Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - Should the White House Have a 'Faith Office'? [Featuring Dr. Carol Swain]

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

The hidden agendas and failures of government and educational institutions are being exposed. Instead of being taught to think critically, Americans are often encouraged to accept the narratives pushed by mainstream media or 'professionals' with political agendas. Dr. Carol Swain, an author, public speaker, and retired political science and law professor at Vanderbilt University, joins Pastor Allen in this podcast. She offers insight on what is currently taking place with the Department of Education, the impact of President Trump's executive orders, and her new book, "The Gay Affair: Harvard, Plagiarism, and the Death of Academic Integrity."More Information:Dr. Carol Swain's Website: https://carolmswain.com/ The Gay Affair: Harvard, Plagiarism, and the Death of Academic Integrity: https://www.logosbooksonline.com/store/p5764/The_Gay_Affair.html__ It’s up to us to bring God’s truth back into our culture. It may feel like an impossible assignment, but there’s much we can do. Join Pastor Allen Jackson as he discusses today’s issues from a biblical perspective. Find thought-provoking insight from Pastor Allen and his guests, equipping you to lead with your faith in your home, your school, your community, and wherever God takes you. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3JsyO6ysUVGOIV70xAjtcm?si=6805fe488cf64a6d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/culture-christianity-the-allen-jackson-podcast/id1729435597

The Marxists, it's about turn down traditional institutions, tear down the family, turn down the church, turn down the schools, just tear it all down. They don't have anything to replace it with. And one of the things, if you want to control people, then you have to get rid of critical thinking. And I learned critical thinking. Boy, did I learn critical thinking.

But in college, I can remember, sure, there were some Marxist professors and liberal professors, but I got exposed to conservative ideas, and I had to grapple with some things that made me feel uncomfortable. And so critical thinking, that's developed by opposing ideas, and you have to think your way through,

and you have to figure out what you believe. That's what is missing, I believe, in American education. So there's a lot of indoctrination, but not exposing people to ideas so they can grapple and figure out what they believe. Welcome to culture and Christianity. Our objective, as I often say, is to take our faith outside the walls of the church. A Christianity that remains theoretical inside a church building and sermons and Sunday school classes

is not what we're called to biblically. We're salt and light. We have to be culture changers. And I am excited today. My guest is Dr. Carroll Swain. Welcome back. Well, thank you so much. I am so thankful for your voice.

Take just a minute. You know, you have your Dr. Carol Swain. with a Ph.D. and faculty at Princeton and Vanderbilt. And we know the person with all the achievement and a mayoral candidate in Nashville. And I hear your voice in so many places very appreciatively. But your life didn't start out just easy. Can you give us just a brief?

I know we've talked about it before, but somebody listening may not know that because they think you've just always, it's been simple for you. But you had a challenge or two. And I think of those degrees that that's the least important thing about me, that the most important thing about me is the transformation, you know, that God did in my life. And places where he took me that I never imagined.

And I did start my life out in a way that non-traditional for someone who became a university professor and have the platform that I have today, I was one of 12 children, born and raised in rural poverty, Southwestern Virginia, dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade, married at age 16, and by the time I was 20, 21, I had three small children, and I ended up getting a high school equivalency, went to a community college, got the first of five degrees, graduated with a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, while working 40 hours a week, nights and weekends at a community college library, never intended to become a university professor, did not plan to get those five degrees. The first degree was in business. I just wanted a job as a store manager. And then when I

applied for jobs, I was told that I needed a four-year degree. I decided that I should be an honest student. And so I made that a goal and graduated with a degree in criminal justice, decided I didn't want a criminal justice career, that I was going to work for the government. And so I chose political science. And while I was doing political science at Virginia Tech professors, persuasive me to apply to a Ph.D. program. I was not interested, but it was the recession of the 1980s, and I needed a job. None of the jobs I applied for did I receive. And so I applied to graduate school and the rest of history. Well, it's a remarkable history. Every time we have this conversation, I think I'm an underachiever. I should have paid more attention in school. So you are

an inspiration to me. I didn't plan it. But you know something? I have been strategic, I guess, much of my life because I made a decision at Rwno College to graduate with honors. And I knew that as a black person, that if I defied the stereotypes, that there would be benefits. And so that's why I worked very hard to be an honest student. And when people talk about racism and how much did you encounter, my race benefited me because when I was an honest student at Ronaughey, When I would be in a class and after the first exam, all the professors would know my name. And I got attention. They knew my name all across the campus.

If I had been white, male or female, I would just have been another white student, you know, with an A or B. And you ended up on faculty, tenured faculty at Princeton. Yes, and went in with the goal of getting early tenure. I told them when they hired me. and the person, John DeUlio, who was the first head of George Bush's faith-based initiative, charitable choice faith-based initiative program when government and church came together the first time. Yeah. He chaired my search committee, and he had earned tenure at Princeton in one year,

and I reasoned that if he did in one, I could do it in three. He came from a working class background. His father was a police officer, I believe, and maybe his mother was a teacher. Better background than mine, but, you know, John was just rough like me. And so I assumed if John could do it, I could do it. And at that time, most people didn't get tenure at Princeton or in the Ivy League at all. it never occurred to me that I wasn't going to get tenure and that I wouldn't get it early and I did.

And, you know, like the strategy part, I had outside offers of tenure, you know, that came during my second and third year and I negotiated for early tenure and Princeton had to make a decision whether they, you know, would give me the early tenure or I would take one of my offers. And they were, they wanted to keep me.

And in fact, one of the person told me that the economist said she's bluffing. She's bluffing. She's not going to take those offers. And this guy Fred Greenstein, who was chairman at the time, he said, I told them she is incapable of back and down. So I got the early tenure. But now, thinking back, it probably was not the right thing to do. and because, you know, I played a hard hand, and that created resentment,

and it would have been better if I had not done that. But I got, I reached my goal, but at a great cost of relationships. Wow. You know, that's hard to know that when you're young and ambitious and achieving. I was ambitious. I was going to get full professorship in six years, and I was going to have a cabinet position. And I had all of that planned out.

And then when the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings took place and I saw their lives, you know, just splattered all over the newspapers, I knew that I would never, ever want to stand for a political appointment. And I don't know. It just something changed within me. And when I got the tenure, it was not fulfilling. And that was when God put in place the spiritual longing and whatever. took place within me that culminated with me being born again because I had won national prizes. I was a hot shot. I'd won the highest prize.

The political scientists can win. And I was miserable. Yeah, we explored that on another discussion, but you came to faith while you were a faculty member at Princeton. As I was leaving, and when I moved to Nashville and inside it at Vanderbilt, I was in New, Christian. And as I grew in my faith, I became more and more conservative. And I thought at one time that the Lord was going to call me into the ministry and that I would be like Joyce Myers or someone, I'd be traveling around the world speaking and I had that vision for myself. And I felt like the Lord gave me a glimpse of what it could be, but I was there at Vanderbilt for 18 years.

You're young. You may still make that around the world circuit. I don't know. Well, you have expertise. You spend a lot of time thinking about education. And I want to spend a few minutes with that because I think our education system's in trouble as it stands today. That's the opinion of a pastor. So you can speak to it with more authority.

For me, the awakening really started with COVID. In a lot of areas, I felt like COVID as horrible as that. the virus was that season, it's as if the curtain started to be pulled back on things. I used to trust the Dr. Fauci in his office. I thought they would tell us the truth. I never trusted them. And I grew up in the, my dad was a veterinarian, so I grew up in that. And I couldn't imagine that, you know, the medical profession would be less than forthright with us.

And COVID proved that they will. But it also pulled the curtain back on our schools because our parents got to hear. Well, I want to say something about the medical profession. When I was on the faculty, I believe this was at Vanderbilt. There were seminars where you had people that would come in, I guess it was in a law school, where they calculate the value of human lives. And so there were discussions that were taking place that were very disturbing. And we know that medicine moved in a direction where it wasn't about necessarily doing everything you could do to save a human life,

that they put valuations on the quality of people's lives. And so they were having some conversations back then that I found very disturbing. And so I have been cynical for a long time and all deeply suspicious about the organs and just how in many families, they have a situation where there's someone in the hospital, they own a respirator.

The doctors are telling you, you know, this person is dead, but they want their organs. They're so eager to get the organs. In my own family, there have been situations where they were told that someone was brain dead. They were going to die. They didn't turn off the respirator. The person lived. They're still living.

And so I don't trust everything. So Dr. Farchi was not the issue. But we can talk about education. And I started mine in the segregated South. And I can tell you that when school, integrated for me, the late 1968, 69, the quality of education I'd received at the segregated black schools, I was not behind, even though I remember the teachers telling us that the white kids had better books and that we would be behind. And I always thought white people were

smarter than black people until I went to school with them. Tushie. And it was great confidence builder for me, the integration. And so back then, the quality of education for blacks and whites was so much more superior than what it is today. And I dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade, but I could read, I could write, and math was always my struggle because I missed a lot of school.

But I was educated at a level that they have people grader. graduating from high school, you know, and they can't read and write, but I could read and write, and I went to segregated schools in the South. So something is terribly, terribly, terribly wrong. And I grew up at a time when the messages really were that if you worked hard, you got an education, you can make something out of yourself. And I believe that I lived in the greatest country in the world. And I loved being a Virginian because my state was the home of presidents. And so that was what it was in. indoctrination, that was the indoctrination I received, and I haven't been heard by it. So why are they teaching our students to hate our country? Because I think if you go back to the Marxism that has taken over education at the K-12 as well as higher education where it started and then it's seeped down, the Marxists, it's about tearing down traditional institutions, turn down the family, turn down the church, turn down the schools, just tear it all down. They don't have anything to replace it with.

And one of the things, if you want to control people, then you have to get rid of critical thinking. And I learned critical thinking. Boy, did I learn critical thinking. But in college, I can remember, sure, there were some Marxist professors and liberal professors, but I got exposed to conservative ideas, and I had to grapple with some things that made me feel uncomfortable.

And so critical thinking, And that's developed by opposing ideas, and you had to think your way through, and you have to figure out what you believe. That's what is missing, I believe, in American education. So there's a lot of indoctrination, but not exposing people to ideas so they can grapple and figure out what they believe. I agree with you 100% about critical thinking, but critical theory is a whole other animal. Right.

It's not the same at all. And some of the people listening may not be aware of the difference. and critical theory has been very destructive in biblical studies. And I think it's been destructive in a lot of the disciplines, academic disciplines. That's different completely than critical thinking, right? Right, totally. Yes, critical thinking is good. Critical thinking universities were supposed to be about the life or the mind.

And so you were supposed to be able to explore different ideas. What has happened is that you're not exploring different ideas that a lot of times you're being told what to think. And it's indoctrination. And the Marxism was at the root of, you know, these critical theories that came on the rise out of cultural Marxism. And then if you go back to the Marxist, the cultural Marxism had to do with when Karl Marxist's economic theory

failed miserably, some of his disciples, they were grappling, you know, they were professors and thinkers. And why did it fail? And they decided, you know, that at the root of it was the culture, the Christian and Western culture, that you had to change the culture first. And so what they did was focus on the institutions. And they've always used infiltration, deception, and manipulation. Go inside of organizations. Be patient.

Work your way to the top. And when you get to the top, change them from within. and whether it's the American Medical Association or the church. Boy Scouts. Oh, my goodness. And Girl Scouts, they change them first. There's so many, I mean, it's just horrible what has been done to our children and how the wolves slipped in as sheep.

And they destroyed these institutions from within. And, you know, they're still trying to do it. So much has been exposed. And, you know, whether or not we're able to take the information that we have about the kinds of people that slipped into institutions and used that for reform, I don't know. It depends

on how bold we are going to be, we are willing to be when we see these things and we call these things out because every institution the cultural Marxists go into, they destroy those institutions.

And when I say cultural Marxists and someone goes and they Google that, they're going to find that, you know, that there's no such thing as cultural Marxism, that is something that was anti-Semitic and it didn't exist. But if they go to Antonio Gramsie and his ideas, and, you know, he was one of the disciples of Marx, then you see that he had a theory of cultural hegemony. And it talked about the need to change the institutions, change the way people think. And they had a long-range strategy.

And so it's bearing fruit today, but it took a while. By the 1960s, we saw the society crumbling. That's when they really, you know, had enough influence to exert themselves. So it seems to me that DEI and CRT have been very disruptive to our educational system, destructive to our educational system. Well, and since you mentioned that, one of the things that President Trump did that a lot of people that would never happen is that he issued an executive. order that overturned Lyndon Johnson's executive order instituting affirmative action in 1965. And a lot of people don't know that affirmative action was never the law of the land that

John Kennedy issued the first affirmative action directive in 1960. And I would argue that it was needed back then because we didn't have a civil rights act. There was a lot of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. And so he issued that in 1970. But in 1964, we passed the Civil Rights Act. Before the Civil Rights Act could really take off, and that Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, religion, sex. Before it had a chance to really take effect, Johnson issued his executive order for affirmative action that gave preferential treatment to certain groups.

And at first, the focus was on blacks, but by 1970, there were like five groups protected by affirmative action. And then over the years, it evolved to the point that the only people not protected were healthy white men, heterosexual, healthy heterosexual white men were the only ones that were excluded. And I called DEI affirmative action on steroids because initially, and I would say that when I got my education, the focus was on non-discrimination, equal opportunity, and outreach. You could get your foot in the door, but you had to prove yourself to stay. And we wanted integrated settings. But when you get to diversity, equity, and inclusion, it's no longer about integration.

And it's no longer about individuals and what they bring. It became about groups bringing them in. And the inclusion was that they maintain, you know, whatever it was. they didn't integrate at all. Assimulation became a dirty word. And that was not the original intent of the American people. And so President Trump's executive order really takes us back to where we should have been. I think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was very effective and that it opened up doors and that it was corrupted by Johnson a year later when he put in affirmative action.

