Draft:Carol Swain

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Carol Swain
God, guns, and freedom
U.S. Politics
Icon politics USA.svg
Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner
Persons of interest
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[1]

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[edit]

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"[2] which argues Democrats are the real racists, "The Inconvenient Truth About the Republican Party"[3] which claims that Republicans are the real fighters against racism, and "Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?"[4] 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,"[2] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7]

Swain goes on to say, "John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, assassinated President Lincoln."[2] No evidence exists which says John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat.[8] 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"[2] despite historians agreeing no evidence exist Johnson actually said this.[9]

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[edit]

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.[10]

Fun facts[edit]

During the 2023 Harvard University plagiarism scandal, she was one of the authors whom Harvard President Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing.[11]

References[edit]