Richard Cohen, President, Southern Poverty Law Center HARDtalk

Now on BBC News it's time for HARDtalk.

Welcome to HARDtalk, I'm Stephen Sackur. Neo-Nazis and race hate are

alive and kicking in the United States. The violence in

Charlottesville was shocking not just because a life was taken but

also because of the polarising impact of President Trump's

responds, fault lines that almost broke the US in the civil war have

not been erased. My guest is Richard Cohen, president of the Southern

Poverty Law Center, a group devoted to civil rights activism. How fans

of all is the notion of a 21st-century American civil war? --

fanciful. Richard Cohen in Montgomery,

Alabama, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you, looking forward to speaking to

you. Of course you join us after all of the destruction of what happened

in Charlottesville just a few days ago. In your opinion, what we're

seeing in the United States today, all of the heated debate, the anger,

the passion, the hatred, is it a blip or is it part of a much deeper

trend? It's both. It's both part of a longer term trend and it's also

something that has been energised at this particular moment in our

country. Let me explain both halves if I can. In our country we've seen

a backlash to our changing demographics. You know, we've

documented about 100% rise in the number of hate groups since the late

90s and they're responding to the changing demographics. That response

to our changing demographics is something that you're also seeing on

your side of the Atlantic, when you see the response to the increase in

immigration in England and in other countries in Western Europe. So this

phenomenon is not peculiar to the knighted States. What is peculiar to

the United States is Mr Trump. During the campaign he was really

playing with fire, Varane a really very xenophobic and racist campaign

in my view and that xenophobia and racism has really energised the

radical right in an ugly way in our country and we saw that in full

display in Charlottesville a week ago. To be clear about this, you are

the boss of one of the highest profile civil rights organisations

in the United States today, are you saying that President Donald Trump

is an out and out racist? I don't know Mr Trump... I don't know what's

in his heart. All I do know is his actions have been racist. They've

been racist for quite some time. As some of your viewers may know, Mr

Trump jumped on the birther bandwagon, claiming perhaps

President Obama wasn't born in this country. That was a true racist

Kennard. Not only did he jump on it but he lied about it repeatedly,

saying things like he had sent investigators to Hawaii and we were

going to be amazed by what they saw and what they found. None of it was

true. The whole birther controversy was an effort to delegitimise the

first black president of our country. It seems to me while your

organisation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, spends an awful lot of

time on research and claims to be an objective observer of what is

happening on the ground in the United States, the things you are

saying to me sound so deeply political and, if I may say so,

partisan, and also not just your words to me right now, but things

you've written. For example you wrote recently the combination of

Trump's raises campaign and the attacks on political correctness

told many people that the gloves were off and they could

unfortunately vote and act with their worst instincts. You seem to

be frankly saying that tens of millions of people who voted for

Trump in the presidential election are racist. I didn't say that and

you misquoted what I said. I didn't say anything about the word vote in

what you just read. Let me say quite frankly, we are partisan, we are

partisan against hate. We're not an organisation that intervenes in

political campaigns, we don't endorse candidates, but we do feel

we have an obligation to speak out against hateful rhetoric whenever

and especially when it enters into the mainstream. And so I make no

apologies for some of the... For condemning the nature of Mr Trump's

campaign. It was shameful. And because he energised the right, the

radical right, and because he engaged in quite frankly a shameful

campaign, he really has lost his moral legitimacy in our country when

it comes to condemning hate, and that's a terrific, terrific problem.

So to get to the background of Charlottesville specifically, do

people who take to the streets in defence, for example, of these

symbols of the old Confederacy, they say they're simply expressing their

sympathy for America's cultural and political heritage, when they take

to the streets and say the statue of general Robert E Lee for example

shouldn't come down in Charlottesville, Virginia, are they

in your opinion behaving in a way that is inflammatory and that

incites hatred? Look, public statues, statues in public places

that are erected by the government are... Send a message of who it is

that we should be be honouring. The statues of so-called Confederate

heroes in our country were raised at a time when people were doing one of

two things, celebrating white supremacy or acting in defiance of

federal law. What I mean by that is the statues came up into periods in

our history, from 1890 to 1920, when Jim Crow was... Had been

re-established in the deep South, and after the Supreme Court's

decision in 1954 calling for the desegregation of public schools. So

those statues were put up to and frankly in the name of white

supremacy. So those statues should come down, we shouldn't be honouring

people who worked on behalf of slavery. So I think it's quite wrong

for people to... No one's trying to take away their heritage, no one's

attacking them, we're simply saying that we shouldn't be honouring those

folk. I understand your point about when these statues were put up and

the motivations of many of the people who are erected them and

funded them, but nonetheless they have stood in the towns and cities

particularly of the South but not just the South of the United States

for an awful long time. We've had Democratic presidents from Carter to

Clinton to Obama who's chosen not to use their bully pulpit to make a

point of saying these statues must come down, so if we're talking about

the atmosphere and the tension in America today, why is it so

important to address this and perhaps than those flames today?