And then it just morphed and just got more extreme. Nixon, President Nixon, he issued an executive order. He was the one that was responsible for quotas. And so it wasn't a Democrat thing. It was a bipartisan plan to sort of reshape America. It was godless. Well, yes. I mean, to be, I mean, I sit in the pastor's seat most of the time.

And what distinguishes us is not the color of our skin. It's the condition of our heart. And I mean, you said it so eloquently that given the opportunity, you flourished. Oh, I wanted to people get out of the way. I wanted to prove what I could do. I love the line of white people were so smart when I got to school with them. That's true. I've been to school with them.

Well, I mean, I had been taught that they, that I assumed that they were smarter than, you know, us, black people. Or because we didn't have the right books. We didn't have this. We didn't have that. because that's what I had been told. But then sitting in the classroom, I discovered that that was not true. So there's a conversation going on right now with Trump and his administration about the possible, at least the diminishment of the Department of Education, a pretty significant diminishment.

You're qualified to have an opinion about that. What do you think? Well, I was disappointed when he appointed a nominee for Secretary of Education and Deputy Secretary I would have preferred he upon a demolition crew, a committee, and they had a charge in one year, you know, that you're going to dismantle this department. I understand that part of the Department of Education was legislatively created, so it has to be legislatively dissolved in a way. And so I understand now, I believe, why he made those appointments. but it makes me uncomfortable because I think that once you're in charge of something,

it's just like a natural tendency that you're going to be protective of what you're in charge of. But it's a step in the right direction because American education has steadily declined since that department was put in place. There's nothing good has come from it and they've had billions of dollars spent

and no results, nothing to show for it. And I'm not sure everybody understands. James Carter made it a cabinet-level position, 1980, with the goal of narrowing the gap between students who were performing poorly and the higher-performing students. And I've said cynically that he succeeded. Now everybody's performing poorly. But the gap just, it didn't narrow the gap.

I mean, the gap is probably as wide as it's ever been. And so nothing good came from it. But it hasn't been there since 1776. It wasn't like Thomas Jefferson said, this is the bedrock of American education. It was a political maneuver that the teachers' unions helped Carter get elected. Right. And he rewarded them by institutionalized, giving them a cabinet-level position.

Right. And they've become more powerful ever since. And I don't think they're helpful for our educational system. You've got more experience. Well, they're definitely. The teachers unions as well as the National Education Association, Department of Education, they have nothing to show for the billions of dollars. or trillions at this point that have flowed through their coffers.

And American education lags behind the educational levels of children in other nations. It's a disgrace. It is. I think people are afraid that if you initiate that kind of disruption, that chaos will ensue. But you have a vision for what it could be. You know, chaos only because there are people that are very skilled in creating, you know, chaos. And so, of course, you know, the people that want to stir up violence would try to stir up violence. But there's an opportunity for the educational system to operate the way, you know, it was anticipated that it goes back to the states.

We all have state governments. We have local governments. I think that that would be a positive because you would not have this overarching bureaucracy that is disseminating destructive stuff. down to every state, every school. It's been very harmful, especially for black, for minority children and poor children, not just black, but just poor children. Parents that have means, financial means, they have been supplementing public education. They've been paying for science labs or for an extra teacher. And so they can make up for the problems.

But for the other kids, they have just been captive. And it's even worse because the critical race theorists, these agendas, these ideologies, gender ideology, and all this critical race theory that argues that the world can be divided into oppressors and oppressed. All minorities are oppressed. All white people are oppressors. And that our whole nation, the DNA, you know, that is full of racism, every institution, that's not constructive. And it also tells racial and ethnic minorities the children that they're victims. You have victims, white people responsible.

You can't even engage in racism because you have no power. Only white people can be racist. Yet we see the worst racism, I'm sorry, coming from some black leaders or minority leaders. And I'm thinking about some of the spokespersons from the Congressional Black Caucus. And I have long said. that we should not have racial caucuses in Congress, that the members of Congress should be there to represent everyone. They should not be divided into racial groups, self-interested groups.

I want to do another podcast and unpack that more. Well, I've been saying the same thing for decades. You have, but we've got to keep saying it, because the platforms of the people that are saying the destructive things are often more celebrated. but I think the truth carries an authority in and of itself. I can't even get on Fox anymore. So, you know, like the people that are saying the things that I'm saying that unpopular,

it's not just the progressives. They're conservatives that are brought into things. And like one of the things I have said is that with Black History Month, that we need to have American History Year or American History, not months, but we could celebrate some aspect of American history every month. we need to get rid of all of these special months for special groups. And so it kind of troubles me when I see, okay, we're just going to get rid of affirmative action and DEI, which is great, but we're still going to celebrate these special group holidays.

I mean, that has to end if we're going to come together. Well, I think the reason we've been silent for so long, well, our country's been pilfered and pulled apart is all of our groups have gotten. little pieces of the pie. I know. And we're afraid we're going to, we'll have to forfeit our little special side deal, our side hustles. And so we just don't say anything.

