White Identity Is Galvanizing the Right

Summary

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Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Episode: "White Identity Is Galvanizing the Right"

Date: March 19, 2026
Host: Ross Douthat (NYT Opinion)
Guest: Jeremy Carl, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and author of The Unprotected Class

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the growing focus on white identity and the perception of anti-white discrimination within the American conservative movement. Host Ross Douthat interviews Jeremy Carl, whose recent book, The Unprotected Class, contends that white Americans face rising legal and cultural discrimination. Their conversation traverses civil rights law, affirmative action, immigration, changes in American culture, and the perils and prospects for white identity politics on the right. The tone remains nuanced, with Ross pressing Jeremy on both the evidence and risks of framing American politics in terms of white identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jeremy Carl’s Background & Controversy

• [02:13] Introduction to Carl’s career shift: Initially an expert in environmental policy, Carl shifted to writing on multiculturalism, immigration, and anti-white discrimination after serving in the Trump administration.
• [03:09] Details on Carl’s nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, a process clouded by controversy over his public views and writings.

2. The Core Argument of The Unprotected Class

• [04:37] The idea of “protected classes” under US civil rights law and Carl’s argument that, in practice, whites do not receive equal protection.
• Carl claims there is an “unfairly weighted” system against white Americans today, covering domains from crime reporting and entertainment to healthcare and education.

3. Civil Rights Law & Disparate Impact

• [05:53] Discussion of how landmark civil rights legislation (esp. Griggs v. Duke Power, 1971) led to the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which Carl claims has functioned to the detriment of whites in:

  • Hiring (especially when groups don’t demographically match the larger population)
  • Federal contracting favoring minority businesses
  • College admissions with race-based considerations

• Carl stresses: “All those things can be reality. And yet we can still have a system that is unfairly weighted against white Americans today.” – Jeremy Carl [10:02]

4. Affirmative Action: Temporal Case and Socioeconomic Angle

• [10:52] Carl largely opposes race-based affirmative action, arguing for support based on socioeconomic status rather than race.

  "I don't think that race needs to directly play into that...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." – Jeremy Carl [11:42]

5. Immigration’s Cultural and Demographic Impact

• [13:14] Carl describes the dramatic effects of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act and the declining white share of the population.

  • Immigration shifts strain what he characterizes as a former cohesive “mainstream American culture.”
  • He asserts that multiculturalism leads to both formal and informal disadvantages for white Americans.

  “Now we have a growing multi-ethnic group and I think that's going to be an important part of this new American ethnicity that we're creating.” – Jeremy Carl [18:02]

• Ross’s Counterpoint: Cultural alienation is not the same as legal discrimination [16:31].

6. Is This Different From Past Immigration Waves?

• [17:54] Carl argues that contemporary immigration’s visual differences (i.e., race) make assimilation more complex than in the past.
• Ross pushes back, citing historical anxieties about Irish, Italians, etc., and the American tradition of eventual assimilation [19:31].

7. The Role of Affirmative Action and Upward Mobility

• [21:21] Carl claims affirmative action confers unearned advantages on recent immigrants of color, fostering resentment among whites.
• He links dismantling DEI and race-conscious policies to improved assimilation and reduced resentment.

8. The “Intensification” of Anti-White Discrimination

• [22:36] Both cite the rise in explicit policies related to race (hiring, media, academia) post-2013 as a break from previous eras.
• Cites pieces like Jacob Savage’s "The Lost Generation" on challenges facing young white professionals, especially men.

9. Supreme Court, Current Policy, and Remaining Gaps

• [26:39] Evaluating the impact of Supreme Court decisions and Trump-era DEI rollbacks:
  • Carl notes Asian Americans became the public face for anti-affirmative action lawsuits, which in some cases left white representation unchanged or declining [28:00].

  “I think it was because they knew...that boomer white Supreme Court justices were just gonna be uncomfortable doing anything that looked like they were advantaging white people." – Jeremy Carl [28:00]

10. Legal Changes vs. Cultural Changes

• [32:19] Concrete change depends on both legal action (lawsuits, enforcement) and shifting public discourse.
• Carl observes increasing national conversation about “anti-white discrimination” since his book’s publication.

11. Personal Experience and Cultural Hostility

• [34:31] Carl admits facing more barriers in elite circles for his political views than for his race.

• [36:07] He claims that cultural depictions of “whiteness” have become stigmatized in elite spaces, though not to the extreme of historical racism against minorities.

