May 28, 2023 “As you suspected, it really is about race”
Dr. Roger Ray click here to see the video
By Kristen Holmes and Jon Passantino, CNN
Updated 5:47 PM EDT, Wed May 3, 2023
In a newly revealed text message, ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson made a racist comment and said he found himself briefly rooting for a mob of Trump supporters to kill a person.
“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington,” Carlson texted a producer. “A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living s**t out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.”
Carlson sent the text message to one of his producers in the hours after the violent January 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill.
A few weeks ago, I dusted off my 1970’s philosophy degree and talked with you about how we know what we know. There is “a priori” knowledge that we just inherently know or that we receive as a revealed truth from a holy book or a religion, and there is “a posteriori” knowledge that we derive from our own experience.
Most of us who grew up in a faith community were expected to believe a whole lot of things based on what was mistakenly called “faith,” sort of an invitation to assassinate your brains and just believe a whole lot of things because you were told to by your church or because it was in the Bible and it was almost a test of character to be able to believe these things without questioning them.
I believe that is precisely where traditional religions and progressive faith communities part company. Progressives are invited to question everything. As Scot Peck once said, “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.” Now, people will reach different conclusions, of course, but if you are not allowed to even ask, not only “Was Jesus really God’s only son?” or “Did Jesus really rise from the dead?”, but more fundamentally, “Was there really a historical Jesus or is the whole gospel tradition a fiction?” . . . if you cannot ask the hard questions then, at least for me and most progressives, your religion is based on nostalgia and wishful thinking.
I have often talked with you about “evidence based faith,” that is, rejecting any belief that is merely handed down to us as an assumed part of our religion and to try to create a faith that is rooted in what can be known, based on testable evidence. This is a hard pill to swallow for a lot of religious people but if what you believe is based only on how you feel, if you believe things that cannot be critically examined, then, again, at least for me, that’s not faith, that’s superstition and I don’t want to base my life, heck, I don’t even want to waste my time listening to your superstitious beliefs.
I believe that religious faith is in need of critical thinking skills and if you ever go down that path, you will find yourself demanding critical thinking in all of the other arenas of your life. . . especially in politics. Public debate is often based on little more than who has the largest megaphone.
Donald Trump keeps finding opportunities to say on TV that the January 6th rioters came to the Capitol with “love in their hearts” and that it was a “beautiful day.”
Which takes us back to the famous Chico Marx quote, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” I sat and watched live coverage of the January 6th insurrection on TV for hours, as did millions of other Americans and people around the globe. What would it take to make you believe that it was a beautiful day and that the thousands of protestors all had love in their hearts as the fought with the police and spread their feces around the Capitol Building?
I suppose that in a technical sense, propaganda might be either true or false. But we typically use that word to describe attempts at persuading people, through repetition and intimidation, to believe things that are clearly not true. Why does anyone believe in heaven or hell, souls, angels, demons, or ghosts? We have no evidence for any of it and yet through repetition and coercion, most of us have been intimidated and indoctrinated by the church, the clergy, our parents, our peers, and culture itself, to believe in absurd and fantastic things that then govern our lives.
I don’t believe in life after death because there is not a shred of evidence of any reliable source to even suggest that there is consciousness apart from a brain, or a soul beyond a living body. Wanting to believe it isn’t evidence. Millions of people at least acting like they believe it isn’t evidence, in the same way that Donald Trump insisting that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest ever, doesn’t make it so.
You can just look at a picture of Obama’s first inauguration beside a picture of Trump’s inauguration crowd and clearly see that Trump had less than half the crowd of other recent inaugurations…. But who are you going to believe, Trump, or your own lying eyes?
One of the really dangerous problems with our current media footprint, is that misinformation can be repeated so often that people will actually believe the lies rather than their own eyes. And, of course, Fox News is always the primary example, but they are not alone. But one of the insidious things about Fox News propaganda is that it is so often delivered in tones of horrible condescension. They use words like “elitist,” which often is just a euphemism for people who are educated and informed, or “woke” or “snowflake” as a description of people who actually have compassion for others, but they say it in a way as if having sincere compassion for the plight of immigrants, or the poor, or racial minorities, is some kind of disease. And the term “antifa” is used to describe protestors as being un-American when “antifa” literally means “anti-fascist.” Folks, have we forgotten that WW II was a war against fascism? My very conservative father, a WWII veteran, was certainly antifa. Who wants to be pro-fascist?
