Reasoning Racism
When Tom Metzger launched his public access program Race and Reason in the 1980s, he didn’t storm the screen with boots and shouts. He appeared calm, almost professorial: collared shirt, measured cadence, a desk and backdrop designed to look respectable. Each 30-minute episode was pre-taped and bicycled to local access stations, a “talking heads” program in which Metzger acted as moderator, interviewing other extremists and sympathetic guests. The format stripped away confrontation and created the impression of a sober seminar.
Metzger carried that same posture onto mainstream stages. On national television, he once sat across from Whoopi Goldberg and calmly explained why integration was, in his words, “intolerable.” It was a grotesque sleight of hand: hate presented as conversation, bigotry disguised as reason.
Decades later, Charlie Kirk built a similar theater for a new generation.