But we would all be stronger if we'd come back to the truth, I think. Well, I think with President Trump, you know, he's done some things that many of us thought we'd never see happen. Yeah, I mean, that thing, you know, like we thought Reagan was going to get rid of affirmative action.

It's so clearly violated civil rights laws in the Constitution. Everyone thought that was conservative. And at the time, I was not conservative. I was a Democrat. And I was wondering what he was going to do and how they would impact my life. He did not get rid of it.

And no other Republican president has gotten rid of it. But Trump did. And so I feel like he's on a role. He can be the wrecking ball. He's not going to run for re-election. And so he has an opportunity. opportunity to really set things straight because if he celebrates Black History Month, which he is going to do, there's a ceremony, I believe, next week,

all these other groups are going to be lined up, too, for their month. And we're still at the same place. If we can get you an appointment as an advisor, what about... You know, something, I would like to have access. I don't need a title and I don't need an appointment. But when I see some of the things that come out, I wonder. like, who didn't speak up? Because I believe a lot of people can see what's wrong with these things, but they're not,

they're too afraid to speak up and lay out the reasons why this might not be a good idea. What's made us such cowards? Because I live in the church world and pastors are afraid. But I don't think it's just pastors. I think it's true across all the professions. They know there's things going wrong in education or health care, and we don't speak up. And I mean, you can say we're greedy and we want to keep our. our jobs and our spots, but I hate that imagine we're cowards just because of greed.

I don't think it's that. I think people want to be liked and loved. And when you, I can tell you, I can post something and then offend someone. And so, you know, I may lose 300 followers in one day, and then two days later, I have, you know, 400. But a person said recently, Carol, they're treating you like a church. You say something they leave that they don't like. But I think that- As if that changes the truth. I think that pastors mostly, they don't want to offend anyone. And that's the problem. Jesus was offensive when he needed to be offensive. He wasn't worried about not offending the Pharisees or various people he encountered. And so if you want to follow Jesus, then you've got to

speak truth, even if it makes someone uncomfortable. Well, Jesus said I didn't come to bring peace. I came to bring division. I know. Church, we've dropped that verse out. That's a little inconvenient. We have, and it's so much focus on the comfort. We want everyone to feel comfortable when they come on Sunday morning.

We don't want them to feel uncomfortable. Well, while we're in this direction, what about separation? I feel uncomfortable sometimes when I feel like more could be said about something affecting the culture, and it's not being said. And I'm thinking, like, the left, you know, I mean, I'm just saying that if you do have the pulpit, and you're in front of this audience, for one thing, God's going to hold us accountable, those of us who are called to be teachers. And so it really is important to save what needs to be saved. Truth is often uncomfortable.

You go to the doctor, and he says to me, you know, you need to lose weight. I don't like that. I want him to tell me to eat more dessert. Right. And he's got a lot of information for me that's probably not comfortable, and it's not really that it's unknown to me. I just don't want to deal with the truth. And so I pay for an appointment to have somebody make me uncomfortable. We need that kind of courage with our culture and our churches and our parenting and our schools.

We've got to have the courage to look at the truth. Well, here's another thing is people are afraid. I'm not going to say they're greedy. They're afraid. And for myself, I do believe that God has called me to speak truth. and I don't know if I shared this with you all, but with the last time I was on podcast, but I felt like that I heard the Lord say

that I've called you to be a martyr, and I don't know whether it was literal or I martyed my career, but I can see that people get so angry, you know, like I don't have Secret Service following me around, but I'm not willing to compromise the truth because so many people

afraid to speak. And so they care on intimidating people to keep them silent. And I think about, you know, like the cost that I paid for being me, like I'm wired a particular kind of way. I didn't choose this. I paid a cost. God's protected me. And I have to believe that as long as I'm doing what he's called me to do, he will

protect me. And by the time, you know, if someone takes my life, for one thing, I probably would be bigger in depth than I was in life. But I'm going to be here until my work is done. And that's a non-with-falsifiable statement, I guess. But I have to not focus on that because the Lord told Jeremiah, you know, don't look at their faces. You have to speak to truth and you can't be looking around and see whether or not they're

offended. Because someone is going to be offended. There's always someone offended. They twist what you say. They were offended at Jesus. And I'm, you know, he raised the dead, healed blind eyes, walked on the water, made wine out of water. And he was still offensive. So I think that means Alan and Carol are probably going to be offensive.

Well, I mean, because of black and I don't see the world the way that people expect me to see the world. I think that that is very offensive to some people. Well, it's very encouraging to many people too. Yeah, I would say that. But I would also say that I know that Martin Luther was a very controversial person and, you know, his anti-Semitism, like, I wish he hadn't done that. But I really love that statement where he says, here I stand, I can do no other. Because I feel like I was wired in a particular kind of way. I've always been different.

