We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on ax at fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot com as well. We
are joined today by author Jeremy Carl, who's out with a new very well
timed book called The Unprotected Class, How anti white Racism is tearing America Apart.
You can follow Jeremy on ax at Real Jeremy Carl. He also has
a new substack out. It's Jeremycarl dot substack dot com. The substack is
called The Course of Empire. Jeremy, Welcome to the show. Thanks so
much showing me on. I believe I'm really excited to just start with what's
in the news right now, because I'm curious how you will explain what's why
what's happening? Well, let me say why or why not not to give
you a leading question, but why are we not what's happening on campuses like
Columbia and Yale right now illustrates the thesis actually that you advance in this book,
the unprotected class. Yeah, I mean, that's actually great because it's
funny. I haven't actually been asked that much about this in that context,
but you're very correct to see the connection because there is I mean, what's
particularly happening with these Jewish students. There is actually some just pure anti Semitism
going on there for sure, but a lot of this, particularly for the
non Arab, non Muslim students who are involved, is kind of downstream.
The anti Semitism is really downstream from anti white racism or anti white feelings.
And I think the interesting thing is you're seeing more and more pep in the
Jewish community kind of understand that, whereas sometimes I felt like I was talking
to a wall and making this point, you know, a couple of years
ago. But but so I think people are understanding that that it's like in
the political context, the Jews, the Israelis. I mean, it's this
is particularly deceptive with the Israelis, but you know, they're the white guys,
and the Palestindians are not the white guys, and therefore the Jews are
the very bad guys and that's just sort of how the morality play is playing
out. Yeah. No, that's really interesting actually because Bill Ackman, for
example, after October seventh, he saw what happened with Claudine Gay, and
he had supported Claudine Gay, I think as a member of the Harvard what's
the Harvard Corporation or something like that, and he backtracked. He said,
I didn't realize what DEI actually actually meant. And so Jeremy, this is
another question. Oh, go ahead, go ahead. I didn't realize the
face eating monkeys were going to eat Maya face, right, you know,
that's like when I joined the face seating monkey party. That's the sort of
frustration that I have with that. But could have foreseen nobody, nobody could
have seen this coming. But actually, that's a really good question for you,
is where specifically should people have been looking. I mean, it sounds
obvious to a lot of conservatives because they saw this playing out on college campuses.
For years. Fox News would do these, you know, campus craziness
segments, and then the world just moved on and everybody would just pretend that
it was its natural ecosystem. It would stay confined within the boundaries of that
ecosystem, and of course that's not what happened. So why should people have
known that it was going to leave the zoo? Basically, well, it's
just these people, you know, It's just like the sixties radicals, right
like first they're on campus and then they're kind of running everything. And I
mean, in many cases we've almost cycled through the first generation of that and
now we're onto the next generation. But this is a this is an old
problem. I mean, just to kind of date myself a little bit,
but also to kind of indicate how old this problem is. I went to
Yale as a freshman in nineteen ninety one and I put on my dorm room
a cover from I believe it was Newsweek magazine, I'm pretty sure, and
it said, like, political correctness is invading America campuses? Is it the
New Enlightenment or the new McCarthyism? And you can still find that cover.
I mean, that magazine still exists. I didn't make it up, but
it's just to say that we're calling it something slightly different. But these issues
were really there, and they kind of had a predictable valance in a particular
way they were going to go. Even in the nineteen nineties, but it
even goes back further. I mean, I talk about in my book just
to show the way that the discourse has really been constrained. So the nineteen
sixty five Immigration Act, the heart Seller build that kind of radically changed America's
immigration policy. People really did not quite expect in Congress for it to happen
in the way it happened. And I actually dug through in some primary research
a New York Times archive and found a story from nineteen sixty eight where congressmen
were like, WHOA, we didn't really mean to do it of this,
but we don't want to do anything about it because we're worried we'll be called
racists. So that's nineteen sixty eight that like, this same dynamic is playing
out. So this is a long game that we've been playing well. And
Neille famously was the subject of basically the first mainstream I started calling attention to
this. And I'm really curious too, Jeremy, for your perspective, because
that was the specter of communism, is what William F. Buckley was arguing
against that. And your book is blurbed for blurb black by Chris Rufo,
who makes this argument that the push for communism that started happening in academia ultimately
metastasized, or that was sort of the germ of the oppressed oppressor dichotomy.
