Can you offer a similar explanation for why you would use a term like “cultural genocide“? Just because that’s again, a phrase that’s associated with some pretty far-right perspectives on the world. I’m thrilled that you asked this because I’ve used it twice. I don’t know if you’re thrilled, but you’re — No, no — You’re OK that I’ve asked it. It’s great, because I can show how totally disingenuous my critics have been. Is there an epidemic of anti-white discrimination in America? “Are you a white male who’s experienced discrimination?” “A man who says he was fired for being a white male.” “What they’re calling reverse discrimination.” And who is more fixated on identity politics? The left? “Identity politics has become an anchor on how the Democratic Party functions.” “They believe the highest title you can have is your pronoun.” “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris.” Or the right? “Things were a lot better back when white men were not being discriminated against.” “White people were so openly attacked and denigrated.” “A generation of white men have had their career prospects obliterated.” My guest this week wrote a book arguing that white Americans are in danger of becoming second-class citizens. “We can’t save the country without kind of addressing this.” This is an idea with a lot of currency on the contemporary right, but it became the source of a lot of controversy when the Trump administration nominated him for a State Department job. “Your belief is that white Americans face more discrimination — at least prior to the Trump administration fixing this, than Black Americans?” “On average, Senator. Yes, that’s correct. And I’m not running away from that statement at all.” Jeremy Carl, welcome to Interesting Times. Thanks so much for having me, Ross. Thank you so much for being here. 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, 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 the Interior in Trump One. Right. And then after Trump won, you did 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. Did I get that right? You got it. I got it right. 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 hearkens 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 Shultz, and did a lot of work in this field there. It was 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?” Of 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 it’s an unfortunately, sad reality of our current politics. So you’re up for that nomination as we have this conversation. Yeah. 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. 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, et cetera. In theory, whites actually are a protected class. And you’re beginning to see, under the great leadership of Harmeet Dhillon, 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 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 health 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. So let’s start with the most concrete elements of the argument. Let’s talk about the law — Sure. — 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 kind of 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 v. 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 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 sword of Damocles 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, sure 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. Well, 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 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. Then 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 right, from affirmative action programs that are explicitly race conscious. But those are also part of your story. No, 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 come together. And I do think that there’s a significant break in about 2013 to 2014, right, where we get into a much more radical 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. Yes that basically say you can consider race in some form as a means to diversification. Which disadvantaged white applicants there too. O.K I’m just trying to set out some categories of what we’re talking about at the outset. Is there anything else I should say at the outset. In no way am I saying that there was that. Like 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. Sure. Was that you have hundreds of years of brutal oppression, and it’s unfair to pass a Civil Rights Act and declare 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, says, well, but in two decades, this will be not necessary anymore. I don’t think that’s a crazy way to look at it. I’d 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 the son of a major African-American CEO is not necessarily that disadvantaged. But obviously, if somebody is poor and in the inner city, then they are more disadvantaged. And I don’t have a problem with taking that into account in what, in admissions to elite universities where does in anything. I mean, I think it’s just like I mean, honestly, it’s just a way of getting good people. If somebody has really come from a terrible background, but they’ve gotten like 90 percent 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. But I don’t think that race needs to directly play into that. Furthermore, I would point to the African-American conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell, who talks about the quest for cosmic justice. And the danger of doing that too much. 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 can look at this demographically, a culture of two large groups. Sure whites and Blacks. There obviously were other racial minorities present. But in the world of 1950s America, 1960s America, that was a cord 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 because people I think younger people, especially don’t have a sense of just how dramatic the changes wrought by the hart-celler Immigration Act of 1965, which totally redid our immigration system, were just to put numbers on that. In 1960, which is the last census we have before the hart-celler act, we are approximately 85.5, I think, percent white. We’re maybe 10.5 percent African-American. Don’t shoot me if I’m off like 1/2 percent somewhere here or there. Of Hispanics, 80 percent 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 percent white, non-Hispanic and 12 percent or 13 percent African-American, and then a whole bunch of groups that were totally marginal players in the American story. I’m not saying that in a judgmental way, 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, again, in my book, I explicitly condemn white nationalism completely overtly, and I’ve done it many times. But 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 h-1bs, for example. And Harmeet Dhillon, herself an indian-american, has been on the front lines, kind of saying, hey, actually 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 whites, 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 at 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 a kind of mainstream American culture in the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet baseball 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 halftime show at the Super Bowl, which is the grand carnival of America. And so I do think that thing matters. And I think culture matters. But that’s just to be clear, that’s not discrimination. That’s more, let’s say alienation 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 Yeah no, 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. If