  “Whiteness...has become culturally disfavored, at least in certain elite circles in recent years.” – Jeremy Carl [36:57]

12. Navigating White Identity and White Culture

• [43:58] Ross questions Carl’s use of terms like "cultural genocide" and rhetoric about "persecution," noting how such language is pervasive and radicalizing on the right.
• Carl responds that he sometimes uses provocative language to “troll the libs,” but tries to take rhetorical distance from concepts like “cultural genocide” [46:08].
• On the future: “I don't actually think that we are in a cultural genocide per se. However...I see some disquieting things going on that make me concerned about our trajectory.” – Jeremy Carl [47:25]

13. Optimism vs. Black-Pill Pessimism on the Right

• [50:26] Discussion of radical despair, "great replacement" theories, and whether Trump has de-radicalized portions of the right.
• Carl insists, “our bad case is not South Africa” and rejects extreme right-wing fatalism [53:55].

14. The Limits of White Identity Politics

• [54:51] Carl says he prefers “common American culture” over "white culture" and urges a civic nationalist approach.

  “I'm a civic nationalist. I'm not an ethnic nationalist or certainly not a racial nationalist of any type...But I'm not willing to let every other group play racial politics and white people just sit there and be victimized by that.” – Jeremy Carl [55:49]

• Ross notes the inherent diversity (and progressivism) within white American subcultures, making "white culture" both diffuse and internally fragmented [56:58].

15. Future Vision for American Identity

• [63:27] Ross asks for the key pillars of a renewed American identity:
  • Carl names: freedom balanced by community; directness; a revival of religious sensibility; and patriotism.

  "The American experiment is an incredible, unique experiment...I want every American to be proud of that. I want us to preserve it." – Jeremy Carl [64:43]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We have 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." – Jeremy Carl [38:22]

• "If we're going to succeed, [we need] a multi-ethnic coalition around American identity...That's gonna have to happen." – Jeremy Carl [61:44]

• “Our bad case is not South Africa. No, we are not going to wind up in a South Africa type situation. I think that it is wrong and foolish to suggest that we are.” – Jeremy Carl [53:55]

• "I actually view Trump as one of the main engines of de-radicalization, particularly of youth..." – Jeremy Carl [51:19]

• "But the reality is you might not have gotten that anyway. There might have been 30 white guys who were better than you." – Jeremy Carl, on affirmative action and resentment [34:57]

• “You sort of have a bifurcated consciousness almost where you're working against this at some level...but you gotta still be responsible for your own life and making your own life good. You cannot get into a victim mentality.” – Jeremy Carl [55:49]

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Important Timestamps by Topic

• 02:13 – Jeremy Carl’s career trajectory and nomination controversy
• 04:37 – The thesis of The Unprotected Class
• 05:53 – Civil Rights law and disparate impact
• 10:52 – Socioeconomic vs. racial affirmative action
• 13:14 – Immigration and demographic change
• 17:54 – Comparison with past immigration waves; assimilation challenges
• 21:21 – The role of affirmative action with new immigrants
• 22:36 – “Intensification” of discrimination in the past decade
• 26:39 – Supreme Court and policy changes under Trump administration
• 32:19 – Legal and cultural remedies: lawsuits and changing the conversation
• 34:31 – Personal experiences of discrimination
• 36:07 – Cultural stigmatization of whiteness
• 43:58 – Use of provocative language (cultural genocide, persecution)
• 47:42 – Monument removals and “slow motion cultural genocide”
• 50:26 – Optimism vs. radicalization; Trump’s de-radicalizing effect
• 54:51 – Limitations and risks of white identity politics
• 63:27 – Four pillars of future American identity

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Takeaways

• Main Theme: The right is grappling with whether to counter identity politics by emphasizing civic nationalism or by affirming a sense of white identity. Jeremy Carl argues for civic nationalism, acknowledging but seeking to move past grievances rooted in white identity.
• Ross Douthat challenges Carl—probing the risks of even rhetorical embrace of white identity, the limitations of treating “white culture” as a unified thing, and advocating for multiracial American conservatism as the most promising way forward.
• Language matters: Carl acknowledges some provocative language in his past was for rhetorical or "trolling" purposes, but sees value in raising awareness about discrimination—yet warns against victimhood.
• Both agree that any sustainable American identity must ultimately incorporate and unify diverse groups, not fragment along lines of race or ethnicity.

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Transcript

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[Ross Douthat]

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 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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.

[Ross Douthat]

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 Karl, welcome to interesting times.

[Jeremy Carl]

Thanks so much for having me. Ross.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 went and did many years of graduate study and have written books and articles on environment and energy policy and served in the Department of Interior. And Trump won.