You talked to us Jeremy about your perspective on that question, is is it
communism that's the germ of this? Because you also write about immigration, you
bring a lot of cultural topics in what do you think happened? Yeah,
I mean, I think that's a piece of it. I'm weary to make
it too big a piece, and I mean I'm certainly not going to go
full James Lindsay on this. And I like James, but like like a
really interesting guy to like read the intellectual history of a lot of obscure things,
the phenomena on the left that actually probably had more effects than you thought.
But I do think that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and
sometimes like anti white racism is just anti white racism. So this is just
kind of like there is absolutely an element of what Rufo talks about with and
his book is very good, you know, the oppressed oppressor dynamic, this
sort of leftist academia, Marxism, cultural Marxism. I mean, I think
those things all exist, and they are all a piece of it. But
I think there's also just a piece of different groups competing for resources tail as
old as time. And you know, the sociologist Cewright Mills, who was
a kind of very famous mid twentieth century sociologist, kind of came up with
the notion of a legitimating ideology, which is kind of say, like,
when you want to seize power, you need an ideology. Do you actually
convince people or at least yourselves, that there's some justice in what you're asking
and that you're not just taking stuff from people? And I think that ultimately
a lot of this stuff is just a legitimating ideology among you know, to
justify resource confiscation of various types that people want to do anyway. And let's
bring immigration in because again it's a part of the book and it's one of
your big sort of focuses actually in general. And a lot of people might
think, Okay, so there's this anti white racism ideology that is proliferating throughout
maybe elite institutions. What does immigration, what does America's sort of status as
this beacon of you know, what is the gem acosta? He recited the
poem from the Statue of Liberty to art against Trump losses. I go into
that a little bit of the book, not a costa, but the poem
itself and its origins. Right, So bring immigration in here for folks who
haven't yet got a copy of the book again, the unprotected class to understand.
Yeah, no, it's great, and the book is actually hitten tomorrow,
so you can order your copy now. But it's you can't understand on
this problem without understanding immigration. Both because I think without the Heartseller Law of
nineteen sixty five, the demographic changes in the US would not have happened to
have made this the level of problem that it is. I also think that
if we're going to ever solve this problem, when key recommendation I have is
we've got to move to something close to net zero immigration over a period of
time. And that doesn't mean forever, but it just means we need to
take a breather. We need to assimilate, for lack of a better term,
the folks that we have and figure out what a new, more unified
American culture looks like with the people that we have here. That's not going
to happen if we just continue to send millions and millions of more people US
an uncontrolled border, or frankly even millions of legal immigrants. It's just it's
not sustainable. So that's a key piece. And I think there's the other
key piece, which is there is an element of the immigration debate that kind
of says, oh, you know, this great replacement ideas, you know,
it's racist, it's not legitimate, that has suggested that it is wrong
an immoral for white Americans to like want to not see the America you know,
dramatically diversify away from them, that there's something illegitimate about that, and
that's certainly something that I reject. I mean, I think there's all sorts
of problems with a high degree of diversity, period, and there's no reason
that anybody should have to endorse their own replacement as the predominant demographic group in
any country. I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with like whites
in America. It's just like Chinese and China, Nigerians and Nigeria. I
would make the same argument, So all the more Nigerians in America might not
be the worst thing in the world. No. No, In fact,
I talked about you know one of the things for the kind of people who
will obsess about anti black racism. And of course I'm not saying that anti
black racism obviously existed in the past. I think this still today in places.
But if you were to take Ebo Americans, for example, which is
a large subset of the Nigerian immigrants here, they would have a higher education,
income, you know, whatever profile than white Americans. So if you're
kind of positing that there's some you know, really systemic thing going on that's
that's punishing people just for being black, you have a hard time explaining the
success of Ebo Americans or many other groups you could do. Ghanian Americans.
Can I talk about this all in the book, And I'm also one of
the things I find difficult, especially especially when thinking about how these ideologies have
taken root among younger people. Jeremy, how much of this is conscious,
you know, anti high white racism in the same way that there was very
conscious you know, Jim Crow laws, anti black racism, actual slavery.