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who often talks like a man who has been bitten by a rabies infected bat, brags that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” This is his slogan to promote his culture war fight to defend white supremacy and to promote book banning, trans-phobia, immigrant bashing, and a generally sad elevation of prejudice and ignorance to a nearly sacramental status.
I love that the British comedian, John Cleese, said about the term “snowflake,” “Yes, I’ve heard this word. I think sociopaths use it in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy.” And I think that is both accurate and fairly obvious.
But more seriously, there is a story from Buddhist tradition that says that after the enlightenment, a man noticed the radiance of the Buddha and he asked him, “Are you a god or a celestial being,” and the Buddha replied, “No.” And the man asked again, “are you a mortal?” And Buddha replied, “No.” So finally the man asks, “Then what are you?” And the Buddha answered, “I am awake.”
So, if the Buddha described himself as being a woke snowflake, how much of an insult can it be for us to be the same thing? And yet, these terms are being used as a dismissive insult in order to defend prejudice against being challenged.
Through these past years as Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, has ranted against any teaching of actual American History being taught in public schools, calling any mention of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation of schools, or discrimination in hiring as being CRT, Critical Race Theory. And he has described the 1619 project as being an inaccurate description of racism in America, used only to make white children feel guilty and to doubt themselves. But all of this has been portrayed as being matters of opinion.
We are not supposed to call Trump or Trump supporters racists. We are not supposed to call out Tucker Carlson or Ron DeSantis as trying to hide and deny America’s institutional racism. But the reason I am bringing all of this up today is because of the recent release of some of Tucker Carlson’s internal Fox texts and emails in which he reveals in stark terms just how horribly racist that he undeniably is.
While Carlson disparaged three Trump supporters for ganging up on one black protestor, it wasn’t because the violent confrontation was wrong, it was, he said, “not how white people fight.” He confessed that he still wished that they had killed the black antifa protestor. It isn’t that he is against lynching or racially provoked murder, he just wants it to be done with better style.
Yes, we are all sick of the partisan division in our government that has increasingly become a kind of cold civil war, dividing our entire nation against itself. I hear of many people saying that they just don’t watch the news anymore, that they refuse to pay attention to politics, as if maintaining neutrality is somehow a virtue. I want to see our country reunited. I want to see Democrats and Republicans cooperating, compromising, and providing meaningful leadership to our country. But we don’t get there by pretending that prejudice either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.
The Latin phrase, “E Pluribus Unum” was officially adopted by an act of congress shortly after we had won our independence as the motto of the United States. Out of the many, one. Unity was the guiding principle, even if none of them were yet fully willing to embrace it.
E Pluribus Unum was our motto even when slavery was still common, and women not only couldn’t vote but they also lacked most of the civil rights of white men. But unity was the goal, unlike many other modern countries that still defend their borders and their culture against diversity, we refused to have a state sponsored religion, we fought a bloody civil war to abolish slavery, and many of us lived through the violent and turbulent years as we dismantled America’s apartheid system of segregation.
The one thing that I believe that Tucker Carlson’s private text messages demonstrates to us, what it is undeniable evidence for is the fact that we really need to teach the painful truths about America’s history of racism and misogyny. All of this book banning is an attempt to erase America’s history of racism, it is an attempt at delegitimizing what it means to be gay or transgender in our diverse culture. The partisan gerrymandering of voting districts in southern states is a defacto attempt at making black voters powerless . . . if they can’t keep black people from voting, then they will try to make their votes ineffective.
America’s greatness is rooted in its diversity, out of the union we build from people of different races, religions, cultures, sexual orientations, and languages. We are a nation of immigrants that now is being taught to fear and despise immigration, how crazy is that?
Look, if being around trans people makes you uncomfortable, maybe even afraid or maybe disgusted, hear me out, I understand. This has not been an easy issue for me. But I can remember when being around openly gay people made me uncomfortable.
Can you straight people remember how you used to feel about gay people? Can you remember what made the difference for you? Do you remember how you got past that prejudice? Right now, here in the state of Missouri, as is happening in Florida and Arkansas and many other states, people who are uncomfortable with trans people are writing legislation to ban trans athletes from competition, passing laws to threaten doctors with loss of their medical license or even with prison time for administering gender affirming medications or surgery.
But do you remember how you managed to escape your prejudice against gay people? It wasn’t by trying to legislate them out of existence or to force them back into the closet, it was by getting to know gay people better. It was by discovering that someone in your family, in your circle of friends, had been gay all along. My own liberation from my cultural prejudice against gay people started to happen when two women that I cared about as friends made it obvious that they were falling in love with one another. Thankfully, rather than condemning them for their love, I had to root out some hatred hiding in me.
