Is America a Racist Nation?

Let's put it out there for discussion.

Is America a racist nation? Truth. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us today on The Line of Fire.

Here's the number to call 866-34-TRUTH, 866-348-7884. At the bottom of the hour, I'm going to be joined by Dr. David Marshall. He has a new book out, Letter to a racist nation, Pull Yourself Together, America. He challenges a lot of the current narrative about America being a racist nation, but it's an open conversation we're going to have.

More particularly, we want to look at some of his expertise in Marxism and socialism and how that ties in with the current discussion and the current crisis in America. But you can weigh in on anything related to the state of the nation today. I'm not taking random Bible questions, but the state of the nation, the elections, if you called and were unable to get through or speak with me yesterday, phones are open, 866-34-TRUTH. Okay, before you pick up stones, before you pull out your swords and start posting angry words, please hear me out.

Please hear me out, all right? I'm a friend. I'm not your enemy.

Paul wrote to the Galatians, have I become your enemy by speaking the truth? My allegiance is to truth. My allegiance is not to a spiritual position or a political party or a person. My allegiance is to truth.

I hope that's your heart as well. I hope you're committed to the truth, whichever way it leads. And although I am blessed by the ability that we have to minister to millions of people through all the different outlets that God has given us, while I'm truly privileged that many of you take time to listen to the broadcast or watch the broadcast or watch our videos or listen to our debates or read our articles, and then you take time to comment while I am truly blessed and I thank each of you who pray for me and support our ministry and send in kind, encouraging words, I know that you want me to please God, not you. I know that to the core of your being, you don't just want me to be a yes man.

You don't want me to just go with the flow and say the things that are popular. The reason that you take the time to listen to what we have to say is because we're doing our best to speak the truth in an unbiased way, recognizing that all of us have blind spots biases, but we do our best as servants of the Lord, especially those of us who teach and preach and have public platforms to go before the Lord, to be in his word, to be in prayer, to be sensitive to his voice. So I am not trying to gain brownie points with anyone.

I am not trying to play both ends against the middle. I'm trying to communicate what God has laid on my heart. Now, interestingly, I was speaking with a very solid committed black Christian earlier today, and he was saying that in his circles, he has to remind people that Joe Biden is not the savior. I said in my circles, I have to remind people he's not the Antichrist.

We were laughing. I said, and conversely, I have to remind people in my circles that Donald Trump is not the savior. And in your circles, you have to remind them that he's not the Antichrist. Now, again, these are exaggerated pictures that we're painting and there's diversity in terms of who votes for whom, but you get the picture depending on who you're talking to, you're going to get a very different perspective.

All right. So I've been hearing from a number of people, not a large number, but a number of friends, colleagues over the years that want me to more aggressively be saying, look, we know there is fraud out there. We know that this election was stolen and they want me to be on the front lines, calling for reform and calling for prayer to bring this down and saying four more years of Donald Trump. Again, it's not a large number, but folks I've known for years, friends, colleagues, things like that, they want me to more aggressively do that. Now, if I knew for a fact that the election was stolen, I would be doing it.

I don't know for a fact and neither do you. Let everything come out. Let it all come to the surface. I am convinced that if we pray earnestly enough to God to expose corruption, that he'll do it, that we don't have to tell him exactly how to do it or exactly where the corruption is. You know, it'd be like, you know, a sports event. Now I know a sports event should be an equal competition and we're talking about alleged fraud, but it would be like praying for a sports event.

Lord, whichever team you want to win, let that team win, but let it be mine. I don't know, listen, God has not called me to spend all my time right now investigating every charge of fraud. I have people very close to the president, close to people close to the president, and they're telling me that there seems to be some real serious irregularities, real serious concerns.

That could well be. I have others saying, Mike, when are you going to drop this? Other friends, other colleagues, Mike, when are you going to drop this?

Dr. Brown, when are you going to get off this? All this conspiracy theory nonsense. I'm not on either side except the side of truth. And if an election has been stolen, then I am confident with the amount of prayer going up to God before the election and after the election, with the amount of efforts, with the amount of eyes on this, with the amount of Trump appointees in courts, you know, justices, judges and things like that, with the amount of lawyers working on this, that if there was corruption, if there's manipulation of numbers and false ballots, it will all come to the light. Isn't it enough to pray for truth to triumph, for light to shine, for darkness to be exposed wherever it is?