We can keep going back, but some of it to me seems as though
people have been conditioned to accept what is blatantly anti white racism without even understanding
where they're going. I think some people actually are just blatantly anti white and
right racist. But it does seem to me like there's a powerful component of
it that is we've been conditioned to kind of accept it. No, I
think you're absolutely right, and I think you as particularly you're a generation at
least down for me in age. I mean, I think you kind of
probably have. I didn't grow up with as much of that, and I
think you probably grew up with a lot more of it. Certainly when I
talked to like younger conservative activists in their you know, sort of early twenties,
or even when I talked to my older kids who are teenagers, you
know, I sort of see some of this in just like it's in the
water, right. It's not even as you say, it's not not even
almost intentionally racist. It's just we've like, oh, that's just how things
are. And I think there's a degree to which, you know, we've
just grown to accept things that shouldn't be acceptable. And now, actually,
thankfully you have groups like America First Legal, Stephen Miller's outfit, which I
think is probably the most effective group that's come out of the Trump administration that
is beginning to look at some of these issues, particularly in the legal realm,
where there's just like blatantly racist and illegal anti white discrimination going on,
and they're beginning to challenge these in courts, and the people are in general
either folding their policies or they're losing in court because what they're doing is illegal
and wrong. But we've sort of been so conditioned to just accept it as
like that's how things should be. And you actually, so we talked about
immigration, there are a couple of other things that you bring into this or
I guess cultural. It's not just cultural, but it's the left priorities.
And I want to talk to you about the green movement, the career energy
movement, because I'm sure, Jeremy, if you were probably telling people I'm
working on a chapter in my book about anti whiteness on environmentalism, it might
be like, what do you mean anti whiteness and environmentalism? But it's super
interesting. Yeah, well this is actually sort of and maybe I wouldn't have
readen this chapter except that I kind of my professional training and what I was
even doing in the Trump administration is not you know, in the field of
worry about race relations. It just sort of it became a thing where,
gosh, it's a really big problem, and I've just you know, found
myself writing more and more about it. But my graduate and academic training was
all in environment and resource policy, so I'm very familiar with this, and
I talk a lot in the book. I go through this whole thing with
not only I was attacked at the Department of Interior for all sorts of by
the left and left wing congressmen and the media they Washington Post and all these
people about things that had nothing to do with my work at Interior, but
because they did not like the fact that I had called out some of these
things in my writing. But you go to the Era Club, the which
I kind of talk about a lot, and is this is the biggest grassroots
environmental group in the country, and it's just like it is truly like Stalinist
show trial, Maoist cultural revolution level you know, self hatred, like you
know, the things that they were putting out and particulate. The height of
the George Floyd kind of in Broglio is just I mean, it's kind of
insane. You know, Oh, where we apologized to like every minority person
who's ever lived, and we're all completely guilty of horrible white privilege and we're
all murderers, and I mean it's like, really it's almost impossible to believe.
I almost kind of wonder whether I should have Twitter cashed the web pages,
because I mean it's so insane that it's hard to believe that it could
even have happened. And where this kind of ended for Thisierra Club is they
literally wrote a blog post the head of this Zero Club called tearing Down Our
Monuments, where they kind of been to John Muir, who's their founder,
for being racist, which I mean they're two things right. One, John
Muir was for his time a racial progressive overall. I mean, he didn't
have twenty first century views on immigration or race, but you know, he
was not some reactionary on these issues. Secondly, I mean it's like I
would say, it's like the US canceling George Washington, but it's way more
insane than that, because John Muir is like the central figure in the Sierra
Club, and yet he's canceled because he doesn't meet the appropriate racial criteria of
today. And it's just I mean, really, you kind of have to
read all this stuff to appreciate how crazy things have gotten. And of course
this is all just a it's a compensation for the fact that the green movement
remains overwhelmingly white and they feel like in terms of the participants, and they
feel really bad about that, and they're worried that they're going to lose political
power because of that, and for that reason they need to just constantly rail
on how terrible white people are, even when it has seemingly nothing to do
with their actual work. And that example is interesting because your point about John
Muir being a racial progressive for the time isn't there's something so depressing and sad.