I took white Americans and I moved them to Thailand, 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. So I am challenging the notion 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, my Yankee ancestors, right. In the early 19th century, were probably not super sympathetic to waves of Irish Catholics coming over felt alienated from the New dispensation. We don’t look back on that and say, well, that was this total betrayal of Yankee Puritans or anything like that. What is this period different for some reason. Well, I think there’s two things. And I don’t disagree with what you laid out. You can go all the way back to Benjamin Franklin complaining about the German influence. Which was concerning Yeah to be 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, important part of this New American ethnicity that we’re creating. What do you mean by visual differences. Meaning people look different. Like people they like, if I’m from Ireland and I go and I marry some old stock English person. Like, my kids are not necessarily going to look in an obvious way. Different 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 percent 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 an accurate story. No, but we do have, I think, a history of fairly successfully getting over some pretty substantial differences for want of a better word, physiognomy culture. I mean, I guess I just disagree with you. I think if you go back and read the writings of immigration critics and skeptics in the 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 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. Like, 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, 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 correct establishment worlds 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 in meaning that if you had your way and a lot of forms of die were swept away, would that make assimilation easier. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, you’re teeing up my point unintentionally, but. Or maybe intentionally, I don’t know. It’s everything that happens on this show is intentional, Jeremy. But yes, I mean, part of the problem is. Have an Igbo 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 Ada’s American descendants of slaves complaining about this in the context of 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 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 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 Yeah well, so I think and there was a piece in compact that got some attention and I just all of a sudden blanked on its name. I think Jacob savage Jacob savage called the Lost Generation, which is about essentially what look like stark, 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. And I think also universities. And he puts hiring for tenure track positions. And for somebody like me, I went to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, I did all that stuff as a white guy. I’m core Gen X. I was born in 1972. There were certain things I had to navigate. There were certain things where even early on, I was certainly 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 talked to friends of mine who were 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 sorts 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 the 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, we’re going to come back to that because I want to talk about when we talk about what white culture actually means in America. I have some questions about that. So that’s a story of intensification in anti-white discrimination that then yields the election of Donald Trump Yeah. The Trump administration has gone much further than 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. But I actually don’t think that was the primary reason they did it. I think it was because they knew that the savvy plaintiffs’ attorneys, that kind of Boomer white Supreme Court justices were just going to be uncomfortable doing anything that looked like they were advantaging white people. And so they put this more friendly Asian face on this to 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. There is some very I have not looked at every single case, but there is variation school to school in this. Yes 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. 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. Where some of it is very specifically targeted against whites, although they don’t put it that way. It’s more we’re going to be for 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 can’t be white to apply for this scholarship, and Asians get folded in. So it’s different on a case by case basis. Is there a way in which though some of your analysis is the White conservative version of disparate impact analysis. Like we started out with you saying this is it’s a big problem that the law says that if you end up with a hiring pool that doesn’t look like the population of applicants that presumptively considered racial discrimination, at least in some of these cases. But it sometimes seems to me like conservatives are doing a kind of disparate impact analysis for white people. They’re saying can tell that people are discriminating against white people just because of 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 to discriminate against white people. I think that’s the difference. They don’t usually utter that sentence. They don’t agree with sentence, but they say, we need to advantage BIPOC whatever. Which means guess who. Black Indigenous people of color for people who are not familiar with the New lingo. But guess who gets left out of that. So I think the difference is there really is intent. Disparate impact was never designed to I mean, if you have intent, if you can show that there was intent to discriminate by race, then disparate impact doesn’t figure into it. It’s just illegal. But like in the case of a Hollywood screenwriting shop, right. Where you go from a world where there’s five white guys out of 10 to 0, there’s no SAT score measurement and 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, I’m not quite sure. I mean, I get what you’re saying. I’m not saying there’s absolutely 0 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 as a white guy, was told to take my name off this script that I had written because they didn’t want a white screenwriter. And I did the work and somebody else got credit. We have enough of those stories to suggest that this is a real thing that is going on. And certainly, if you look at, say, the Academy Awards, in which very few people know this. 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 it’s wrong. 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, who’s a 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 puckered a little bit because he’s like, oh, anti-white 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 term, since I wrote my book of anti-white discrimination and 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 call outs, raising awareness. I’m doing I feel like I’ve heard this I’ve heard this language before, but O.K. But in the concrete Yeah you need the changes that the Trump administration has made to stick over time. 