[Ross Douthat]

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. Did I get that right?

[Jeremy Carl]

You got it right.

[Ross Douthat]

I got it right. Okay.

[Jeremy Carl]

It's a mouthful.

[Ross Douthat]

Talk about the job that you were nominated for. What would you be doing?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 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 things that the sad things about the way my hearing was conducted was that I got almost nothing substantive about 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 an unfortunately sad reality of our current politics.

[Ross Douthat]

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 politics. Possibly by the time this airs, we will know the fate of your nomination. But we're gonna 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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 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 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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. 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[Ross Douthat]

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. Explain that a little more.

[Jeremy Carl]

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

[Ross Douthat]

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.

[Jeremy Carl]

Correct.

[Ross Douthat]

That's distinct somewhat from affirmative action programs that are sort of explicitly race conscious. Right, but those are also part of your story, right?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 sort of come together. And I do think that there's a significant break in about 2013-2014 where we get into a much more radical sort of world than where we've been.

[Ross Douthat]

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.

[Jeremy Carl]

Absolutely.

[Ross Douthat]

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. Dare 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?

[Jeremy Carl]

And I should say at the outset, in no way am I saying 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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 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. What do you make of that argument?

[Jeremy Carl]

So I think there's a couple 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'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.

[Ross Douthat]

In what, in admissions to elite universities?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 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 Sowell, who talks about the quest for cosmic justice 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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. There obviously were other racial minorities present, but in the world of 1950s America, 1960s America, that was sort of a chord background dynamic that changes as immigration policy changes in the late 60s. How does immigration policy fit into your story?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 wrought by the Hart Celler Immigration act of 1965, which totally redid our immigration system, were just to kind of put numbers on that.

[Ross Douthat]

Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

In 1960, which is the last census we have before the Hart Celler act, we are approximately 85.5, I think, percentage 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 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 the reality is you have a more multiethnic group, groups are gonna 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 Harmeet Dhon, herself an Indian American, has been 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 kind of mainstream American culture in the 1950s, you know, Ozzie 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 halftime 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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.

[Ross Douthat]

Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

If I took 5 million white Americans and I moved them to Thailand, maybe that's not even so crazy at this point. Right. Like it's gonna have an effect on Thai culture. They may not like that. Right. So I am challenging the notion per se, quite explicitly, that diversity is our strength.

[Ross Douthat]

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 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. Is this period different for some reason?

[Jeremy Carl]

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.

[Ross Douthat]

Which was concerning, to be clear.

[Jeremy Carl]

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.

[Ross Douthat]

What do you mean by visual differences?

[Jeremy Carl]

Meaning people look different? Right. Like if I'm from Ireland and I go and I marry some old stock English person. Right. Like my Kids are not necessarily gonna 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. Of 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 De 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've 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.

[Ross Douthat]

No, but we have. We do have, I think, a history of fairly successfully getting over some, you know, pretty substantial differences of, for want of a better word, physiognomy, culture. I mean, I think. 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 that alone is a dramatic difference now. Maybe religion is a bigger difference.

[Jeremy Carl]

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. Right. Like, there was no question that in the early 20th century, it's like you were gonna assimilate and you could have the League of United Latin American Citizens right in the 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 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

Oh, absolutely. And you're sort of teeing up my point unintentionally or maybe intentionally, I don't know.

[Ross Douthat]

Everything that happens on this show is intentional, Jeremy.

[Jeremy Carl]

But yes, I mean, part of the problem is like you 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 ADAs, 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ross Douthat]

What concretely changes in terms of patterns of hiring, discrimination, admissions, discrimination, what are we talking about there?

[Jeremy Carl]

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

[Ross Douthat]

name, I think Jacob Savage. It's a piece called the Lost Generation, which is 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. And I think also universities. Right.

[Ross Douthat]

And he's hiring for tenure track positions. Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

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 had to navigate. 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 talked 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, 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.

[Ross Douthat]

Yeah, and we're going to come back to that because I want to talk about what white culture actually means in in America. I have some questions about.

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[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 Frank, 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.

[Ross Douthat]

This is in applications to Harvard and elite institutions generally. Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

But I actually don't think that that was the primary reason they did it. I think it was because they knew the savvy plaintiff's attorneys, that boomer white Supreme Court justices were just gonna be uncomfortable doing anything that looked like they were advantaging white people. And so they sort of put this more friendly Asian face on this to make it acceptable to them. However, now we have a couple 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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, although they don't put it that way. It's sort of. 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 you can't be white to apply for this scholarship and Asians get sort of folded in. So it's different on a case by case basis.