I remember in twenty twenty there was a statue of an abolitionist that was
torn down in my home state, and this was at the University of Wisconsin.
A statue of an abolitionist was torn down because, you know, in
the case of John muiror he didn't have twenty first century racial perspectives. And
that's what's so sad to me is basically, no society or culture ever has
like what we achieved in the nineteen nineties. You know, I think of
that as maybe the peak decade. I'm curious what you think of this,
Jeremy, and maybe the two thousands. What we achieved is the United States
of America in terms of pluralism, has never been seen at scale like that
before, where you had high level and there's so much polling, you know,
in a racial marriage or support for it exploding, opposition to it dissipating.
What we had achieved here that we're now backsliding away from rapidly was actually
incredible. And it's not to say that the writing wasn't on the wall and
universities, but basically, it's never at the scale, has never existed before,
and it's the left that's throwing it all away, right. I think
the eighties and nineties really were kind of a peak time. I think of
my childhood in the eighties and it was like Michael Jordan is the big sports
star, and Eddie Murphy is the big movie star, and Michael Jackson is
like the big singer, and it's just sort of like, and again,
I don't want to be so trite as to say, oh, well,
race didn't matter, right, but I do feel like we like when I
tell younger people, I'm like, race relations by Annie Stretch were way way
better back then than they are today. Even if I think you can fairly
argue that perhaps the seeds of destruction were already being planted at that time,
but it is worth worth mentioning that just because things have gotten so crazy in
the introm and it's you know, it's just really it's unfortunate. Yeah,
And for me, so I think I mentioned this on another podcast recently,
but we I started rewatching Malcolm in the Middle recently and it's incredible. The
show deals with race, but it's incredible how much healthier it is in this
sort of like primetime sitcom for sitcom format, because it's just it's not perfect,
but it's so much healthier. And to me it was I was in
college when the Trayvon Martin controversy erupted, and you write about that in the
book. For me, that's when I've just had this like visceral feeling of
whoa, this something just changed. It feels like a switch flipped, and
it really did. And I should I should add, I mean it was
the Trayvon Martin case, although I don't think that that was probably the origin,
right the the these sorts of things, as I write in the book,
they don't spreading like Athena fully armored from Zeus's head, you know,
and ready for battle, right these ideas like they've just stated for a time,
But definitely trayvon Martin in twenty thirteen was the beginning of what's so called
the Great Awokening, or maybe that was twenty fifteen. Was thirteen or twenty
fifteen? Can I remember which? I thought? Twenty twelve? Okay,
so yeah, twenty twelve was treyvon Martin and then twenty thirteen you have hands
up, don't shoot in Missouri. These are kind of the early cases around
crime where you have the so called Great Awokening, which is a play on
words for the Great Awakening, where these are these historical religious revivals in America,
but we begin to get very religious about the question of race. So
I don't actually have a perfect explanation for why. And this is my next
book. I think I'm going to kind of look at this. Among other
things, some of it was probably Obama being elected for a second term,
feeling like he could let his freak flag fly a little bit more now that
you didn't have to worry about being reelected. But I don't think, I
mean, that's a little too convenient in need, I think there had to
be a lot of other stuff that was going on under the surface, changing
demographics, changing political ideologies. But you do see this dramatic change in polling
right around twenty twelve twenty thirteen that has continued to this day where people just
get crazier and crazier on the race issue and particularly on anti whiteness. Your
chapter on the military is terrifying, and I'm probably not the first person who
told you that. In fact, you probably find it terrifying, hear me.
But it raises this question of why a country would intentionally undermine its military.
Why the country would intentionally undercut military readiness. You know, no other
country, China, forget it, they would never. But so that's kind
of a two part question. One if you could tell us a little bit
about I think some people know high profile stories Mark Milly talking about white rage,
whatever else, But what's happening. And then why a military would intentionally
weak in itself. Well, it's a good question, and it's a relevant
question, and it is scary. And I have one of my kids,
one of my teenagers, is very interested in the military, but he's also
kind of very aware of these issues, and he still is kind of wanting
to go forward, and I'm not discouraging him from doing that as long as
he's doing it with his eyes open, which is that he is not going
to be on a level playing field when he gets there, and hopefully we
can address this. I don't think that this is intentional, because as you
point out, like why would somebody do it intentionally? I just think the
fact that we're in such a severe situation, even in something that is so
core to our existence as the military, should show just how serious the problem
is getting, Like we just we can't correct. It's like the junkie who
just needs one more hit and it just doesn't matter what the consequences are.
