Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Live Event/Special
The History of White Supremacy; Spread of Hate in the 20th Century; State of Hate: The Explosion of White Nationalism. Aired 9- 10p ET
Aired July 05, 2019 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[21:00:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The following is a CNN special report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: America is at war with itself.
RANDALL KENNEDY, PROFESSOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: Young people openly racist walking the streets of the United States.
ZAKARIA: Cities turn to battlegrounds.
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST: Another beautiful life stolen.
ZAKARIA: Charlottesville.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think people (Inaudible) them. This is my town.
ZAKARIA: Pittsburgh.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Murdered because they were Jewish.
ZAKARIA: Charleston.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He said he wanted to kill black people.
ZAKARIA: In city after city.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are looking at your own backyard.
ZAKARIA: An army of hate.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: Whose numbers are soaring. The country is changing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get the (muted) out of here.
ZAKARIA: The fear growing.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: And it's spreading across the world.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why would you treat us like that?
ZAKARIA: A fire --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hail Trump.
ZAKARIA: -- fed by politics.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Very fine people on both sides.
ZAKARIA: Haunted by the past.
KENNEDY: Adolph Hitler says we can learn from them.
ZAKARIA: The roots of the crisis.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was a boom and there was nothing left.
ZAKARIA: The flash point question. All men are created equal. You don't believe that?
JARED TAYLOR, WHITE NATIONALIST: Of course, not.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: The fabric of a country.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: Demands a call for action.
KENNEDY: We have never done all that could be done.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: Once upon a time in America, it looked like almost everyone was white.
KENNEDY: The idea of America as a white man's country, very powerful idea.
ZAKARIA: In 1960, whites made up 89 percent of the country. Black people were decidedly second-class citizens.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leave it to Beaver.
ZAKARIA: The only African-American who played a role on "Leave it to Beaver" appeared as a maid.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Care for some more punch, boys?
KENNEDY: White, white, white, white.
ZAKARIA: Then came the Immigration Act of 1965.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I now declare each of you to be a citizen of the United States.
ZAKARIA: America's doors opened to immigrants from new countries. Nonwestern lands. By the 1980s, the white percentage was down about 10 points.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RONALD REAGAN, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: This land, its people, those are what make America soar.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Immigrants kept coming even as the white birth rate declined. By the 2000s, the Census Bureau had news for us.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Minority groups will become the majority in the United States by the year 2043.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Many Americans celebrated the new diversity. But for one group, it was a five-alarm fire.
(CROWD CHANTING)
KATHLEEN BELEW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: We have to understand a sense of emergency as animating this movement because all of this is about a immediate and apocalyptic danger to the future.
[21:05:00] TAYLOR: There are still plenty of white people, they deserve a future, not to be simply melted away in this multiracial mish-mash that they did not choose.
ZAKARIA: Jared Taylor is a white nationalist. Quite literally. He does not advocate violence, but he does want to create a whites only version of America.
TAYLOR: I'm not at all talking about the entire United States becoming white, I'm talking about simply a portion of it becoming white.
ZAKARIA: So, the whites would secede?
TAYLOR: Perhaps. I can assure you that more and more white people agree with me all the time. They do not want to become a minority.
ZAKARIA: Would that secession mean maybe creating a new nation?
TAYLOR: Ideally, yes?
ZAKARIA: We'll hear more from Taylor later, but repeatedly he voices the biggest fear of the white supremacy movement.
TAYLOR: Should I want my people to disappear? It is entirely profoundly moral to resist that kind of replacement.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: Replacement. The word has become a call to arms.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Charlottesville did shock a lot of people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Whose streets?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our streets.
KENNEDY: Nazism. The United States of America fought a war against Nazi Germany.
ZAKARIA: But the marches didn't look like Nazis or the Klan. Instead of hoods and Swastikas, they wore khakis and golf shirts. Some of them call themselves the alt-right. Others, white nationalists.
BELEW: Very, very clever rebranding. When people hear the phrase "white nationalism," I think they often
think of sort of overzealous patriotism. This isn't that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your America's gone, mother --
ZAKARIA: It soon became clear.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's go. Coward.
ZAKARIA: They might have new names.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: USA.
ZAKARIA: But they were America's oldest nightmare.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To next door's step. Let's go.
ZAKARIA: White supremacy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey. Hey.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Get him off of us. Get him off.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Holy shit. Holy shit.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Grief and shock in Charlottesville, Virginia.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One person is dead.
