White Identity Is Galvanizing the Right

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From New York Times' opinion, I'm Ross Douthit, and this is Interesting Times.

The idea that white people and white men, in particular, face discrimination,

has become something of an obsession on the American right.

The age of DEI transformed affirmative action into something that felt more sharply

discriminatory. And now, there's a big debate among conservatives.

Should they counter progressive identity politics with a colorblind nationalism or treat white

culture as something real and embattled and worth organizing around?

My guest this week ended up at the center of that debate when the Trump administration

nominated him for a State Department post.

So your belief is that white Americans face more discrimination than black Americans.

On average, Senator, yes, that's correct, and I'm not running away from that statement at all.

Jeremy Carl is the author of The Unprotected Class, a book that argues that white Americans are

in danger of becoming second-class citizens. And we talked about what constitutes anti-white

discrimination and whether focusing on it leads inexorably toward white nationalism.

Jeremy Carl, welcome to Interesting Times.

Thanks so much for having me, Ross.

So you are a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which is a well-known especially in the

Trump era conservative think tank. Your background right is in environmental policy and energy?

Yeah, that's right. I mean, my formal background is in nothing to do with any of the things for

which I'm best known now, but I did many years of graduate study and have written books and articles

on environment and energy policy and served in the Department of Interior in Trump one.

And then after Trump won, you did a career pivot where you became a guy who writes about anti-white

discrimination, multiculturalism, immigration. These are ideas that have a lot of currency

on the right and they've become the focus of controversy around your nomination to be

assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Do I get that right?

You got it right. Okay. It's a mouthful. Talk about the job that you were nominated for.

What would you be doing? So it's a job that oversees basically everything that we're doing at the

United Nations, but also has a supervisory role at things like the G7, the G20, the World Bank,

other sorts of major international organizations that we're a part of. It really harkens back a

little bit more frankly to an earlier portion of my career. I spent almost a decade as the

right hand man for the late secretary of state George Schultz and did a lot of work in this field

there as one of the reasons why when the State Department came to me and approached me that I was

interested. Obviously, on issues like migration or other things, it does touch on some of the things

that we're talking about here, but I think one of the sad things about the way my hearing was

conducted was that I got almost nothing substantive about like how would you do this job, which I had

all sorts of answers and really it just kind of became a big gotcha about some tweet that I'd

done and that's just an unfortunately sad reality of our current politics. So you're up for that

nomination as we have this conversation. You've received criticism and skepticism from some

Republicans as well as from Democrats. Possibly by the time this airs, we will know the fate of your

nomination, but we're going to talk about the arguments that have been the source of controversy.

In 2024, you wrote a book called The Unprotected Class, which is about discrimination against

white Americans. So tell me in broad terms, the argument of the book. Yeah, so the title of the book

comes from the notion in civil rights law that you have protected classes and those are basically

classes of people that you can't discriminate against and that can have to do with disability,

it can have to do with race, it can have to do with gender identity, etc. In theory, whites actually

are a protected class and you're beginning to see under the great leadership of Harmeet Dylan,

a friend of mine at the Department of Civil Rights right now that we're actually maybe finally seeing

that, but historically, functionally, it hasn't been that way. And so the argument of the book essentially

is I basically look at what I think is the rise of the anti-white discrimination and racism.

In the United States, I look at everything from the way that we talk about crime, to how we look at

the entertainment, sort of more informally, to how we educate people, the healthcare system,

and really document in each chapter by subject where I think this is going on, why I think it's

important and what we should do about it. Start with the most concrete elements of the argument. Let's

talk about the law and changes to American law in the last 50 or 60 years that you think have

enabled anti-white discrimination. So start with the 1960s and 1970s. What happened then?

Yeah, well, and I think this is, I'm glad that you've raised this because it's an important

departure point and I'm actually slightly to the left of people who are more interested in

really taking a hatchet to civil rights law, in some cases, than I am. I mean, yes, there are

some significant reforms we need to do in civil rights laws, even some fundamental reforms,

but that actually what we need to do is utilize civil rights law and apply it equally. So if you

look at the Civil Rights Act, obviously that's the beginning, but I think it goes off the rails

pretty quickly. In 1971, I believe you have Griggs versus Duke power, which is an important case

that kind of creates a doctrine called disparate impact. And to not have the lawyers shoot me,

I'm just going to say I'm oversimplifying it dramatically here for the purposes of this discussion,

but basically what disparate impact does is if you sort of have a reference population applying for

something, whether it's housing or a job or something else, and then the population you select

ends up looking very different than that reference population. You have to go prove a bunch of things

to basically show that you didn't discriminate and that it didn't have a disparate impact on that

group. And that has been a metaphorical sort of damacles over all sorts of things. And the

interesting thing about it is if you go back in the Civil Rights Law and the debate over the 1964

Act, there's a concern by some of the people who are skeptical about the act that something like

this could happen. But in 1971, just a few years later, the Supreme Court in fact effectively

enshrines that in the law. So just to make this as clear as possible, the Civil Rights Act says you're

not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. And obviously that applies to discrimination

against a qualified African American job applicant and on paper it applies to whites as well.

Then disparate impact means that what companies find themselves so focused on making sure that they

aren't guilty of discriminating against black people or racial minorities generally that they

can't help discriminating against qualified white applicants. Just explain that a little more.

Yeah, I mean, let me get into the specifics of the case a little bit. So the particular case was

the Duke power, which was a Southern power company in North Carolina, had put some tests that

they considered to be relevant, genuinely relevant to determine who is going to advance in jobs.

And there was no intent alleged that there was any racially discriminatory intent of those tests

whatsoever. But you wound up with a disproportionately white group of people who passed the test.

And what the Supreme Court effectively says in Griggs versus Duke power is even if there is no intent

to discriminate, you are on the wrong side of the law by doing that. So this is one category

that you have corporations and businesses that are afraid of being sued for racial discrimination,

qualified white applicants lose out to less qualified minorities.

