After years of leading a white supremacist group and the Ku Klux Klan in Germany, TM Garret is in the business of compassion. His work now focuses on creating connections – such as getting people who think and look differently to interact face-to-face – at a time when everyone is too quick to dehumanize the other, he said.
In events in Chattanooga spanning two days, Garret is sharing his journey of entering the neo-Nazi movement and Ku Klux Klan in Europe and his path away from hate and into human rights work. On Wednesday evening, Garret spoke to dozens of people at Brainerd Baptist Church. On Thursday, he will continue the conversation at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Garret warns people how their responses to seemingly hateful action can make the problem even worse. As a child making jokes about the Holocaust and Hiter, he was labelled an outcast and as a Nazi, he said, which only pushed him toward the movement since they were the people who accepted him.
The same thing happens today when people pile on to someone they think is racist or anti-Semitic, rather than engaging them about why they think that way, Garret said in an interview with the Times Free Press.
“If you put them in a corner or you put them in a box where they can’t get out, well guess what? The guys in the white robes and white hoods are picking them up,” he said.