This week my guest is the political scientist and writer Carol Swain. She is a proud black, Christian, conservative woman, and she’s just published a new book, The Adversity of Diversity: How Real Training Can Promote Healing in a Post-Affirmative Action World
So much fascinating insight here. I agree with Glenn that a corporation *attempting* to improve race relations via diversity training CANNOT be unconstitutional on its face. I also agree with Carol that these programs are, generally, well, crap. All that said, DEI programs are really just a symptom. The ascension of the "I'm a victim" mindset is also but a symptom. Beyond those observations, these types of discussions represent exactly the type of discussions for which I began to follow The Glenn Show. Kudos!
I started listening to your interview with Carol Swain this morning and got halfway through. Looking forward to finishing the interview and learning about her new book.
I appreciate you asking Ms. Swain some of the common questions circulating regarding her support for Donald Trump. I make the following points that I think are relevant to your questions:
• The only election contest brought by Donald Trump was in Georgia. Georgia law required a hearing to be set within at least 10 days. The lower court simply did not set a hearing, and the Georgia appellant and Supreme Court failed to enforce the law. That reinforces Ms. Swain’s statement that there is not fair judicial relief available.
• Regarding what were the Georgia election irregularities, I believe Ms. Swain correctly responded there were many. Some of the more common ones are detailed in the Georgia case filing. I will try to attach that filing to my post for the benefit of your community. (I couldn’t post the PDF but here is a link to the post with the PDF: vivabarneslaw.locals.com/post/4439850/b….
• Finally, in response to your comment about Donald Trump conceding after not receiving remedy through the court system, in addition to the difficulty of courts appropriately responding to the relief sought by others (and Donald Trump in Georgia) that Ms. Swain referenced, it is important to note that the Constitution saw election challenges mostly having a political resolution; that is, that is why the Constitution allows for election irregularities to be brought to Congress. This is precisely what Donald Trump did as well as many other incumbents and challengers over the history of our founding.
Ms. Swain referenced all these points, in general, but your listeners would benefit I believe from a much more detailed discussion. I recommend you interview Robert Barnes, a constitutional and civil rights lawyer who has done many election challenges and was heavily involved in the Georgia court filing. He can be found on Locals at vivabvarnes.local.com. He had you on his show and you were great there!
The reason Trump keeps getting arrested is because he is a reckless fool. It takes little effort to play the victim and spin conspiracy theories. I agree that restorative justice in the end hurts minorities. If you want to understand why Trump lost the election refer to my reason for why he keeps getting arrested. Trump jumps in front of a bus than screams bloody murder at the bus driver.
I wanted to write a comment about my impressions about Ms. Swain as the podcast started, then progressed.
Mr. Loury started the show off with a conversation conversation the "stolen" 2020 election. As I was listening to Ms. Swain state her position -- many of her claims have been thoroughly debunked -- I began to judge her as being another Trump crackpot. Ms. Swain continued on & on about why she supported Trump in spite the faults she willfully acknowledged (e.g., "Trump surrounds himself with bad people"). Ms. Swain described the Fulton County charges against Trump & his cohorts as completely without merit and politically motivated. She went on to suggest that the Democrats were an existential threat to our nation. She accused the left of selectively publicizing cases of police brutality when an African American is the victim.
Each time she made her derogatory comments, in my head, I was thinking that the exact same charges could be made against Republicans. For example, Trump being an existential threat to our nation, Republicans selectively publicizing crimes committed by illegal aliens, politically motivated investigations about Bengazi & Hillary Clinton, the pending impeachment push by McCarthy before concrete evidence of wrongdoing is found against President Biden.
I was wondering why Mr. Loury would have her on his show if this was the extent of her contribution to the podcast. He halfheartedly AT BEST challenged her claims.
Finally, Mr. Loury steered the conversation into her academic work, her books, and her then-controversial positions on growing white nationalism. As I heard more from Ms. Swain, I began to think perhaps I judged her too soon into the podcast. I enjoyed hearing all of her points of view once the conversation left the realm of politics.
Later, I was thinking how wrong it is for ALL of us to judge people on the basis of what Presidential candidate they vote for every four years. I have really been trying hard to better understand why Donald Trump came to be a political force in the first place. I have read a number of books on what conditions existed to warrant almost 50% of voters to think Trump is the solution to America's problems.
I spent the better part of 3 years judging people harshly who voted for Trump. I felt that their support of Trump must mean that they have a significantly different set of ethics & morality than I.
I was wrong to judge others that way. And my judgements were not much different than those who judge a person based on the color their skin, or their religious beliefs. This may not seem reasonable to those who are entrenched in their tribal political camps. But I believe it to be true.