Correct. That's distinct somewhat from affirmative action programs that are sort of explicitly

race conscious. Right. But those are also part of your story. Absolutely. So the whole affirmative

action kind of regime, the whole DEI regime that again, this administration in my view is

totally correctly doing a great job of rooting out. I mean, all of those things sort of come together.

And I do think that there's a significant break in about 2013 to 2014 where we get

into a much more radical sort of world than where we've been. But prior to that point,

just to stay with the nature of the discrimination, that means that people competing for federal

contracts who are white-owned businesses or white competitors are being unfairly discriminated

against because there are rules that advantage minority-owned businesses. Absolutely.

And then you have college admissions that basically say you can consider race in some form

as a means to diversification, which disadvantage white applicants there to. Of course.

Okay. I'm just trying to set out some categories of what we're talking about at the outset.

Is there anything else? And I should say at the outset, in no way am I saying that everything

was really happy before the civil rights law ruled in that there was not past discrimination

against racial minorities, that there's not current discrimination against racial minorities.

All those things can be reality, and yet we can still have a system that is unfairly weighted

against white Americans today. And just to understand a little more about your view of that part of

the story, the history of discrimination, segregation, slavery, everything going back around black

Americans. Lyndon Johnson's famous case for affirmative action right was that you have hundreds of

years of brutal oppression, and it's unfair to pass a civil rights act into clear that we're

magically a meritocracy. You need some kind of extra boost. Yeah. What do you make of that argument?

So I think there's a couple of things, and I think it's really time-dependent. So I believe

Sandra Day O'Connor, after the original affirmative action case, which was where you got

college affirmative action, it's effectively affirmed by the court. And Sandra Day O'Connor,

I believe, sort of says, well, but in two decades, this will kind of be not necessary anymore.

I don't think that's a crazy way to look at it. I probably be a little more aggressive on the

no side, but I don't think that it's wrong. I think the best way to do this is to take into account

the socioeconomic standing, rather than just the race of the person involved. So, you know,

like the son of a major African-American CEO is not necessarily that disadvantaged,

but obviously if somebody is pouring in the inner city, then they are more disadvantaged.

And I have a problem with taking that into account in what? In admissions to elite universities?

Like, where does- In anything. I mean, honestly, it's just a way of getting good people, right?

If somebody has really come from a terrible background, but they've gotten like 90% of the way

there, as compared to somebody who had a lot of privileges growing up, then I think you want

the better person. And that's likely to be the person who's come over it. But I don't think that race

needs to directly play into that. Furthermore, I would kind of point to the African-American

conservative intellectual Thomas Sol who talks about the quest for cosmic justice, right? And the

sort of danger of doing that too much, right? So in no way am I saying, like, oh, there's some

perfect way to balance the scales. But I think just as a general rule, in a multi-ethnic society,

we want to treat everybody as much as we can, the same regardless of race. And as soon as you open

up the Pandora's box of, we're going to favor this race here, we're going to favor that race there,

you wind up in a lot of problems. So the term multi-ethnic society is a useful bridge to the next point,

because one of the realities around civil rights debates and early debates about immigration

was that American culture at that point was very much, you know, you can look at this

demographically a culture of two large groups, whites and blacks, right? They're obviously where

other racial minorities present. But in the world of 1950s America, 1960s America, that was sort of a

accord background dynamic that changes as immigration policy changes in the late 60s.

How does immigration policy fit into your story?

Well, it's huge. And I think just for the reasons you touched on, right? Because people,

I think younger people especially don't have a sense of just how dramatic the changes

brought by the Heart Seller Immigration Act of 1965, which totally redid our immigration system

were just to kind of put numbers on that, right? In 1960, which is the last census we have before

the Heart Seller Act, we are approximately 85.5, I think, percent white. We're maybe 10 and a half

percent African American. Don't shoot me if I'm off like a half percent somewhere here or there.

Of Hispanics, 80% of them were US-born. Half of them had lived in the US for more than three generations

as their families. So it's a very acculturated group for the most part. We are now at a point

where we're 57% white non-Hispanic and 12 or 13% African American. And then a whole bunch of

groups that were totally sort of marginal players in the American story. I'm not saying that in

judgment away, just a factual way, who are now very, very major parts of the American quilt.

We have to deal with that reality and build a unified country out of it. But it's a very,

very big change in what's a relatively short period of time.

But how does it actually relate to, again, the core subject of your argument, which is discrimination

against white people? How are white people discriminated against by having more

Indian Americans or Asian Americans or any other group whose numbers have increased?

Well, I think that it's just, I mean, it's a nature. I have, again, always argued for civic

nationalism. I was attacked in the Senate as, oh, I'm a white nationalist. I mean,

in my book, I explicitly condemn white nationalism completely overtly, and I've done it many times.

But, you know, the reality is you have a more multi-ethnic group. Groups are going to organize

in their own interests often, whether or not I think that's a good idea or not. I wouldn't

prefer that, but that's just the reality. And so white Americans have often wound up on the

low end of that. You see a lot of things right now being exploited with H1Bs, for example,

and Parmeet Dylan herself, an Indian American, has been, you know, on the front lines kind of saying,

hey, actually, you can't just advertise this job for foreigners, mostly from India. You actually

have to open this up to Americans. So is it primarily a matter of issues like that where you have

companies exploiting the immigration system to not hire native-born Americans, and that

disproportionately affects white? Is that the core mechanism that immigration changes things?

Well, I think that's one formal thing, but I think the informal element, which I'm not, again,

I don't run away from it all, is also important. I mean, we had a particular cohesive mainstream

American culture. Now, we can talk about multi-generation Italians, et cetera, but normatively,

there was kind of mainstream American culture in the 1950s, you know, Ozzy and Harriet,

baseball, you know, whatever have you. And those traditions, as you have more groups in,

not because those groups are bad, but just because they are coming from a very different

perspective, become more attenuated. And then all of a sudden, you have a non-English speaking

half-time show at the Super Bowl, which is kind of the grand carnival of America. And so,

I do think that that sort of thing matters, and I think culture matters.

