don’t have Japanese citizenship.
Second point: Unlike other prejudices, Islamophobia is actually actively manufactured and promoted by a well financed web: https://islamophobianetwork.com/
David Duke endorsed Biden BTW. Where is the flurry of outrage demanding he denounce it?
User, that flurry is only applied when a Republican’s seat is at stake. I know you knew that, but some of the readers may not know of the double standard.
l’important n’est pas dans la couleur de la peau mais dans le comportement individuel et du groupe . quand Hitler n’avez pas voulu saluer la main d’un noir qui avez gagné la compétition olympique en 1936, en Allemagne est-ce un comportement raciste lié à Hitler ou un comportement lié à la philosohie du troisième Reich ;à la race Ayerienne de la supériorité du blanc . aucun pays au monde n’est épargné de cette vraie-fausse idée de la supériorité de la race ,de la couleur blanche…c’est une question d’intellectualisme liée à l’être hmain faible d’interieur ,de conscience qui ne tolère personne en dehors du groupe. cette idée est souvent véhiculée par les minorités , par exemple au Maroc, les berbères de Souss Massa, Atlas, Touarègue,Rif et les berbères d’Algérie de TiziOuzou,des juifs…se considèrent comme des minorités supérieures à la race majoritaire c-à-d des arabes et cette fausse idée méne à la reconnaissance de leur dialécte berbère,comme langue nationale qui donne naissance à une guerre civile . car tout se joue avec cette fausse idée comme la vie des annimaux sauvage ;chacun dans son clan et pour se faire valoir le passage par une guerre est obligatoire et donc est-ce la responsabilité de l’Etat qui est mise en cause de ne pas instruire les gens sur le respect de l’autre?
l’important n’est pas dans la couleur de la peau mais dans le comportement individuel et du groupe . quand Hitler n’avez pas voulu saluer la main d’un noir qui avez gagné la compétition olympique en 1936, en Allemagne est-ce un comportement raciste lié à Hitler ou un comportement lié à la philosohie du troisième Reich ;à la race Aryenne de la supériorité du blanc . aucun pays au monde n’est épargné de cette vraie-fausse idée de la supériorité de la race ,de la couleur blanche…c’est une question d’intellectualisme liée à l’être hmain faible d’interieur ,de conscience qui ne tolère personne en dehors du groupe. cette idée est souvent véhiculée par les minorités , par exemple au Maroc, les berbères de Souss Massa, Atlas, Touarègue,Rif et les berbères d’Algérie de TiziOuzou,des juifs…se considèrent comme des minorités supérieures à la race majoritaire c-à-d des arabes et cette fausse idée méne à la reconnaissance de leur dialécte berbère,comme langue nationale qui donne naissance à une guerre civile . car tout se joue avec cette fausse idée comme la vie des annimaux sauvage ;chacun dans son clan et pour se faire valoir le passage par une guerre est obligatoire et donc est-ce la responsabilité de l’Etat qui est mise en cause de ne pas instruire les gens sur le respect de l’autre?
bonjour;
l’important n’est pas dans la couleur de la peau mais dans le comportement individuel et du groupe . quand Hitler n’avez pas voulu saluer la main d’un noir qui avez gagné la compétition olympique en 1936, en Allemagne est-ce un comportement raciste lié à Hitler ou un comportement lié à la philosohie du troisième Reich ;à la race Ayerienne de la supériorité du blanc . aucun pays au monde n’est épargné de cette vraie-fausse idée de la supériorité de la race ,de la couleur blanche…c’est une question d’intellectualisme liée à l’être hmain faible d’interieur ,de conscience qui ne tolère personne en dehors du groupe. cette idée est souvent véhiculée par les minorités , par exemple au Maroc, les berbères de Souss Massa, Atlas, Touarègue,Rif et les berbères d’Algérie de TiziOuzou,des juifs…se considèrent comme des minorités supérieures à la race majoritaire c-à-d des arabes et cette fausse idée méne à la reconnaissance de leur dialécte berbère,comme langue nationale qui donne naissance à une guerre civile . car tout se joue avec cette fausse idée comme la vie des annimaux sauvage ;chacun dans son clan et pour se faire valoir le passage par une guerre est obligatoire et donc est-ce la responsabilité de l’Etat qui est mise en cause de ne pas instruire les gens sur le respect de l’autre?
Most of U.S. states use local property taxes to finance our schools. The wealthy get 1) great public schools with a 2) relatively modest tax rate while the poor don’t get either. We could call that systemic discrimination.
What does that have to do with race? Are you a class reductionist? Shame… Shame… Shame!
Unsubscribing because of this preachy biased white woman telling me, as so many are doing now, that racism (and race supremacy) is going all in one direction, and that Blacks are always the victims of Whites when what’s happening right now proves otherwise.
People are often afraid to say all that the white race has done. While it’s not superior, it has done more to improve the lives of humans than all other races combined. The technological advances alone have saved millions of lives. Those advanced moved the average life expectancy from 35 to 75. Is it the geographic area that promoted this? Is it capitalism? Is it Christianity? Maybe some of all three. No other race can make those claims. Whites certainly have been exceptional, but that doesn’t make them superior. Those other races have contributed and are welcomed to join in the future. The more we have working together, the further we can move the needle.
Yeah, there is a lot of debate about this. For many millennia the civilization was in the warmer belt from china over northern India, Persia and with Mediterranean at the end. Until Romans conquered norther Europe, people there lived much like they did in Africa: in simple tribal villages with no permanent structures or system of writing. After the Roman conquest and then collapse, people of northern Europe learned masonry, metallurgy and writing (Which is why we had knights and castles), but the seat of civilization was still the warm belt from Mediterranean to China.
This all changed about 500 years ago, and nobody is sure why. Maybe it was Protestantism, maybe it was a discovery of Americas or maybe even climate change. We can only speculate.
I wouldn’t say that it was capitalism, because Northern Europe at the time was mostly feudal while there was extensive network of trade from China to Europe called the ‘Silk Road’
I also don’t think that it was Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity started the dark ages and set Europe back by about 1,500 years. Under pagans, Roman empire was a strong and expanding society that tolerated freedom of thought and religion. Once Christianity took over, they pretty much killed all science, philosophy and religion which weakened the state. As a result, the eastern Roman empire collapsed while western roman empire lasted another 1,000 but was never as successful as before Christianity.
Out of many religions that existed in Roman empire, only Judaism survived Christianity in Europe and even that just barely. Also, a lot of knowledge was purposely destroyed, and much of what we know of Greek and Roman philosophy had to be re-learned from Muslims by Europeans.