Isn't that enough? Isn't Almighty God big enough? God, we're talking about God. We're talking about the creator of the universe.

Is he not big enough to get the outcome he desires as his people cry out to him day and night? Let me go further. And this is where some of you may take exception. But hear me out. Hear me out.

Let me, let me explain why you should hear me out first. Has anyone, excuse me, has anyone in our evangelical circles or Christian conservative circles, Messianic Jewish circles, has anyone been more vocal for more years about the dangers of LGBTQ activism? Has anyone been more vocal for more years in our circles about the radical agenda of the left and where it could go? Has anyone been more vocal for more years about calling believers to stand for pro-life? Oh, others have done individual things. But I'm saying as a consistent voice, have I not been on the front lines? It's not my latest article about radical leftists wanting to prosecute, convict, and remove Christian conservatives from society.

Is that yet not another warning? Does a week go by where I'm not saying something about these issues? Have I not lost a lot in terms of taking hits and being blacklisted and people shutting doors on me because I've taken stands on this?

Yes, joyfully, my privilege. So I have not gone soft. Dr. Bruhn, this is what we need you to go. So I'm not going soft. I go God, period.

I'm going God. What he convicts me of, what he lays on my heart, what the scriptures say, that's where I'm going. If people love me, they love me.

If they hate me, they hate me. So be it. If I lose every social media follower tomorrow in obedience to Jesus, so be it. If radio networks shut me down, so be it. If I lose income, so be it. Those are minor choices when it comes to obeying God. Come on.

But let me throw something out to you to consider. For all those who believe that a democratic administration could be disastrous, and in many ways I believe that's the case, let me challenge your thinking here. What if fraud is found in the elections and the courts overturn the current results and pronounce Donald Trump as president? Can you imagine the chaos, the resistance, the anarchy that'll break? You're saying we shouldn't do it because that? No, no, no.

Hear me out. Do you think that those on the left and those in the middle who just oppose Donald Trump because of who he is, do you think they'll just sit back as we push forward more pro-life legislation and things like that and push back against extreme agendas of love? You think they'll just sit back or will there not be an even greater backlash? Friends, people were dancing in the streets after Joe Biden was announced by the media as president. They were dancing in the streets, not so much because they love Joe Biden, not so much because they're happy he's in the White House, because Trump's out.

That's what they're dancing for. That's how much they hate him. That's how much they despise him.

Some of it's because of his policies and a lot of it's because of his person, personality. So maybe more of our prayers should be directed in a different direction. Maybe those of us who are just praying, oh God, the election was stolen, we need four more years of Donald Trump to have the Democrats in will be disastrous. Maybe we should be praying, praying harder for the transformation of Donald Trump. Maybe we should be praying for the church to repent of putting too much trust in a man. After all, if the whole Cyrus prophecy analogy was that God is going to use someone who's not one of us, who's not a true believer, at least coming into the White House, who's an outsider, the most unlikely candidate and idol worshiper idol worshiper that God will use to do good for Israel and to do good for the church. Why couldn't God use Joe Biden? Why couldn't God use you?

Why couldn't God use any of us? In other words, if God can use the most unlikely vessel, could it be that America's greatest issue is not who's in the White House, that America's greatest issue is not as in the Congress, that America's greatest issue is the state of the church. And if the church would awaken and do right, then the political scene would change as well. And there would be more righteous politicians and there would be more godly decisions and there would be more holistic concern for the poor, the hurting, the needy beginning in the womb and right through society.

Not one party strong here, another party strong here. No, but that there'd be righteousness. Look, I don't know where things are going to go because God didn't speak to me about it, but I know we're in an urgent situation right now. And whichever way this goes, there's going to be massive backlash. What if the courts don't rule for Trump?

And what if he says, OK, I'm just going to campaign the next four years, launch a whole movement and he's going to have tens of billions behind him. That's not going to advance the cause of the gospel any more than if the courts overturn it and give things to him. The cause of the gospel is going to be advanced through us, through you and me. Maybe if we get our hearts in the right place and if you say, hey, don't judge me. I'm not.

