Ep 83 | How Trump Is BREAKING the Racist DEI Caste System | Jeremy Carl

Summary

Zero Hour with James Poulos - Episode 83 Summary

Title: How Trump Is BREAKING the Racist DEI Caste System
Host: James Poulos
Guest: Jeremy Carl
Release Date: February 3, 2025

---

1. Introduction

In Episode 83 of Zero Hour with James Poulos, host James Poulos engages in a profound discussion with Jeremy Carl, a seasoned analyst with over a decade of experience in American cultural issues and a former policy adviser at Stanford University. The episode delves into the intricate dynamics of race, politics, and institutional frameworks in the United States, particularly focusing on how former President Donald Trump is challenging the prevailing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) systems that Carl describes as a "racist caste system."

---

2. The Concept of Whiteness and DEI

Jeremy Carl introduces the premise of his book, The Unprotected Class, arguing that white Americans have increasingly become the "unprotected class" in societal discourse. He emphasizes that current anti-white discrimination permeates various societal institutions, necessitating open conversations and corrective measures.

Jeremy Carl [03:43]: "It's a work of saying, hey, right now we've got a lot of anti white discrimination throughout our society and we should be talking about it. We should fix that because we want to get back to... focusing on the content of our character and not the color of our skin."

Carl critiques the academic and legal constructs that have historically defined and redefined "whiteness," suggesting that the legal definitions have remained relatively stable despite superficial changes in cultural perceptions.

---

3. The Changing Coalition under Trump

The conversation shifts to the unique coalition that supports Trump—multiethnic and diverse—challenging the notion that his support base is predominantly white. Carl highlights how minorities have voted for Trump, suggesting a shift towards a more inclusive nationalist identity that transcends traditional racial boundaries.

James Poulos [01:30]: "You got the red tie, the orange man is coming back. And white Americans are part of a big tent now."

Jeremy Carl [14:28]: "This is a very multi ethnic coalition that's saying, no, we're just not going to treat other Americans this way."

Carl posits that Trump's platform offers an opportunity to dismantle institutionalized anti-white discrimination by fostering a consensus that includes diverse ethnic groups aiming for a united American identity.

---

4. Institutional Racism and Free Association

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the concept of "freedom of association." Carl argues that current civil rights laws have overstepped, leading to enforced discrimination rather than genuine equality. He advocates for restoring freedom of association in the private sector, allowing individuals and businesses to make choices without federal interference.

Jeremy Carl [24:02]: "As long as the government is not doing that, that should be a permissible thing. And the extent that we've lost that, it sort of becomes... we're not going to have the government... dictating that to them."

Carl references historical cases like Griggs vs. Duke Power to illustrate how legal doctrines have enabled discrimination without intent, complicating the pursuit of genuine equality.

---

5. The Role of HR and Gender in DEI

Carl explores how Human Resources (HR) departments have become battlegrounds for DEI policies, often driven by liberal white women in corporate settings. He traces the rise of HR from the 1950s to its current role in perpetuating anti-white sentiments within elite social circles.

Jeremy Carl [19:16]: "These sorts of things... Richard Hanania, who's kind of written on somewhat similar subjects..."

Carl acknowledges the complexity of addressing DEI issues without alienating key demographics, advocating for responsible and consensual policy reforms.

---

6. Future Policies and Legal Changes

Looking ahead, Carl outlines actionable strategies to dismantle the DEI caste system. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging the conservative legal apparatus, such as the Federalist Society, to reinterpret constitutional and legal frameworks favorably.

Jeremy Carl [37:41]: "I think what's needed is to copy what the left has done and be very aggressive about interpreting a constitutional and legal structure in ways that advance our own agenda and not apologize for doing that."

He suggests eliminating doctrines like "disparate impact," which allow for discrimination lawsuits based on statistical disparities without intent, thereby restoring individual choice in associations.

---

7. Geopolitical Impacts

The discussion broadens to include the influence of foreign adversaries in exacerbating American racial and ethnic divisions. Carl speculates on how countries like China might leverage platforms like TikTok to manipulate public opinion and foster internal discord.

Jeremy Carl [53:13]: "If I were the Chinese, I would be pushing for unrestricted open borders in the United States... attempting to cripple my adversary in that way."

Carl urges vigilance against such foreign interventions, highlighting the need for strategic countermeasures to preserve national unity.

---

8. Conclusions and Optimistic Pathways

In concluding the episode, Carl expresses cautious optimism about the future. He believes that Trump's broad-based coalition can usher in a new era of American identity that is inclusive yet rooted in traditional values. Carl envisions a society where diverse ethnic groups unite under a common patriotic sentiment, reducing racial animosity and fostering mutual respect.

Jeremy Carl [59:55]: "He is trying to unite people around a kind of an American nationalist pride and identity. And I think that's great."

James Poulos echoes this sentiment, suggesting that achieving a "purple America" requires starting with a unified red America first—a departure from the traditional approach of seeking bipartisan consensus.

James Poulos [60:25]: "To get back to a purple America, we need a red America first."

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• James Poulos [01:30]: "You got the red tie, the orange man is coming back. And white Americans are part of a big tent now."

• Jeremy Carl [03:43]: "It's a work of saying, hey, right now we've got a lot of anti white discrimination throughout our society and we should be talking about it. We should fix that because we want to get back to... focusing on the content of our character and not the color of our skin."

• Jeremy Carl [14:28]: "This is a very multi ethnic coalition that's saying, no, we're just not going to treat other Americans this way."

• Jeremy Carl [24:02]: "As long as the government is not doing that, that should be a permissible thing. And the extent that we've lost that, it sort of becomes... we're not going to have the government... dictating that to them."

• Jeremy Carl [37:41]: "I think what's needed is to copy what the left has done and be very aggressive about interpreting a constitutional and legal structure in ways that advance our own agenda and not apologize for doing that."

• Jeremy Carl [53:13]: "If I were the Chinese, I would be pushing for unrestricted open borders in the United States... attempting to cripple my adversary in that way."

• Jeremy Carl [59:55]: "He is trying to unite people around a kind of an American nationalist pride and identity. And I think that's great."

• James Poulos [60:25]: "To get back to a purple America, we need a red America first."

---

Final Thoughts

Episode 83 of Zero Hour with James Poulos offers a compelling analysis of the current racial and political landscape in the United States. Jeremy Carl presents a critical perspective on DEI initiatives, advocating for a reevaluation of institutional practices to foster genuine equality and unity. The conversation underscores the complexity of dismantling entrenched systems while highlighting the potential for a more inclusive American identity under Trump's leadership. Listeners are encouraged to reflect on the interplay between race, policy, and national unity as the nation navigates its evolving identity.

Transcript

[Advertiser]

This episode is brought to you by Meundies. While Meundies can't totally help your love life, this Valentine's Day they can offer you insanely comfy undies and loungewear to buy or gift. Meundies has so many awesome Valentine's Day prints and styles. Plus you can match with your partner, friends or even your pets. This Valentine's Day give the gift that'll keep them thinking of you and score huge site wide [e-mail] Spotify that's meundies.com Spotify Meundies. Comfort from the outside in.