Look, I don't know if one is fanning these flames. A lot of this goes

back a couple of years. As your viewers may know, in June, 2013, a

young man with Aidan's heart went into an historic black church in

Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine parishioners. After that

the state of South Carolina decided to take down its Confederate flag

because they felt, gosh it had no place in 21st-century America and

was sending the wrong message, especially after the massacre at the

black church. Now, after that there were a number of demonstrations

around the country in favour of the Confederate flag and I think what

we're seeing now is a continuation of that. So suddenly issues that

have long been dormant but come salient and people then speak out. I

think you're own SPLC website, say there are well over 1000, something

like 1500 different Confederate monuments across the United States,

is your group saying they must all come down now this has been brought

out into the open and is such a big national debating point, are you

saying they all have to come down? There are 1500 Confederate symbols,

whether that be a statue, whether that be a holiday, whether that be

the name of a street, and I think in all of those instances are

communities that support them or to take a hard look and ask themselves,

is that the message they want to send? In Montgomery, Alabama,

there's a school called Jefferson Davis High School. It was dedicated

in the late 1960s when the citizenry or the leadership in Montgomery was

still resisting school desegregation. Do I think it's wrong

for that school to have been named after Jefferson Davis, a person who

fought and led a treasonous government to defend slavery?

Absolutely. Do I think the key minute he should change its name?

Yes I do. Those in America who see these symbols and statues as

fundamentally reprehensible, if this campaign goes on, do you not worry

that it will play into the hands of the white supremacists, of the

extreme right factions who want to portray America today as indulged in

a culture war in which white people are the victims. Do you not feel

that that narrative may thrive if you continue with this campaign?

While, first, it's not just the Southern Poverty Law Center's

campaign, it's something that's been considered and talked about and

waged by people all over the country and in response to your question,

yes I do, I do worry about the reaction to the taking down of

Confederate statues. But I worry more about the message that those

statues will send to future generations if they're not dealt

with properly. But on this point, and you said, you know, frankly,

earlier in this interview, I'm partisan in a sense, I have a side

in this debate. Let me quote to you the words of somebody on the other

side, a man that you have condemned in very clear terms for a long time

now, you've called for his dismissal from the White House, of course he

has now gone from the White House, I'm talking, you know, about Steve

Bannon and after his departure from the White House he said this, he

said," If the Democratic Party and people who support it fall back on

the politics of race and identity, that's fine by me because we have

economic nationalism and if that is the debate, we will win". Yeah, Mr

Bannon did say that and I worry about the dynamics in our country

and the flames that Mr Bannon, through Breitbart, through Mr Trump,

has fuelled. So we're going through a period where the country's trying

to come to terms with the racism of its past and trying to forge a new

identity, and of identity that welcomes all Americans. Again, these

are not struggles... These are not struggles that exist only in the

United States. You know, when I think about the vote at Brexit, when

I think about Thomas Maier, who killed Jo Cox, he too was a man with

Heydon's heart, he too represented a white supremacy and the backlash

against the changing demographics of the Western world. Let's get down to

specifics now because we talk about two a lot about the politics of the

United States today, we haven't talked about in detail the nature of

hate groups, and that in the end is at the core of your organisation's

activism and campaigning. What actually constitutes a hate group to

you? We label them hate groups if they target groups of people for

their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or the like. It's not

that you're saying you don't have a right to express hate in the United

States in 2017, because surely under the First Amendment you do have that

right? Absolutely. You have a right to express hate and we have a right

to call it out in the exercise of our First Amendment rights. But then

when you lump together the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis and

other groups who appeared to the outside observer, for example the

centre For Immigration Studies, a Conservative anti immigration think

tank, some people are left confused, is there really a strand that unites

the neo-Nazi groups in the US today with the scent of immigration

studies? I think there is. If you look at the

words of the Centre for Immigration Studies and its leaders, I think you

hear racism. They are not simply opposing immigration because of some

view of how it will affect the United States economically. It also

appears to us that there is... That their views are tinged with racism.

Let me give you an example. After the devastating earthquake in Haiti,

the head of the Centre for Immigration Studies said that maybe

the reason Haiti was having so many problems was because it wasn't

colonised long enough. And he responds by saying that the idea

that we, a think-tank on Quay Street, which is of course the

street in Washington where all the lobbyist sets, that we as a

think-tank are comparable to a skinhead group is simply laughable.

And he points out that dozens and dozens of times, his think-tank, his

centre, has been invited to testify before Congress. You know, if you

use this very blunt instrument of lumping them in the same category...