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. O.K school desegregation doesn’t fully happen probably till 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 are going to comply with this. And so right now that’s 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 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 on because of your race. Well, I mean, I just think obviously, I mean, I was able to overcome it, obviously to get into some good schools and opportunities. But opportunities. But just as a point of fact, I don’t just in the sense that affirmative action and diversity rules discriminated against you when you applied. And then I mean, this is one of the toxic things. It’s actually talk about things that build up in excess of unjustified white resentment. So let’s say you’ve got 100 white guys who apply for something. And then it goes to something a particular minority who, at least on paper, would be less qualified. Then you’re going to be told, hey, we couldn’t hire you because we had to have X minority in this role. 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 if there weren’t some handicapped person there, I would get it. No somebody else would have taken the spot. So it’s spread out. But I think that’s mentioned the discomfort with the language of anti-white discrimination. That when people talk about racial discrimination, they associate it with racial hostility, racial slurs like racist interpersonal dynamics. Do you think that’s part of this story. Like, has America become racist against white people in any way that’s comparable to 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, but 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 have a lot of very specific examples I get into in the book. Now, is that the equivalent hostility of Jim Crow South in the 1950s. No but is it there. I do think that whiteness, again, 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 popular culture. But if you go watch Gone with the Wind, right. And you watch the portrayals of slaves in that movie. They are just racist stereotypes. Absolutely I don’t get that vibe watching American pop culture in the current age as regards white people. Well, do you 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 say, early 20th century. On the other hand, and I cite some data from Annenberg mannenberg, which is actually using it for opposite purposes of how I’m using it. They 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. There are certainly areas in which. Obviously obviously Tom Cruise is off being the White fighter pilot here. I’m not saying that doesn’t exist. But I think statistically that tendency is still there. And it’s O.K 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. And you can something that would affect your kids, for instance, in everyday life. Oppressive is a pretty strong word. So don’t know that I would go that far, at least as a generality. But again, as whites become a 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 into American mores 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 have preferred that you take a job focused on these areas. Do you think. I didn’t get into that discussion too deeply with them. And I want to be very, very careful in not misrepresenting the administration or 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. 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, go put your agenda vis a vis race. I think what they looked at is they said, O.K, 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 meta sense, I think that’s why I was potentially going 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. 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 Intuit this already from some of my questions. But I guess I would say this just as of brief editorializing interlude. I think the story that you tell is broadly, 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 facto, some of it was formal. I also think that soft thumb on the scale became much more intense in the last 10 years. So these are 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, what came up at the Senate hearing and what 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 On 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. It’s using language about replacement and the great replacement in tweets that you had 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 six. 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. Just on that last point, I would note that even if you think that those trials were show trials and totally unfair to January six defendants, no one was, to my knowledge, lynched in that context. No one was executed. And so on. These are banal, banal points. Well, so can I. Can I address that particular one. And 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 bad. 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 in Jim Crow South because it’s a provocative everybody agrees it was a horrible thing, but that’s kind of in my role as a provocateur. That’s the thing I’m talking about. And can you offer a similar explanation for why you would use a term like cultural genocide. Just 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. No, no, you’re O.K. 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 that I mostly just kind of saying this. I literally say to troll the libs. And in fact, I realized as I was saying, wow, persecution. That’s kind of edgy, that in my book I actually talk about something even perhaps more extreme America, American whites, as being victims of a cultural genocide. And I’m suggesting this partially, again, to troll any leftist media who might be in the room and be furiously scribbling my unforgivable hate speech in their notebooks. So I was immediately taking some genuine ironic distance. I don’t actually think that we are in a cultural genocide 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. 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 push people like, wow think about this just a little bit, and see how this matches up with the 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 make me concerned about our trajectory. And just to be concrete mean dismantling monuments not just to Confederate generals, but to founding fathers. Absolutely like that kind of thing. Absolutely yeah. So 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 the language around it, the intensity, the no enemies to the right and relatively few friends in the center mode that they’ve sometimes embraced reflects just this kind of extreme pessimism. I’ve used the term “black-pill.” It just seems like there are a lot of people on the right, maybe especially young people who aren’t using cultural genocide just to troll the libs. 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 immigrants in this conscious scheme. There’s a lot of that on 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. Well, but see, that’s an example. You said we’ll see if it works out for them. To me, yes, it 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. So that’s what I’m saying. But that isn’t actually one. One I think that is understandable as of normal part of ethnic patronage politics, which is part of the American tradition, which you can be against. But I’m against that. But it’s not like but it’s not like five guys, sitting in a room saying, we hate white people. No and we only want Hispanics now. One, two. It seems like the evidence of Donald Trump himself is that this 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 Yeah, shouldn’t there be a little more. I guess just fundamental optimism about 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 God bless you, you got a million things to do every single word of your book, Jeremy, and don’t test me on it. But I know I like it ends on a very optimistic tone. But books. There’s books. 