After all of that, my big criticisms of Ms. Swain was her claim that Supreme Court Justice Jackson "has no critical thinking skills and is only capable of regurgitating party-line thinking" (I am paraphrasing). Sorry, Ms. Swain, but I have read a few of Justice Jackson's opinions from the Supreme Court. She is an incredible person to have on the Supreme Court.
And I have also read opinions from Justices Scalia, Thomas, Ginsberg, Alito, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Chief Justice Roberts. ALL OF THEM are incredible legal minds. Even when I have disagreed with their decisions, I recognize that their opinions are rooted in solid legal knowledge.
Putting Ms. Swain's homage to Trump aside, her derogatory comment on Justice Jackson showed HER partisan leaning and disdain for the left side of the aisle. And it reinforced her earlier tributes to Trump.
Unfortunately about 1/3 to 1/2 of the conversation was not too valuable, save for testing my growing patience with Trumpers. But the last 1/2 of the conversation made up for the half that almost had me judging Ms. Swain too harshly.
1:04:43 It's hard to assume good faith on Swain's part when she implies that both Dershowitz and Loury aren't honest when they engage with her amicably. The fact that Glenn laughs it off indicates his wisdom and humility.
18:19 I know about ballot harvesting because I lived in the the ninth Congressional district of North Carolina in 2018 when Republican shenanigans resulted in the election not being certified. BTW, I didn't vote for either the Democratic or the Republican candidate.
I'm so glad to see Gordon Strause and others push back hard against Carol Swain's conspiratorial, free-associative, evidence-free blather about stolen elections. I've got nothing against conservatives; I'm rereading Christopher Caldwell's "The Age of Entitlement" right now, with great enthusiasm. But Swain's stream-of-consciousness complaint here brought to mind Lionel Trilling's comment about conservatism consisting of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." At no point in that first 30 minutes did she actually get down to the hard business of actually making a CASE for stolen elections. At no point did she say, "The following state's election was demonstrably stolen by the D's, and here is the evidence." I know she's got a Ph.D. and has done serious research in political science, but it's precisely because she's got that cred that anybody would have hoped for more. Glenn, I actually think you did a passable job, with the help of two due-diligence questions, of calling her on the election denialism. You did ask those questions. But that's all--and, as others have pointed out, it wasn't enough. I've only listened to the first 35 minutes; I'll suspend judgment about the rest for now. But, like others--clearly!--I felt the need to come here and say Whoa. EDITED on 94/23 TO ADD: Although this was my response to the opening portion of the conversation with Swain, I love and agree with her thoughts about DEI and affirmative action. Yes, old-school affirmative action of the sort she approves of made a point of broadening the applicant pool--reaching outside the box, working hard to open the process to those who might not automatically be aware of it or feel that they were entitled to be a part of it. Equality and equal access demand no less. But the equity imperative, the demand for equality of results rather than equality of opportunity, has invidious results, as she rightly notes.
I gave up listening. I like Glenn’s gentlemanly manners, but I really felt he would have socked it to a man who blathered so much nonsense.
I did learn something: I was listening in order to find out why people believe Trump’s nonsense - I have a neighbor who’s a big fan of his, and listening to her, I finally came to the conclusion she’s just not capable of thinking straight. But my neighbor never attended college and just doesn’t seem equipped by nature to follow a logical argument. So I listened to this podcast to know why an educated, supposedly intelligent person would also fall for the Trump line. Well, now I know: there’s no shortage of Ph.D.s who can’t think straight, either.
What the hell, Glenn? Okay, I know you like to present diverse viewpoints but *this* anti-Christian, conspiracy theorist nonsense? I got about twenty minutes in, trying to give her an honest shot, but Jesus Christ, the woman is Exhibit A as to why America has come to where it is.
I don't know whether she was a more rational-minded conservative before she turned her brain off with her conversion to conservative Christianity, but I am curious & will Google her to see if she was capable of critical thought before then. Bill Maher has pointed out that the coddling and leeway we give to religious belief also includes fundamentalist Christianity and *this* is the brainless, largely fact-free, bigoted model we see rife throughout the conservative movement, and it's taken hold in a different form on the left with wokism and its many culty faces, each borrowed directly from fundamentalist religion (John McWhorter's book Woke Racism is an outline of *all* the woke ideology cults, not just antiracism).
Frankly, and I will probably annoy some people by saying this, but I'm sorry, you can't be a Trump supporter and a Christian. She went morally awry in 2009. If she can't see what an awful, dangerous human being Donald Trump is, I assume she's incapable of reading the Bible to see what Jesus said. They're mutually exclusive.