ZAKARIA: The year after Charlottesville, the number of white nationalist groups soared. By one estimate, up almost 50 percent.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is now 30 seconds to zero time.
ZAKARIA: Some have become especially violent.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wage war now.
ZAKARIA: This group is called Atomwaffen, German for atopic weapons.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The things that they were planning were horrible.
ZAKARIA: One former member warned the police about deadly plots.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They were planning to kill civilian life.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, do they, were they specific in their plans?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues.
ZAKARIA: Is the federal government fighting this?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB (D-MI): How come we don't have enough tools right now to pull these people in?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: At a recent hearing on white supremacy, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim, read a letter she had gotten in the mail.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TLAIB: I was totally excited and pleased when I heard about 49 Muslims were killed and many -- many more were wounded in New Zealand. This is a great start. Let's hope and pray that it continues here in the good old USA. The only -- the only good Muslim is a -- is a dead one.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: First, my empathy --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But listen to the way the money is spent.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAEL MCGARRITY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, FBI: Those agents in the field that work domestic terrorism, about 20 percent. And we have about 80 percent working international terrorism.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: That's right. Four times as many agents on international terror, even though last year just one person died from an Islamic terror attack in America. Forty-nine people were killed in domestic extremist attacks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. AL GREEN (D-TX): There is a mindset that has to be dealt with.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: And this is not just an American story. There is now a worldwide movement of white supremacists. Sharing their twisted ideas on the internet.
[21:10:01] In March, a gunman massacred 51 people at prayer in New Zealand. In his 87-page manifesto, the terrorist cited his inspiration. White supremacists in America, Britain, Sweden, Norway.
All of these people believe that they are being replaced and must fight to resist it. And much of this discourse on white supremacy is centered in the United States of America.
How did this happen? Where did it come from? After slavery, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement. The truth is race has been the central conflict in American life from the day the republic was born.
We've witnessed extreme racism before in periods of upheaval and rapid social change. And now once again we are living in such a time.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RICHARD SPENCER, ALT-RIGHT LEADER: Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We need to make America great again.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPENCER: Trump definitely energized the alt-right. Because we have this connection with him, we can inflect his policies.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVID DUKE, FORMER GRAND WIZARD, KU KLUX KLAN: We are determined to take the country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald trump.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Donald Trump is not a white supremacist, but there is no doubt he is a hero to many in the white supremacy movement. The current upsurge might have been triggered, however, because of another president.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(CROWD CHANTING)
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Thank you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Barack Obama's election was a moment of joy and unity for millions of Americans.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: God bless the United States of America.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But some, perhaps many, were shocked by it.
KENNEDY: Clearly, the presence of a black family in the White House deranged many millions of Americans.
ZAKARIA: Once Obama was in the White House, the backlash grew and grew.
FONER: You remember some of the racist caricatures of Obama as a monkey, as a gorilla.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: Overt and ugly displays of racism became common.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Afro Leninism coming to you on a silver platter, Barack Hussein Obama.
TRUMP: Why doesn't he give his birth certificate?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: The incendiary charge that Obama was not born in this country.
FONER: No other American president was badgered to prove he was an American.
KENNEDY: The idea of whether he was born in the United States, I think that's a metaphor. Is he one of us? Answer, no.
ZAKARIA: Obama combined the two fires that feed white supremacy, attitudes towards blacks and fears about immigration.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: Whether our forbearers were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Throughout the history of this country, immigration has reinvigorated the United States. But it has also awakened the darkest American impulses.
One little remembered chapter holds a frightening reminder of where those impulses can lead.
Ellis Island 100 years ago. Immigrants were pouring into the country. At times 100,000 a month. Packed body to body on rickety boats. Penny less, hungry, desperate to become Americans.
FONER: These newcomers were considered just inferior. Polish people or Jewish or southern Italians.
ZAKARIA: At a time, many European immigrants were considered to be entirely different races.
KENNEDY: People referred to people from Ireland as a race, people from Hungary as a race, the Jews as a race.
ZAKARIA: With new enemies to hate, membership in the Klan soared. Some of America's most prominent men were under those hoods.
KENNEDY: Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
ZAKARIA: Until 1925. He went on to serve as a Supreme Court justice until 1971. Back then white supremacy was an elite movement led by some of America's richest and most powerful.