I see things differently. And this is just who I am. and I don't feel like I had a lot of choice about that. And I've tried sometimes to fit in or tried to not say something, and it just didn't work. I think if you tried not to say what you think, you'd joke. Well, it didn't work for me. I'm grateful it didn't. I hope it never does.

What about the separation of church and state? Because they play that card frequently from academia to the political world. And I don't agree with the way it's. interpreted and presented. I think our strength of our nation has been, we had a worldview and a set of values that shaped our education, our legal system, our forms of government, and they're trying to separate us from that. Well, in 2011, I published a book, Be the People, a call to reclaim America's faith and promise. And there's a chapter in there about America's religious roots. And so it really goes into some of the cases and the arguments. And there's a book.

by authors, these are secular people, Kramack and Moore, the godless Constitution. And they argue, you know, the Constitution doesn't mention Jesus or Christian. It was signed in the year of our Lord. But it actually has the information about the discussions and the debate. And it says that the people, you know, who drafted the Constitution were deeply religious and, you know, and people that had reverence for God. And so the absence of a mention of Jesus and God had nothing to do with them trying to, you know,

make these separate spears. And we know that Thomas Jefferson, his letter regarding the Danbury Baptist, where he used that metaphor about the Wall of Separation, that that's where they got it from. It's not the way the Constitution was drafted. I think the framers didn't invent. vision that this would not be a Judeo-Christian nation or a Christian nation. I say Judeo because there would not be a Christianity without the Jews and that we're so close together, you know,

that we are almost like one. But they didn't anticipate, you know, the kinds of debates that we're having today. And so, you know, separation of church and state, I don't think it applies, but I am deeply, deeply concerned about the Office of Faith being in the White House. And it's because the way our Constitution is written and the way, you know, we interpret it now, you set up that infrastructure. There's nothing to stop the next president who is not a Republican, who's not a Christian, from installing their favorite guru. They can put anyone in that office of faith.

We saw that in the military with the chaplaincy, how they had, you know, every, I mean, you could be a Satanist chaplain. You could be any kind of chaplain. And to bring it into the White House, because I think there's a symbolism of the White House, it really does represent the nation. And so to have that in the White House is an infrastructure that the enemy can use in a way that people that are celebrating today have not thought it through. Well, I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you say. the order that they signed to root out the discrimination against Christianity that has taken root from the IRS through the Fed, I think is helpful. But to try to institutionalize it in that office makes it very easy to manipulate. Well, I read the order and the executive order, and unless I overlook something, I don't know that it actually, I could be wrong, but I didn't think it mentioned really.

Christianity and Judaism. Those are the groups that are being persecuted the most right now. But it sort of affirmed our commitment to faith and faith organizations and protecting faith organizations. And it talked about funding. So, you know. I think we have to have the courage to say that a Judeo-Christian worldviews made our nation strong. Well, I mean, that's why we became the envy of the world.

Everybody's welcome here, but they didn't make the contribution. to the character of this nation that made us strong. And I don't say, I mean, I don't want a state church. I don't want the state meddling in the church. But I think we should acknowledge with gratitude the contribution of that Judeo-Christian value set to who we are as a people. Well, the problem was the government giving money

to religious organizations is that once people start taking the money, like leaders come and leaders go, different parties control the government. What I saw happened after Bush's, after George W. opened the door with his charitable choice faith-based initiative was that the next President Obama was able to take that office,

install a very progressive guy. He was able to go to black churches and push them further to the left. And some of the pastors who supported George W. Bush immediately went to Obama because they wanted the money. And so it created a dependency. And so it makes churches, church leaders that they have gotten dependent on that money. They're going to get an epiphany or something.

And some of them are going to change their mind. And they're going to go with the money. We could have avoided that. Amen. Well, you mentioned a book you'd written. You have written a shelf full of books. Well, my latest book. Tell us about it. It's called The Gay Affair.

And it's not what you think from the title. It's a reference to a former president at Harvard. Yeah, the title is The Gay Affair, Harvard Pledurism, and the Deaf of Academic Integrity. And it is not my first romance novel. I've never written a romance novel. And it tells the backstory of when I found out that I had been plagiarized because it happened 26 years ago. I found out along with the rest of the world,

December 10th, 2023. I went through a range of emotions. First, I was, I didn't, I did not rush to judgment that it was, it had to be right. I thought it could have been an accident. Then I read her work and I became sad.

I was sad for me. I was sad for Claudine Gay because we're both black women and I was sure she'd be fired. But when Harvard came out defending her and saying that it wasn't pleasureism, it was duplicative language without attribution, the fancy way. Tomato tomato. Yes. And that made me upset.

