HEATED: Rep. Jared Moskowitz Asked Carol Swain One Question Then It Got Ugly

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]During an official House Judiciary Committee proceeding, the body in Congress that oversees the courts and law enforcement, Florida Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz tried to get former law professor Dr. Carol Swain, she's the expert the committee had officially invited to testify, and to agree that neo-Nazis are white supremacists. She eventually said yes.

[00:00:19]But what you need to understand before you watch this isn't the awkwardness of it or the frustration behind it. It's what that moment reveals about the country we're actually living in right now. Because when the people who are supposed to be confronting hatred can't agree on what hatred even is, the thing they're supposedly fighting just keeps growing. Watch this. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[00:00:40]I want to go back really quick to uh the questioning uh by Ms. Crockett.

[00:00:45]It's cuz I thought it was actually an easy line of questioning, and I want to give everyone an opportunity just to clarify.

[00:00:52]Ms. Swain, the the neo-Nazis are a supremacist group, right? I know you talked about your book, but neo-Nazis are a supremacist group.

[00:00:59]>> May I define a white supremacist because I did a Cambridge University Press book.

[00:01:04]>> Okay. And when I did my research at I know, but Ms. Swain, you're I got I got to ask you, you're doing what the you're doing what the university professors did with Elise Stefanik.

[00:01:12]>> No, I'm talking about well, what's the definition of this and what's the >> giving you a definition because you all don't have one.

[00:01:17]>> No, no, I I Oh, I The neo-Nazis are a supremacist group. They believe they're supreme, right? That's why they wanted to put people in camps that they believed were not pure.

[00:01:28]Neo-Nazis are a supremacist group, right? I mean, this This doesn't This is not a trick question, Ms. Swain. I'm I'm not trying to trip you up, and the fact that you are >> like to define a white supremacist, and when I did my research, it was white people who believed that because of their race, they were superior to other groups. But the left redefined white supremacist so that it could include any white person in the >> Okay, Ms. Swain, Ms. Swain, that's Hold on. That's a wonderful speech and a filibuster. No, it's true. Are neo-Nazis supremacists?

[00:01:59]It It depends on which ones. They are They are They are individuals.

[00:02:02]>> I didn't ask you I didn't ask you which ones.

[00:02:06]Miss Swan, listen, I'm not reading your book if you literally can't answer this question. Are neo-Nazis supremacists?

[00:02:12]They're individuals. Some are and some may be just plain old anti-Semites. No, neo-Nazis are anti-Semites, okay? We're going to agree there. But they're also supremacists, Miss Swan. Okay, if you if you agree >> No, no, you don't have to take my word for it. Right? Like they are It's the That's the WHOLE REASON THEY EXIST BECAUSE THEY believe they are supreme.

[00:02:34]>> You all don't seem to understand that a WHITE >> WHO'S THEY ALL? I'M NOT A NEO-NAZI.

[00:02:38]Who's they all? I'm a regular person asking another regular person if we can agree that neo-Nazis are supremacists.

[00:02:45]>> will agree with you.

[00:02:47]>> Okay, I didn't I don't want you to be forced into it.

[00:02:49]>> agree with you, but I suggest you all take the time and read my Cambridge University Press book.

[00:02:53]>> Yeah, listen, Miss Swan, Dr. Swan, I can promise you there's no freaking way I'm buying your book. When when it took 2 minutes for you to look at me and not and and had to convince you that neo-Nazis Listen, because I don't like the talking points of the left and the right. This is not a talking point. This is 100 years of history. Watch this, I'm going to show you how easy it is. Mr. Perkins, are neo-Nazis supremacists?

[00:03:04]They are supremacists. Thank you, sir.

[00:03:04]Mr. O'Neal, yes. Okay. Dr. Swan, that wasn't a trick question for them. I wasn't trying to trip them up. I wasn't using DNC talking points.

[00:03:27]This is part of the problem and I and I I didn't even want to do this, quite frankly, cuz I don't want I'm not interested in making this stuff political. Right? I got I got Democratic candidates in in Texas coming out yesterday and saying that Jews belong in concentration camps again.