[Ross Douthat]

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 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's 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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.

[Ross Douthat]

They don't usually utter that sentence. Would you agree with that?

[Jeremy Carl]

They utter that sentence, but they say, you know, 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, right? 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.

[Ross Douthat]

But like in the case of a Hollywood screenwriting shop, 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

Well, 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 this 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 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. 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 think that we've got smoking guns here. It's not just, I'm saying, oh, well, the number is different, it's wrong.

[Ross Douthat]

So 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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 Ruffo, 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 sort of puckered a little bit because, like, oh, you know, 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 politicians and people who will call that out by name has gone up a lot just in the last.

[Ross Douthat]

So you're raising awareness, you're doing call

[Jeremy Carl]

outs, you're raising awareness.

[Ross Douthat]

I do. I feel like I've heard this language before. But in the concrete, you need the changes that the Trump administration has made to stick over time.

[Jeremy Carl]

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 till the late 60s. And then of course you have some informal resegregation that happened 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 gonna 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 gonna bring them into compliance because it's gonna be painful for them not to obey the law.

[Ross Douthat]

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 because of your race?

[Jeremy Carl]

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,

[Ross Douthat]

I don't know, just in the sense that like affirmative action and diversity rules discriminated against you when you applied.

[Jeremy Carl]

And then, and I mean, this is one of the toxic things, right? It's actually talk about things that build up an excess of unjustified white resentment. So let's say you've got 100 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, hey, 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 handicapped parking spots where people see them empty and you're like, ah, if there weren't some handicapped person there, I would get it. No, somebody else would have taken the spot.

[Ross Douthat]

But I think that's. You mentioned the 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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 of 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.

[Ross Douthat]

But that doesn't seem like racial hostility. I don't wanna go through 16 different examples right. 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?

[Jeremy Carl]

Absolutely.

[Ross Douthat]

I don't get that vibe watching American pop culture in the current age as regards white people.

[Jeremy Carl]

Well, as I said, 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, and I cite some data from Annenberg, 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. There's certainly areas in which obviously Tom Cruise is off being the white fighter pilot hero, 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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? Like something that would affect your kids, for instance, in everyday life?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 gonna 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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? Would they have preferred that you take a job focused on these areas, do you think?

[Jeremy Carl]

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, 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, but he's not afraid to, say, go into a sclerotic UN bureaucracy and say, hey, we need to do things differently. And so if that meta sense, 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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[EM Gessen]

In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Anyone's first cousin could be plotting murder.

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This is UCE 4735 and today is

[EM Gessen]

upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals. And I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan, an upstanding citizen.

[Jeremy Carl]

You know, my clients are cartel level guys. They're all badasses.

[EM Gessen]

But it's one thing to know there's

[Ross Douthat]

a more permanent way to do it.

[EM Gessen]

Is there?

[Ross Douthat]

Yeah, more and more different, permanent.

[EM Gessen]

And another thing to understand.

[Ross Douthat]

Alan. Murder me.

[EM Gessen]

It ended up being so much worse than I thought I knew.

[Ross Douthat]

The price is eminently reasonable. Okay, for what it's worth, what the

[EM Gessen]

hell was Alan thinking?

[Jeremy Carl]

Let's just say that I'm a little bit pissed off. Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah.

[EM Gessen]

From Serial Productions and the New York Times. I'm EM Gessen, and this is the idiot. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ross Douthat]

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, like 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, right? But you know, 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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?

[Ross Douthat]

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

[Jeremy Carl]

deleted, by the way, I've always just deleted my tweets. Quarterly for years. Had nothing to do with trying to hide anything.

[Ross Douthat]

Okay. But just to take one of the fuller quotes, this was something you wrote after A jury convicted January 6th rioters. 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 D.C. 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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 bads. 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 in the Jim Crow's house 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 sort of thing I'm talking about.

[Ross Douthat]

Can you offer a similar explanation for why you would use a term like cultural genocide? Just because that. 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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

[Ross Douthat]

I don't know if you're thrilled, but you're okay that I've asked.

[Jeremy Carl]

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 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, 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. I'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 make me concerned about our trajectory.

[Ross Douthat]

And just to be concrete, you mean, you know, 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. 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 that 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 libs. Right, 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 immigrants in this conscious scheme. Right. Like there's a lot of that on the right.

[Jeremy Carl]

Well, 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.

[Ross Douthat]

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. Correct. And that was good for them. 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, I mean, but it's not like five guys, you know, sitting in a room saying, we hate white people 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 where things are going than the kind of language you're using would suggest?