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 proctological exam of everything I’ve ever tweeted or written or said on a podcast that I was really like, I shouldn’t have said that. My bad. It does happen. So I’m not without getting into each individual utterance. 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 pretty important. Jeremy I hate to tell you this Yeah well lesson, lesson learned. 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 deradicalization, particularly of youth, because I think there were a lot of these folks and I knew them. You were probably in group chats, maybe, or talked to them or whatever. Maybe not. I don’t know what you mean with these people who were very radicalized and black-pilled, for lack of a better term. Under the previous administrations, and they despaired that they could have any effect on the system at all. And then Trump has come in and just done things 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. And the young people, I think, who have some of these more out there views, they’re just marginal politically, I don’t know anybody and I know a few people. Who is in the actual what I would consider a serious position of responsibility in government, who I’m like, wow, that person’s views are just from my perspective way, way dangerous and outside of any American mainstream. Obviously, some of your liberal listeners will disagree with where I’m drawing that boundary. They might. Yes 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. 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. Well, we’ll take an example. Very concrete example. Elon Musk Elon Musk is not in the administration right now, held a very important administration job. Sure I read Elon Musk’s tweets about issues that you’re writing about race, anti-white discrimination. He clearly thinks the United States is in a kind of South African position where there is going to be this white minority, a very rapid time horizon. In a state governed by non-whites, this is the future. So one that’s a radical perspective. Two I just think it’s obviously wrong. Whatever is going to happen to the United States is not going to be what’s happened in South Africa. Could not agree more. O.K, good. So tell me tell me more about that. Our bad case is not South Africa. No, we are not going to wind up in a South Africa type situation. And I think that it is wrong and foolish to suggest that we are. O.K, good. And that brings me to my second related question for your argument. Which is just as a matter of political engagement or 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 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 mean, I don’t think I’ve ever used the term white culture, maybe like once or twice in a million words plus 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 an interesting discussion from guys like Eric Kaufmann, who’s 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, the reason why you have to talk about it, about it. It’s a little bit of a bifurcated thing. And I think about this with my own kids. I 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. You can’t use it. You’ve got it. You’ve got to 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 100 times, I’ll say it 101 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 white people just 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 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’m not. I’ve done enough real politics that I don’t think that comes from just saying, oh, pretty please stop. We need to show that they’re going to be actual consequences for people who are discriminating against whites in America. But isn’t there then isn’t there at least a certain limitation on that kind of organization imposed by the reality that white people as a category is. I mean, look, all these categories are insanely diverse. Of course, 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 there just is 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. right. Not just for a little while, just to be clear. I’m not on yacht off Kennebunkport. I’m not Kennebunkport Yeah near my lobster fisherman. Cousins, mostly. But Maine is one of the whitest states in the union. It is also a extremely progressive environment. Not the whole state. State is divided. There’s white working class voters whose state is more progressive. Downstate is it’s progressive. And that’s white culture. If there is any white culture, isn’t that white culture. Well, I agree, and this is why I don’t use the term right. I mean, again, it was pinned on me at the Senate hearing. But I do think that there’s some validity in it. I mean, that’s kind of where I wound up in reading the subsequent internet debate, but it’s not the best term. There was. Well, and there was Yeah 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 O.K, historic American culture, we should describe this as white culture. And again, I followed the ins and outs of that debate. It definitely reflected, I think, yeah, a real impulse on the right to respond to anti-white discrimination with a more self-conscious white identity politics Yeah I mean, what I’m interested in most is like stopping the formal discrimination. O.K, that’s what I want to stop. O.K After that, it gets much Messier. I mean, again, the book I’m working on right now has 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 allusion to 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 they are, 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. Just in the sense that if that is reality, if a big part of what whiteness in America means is liberal, progressive, far left politics, 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 know you’ve got a bunch of non-whites on your side. So there’s a version of Jeremy Carl, right. 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 progressivism. 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 libs 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. I do think that at the same time, it is, 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 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 going to have to happen. Is it O.K 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 truce that we’re going to work out, hopefully. I mean. But to do that, we have to beat the left’s version, because I think the left’s version is just incompatible with a peaceful civilization. I mean, 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 here and here and there, here and there, I’ll say, they don’t always listen. But I say, 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, that’s what’s going to win. I mean, either the country is going to lose as a whole, or some version of what you’re just talking about is going to win, because 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 have the negotiation for our future polity, what it’s going to look like. Last, last question, then it is the 2050s or the 2070s or something. Some future point where we have 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 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 being out there as a libertine all by yourself, but 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 creedal 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. And I want us to preserve it. All right. Jeremy Carl, thank you for joining me. Thanks so much, Ross. A pleasure to talk to you.
