On Thursday, barely an hour after the Charleston Gazette Mail discovered that his assistant communications director had participated in a video that features slogans of white supremacists, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey fired her.
Morrisey, a Republican, fired Carrie Bowe, who only started working for him in January 2015, for reciting the slogans in a video titled, “THE ‘Stop White Genocide’ Video.” White nationalists often foment a conspiracy theory using the term “white genocide.”
Morrisey spokesman Curtis stated 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.”
The YouTube video, which was posted on YouTube in December 2012, claims it has been banned in 18 countries. It was excised from YouTube but then reposted in 2013; it has been viewed over 260,000 times.
In the video, Bowe consistently intones, “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white,” a phrase originated by white supremacist Bob Whitaker, as well as referring to “the ongoing obvious truth about white genocide.” She also states “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,” “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,” “Now, many of you have jobs where minorities say things that would get you as a white person instantly fired.”
Joined by three other women all of whom dressed completely in white, as Bowe also does in the video, she ask viewers to “recite The Mantra,” which reads: “Asia for the Asians, Africa for the Africans, white countries for everybody.”
Bowe adds, “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.”
“Asia for the Asians, Africa for the Africans, white countries for everybody.”
Slogan recited by fired aide Carrie Bowe
Bowe apologized on her Facebook earlier this week, writing of a “project” that “may be offensive and hurtful to some.,” acknowledging she took “full ownership of my role in the message … Unfortunately, I did not view the finished edit. My understanding of the project was not the reality of the completed product or the malice [sic] intentions of its creators.” She asserted she is “working with all of my power to remove the content,” and added she “would greatly appreciate prayers during this time” and 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 wrote to West Virginia Public Broadcasting after she was fired, “embarrassed and heartbroken” over the video and saying she participated because she thought it would “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. 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.”