[21:15:01] They came up with a solution. A pseudoscience called Eugenics. Based on the belief that many Americans were mentally defective. Among them, immigrants.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America is degenerating.
ZAKARIA: Eugenicists believed so-called defectives should not be allowed to reproduce.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sterilize women who were thought not capable of having the right kind of children.
ZAKARIA: Thousands of women were sterilized as the fake science became a national craze. The Eugenics movement decided it was time to bring its so-called research to Capitol Hill.
GARLAND ALLEN, HISTORIAN, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Charts of data purporting to show that people from Italy, from Poland, from the Slavic countries were genetically inferior to the northern European, the Nordic, the Aryan, the Anglo-Saxon.
ZAKARIA: After months of debate, a new immigration law was passed in 1924 with Draconian cuts and quotas for supposed undesirables.
THOMAS LEONARD, HISTORIAN OF ECONOMICS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: They shut the doors and reduced immigration to the United States by 97 percent.
ZAKARIA: Meanwhile, something even more disturbing was happening in Europe. An ambitious young German leader was watching America closely.
KENNEDY: Adolph Hitler had some real praise for the United States.
ZAKARIA: Hitler was even meeting with the leaders of the Eugenics movement.
KENNEDY: Adolph Hitler said the United States is really on the money and we can learn from them.
ZAKARIA: As Hitler's power grew and his ambitions became clear, Americans saw the terrifying consequences of white supremacy. Most pulled back from the edge. Eugenics died out in America. Of course, Hitler's plans did not.
FONER: That idea of improving the human race, which is what Eugenics is all about, definitely had echoes in Nazi policy of the 1930s and the Holocaust is one horrific consequence of that.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: The white supremacy of today has not reached the level it did a century ago.
(CROWD CHANTING)
ZAKARIA: But some of its deeply troubling ideas are returning.
You don't think all races are equal?
TAYLOR: No, I do not, and I don't see why anyone would.
ZAKARIA: The white nationalist Jared Taylor is a learned man, a graduate of Yale like myself, but we don't see eye to eye, to say the least.
TAYLOR: I want the people of Africa to make Africa the best possible continent they can for Africans. And Africans, I believe, will be happiest not living in a society like ours.
ZAKARIA: I think that you place so much weight on the fact that a certain group of people's ancestors spent a lot more time in the sun than another group so their skin is darker.
TAYLOR: Do you really think -- do you really think that blacks and whites are basically identical twins separated at birth? That they are really indistinguishable and replaceable? In other words --
ZAKARIA: Taylor believes that nonwhites have made America worse.
Why are Hispanics not OK? They are European.
TAYLOR: Spaniards are Europeans, but the people who qualify as Hispanic they can come from Honduras or Guatemala or Mexico. They're genetically and visually and physically different from Europeans.
ZAKARIA: So, in the 19th century, people thought of Jews as a separate race. Are Jews the same race?
TAYLOR: Jews are a subrace of whites, as far as I can tell. Eastern European Jews who came from the Stadler they dressed in odd ways, they behaved in odd ways. They were clearly alien. ZAKARIA: Apparently, Taylor says, some Jews are white.
TAYLOR: There are many Ashkenazi Jews that do not look Jewish at all. And Ashkenazi Jews that lived among Europeans and interact with them
for a long time.
ZAKARIA: Racism can become confusing. I want to know who is we and who is they?
TAYLOR: Mr. Zakaria, almost is there never confusion as to what race someone is. Almost never.
ZAKARIA: Well, let's try one case. Mine.
I think scholars would agree I have as good a claim on being Caucasian as you do. Caucasian meant people who come out of Central Asia, out of the caucuses. In fact, the term Aryan, which is often another one that is often used --
TAYLOR: Yes.
ZAKARIA: -- comes specifically out of India, which is where I grew up. So why am I not a Caucasian? If you are advocating policies based on racial categories, I just want to understand where I fit in.
TAYLOR: I think most people would not consider you white.
ZAKARIA: It's not a popularity contest. Either this is a scientific fact or it isn't.
[21:20:01] TAYLOR: Most of the time it's not all that difficult to tell.
ZAKARIA: How?
TAYLOR: Even just from visual inspection.
ZAKARIA: You look at people and try to figure out how white they were, even though you don't quite know what white means.
TAYLOR: I know very well what white means. You don't but I do.
ZAKARIA: Later in this hour, a deep dive. How is race determined?
FONER: Well, question, who is white?