[00:03:42]Okay? Like we're we're in real We're in real bad times.

[00:03:47]And so, if we put all this if we put these hateful conversations in our political box and we do the whataboutism.

[00:03:56]We're This is just going to continue to spread hate.

[00:04:00]>> I agree with 100%. We agree on it.

[00:04:02]Right. But and that's why that's why we we got to be able to at least agree to a simple set of facts that neo-Nazis are supremacists. Right?

[00:04:10]Okay. We've moved on. We've moved on.

[00:04:12]We're you're there. But you all use white supremacist as a broad statement.

[00:04:18]Listen, I didn't I didn't say anything other than they're supremacists. Okay.

[00:04:21]>> And they are. I apologize to you, sir.

[00:04:23]>> Okay. Now, you don't have to apologize to me. I just I just want you to understand like if we can't agree on a simple set of facts, then we can't solve real problems. So, you know, Mr. Chairman, you know, this obviously was a specific topic that you had scheduled uh a couple weeks ago and invited these witnesses in.

[00:04:42]But I got to be honest like the last week the amount of anti-Semitic messages, voicemails, text messages I have gotten, stuff on my social media, an assassination plot, you know, a couple months ago someone serving 25 years in in jail, um and now watching someone running for office trying to join the greatest deliberative body ever created on this planet who thinks the way forward for America is to look at 1940s Germany.

[00:05:14]Okay. My grandmother was part of the Kindertransport out of Germany. Her parents died at Auschwitz. My kids are not going to an internment camp. I can assure you.

[00:05:24]Uh and it's becoming so normalized.

[00:05:28]It it it is you know, we we've gone from, you know, like, oh, there's there's Americans who donate to elected officials, you know, that are AIPAC, and then it's, you know, okay, Netanyahu, and then it's, you know, okay, you know, maybe we shouldn't support foreign money, and then, okay, now we're going to call these people Zionists and now we're at concentration camps. By the way, we got the concentration camps much faster than I thought we would get, but here we are.

[00:05:54]Um and it's real scary.

[00:05:57]The people are scared.

[00:05:59]People don't want to show their Jewish stars anymore. They're moving into neighborhoods just to be around other other Jews because they're concerned.

[00:06:06]And one of the my Republican colleagues now I know I'm over Mr. Chairman, I'm going to wrap it up. One of my Republican colleagues asked like do we know why it's spreading? Hate all sorts of hate, not just anti-Semitism. Why is this is why it's spreading. It's all here.

[00:06:21]It's really here.

[00:06:22]Go go poll young kids versus seniors.

[00:06:25]It's a dramatic difference in the amount of hate young kids have versus seniors.

[00:06:30]This is the difference. You're seeing it in voting patterns, you're seeing it in belief systems. We've let foreign governments and bots just totally weaponize this getting No no countries can beat us militarily. We're stronger than everyone combined, but they have they are god in us fighting amongst ourselves, dividing us, at each other's throats. So if you you ask me why things are so bad.

[00:06:55]I mean just just spend a couple minutes.

[00:06:57]Go to my Twitter.

[00:06:59]Go look at some happy things like a happy Veterans Day or happy Memorial Day that I posted. Look at the hate I get.

[00:07:06]You know, it is out of control. So Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you doing this hearing in general.

[00:07:12]But hate in hate real hate is spreading in this country in ways that my grandparents they're gone, but I I can't imagine if they were alive to see what was going on here. I yield back. Thank you for the extra time, Mr. Chairman. So let's be clear about why that hearing actually happened because it wasn't because anyone in Congress suddenly woke up and decided to get serious about confronting hate groups. The Trump Justice Department formally charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks and fights hate groups across the country with crimes on April 21st, 2026, 11 separate charges, including financial fraud and money laundering, which means hiding where money came from, and Jim Jordan's committee formally invited them to testify 7 days after those charges were filed. The Department of Justice claimed the SPLC secretly sent more than $3 million in donor money to paid spies who were working undercover inside hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, a violent white supremacist organization, between 2014 and 2023. Those are just claims the government is making.