I'm not anti-religion and I'm not anti-Christian; I used to be one myself and my family is still Christian and we get along just great; we had a conservative Christian who passed away a few years ago who worked to provide abortion alternatives to young women but still supported the right to choose. That's the kind of Christian I wish Carol would aspire to.
BREAKING NEWS: Another race soldier bites the dust. Ex-leader of PROUD BOYS sentenced to 17 years in prison. Convicted felons cannot own or possess firearms. Parolees can be searched 24/7 without a warrant. 😂😂😂😂👍
*Donald Trump (orange mango)* will be the finale of the story.
Glenn, here is Wiki’s description of Ketanji Brown’s parents and uncle: “Her father, Johnny Brown, attended the University of Miami School of Law and became chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board. Her mother, Ellery, was school principal at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. One of her uncles, Calvin Ross, served as the chief of the Miami Police Department.” She had an upper middle class background, and she was admitted to Harvard as an undergraduate, perhaps in part because of affirmative action. Compare her birth family with yours, Carol Swain’s, or Clarence Thomas’s.
Carol Swain was basically saying that Katanji Brown can’t think clearly because much of what she achieved was handed to her on a silver platter. It’s the same (largely true) argument the Left used against GW Bush .
She says,"when I'm wrong,... I'm rarely wrong." Well,this ie one of those times. She's wrong. And so a were you Glenn in even having her on. This was not a discussion . It was a platform you freely gave her to spout her party propaganda. Well done. Can't imagine why you had her on. She's no intellectual. Her lack of rational,critical thinking proves that. And I've got my doubts about you,too. Why no real cogent rebuttals?
Yesterday I listened to Bari Weiss' podcast recap of the first GOP debate on Honestly. The commentator on the podcast most supportive of Trump made a comment that Trump wanted to represent all Americans but the Left wouldn't let him. Bari then played a clip of the Trump interview by Tucker Carlson in which Trump himself says he wants to represent all Americans. Swain says the "all Americans" thing here too. The party line to court Independents is becoming clear. Let's see if it'll work.
So much fascinating insight here. I agree with Glenn that a corporation *attempting* to improve race relations via diversity training CANNOT be unconstitutional on its face. I also agree with Carol that these programs are, generally, well, crap. All that said, DEI programs are really just a symptom. The ascension of the "I'm a victim" mindset is also but a symptom. Beyond those observations, these types of discussions represent exactly the type of discussions for which I began to follow The Glenn Show. Kudos!
Hi Glenn,
I started listening to your interview with Carol Swain this morning and got halfway through. Looking forward to finishing the interview and learning about her new book.
I appreciate you asking Ms. Swain some of the common questions circulating regarding her support for Donald Trump. I make the following points that I think are relevant to your questions:
• The only election contest brought by Donald Trump was in Georgia. Georgia law required a hearing to be set within at least 10 days. The lower court simply did not set a hearing, and the Georgia appellant and Supreme Court failed to enforce the law. That reinforces Ms. Swain’s statement that there is not fair judicial relief available.
• Regarding what were the Georgia election irregularities, I believe Ms. Swain correctly responded there were many. Some of the more common ones are detailed in the Georgia case filing. I will try to attach that filing to my post for the benefit of your community. (I couldn’t post the PDF but here is a link to the post with the PDF: vivabarneslaw.locals.com/post/4439850/b….
• Finally, in response to your comment about Donald Trump conceding after not receiving remedy through the court system, in addition to the difficulty of courts appropriately responding to the relief sought by others (and Donald Trump in Georgia) that Ms. Swain referenced, it is important to note that the Constitution saw election challenges mostly having a political resolution; that is, that is why the Constitution allows for election irregularities to be brought to Congress. This is precisely what Donald Trump did as well as many other incumbents and challengers over the history of our founding.
Ms. Swain referenced all these points, in general, but your listeners would benefit I believe from a much more detailed discussion. I recommend you interview Robert Barnes, a constitutional and civil rights lawyer who has done many election challenges and was heavily involved in the Georgia court filing. He can be found on Locals at vivabvarnes.local.com. He had you on his show and you were great there!
The reason Trump keeps getting arrested is because he is a reckless fool. It takes little effort to play the victim and spin conspiracy theories. I agree that restorative justice in the end hurts minorities. If you want to understand why Trump lost the election refer to my reason for why he keeps getting arrested. Trump jumps in front of a bus than screams bloody murder at the bus driver.