[James Polis]

At some point, whites became the unprotected class in America. We're allowed to talk about that, but how long is it going to last? Jeremy Carl's here. I'm James Polis. Welcome to Zero Hour.

[Jeremy Carl]

La.

[James Polis]

Jeremy Carl is in the chair. He's been studying cultural issues in America for over a decade, even serving as a policy adviser to national political figures during his time at Stanford University as a research fellow. He is here today to bless us with his extensive knowledge. Jeremy, welcome.

[Jeremy Carl]

Thanks so much, James. It's a pleasure to sit down and talk with you.

[James Polis]

You got the red tie, the orange man is coming back.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yep.

[James Polis]

And white Americans are part of a big tent now.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's actually the fascinating thing right. About this election. And in many ways, in many ways this is a best case scenario and that, you know, somehow like all the minorities voted for the Nazi and they just, you know, forgot to realize it, I guess. Right. And so I do think that this gives the possibility of kind of folding an anti white discrimination, you know, agenda into like an actual thing that is not just about white people but about a kind of multi ethnic group of people who don't want to discriminate on the basis of race, who just want America to be great. Right. And I think it's really exciting to see that a lot of these folks on the left who claim to speak for the agendas of various groups kind of got exposed.

[James Polis]

Well, it is exciting. We got your book right back there on the shelf. The unprotected class is not yet obsolete. So just like lay it out. So what's the thesis of the book? I know it was, you know, some people wanted to grab it with radioactive tongs a couple weeks ago, but now we're allowed to talk about all this stuff.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, no, it's been great. I mean, I was obviously very nervous when I wrote the book originally. Not very nervous because I'd sort of decided that I'm going to write it no matter what. Moderately nervous, but I was moderately nervous about how it would be received. And what saw is from guys like Tucker and Donald Trump Jr. But folks who are obviously very movement people embraced it. But I also, it was embraced by a lot of people who were not even particularly political, not even particularly conservative, who just said, hey, this is a conversation that we need to have. And I really tried to have it in the book in a responsible way. I mean, again, it's not a work of racial identitarianism. It's certainly not a work of white supremacy. It's a work of saying, hey, right now we've got a lot of anti white discrimination throughout our society and we should be talking about it. We should fix that because we want to get back to, even though it's slightly cliched, but we want to try to embrace a country where we're focusing on the content of our character and not the color of our skin. And we can't do that when we're kind of telling one group to get to the back of the line and they're not even allowed to complain about it.

[James Polis]

Yeah. So whole basket issues here. A large part of the problem, as I know you agree, is we somehow wound it up with this sort of priestly cast of spiritual overlords kind of telling us who counted as white as a matter of this newfangled religion that they were slapping together. But there is sort of, I think a lot of Americans, especially today, are sort of like, you know, what is whiteness anyway? Like, what does it mean to be white in America in 2024?

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, well, and there is what you're seeing, I think, again, as people try on the left to comprehend what happened with Trump, you know, you're going to hear a lot more about multiracial whiteness and everything else. And what that basically just means functionally is people who are not white, who want to be part of the American project and be perceived as normatively American, which is of course a wonderful thing and we should encourage. But this of course drives the left to rage like almost nothing else. And so you have that going on at the same time, sort of what counts as white. This is actually less of a moving target than people think. Again, you can react a lot of these leftist scholars who get very cute talking about how the Irish became white or how the Jews became white, and there's a whole literature around this. And at some level this is true. And I do talk about this in my book, that obviously even within the white community, historically there's always been a so called caste system. I mean, if you were sort of British descent of a certain class at the beginning, or you were kind of a wasp, you were sort of at the top. And if your name was maybe suspiciously Greek, maybe you weren't as high. If your name was Jewish, you weren't as high. But at the same time, Even back in 1790, when we had a naturalization act that was limited to white people at the time in 1790, nobody was unclear on who that is. And it would have included a bunch of people who would not be seen as maybe culturally at the top of the status pecking order. But, but at the same time, people could get a little too cute with this question and be like, oh, well, these groups became white. No, they were always kind of considered white. The way I talk about it in the book is really kind of using that legal definition. I don't kind of get into these abstract whiteness studies questions. I just say somebody who's treated white legally by the regime, they are the white people I'm talking about. And if somebody is a Hispanic, but they look whiter than me, but they're not treated as a white person by the regime in terms of how it passes out certain favors, then they're not in that category.

[James Polis]

Yeah, I mean, it can definitely become capricious. And it really is a vast invitation to me. Search and anecdote and master's theses and even probably PhD dissertations at this point. I mean, my dad growing up in Detroit, Michigan in the 1950s, you know, there were signs that the public pools. It's just invidious discrimination against those swarthy Mediterranean Greeks.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

So, you know, fast forward to the 90s and you know, the. One of the big academic books, trendy academic books at the time, was Black Athena. And it was all about how like actually, no, the Greeks were. Well, maybe they weren't really African, but they were kind of more African than they were white.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And you know, I've been, I've been slowly morphing into just full dad joke mode and just like humor, entertaining myself with these jokes and never letting them die. Um, but you know, for me, you know, the, my, my, my working definition of whiteness has always sort of been. Well, it was kind of like what you got when all of the different Europeans just kind of intermarried.

[Jeremy Carl]

Correct.

[James Polis]

You know, and in that sense, like, whiteness is kind of the beacon of, of inner ethnic harmony.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

Certainly relative to Europe. And we got a little bit of that, that white ethnic Disharmony in, you know, Detroit, in Chicago, it's all Inski's Chicago. You just street, you know, running battles in the streets. And you know, the, the Poles came to America and were reviled for being, you know, sort of all these, these anti Polish stereotypes. So it's like, you know, our, our collective memory in this, in this area has, has really been like very short. And it's, it is, it's been sad, I guess, to watch so many younger Americans really with no recollection of even what their parents or grandparents went through in terms of sort of ethnic animosity. Yeah. You know, two to four years in a crappy college and coming out thinking that all of America needs to be put to the torch because racism.

[Jeremy Carl]

No, absolutely. And I actually talk a little bit about kind of, again, I don't get into the construction of whiteness so much, much less kind of like trying to have some Nazi adjacent racial mysticism category of what whiteness is. But I think you're correct to observe that it really starts frankly after the Immigration act of 1924, which is the strictest immigration law ever passed in the United States. So you have that and basically immigration slows down dramatically. You've had this big influx of white ethnics from various parts of the world at that time, the so called off whites, as some people would call them. And you have the stopping of immigration plus World War II. And it acts as sort of a cultural mixer. And so the point you get to like 1950s, this has been going on for a long time. And all of the Greeks and the Italians and whatever else are going through this process of Americanization. And by the way, I think the relevance of this, and it's one of the recommendations in my book is I think that if we stopped having kind of racial categorizations for which we were awarding or penalizing people, I think that could happen to a lot of other groups where we could kind of build a new American majority that's going to include all sorts of multiethnic people, a lot of Hispanics who are of course predominantly of European descent. And it's not that, of course, if you're not in that group that your rights are somewhat less. Not at all. I mean, everybody needs to have equal rights. But in terms of a cultural majority, we could begin building that kind of new American identity right now if we stopped trying to push people apart, which is essentially what we're doing.