I'm saying we. Maybe if we get our hearts in the right place, maybe if we direct our prayers for the transformation of Donald Trump and not just for the courts and for the transformation of the church to be the church united around Jesus and making him known, then perhaps things would fall into place more in our society. And perhaps things have to get worse before they get better, because ultimately it comes to us waking up and then the church being touched. All right, now you can take out the stones and pull out the knives or maybe say, amen, I'm with you. Be right back with the call.

by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us on the line of fire.

Hey, well, more to say. I'll hold my tongue for a moment. 866-34-87884. I want to take your calls in a moment.

In a few minutes, I'll be joined by Dr. David Marshall. We'll talk about racism in America, but then want to focus on the issue of socialism and the dangers of that and what he knows about that. But in my book, Evangelicals at the Crossroads, where we pass the Trump test, I have a chapter. It's chapter five titled The Cult of Trump versus Trump Derangement Syndrome, that you have many on the left saying that those that vote for Donald Trump support Donald Trump or part of his cult. And then you have those on the right saying those who vilify and attack him are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's almost like the worst is brought out on all sides, that you ever have somebody like that, a family member, a coworker, that they have a certain personality and it can bring out the worst in people? And, you know, just the way they are, it can agitate everybody's in the flesh. And that's kind of what happens. There's hardly any middle ground when it comes to Donald Trump.

I think you'd agree. And remember, I voted for him twice now. OK, voted for him twice. But I ask in this chapter, does Donald Trump use proven cultic techniques to manipulate and control his followers? And do some of them follow him with a cult-like devotion? Does their loyalty to him and esteem for him go far beyond what is acceptable or even logical? Remember, January 2016, candidate Trump said, you know what else they say about my people? The polls, they say, have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that?

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters. OK, it's like incredible. So there is this unusual loyalty to a man that in certain ways makes no sense. On one hand, it's understandable because he's fearless and he fights for things that are of importance to many of us. And he's taking on things nobody else ever took on in extraordinary ways.

On the other hand, is it should it be like that that you follow somebody no matter what? I note it in the book. It's one thing to be an enthusiastic Trump supporter like this gentleman named Howard, who tweeted after the president stated the union address in February 2020, one day before his expected acquittal. So impeachment acquittal.

Shalom, Dr. Brown. As you know, God has raised Donald Trump up for this time to do a work. And after he's acquitted today, he'll be reelected.

Roe v. Wade will be overturned and Donald Trump will finish the work that God sent him to do. Well, we shall see how that plays out, right? You know, right now, a lot against it. We shall see how that plays out in terms of reelection and so on.

OK, I understand you think purpose voted from fine. It's another thing to have an almost religious devotion to him, to defend his every word, indeed, to reference him as a savior figure, to see him as called by God so much and raised up so much for such a time as this that to criticize him is to criticize the Lord. So this concerns me. So on the one hand, you have left leaning Christians like Shane Claiborne, who was on the show with me saying Trump. Evangelicalism is a cult.

Let us rebuke it in the name of Jesus. And I love Jesus. And it's precisely my love for Jesus that creates my outrage at Trump. When I look at the things Jesus said and compare them to the things Trump says, it's impossible to reconcile the two. I don't know how any Christian can defend Trump. And then conversely, you say, I don't know how any Christian can vote against Trump.

And we have these clear extremes. So I analyzed this book by Stephen Hassan, mental health professional, who wrote a book called The Cult of Trump. A leading cult expert explains how the president uses mind control. And I go through it. I actually break it down in the book.

I go through it. I go through his arguments. And I said, yeah, in some ways it seems it's true. But then I point out that there are other areas where if Trump changed his views, say pro-life or pro-Israel or other things that his supporters would abandon him in a heartbeat.

You know, those that for whom those are especially important issues. Then on the other hand, I point out what's called Trump derangement syndrome, where you watch some of the left wing media. It's like they lost their mind. They completely lost their minds.