That's what they're going to do. I think that's what you really have going
on. So what you've seen is with this kind of orgy of anti white
poule and Discriminatorytory promotion and hiring, is whites are looking at this and they're
opting out. And so you're seeing in a five year period, white recruitment
went down. I'm banking on the number all of a sudden, whether it's
twenty five or forty percent, but really substantially over a five year period,
whereas everybody else's recruitment was pretty much flat. So I mean, that's problematic
in and of itself, that would be hugely problematic. But why it's particularly
problematic, as I talked about in the book, is that whites are disproportionately
the tip of the spear so called in our military. So they're the most
likely to be in special forces, they're the most likely to be in combat
roles. So you're disproportionately taking out the group of people who have been your
most important and most active soldiers, sailors, airmen, et cetera, and
you're telling them we're not really wanted. One of the heartening things in the
book that I kind of document is that there's a number of pushbacks that are
going on to this from people who are like, yeah, I grew up
in the Third World, and like, I don't buy any of this white
oppression bs, you know, from kind of the rank and file pushing back.
But yet at a general level, like at the officer level, where
this is really happening, it's still full steam ahead, and it's certainly under
the Biden administration is fully doubled down on this sort of thing. I forget
if that's the chapter you open with a Biden quot or if it's another,
but it's a Biden quote from what the seventies were. Yeah, it's the
reparations chapter where he says like he's not going to feel responsible for anything that
happened three hundred years ago. And it's kind of shocking when you have the
amazing thing about Biden if we actually had anything other than a fake media,
as the kind of regime media. Biden's career has been so long that it
shows the absurd contortions of the Democratic Party on this issue, because you can
go back to like early to mid seventies Biden, he's like way to the
right of the modern GOP on a lot of this stuff, not only on
forced bussing in schools, which was like his signature issue in which he was
probably to the right of me even on the issue of forced bussing, but
just everything, you know, anything looking like reparations. I mean, it
just shows that Biden is an empty shell a but it also shows how much
the Democratic Party has changed rapidly in the half century plus that he's been in
public life. Well, I was also going to ask you about that,
because where does it go? You know, that's appropriately opening the reparations chapter.
I think it seems like we're hurtling towards some sort of effort at national
reparations. It's happened on a local scale already, as you know, sort
of unthinkable as it sounded to a lot of people for a long time.
It's really it's being experimented with on the local level. You see the arc
of Biden. But also you were telling me before we recorded, Jeremy,
that was it. The Biden rapid Response team was like needling you for some
thing that you said over the weekend. And it's almost like they see this
as good politics because the media is so complicit that it'll buy their spin and
you don't have an option really to push back without being called racist. Yeah,
absolutely no, if it's the Biden rapid Response team, which is there.
You know, part of the Biden campaign went after me and Charlie Kirk
for a show I did with with Charlie last week where we talked about the
Civil Rights Act and we were critical of where it is today. And they
said, Charlie Kirk, you know, and my implicit thing, me you
know, wants to appeal the Civil Rights Act. I'm like, huh,
that's interesting, Like I actually don't want to. I don't think we should.
I've offered say we need to fundamentally reform it in some major, major
ways, but I haven't called further pial. So then I actually listened to
the excerpt and I'm like, Okay, yeah, I didn't say that,
did Charlie. But you know, it's sort of indicative that the truth is
like very optional for the left these days. If anything, it's almost a
and they will go after you. And honestly, if they weren't going after
me, I mean when I saw that, I felt great. I'm not
like, oh my gosh, somebody called me a racist. I'm like,
yeah, that's right, I'm over the target. That's how it should be.
This book is going to get attacked a lot, as Charlie was pointing
out, and it should be, not because it's a bad book, but
because it's really taking on a really germane issue in which the left has tried
to tightly control the discourse. But what we're beginning to see in these last
couple of years is that people are beginning to break out of that control.