[Farmer Bill]

If you're like me, you grew up on beef jerky. It was a must have for a road Trip. But have you read the ingredients they're putting in jerky? Maltodextrin, msg, synthetic nitrates, artificial flavors, tons of sugar and allergens like ultra processed soy and gluten.

[James Polis]

Ugh.

[Farmer Bill]

Not to mention most drinking companies use the lowest quality of imported beef. There's the dilemma.

[James Polis]

You need protein on the go, but.

[Farmer Bill]

Beef jerky is laced with lab chemicals from the globalist laboratories. Enter Farmer Bill. Farmer Bill's provisions is a rancher owned meat snacks company in South Dakota that offers pasture raised meat snacks. He makes biltong. It's like beef jerky but without all the bad stuff. Just beef, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, coriander, clove white and black pepper.

[Jeremy Carl]

That's it.

[Farmer Bill]

No sugar, no soy, no nitrates. You can try the four pack sampler of their pre sliced biltong, but I would recommend going for their best seller bundle which includes the four pack, a half pound slab and two of their grass fed tallow balms that will nourish that dry wintry skin. The pre sliced biltong is perfect. Perfect for protein on the go and the slab is great for snacking at the house or hosting a party. It's like a huge dry aged ribeye that you can slice off little steak strips for snacking. Grab Farmer Bills bestseller bundle with free shipping and an extra 15% off with zero hour. Use the code zero hour.

[James Polis]

One word.

[Farmer Bill]

Go to www.farmerbillsprovisions.com or click the link.

[James Polis]

In the show notes.

[Farmer Bill]

The owner of Farmer Bills is a listener of the show. So let's support those who support the show show. Use code zero hour.

[James Polis]

Today you mentioned these sort of like bizarre and recondite like racialist memes and kind of that corner of the Internet. I, I think sometimes it can be hard for people who aren't as like online as, as we are to understand like how to just a set, you know, like so wait, there, there are these guys and they actually say that they're real Nazis, but then they're just like all they're doing is telling jokes. But then some of them are like not funny. So just like help people understand like what is going on in that corner of things. How much do you think it's like a real problem and how much do you think it's ultimately just kind of like a laugh?

[Jeremy Carl]

I think I wouldn't be so dismissive as to say it's just a laugh, but I also think it's much more politically marginal. Like a guy like Richard Spencer who's kind of the One of the biggest guys to come out of that world.

[James Polis]

You know, kind of claimed famed CNN analyst Richard Spencer.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, I mean, I think he gets his most publicity when he got it from the left and that he's out there endorsing Kamala and whatever else. I think that these guys can be very loud on Twitter, but their political profile in terms of the right is much more marginal. It's just not where the overwhelming majority of conservatives are. They don't want to engage in that sort of stuff. And I mean, I think that there are people. And I think the only worry would be that if we don't stop the kind of anti white discrimination and racism going on in our official institutions, you do push a lot of angry young white men in that direction because they say, well, the system doesn't have anything going on for me. So, you know, these guys are kind of offering this vision of greatness. Right. And that's kind of what they do. But I think at the end of the day, these are pretty marginal people for the most part. And some of them have gone after me. I mean, because, you know, I'm not a purist enough and I'm very much. This is a civic nationalist book and not an ethnic nationalist.

[James Polis]

What is it like the A10 blue eyes.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. Yeah, yeah, whatever. The hair thing is also. I can't remember what you call it, but it's also insufficient. But yeah, it's. I mean, I think the number of people who really are deeply engaged in this who are not online is small. And you can also tell, by the way, because for all of the freaking out, the amount of white directed racial violence from white people that's going on toward minorities in this country is like trivial. I mean, it's Juicy Smollett notwithstanding. Notwithstanding. Right. It is truly. I mean, but it's like a man bites dog sort of story when it really does happen. And I'd say it never happens. Right, but. So I think that these guys are mostly much more bark than bite.

[James Polis]

You opened with the joke of this broad based, multiethnic coalition of Trump voters not realizing that they were voting for the fascist or whatever.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

But, you know, by the same token, a lot of these guys online who, not fascist, but reactionary, just sort of openly like, no, like, this project has failed. We must return most of those guys, from what I can tell, and this is now becoming a running joke on the Internet, most of those guys are themselves Latinos.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, well, there's definitely. There's definitely. And maybe I should say I'm almost hesitant to say the word Nick Fuentes, because I feel like somebody will come out and attack me. But you're summoning the demon. But yeah, I mean, Right. Like, it's sort of funny that the kind of most notorious of these so called white supremacists today is this guy who is at least partially of Latino descent. I'm not put his whole family tree to some sort of examination, but yeah, you have some of this overcompensation going on. Right. And it's sort of, I wouldn't call it so harmless as to be a joke, but it's a reaction and frustration to the straitjacket that they're being put in. And this is kind of what I talk about in the book is the elements of that straitjacket. And I'm really hopeful that with Trump and I'd be delighted to be a part of this in some way if I can, but that the administration comes in and I think there's definitely the mindset and the knowledge that we didn't have in 2016 to really take a sledgehammer to a lot of this stuff, at least as far as the government goes, and to return us to a greater degree of freedom of association. And as not to be trite, but as Justice Roberts said, the best way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. And so I'm not under any illusion that we're going to be able to fix that in four years. But I do think that in some ways the particularly multiethnic element of this coalition that Trump has put together gives him a unique kind of platform to do that. Because it's really hard to say, well, this is just like the desperate last gasp of white people against the tides of minorities who want to crush them, when in fact, this is a very multi ethnic coalition that's saying, no, we're just not going to treat other Americans this way. And so I do think that that is a unique and not entirely unexpected opportunity because you saw some of these Trends even in 2020. But I think even for somebody like me who was very bullish on Trump's chances, the degree of shift, particularly among minority voters, was quite something to watch.

[James Polis]

Yeah, well, I mean, for professional or semi pro ideological trend watchers like you and I, God help us, some of these trends have been, you know, have been visible for quite some time. And you know, when you're talking about the, the politics of that sledgehammer, just like breaking up these, these really ossified legal structures. Yeah, I think a lot of people, you know, outside of that. That fish tank, shocked, you know, what are, what are all these Jewish guys doing? Sort of wanting, you know, why. Why aren't they sort of, you know, playing the victim card or Michelin's, you know, so a lot of those guys are right at the front.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, no, absolutely. And again, you look at. Or you look in, In Florida and Texas, I think Trump took strong majorities of, not just Hispanics. And there's not. These are not small groups. Right. This is not sampling error. Right. When you have like 26% or whatever, 35% Miami. Yeah. And you can figure it. You can figure it out. Asian Americans. He also won a majority in those areas, and then even huge numbers of young black men as compared to previous times. So there really are opportunities, and it is much better. I kind of talk about at the beginning of the book that this can't just be a project of white people whining about how they're oppressed and trying to play a victim class and seeing if they can get something against other people. That it has to be ultimately a consensus reality that people of a wide variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds agree that we've got this problem and are trying to address it. And at some level, while there's a million things going on that it's from a political science perspective, over determined Trump's victory.