They become like little babies, man. And then it's like, I thought you were professional newscasters when the world happened. So in a sense, Trump brought out the worst of all sides. And again, I see him as used by God to do that, to bring out the worst of sides. But he's also brought out the worst side of the church.

We become like him or we justify that kind of behavior and rhetoric where we're unable to see how our witness has been tarnished by the degree that we're associated with him, especially those of us who are white conservative believers. I'm not saying that the elections aren't important. I'm not saying that if there's fraud, it should not be exposed. I am not saying they'll just say, hey, well, whoever's in power is great.

No problem. I'm not saying any of that. If you listen to me over the years, watch me over the years, read me over the years, you know, that's not my position. But there is something wrong in the degree that many of us are better known as supporters of Trump than followers of Jesus.

And we seem more emotionally attached to the president than to the gospel. You say, that's crazy. I don't know a single person's like it.

Oh yeah? Just look at our social media feeds and look at how we've degenerated on all sides. The nastiness and they're just the posting of junk and trash. And, you know, listen, there's stuff comes my way all the time and it's very funny and it's very clever, but it's demeaning. It's ugly. It's destructive.

It's just political junk. I'm not going to engage in that. I'm a man of God.

I'm trying to serve and honor the Lord. You know, years back when Bill Clinton was president, I listened to Rush Limbaugh, someone who lived in Maryland just during my drives. He was on. And he said, you know, he was on and learned a lot.

A lot of great insights and other things are different with, obviously. But, you know, he'd refer to Clinton as Slick Willie. I thought, well, he's not doing that as a believer or a minister of the gospel. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to engage in the name calling and the rhetoric. You say, well, you're weak. That's got nothing to do with weakness. It has to do with integrity. It has to do with ethics.

It has to do with character. So, friends, we don't fight the way the world fights, but we become worldly. We become carnal.

We become petty. We have. We have.

We really have. Listen, I've been grieved over this for years and years, long before Trump. His presidency has just brought it up to the surface. And I'm saying this as a Trump supporter and a Trump voter and someone who thinks, maybe there is fraud. Let us see it. Let us get to the bottom of it and let righteousness be done.

But four more years of Donald Trump, especially if it's by the courts overturning the elections, is saying they were fraudulent. He's he's the rightful winner. The backlash is going to be so extreme that if we just become defenders of Trump, we will completely lose our gospel witness.

If he's in, great. Let's pray for him to do what he's supposed to do. And let's pray for him to be less of an abrasive person. And then let's say, hey, I don't want to talk about Trump.

I want to talk about Jesus and reach out to people and love them. Otherwise, we're going to be in a worse mess than we've ever been in. And if the Democrats take control and and and and go the way of the less this agenda that many of them wanted to, it's going to be very tough, very, very tough. Either way, we're going to have to get our act together as followers of Jesus here in America.

It's going to be very tough either way. All right. With that, we just looked up. Phone lines are jammed. Let me get to a couple of calls and then we'll bring our guests on and take some more calls.

We'll start with Troy, excuse me, Tari in Burlington, New Jersey. Thanks for calling. Please weigh in with your thoughts on the nation.

Sure. Real quick, Pastor, and thank you for all you do, sir. So, you know, obviously, President Trump is not our king. And the thing is, President Trump didn't cause any of the climate in America. It was already here. In regards to his election, you know, as a church, we have to look at it and say, well, who gets put in place?

If there's fraud, we should look at that. But we also accept that God's will is also being done. Now, in regards to whether the United States is a racist country, I want you to think of Sweden, think of Nigeria, think of different countries around the world. Now, America is unique in the fact that it actually is what we would call a white nation. The reason why I'm saying that, I'm an African American who voted for Donald Trump, but I think he ruined it for himself with some of his rhetoric and behavior. And it brought out some of the ugliness of white Americans, some of that type of past feeling of hatred of their fellow black human being. But America is a white nation, in the sense that not like Sweden, or not like Nigeria, where it naturally is a representation of the people there. Obviously, there were a lot a lot of hardship there. This was already an occupied land.

So it wasn't really discovered, maybe discovered for the people who came here, but not for the people who lived here. And so unless you are able to unpack that and address that this is a white nation, and again, that may ruffle some feathers, and I'm a black man, and I'm willing to say this is a white nation. But the the afterthought is how do we deal with people that we would better here, African Americans, natives and so forth. And you see this ugly rhetoric in some of Trump's talks about making people feel fearful of say, for example, low income housing being placed in the suburbs. It's all it was all a fear type of speech.

And I truly hope that over the years that he would have matured, but he did not. And so I believe in a message that hey, I am a president for all, and I'm not your pastor. So for example, if someone wants to have a gay wedding, let them have it. It is no representation of me. I won't say whether I'm supporting or against. I'm just your president. I'm here to make sure things are done correctly and fairly and defend the nation.

And I think that's where a lot of people get caught up in in wanting to put all of their views in or behind a president. Yeah, I understood. Hey, I'm just jumping in because I got a break.

I wanted to let you speak. Let me just throw out one thing to consider. And obviously, if we had time, I'd ask more what you mean about white nation, etc.

But this is one thing to throw out. I personally don't believe Trump is a racist. I have lots of issues with what he says in his personality.

I don't believe he's a racist. I do believe the media has taken certain comments either out of context and inflamed them. However, however, obviously everybody hears certain things different ways.

In other words, what was the intent in saying a certain thing, who was being appealed to? That's why we need to have open, honest conversations as brothers and sisters in Jesus to explain the worlds we're living in. Thank you, sir. David Marshall has written a book, Letter to a Racist Nation, Pull Yourself Together, America.

And his own background experience has given him some firsthand insight into Marxism, communism. And I said, hey, it would be great to have this discussion on the air. I know many of you would like to get on and speak with us.

We'll try to get to some more calls as we go. But first, I want to bring on Dr. David Marshall. David, thanks so much for joining us today. Hi, Michael. Good to talk with you again.

Yes, sir. So I do want to look at larger issues, socialism, communism, where you think America could be headed with some of the agenda that's being put forth on the left. But first, your book, what motivated you as a white Christian to write this book? Well, COVID-19, for one thing. I was teaching young people in China how to do research at a top school in northern China.

And I came back for a little vacation, which has turned into almost a year now, thanks to COVID-19. And when I came back to the US, there was kind of an intersection of spiritual oppression and concerns that lay on me. My hometown is Seattle. Seattle was kind of the center of a lot of the rioting and the famous Capitol Hill autonomous zone, or CHAZ. Robin DiAngelo, who has sold millions and millions of books on what she calls white fragility, is from the University of Washington, where I also studied.

And also my brother was a police officer. And I saw that there was a lot going on that was very unjust. And it reminded me a little bit of the cultural revolution in China in some ways. And you've had years of experience as a missionary, as an educator, teaching at elite universities, China, Japan. So you've got that multicultural background and experience. So how did that influence your current perspective now in terms of what's happening in America?

Expand on that. Well, for one thing, I think that a lot of the leaders of this woke movement or this revolution in critical racial theory don't understand culture at all, to be very blunt about it. Their perspective is like, in the Chinese proverb, a frog that's in a well looking up at the sky and just seeing a tiny bit of the sky. These are people who are untraveled, both physically and intellectually, and they really don't understand the importance of culture, which I believe is very, very central to a lot of the things that they criticize in American culture. Now, like you, I mean, you're Jewish.

And if you look at a list of the people who won Nobel Prizes around the world, there's something like 30% of Nobel Prize recipients are Jewish ancestry. The importance of culture is enormous. Culture very much, and most of the time, the people who are criticizing America are looking at it very much from a racial perspective, which from my point of view is very sub-Christian, and it is a relapse into something that we were 100 years ago, and it's very unfortunate.

All right, so let me unpack this then. You're saying to look at our current issues as race related is missing the point. They are culture related, that at one point in America, they were race related when people were looked at as inferior human beings based on skin color. But the challenges, the tensions, the difficulties we face now are primarily not based on race, but rather on cultural differences, and that maybe people pushing the race argument would be misguided, stirring up dissension or creating problems that don't exist.

Am I accurately stating things? I think there's three things we need to understand about culture in order to understand what's going on here. First of all, culture matters tremendously. How people live and whether it's income, or even if we talk about how long people live, life expectancy, what we eat is part of our culture as well, and what we eat partly determines how long we're going to live.

People like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi are driving America, and Joe Biden has very much accepted this as well, driving a dramatic change in American culture based on the idea that all inequities are related to race or gender or different intersectional differences between us. And the first thing is culture is really more important than race. The second thing that we need to consider is that culture is beautiful.

I believe, having lived in many cultures around the world, I deeply appreciate the differences in cultures between, and subcultures as well, between different people, American Indians or tribal peoples in Taiwan that I would sing with in the middle of the night and dance in a circle. Sometimes we need to appreciate the differences in culture, but we recognize that there are differences in culture. But thirdly, the third point that's very important to consider is that cultures can also be shattered and fractured by bad ideas. What's upstream of culture is religion, ideas that we accept. And when a people within a culture accepts a certain idea, that's going to transform how they live. So those three things I think we all need to keep in mind as we look at the situation in America today. Various people have written about how culture has affected places like the South Side of Chicago or Native American reservations or Appalachia, white Appalachia, and different parts of the different subcultures within America. Ideas are central. We should appreciate the good in each one of those cultures.

And I think without those cultures, without the variety of those cultures, America would be an extremely poor place. So we should appreciate one another. We should appreciate the difference differences.

We should also recognize that those differences are things that arise from who we are and what we value and what we believe. So just looking at a question on Facebook, just to indicate how you can be understood or misunderstood. Tracy asked, so David Marshall is saying that, quote, woke people are illiterate, unlearned, untraveled, and ignorant, question mark. Perhaps a surprising question based on what you were saying.

So since it's an honest question, give an honest response. I don't want to say that about everybody who holds to critical race theory. I'm just saying that in my perception from reading Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi is that many of the things they believe are based on too narrow a base of evidential facts. They haven't they haven't they focused. They're too American in some ways.

They haven't seen enough of the world to understand what's really going on, in my opinion. But I don't say that about everybody who holds. Got it. All right. Hey, Tracy, I appreciate the honest question.

And David appreciate the honest response. But let's step back then and look at something larger here. And by the way, the letter to a racist nation racist is in quotes because obviously David says that's not the the current issue now. So how does this play in with an agenda of socialism or communism? How does how does that play out in terms of if you want to push critical race theory or something else to get the end results, not of equal opportunity, but of equal results? How does it tie in with socialism or communism?

Well, there are people who've discussed the whole history of how these ideas have evolved. The problem with Marxism, and I am a Marxist, a scholar of Marxism originally I was, the problem with Marxism is it has never been able to be applied directly. What Karl Marx wrote and what Engels wrote, you can't really apply it directly to the real world because its theories don't really pan out very well when you try to apply them. So whether Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, whoever the revolutionary was, he had to make some adjustments, do some tweaking to bring the theory into, for example, in Mao Zedong's case, he had to change the focus from the working people, the working classes, to the farmers and peasants in China because that's what most of the people in China were.

Modern critical theory does something like that, and you can see it in the work of a scholar, a historian by the name of Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn was a communist, most likely. He was probably a member of the Communist Party in his early days, and he started to teach at a college called Spelman in Atlanta, and Spelman was a black women's college, a Christian college, and he very consciously adopted and adapted Marxism to reach out to the African American community. It didn't always work very well because a lot of African Americans, most African Americans, didn't really like Marxism very well. But very early on, that was an important direction in which American communists tend to go, and that Marxists. A couple of things, I think, really stand out about the critical theory, the woke ideology that really, and it's not completely 100% Marxism, Marxism was a racist, but a couple of things really stand out that resemble Marxism.

One of them is that the revolutions of 2020, the woke revolution as I call it, is very much focused on the group. And Jesus, of course, was somebody who cared about people on the margins. So in a sense, you could say that both Marxism and critical theory, neither one of them can be explained apart from the life of Jesus Christ, because they focused on people on the margins. In the ancient world, if you read, for example, the Roman historian Suetonius, you find that the ancient Romans really didn't care about the conquered peoples or women or children or people who are, you know, on the margins of society and including the Christians, of course, eventually. That was introduced into Western culture by Jesus of Nazareth.

