Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Solana Pine.
Chapter 2: What led to Jeremy Carl's nomination to the State Department?
I'm the director of video at The New York Times. For years, my team has made videos that bring you closer to big news moments, videos by Times journalists that have the expertise to help you understand what's going on. Now we're bringing those videos to you in the Watch tab in The New York Times app. It's a dedicated video feed where you know you can trust what you're seeing.
Chapter 3: How does the Civil Rights Act relate to anti-white discrimination?
All the videos there are free for anyone to watch. You don't have to be a subscriber. Download The New York Times app to start watching. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. The idea that white people, and white men in particular, face discrimination has become something of an obsession on the American right.
The age of DEI transformed affirmative action into something that felt more sharply discriminatory. And now there's a big debate among conservatives.
Chapter 4: What impact does immigration have on white Americans?
Should they counter progressive identity politics with a colorblind nationalism or treat white culture as something real and embattled and worth organizing around? My guest this week ended up at the center of that debate when the Trump administration nominated him for a State Department post. So your belief is that white Americans face more discrimination than black Americans?
On average, Senator, yes, that's correct. And I'm not running away from that statement at all. Jeremy Karl 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. Thanks so much for having me, Ross. So you are a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which is a well-known, especially in the Trump era, conservative think tank. Your background, right, is in environmental policy and energy? Yeah, that's right.
Chapter 5: How is D.E.I. influencing the radicalization of conservative thought?
I mean, my formal background is in nothing to do with any of the things for which I'm best known now, but I did many years of graduate study and have written books and articles on environment and energy policy and served in the Department of Interior in Trump I.
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? You got it right.
I got it right. Okay. It's a mouthful. Talk about the job that you were nominated for. What would you be doing? So it's a job that oversees basically everything that we're doing at the United Nations, but also has a supervisory role at things like the G7, the G20, the World Bank, other sorts of major international organizations. that we're a part of.
It really harkens back a little bit more, frankly, to an earlier portion of my career.
Chapter 6: What controversies surround Jeremy Carl's statements and social media presence?
I spent almost a decade as the right-hand man for the late Secretary of State George Shultz and did a lot of work in this field there. It was one of the reasons why when the State Department came to me and approached me that I was interested. Obviously, on issues like migration or other things, it does touch on some of the things that we're talking about here.
But I think one of the sad things about the way my hearing was conducted was that I got almost nothing substantive about how would you do this job? Of which I had all sorts of answers. And really, it just kind of became a big, you know, gotcha about some tweet that I'd done. And that's just, you know, it's an unfortunately sad reality of our current politics.
So you're up for that nomination as we have this conversation. Yeah. You've received criticism and skepticism from some Republicans as well as from Democrats. Possibly by the time this airs, we will know the fate of your nomination. But we're going to talk about the arguments that have been the source of controversy.
Chapter 7: How do 'white culture' and 'civic nationalism' differ?
In 2024, you wrote a book called The Unprotected Class, which is about discrimination against white Americans. So tell me, in broad terms, the argument of the book. Yeah. So the title of the book comes from the notion in civil rights law that you have protected classes. And those are basically classes of people that you can't discriminate against. And that can have to do with disability.
It can have to do with race. It can have to do with gender identity, etc. In theory, whites actually are a protected class.
Chapter 8: What are the four pillars of 'Americanness' according to the guest?
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. to how we look at the entertainment sort of more informally, to how we educate people, the healthcare system, and really document in each chapter by subject where I think this is going on, why I think it's important, and what we should do about it. Start with the most concrete elements of the argument.
Let's talk about the law and changes to American law in the last 50 or 60 years that you think have enabled anti-white discrimination. So start with the 1960s and 1970s. What happened then? Yeah. Well, and I think this is I'm glad that you've raised this because it's an important departure point.
And I'm actually slightly to the left of people who are more interested in really taking a hatchet to civil rights law in some cases than I am. I mean, yes, there are some significant reforms we need to do.
in civil rights laws even some fundamental reforms but that actually what we need to do is utilize civil rights law and apply it equally so if you look at the civil rights act obviously that's the beginning but i think it goes off the rails pretty quickly um in 1971 i believe you have griggs versus duke power which is an important case that kind of creates a doctrine called disparate impact
And to not have the lawyers shoot me, I'm just going to say I'm oversimplifying it dramatically here for the purposes of this discussion.
But basically what disparate impact does is if you sort of have a reference population applying for something, whether it's housing or a job or something else, and then the population you select ends up looking very different than that reference population, you have to go prove that.
a bunch of things to basically show that you didn't discriminate and that it didn't have a disparate impact on that group. And that has been a metaphorical sword of Damocles over all sorts of things. And the interesting thing about it is if you go back in the civil rights law and the debate over the 1964 act,
There's a concern by some of the people who are skeptical about the act that something like this could happen. But in 1971, just a few years later, the Supreme Court, in fact, effectively enshrines that in the law. So just to make this as clear as possible, the Civil Rights Act says you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. Right.
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