And I really wrote this book to kind of hopefully be at the leading edge
of leading a revolution on that issue, that we don't need to buy the
left false narrative on race. Yeah, that's actually when you were talking about,
actually when you're talking about the military and people who maybe moved to the
United States from a third world country or something like that, pushing back.
It reminded me of what I heard from parents in Lowden County when at the
Federals we were doing some reporting out there back in twenty twenty. It was
actually a lot of minorities immigrants who were just deeply offended by what they heard
these classrooms from critical race theorists and so Jeremy, do you think are you
optimistic that enough Americans are animated by their opposition to CRT sort of that broader
ideology whatever you want, woke to CRT, whatever it is, this neo
racism essentially, are you optimistic that they can sort of break through the elite
regime's refusal to have that conversation without tiring everybody, whether they're black or Asian,
or Hispanic or white or racist. Well, I mean, I think
it is It is encouraging that you're seeing some of this pushback, and not
only in my book endorsement as you mentioned Rufo, but I've got Tucker,
I've got Charlie Kirk, I've got Victor Davis Hanson and other kind of conservative
stalwarts. But I also, you know, kind of have a multiracial cast
of characters. I have Peter Keerson now remy a wonderful endorsement. He's the
longest ever serving member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, African American Republican.
I've got guys like sorb Sharma heading up American moment, you know.
So, like I was definitely conscious about not just speaking to a white audience
in doing this. At the same time, it is awesome that we have
these folks, and I saluted it. I think it makes me more optimistic
about the future of America. At the same time, part of the reason
I wrote this book is to convince white people that they need to be able
to speak up in their own defense. Like it's not okay to just,
you know, say this great thing, but like we've got to hide behind
a minority person to say it because we're too scared to say it ourselves.
Like that's not sustainable. And it was actually kind of funny. I sort
of relate. I think in the book At one point when I asked what
I told people I was writing this book, they said, well, that's
great. I've looked at me a little as scance, but they're like,
well, that's good. But you know, I think it would be better,
ironically, in the light of least developments, if Candice Owens had written
right to this book. But the idea being that, like, it just
shouldn't be a white guy, and I actually think, no, it's actually
really important that it is a white guy who writes this book, because I
don't need to apologize for not being a doormat, for standing up for myself.
And you know, I'm not doing this to complain to the ref So
I'm trying to rally the troops and say, for all Americans, but particularly
for white Americans, we should not find this acceptable. Yeah, in my
perspective on that until recently, because you would hear, you know, on
the right, there'd be fringe people picking up on some of these very legitimate
examples from college campuses for years, and until very recently, my response was
basically crocodile tears, like, yes, this is probably on principle incorrect,
but you know, crimea river, like there was actual chattel slavery in this
country for decades there was Jim Crow. So the white people now getting a
taste of their own medicine for you know, a couple of years or in
a couple of isolated cases. You know, is it wrong? Is whatever's
being taught wrong in principle? Yes? But you know, is it the
biggest seal in the world now? But what we've seen is it become totally
metastasized, become a dominant elite ideology that's running institutions. So at this point
it seems like it is entirely well, obviously you agree with me because you
wrote a book about it. It seems entirely fair to say, like,
actually, what we're about to do is throw generations of blood that was spilled,
hard work, incredible progress out the window for the sake of what this
like, absurd neo racism essentially. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more
right, And I just point out, even when you for both religious and
other reasons, I kind of reject the idea of a reparations, particularly to
somebody who is not directly harmed. I think when you're dealing with somebody who
has direct and visible harm, like that's a different question. But like I
reject that kind of root and branch. But even if you accepted it,
there's a whole host of social programs that we've had in America over many,
many decades that have functionally, you know, functioned as reparations effectively, whether
or not they should have. So in some level, the kind of reparations
debate gets a little bit fake, and that kind of reparations are already here,
but we're now just talking about doing much more dramatic and much more silly
things. And I was actually just seeing something from another independent member of the
US Commission on Civil Rights who tweeted out to her surprise, although I don't
know why, she was surprised that California is really going full hog with this
to the point that they're going to like assess whether a black person has the
appropriate amount of actual slave ancestry to be eligible for I mean, that's where
we're at, right or it's going to be like if you're Chinese American,
like was your family directly impacted by the Chinese Exclusion Act of the eighteen eighties,
right, Like you could see where this goes, Like, you know,
did the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo directly sees, you know, lands from
your mestizo ancestors, right, like, there's when you have the wrong principle,
there's really no limit to where you can go with it. Your great
great great great grandfather on the Alamo, right, right, No, exactly
right, that's and that's where we go. And this is you know,
Thomas Soul has written, he's written a lot about this, and he was
one of the main inspirations for this book. Twenty years ago when I was
living in India and seeing a lot of these same types of issues but with
different groups of people as the victim class and the perpetrator class put in and
I was reading Soul at the time. His book Affirmative Action Around the World
kind of had a big influence on me. But you know, he talks
about Soul talks about how the quest for cosmic justice inevitably leads to greater injustice.