[00:08:20]The SPLC has denied every one of them and promised to fight every single charge in court. But here's the thing, the legal community wasn't buying it.

[00:08:29]John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia University Law School, reviewed the charges and called it very thin, concluding it doesn't actually have the evidence needed to back up the financial crimes it claims were committed. And The Intercept, a news organization, reportedly contacted donors whose money was described as having been stolen through deception and reported that 20 of them said the payments matched exactly what they'd always wanted their donations to go toward. Now, look at the timing and I want you to sit with this.

[00:08:57]Two days after a federal grand jury, a panel of citizens that decides whether criminal charges are strong enough to proceed, officially approved the criminal charges against the SPLC, Jordan officially sent the organization a written demand for documents. A Department of Justice insider who came forward to expose wrongdoing also claimed that a lawyer in the office of Todd Blanche, who was serving as the temporary head of the Justice Department, pressured government lawyers into filing criminal charges despite internal concerns about the strength of the case. And Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, called the criminal case abusive and baseless, launching his own investigation into what he described as the government punishing a civil rights organization for political reasons. And now I want you to think about who that witness actually is. In 2002, Dr. Carol Swain, who spent years at Princeton and Vanderbilt studying white nationalist movements in America, groups that believe white Americans should hold political and cultural power above all others, published a book through Cambridge University Press, one of the most respected academic publishers in the world, warning that these groups were gaining strength and posed a serious threat to race relations.

[00:10:04]Cambridge nominated it for a Pulitzer Prize, one of the most respected and important awards in journalism and publishing. That was Carol Swain in 2002, building an entire academic career on documenting exactly how those movements operate. She spent 2 minutes refusing to say neo-Nazis fit the very definition she spent years writing about. The book exists, you can look it up. And look, the stakes of those arguments about what words mean aren't just ideas on paper. On November 2nd, 2024, police in Moscow's own congressional district arrested a 41-year-old man named John Lapinsky.

[00:10:39]Here's what the search turned up: body armor, smoke grenades, roughly 3,000 rounds of ammunition, multiple firearms including a rifle fitted with a suppressor, a device that silences the sound of gunshots, and detailed tactical maps of the surrounding area. They also found a written document laying out his beliefs filled with anti-Semitic language, meaning hate directed at Jewish people, with exactly one name on the target list. Federal Judge Rodney Smith later sentenced Lapinsky to 25 years in prison, calling him cold-blooded, cold-hearted, and plain evil. And here's the thing, that case isn't some isolated incident. Moscow had said most Jewish members of Congress now require full-time personal security guards, and said synagogues, Jewish houses of worship across the country, now require armed security at their doors. These aren't people being overly cautious, they're responding to a documented pattern of violence that has escalated every year for the better part of a decade. I want you to understand something about these next numbers before I give them to you. The Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights organization that tracks hate crimes and discrimination against Jewish people, released its annual count of antisemitic incidents on May 6th, 2026, and in one sense, the numbers were down 6,274 total incidents recorded in 2025, a 33% decline from the record 9,354 in 2024. But, here's what ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said when those lower numbers came out. Numbers that would have shocked us 5 years ago are now our floor. 2025 was still the third highest year on record since the organization started tracking in 1979, 17 incidents per day, every single day of the year. The overall decline covered up a sharp jump in the most dangerous type of attack. Assaults involving a deadly weapon jumped 39% from 23 in 2024 to 32 in 2025. Three people were killed in antisemitic attacks in 2025, making it the first year since 2019 in which Jewish people were murdered in antisemitic attacks on American soil.

[00:12:38]Two of them were Israeli embassy employees, workers representing Israel's government in the US, killed in an antisemitic attack at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The overall count is falling. The most violent category is not, and here's the part I genuinely want you to pay attention to.

[00:12:54]Social media platforms aren't just where antisemitism shows up, they're where it gets deliberately spread wider and wider. A study analyzing social media posts found that antisemitic content in 2025 showed a 21% increase in interaction rates, likes, shares, comments, even as the number of users actively posting it declined.