Okay, but that's just to be clear, that's not discrimination. That's more, let's say, alienation.

Right. That it creates a more multicultural America is a culture that people who are attached

to the normative culture of the 1950s or 1960s feel less at home in, right? Yeah, I mean,

I think there's formal things, there's less formal things. And I was just addressing the

less formal elements of that argument, right? If I took five million white Americans and I moved

them to Thailand, and maybe that's not even so crazy at this point, right? Like, it's going to have

an effect on Thai culture. They may not like that, right? So, it's, I am challenging the notion

per se, quite explicitly, that diversity is our strength. Is there something that's different,

though, about this period of mass immigration versus periods in our past? Certainly the story of

Irish Italian, Polish, whatever else, immigration is a big part of our story. And certainly, you know,

my, my Yankee ancestors, right? In the early 19th century, we're probably not super sympathetic to

waves of Irish Catholics coming over, felt alienated from the new dispensation.

Right. We don't look back on that and say, well, that, you know, was this total betrayal

of Yankee Puritans or anything like that? Right. Is this period different for some reason?

Well, I think there's two things. And I don't disagree with sort of what you laid out. You can go

all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, complaining about the German influence, right?

Right. Which was concerning. Yeah. It's clear. Having said that, I think that there are a few

differences. One is the obvious visual differences in many groups that are coming over,

create more challenges to assimilation. Now, we have a growing multi-ethnic group. And I think

that's going to be a part, an important part of this new American ethnicity that we're creating.

What do you mean by visual differences? People look different, right? Like, people they,

like, if I'm from Ireland and I go and I marry some old stock English person, right? Like,

my kids are not necessarily going to look in an obvious way different, right? Whereas it's a more

challenge when you have what Canada would call visible minorities now with all the demographic

changes in Canada that may be an outdated term at some point. But I think that matters. I think

it's also important that people don't really understand the immigration story. So there were huge

periods of time that we had very low immigration in this country. And if you actually read

Democracy in America by Tocqueville, he doesn't mention the word immigrant or immigration even once

in that book. The US is 2% foreign born at that time. And it's really only after the failed

revolutions of 1848 that we begin to get a substantial non-anglo component. So I would say that

we've never been a quote-unquote nation of immigrants consistently. There have been times where we

have. There have been times where we've been a nation of settlers. But this kind of notion that we've

always just for 400 years been assimilating immigrants. I think that's not quite a accurate story.

No, but we do have, I think, a history of fairly successfully getting over some pretty substantial

differences of, for one of a better word, physiognomy culture. I guess I just disagree with you. I

think if you go back and read the writings of immigration critics and skeptics in late 19th and

early 20th century, you'll find plenty of people who write about Southern Italians or Slavs

in the way that people who are skeptical of East Asian or South Asian assimilation might

today. I'm just not sure that that alone is a dramatic difference. Now maybe religion

is a bigger difference. It's a huge difference. And if you read my book, you'll see this. I don't have

a simplistic view of how this works. Nor do I think that, oh my gosh, it's impossible. Because

now we have people who look different, who have different foods, and they have a different religion

that we can't do it. We have to do it. I just think it's a real challenge. And I think compounding

that challenge is the fact that we've lost so much cultural confidence since the 1960s. There

was no question that in the early 20th century, it's like, you were going to assimilate,

and you could have the League of United Latin American citizens in the early 20th century,

which is this very patriotic, sort of proto-Hispanic activist group that's just like, yeah,

we're more patriotic even than you guys. I don't think we have that, at least as a unified position

today. The melting pot is very unfashionable, certainly assimilation on the left, and in the

correct establishment world, it's like you and I have often existed in is a very, very dirty word.

And so I think it's just much more challenging because of where we are culturally and our lack of

confidence culturally as a nation right now. Do you think it's challenging because of the structure

of affirmative action and civil rights law? Like, if you had your way, and a lot of forms of

DEI were swept away, would that make assimilation easier? Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you're sort of

teeing up my point unintentionally, or maybe intentionally, I don't know. It's everything that

happens on the show is intentional, Jeremy. But yes, I mean, part of the problem is you have an

EBO from Nigeria, which is a very successful group, both in Nigeria and when they get to the US,

higher income, higher educational attainment, obviously no history of slavery here. And you're

going to walk in and give them very substantial advantages because of the color of their skin.

And you actually see Ados, American descendants of slaves, complaining about this in the context of,

well, like Harvard admissions or something where you have a lot of these African immigrants.

But beyond that, I mean, again, if a Hispanic person, again, with no history of

slavery here personally or any sort of, you know, they're coming here for opportunity,

and they walk in and they're automatically advantaged over my kids. Yeah, that creates a huge

opportunity for resentment. It's one of the real important reasons to get rid of these sorts of

programs in my view. Just to pick up a point you mentioned earlier, you think that there was a

sort of transformation or acceleration in anti-white discrimination in the last 10 or 15 years.

Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. What concretely changes in terms of patterns of

hiring discrimination, admissions discrimination, what are we talking about data?

Well, I so I think and there was a piece in compact that got some attention and I just all

the sudden blanked on its name. I think Jacob Savage and the piece called the

Lost Generation, which is about what look like stark inequities in hiring in what you might call

creative class professions, academia, media and elsewhere that are specific to the last 10 years,

where it suddenly just becomes really, really hard to get an entry-level job in Hollywood or media

if you're white or if you're a white man. That was the argument. Right. And I think also

universities, right? And he puts a hiring for 10-year track positions, right? Yeah.

And for somebody like me, you know, I went Yale, Harvard, Stanford, I did all that stuff. As a white

guy, I'm sort of core Gen X. I was born in 1972. There were certain things I didn't advocate.