I wanted to write a comment about my impressions about Ms. Swain as the podcast started, then progressed.
Mr. Loury started the show off with a conversation conversation the "stolen" 2020 election. As I was listening to Ms. Swain state her position -- many of her claims have been thoroughly debunked -- I began to judge her as being another Trump crackpot. Ms. Swain continued on & on about why she supported Trump in spite the faults she willfully acknowledged (e.g., "Trump surrounds himself with bad people"). Ms. Swain described the Fulton County charges against Trump & his cohorts as completely without merit and politically motivated. She went on to suggest that the Democrats were an existential threat to our nation. She accused the left of selectively publicizing cases of police brutality when an African American is the victim.
Each time she made her derogatory comments, in my head, I was thinking that the exact same charges could be made against Republicans. For example, Trump being an existential threat to our nation, Republicans selectively publicizing crimes committed by illegal aliens, politically motivated investigations about Bengazi & Hillary Clinton, the pending impeachment push by McCarthy before concrete evidence of wrongdoing is found against President Biden.
I was wondering why Mr. Loury would have her on his show if this was the extent of her contribution to the podcast. He halfheartedly AT BEST challenged her claims.
Finally, Mr. Loury steered the conversation into her academic work, her books, and her then-controversial positions on growing white nationalism. As I heard more from Ms. Swain, I began to think perhaps I judged her too soon into the podcast. I enjoyed hearing all of her points of view once the conversation left the realm of politics.
Later, I was thinking how wrong it is for ALL of us to judge people on the basis of what Presidential candidate they vote for every four years. I have really been trying hard to better understand why Donald Trump came to be a political force in the first place. I have read a number of books on what conditions existed to warrant almost 50% of voters to think Trump is the solution to America's problems.
I spent the better part of 3 years judging people harshly who voted for Trump. I felt that their support of Trump must mean that they have a significantly different set of ethics & morality than I.
I was wrong to judge others that way. And my judgements were not much different than those who judge a person based on the color their skin, or their religious beliefs. This may not seem reasonable to those who are entrenched in their tribal political camps. But I believe it to be true.
After all of that, my big criticisms of Ms. Swain was her claim that Supreme Court Justice Jackson "has no critical thinking skills and is only capable of regurgitating party-line thinking" (I am paraphrasing). Sorry, Ms. Swain, but I have read a few of Justice Jackson's opinions from the Supreme Court. She is an incredible person to have on the Supreme Court.
And I have also read opinions from Justices Scalia, Thomas, Ginsberg, Alito, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Chief Justice Roberts. ALL OF THEM are incredible legal minds. Even when I have disagreed with their decisions, I recognize that their opinions are rooted in solid legal knowledge.
Putting Ms. Swain's homage to Trump aside, her derogatory comment on Justice Jackson showed HER partisan leaning and disdain for the left side of the aisle. And it reinforced her earlier tributes to Trump.
Unfortunately about 1/3 to 1/2 of the conversation was not too valuable, save for testing my growing patience with Trumpers. But the last 1/2 of the conversation made up for the half that almost had me judging Ms. Swain too harshly.
1:04:43 It's hard to assume good faith on Swain's part when she implies that both Dershowitz and Loury aren't honest when they engage with her amicably. The fact that Glenn laughs it off indicates his wisdom and humility.
29:44 A Soviet sympathizer murdered JFK.
23:33 If we don't have due process, we can't trust any election. Presumably, Carol thinks that Gore made a mistake when he conceded in 2000.
18:19 I know about ballot harvesting because I lived in the the ninth Congressional district of North Carolina in 2018 when Republican shenanigans resulted in the election not being certified. BTW, I didn't vote for either the Democratic or the Republican candidate.
I'm so glad to see Gordon Strause and others push back hard against Carol Swain's conspiratorial, free-associative, evidence-free blather about stolen elections. I've got nothing against conservatives; I'm rereading Christopher Caldwell's "The Age of Entitlement" right now, with great enthusiasm. But Swain's stream-of-consciousness complaint here brought to mind Lionel Trilling's comment about conservatism consisting of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." At no point in that first 30 minutes did she actually get down to the hard business of actually making a CASE for stolen elections. At no point did she say, "The following state's election was demonstrably stolen by the D's, and here is the evidence." I know she's got a Ph.D. and has done serious research in political science, but it's precisely because she's got that cred that anybody would have hoped for more. Glenn, I actually think you did a passable job, with the help of two due-diligence questions, of calling her on the election denialism. You did ask those questions. But that's all--and, as others have pointed out, it wasn't enough. I've only listened to the first 35 minutes; I'll suspend judgment about the rest for now. But, like others--clearly!--I felt the need to come here and say Whoa. EDITED on 94/23 TO ADD: Although this was my response to the opening portion of the conversation with Swain, I love and agree with her thoughts about DEI and affirmative action. Yes, old-school affirmative action of the sort she approves of made a point of broadening the applicant pool--reaching outside the box, working hard to open the process to those who might not automatically be aware of it or feel that they were entitled to be a part of it. Equality and equal access demand no less. But the equity imperative, the demand for equality of results rather than equality of opportunity, has invidious results, as she rightly notes.