[Jeremy Carl]

Well, again, if you read the end of my book, and I know, God bless you, you got a million subsidies.

[Ross Douthat]

I've read every single word of your book, Jeremy, and don't test me on it, but I. No, I am.

[Jeremy Carl]

It ends on a very optimistic tone. Right.

[Ross Douthat]

But books. There's books.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[Ross Douthat]

And then there's Internet Persona.

[Jeremy Carl]

Sure.

[Ross Douthat]

And there are plenty of people on the right who have a tone in their books and then a tone on social media.

[Jeremy Carl]

Sure.

[Ross Douthat]

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.

[Jeremy Carl]

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, ugh, you know, I 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 gonna 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.

[Ross Douthat]

They're pretty important, Jeremy. I hate to tell you this.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, well, so 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, or talked to them or whatever. Maybe not. I know what you mean with. With sort of these people who were Very radicalized and black pilled, for lack of a better term under the previous administrations. And they sort of despaired 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 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. I don't know anybody and I know a few people who is in an 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 sort of American mainstream. Obviously some of your liberal listeners will disagree with where I'm drawing that boundary.

[Ross Douthat]

They might, yes, I think. I don't know. Yeah, 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. 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. 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 on a very rapid time horizon in a state governed by non whites, that this is the future. So one, 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 could not agree more. Okay, good. So tell me more about that.

[Jeremy Carl]

Our bad case is not South Africa. No, we are not going to wind up in a South Africa type situation. I think that it is wrong and foolish to suggest that we are.

[Ross Douthat]

Okay, good. So that brings me to my second question for your argument. Right. 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? Right. 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.

[Jeremy Carl]

You have made several statements about your worry regarding the erasure of, of white

[Ross Douthat]

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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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 sort of an interesting discussion from guys like Eric Kaufman, 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, that the reason why you have to talk about it, 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.

[Ross Douthat]

That discrimination is out there, but you can't use it as an excuse.

[Jeremy Carl]

You can't use it. 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 gotta 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, right, like 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 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. You know, we need to show that there are going to be actual consequences for people who are discriminating against whites in America.

[Ross Douthat]

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. Right, Right, of course. But white liberals have become more radicalized on racial issues. Absolutely. You can see this in the polling data. Right. But what that means to me is that there just is sort of 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. Right. I'm not on a yacht, not at Kennebunkport. I'm not at Kennebunkport. I'm 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 is divided. There's white working class voters who supported it down. The whole state is more progressive. That downstate is. It's progressive. And that's white culture. Right, right. If there is any white culture, isn't that white culture?

[Jeremy Carl]

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.

[Ross Douthat]

There was. Well, and there was. Yeah.

[Jeremy Carl]

And it's not the term that I used.

[Ross Douthat]

Cause 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 sort of defend the notion that, okay, 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 sort of impulse on the right to respond to anti white discrimination with a kind of more self conscious white identity politics.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah. I mean, what I'm interested in most is like stopping the formal discrimination. Okay. That's What I want to stop 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.

[Ross Douthat]

But there is, I think, at least some tension in the argument you're making, 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 States. Should 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?

[Jeremy Carl]

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

[Ross Douthat]

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.

[Jeremy Carl]

I think some element of that is gonna have to be the truce that we're gonna 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 gonna lead to anything other than incredible amounts of racial strife and anger and societal dislocation. Right. So I just. What I'm hoping is a group of us beat that vision and then we're gonna 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 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 gonna be that negotiation. But I think the good news is that's what's gonna win. I mean, either the country is gonna lose as a whole, or some version of what you're just talking about is gonna win. We're not going back to the 1950s. We're gonna have to reconstitute. There's a ton of patriotic people I know of every possible ethnic background who wanna make that happen. And that's gonna be, I hope, the negotiation for our future polity, what it's gonna look like.

[Ross Douthat]

Last question. Then it is the 2000 and 50s or the 2000 and 70s, 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 the four pillars, the non negotiables of Americanness that you would want to see endure.

[Jeremy Carl]

I think freedom, but within a sense of community, not being out there as libertine all by yourself, but kind of 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. I want us to preserve it.

[Ross Douthat]

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

[Jeremy Carl]

Thanks so much, Ross. A pleasure to talk to you. You.

[Ross Douthat]

Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez Boy, Victoria Chamberlain and Emily Holzeneck. Jordana Hochman 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 Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos and Emma Kelbeck. Special thanks to Jonah Kessler, Russell, Alison Brusek, Marina King, Jan Kobel and Mike Pierretz. And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

[EM Gessen]

Foreign.

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