There were certain things where even early on, I was certainly, you know, I wasn't a

beneficiary of affirmative action, but I could still do it. It was a bigger impediment to my career

ultimately that I was a right winger than that my skin happened to be white. But I talk to

friends of mine who are a decade or a decade and a half younger or certainly any of the 20-somethings

who are some of the biggest fans of my book. And that is not the case for them. It was very,

very different. They were really shut out of all of these sort of formal prestige occupations

effectively, even no matter almost what their view. I mean, I think the interesting thing is that

liberal whites, which is a subject of my next book, have become far more left wing over the last

decade plus on all of these issues than actually minorities are. It's one of the fascinating

elements of this discussion. Yeah, and we're going to come back to that because I want to

talk about what white culture actually means in America. I have some questions about that.

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So that's a story of intensification and anti-white discrimination

that then yields the election of Donald Trump. Trump administration has gone much further

past Republican administrations in rolling back affirmative action, attacking DEI programs.

Obviously, this follows on a Supreme Court decision that made certain kinds of affirmative action

in higher education presumptively unconstitutional. Do those changes solve the problem that you're describing?

Well, again, I think the team at civil rights is doing amazing work right now. They're really

pushing the envelope. My hat is off to them because what they're doing is really hard. And

Harmeet has often had to work with frankly, a kind of legacy base of attorneys with a very left

wing understanding of what civil rights might look like. And so I've just been enormously impressed

by what the administration has done in this area. That having been said, if you look at the 2023

Supreme Court case that made this illegal, Asian Americans were chosen as the plaintiffs for that case.

There's some reasonable reasons that you might do that facially. The gap between Asian

Americans and other groups on their test scores was the most of any group, more than for white

Americans and other groups. This is in applications to Harvard and elite institutions generally,

right? But I actually don't think that that was the primary reason they did it. I think it was because

they knew the savvy point of attorneys that Boomer white Supreme Court justices were just going

to be uncomfortable doing anything that looked like they were advancing white people. And so they

sort of put this more friendly Asian face on this to like make it acceptable to them. However,

now we have a couple of years of admissions data. And what's happened is Asian American percentages

have gone up very significantly at these schools. White percentage, I believe, is actually

down a little bit, certainly not up. I have not looked at every single case, but there is variation

school to school in this. My sense from looking at other elite colleges, though, is that it is

in some of the cases you're describing a matter of Asian American admissions going up and white

admissions staying somewhat flat and black and Latino admissions go down and those black and

Latino admissions or matriculation or whatever else go up at state schools. Right. But that suggests

the dynamic where if whites are being discriminated against now, it's more in the name of

Asian American applicants. Is that your view? I think that in this micro area, I would say yes.

I mean, in fact, one of the things I talk about in the unprotected class is that you have both

intentional and unintentional discrimination going on, right? Where some of it is very specifically

targeted against whites. I'll put it that way. It's sort of it's more we're going to be four

African Americans or Hispanics, but functionally it's the same thing. Asian Americans end up

getting caught up in a lot of that, but there are also some things where it's just like you can't

be white to apply to the scholarship and Asians get sort of folded in. So it's different on a case

by case basis. Is there a way in which though some of your analysis is kind of the white conservative

version of disparate impact analysis, right? Like we started out with you saying this is it's a

big problem, right? That the law says that, you know, if you end up with a hiring pool that

doesn't look like the population of applicants, that sort of presumptively considered racial

discrimination, at least in some of these cases, but it sometimes seems to me like conservatives are

are doing a kind of disparate impact analysis for white people. They're saying you can tell that

people are discriminating against white people just because of like the mismatch. But I think the

difference is I'm not claiming just because of the mismatch. It's because they have discriminated

actively against white people in the immediate past and they're on the record a million times.

They don't even necessarily, it's almost without shame. They effectively say we want to continue

discriminating against white people. I think that's the difference. They don't usually utter that

sentence, which you agree with that. But they say, you know, we need to advantage BIPOC, you know,

whatever, which means guess who black indigenous people of color for people who are not, you know,

familiar with the new lingo. But guess who gets left out of that, right? So I think the

difference is there really is intent. Disprote impact was never designed to, I mean, if you have

intent, if you can show that there was intent to discriminate by race, then, you know, disparate

impact doesn't figure into it. It's just illegal. But like in the case of like a Hollywood screenwriting

shop, right, where you go from a world where there's, you know, five white guys out of 10,

right to, you know, to zero. There's no like SAT score measurement or so on. You can do

there, right? I mean, to some degree, it seems like the conservative has to make some version

of that argument to say you can tell there's discrimination there just because suddenly,

there aren't any white guys in the writers room. Well, because I'm not quite sure. I mean,

I get what you're saying. I'm not saying there's absolutely zero to it. If I made the strongest

possible version of my argument, I might grant you that. But I think we have all sorts of cases

that people have said, yes, I as a white guy was told to take my name off the script that I had

written because they didn't want a white screenwriter, right? And I did the work and somebody else

got credit. We have enough of those stories to suggest that like this, there's a real thing

that is going on. And certainly if you look at say the Academy Awards in which, and very few people

know this right in the last few years, there's all sorts of explicit quotas of racial, not just racial,

but all sorts of things that you have to check off. Again, I just, I think that we've got

smoking guns here. It's not just I'm saying, oh, well, the number is different. So how does,

then how does your side of the argument win? Is it just a matter of having Republican administrations

with Donald Trump's policies for long enough to investigate and sue enough institutions? What's

the path to victory, I guess, from your perspective? Absolutely. So, I mean, I think one is legal

changes and we're seeing those again through Republican administrations. One is a cultural change

and just even being able to talk about this issue. When you used to say anti-white discrimination,

it was uncomfortable for me. I was talking to Chris Rufo, his person who's been very prominent

in this and he was one of the endorsers of my book. But when I first showed it to him, he sort of

puckered a little bit because like, oh, you know, anti-white, you know, can we even say that? And

that's just where the culture was. I don't have the Google Ngram data yet because it's not updated,

but I can tell you that the use of the terms since I wrote my book of anti-white discrimination

racism of like politicians and people who will call that out by name has gone up a lot just in

the last year. So you're raising awareness. You're doing, you're doing call outs, right? I feel

like I've heard this, I've heard this language before, but in the concrete, you need the changes

that the Trump administration has made to stick over time. Yeah. So I'd say here's the key thing.

You have to go back and look at civil rights law and how it actually ended up winning.

And this is where I think, again, it's really important that I'm saying don't throw the baby out

with the bathwater as far as civil rights law goes because what happened is you have Brown v. Board

in 1954, okay? School desegregation doesn't fully happen probably to the late 60s. And then of

course, you have some informal resegregation that happens since then, but that's another story.

What happens in the interim is you get that win at the Supreme Court and then you had to go sue

all the resistors one by one and say you are going to comply with this. And so right now,

that's kind of the phase of the battle that we're in. And so what civil rights needs to do, what

right wing groups need to do is we need to just sue people who are breaking the law and make that

painful for them. And eventually over time, we're going to bring them into compliance because

it's going to be painful for them not to obey the law. You mentioned earlier, feeling like you

had been, you know, suffered more professionally at times for being right wing than white.

Do you feel like you have been discriminated against personally at any point in your career as a

white because of your race? Well, I mean, I just think obviously, and I mean, I was able to overcome

it obviously to get into some good schools and opportunities, but just as a point of fact,

obviously I was. I don't know. Just in the sense that like affirmative action and diversity

rules discriminated against you when you applied. And then, I mean, this is one of the toxic

things, right? And it's actually talking about things that build up an excess of unjustified white

resentment. So let's say you've got a hundred white guys who apply for something, right? And then

it goes to something, a particular minority who at least on paper would be less qualified, right?

Then you're going to be told, you know, hey, we just, we couldn't hire you because we had to have

X minority in this role, right? The reality is you might not have gotten that anyway. There

might have been 30 white guys who were better than you. And so it's a little bit like handicap

parking spots where people see them empty and you're like, ah, you know, like if there weren't

this some handicap person there, I would get it. No, you know, somebody else would have taken

the spot. But I think that's, you know, you mentioned this sort of discomfort with the language

of anti-white discrimination, right? That when people talk about racial discrimination, they

associate it with, you know, racial hostility, racial slurs, like racist interpersonal dynamics.

Has America become racist against white people in any way that's comparable to, you know,

sort of racial slurs against black people or Mexicans or anything else?

Well, I talk about this in my entertainment chapter of the book in particular in which the ways

in which I think kind of whiteness, not a phrase I love, but I'm just kind of using it as a

placeholder has been stigmatized in our modern entertainment. And this can come from everything

like Hamilton, which is a work that artistically actually like a lot that I think can be interrogated

racially to use the left-wing term to movies like Black Panther. And if you look at some of the

racial politics around that. And again, I mean, I just, I have a lot of very specific examples I

get into in the book. Now, is that the equivalent of hostility of Jim Crow South in the 1950s? No.

But is it there? I do think that whiteness, again, it has become culturally disfavored at

least in certain elite circles in recent years. But that doesn't seem like racial hostility.

I don't want to go through 16 different examples, right, from from popular culture, right? But

if you go watch Gone with the Wind, and you watch the portrayals of slaves in that movie,

they are just racist stereotypes, right? Absolutely. I don't get that vibe watching American pop culture

in the current age as regards white people. Well, as I said, I would, I'm not saying, I mean,

I just explicitly said I don't think it's as extreme as it was in the other direction in the

say early 20th century. On the other hand, I cite some data from Annanburg, which is actually using

it for opposite purposes of how I'm using it. They kind of look at the demographics of people

in every mainstream movie and white people kind of wind up on the short end of the stick.

Now, it is a big culture. Kid Rock can still go do his thing, right? Like, there's certainly

areas in which obviously, obviously Tom Creases off being the white fighter pilot here, right?

I'm not saying that doesn't exist. But I think statistically, that tendency is still there,

and it's okay to call that out. Is there any other area in the culture where you feel like

this kind of legal structure of discrimination cashes out in something that is actually

overtly oppressive? Something that would affect your kids, for instance, in every day life.

Oppressive is a pretty strong word, so I don't know that I would go that far at least as a

generality. But again, as whites become another minority in America or just one of many groups,

you could see the pressures pushing in that direction over time. That's not to say it's inevitable.

I wrote the book because I don't want that to happen. I think if we ethnically

Balkanize around various racial nationalisms, it's going to be a disaster. We've got to recreate

a common American culture. And I think that's frankly tricky because we've had massive amounts

of immigration without enough time in my view to assimilate them and to American moors and values.

And you've got a lot of people who benefit from creating that division.

All right, let's pivot there back to your nomination. To what extent do you think that your

prominence and your writings on this subject influence why the Trump administration would offer

you a job? Like, did they, would they have preferred that you take a job focused on these areas,

do you think? You know, I didn't get into that discussion too deeply with them. And I want to be

very, very careful in not misrepresenting the administration of the State Department never.

I've had fans just as a matter of record in the White House in the State Department at senior levels

who really like my work just in general. They reached out to me and another group has subsequently

reached out to me after the hearing saying, hey, we would love to have you talk. So I mean, I have

fans in those places. I don't think they wanted me to go in to necessarily, oh, you know,

like go put your agenda vis-a-vis race. I think what they looked at is they said, okay,

this guy is not afraid of shaking things up. He's not afraid to take a controversial position

and stick to it. He's not afraid to say go into a sclerotic UN bureaucracy and say, hey,

we need to do things differently. And so at that metasense, I think that's why I was potentially

an attractive candidate. It wasn't because my view on X issue was the thing that they were looking

to drive. If they were, I think I would have been working in immigration or whatever else.

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Okay, now I want to talk about two areas where I am skeptical of those controversial views.