If you walk down the street, you'll say, hey, that person is white, that person doesn't seem white.
TAYLOR: I like being white. It's OK to be white.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA: Oklahoma City, 1995.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get them back. Get them back. Get them back. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a bomb.
ZAKARIA: A truck bomb rips through a federal building.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was a boom and there was nothing left.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seemed like the whole world ended.
ZAKARIA: One hundred sixty-eight are dead. Including 19 children.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are not watching some scene of international catastrophe; you are looking at your own backyard.
ZAKARIA: At the time, it was the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. The terrorist, a young man named Timothy McVeigh. He has been thought of as a lone wolf, but in reality, he was part of a movement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do we want?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: White power.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When do we want it?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now.
ZAKARIA: He had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He had contacts with other white supremacists across the country. And the inspiration for his attack was a book that's been called the bible of American white supremacists. It gave birth to a little-known armed white rebellion. That continues to this day.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is just cold-blooded murder any way you put it.
ZAKARIA: To understand Oklahoma City and today's violence in Charleston and Pittsburgh --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shots fired. Shots fired.
ZAKARIA: -- we need to understand McVeigh's favorite book. It's called "The Turner Diaries."
WILLIAM PIERCE, AUTHOR: Nationalism really is the wave of the future.
ZAKARIA: It was written in the 1970s by William Pierce.
[21:25:01] PIERCE: I did admire many things that Hitler wrote.
ZAKARIA: He was a one-time physics professor who became a leading figure in the white supremacist movement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Felonious, traitorous.
ZAKARIA: In the 1960s, Pierce saw his cause in disarray.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I for one under God will die before I yield --
ZAKARIA: For years, the all-powerful Ku Klux Klan had led the charge.
KENNEDY: Threats. Beatings. Rapings. And, of course, murder.
ZAKARIA: Then came the Civil Rights movement. A crushing blow to the Klan.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty we are free at last.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: In its wake, Klan membership declined. And white supremacists were divided --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: White revolution.
ZAKARIA: -- among competing ideologies. Pierce wrote "The Turner Diaries" hoping to unite the movement behind a story.
HEIDI BEIRICH, INTELLIGENCE PROJECT DIRECTOR, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER: Pierce knew that fiction would be more powerful than facts.
ZAKARIA: It was the tale of Earl Turner, a soldier in a white rebellion.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are in a war to the death with the Jew.
ZAKARIA: Against the evil Jewish-controlled American government. Turner bombs FBI headquarters and other targets. Joining an elite terrorist group called The Order. The group kills millions of blacks, Jews and their allies on the road to victory.
BELEW: Spoiler alert, the book ends with Turner flying a mega ton bomb into the Pentagon.
ZAKARIA: Pierce's race war fantasy struck a chord.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They got so many requests for the self-published paperback they started to stock it.
ZAKARIA: Selling half a million copies in the years that followed.
BEIRICH: It's to this point the most influential piece of white supremacist writing that exists.
ZAKARIA: And what began as fiction --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: White power!
ZAKARIA: -- became a real-life rebellion. Powerful new white supremacist armies sprung up in the 1980s. Boasting tens of thousands of hardcore members.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You could say we're the front-line soldiers for the movements.
ZAKARIA: Many were directly inspired by "The Turner Diaries."
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've offered ourselves up to try to save America.
ZAKARIA: Officially declaring war on the United States government.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fire.
ZAKARIA: One group actually took its name from the book.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jews, get the heck out of here. The Order.
BELWE: There was a sea change in the kind of activity carried out by the white power movement.
ZAKARIA: The groups adopted the book's terrorist tactics.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They stole $4 million in armed robbery --
ZAKARIA: Including armed robberies to get funding.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Alan Burr was murdered after --
ZAKARIA: And assassinations.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ten defendants were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government.
ZAKARIA: The federal government tried to bring the movement down.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. Beam (Ph), did you plan to overthrow the government?
ZAKARIA: Indicting several of its ringleaders on seditious conspiracy and other charges but they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
BEIRICH: The trial is really important because when it collapsed, the government got paranoid and really backed away from treating white supremacy as a coherent movement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is our young people who are going to reclaim America.
ZAKARIA: Emboldened, these white power groups gained even more momentum in the 1990s, collaborating with other anti-government militias.
BELEW: The white power movement grows into the militia movement.
ZAKARIA: Then a bloody standoff.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Weaver's son, his wife and a United States marshal were killed.