The first few years of my public school education took place in a rural segregated school system in Kentucky and I was just ten years old when schools were integrated and it wasn’t an especially smooth transition but it got easier as our little league baseball team became integrated, and then the municipal swimming pool. And in college I lived in an integrated neighborhood, and later I dated interracially and then adopted interracially. Every part of that journey had some challenges to it but every step of the way was a step towards liberation, a movement towards unity and now I can proudly say that I am woke as F.
Now, I know that I need to bring this sermon home before I run out of either time or your patience, if I have not done so already. I went to seminary at Vanderbilt in 1979 with a brand new degree in philosophy and 23 years of experience in traditional Christianity. When I started seminary, I confidently believed that Christianity was the only true religion. I believed that the Bible was the word of God. I believed that Jesus was the only source of salvation and heaven and hell were as real in my mind as Canada and Mexico.
Four years later, I knew that none of those things were true, but I was in a job where for the next 25 years I had to conform to a culture that still basically believed in all of those things. My career as a Christian pastor came to an end when I started to talk a little too much about evidence based faith. I came out of the closet of traditional faith when the closet got too small for me to continue to live in it anymore. But I lived in that closet for 20 years after I knew that I didn’t really belong there anymore.
Folks, Tucker Carlson graduated with a degree in history from Trinity College. Ron DeSantis graduated from Yale and then graduated from Harvard Law School.
Ted Cruz, the anti-immigrant, racist senator from Texas, whose real name is Rafael Cruz . . . I don’t know how you get Ted out of Rafael, but Senator Cruz was born in Canada and later graduated from Yale and then Harvard Law School. Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas was at Vanderbilt at the same time that I was. He was in the law school while I was next door in the Divinity School where we shared a lunch room that was called a refectory because, after all, it was Vanderbilt.
All of these public racists are living in a closet that they know that they don’t belong in. They may have gone to Trinity, or Yale, or Harvard with those prejudices but if they read enough of their assignments to pass the exams and graduate, then I can assure you that they know that their public dismissal of snowflakes, their curled lips when they talk about being woke, and their shameless attacks on trans kids and poor immigrants is all an act they are putting on to manipulate voters who never had a chance to go to Trinity, or Yale, or Vanderbilt, or Harvard.
I went to Vanderbilt where most of my professors were Yale grads, and I was later a fellow at Harvard. I am not telling you what I believe to be true, I am telling you what I know from experience, from evidence, is true. We don’t need to unite with them in a way that would imply that their anti-woke rhetoric is a legitimate difference of opinion. It is a manipulative, dishonest, act that is destroying this country and we don’t need to tolerate it for another minute.
Both honesty and patriotism demands that we begin to love our nation enough to demand that we live up to our original vision embodied in the motto, e pluribus unum. The trans kid who makes my coffee at Starbucks is a part of this nation and she is a part of me, just like the undocumented farm worker who picks Rafael Cruz’s apples and oranges are a part of him.
And remember, before Tucker Carlson got fired at Fox, he was fired by MSNBC and CNN. It is time for this nation’s politicians and talking heads to come out of the closet.
When, in the 10th chapter of Luke, Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers by telling the story of the good Samaritan . . . he tells a story about a Jew who was saved by a man who that Jew had grown up believing was his enemy.
Just to suggest a conversation starter at your next family Thanksgiving dinner, may I suggest just mentioning that person with the highest known IQ in the world is an 11-year-old British kid, Yusuf Shah. His performance beats those of physicists Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Even though he is of a race and heritage that most of these right wing racists would not have allowed to immigrate into the United States. More than that, how many kids with as much or more intelligence than Yusuf Shah were detained in cages at our border or left to grow up without education harvesting peaches and broccoli in farm worker camps in California or the Carolinas? It’s just something to think about.
Just as Christianity may begin to regain some of its lost credibility when they remember that Jesus taught us to love our enemies, to literally turn our enemies into our neighbors, so America will become great again when they remember that our diversity is our greatest source of genius, creativity, liberty, and justice for all when we are able to look at our own history of racism and prejudice and decide to get to know the immigrant at the border better, to enter conversation with trans people until we can let go of our fear and turn our disgust into friendship.
It isn’t easy and it usually isn’t done quickly, but we have done it before and we can do it again. That’s not just my opinion, this time, you know that I am right.
