Carol Swain

Carol Swain

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

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Persons of interest

Robert Byrd John C. Calhoun Dennis Hastert Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez J. D. Vance Doug Mastriano v - t - e

“” This book raises important and prescient questions about the origins and nature of white nationalism, but is too weighed down by ideology to be illuminating.

—Mark Q. Sawyer's review by Carol Swain's book The New White Nationalism in America

Carol Miller Swain (1954–) is a right-wing political activist most famous for her declaration that "Democrats are the real racists."

The (ironically named) inconvenient truth

Swain has done multiple videos for PragerU on the topic discussing race in the United States, examples including "The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party" which argues Democrats are the real racists, "The Inconvenient Truth About the Republican Party" which claims that Republicans are the real fighters against racism, and "Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?" which tries to claim that The South switching from primarily Democrat to primarily Republican was due to factors other than race.

The videos in question are full of pseudohistory, primarily through simplification. For example, the first video she did says "The Democratic Party defended slavery," however, although many Democrats did defend slavery, this is a massive oversimplification of the truth. Slavery was actually rather controversial within the Democratic Party during its time, with the party dividing into multiple factions specifically over said topic. It got so bad that during the 1860 Presidential Election the Democratic Party was forced to have two conventions and ended up with two different candidates running as the nomination, one nominated by the Northern wing of the party and another nominated by the Southern wing. The difference between the two candidates being that the candidate of the North, Stephen A. Douglas, supported "popular sovereignty" or allowing states to choose if they had slavery or not, while the southern nomination, John C. Breckinridge, actively wanted federal intervention to protect slavery.

Swain goes on to say, "John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, assassinated President Lincoln." No evidence exists which says John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat. She also adds that "after Reconstruction ended, when the federal troops went home, Democrats roared back into power in the South. They quickly reestablished white supremacy across the region with measures like black codes," even though black code laws in the South predate the end of reconstruction by a dozen years.

In the same regard, she mentions Lyndon Johnson saying that he'll have black people (although he did not use that term, instead saying a far more offensive word starting with an "n") "voting Democrat for 200 years" despite historians agreeing no evidence exists that Johnson actually said this.

The second video is mainly Swain explaining why the Southern Strategy is a hoax made up by Democrats to smear Republicans as racist.

Vanderbilt University protests

In 2015, a petition sprung up asking Vanderbilt University to suspend Swain from her position as a professor due to her comments on topics like Islam and the LGBT community, which ended up getting over eleven hundred signatures. The petition in question listed three major issues with her, those being:

• Firstly, Professor Carol Swain has failed to clearly separate her role on her Facebook page as a “Public Figure” from the Vanderbilt name, creating a situation in which the public may misconstrue her as speaking on behalf of the University. We want to make it clear that Carol Swain in no way represents our alma mater, regardless of the fact that she teaches here.

• Secondly, there have been several instances in which students have contacted Professor Swain to hold an intellectual debate with her, and in return, she has resorted to name-calling and posting their personal contact information on her public page. In many cases, students claimed this led to public shaming, intimidation, and/or harassment by her followers.

• Additionally, several students who claim to have taken Professor Swain’s class(es) have expressed concerns that minority students enrolled in her class(es) – especially those who are LGBTQIA+ and/or non-Christians – expose themselves to unfair assessment in-class and may receive lower grades than their peers simply because of their identities. At a University that prides itself on fairness, diversity and inclusion, these allegations are entirely unacceptable if true.

The petition goes on to ask the university for the following regarding her position:

1) To give Prof. Swain diversity training

2) To conduct an investigation into student allegations of "doxxing," or posting a student's personal information publicly in attempts to intimidate them

3) To conduct a thorough review of Prof. Swain's Facebook page to ensure it implies no affiliation with the views of Vanderbilt University.

Of specific note is also two pieces of writing of Swain's the petition felt the need to mention: Those being the 2015 articles "Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam" and "C. S. Lewis on Biblical Marriage and Swain Reflections."

The first piece argues that, as can be seen through the then-recent Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, Islam is not comparable to other religions such as Christianity, with Swain writing:

It becomes clearer every day that Islam is not just another religion to be accorded the respect given to Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Baha'i and other world religions. The Jan. 7 terrorist attack resulting in 12 deaths at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that committed the apparently unpardonable sin of lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, once again illustrates that Islam is a dangerous set of beliefs totally incompatible with Western beliefs concerning freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association.

Even ignoring the morality of judging an entire group on the basis of its most radical induvial, the notion that the actions of the terrorists in this event do not have equivalents in other faits is just nonsensical. In 2020, a group of radical Christians firebombed the comedy group Porta dos Fundos due to its mocking of Jesus in a 2019 Netflix special. Obviously this fails to prove Christians as a whole are unable to take part in modern western society, so why should Muslims be given an especially harsh standard?

The second piece argues that Christians need to take a stand against the legalization of same-sex marriage in response to the Supreme Court declaring it a Constitutional right and, with it, legalizing it in all fifty states.

Vanderbilt refused to suspend Swain, citing their dedication to intellectual diversity, and she retired on her own terms in 2017.

Fun facts

During the 2023 Harvard University plagiarism scandal, she was one of the authors whom Harvard President Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing.