White Identity Is Galvanizing the Right
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Solana Pine.
What led to Jeremy Carl's nomination to the State Department?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:02
2
What led to Jeremy Carl's nomination to the State Department?
0:02–0:22
3
How does the Civil Rights Act relate to anti-white discrimination?
0:22–1:14
4
What impact does immigration have on white Americans?
1:14–2:26
5
How is D.E.I. influencing the radicalization of conservative thought?
2:26–3:27
6
What controversies surround Jeremy Carl's statements and social media presence?
3:27–4:24
7
How do 'white culture' and 'civic nationalism' differ?
4:24–4:57
8
What are the four pillars of 'Americanness' according to the guest?
4:57–1:03:49
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