And then I found out I worked up some anger because people are saying, why aren't you angry? I would be so angry. And, you know, like, okay, it's not easy me to get angry. But I got really angry at the way it was being handled. and then people were contacted me telling me to back Dan

you know don't say anything calm myself Dan because this was like the Christmas holiday I had to visit people

and I was totally calm until January 2nd Claudine gave resigned from Harvard with a letter she was doing it for the best

of the institution she blamed racism and that made my blood boil that had been an attorney contacted me

about taking the case pro bono, I called him and told him to pursue it. And so he wrote the first demand letter to Harvard. Then I later decided, you know, that this attorney who was based in Austin that I needed local counsel. And so I went to a firm in Nashville because the case would have been filed here in Tennessee, which was a for-pay legal firm. And so I had a lawyers I had to pay. They wrote two letters to Harvard, I believe, and the Harvard people came back, you know, pretty much swinging. Claudine Gay had her own attorney, probably the top copyright attorney in the country.

And what I learned was that copyright law is not a good vehicle for this kind of case because ideas are not protected. Ideas are not protected. They protect copyrights on books and songs and stuff, but not. ideas. And, you know, part of the defense was, oh, it was the minimus, I mean, she didn't steal that much. And then it was fair use. You know, normally with fair use, it's always been, you can use someone's stuff, but you've got to get permission if you use so much. And it's just various stuff like that. And then Harvard said they didn't publish the dissertation. It was a third party. So at some point, one of my former colleagues at Vanderbilt,

in the law school, we had lunch, and he told me his concerns. And he also, he wasn't an expert on copyright law, but I learned that under copyright law, if you file and lose, you have to pay the legal expenses. And this man pointed out that Harvard's legal expenses were probably $1,000 an hour, those lawyers. And he suggested I find another way. And maybe have a conference.

It may be write a book. And I thought it over, and I thought about my retirement, I saved my retirement income, my Social Security, how I wanted to spend my money. I did not want to risk losing and having to pay Harvard's attorney's fees when they have a $53 billion endowment. So I wrote the book, and I put the complaint, the side by side of, you know, my argument about why I believe she pleasure

my work. And it wasn't just me. There were 47 instances of plagiarism. Part of my argument is there are five verbatim from my work, but that her whole thesis was taken from the research question from a conclusion in my book, Prize winning book, Black Faces, Black Interest, the representation of African Americans in Congress. And part of the thing, she cited people that were derivative to my work that agreed with her position because she was not stealing my ideas because she agreed with them. She was cantering the ideas.

And so they pointed that out to Harvard lawyers that she was reaching a different conclusion. So at the end of the day, I used the book as a vehicle to get my complaint, which was ready to be filed in district court and my side and excerpts. from the letters. And I learned also that I could not publish their letters verbatim, that when a lawyer or someone like that writes a letter to you, they still own the copyright

on that letter. I would have had to approach them and ask for permission. So what I did was use excerpts from their letters. So the book tells the story, but it's not just about me and Claudine Gay. It talks about higher education as a whole. And I talk about pleasure a pandemic that's affecting academia. And what I believe is that they've started watering it down in a way because if they actually applied the standards, they used to apply, the standards they apply to students, they would have had to address it. But when it's high-profile people engaging in it, they've just decided to water it down.

And for those in academic circles and the upper echelons, Plagiarism is about the most egregious offense you can commit. I mean, you're stealing somebody else's ideas and taking credit for them. And there's ways to do that. You can document it and say, I read what you wrote and I liked it so much. I included it in my work. And then I give you a citation. Well, here's how she should have done it.

I'd talk in the book that if you, would she, what a real scholar would have done? They would say, Swain argues, such and such and such and this is, you know, wrong. And then you lay out what I argued. and then you provide your counter and you take the person down, you take them apart. She didn't do that. I mean, there's a way to do it.

And so I feel, you know, I say she cheated me out of citations because had she been using the work and taking it down and stuff like that, I would have had citations that I didn't get. And in academia, your statue is very much, depends on citations.

And I also talked about how I had heard of Claudine Gay. We were not friends, but when I was at Princeton, I heard about this brilliant black woman. That's all I could hear about is how brilliant she was. It was like her first thing was brilliant.

And I felt like that she came along mid-1990s, and that was a time when affirmative action was under attack, and the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, William Bowen,

Princeton, Dirkbach, Harvard. They had written a book, The Shape of the River, about affirmative action. They argued that if they didn't continue doing what they were doing, there would be no minority leaders, and the whole world would be bereft of minority leaders, totally discounting the role of the historically black colleges and universities. She came along around that time, and so they fast-tracked her. The journalists that uncovered the plagiarism,

one of them said that 11, three quarters of her 11 articles had evidence of pleasureism. She was fast-tracked. And she's not someone, you know, high school dropout, in a city. She went to Phillips Exeter Academy, and she has an undergraduate degree from Stanford, a Ph.HD. from Harvard. And she won prizes for that dissertation. She won a prize for the dissertation and also for her senior thesis, which has not been released to be analyzed. So we can find this book on Amazon? It's locally, it's at Logos Bookstore, as well as anywhere books are sold.

So Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any of those places, and there's an audio book that I read. Do you reach your audio books? I do. Is it easy for you? It's not too bad. Oh, I kind of think it's kind of hard because they make you say the words precisely. They can't, they catch everything. They do.

With my southern accent, it's been, it takes us a while to go through, but it's an audiobook and e-book. And that's it. The title is the gay affair, Harvard, plagiarism, and the death of academic integrity by Carol M. Swain. And it is worth the effort. I've got one last question. When we do these podcasts, we always want to wrap up by talking about what we can do. So education is in disarray. What can we do?

Parents, grandparents. Okay, first of all, I think school choice is a good idea. But every state that passes school choice, like what's in the bill depends on who drafts it. And Tennessee, for example, the, school choice bill that we passed will only impact a small percentage of the students with the voucher program. And I think it's important that if education is returned to the states, that we are vigilant to make sure that the needs of homeschoolers. I've heard that there's some states that to put restrictions on homeschoolers through school choice.

And so what will happen is that progressives were getting involved with writing various forms of legislation. And if we're not careful at the state level, we could end up having some of the same policies and roadblocks that came from the federal level. And so we have to be very much involved. But I think school choice, as long as the choice. are you can homeschool and have the education you believe is appropriate for your child. Private schools, you know, if you have voucher programs, you know, that the vouchers are

enough that everyone has a choice. And there are some private schools like Thaley's Academy where the tuition is not so great where you probably, with $6 or $7,000, you could have a private education. But it's harder to find private education at that. level. And the public schools, we pay taxes. So we have to be involved in public education, even if our children are in private schools or we don't have children. We have to, we have a stake in our society. We want people who are educated. We want them to know, you know, just had the basic skills. And we don't want them indoctrinated with, you know, dangerous ideologies that came from the college level that are rooted in Marxism,

that have been destructive for the universities, and now they're poisoning K through 12. So bringing education back to the state level is a good thing, if we'll be vigilant about what the details of that become. The details are going to be very important. And I think it's important to remember, even if we don't have children any longer in the schools, the education of our children is of utmost importance

to all of us, and we can't just ignore it and say it's not my problem. That's right. And then I just want to say one thing. A lot of people will say, you know, young people, Gen Z, you know, the world is, you know, moving in the wrong direction. And I want to say that as someone is out speaking and meeting people, I am very encouraged by Gen Ziers that actually get it as well as Gen Alpha, that group, the younger ones, that are coming along.

there are a lot of them that actually get it. They share our values. And in some cases, the progressive parents are very upset because their children that they raise to be liberals are conservatives. They get it. And like when God ingrained the conscience and ability to know right and wrong within us, there are some people that it's percolating. They're being able to see through things. And so we should be encouraged.

I know you've got some places where people can. find content. You've got a website? Yes, but I saved my best stuff for X. I love X because there's all these news things happening and it's easy to comment on a lot of stuff. So I have a website, carolamswain.com, be the people news. Instead of we the people, be the people, but I'm on X or Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And also get her and true. So, but the real action happens on X. All right. We're going to start paying attention.

I just in my picture showed about there one day. Yeah, I met you. Well, you were already famous, but I met you more famous. Well, thank you for your courage to tell the truth. You are a refreshing voice, and I pray you don't grow weary. Well, thank you. And it's a mutual admiration society, and it's just amazing what you've been able to do. You're not just in Tennessee, but how you impact in the nation.

And don't you grow weary and well-doing. And don't get, you know, sometimes people start off right. And Satan targets those people. And before you know it, you know, they're thinking they did it and not God. And it's just disappointing sometimes how we start off well. That could be me or any of us. And then as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, then we sort of lose our way.

And I pray that it would never happen for either one of us or the people that we... You know, at the end of the day, the part that matters is how we finish. Yeah, that's right. Everybody's pretty at the beginning of the race. You know, we've got our new shoes and our new little outfits and we're posing for pictures. At the end of the race, we're a mess. But how you finish the thing is what matters. So I agree, we got to finish well.

And here, well done, my good and faithful servant. Amen. Well, Carol Swain, it is always an honor. I hope you'll come back and see us again. Thank you. That's culture and Christianity. You can make a difference. Do not leave your faith inside the church.

Take it to work with you. Take it to your kitchen table. Take it to your holiday gatherings. Take it to your circle of friends. And we can make a difference in this generation for the kingdom of God. Hey, thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe to Alan Jackson,

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