And I think anyone listening to this conversation can sort of intuit this

already from some of my questions. But I guess I would say this just as a sort of brief editorializing

interlude. I think the story that you tell is broadly correct that there was a long period in

American life in the aftermath of the civil rights era in which for a variety of reasons,

some defensible, some less so, there was a kind of thumb on the scale against white people,

maybe especially white men in various aspects of American life. Some of that was de facto,

some of it was formal. I also think that that soft thumb on the scale became much more intense

in the last 10 years. So these are sort of points of broad overlap between our perspective.

Where I'm skeptical is twofold. One is about scale and intensity and direness of the problem,

and the way that conservatives and especially white conservatives should talk about it,

the kind of framing that they should use. And the other related is about how white people and

white conservatives should think about white identity, their sense of their own identity,

how they label themselves. So let's just start with the question of scale. And again, you've said

you're a controversialist, but what came up at the Senate hearing and what sort of circulated

on the internet was not just statements about the problems of disparate impact. It is phrases

like cultural genocide. You gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in July of 2024,

entitled in the persecution of whites in America. And one of the things you said was,

American whites are victims of a cultural genocide, a cultural genocide.

Where to start? So using language about replacement and the great replacement in tweets that were

deleted, but I assume that they were actually your tweets. And I'll just give one more automatically

deleted. By the way, I've always just deleted my tweets quarterly for years, had nothing to do

with trying to hide anything. But just to take one of the fuller quotes, this was something you

wrote after a jury convicted January 6th rioters. This is, you said, I would rather be a black man

on trial for the assault of a white man in 1930s rural Mississippi than I would be a right-winger

in DC today on trial for political crimes. I would note that even if you think that those

trials were show trials and totally unfair to January 6th defendants, no one was to my knowledge

lynched in that context. No one was executed and so on, right? These are sort of.

Well, so can I address that? Yeah, we could get into it. And it's totally fair of you to bring

up specifics. And a lot of things truly were taken out of context. A few were just my bats,

right? They were idiocies. But for example, let's take the one on the Jim Crow one.

That was definitely a statement of provocation. Now, obviously I'm not equating in any real sense

that there were some very serious miscarriages of justice. I mean,

I'm using Jim Crow because it was a provocative, everybody agrees it was a horrible thing.

But that's kind of, in my role as a provocateur, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

And, you know, can you offer a similar explanation for why you would use a term like cultural genocide?

Yeah. Because that's, again, a phrase that circulates widely on the internet, not just from you,

but it's associated with some pretty far-right perspectives on the world.

So I'll give you, again, I'm thrilled that you asked this because I've used it twice.

I don't know if you're thrilled, but you're okay because it's great because I can show how

totally disingenuous my critics have been. So the particular case that was brought up at the

Senate hearing where I'd said this at a conference. I specifically say, I'm mostly just kind of

saying this, I literally say, to troll the lips. And in fact, I realized as I was saying,

persecution, that's kind of edgy, that in my book, I actually talk about something even perhaps

more extreme. America invites us being victims of a cultural genocide. And I'm suggesting this

partially, again, to troll any leftist media who might be in the room. It'd be furious.

So I was immediately taking some genuine ironic distance. I don't actually think

that we are in a cultural genocide, per se. However, and I talk about this in my book,

Raphael Lemkin, who's the Polish Jewish lawyer who invents the term genocide and gets it recognized

at the UN, had a concept of cultural genocide. But he talks about the takeover of the education

system, the destruction of monuments and cultural symbols, goes on up and down the list.

And a lot of those things you can point to and say, hey, a lot of this is happening

at a slow motion way, which is what I talk about in my book, for white Americans today.

I'm trying to kind of push people like, wow, think about this just a little bit and see how this

matches up with typology of cultural genocide that was used. So I don't think that we're there yet,

but I see some disquieting things going on that may be concerned about our trajectory.

And just to be concrete, like you mean dismantling monuments, not just to confederate generals,

but to founding fathers. Absolutely. Like that kind of thing.

Absolutely. Yeah. So this is this is where I'm curious what you think about this in the context of

actual right wing politics in the age of Trump. Yeah. Right. Where it just seems to me that a lot of

what the Trump administration, not just what they have done, but sort of the language around it,

the intensity, the kind of like, you know, no enemies to the right and relatively few friends in

the center mode, but they've sometimes embraced reflects just this kind of extreme pessimism.

Like I use the term black pill, but it just seems like there are a lot of people on the right,

maybe especially young people, right, who aren't using, you know, cultural genocide just to

troll the lips, right? When they say the great replacement, they don't mean like what you were

talking about earlier, the anxieties of a historically dominant majority in a diversifying country,

they mean like evil elites are trying to replace us with with immigrants in this conscious scheme,

right? Like there's a lot of that on on the right. I believe the last thing, not evil elites,

but I believe it's the conscious policy of the democratic party to hyper diversify the country

because they perceive and we'll see whether it actually works out for them. The Hispanic vote

suggests that maybe it won't, but but see that's an example. You said we'll see if it works out

for them, right? To me, yes, clearly there has been a period in democratic party politics where

the party decided that more immigration would lead to more democratic votes and that was good for

them. But that isn't, but that isn't actually one, one, I think that that is understandable

as a sort of normal part of ethnic patronage politics, which is part of the American tradition,

which you can be against, but it's not like, but it's not like five guys, you know,

sitting in a room saying we hate white people, no, and we only want Hispanics now, right? One,

two, it seems like the evidence of Donald Trump himself is that in the American context,

this is just not how politics works. Like you end up getting a lot of Hispanics who vote for Trump

because people assimilate, right? Like shouldn't there be a little more, I guess,

just sort of fundamental optimism about like where things are going, then the kind of language

you're using would suggest. Well, again, if you read the end of my book, and I know, you know,