[James Polis]

Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

This is one of the things that I see in it. And again, I think that's. That's really exciting.

[James Polis]

I want to talk a little bit more about free association, but first, just, you know, you look at the way that Trump has won in those categories.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And he, he did win women outright, I think. Nevertheless.

[Jeremy Carl]

Married women.

[James Polis]

Married women. Yeah. Nevertheless. Looking at that gender gap, which is real, and then looking at, well, you know, where did this politics of racial and ethnic grievance come from and how was it reified into these institutions and laws?

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

How much of that is really more about. About gender than it is about race? How much of that apparatus that superstructure was, is really ultimately the creation of. Of a certain kind of woman and, you know, a certain kind of white woman.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah. Well, there is the H R ification of our culture. And in fact, Richard Hanania, who's kind of written on somewhat similar subjects, has talked about, I think I quote this in the book. You know, in 1950, you know, 27% of corporations had HR departments. Right. And now it's like 99%.

[James Polis]

Now it's 110%.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. And so. And so these sorts of things. Yes, it is there. So there's two things going on. In fact, my next book is gonna be all about how horrible liberal white people are and how they're destroying everything. So it's not that I'm letting liberal white people and particularly liberal white women off the hook. At the same time, I wanna be a little bit careful in that sometimes when people say that, they kind of use it because they wanna avoid any sort of uncomfortable racial confrontation. And I have enough respect for the political agency of every community in this country, ethnic and otherwise, to say, hey, you know what? There've been a lot of bad actors in the African American, the Asian American and Hispanic communities who have a lot of power and who have misused that to kind of foist various anti white things on society, and they need to be responsible for that. So that large disclaimer being made. I do think that the white woman HR lady, who's often very left wing, has definitely been a huge part of this problem, especially in the socially elite way. And in many ways you could actually trace the origins of this, as I'll do in my book, back to the 19th century and some of the social amelioration and improvement that went on among a certain class of kind of what we would now call, though it was not recognized at the time, progressive white women.

[James Polis]

Well, I can tell that the book has been a success because here you are talking about your next book. So congratulations. That's how you know it's real.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, no, no, for sure. Okay.

[James Polis]

So freedom of association, one of the things that evidently we are now allowed to talk about with the free speech that was constitutionally guaranteed to us is just bringing back into question, you know, the whole kind of civil rights.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

Superstructure of laws and regulations. Until very recently, this was sort of like, you know, you'd get the zap if you talked about it. There are obvious reasons for that. But I think at the same time, you know, especially coming out of COVID when sort of nobody had civil rights for a minute, they're like, whoa, what's going on? The vibe shifted and there are now questions being openly asked about whether we need to fundamentally reform or even throw out some of these civil rights laws. How do you unpack that and how do you sort of distinguish between what we should keep and what we should dump?

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, and I talk about this a lot in the book with the origins of the civil rights laws and essentially what I think we should keep and what we should dump. Although I don't get too granular on that because I think that ultimately has to be part again of a political process that's going to involve consensus. If one group just tries to.

[James Polis]

Some of this goes into federalism.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. If one group just tries to impose that vision on other groups, that's not going to work well. And in fact, it's sort of interesting because this book, while it's pretty radical in a lot of ways, although I think it helped change the conversation in the few months it's been out already, that it's maybe a little less radical than when I wrote it, but I'm actually a lot more understanding of the civil rights movement than some of the critics. And then I don't in any way pretend that pre1964 we were in some racial nirvana in America where everything was perfect until these horrible people came along pushing civil rights. No, I mean, there were real problems that we had in America that were serious and that needed to be addressed. And I think what happened is we took this instrument that was civil rights Law, Civil Rights act of 64. But it was a very blunt instrument and it did the job that we needed it to do at a basic level. But then it kind of is such a blunt instrument that there was a bunch of things down the line that it began to cause a lot of problems. And then I think it's also important to do, if you kind of look through the debates around the original Civil Rights act and then a lot of the things that followed on from it, that there were a lot of things that it was really clear both from the text of the act and the debates around it, where everybody was like, well, it won't do this. It won't have quotas. Of course, you wouldn't have anything that became like disparate impact doctrine or any of these sorts of things. And then a few years later, the administrative state and the courts get it, and that's exactly what we're doing. And then we get follow on Civil Rights act and a bunch of things that the people who, with very good intentions, put in the original Civil Rights act never would have contemplated have come to pass. So that's where we are again. I try to be understanding of the history that we have, but at the same time, I think that particularly in the private sector, that's where we need to really focus on restoring freedom of association. There needs to be a presumption that people are allowed to discriminate. And I mean that in the most neutral sense, meaning they make a choice.

[James Polis]

About this and not that.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right, this and that, not that. And that as long as the government is not doing that, that should be a permissible thing. And the extent that we've lost that, it sort of becomes, I mean, it sounds like, oh, well, you know, who would want to discriminate? Well, I would hope nobody would want to discriminate just on the basis of somebody's skin color. But what it functionally becomes is not that actually somebody's saying no Hispanic people are allowed there. It's somebody ends up in the real world, it's somebody suing because there's only 3% of Hispanics in this group, but the reference population is 20%. So there's discrimination clearly going on here. And what I want to do is just eliminate all that type of thinking and allow people in their private lives, in their private businesses, whatever else, to associate with whom they want to associate with and not have the federal government kind of dictating that to them.

[James Polis]

Yeah, well, I mean, you've, you've lived through this. There was once a time when the, the respectable boomer who was sort of running the show in America had this kind of bipolar vision of freedom where it was freedom of speech, sacred, sacrosanct, burn the flag, Nazis marching down the main street. Yeah, that's all great, but freedom of association, bad racist, like, you know, kkk. And it was this. You couldn't really reconcile these two components, right? And sure enough, you fast forward to the 2000 and tens, and lo and behold, it's freedom of association, bad KKK racism, drinking fountains, free speech. Also bad. Talking about the KKK saying racist things, saying mean stuff, that because of what race you are, that turns into mean racist stuff. And that distinction collapsed.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

Well, meanwhile, the reality of the situation is freedom of speech is great. Freedom of speech is constitutionally protected, but if you don't have freedom of association at all, then your free speech is basically toothless.

[Jeremy Carl]

That's correct. It's a similar way that people sometimes talk about the Second Amendment being the right that vindicates all of our other rights. I think, again, freedom of association is just such a fundamental thing. And my colleague at Claremont, Christopher Caldwell, who wrote a very good book on this, sort of talks about there kind of being two different constitutions almost, and that the new civil rights constitution in many ways replaced in this sort of awkward way that nobody really acknowledged at the time, the original Constitution. And again, I tried to be historically understanding of how we got there, but I think we just need to peel that back. Well, at the same time, I mean, I want to be clear, like at A governmental level. We absolutely can't. I mean, we can't have freedom of association in that way. Like, we're not going to have the government saying, well, this race gets to do something, or I get to like only associate as a government with, you know, black people or whatever it is. Right. It's just like you can't have that. So there has to be a stricter standard for things that are purely governmental in terms of nobody putting a thumb on the scale. But also people's private lives need to be returned to that.

[James Polis]

Caldwell's book, Age of Entitlement. Yeah, great book. I think it's a great companion with Helen Andrews book on the boomers.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yes.

[James Polis]

Because just so much of what's tied up in all this sort of racial politics really has to do, I think a lot with that kind of social psychology of the boomers as a generation. That psychodrama that they went through with civil rights and with Vietnam and with kind of like the, the beginning of this, this cultural.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

Tug of war within really Protestant Christianity over what is this denomination, what does this mean, where do we stand politically?

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

What about our retention rates? You know, does this all need to just become sort of literally like multiracial Kumbaya? Yeah, These things all played out and, you know, many, many boomers, this is kind of like their final act as, as eminence Greece, you know, political authority in America.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And there's still so much tied up in this idea of like, gosh darn it, what do we have to, you know, which of these levers do we have to flip in order for us to be this kind of happily united, multiracial, multi ethnic society where you're colorblind but not too colorblind and you're sensitive but not too sensitive.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

And you're judging people by the content of their character, but you're also not, you know, saying things that sort of make them feel weird. And I just, you know, like, I understand having, having, you know, spent most of my life growing up in, in boomer society.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

I understand kind of where this is coming from. And I, you know, I don't want to be dismissive of that experience because it was really in so many ways like nothing else that, that Americans had been through. But at the same time, it's like, you know, maybe it's not going to be any of these switches and maybe it's not going to be any combination of these switches. And maybe you're striving for some kind of like cathartic spiritual experience that Just can't be found in political or social life and is ultimately something religious. And if you want that experience, like the church is right there, there it is. You can all go in there. But the boomers have by and large been fairly resistant to that.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, I think you're right. There's a ton in that comment that I want to unpack. I mean, first, I think Helen Andrews book on the boomers is great, and I'm glad you mentioned it, because there were certain themes. She actually gave a very kind review of my own book, and I think she didn't mention her own in that context, but I think she probably, as one does. She probably saw some of those same contexts that I was talking about. And I, of course, absolutely agree with you as a fellow Christian about the church. Right. That as people have left the church, that kind of search for the transcendent within the secular turns out to be very ugly, as it almost invariably does. And, you know, whenever we try to imminentize the eshaton, it always turns out very badly, which means.

[James Polis]

And very disappointing, you know, this melancholy that sort of haunts the, you know, so much idealism and like. And look what happened. You know, the black family was destroyed, and now there's crime and just spirals and spirals.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, yeah, well. And people have. I mean, you mentioned the black family being destroyed. This is, again, one of the things I talk about in the book, because it's so absurd. Some of the things that talk about, they'll look at illegitimacy rates within the black community, and they'll say, legacy of slavery and racism. And if you go back to 1940, of course, the illegitimacy rates of the black family were not just way lower than they are now, they're way lower than white illegitimacy rates are now, especially.

[James Polis]

In certain parts of the country.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. So it's like something happened to the broader culture that was not about race relations that sort of poisoned this. But I think the final thing that you mentioned in your comment that I really want to pick up on is, of course, Trump himself is a boomer, and he is a boomer par excellence, extraordinaire in so many ways. I mean. Right. And it's interesting to watch him interact with J.D. vance, who clearly he really likes, and I think J.D. really likes him. But J.D. who's kind of an older millennial, and I think in many ways, Trump kind of has this boomer view of all these things deep down underneath it all, whereas JD has grown up a little more Online and everything else. And sometimes you're like, whoa, don't show your power level quite that much, J.D. but I think he has a little bit more of that astringent experience, for lack of a better term that's been applied to him. And I think for that reason, maybe he sees some of these issues in a little bit more of a clear eyed way. And frankly, when we finally really get going on him, it's probably gonna be people who have kind of gone through that ringer, like Vice President Elect Vance, who will be kind of leading that charge. But in the meantime, I think Trump sort of instinctually kind of understands where we need to go on a lot of these issues and is trying to unite people around a kind of an American nationalist pride and identity. And I think that's great, you know?

[James Polis]

Yeah, I definitely think that's right, both with regard to Trump and J.D. but, you know, I'll go one step further. And for those of us who zoomers in their lives, you know, it's. It's zoomer guys on the Internet who spend probably way too much time on the Internet, quote, unquote. Yeah. Who have become so familiar with black culture.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And so comfortable sort of speaking the language, exchanging the memes, like, really admiringly in some respects and also like not admiringly in others, and seeing those kind of, you know, what. What to a boomer or even like an Xer would seem like pretty distinct moral categories. Like, no, you are literally like making fun of these black people because of the way they look or whatever, versus, like, but. And yet you're also like borrowing all of their slang and laughing at their jokes and listening to their music. Those things have really started to just mush together in the experience of the zoomers. And it's been fascinating to see.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah. Well, and my older two boys are kind of core zoomers, and they sort of have had their, I don't want to say political awakening because they're not radicalized or anything, but they get a lot of their political experience. Whatever they don't get at the dinner table, they're getting it on the Internet in this meme culture, in this meme world. And so, yes, I think all those sorts of things come into play and they're going to navigate this space in a way that they will look back and say, oh, you know, you Gen Xers, you just don't get it. Now. I'm proud that the Gen X, by the way, did show that we were the greatest generation. The real greatest generation, by far being the most Trump supportive, outright majority generation, the only one.

[James Polis]

Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

But, yeah, we were the people who grew up during the Reagan era, at least for some of the older ones of us. And I think that probably plays into it. But, yes, there's sort of complicated racial identification and all sorts of things going on online. And again, I think the important thing is if we don't stop some of the institutionalized discrimination, that can go in a very bad direction with people because they're seeing. I mean, my older boys just see it. And it's not just them, by the way. It's all sorts of unrelated young men of that generation come up to me and they're like, as a white guy, I'm just shut out of all of these institutional things. And in many ways they're going out and starting their own things, which is what discriminated against groups have done from time immemorial. But on the other hand. So, I mean, at one level, that's giving them a certain extra degree of drive, but it's not healthy for society. What we want to do for society is welcome in everybody equally and not make me feel like, as is functionally almost the case today, if I want to go to an Ivy League school and I am a white guy without connections, it's pretty much impossible. And that is functionally, unfortunately, the system we're in today.