That's the problem. That sometimes the groups that spew racism or have

racism tainting their message, the fact that they get into the

mainstream makes them more dangerous, perhaps, than the

skinhead group that everyone recognises as something margin

marginal. You know, Mr Krikorian's organisation has published scores

and scores of articles, reprinted scores and scores or republished

scores and scores of articles, from racists. We have documented this. So

again, the fact that they have testified in Congress, in our view,

that is the problem. They shouldn't. They are an example of hate in the

mainstream. It is always easy to tell the haters if they have

swastikas or white sheets. It is harder to recognise the haters who

are in business suits. That is why we think it is so important to point

them out when we see them. It is harder, and sometimes you get them

wrong. For example, Doctor Ben Carson, who currently sits in the

Trump administration, but was this a candidate or president himself back

during the campaign, you put him on a list of people peddling hate, and

then you had to apologise. What happened there? Can you explain to

me how you can make that kind of mistake to put it bluntly? Well,

look. We acknowledged it was a mistake, and publicly apologised to

Doctor Carson. We did not call him a hater. We had him on a list of

extremists, and that was a mistake. I think anyone who googles Mr Carson

can see that he made some... What I would say, you know, odd, peculiar,

extreme statements. But we shouldn't have listed him on the way that we

do. We make mistakes sometimes, and we own up to them. Do you think it

is dangerous, this polarisation, which you are a part of? And I

understand why you feel it is so important to stand up to hate, but

in a sense, you are part of the polarisation. Well, look. I don't

think... I don't think hate and calling out hate are morally

equivalent. I think that is a false equivalency, and so I think they are

quite different things. So I would reject the premise of your question

entirely. Let's get, then, to the critique that comes your way from

the other side, if you like. And that is from those young people in

particular who look at what is happening on the streets of

Charlottesville and elsewhere today, and they say that the only way to

confront the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, the

only way is to confront them with direct action, and if they are

violent, if the extremists from the right are violent, then these

groups, they call themselves antifa, the antifascist action groupings,

they say they will be violent themselves. You have ruled out that

kind of response. Why? Well, we think that no group with the antifa,

we think, are absolutely part of the problem. The idea that they decide

themselves that they can stop another group from speaking is

antithetical to the values in the first Amendment in our country, and

horribly counter-productive. So you know, we have been consistent in

saying that... In condemning the antifa. They are completely

misguided, and I think their tactics are quite dangerous. Here is a quote

from one. 20-year-old Emily Rose on the streets of Charlottesville, she

said, people are starting to understand that neo-Nazis don't care

if you are quiet and if you are peaceful. You need violence in order

to protect non-violence. Yes, well, look. You saw what happened in

Charlottesville. You know, just a terrible situation. And then you

contrast it with what happened in Boston, where thousands and

thousands of people came and marched in peace against hate. I think the

message that the good people of Boston sent peacefully was certainly

much more powerful than the message that the antifa sent in

Charlottesville, with their clubs. So if the clansman or the white

supremacist saw the neo-Nazis want to march, you say we have got to let

the march? Absolutely. They have a right to... They have a right to

their speech, and I think an effort to suppress them only plays into

their hands, by allowing them to portray themselves as martyrs.

Before we end, I want to ask you about one different aspect of your

activism and campaigning. That is your concern about the rising tide

in Islamic phobia in the United States. And all the figures show

that it is spiking and has done so for the last few years. You have

chosen to end some of your fire at people who actually have made it

their life's work to campaign against extremist Islamist. I am

thinking for example of the head of the Quilliam organisation here in

the United Kingdom. He is so angry with the fact you have put him on a

list of extremists that he is threatening to sue you. Why did you

do that? Well, Lock. What we have said about Mr Nawaz is a matter of

public record, and given that he has said he is going to sue us, I don't

think it is appropriate for me to comment any further at this time.

All right, another inveterate campaign against jihadis, radicalism

is, you have also had her in your line of fire as well. It just seems

to me you are choosing to pick on people who have taken risks

themselves to confront the dangers that are represented by extreme

political and violent Islamist. Yes, no, I understand the point that you

are making. Of course, the person who you are speaking of has

described, you know, Islam as a death cult. I think that is painting

with a very, very broad rush, and doesn't help the cause of interfaith

understanding. So you have no regrets about that? You don't think

that perhaps your message on Islamist phobia has been somewhat

confused some of the targets you have picked Don? I understand the

criticism, but I think the larger issue is that we know that there has

been a rise in anti-Muslim fever in this country, just as there has been

a rise in Britain and in other places in Western Europe. And it is

a tremendous problem, and it is something that someone like Mr Trump

has exacerbated through his rhetoric during his campaign and his actions

as the President. Richard Cohen, I want to end, if I may, with this one

broadbrush question. I was very taken by a New Yorker magazine

article just a few days ago which talked about the possibility of the

new American civil war. And they pulled a bunch of historians and

leading analyst and asked them to stay in percentage terms what they

thought the possibility was. And the consensus was a 35% possibility they

could be a new American civil war. Where would you put it? I would put

it at zero. I think those estimates are ridiculous. You know, America is

a strong country, and we will get through this. Sure, we will continue

to have controversy around race. That is going to happen in our

country, that is going to happen in England. At our country is not going

to break out into a civil war, I would bet my life on it. All right,

well, we have to leave it there. But I thank you, Richard Cohen, for

joining me from Montgomery, Alabama. Thank you.