God bless you, you've got to move. I've read every single word of your book, Jeremy, and don't

test me on it, but I know I am, it ends on a very optimistic tone. Right, but books, there's books,

right? And then there's internet persona. Sure. And there are plenty of people on the right who

have a tone in their books and then a tone on social media. Sure. But the tone on social media

is a dominant tone in our culture, maybe more important than the tone on books. It just seems

like the things that Democrats have plucked out and critiqued in your writings are things that

are pervasive on the right styles of speaking. Yeah, I mean, there are a few things that they

dug out in their intellectual, prological exam of everything I've ever tweeted or written or

said on a podcast that I was really like, you know, shouldn't have said that, my bad. It does

happen. So I'm not, you know, without getting into each individual utterance, right? Like I'm

not going to certainly defend everything I've said. I would also say that frankly, as a result of

this process, I have become more aware of even though I consider tweets to be a lot less important

than books and articles. They're, they're pretty important, Jeremy. I hate to tell you that. Yeah,

well, so, you know, like lesson, lesson learned, right? At least in the discourse. Having said that,

I want to come back to something you said earlier because I think it is important and maybe a

little bit of a different point of difference for us. I actually view Trump as one of the main

engines of de-radicalization, particularly of youth, because I think there were a lot of these

folks and I knew them. You were probably in group chats, maybe you're talked to them or whatever,

maybe not. I know what you mean. With, with sort of these people who were very radicalized and

blackpilled for lack of a better term, under the previous administrations, and they sort of

dispaired that they could have any effect on the system at all. And then Trump has come in and

just done things like do correct civil rights law and from my view and do other things. And now these

people are saying, oh, I don't need to come into some weird esoteric right-wing pagan ethno-nationalism.

I can just be a normal person and advocate for things I believe. So I think that's something that

Trump has actually really been attacked for that I think is the opposite is true. The young people,

I think, who have some of these more out there views, they're just marginal politically. Like,

I don't know anybody. And I know a few people, right? Like, who is in the actual, but I would consider

a serious position of responsibility in government, who I'm like, wow, you know, that person's views

are just from my perspective, like way, way dangerous and outside of any sort of American mainstream.

Obviously, some of your liberal listeners will disagree with where I'm drawing that boundary.

But I think I don't know, yeah, I don't know, I don't fully agree with that. I guess I agree with

you that Trump himself is substantially less radical than important parts of the online right.

And I definitely agree with you that Trump's victory had a partially de-radicalizing effect

on some people. At the same time, I think there are people who will take an example, very concrete

example, Elon Musk. Elon Musk is not in the administration right now, held a very important

administration job. I read Elon Musk's tweets about issues that you're writing about,

raise anti-white discrimination. He clearly thinks the United States is in a kind of South

African position where there is going to be this like white minority on a very rapid time horizon,

in a state governed by non-whites, that this is the future. So one, that's a radical perspective.

Two, I just think it's obviously wrong. Like, whatever is going to happen to the United States

is not going to be what's happened in South Africa, the country.

Could not agree more about that. Okay, good. So we're going to tell me more about that.

Are bad cases not South Africa? No, we're not going to wind up in a South Africa type situation.

I think that it is wrong and foolish to suggest that we are.

Okay, good. So that brings me to my second question for your argument, which is just as a matter

of political engagement or sort of self-identification, does it make sense for white conservatives,

white people generally to just think of their own identity in those terms, to think about

white culture, for instance, another thing you were asked about in your hearing as something

that they should be attached to or associated with. You have made several statements about your

worry regarding the erasure of white culture in America. In terms of broader engagement with

American politics or American culture, is there anything productive in thinking about your own

whiteness in those terms? Yeah, I mean, again, contrary to what was thrown at me in the Senate.

I don't think I've ever used the term white culture maybe like once or twice and a million

words in class of interviews. It's not that I think it's invalid. And in fact, the only good thing

that came out of the hearing was there was sort of an interesting discussion from guys like

Eric Kaufman is a very interesting scholar of race and ethnicity who reviewed my book positively

on. Do we have a white culture? Is it being discriminated against? It's not a term that I prefer.

I prefer to talk, as I said, at the hearing about our common American culture, which is derived

from European cultures, but it's not European and nor is it exclusively racial to white people.

I think that's just a better way of looking at the problem. I would say beyond that that the

reason why you have to talk about it's a little bit of a bifurcated thing. And I think about this

with my own kids, I sort of tell them it's like, look, you need to understand that this is out there.

At the same time, you cannot use it as an excuse because it'll just destroy you. That discrimination

is out there, but you can't use it as an excuse. You've got to sort of have a bifurcated

consciousness almost where you're working against this at some level to the extent you can,

but you got to still be responsible for your own life and making your own life good. You cannot

get into a victim mentality. It's just it's very toxic and self-destructive for your own totally

selfish reasons. You just shouldn't do it. Having said that, I have made my opinion. I've said it

not once. I've said it a hundred times. I'll say it a hundred and one times here. I'm a civic

nationalist. I'm not an ethnic nationalist or certainly not a racial nationalist of any type.

However, I am not willing to let every other group, racial group play racial politics and

why people to sit there and be victimized by that. Let's try to focus on what unifies us as

Americans and let's slow down immigration so that we can kind of reconstitute whatever our new

common identity as a country is going to be and go from there. That's the way that I think is

going to do that, but I've done enough real politics that I don't think that that comes from

just saying, oh, pretty please stop. We need to show that there are going to be actual consequences

for people who are discriminating against whites in America. But isn't there at least a certain

limitation on that kind of organization imposed by the reality that white people as a category

is... All these categories are insanely diverse. White liberals have become more radicalized

on racial issues. You can see this in the polling data. But what that means to me is that they're

just an inherent dead end, a kind of absurdity to certain forms of white culture that I think

was honestly reflected in some of the back and forth in your interview. Again, I'm from New England.

I go to Maine in the summer just to be clear. I'm not a Kennebunk port. I'm near my lobster

fisherman cousins mostly, but Maine is one of the whitest states in the union. It is also

an extremely progressive environment. Not the whole state state has divided. There's white

working class voters who support it. Downstate is more progressive. Downstate is progressive,

and that's white culture, right? If there is any white culture, isn't that white culture?