ZAKARIA: Between white separatists and federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. And the demise of the branch Davidian cult battling the feds near Waco, Texas.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're a disgrace to the white race.
ZAKARIA: Brought the movement to a fever pitch.
BEIRICH: While all these incidents are happening, the number of militia groups in the United States is skyrocketing. The number of white supremacist groups is leaping in tandem with that.
ZAKARIA: Among those angry young men was a gulf war veteran named Timothy McVeigh. He had been very interested in "The Turner Diaries" while he was in the army.
DAVE DILLY, TIMOTHY MCVEIGH'S ARMY ROOMMATE: When he first got it, I mean, he read it constantly for three, four weeks. He kept wanting me to read it. You got to read this book. You got to read this book.
[21:29:59] ZAKARIA: After McVeigh left the military, he radicalized even more. Getting involved with a militia in Michigan. He met with white supremacists across the nation while on the gun show circuit, where he also showed his favorite book.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just arrived today.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): He was outraged by Waco.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Somebody told me a lot of people would be scared --
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Which he visited, in person, during the standoff. The fiery inferno there drove him to action.
HEIDI BEIRICH, INTELLIGENCE PROJECT DIRECTOR, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER: He finally decides that this government is so dangerous to its own citizens that it needs to be destroyed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Holy cow.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): On April 19th, 1995, the two-year anniversary of Waco --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Blown away.
ZAKARIA: McVeigh carried out what he considered to be his masterpiece. The attack was eerily similar to Earl Turner's attack on the FBI in "The Turner Diaries." It was the same kind of target, a federal building, a similar kind of bomb detonated at the same time of day just after 9:00 a.m. McVeigh had become Earl Turner, his white supremacist hero.
BEIRICH: When he was arrested a few days after the bombing, he had pages of "The Turner Diaries" in his car and that's how people were able to connect the dots on these things.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Today, there are tributes to McVeigh and to "The Turner Diaries" all over the internet.
(GUNSHOTS)
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Remember Atomwaffen, the deadly group said to be planning attacks on nuclear plants? Authorities discovered that they had explosives, radioactive material, and a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, along with a copy of "The Turner Diaries."
[21:35:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA (voice-over): For white supremacy to exist, there has to be some standard for whiteness.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: People think they know what white is. And if you walk down the street, you'll say, hey, that person is white, that person doesn't seem white. But as a scientific concept, it's completely murky.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Experts say, visible differences among races are mostly a result of how much time their ancestors spent in the sun.
FONER: There are differences in color between different peoples, but those do not go along with inner characteristics of intelligence or self-control or anything like that. There are no racial qualities that some people have and other people don't have.
CROWD: You will not replace us. You will not replace us.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): In other words, racial hierarchy is a social construction and who is considered white at the top of the heap has always been determined by those in power. The case of Bhagat Singh Thind tells the story.
FONER: The Thind case in the 1920s shows the absurdity of these racial classifications.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Thind was an immigrant from India --
(GUNSHOTS)
ZAKARIA (voice-over): -- who had served in the U.S. army in World War I and later married an American woman.
FONER: At that time, Thind was not allowed to become an American citizen because he was non-white.
RANDALL KENNEDY, PROFESSOR, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Well, question, who is white?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Thind argued that he was white because his people, from the state of Punjab in India, were descended from Aryans, the original Caucasians. The term, Aryan, of course, finds its origins in Asia, referring to the people from Central Asia who are believed to have later migrated to India. And remember, the Caucasians refers to people from the Caucasus Mountains.
KENNEDY: What the court says is would most white Americans view you as white? If the answer to that is no, I'm sorry, no.
FONER: Well, what kind of concept is that?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The judges made the case that the purity of the Aryan blood in India had been destroyed when Aryans intermarried with the local population there, implying that Thind was, therefore, not a pure Aryan.
Ironically, Nazi racial policies were based on similar ideas, that the Germans were the only pure Aryans because the original ones in Asia had intermarried. America's racial distinctions were closely studied by the Nazis.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNTRANSLATED)
KENNEDY: And that learning leaves its imprints, at least, in part, on Hitler's Nuremberg Laws.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Cephalic index.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But using dubious pseudo-science to prop up racism happens even in 2019. Remember Jared Taylor?
JARED TAYLOR, WHITE NATIONALIST: I think most people would not consider you white.
ZAKARIA: You believe that whites are superior in terms of intelligence?
