Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist, Dr. Carol Swain, a newly appointed fellow for constitutional studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation in studio to talk about her upcoming event and partnership with Dr. Ben Carson and Little Patriot Books, minority education, and the push for resegregation.
Leahy: Our day got a little brighter just now. Carol Swain, our all-star panelist, good friend, is in studio with us. Good morning, Carol.
Swain: Good morning, Michael. And good morning, world.
Leahy: We are calling this statement Catching Up With Carol because you have been so very busy. First congratulations, you’re now is it a distinguished senior fellow?
Swain: For constitutional studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. And I’m also a senior education advisor or I will be soon for Ben Carson’s American Cornerstone.
Leahy: I didn’t know about that one. I will be doing some appearances with Dr. Carson.
Leahy: So tell us about that gig with Dr. Carson. What is his group and what is he going to be doing?
Swain: American Cornerstone Institute is focused on education, and he has a program called Little Patriots Books. In fact, these books he’s making available to schools to teach young people about the Constitution. And so he will be the keynote speaker at an event that my nonprofit is hosting in Franklin on January 14th.
Leahy: I think I’m going to be there.
Swain: And you are going to be moderating that event, and the Gatlin Brothers will be providing music. So that’s day one. Day two, we have educational panels and there will be an after-party. More details will be released later this week.
Leahy: This sounds like a lot of fun.
Swain: It’s going to be educational, but will also be a lot of fun.
Leahy: Now, tell us about these books for Little Patriots that Dr. Ben Carson is doing.
Swain: For one thing, Dr. Carson is very much dedicated to educating children. And there is a focus on inner-city children as well as other Americans that need to know about our Constitution and our nation and the opportunities that it offers.
And so I will be providing more details about the Little Patriot books. In fact, we’re giving them away free if there is someone that can distribute them to schools.
Leahy: Well, we’ll do that. Our little nonprofit, The National Constitution Bee. We’ll partner up with you guys and we’ll distribute them to schools. We’ll be happy to.
Swain: More information about that later. And with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, pretty much I’m doing what I do. I do media for them. Op-eds. I will be testifying before the legislature at times.
Leahy: In Texas?
Swain: Yes.
Leahy: Oh, that will be so much fun. These are the Democrats there that staged the flight to D.C. and got COVID. That crowd. Will you be seeing Beto O’Rourke at any of this?
Swain: I have no idea, but I will be out and about some in Texas as part of this arrangement. And it’s a very good fit.
Leahy: You and Texas, oh, that’s a great fit.
Swain: I’m a Texan at heart.
Leahy: You are! If you love liberty, you got to live in Tennessee or Texas, or Florida.
Swain: Right.
Leahy: Those are the places. I can just see you. Oh, we have got to get a film crew down there when you testify before the Texas state legislature and the Democrats, what are they going to try to portray you as?
Swain: It doesn’t matter, because whatever topic I testify about, it would be something that I will be very knowledgeable about. I will be very professional. And so there’s nothing that Democrats can throw at me that I’m not prepared for.
Leahy: Oh, yeah! (Laughter)
Swain: Their tactics never change. And I think about the race arguments that are being made today. Same arguments, same complaints. I’ve been a political scientist now, in fact, count graduate school, so for over 35 years I’ve been around political science and nothing ever changes.
And if you look at the Democratic Party, you remember a few years ago, there was this big debate about whether that was a big switch and the Democrats had become the party of civil rights, and the Republicans were the party of racism and oppression.
So Democrats were owning up partially to that past, but saying that they had changed. Everything that they do shows that they have not changed because what are they pushing? Resegregation. And they have been pushing that for years.
They want to resegregate blacks, not just in colleges and universities, but also in K-12. And another thing they’re doing is pushing lower standards. It’s the Republicans that want everyone to meet the same standards, and they believe in people’s intellect and their individualism individuality, and all of these things, the uniqueness of the individual.
Democrats believe that blacks and other minorities are inferior and the standards have to be lowered for them. They’ve always believed that. And it’s more apparent today than ever with their CRT agenda. It is a racist agenda. It is a white supremacist agenda.
Leahy: And what’s really striking to me is apparently now the Critical Race Theory agenda has permeated every level of K-12 public education, including mathematics. There’s a push now among the left to say that two plus two does not equal four because that’s racist. Am I overstating the case?
Swain: No, it’s called ethnomathematics. But I’ve heard this before. During the time I was at Princeton, there was a situation involving a job hire. Someone that was interviewing for a job as a political scientist. And the progressive who was pushing this candidate made the argument that when a black person interprets a multiple regression, they can get a different answer than a white person.
And this was because her candidate had misinterpreted his data. And so she actually made this argument before all the faculty that the results of multiple regression statistics depend on the race of the person interpreting the data.
Leahy: Okay, that’s like insane.
Swain: It’s insane. But this ethnomathematics is very serious because if minority students are not held to the same standards, and I do believe that the schools that adopt it are not just going to be teaching that to minority students, that every child in that school would get the same education.
And they will be told that math is relative. That two plus two might not be four. It depends on the cultural background of the person interpreting the math problem. And what that’s going to mean is that Blacks can now aspire to be scientists, architects, accountants, pharmacists, and nurses.
Go down the list of occupations that require you to know math and science and some algebra, maybe a little bit of calculus. I mean, almost every field requires some mathematical abilities.
If you teach minority students that there are no right and wrong answers to math, and if they don’t get basic math correct, they’re not going to be able to do algebra. They’re not going to be able to do calculus.
They are going to be limited in what they can do in life. And maybe with the fancy computers and cash registers they have today, maybe they don’t have to know math the way you had to know it in the past.
But what they’re doing is limiting the opportunities of any child that’s taught under that system. And Bill Gates-funded this ethnomathematics.
Leahy: Yeah, that’s so crazy. Now, Ben Carson, a very popular guy, tell us how you got to know him. And what kind of guy is Ben Carson?
Swain: I guess I got to know Ben Carson the same way that many other Americans did when he decided to get involved with politics, especially during the time he was running for president.
But I had known of him for many years because of his book Gifted Hands and the attention that he received based on the fact that he was a brilliant brain surgeon that had separated these, I don’t know if you can say, conjoined twins.
Leahy: Twins. Right.
Swain: And so that was how a lot of us were introduced to him. But I gradually got to know him from events and one in particular that I would not go into detail…
Leahy: Oh, come on. Our listeners want to know the inside scoop, Carol. (Laughs)Â Just give us the highlights of it. We only have a minute here in this segment.
Swain: There was a situation that my first visit to the West Wing, where I spoke about something, and he was seated across from me. And he believes in courage, that we need to have courage.
And he thought that I was courageous. But he invited me to do some things, and we’ve been on panels together, and our backgrounds are similar.
Leahy: They are.
Swain: Except he did go to high school and graduate, and I didn’t. (Chuckles)
Leahy: Well, that’s a good story. Off-air you’ll tell me the real truth about that exciting story.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Ben Carson” by Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0.
