West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey fired a spokeswoman Thursday, after it was revealed that she took part in a video called “THE ‘Stop White Genocide’ Video” that recites slogans of white supremacists.
Carrie Bowe, who was Morrisey’s assistant communications director, appears throughout the video, speaking about white genocide, a white nationalist conspiracy theory that alleges immigration and integration will cause whites to become extinct.
The YouTube video, first uploaded in December 2012 by someone with the screen name of “Johnny Mantraseed,” boasts that it was banned in 18 countries and was once removed from YouTube. It was re-posted to YouTube in 2013 and has been viewed more than 260,000 times.
Throughout the video, Bowe, who started working for Morrisey in January 2015, repeatedly states, “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white,” a phrase coined by well-known white supremacist Bob Whitaker, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
Bowe did not respond to phone, email and Facebook messages seeking comment.
A little more than an hour after the Gazette-Mail published a story online about the video Thursday, Morrisey’s office released a statement saying that Bowe “is no longer a member of this office.”
“The employee’s conduct and statements, which occurred years before being employed by the attorney general’s office, were not previously disclosed until today, which is contrary to the transparency requirements for being a member of this office, do not reflect the opinion or the perspective of the attorney general or this office,” Morrisey spokesman Curtis Johnson wrote.
As attorney general, Morrisey is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws. He refused to answer specific question’s about Bowe’s conduct.
Bowe posted an apology on her Facebook page earlier this week, referencing a “project” that “may be offensive and hurtful to some.” She wrote she never intended to hurt anyone and was taking “full ownership of my role in the message.”
“Unfortunately, I did not view the finished edit,” Bowe said on Facebook. “My understanding of the project was not the reality of the completed product or the malice [sic] intentions of its creators.”
Bowe said in her Facebook post that she is “working with all of my power to remove the content.”
At least seven YouTube channels have picked up the video, including one called European American Awakening, which has videos from white supremacist David Duke.
After her firing, Bowe wrote to West Virginia Public Broadcasting, saying that she is “embarrassed and heartbroken” over the video and said she had agreed to do it because she thought its purpose was to “further discussion on race relation from a white perspective.”
“Growing up, you could not question why some races could talk or behave a certain way and it was seen as OK, whereby if the behavior was repeated by a white person, it was automatically racist,” Bowe wrote. “As a child and a teenager, the inability to even question this was confusing and, really, the opposite of the honest dialogue we need to have in order to understand different cultures and their history better.”
In the video, Bowe repeatedly talks about “the ongoing obvious truth about white genocide.” She appears in the video with three other young women, all of whom are dressed in all white.
Neither Bowe nor any of the other women are identified in the video, but five friends and acquaintances of Bowe independently verified that it was her in the video.
“If I tell you the ongoing truth about genocide against my race, the white race, liberals and ‘respectable conservatives’ agree that I’m a Nazi that wants to kill 6 million Jews,” Bowe says in the video.
Bowe also says white children in schools are being misled.
“Throughout elementary school, junior high, high school and college, I was told that my race, the white race, was the cause of all the world’s problems,” Bowe says in the video. “Now, many of you have jobs where minorities say things that would get you as a white person instantly fired.”
The four women ask viewers to “recite The Mantra,” a series of phrases embraced by segregationists.
“Asia for the Asians, Africa for the Africans, white countries for everybody,” another woman in the video says, the first phrase of “The Mantra.”
Bowe continues: “Everybody says the final solution to this race problem is for every white country, and only white countries, to assimilate, i.e., intermarry with all those non-whites.”
One of the other women in the video echoes that language when she says: “How long would it take anyone to realize, I’m not talking a race problem, I’m talking about the final solution to the black problem?”
The “final solution” was the term for Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate Jews across Europe.
Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies and tracks hate groups, called “The Mantra” a “white supremacist idea codified into a few sentences.”
Potok said that the notion of “white genocide” is a “fundamentally neo-Nazi idea.”
“Anyone who is quoting directly from ‘The Mantra’ is doing the equivalent of quoting from a Ku Klux Klan document,” he said. “You just read ‘The Mantra’ and if you don’t understand it’s white supremacy, then maybe you need to go back to school for a while.”
In her recent Facebook post, Bowe said she “would greatly appreciate prayers during this time.”
She wrote that she is “TRULY sorry.”
“P.S.: I sincerely ask should you see something of concern, please don’t pass it along or engage in public conversation on the matter,” Bowe concluded.
Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, said the video offended him “as a Jew, as the representative of the state’s largest African-American community and as a West Virginian.”
“How can any West Virginian believe that they will be equally represented by Patrick Morrisey, their lawyer, when this is the kind of person with whom he surrounds himself?” Pushkin said.
Delegate Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell, said Morrisey’s decision to fire Bowe after the story broke was political. Morrisey, a Republican, is running for re-election against Democrat Doug Reynolds.
“He fired somebody because he wants to win an election,” said Hornbuckle, one of only three black lawmakers in the 134-member West Virginia Legislature. “It’s terrible that you have people in your office secretly behind closed doors doing things like this. If your [assistant] communications director feels like that, it shows a lot.”
Bowe, who made $40,000 as a Morrisey aide, served as his acting press secretary in September 2015. She also helped manage his field office staff members.
Before Morrisey hired her, she was member relations director with the conservative Family Policy Council of West Virginia.
Staff writer Erin Beck contributed to this report.
Reach Eric Eyre at ericeyre@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4869 or follow @ericeyre on Twitter.
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5100 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.