TAYLOR: Oh, the evidence seems to suggest that the smartest people in the world are Ashkenazi Jews, then East Asians, then whites. Then Hispanics are very heterogeneous population, but then black Africans and Australian aborigines come up near the bottom.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): While genetic variations among human populations clearly exist, human beings are, in fact, 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We sequence the first genome in history.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): No less an expert than one of the geneticists who mapped the human genome, Craig Venter, put it simply. There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence. Nevertheless, efforts to categorize people into a racial hierarchy go back hundreds of years.
FONER: Whether it's five races, three races, Africans and mongoloids, as they're called, and Caucasians, as whites are called, there's always this kind of pseudo-racial science which tries to give a supposedly objective grounding to what is ultimately a system of prejudice.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The case of Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896 shows just how arbitrary definitions of race can be in America.
FONER: A man who was white by any definition, Homer Plessy, but he was considered black because maybe one, you know, black ancestor.
[21:40:04] ZAKARIA (voice-over): Plessy intentionally boarded a whites-only train car in Louisiana, challenging the state's separate but equal laws.
FONER: The conductor came and said, get out of this car, you are not white.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): When Plessy refused to leave, he was arrested, in what became known as the separate but equal decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy, ushering in decades of discriminatory laws.
KENNEDY: The idea was to separate black people, to ostracize black people, to put a marker on black people. It was the American cast system. That is an idea deeply, deeply, deeply entrenched in American culture.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA (voice-over): One horrific day last March, in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, an Australian man entered a mosque and started shooting.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I just don't understand why someone would hurt us like this, just like an animal, like, why would you treat us like that?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Fifty-one people murdered during Friday evening prayers by a white supremacist.
JACINDA ARDERN, PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND: You may have chosen us, but we utterly reject and condemn you.
[21:44:58] ZAKARIA (voice-over): The killer's weapons were inscribed with names, racist messages, and Nazi symbols. One of the names was Ebba Akerlund, a young Swedish girl killed in a terror attack in April of 2017. The New Zealand terrorist mentioned her many times in his manifesto. To take revenge for Ebba Akerlund, he wrote.
The inspiration for his gruesome attack came from another white supremacist. Anders Breivik committed the worst massacre in Norway's history in 2011.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: An assassin dressed as a police officer opened fire at a summer camp.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): He murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers, at a summer youth camp run by the Labour Party. Breivik's manifesto was a warning about Muslim colonization and multiculturalism, and a call to arms for other white supremacists, like the New Zealand terrorist who echoed many of the same themes in his manifesto. He called it "The Great Replacement."
CROWD: Jews will not replace us.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Remember, that was one of the chants from the Charlottesville rally. But, in fact, the idea doesn't come from America. It comes from a French group of intellectuals called the Nouvelle Droite or the European New Right that first emerged in the late 1960s as a reaction to the loss of France's colony, Algeria.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Many colonials who oppose any moderate settlement with Muslims rebels --
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The New Right did not want Muslim colonists or any foreigners living in France. But by the 1970s, most Europeans publicly rejected that kind of racist talk.
ANNE APPLEBAUM, COLUMNIST, WASHINGTON POST: The decolonization movement made Europeans very wary about using the language of white supremacy or cultural supremacy as people began to understand where some of those ideas had led.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Colonization was seen as a shameful chapter in Europe's history in which Europeans often had treated their foreign subjects brutally. For instance, at the end of the 19th century, Belgians massacred millions in their territory in the Congo. And in the 1950s, the British tortured and killed thousands in detention camps in Kenya.
The backlash to post-colonial gift, The New Right, remained on the intellectual fringes for decades. Soon, a new movement turned the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite into action. They call themselves Identitarians.
TEXT: Don't think this is simply a manifesto. It is a declaration of war.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The internet gave the Identitarians the ability to build an interconnected movement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our culture is dying.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): It included racist groups across the world.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our movement is growing.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nationalism.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Population replacement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Great Replacement.
APPLEBAUM (voice-over): They tweet and repost one another's comments and statements. They watch one another's videos. They're very much part of the same culture now.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Then in 2015, the movement found its moment, the migrant crisis.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Every day, every hour, ships packed with illegal immigrants are flooding the European border. An invasion is taking place.
APPLEBAUM (voice-over): Genuinely large numbers of people began arriving in Europe in very dramatic ways.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I feel happy (ph).