And so in a sense, this theory, this movement can hardly be explained apart from the life of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, and of course, the example. But in another way, it's very, it's kind of a mirror image or a flip image of the very thing that it opposes. Because originally, you might you have racism, 100 years ago, you have riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and things like that. You have redlining, you have going further back, you have slavery. One of the things you can, you should understand from the Cultural Revolution is that, while times change, in the Cultural Revolution, the people who are persecuted by the Red Guards were the grandchildren of those who did the persecuting. So you can't simplistically say, oh, these people are persecuted, those people do the persecuting. You have to look at your era, you have to look at the generation and see what's actually going on. And I think that's one of the key mistakes that critical theory makes.

It's focused, and as an historian, I mean, I love history, I think history is a very important component who we are. But at the same time, you have to observe what's actually going on around. I tell you what, stay right there, David. We come back, I want to make sure everyone knows what happened in the Cultural Revolution in China. And then I'm going to get your calls so you can interact with David Marshall and with me. The book we've been talking about, Power to a Racist Nation, racist in quotes, from Dr. David Marshall. It's The Line of Fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Get into The Line of Fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us today on The Line of Fire, 866-34-TRUTH, talking with Dr. David Marshall. David, I do want to get some callers in to speak with you, but Mao's Cultural Revolution, many younger folks are not as familiar with it. Many Americans in general don't really know what happened, but I know you could go on for hours about this, but give us the cliff notes version of what Mao's objectives were and what happened with the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. 1966, Chairman Mao declared a great Cultural Revolution from Tiananmen in Beijing, the big gate of heavenly peace. Instead of working top down through the hierarchy of the party or through the government, he decided to work bottoms up from the students, 15, 16-year-old students, high school students, sometimes college students, to overthrow the system of government which he had already put into place.

Some people just think he got bored. But in any case, Red Guards, as they were called, came to Tiananmen Square and urged them on to basically attack their teachers and attack other olds, the Four Olds, and figures of authority around China to tear down some of the symbols of ancient Chinese civilization and also churches as well. And then these young people, these Red Guards, set off on a huge demolition project, very much like our modern cancel culture or the riots that occurred in 2020, in a sense. One of their targets was the husband of my, later on, my teacher in the city of Xiamen in South China on the coast. He was basically tossed out a window. This is what they called struggle sessions.

They would bring their target, put a dunce cap on him perhaps, and then they would make accusations against him and they would force him to write a self-incriminating letter explaining why he was really guilty and why he really deserved all of this. Right, so quite, quite shocking in terms of the overt nature of this. And of course... It was also very much an overthrow of traditional Chinese culture because traditionally Chinese have revered their teachers, which is good for me, of course, because I'm a teacher. Right. And what were the four outmoded ways? Oh, old religion.

I'm not sure what the four were. Okay. I was actually just looking at it in my own book, Revolution, The Urgent Cultural Moral, Holy Uprising.

David, how would you respond to this? If you could just scroll those comments down over on Facebook. Let's see. Tori said, racism in America never ended. People don't want to have an unfiltered conversation about white hate. Until we can do that, we'll be in a constant state of denial. Germany took down their Nazi statues.

America wants to hold on to its Confederate statues. Obviously, many feel the way Tori feels and feels that there's not been an unfiltered conversation about, quote, white hate. How do you respond to that today? I think that if you take an empirical study of America right now, you'll find that there are some people of all races and of all kinds of backgrounds who have hatred towards other people for some reason or another. Empirically speaking, I think about one-third of white Americans say they've experienced racist incidents from black Americans. About two-thirds of black Americans say they've experienced racist incidents.

I have no reason to disbelieve that, but I don't think it defines who we are, and I don't think it describes the vast majority of Americans today. The danger is to essentialize, because it's true that in 1920, there were terrible, terrible attacks on African Americans. And it was true in 2020 that there were terrible, terrible attacks on the police.

