Listen To This Story

When I was still in junior high school, I came across a slim volume in the local public library entitled A Youth Primer for the National Socialist Movement. “National Socialist” was part of the official name of the German Nazi Party. I checked the book out, primarily because, at the tender age of 14, I was interested in the philosophical argument that had led to the most painful war in human history.

Surprisingly, I found the arguments presented in the book to be both logical and entirely reasonable. 

Nature, the text began, is full of obvious differences. Both a horse and a cow are animals, but they are obviously not the same. Just as animals are different, we can see differences in human beings. The tall, blue-eyed, blond people who live in northern Europe tend to develop more slowly than the shorter, olive-skinned, dark-haired people who inhabit southern Europe. But as the northerners develop more slowly, their development is much deeper, and in the end, they are more complete. 

I had checked the book out in the late 1950s. The southern states were still racially segregated, and even northern states had some serious questions about the level of achievement that different ethnic groups were able to achieve. At a dinner table discussion on the pros and cons of racial integration, a member of my own family said, “There are differences in nature. A horse is not the same as a cow.” I remember thinking, “I have heard that argument before.”

The Nazi primer had sounded reasonable enough, but at 14 I was still too young to recognize a false syllogism — the weak point at which a logical argument veers into the illogical and arrives at a false conclusion. The classic example, later explained at university, was: “All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.” Obviously, Socrates was not a cat, but the flaws in other, seemingly logical but subtler, arguments can be harder to detect. 

Kirk — well-spoken as he was — managed to make the right-wing racist arguments that had torn the country apart in the 1960s seem almost reasonable. 

Almost Reasonable

I had honestly not heard of Charlie Kirk before his murder in Utah. I don’t regularly watch Fox News, scroll X, or pay attention to right-wing influencers. I’ve already heard most of the arguments these outlets try to push. They are usually based on incorrect or obviously false information, and listening to them seems like a waste of time. 

Kirk’s untimely death forced me to finally listen to what he and his influencer podcast had actually been saying. When I finally did go through his comments, I was transported back to that slim volume I’d accidentally stumbled across in the public library. 

Kirk — well-spoken as he was — managed to make the right-wing racist arguments that had torn the country apart in the 1960s seem almost reasonable. 

In one of the more controversial quotes cited by his detractors, Kirk noted that he had second thoughts about taking a plane with a Black pilot in the cockpit. The statement is an expression of personal opinion, and it describes Kirk’s personal feelings of insecurity. 

Many would reflexively classify it, and thus Kirk, as racist. And they might well be right about him. But labels can take us only so far and — as we’ve seen in this age of labeling, identity politics, and hyperpolarization — they have a disturbing tendency to dump us in political and cultural ditches. It is always, I would submit, worth taking the time to think a thing through from the perspective of whomever we are most tempted to label or dismiss.

In Kirk’s case, his concern, at least the one he was putting out in public, was that because the pilot was Black, he might have gotten the job because of affirmative action. Which is a reasonable enough deduction, given the role that affirmative action has played in education and employment. 

For Kirk, the culprit was affirmative action itself — the idea that a candidate’s achievement level might be overlooked in order to create a racial balance in the upper echelons of the workplace. Kirk raised the specter of an individual, who might be less qualified than the usual white person, making a mistake that could put his life in danger. Forget about pilot examinations or Federal Aviation regulations; who knows what rules the government might overlook in an effort to boost racial equality?

The Roots of Our Divergent Worldviews

Where I differed most from Kirk was on the question of race and his attitude towards the role of women, as well as the origin of many of the disparities we see today. I had lived through the turbulent civil rights movement in the 1960s. Kirk had not. I had been raised to think of the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental part of what it meant to be American, especially the line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Charlie Kirk had apparently missed that part. 

I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the early 1960s when North Carolina was still segregated. My great-grandfather, Julian Cone Dowell, lived in North Carolina through the Civil War. But like most who had initiative, he had migrated north — in his case, to Washington, DC, where he eventually became a page in the US Senate and ultimately one of the city’s successful lawyers.

My grandfather and my father had always been nostalgic about the South, but they lived in the North. When my father finally came to visit me in Chapel Hill, he remarked, “I guess you are right. Things are kind of slow around here.”

On arrival at Chapel Hill, I was both shocked and embarrassed by what I saw. In the 1960s, much of the South was still run by an assortment of notoriously racist “good old boys” who colluded in back rooms to maintain order through an iron-handed tyranny that had resulted in cultural stagnation. 

The place looked dead. Anyone who was Black knew their place, and when an African American approached you, he would often step off the sidewalk into the gutter and diffidently mumble, “Good morning, Sir.” That greeting was out of fear, not respect. 

The first time I walked through nearby Durham and saw the emotional and cultural damage that had been caused by segregation, my instinctive reaction was, “I am not responsible for this.” But I knew that I was. Anyone who had roots in the South had to be responsible. You didn’t need the Bible to tell you that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons for three generations — or in the case of the South, far more than just three generations.

When I did a story for the university newspaper, The Daily Tarheel — on an incident in which a white student has been arrested after he refused to pay for a lunch he’d ordered because the restaurant refused to serve his best friend, who was Black — I interviewed the chief of police in neighboring Durham. In a pleasantly reassuring tone, he dismissed the whole incident as a simple “misunderstanding.” 

He offered to let me interview the arresting officer. An overweight, not very bright cop entered the room. “Would you want your sister marrying one of them?” he asked me. The chief, who saw me transcribing the conversation word-for-word, told him to shut up and leave the room.

The South has changed enormously since I attended university there. I have just moved to Atlanta, GA. Much of the Black population in Atlanta is well-educated and economically successful. The contrast with the 1960s that impressed me the most is that people — Black, White, Asian or Hispanic — seem to feel confident and happy with their lives.

My impression from recent statements by JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and the Breitbart/MAGA crowd is that they’re not at all happy with this state of affairs and want to return to the bad old days before the country decided to at least try to put the evil of slavery and racial segregation behind it. 

Vance and Donald Trump’s statements promising a search to find an ideological enemy that they can blame Kirk’s murder on are all too clearly intended to inflame the situation rather than calm it. The image that comes to mind is 1933’s Reichstag fire — the destruction of Germany’s parliament that Hitler used as a justification for seizing all power for himself. And then Kristallnacht, 1938’s deadly pogrom against Germany’s Jews, triggered by the assassination of a Nazi bureaucrat.

More Subtle, More Dangerous

Kirk was much more subtle than Stephen Miller, the instigator behind detention (concentration) centers such as “Alligator Alcatraz,” and the guy who had the bright inspiration of exiling unsuspecting Hispanic immigrants to Sudan — the current site of the planet’s most vicious and uncontrollable civil war.

In contrast to the MAGA wolves, Kirk mostly expressed personal frustrations at racial and gender differences that others might experience. 

But what both he and the MAGA crowd failed to mention was how the situation developed in the first place. If the country were really concerned about the intelligence and ability of its non-white population, would it not have invested in public education? 

To a certain extent, it did. It is that investment in America’s future that Trump and his MAGA followers are now trying to roll back, supposedly to make America great again. It shouldn’t take an advanced degree in sociology or theology to see that these are false prophets.

Kirk’s advantage was that he usually sounded more reasonable and thoughtful than Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, or JD Vance. That didn’t mean he was right.

Probably the institution that had the greatest success in racially integrating America was the US Army. A rifle squad in combat learns quickly that survival depends on working together as a team, and, when your life depends on the person next to you, you don’t really care what color skin he or she has. You are more concerned with his qualities as a human being.

I was drafted in the lead-up to the Vietnam War, and I was initially skeptical. I later had to admit that the Army taught me a great deal — as direct experience, and particularly the sharing of tasks and perils, often does.

I have no problem flying in a plane that is piloted by someone who is Black, because I know from experience many people who are not White upon whom I would stake my life. Kirk never had that experience, and to a certain extent, he never really knew what he was talking about. His advantage was that he usually sounded more reasonable and thoughtful than Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, or JD Vance. That didn’t mean he was right.

Like Charlie Kirk, the Nazi youth primer didn’t sound catastrophic, but we know where National Socialism led Germany. 

Like the MAGA movement, the Nazis boasted that they would make Germany great again. Instead, they reduced what had been Europe’s most intellectually advanced country to a heap of rubble. 

Sometimes it is hard to see the dark place where a seemingly reasonable argument will ultimately take you.