[James Polis]

Yeah, they're aware of it. And if you're like a teenage guy and you're looking at the college situation, you're thinking like, well, you know, I'll take my chances on a startup or something.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, no, I mean, my oldest is not going to go straight to college because he's looking at the system and he's just like, it's a scam. Yeah. Not even necessarily per se, because, I mean, I think he would certainly acknowledge some of the things that I'm talking about here. But it's just. That's just one of a million different ways in which he sees that, like, the system is not going to be friendly to him or people who have his background. And so he's just like, well, I'm going to navigate. I'm going to do a startup or whatever he ends up doing. Right. But it's going to kind of work around that system. But that's a huge waste of human capital when we don't kind of offer tracks for everybody.

[James Polis]

No, it's really not good for America for higher education to be totally discredited and be this sort of zombie thing living off of these huge endowments. Young guys, of course, Overwhelmingly for Trump, I think as a cohort, they made the largest sort of rightward. Yeah, rightward move of the demographics. And, you know, not a surprise considering how black coded Trump has become. Yeah, you know, I mean, the memes have just been out of control and, yeah, it has been funny and he's leaned into it and it works.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yes, he has. No, and he, you know, again, and he is interesting in that he did that. I think this is a lesson for white people. In talking about race in general, he was just himself. He just. In the same way that when he goes to McDonald's, he's still wearing the suit, right?

[James Polis]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Carl]

It's just he didn't try to, like, put on the work overalls and say, you know, whatever. He didn't try to, like, wear gold chains and say, like, I'm, you know, a rapper just like you. He just. He embraced them in all of his white boomerness. And he didn't apologize for being a white boomer, but he's like, hey, you know, I love America, you love America. You know, we can both kind of do our thing here. And that's great. And people just, you know, there was a certain swag and energy that he just had that I think was, again, something that transcended race. But I think one of the most important things, he never apologized for who he was. And that's kind of a goal that I have for all white people is to not kind of apologize for who they are. And that's really a lot of what I wrote the book about.

[James Polis]

All right, so let's come down to the ground level of just nuts and bolts policies here. We have a moment. We got four years to play with, maybe more, depending on how high JD's power level truly deus volt truly rises. What can actually be done, do you think, in this landscape? And where are going to be the main obstacles?

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, I think the main obstacles for certain things will be 60 votes in the Senate. Now, I think we can just. One of the things I would like to see us just do in general and policy more is do it. The left is a function which is like, create facts on the ground. So just say, you know what? Our legal opinion is that we actually can do it this way, and we're going to do it this way, and we're running the government, so we're going to do it. And what are you going to really do about it? I'm not suggesting that we just do that in a way that discards the constitutional structure. I'm suggesting that we copy what the left has done and be very aggressive about interpreting a constitutional and legal structure in ways that advance our own agenda and not apologize for doing that. So I think 60 votes in the Senate will be a problem for some things. But I think getting rid of DEI throughout the government and kind of just that, well, has already gotten poisoned to a degree, but just making it a completely poisonous well. I think we can do a lot with that. I think we can expand tremendously on this new Supreme Court affirmative action ruling. It's not totally clear. Does that apply to employers right now? Is it just college admissions? Again, I think we can create realities on the ground. I think even if you create legal ambiguity around some of these things or a sense that there's going to be a back and forth on them, what you're going to find is, yeah, I mean, the truly devoted woke corporations are still not going to go with you unless they're sued. And folks like America First Legal are kind of doing that. But if you just give the space open, then the companies that aren't really woke, they just want to run their businesses, they will say, great, you know, I'm not going to be woke because I don't have to be anymore. So I think you can get a lot by doing that. I think we can continue to push cases to the Supreme Court that just simply make it clear that we're not going to have legalized discrimination of any type in America, period. I think one of the best things we could do is get the court to declare disparate impact legislation, which is, I mean, this complicated the history of it, but it started out as a Supreme Court case and then it got written into the Civil Rights act of 1991. But just to declare it unconstitutional, disparate impact, again, I talk about it in the book now.

[James Polis]

It becomes a magic wand. It's whatever you want.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right? Right. But just for the viewers here who may not be familiar with kind of the history, disparate impact is a doctrine that basically, and I'm oversimplifying, so lawyers, please don't yell at me, but if you've got a 20% reference population that belong to a certain group, whatever it is, say Asian Americans, and you have some sort of an employment hiring process, and you come out of that hiring process and it's only 3% Asian Americans, it could be said to have a disparate impact on that group and you are potentially legally liable for discrimination lawsuits unless you can jump through all these hoops and show that you had business.

[James Polis]

Necessities Shading into a presumption of guilt.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. And here's the key. I mean, this is the real key from the original Griggs vs. Duke Power case. Duke Power, which is the 1971 case, is sued and they say, well, but we didn't mean to discriminate. We had. There's no. You can't show any intention that we.

[James Polis]

Had no mens rea to discrimination.

[Jeremy Carl]

And they didn't. That's like, we don't care. It just doesn't. It doesn't matter. Right. And so that's really where the Rubicon was crossed. And so I think just getting back to a point where we say, you know what? This is just not the business of the government to be picking and choosing and Rachel Bean counting in that way, I think that will help a lot. I think enforcing, again, using state power to enforce better teaching in our schools, and maybe some of that is just really opening up school choice much more dramatically. Because the way that these schools are able to be such hotbeds of leftist idiocy is because they have no competition. And if the money follows the student, all of a sudden there's more opportunity. And it's funny because school choice is kind of historically this slightly boomer libertarian thing, but I think we can actually do quite, really dramatic cultural improvement by really opening that up. And, yeah, it'll provide more opportunities to African American and Hispanic students in the inner cities. And that's great. I mean, I'm all happy for that, but it'll actually just do really good things for everybody. So I think there's opportunities to do things there. And we're just. We need to get more comfortable with actually using state power. And that is something that the right in America has historically been uncomfortable in doing. And we need to get rid of that type of thinking in general. I mean, not that, of course, we should be aware of potential for abuses, but. But if one group is always using power and then the other group and they get into power is like, well, we don't believe in using power at all.

[James Polis]

That's guaranteed abuse.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, Right. So it's just there needs to be a certain balance of terror, to use the Cold War term, that needs to be achieved between the right and the left, where we kind of decide that actually we kind of get to a point where we have developed enough a credible deterrent against the left that they're like, hey, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't just go be at each other's throats all the time. Let's just find a way to work together. And then I will welcome that. Right. Like, my vision of America does not involve that we must crush every single person who ever had a leftist idea and eliminate them. It's that, you know, it's get off of my lawn. Right. Like, that's, that's where my, my problem is.

[James Polis]

Well, and a lot of these guys on the left now are really licking their wounds. And it's always mortifying when you get slapped around so bad. And, you know, they're not, they're not gonna go off into the corner and. And commit seppuku. Like, they're gonna be around and they're still like, you know, many millions of these people.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And they're gonna. A lot of them want a way out. Like, the wokeness did not eat the entire Democratic Party apparatus. There's still a lot of people in there who are sort of trying to, trying to at least pump the brakes and they need an out. And if we don't help give them an out, then it's, you know, that's not gonna help anyone.