In the Cultural Revolution, the people who had traditionally been the attackers became the people, the grandchildren became the people who were attacked. And when I walked through Chaz in downtown Seattle, I know my brother. I've heard for 40 years, I've heard about his career and what he's been doing, how he saved somebody, dragged somebody out of a burning car and rescued people in the middle of islands, and all kinds of things like that. Even when the police give somebody a ticket, a traffic ticket, speeding ticket, they're saving people's lives. And then when I walk around Chaz and I see kill the cops, and I see signs like that spray painted all over Chaz, the irony is that according to Scientific American, every year, doctors and nurses, the medical profession, makes mistakes that result in the death of some 300 to 400,000 Americans. Now, the same analogous mistakes are also sometimes made by the police. And they result in something like the death of about 60 unarmed, nonviolent American citizens. So about 5,000 people are killed in America by medical mistakes to every one that is killed by mistakes by the police. Now, I'm not saying we should go after the doctors or nurses, that would be terribly unjust. But I think that there's a certain psychosis in American society right now, which is analogous to the revolution, that creates this mob violence and anger that we saw in 2020.

And the thing is, there is a French sociologist by the name of Rene Girard, very famous member of the French Academy. He describes what he called scapegoating. And some of the traits that you find in historical scapegoating against the Jews in the Middle Ages, against Chinese or Koreans, or against doctors under Joseph Stalin's reign, or against teachers in the Cultural Revolution, are very similar to what you find in 2020 America. For example, one of the traits is these scapegoating events or witch hunts often occur during a pandemic.

Got it. So it's just, it's the perfect moment for something like that to happen. Yeah, so I'm not saying that, of course, there are people who are, they're racists in America, they're people of all sorts of bad people in America. As Christians, I think we should put that on a larger perspective and recognize that all of us have sinned, sins of many different kinds. And Jesus said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbors yourself. That's the fundamental Christian moral truth. I think we need to put all the things that we hear from the world in the perspective that Jesus put it in. Yeah, absolutely. Because the other thing is, once you, it's not so you don't deal with real issues and ask hard questions and have serious discussions and ask people to help you see blind spots, etc. But when we filter everything through a certain lens, then everything becomes race or everything becomes this or everything becomes that. And then it becomes, you can make no progress because you're seeing, you put on your own glasses that are biased and now you're seeing the whole world through those.

By the way, yeah, the four olds, old ideas, old cultural habits, old customs. Let's see if we can grab a call or two. Scott in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, thanks for holding. Welcome to the Line of Fire. Yes, sir, I got a question about, are there any hungry and are there any people that can get food in the United States? That's one question. The other question is, is silence a way to create food and everything else, for that matter, except God Himself, you know?

So people in this world that don't know God already died is, you know, a race that may be a Christian race. Do you make any sense at all? I will tell you what, let's just focus on the first question. I guess, to what level is their poverty, hunger in America, David, is the inequality of the situation.

I'm just going to just modify your question, Scott, if you don't mind. It's been pointed out, say that average net worth of a household of a white American is way, way, way above that of a black American because you have generations of accumulation and things like that. If we see just the way it is now on average that a black person is making less than a white person, net worth is way less, etc., does that mean that we have not yet corrected the inequities of the past? The difficult thing about answering that question is, and let's be frank, all of American culture right now is in a mess. And probably the biggest problem in my opinion is the fact that a huge number of American children are born out of wedlock. A lot of kids grew up not knowing what the word dad means.

And if we don't start with that, I think we're starting in the wrong place. I think that represents the breakdown of culture, both white and black, but not so much Asian so far, which is the fundamental problem that needs to be solved in American society. Now, as a matter of fact, white Americans are not at the top of the earning list in America. Indian Americans, I mean people from India, make about twice as much as the average white family per average family. And if you go down the list of income per family household, white Americans definitely make a lot more money than black Americans or Native Americans, but there are other family groups, other races that make more money.

I would say cultural groups, because culture I think is central. Now, is it a coincidence that Asian Americans have suffered less family breakdown and also have a higher earning per capita? Probably not. I don't think so. All right, in the middle of a sentence that needs to be expanded and with many more minutes to talk, we're out of time. The point being made is if we only see things through the eyes of race, then we won't see where the deeper problems are and where the deeper solutions are. Hey, we're having a conversation here. Feel free to call in and differ in the days ahead.