And so it's not to say that there of course, of course America's
hands are not clean. Historically, no people's hands are clean. But if
you attempt to get this sort of cosmic justice, it will be much worse
for everybody involved. I have the PDF of your book pulled up in front
of me. But I actually have this hard copy of the as well as
Soul written for me as well, and that's sort of where I wanted to
maybe bring all of this together. Jeremy is you know, there's the Christopher
Christopher Caldwell argument and agement tittlement, there's you know, Hanania has made arguments
in this space. Where do you stand on if there were to be,
let's say, for the sake of hypotheticals, a Trump presidency or maybe even
a Rondes Santis presidency and they seize controls of the administrative state. You know,
I shouldn't say sees, but they peacefully assume the administrative peacefully protesting as
they take over the administrative state. So you've actually been a part of this
our federal bureaucracy, so you have some insider knowledge of how all of this
works, what needs to be done, what can be done. I assume
you agree it has to be at the federal level. In fact, is
in the book at the federal level. Yeah, it is at the federal
level. And it's a problem. I managed a ten thousand peerson federal bureaucracy
and it was weird because it was COVID, so I couldn't even see most
of them, but be you know, probably nine nine hundred of them were
trying to undermine me in some way. Right, So, like I think,
unless you address the federal bureaucracy and the federal laws directly, I think
there are limits to where you'll get. And I think an area in which
I don't want to say that I differ with Caldwell and Hanania, but I
would not go as far as them as I think they have done a great
job of putting attention on these civil rights laws, for example, and I
think that's totally warranted. I have an entire chapter where I do the same.
But I think it's important to also realize we could get rid of every
single one of these laws and regulations in America, and it would not get
rid of the problem, okay, because it's it's deeply embedded. At this
point, I'm not trying to say we shouldn't do it, because I think
ultimately it's a necessary kind of fundamental reform of these laws and institutions is a
necessary step to get where we need to get, but it's not a sufficient
step in of itself, and laws are also only worth what people are going
to enforce them. The best exact of this that I can really point to
and why I'm not just kind of a legalist about this, California has twice
outlawed affirmative action in its universities, and the last time it did it in
the same election where Joe Biden was carrying sixty three percent in California and every
politician in California had endorsed the pro afirmative action side, and it's still lost.
It didn't even lose by that little It was on like fifty six to
forty four. And yet, for those of us who have followed, and
my friend yng Ma has kind of worked on these campaigns over twenty years,
for those who followed, what's actually happened in universities when affirmative action was outlawed.
I don't want to say that like if you squint, you can't see
a difference, but like, basically the university has just ignored it and did
what they wanted to do anyway. And so that's why I caution an excessive
focus on laws, even though I do think we need to reform them as
an important piece. And you know, I was going to leave it there,
but I actually that brings me to another question I feel like you have
a good answer to because you sort of got into that a little bit earlier
when you were talking about how, you know, Thomas ol has made some
brilliant arguments and has been absolutely pillar Reid and you know, been targeted by
racist smears, just like you know people like Jason Riley. You know,
they've been out there doing this. But you know, it's like for Republicans,
terrifying Republican politicians, elected Republicans and even you know, maybe people on
local school boards, whatever, it's a terrifying space to go into because for
good reasons, there's basically nothing more stigmatized in America than being a biggot.