[Jeremy Carl]

No, that's right. You've got to have a combination of carrots and sticks. And again, I talk about this in my recommendations of the book. Right. You see, you've got to have a thing where you realize that 48% of Americans who voted for Harris, they're not absolutely crazy. Right. Like, their leaders, I would argue, are crazy and probably need to be crushed. But a lot of them are just. They're either just have a different way of looking at things, or they're getting really bad information from the regime, media or whatever.

[James Polis]

Have you many genuinely just thought that Trump was unlike any person who's ever existed and had to be treated like his category of want.

[Jeremy Carl]

So, you know, you need to reach out for those people who are looking for a way out. And that's again, why I talk about the importance of. Of having a societal consensus that can't just be something where white people are complaining and imposing whatever they think on everybody else. And at the same time, you've got to, metaphorically speaking, just metaphorically put some heads on pikes. Always metaphor. You've got to really show that some of the worst actors who have enabled some of the worst stuff, that their careers are destroyed, that they are no longer able to participate as political leaders. You kind of have that credible deterrent for really, really bad actors on the other side. Then you can begin to work with moderates.

[James Polis]

Yeah. So just across the T on the legal stuff, I know that some of it can be a little Bit in the weeds, but it's important. There's a lot of stake and people should be aware of kind of what the lay of the land is. You mentioned American First Legal. There's this whole kind of conservative movement, conservative legal apparatus that grew up beginning in the 80s, Federalist Society, others. Huge amount of opium pumped into that side of things over the course, especially of the Obama years, where it was like, well, you know, we may be sort of, you know, kicking ourselves in the nuts a little bit, and no Gadsden flags on the convention floor. You know, we're super good, but at least we have, you know, at least we're churning out these, these rock rib, conservative legal guys and we're going to take the Supreme Court and the pellet and all that stuff. And, you know, expectations are very high. It's hard to meet expectations that high. But there was a pipeline and it kind of filled up the space with, with some decent guys. Over time, some of them developed a reputation of being maybe too squishy to be of much use and maybe a net negative in some respects. Kind of a risk that you run with any, any kind of establishment building enterprise. Do you think that that that whole sort of movement, conservative legal apparatus, as it stands right now, is ready, willing and able to hit the ground and do the work of changing those facts on the ground that you mentioned earlier?

[Jeremy Carl]

I mean, you've asked the $64,000 question. And when people have asked me, like, what do I really. What do I care most about in terms of personnel in the Trump White House? It's not anything that I might do in the administration. I mean, I'm sure I could do useful things if they want to have me back at some point, but. But it is olc, the Office of Legal Counsel, and the White House Counsel's Office. We have to control those with really hardcore people who just don't give a damn and, like, what the left is going to say about them and are willing to be very aggressive with good legal opinions, not, like shoddy stuff, but, like, stuff that could really stand up to serious scrutiny. To say, look, this is why we're not letting you get away with this kind of nonsense anymore. And they're willing to put a risk out. And by the way, so much of what the left strategy has been in going after our attorneys, in going after my Claremont colleague John Eastman, in going after my friend Jeff Clark, and putting all these Trump attorneys in jail or disbarring them or doing whatever they're doing, what they did to Giuliani, is to kind of try to send a message that we're going to destroy you if you kind of try to make those legal arguments. Well, now we're going to control the government. So we have these guys on the back foot. We've got to turn the tables and have that. We do have, I think, enough good conservative lawyers to do that. But whether we can get all those guys in the pipeline and have them be the ones who are selected, that remains to be seen. Now, I think.

[James Polis]

Well, you're talking about two, you know, small offices, relatively speaking, that probably most Americans have never heard of. You feeling bullish about those?

[Jeremy Carl]

I mean, I'm not close enough right now. I mean, I'm going to D.C. in a week, and I'm gonna spend some time with folks, and maybe I'll ask.

[James Polis]

You after that, I'll have a little.

[Jeremy Carl]

Better sense of how to answer that question, because obviously these things, we have the transition planning in process, and I know some folks there, as I assume you do as well. But I'm cautiously optimistic because I think Trump understands what was done to him, and he understands the need to be aggressive, and he's never been shy in his personal and business life about deploying aggressive attorneys on his behalf. So he understands that world. And I think now he understands he needs to be just as aggressive in terms of the sorts of attorneys he's going to put in the White House Counsel's office or what have you. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but we'll have to see. And then maybe, hopefully some of these more establishment guys who are very pedigreed, we can bring them along, because people can change, or even people could be transactionally useful and just realize, hey, you know, if I want this fancy job, this is what I'm signing up for. And that's great, you know, like, we got to work. That's politics.

[James Polis]

So the case of John Eastman.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

You know, one. One memo he just. Just really persecuted out of. Out of all conceivable proportion.

[Jeremy Carl]

Sure.

[James Polis]

Made an example of.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And just the damage that that kind of punitive behavior does.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

To the broader right wing is hard to measure because what happens is you have institutions that need to stay mission oriented in order to defend themselves, but still pursue their objectives when they're out of power, which is where a lot of those conservative institutions found themselves in the dark days of the post January 6th world. And when suddenly, as an institution, you now have to choose between spending your precious, you know, earned media or your little PR campaign or, you know, what are we What. What have you done this week? You know, to use Elon Musk phrase, what have you done this month? You'll. You might find yourself in a position where you have to choose between pursuing your mission and going to bat for someone like John Eastman, who's just getting just. Just another, you know, another limb chopped off every day of the week.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right. Well, at Claremont, we did that. Had to do that to a degree. And I. I mean, I wasn't the person who was making those decisions, but. But Ryan Williams, our president, had to think about that in the context of John. And that was, of course, very much the strategy of the people who were going after John. Right. And this is why I talk about that. We need to crush some of these guys. We need to do to them what they were trying to do to John. Not because I'm vindictive and awful, but because we have to establish a credible deterrent for this type of behavior. I'm not saying that I want to go pick innocent attorneys on their side and try to ruin their lives in the same way that somebody's like, John was ruined. But I'm saying if you engaged in that type of behavior, that it should be outside of all bounds of professionalism. Maybe it's your career that gets ruined. And then at that point, they realize that maybe this is actually. Let's go back to having rules, because when we have rules, things work better for everybody on both sides of the aisle.

[James Polis]

And looking at someone like Rudy, maybe that's a more complicated case. Might be above my pay grade as a mere talk show host. But specific to Eastman, do you think that the right at large, the established right, is ready to spend that capital that it's gonna take to get him back in society's good graces?

[Jeremy Carl]

Well, we'll see. I mean, I think nothing changes people's minds like victory.

[James Polis]

Right.

[Jeremy Carl]

And I think the type of victory also mattered a lot. Again, that it was so broad based that we're gonna have a majority, not just of the Electoral College, so that it was some sort of thing that the left can complain about, but even the popular vote. I think President Trump appreciates the work that John did on his behalf and that he paid for that. And I think that. That there's probably enough political capital to move him back in, at least to a degree. And I mean, I certainly, obviously will advocate for that very strongly in whatever small capacity I can. And we can hope that the same thing happens to other similarly kind of put upon folks on our side.