ZAKARIA (voice-over): As Europe argued over who would take the migrants, Sweden set an example and welcomed them in.
In my Europe, said Sweden's prime minister, we don't build walls, we help each other out. But instead, 2015 became the year walls and borders were back on the global agenda.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Hungary has declared a state of emergency and has totally closed its borders to anyone.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): It was also the year of a series of deadly terrorist attacks that began to hit the heart of Europe. It was 10 days after the attack at the Bataclan theater in Paris that Sweden suddenly reversed course.
It was painful for Sweden's leaders to announce the country was restricting its borders. But Sweden had quickly become overwhelmed. Percentage-wise, it had taken in more than any other country in Europe. Meanwhile, white supremacy groups seized on and exaggerated Sweden's problems.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: New level of criminality.
APPLEBAUM (voice-over): The far-right deliberately made Sweden into a kind of symbol of chaos and destruction of western culture.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Even America's president jumped on the bandwagon.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden.
APPLEBAUM (voice-over): When they hear Donald Trump using language that they know comes from their ideology.
TRUMP: They're having problems like they never thought possible.
[21:50:03] APPLEBAUM (voice-over): They feel energized and they feel they've succeeded.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's wonderful that he's addressing this, and he's bringing this to the attention of the people.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): In fact, Sweden has had a long history of successful immigration. In the most recent parliamentary elections, far right party saw success, including in Sweden. But overall, didn't perform as well as predicted.
Now, there are signs that the political terrain is shifting. Liberal and green parties across the continent saw an astonishing and unexpected surge of support, and that happened after this.
CROWD: Refugees are welcome here.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Tens of thousands took to the streets across Europe with an entirely different message, one Europe for everyone.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA: If there is a great American novel, one that is thought to define the American sensibility, it is "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece. In its opening pages, one of the characters, Tom Buchanan, talks about a fine book titled "The Rise of the Colored Empires" by a man named Goddard.
JOEL EDGERTON, ACTOR: Have you read "The Rise of the Colored Empires" by this man Goddard? Everybody ought to read it.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The idea of Tom explains, is if we don't look out, the white race will be utterly submerged.
EDGERTON: The idea is that it's up to us. The dominant race to watch out or these other races --
ZAKARIA: It's all scientific stuff. It's been proved, he says. Fitzgerald might not have been endorsing these sentiments, but the character who mouths them, Tom Buchanan, is one of the least admirable ones in the book, representing a certain kind of unthinking, vulgar rich man.
And yet, in 1921, just a few years before he wrote "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald wrote a letter to the legendary literary critic, Edmund Wilson, explaining his own views.
[21:55:07] The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race, he wrote. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter.
Now, Fitzgerald seems aware that his views even then were not politically correct. He adds in the letter, my reactions were all philistine, anti-socialist, provincial and racially snobbish, but he persisted in his view of racial hierarchy. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.
The reason I begin with this literary reference is to remind us all how deeply embedded is the idea of racial hierarchy in western civilization. In fact, in some ways, it is in the DNA of the modern west, because from the 16th and 17th centuries, as Europe grew richer and stronger, it began to assume that its material success must be a result of its superiority, religious or ethnic or racial.
This view, built on centuries of western success, has taken deep root and not just among whites. People across Asia and Africa prefer light skin to dark.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I realize that an obstacle to attain my dream job was my skin.
ZAKARIA: And spent billions of dollars on creams, the promise to make them whiter.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Discover fair and lovely multivitamin for total fairness.
ZAKARIA: In the black community in the United States, there is a distinct preference for lighter skin. And ironically, this all persists despite the fact that we're now living in an age where the fastest growing economies in the world are Asian, where China and South Korea and India are demonstrating powerfully that they can be as materially successful as the whitest and most Nordic people.
The fact that these views are so deep-seated, subconsciously part of the modern psyche is perhaps by we've been unable to see the growing danger in our midst, the number of white militants has grown sharply. They have attacked more often and with greater brutality. And yet, the authorities have always seemed to be surprised and unprepared, perhaps unable to fully internalize the nature of this ideology and its violent ambitions.
It's important to understand as America and the western world become more mixed, multicultural, and multiracial, the backlash will grow. White supremacists want to do more than just protest. They make this clear in their internal communications. They are planning for it every day. Let's hope we can all recognize this danger before they succeed.
I'm Fareed Zakaria. Thank you for watching.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:00:00]