So maybe for a candidate, and I don't know if you could apply that
more broadly, but how should Republicans people in the culture space people in the
politics space? Is your advice? You know, bold colors not pill pastels,
to quote Ronald Reagon, just sort of if you look like you're stepping
tepidly into this argument, you look like you're apologetic and ashamed of what you
think about it. Yeah, I think in general it is, And I
mean, obviously I wrote the book for a reason, And really that's why
I wrote the book, to say, like, we shouldn't be ashamed,
to encourage people to that there's nothing not only is there nothing wrong with these
arguments, these arguments are profoundly correct and in keeping with our most fundamental traditions,
values, and goals, and our opponents are not. They're very bad,
and we should call them out without shame. And we can do that
also as white people, particularly, although again I didn't just write the book
for white people, but I wanted to do that as a white guy.
So I think it is important. And I will say, you know,
when I started to write this book a couple of years ago, I was
like, ooh, this tightrope is awfully narrow, and that's you know,
alligators down there in the pit. Even just in a couple of years that
I've written this, I mean, you will hear guys like Tucker or Matt
Walsh, or Charlie Kirk or even just you know other folks. They will
say the words anti white or anti white racism. So I think the environment
has improved, not in terms of like what the crazy people on the left
are doing, but I think the crazy people on the left have gotten so
crazy that people on the writer are like, actually, you know what,
we just we kind of hate it, but we need to stand up for
ourselves. And again, look, I hope if people are listening to this
conversation, they're like, Wow, this guy sounds great and I want to
go buy his book. He's got it, He's got it right. Believe
me, if you know anything about the economics of selling books, it won't
make a big difference in my financial life. But I would encourage you,
even if you're maybe not totally convinced, if we're going to have these sorts
of conversations, you know, buying books like this is a signal to kind
of the elite publishing world and other people. Oh, you know, people
are actually interested in this issue and perspectives. We're going to go find other
people who can talk about this. And so it really does make a difference
for people to you know, if they buy the book, or if they
read the book, if even they borrow a friend's copy and then talk about
it with friends. You know, said it's a readership issue as much as
it is a sales issue. It makes a big difference. And I think
that we don't want to be obnoxious, and I try not to be.
I've really I've said in this to other people, like I didn't write this
for the edgiest edge lord you know out there who's like super online. I
mean, they will learn things, and I've given it to a couple of
them and they learned a lot of things. But I wrote it so that
they could take it to their mom or dad who's maybe not even fully convinced
or is convinced that if they talk about this type of an issue, that
they're a very bad person, and that it's really justifacts me on type approach,
and that a fair minded person will look at this evidence and find it
persuasive that we need to change course from what we've been doing. You know,
I've never had we have authors on the show almost every day, and
actually nobody's ever made that argument about the cultural space. But it's absolutely true.
Publishers look at these numbers and they're so meaningful, and even just having
these conversations in your individual lives, like I caught sometimes voting in the cultural
war. You don't always get to vote for the best candidate, but you
can actually cast votes in the culture war every single day, and buying books
is one great way to do that. Yeah, and I told you before.
I got a call from my publisher right before I went on saying,
hey, this is doing really well. I think we're going to do a
second printing even though the book is not out yet. So it does make
a difference that I guarantee when they look at you know, it's a very
mainstream publisher I'm out with, like whether they're going to do another book in
this space, it matters a lot, And so we can influence by the
choices that we make as consumers. Just it's not just bud Light Boycott's.
It's what we positively choose to buy and consume, whether that's Robin DiAngelo or
Jeremy Carl. Yeah, there's no right white rural rage in this book.
Although I am white. I live in Montana and I'm angry, so you
know, maybe maybe, but it's you know, it's I try to be
fair in the book, and hopefully that will come across to the readers.
The very problematic archetype all in one place there too. Yes, yes,
I am the avatar of evil, I'm afraid. Well, the book again
is called the Unprotected Class. How anti white racism is tearing America Apart.
You can follow Jeremy on accep Real Jeremy Carl and also you can check out
a substack called The Course of Empire that's at Jeremycarl dot substack dot com.
Jeremy, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much, eway a
great conversation. Really appreciate it. You've been listening to another edition of The
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Tashinski, culture editor here at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and
anxious for the frame. All right, you