[James Polis]

We got about 10 minutes left. Let's talk a little bit about the geopolitics of all this because it is. Yeah. I went to a, let's say left leaning law school once upon a time and it was a big deal for my con Law. Prof. That civil rights happened because of the Cold War. Basically, like we need to be able to demonstrate to Americans but also to, you know, the post colonial world that we have something to offer besides communism.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

Something even, even better than communism. Right. I think it was Steve Saylor who called the Civil War sort of global war, war for control of the global left. And I think that's right. And I think, you know, although I was getting this from a lefty. Prof. I think, you know, basically the theory of the case is true.

[Jeremy Carl]

That's right. You'll see people on the fairly radical right make the same point. It's a little one of these woke more correct type things.

[James Polis]

And so, you know, right through to present day, you know, yes, America has adversaries and it is in the interest of those adversaries to keep us at each other's throats and to exacerbate those racial and ethnic divides.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah. I think this is a really interesting question. I don't get into it in my book because it's the sort of thing that you shouldn't just sort of speculate too much about without evidence. But we could simply look at the history, including the history of the communist involvement in the far left of the civil rights movement, which is documented and unquestioned to say that in the past the left, the global left, has not hesitated to spark racial animosity in the US to further its own interests. And we should certainly expect that our adversaries are probably trying to do the same and that some of again, I'm certainly not going to speculate about any individuals or institutions, but that I would not surprise me at all to find that some of the funding for some of the craziest stuff that's been going on has been trafficked through people or through countries that are adversarial to us in some ways because certainly if I were the Chinese, I would be doing that. If I were the Chinese, I'd also be pushing for unrestricted open borders in the United States. And I would be figuring out ways to make those sorts of things happen. It would just be foolish for me as a strategist not to attempt to cripple my adversary in that way. And so while I don't have smoking guns, it's just stands to reason that I think if we look a little bit we'll, we'll certainly find those. And we have, I mean, to be fair, there, there are some isolated instances which I'm aware of, where we've really been able to trace this to American adversaries, but I would not be surprised if it's, it's a much bigger problem than we realize it right now.

[James Polis]

Yeah, I don't have smoking guns either. I did hear recently though, from, from someone who would know that, you know, the Israelis became alarmed when they saw some, some poll out of America where It was like 60% of college students support Hamas.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right, Right.

[James Polis]

Wow, that seems like a really big number. And so, you know, started. Start digging into the data and what's going on is like, well, it's basically kind of this, like, peer pressure preference cascade caused by the TikTok algorithm just being boosted. Basically the Chinese just turning up all the volumes on all Hamas stuff so that all these young people start thinking like, well, gosh, you know, it seems like a lot of people like me support this cause or support these people or whatever. So I guess probably I do too. At least I should say that I do.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right.

[James Polis]

So, yeah, you know, that kind of stuff seems to, seems to definitely be going on. Yeah, it's, it's, it's tricky because, you know, some amount of paranoia is probably good and diminishing returns, top of the curve, and then there's probably like a big cliff.

[Jeremy Carl]

Right, right. It's probably one of the weird things. It's like the midwit meme, except the midwit is actually right in this case. You know, it's the right way to think about it. But yeah, I think this is probably going on and maybe we need like Trump talk or something. I don't know. That's kind of like battle against it. But yeah, I think certainly it's not crazy. It's been noted by many mainstream people that TikTok is controlled by a adversary of the United States and that it is being used in that way to promote certain things. And we need to handle it with all due care for that reason.

[James Polis]

Looking forward to the next, let's say five to ten years. Are you, I mean, you know, you're, you're, you're a, you're a quant guy. You know, how to sort of place place bets on, on things that other people might not see. Are you expecting, do you have any, any kind of like dark horse candidates for, for major political changes in ethnic groups? I mean, what's gonna happen with sort of Jewish Americans seems to be up for Grabs. There's division there, the division that's emerging between, I mean, black men and black women just on this election. This is a fluid situation. And I wonder if you're sort of tracking anything and expecting any kind of major shakeups there.

[Jeremy Carl]

Yeah, well, I think that's what's so exciting. And I'm literally like, right before I came over here to tape, I'm like going through all the exit polls right now, which you always have to be a little bit careful because the early exit polls are kind of wrong and they adjust, but they're not. If the group is big enough, they're not hugely wrong. And you're beginning to certainly see certain things. I talked about the Hispanic and Asian American votes in red states. I do think the. The fact that the left is going to realize that they no longer have a unique hold on all minority voters and can claim to speak for them is going to have some interesting possibilities for it. And it actually can kind of help move us out of some of the most poisonous elements of the racial animosity that I talk about in the unprotected class. Because so much of the worst things are being done, in my view, by the left because they perceive it to be in their partisan political advantage to do so. Now that that's maybe up for grabs. Now that Trump, in a pretty way that has. He's not exactly apologized for being a white guy. Okay. This is. No. Tim Waltz has been able to go and win all these voters over. I think offers an opportunity for maybe some sort of a truce on these issues to be navigated through. Or maybe the left, once they realize that not every single one of these immigrants is gonna vote for them, becomes a little bit less passionate about pushing unlimited illegal immigration. Oh, by the way, I mean, and part of the reason they're not voting for you is because you are importing massive numbers of their people, often co ethnics, to like take their jobs. Right. Like that they have as legal Americans and American citizens. So I think that there could be some really exciting things happening there if we play our cards right. And certainly in. If I were to write the last chapter of my book right now, I would offer some sort of more optimistic pathways, I think. Not that, I mean, the book is actually ends on an optimistic note, but I think as opposed to kind of just sort of very fairy optimism, I think we actually have some very concrete paths that we could pursue right now to kind of unify around a new American identity. And by the way, realize that in fact, having that majority American identity that is rooted in some way in our historical European origin culture is actually a good thing, rather than having a bunch of different groups at each other's throats. And if that means that there are Asian and black and Hispanic white supremacists, and I'm using white supremacists in their quotes right there, just to say that those are people who want to join in an American majority culture and be proud of it, I think that's a wonderful thing.

[James Polis]

Yeah, well, I mean, that's the promise of the Internet, right? Is an infinite number of identities, including ones that you could never imagine. You will find people in that sub, sub, sub, subcategory to me, at least for, for, for now, until further notice. I think my big sort of strategic takeaway from this election is the prevailing wisdom that in order to get to a purple America, you had to get start with a blue America and red people had to meet them over there. Yeah, that's wrong. It turns out that in order to get back to a purple America, we need a red America first.

[Jeremy Carl]

Absolutely.

[James Polis]

Jeremy Karl, thanks so much for joining us.

[Jeremy Carl]

Thanks so much for having me on, James.

[James Polis]

And that's about all the time we got over here. I am James Polis, this is Zero Hour and may God have mercy on us all.