[00:13:14]Researchers said that gap was caused specifically by automated computer programs linked to extremist groups keeping hatred of Jewish people circulating online even when there's no major news event driving it. References to Heil Hitler rose by more than 200% in posts and conversations that year and by more than 240% in shares, likes, and comments. The technology designed to decide what you see online doesn't need a moment of outrage to keep that cycle running. It runs on its own. And here's the part nobody is talking about. The American Jewish Committee, another major civil rights organization that tracks anti-Semitism in the US, found in its annual report that 82% of Jewish Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 had encountered anti-Semitic content online or on social media in the previous 12 months, including 17% who encountered it specifically on online gaming platforms, a documented pathway for pushing young people toward extremist views, one that has generated almost no response from Congress. That compares to 67% of Jewish adults overall. For this generation, exposure to this material isn't occasional. It's constant background noise, and it has permanently changed what feels normal to them. Now, I want you to think about something. When the Nazis organized Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a coordinated wave of violent attacks across Germany in November 1938, this attack was deliberately designed to look like a natural outburst of popular anger against Jews, not something the government planned. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the official national museum that documents and preserves the history of the Holocaust, confirms this precisely. The violence was planned and carried out by the government, but deliberately made to look like it started naturally on its own. What something is and what it's officially called are not the same thing, and the gap between those two has consequences.

[00:15:02]That night, Nazi-organized mobs destroyed more than 1,400 synagogues, Jewish houses of worship, and sent between roughly 26,000 and 30,000 people to concentration camps. In the 9 months that followed, the British government officially approved and launched an emergency rescue program known as the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children from Nazi-controlled Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland by relocating them to safety in the United Kingdom. Most of those children never saw their parents again. Their parents knew exactly what they were protecting their children from. The question is always whether people with power recognize the danger before it's too late to act. And look, let me be very clear about what's actually happening here. The committee's stated argument, at least on the surface, was that the SPLC had actually created extremism rather than fought it. But Raskin argued that for decades the SPLC shared secretly gathered information about violent racist plots with the FBI, and that this cooperation repeatedly led to the disruption of actual KKK and neo-Nazi plots. The organization that spent five decades tracking violent extremism was being criminally charged for tracking violent extremism by a Justice Department coordinating closely with the same congressman who had sent the SPLC a written demand for documents two days after the charges were filed, while insiders who had come forward to expose wrongdoing claimed Justice Department officials had been pressured into filing the case. Researchers who study how hatred spreads online have identified a specific pattern. A public figure makes a deliberately vague statement, one that's unclear on purpose. Online middlemen, podcasters, influencers, commentators take that statement and push it into something more direct and extreme. And comment sections take that vagueness and turn it into open direct hate speech.

[00:16:54]Researchers call this process cascading radicalization, hatred that spreads step by step, getting more extreme at each stage. It happens mostly right here at home, driven by the way social media platforms are designed to spread content, not solely by foreign governments or outside groups. And here's what that process requires at its starting point. A recognized authority figure, someone with official qualifications, making the vague statement. A congressional hearing grants exactly that official authority and a massive national audience. An invited expert witness spending 2 minutes dodging a direct answer about neo-Nazis doesn't just damage credibility. It produces content. The parents who chose the Kindertransport in 1938 and 1939 had already waited too long to believe it was real. The warning signs on anti-Semitism in America right now are impossible to ignore the murders. The 17 documented incidents per day. A federal security program that needed an emergency $30 million increase just to keep Jewish institutions protected. The automated computer program spreading hatred through the night. The only open question is whether the people responsible for confronting it will spend their time arguing about what the words mean or do something about what the words describe. That hearing gave you the answer. You just watched it. Okay, before you head out, I want to hear your honest reaction to this story. Jump into the comments and tell me if you think this is a real issue or just political noise. If this video kept your attention, show some support by hitting the like button.

[00:18:18]Don't forget to tap the bell so the next update shows up when it drops. And if you're new here, subscribe so you can stay plugged into the conversation. I appreciate you watching and I'll see you in the next breakdown.

[00:19:34]>> Mhm.