Well, I agree, and this is why I don't use the term. Again, it was pinned on me at the Senate

hearing, but I do think that there's some validity in it. That's where I wound up and reading

the subsequent internet debate, but it's not the best term. There was, and it's not the term that I

use. Because in that internet debate, there really were a bunch of people not all in the furthest

reaches of the right who wanted to come out and defend the notion that, okay, historic American

culture, we should describe this as white culture. Again, I followed the ins and outs of that

debate. It definitely reflected, I think, a real impulse on the right to respond to anti-white

discrimination with a more self-conscious white identity politics. Yeah. What I'm interested in most

is stopping the formal discrimination. That's what I want to stop. After that, it gets much

messier. I mean, again, the book I'm working on right now is got the working title, What's the

Matter with Minnesota? And I chose that a year ago, by the way. Listeners, just like you,

will recognize that as an illusion of Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas. But what I'm

essentially doing is looking at white liberals and white leftists and why, from my view, they've

gone so insane and what the consequences are for the country. Because I really do think that

here in many ways, the biggest impediment right now to coming to a more sane kind of

truce on a lot of these issues. And they're not showing a lot of signs to me of putting the

woke away, as they say. But there is, I think, at least some tension in the argument you're making,

in just in the sense that if that is reality, right, if a big part of what whiteness in America

means is liberal progressive far left politics, right? Then guess what? You, as a white conservative,

are stuck with a landscape in which your politics, your perspective, can only be

instantiated if you've got a bunch of non-whites on your side. So there's a version of Jeremy

Carl, who would say good news, the American culture of the 1950s, baseball, hot dogs, and so on,

it encompasses minorities. And united this multiracial conservatism, which is just Americanism,

can defeat or hold back progressiveism. But at the same time, there's also a part of your argument

that is extremely solicitous towards conservative white Americans, for whom what they're freaked out

about isn't white lips in Minnesota, white liberals in Maine. But people whose skin color is different,

people whose cultures are different and so on. Can you reconcile those two views?

I think you can, but of course it's inherently messy. And I should mention, I mean, of the young people,

certainly like young white men have been huge fans of the book, but I've had tons of young minority

folks come up to me and say, yes, we see the same thing, it's a problem, and we're glad that you're

speaking up about it. So I actually do think this is very optimistic element. At the same time,

I absolutely do have sympathy to this notion that we're changing too quickly. I've called for a net

zero immigration. I'm not running away from that or apologizing for it. I think we need a long

pause to reconstitute what this country is, what our new identity is going to be. The Democrats

are obviously totally opposed to that in every way. And you know, we have just a fundamental

impasse. But I absolutely think that we need to have ultimately, if we're going to succeed,

a multi-ethnic coalition around American identity. And that's just, that's going to have to happen.

Is it okay if the deal that is offered to white people by that coalition is to say,

number one, we are going to reduce the burden of legal discrimination that you favor. But number two,

you need to not throw around terms like heritage American and be a little more chill about the

realities of ethnic diversity that aren't going away. I think some element of that is going to

have to be the truth that we're going to work out. Hopefully, I mean, but to see that, we have to

beat the left version because I think the left version is just incompatible with a peaceful

civilization. I mean, that's not, it's just an empirical judgment on my part. I'm not making

a moral judgment. I just don't think that what the left wants to do is going to lead to anything

other than incredible amounts of racial strife and anger and societal dislocation. So I just,

what I'm hoping is a group of us beat that vision. And then we're going to have to negotiate

exactly along the lines of what you're saying. And I certainly do tell, especially some younger

people who I see getting a little bit out of line. I'll say, like, you know, here and here and there.

Here and there. I'll say, like, they don't always listen. But I say, you know, this is not

a productive way to talk about these issues either publicly or privately. And I think that it

is going to be that negotiation. But I think the good news is like, that's what's going to win.

I mean, either the country is going to lose us a whole or some version of what you're just talking

about is going to win because it's, we're not, we're not going back to the 1950s. We're going to

have to reconstitute. There's a ton of patriotic people I know of every possible ethnic background

who want to make that happen. And that's going to be, I hope, the negotiation for our future

polity, what it's going to look like. Last question. Then it is the 2050s or the 2070s, you know,

some future point where we have kind of achieved a greater consensus than we have now. We have a

kind of restored sense of American identity that's different from the 1950s, but has commonalities.

What does that look like? Because we've talked a lot about American identity as distinct from

white identity or racial identity. What are just like the four pillars, the non-negotiables of

Americanness that you would want to see endure? So I think freedom, but within a sense of community.

I mean, not, not sort of being out there as a liberty and all by yourself, but kind of the,

the combination of those two things. I think America's directness has always been a great

boon. I would love to see a religious sense return much more to the mainstream of American culture.

I think that that's incredibly important. And I think just a sense of patriotism. I think that

the American experiment is an incredible, unique experiment. I am not just a credal American,

but I think that what we've accomplished here is incredibly unique. And we should be proud of that.

I want every American to be proud of that. I want us to preserve it.

All right, Jeremy Carl, thank you for joining me.

Thanks so much, Ross. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

Interesting times is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holesnack.

Jordana Hoekman is our executive producer and editor,

original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker.

Mixing by Pat McCusker, audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta,

Christina Samuluski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelback.

Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusek, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz.

And our Director of Opinion Shows is Annie Rose Straszer.

Music

Real talent is defined by what people can do, not just where they learn to do it.

In the US, more than 70 million stars, workers skilled through alternative routes,

are overlooked because they don't have a bachelor's degree.

It's time to let the story unfold and gain access to a talent pool with valuable skills

to help your business thrive now and in the future.

See what others miss.

Higher skills first.

Learn why it's a competitive advantage at tearthepapercealing.org.

Brought to you by Opportunity at Work in the Add Council.