I gave up listening. I like Glenn’s gentlemanly manners, but I really felt he would have socked it to a man who blathered so much nonsense.
I did learn something: I was listening in order to find out why people believe Trump’s nonsense - I have a neighbor who’s a big fan of his, and listening to her, I finally came to the conclusion she’s just not capable of thinking straight. But my neighbor never attended college and just doesn’t seem equipped by nature to follow a logical argument. So I listened to this podcast to know why an educated, supposedly intelligent person would also fall for the Trump line. Well, now I know: there’s no shortage of Ph.D.s who can’t think straight, either.
What the hell, Glenn? Okay, I know you like to present diverse viewpoints but *this* anti-Christian, conspiracy theorist nonsense? I got about twenty minutes in, trying to give her an honest shot, but Jesus Christ, the woman is Exhibit A as to why America has come to where it is.
I don't know whether she was a more rational-minded conservative before she turned her brain off with her conversion to conservative Christianity, but I am curious & will Google her to see if she was capable of critical thought before then. Bill Maher has pointed out that the coddling and leeway we give to religious belief also includes fundamentalist Christianity and *this* is the brainless, largely fact-free, bigoted model we see rife throughout the conservative movement, and it's taken hold in a different form on the left with wokism and its many culty faces, each borrowed directly from fundamentalist religion (John McWhorter's book Woke Racism is an outline of *all* the woke ideology cults, not just antiracism).
Frankly, and I will probably annoy some people by saying this, but I'm sorry, you can't be a Trump supporter and a Christian. She went morally awry in 2009. If she can't see what an awful, dangerous human being Donald Trump is, I assume she's incapable of reading the Bible to see what Jesus said. They're mutually exclusive.
I'm not anti-religion and I'm not anti-Christian; I used to be one myself and my family is still Christian and we get along just great; we had a conservative Christian who passed away a few years ago who worked to provide abortion alternatives to young women but still supported the right to choose. That's the kind of Christian I wish Carol would aspire to.
Here's what Carol's boy supports for America:
https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981?utm_source=RecoReel&utm_medium=articlePage&utm_id=Taboola
I am reminded of the Soviet Union's Communist Party "Useful..." well, never mind.
BREAKING NEWS: Another race soldier bites the dust. Ex-leader of PROUD BOYS sentenced to 17 years in prison. Convicted felons cannot own or possess firearms. Parolees can be searched 24/7 without a warrant. 😂😂😂😂👍
*Donald Trump (orange mango)* will be the finale of the story.
Glenn, here is Wiki’s description of Ketanji Brown’s parents and uncle: “Her father, Johnny Brown, attended the University of Miami School of Law and became chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board. Her mother, Ellery, was school principal at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. One of her uncles, Calvin Ross, served as the chief of the Miami Police Department.” She had an upper middle class background, and she was admitted to Harvard as an undergraduate, perhaps in part because of affirmative action. Compare her birth family with yours, Carol Swain’s, or Clarence Thomas’s.
Carol Swain was basically saying that Katanji Brown can’t think clearly because much of what she achieved was handed to her on a silver platter. It’s the same (largely true) argument the Left used against GW Bush .
She says,"when I'm wrong,... I'm rarely wrong." Well,this ie one of those times. She's wrong. And so a were you Glenn in even having her on. This was not a discussion . It was a platform you freely gave her to spout her party propaganda. Well done. Can't imagine why you had her on. She's no intellectual. Her lack of rational,critical thinking proves that. And I've got my doubts about you,too. Why no real cogent rebuttals?
Yesterday I listened to Bari Weiss' podcast recap of the first GOP debate on Honestly. The commentator on the podcast most supportive of Trump made a comment that Trump wanted to represent all Americans but the Left wouldn't let him. Bari then played a clip of the Trump interview by Tucker Carlson in which Trump himself says he wants to represent all Americans. Swain says the "all Americans" thing here too. The party line to court Independents is becoming clear. Let's see if it'll work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOYQeIrVdYo