From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the
power Line Show with your host Steve Hayward. Well, hi everybody, and
welcome to a bonus podcast episode in the classic format with me in a conversation
one on one with a notable person. And today's notable person is a repeat
guest and an old friend. It's Jeremy Carl, nowadays a senior fellow at
the Claremont Institute. He spent many years and I first got to know him
during the years he worked at the Hoover Institution with the Secretary of State George
Schultz. Jeremy's really done it now. He's written a brand new book just
out called The Unprotected Class, How anti white Racism is tearing America apart.
And first of all, the book is wonderfully written. I highly recommend it.
It covers the entire waterfront and not just particular issues like crime or you
know, diversity and affirmative action in higher education. He's got it all from
A to Z, and I say he's done it now. He says all
the things that you're not supposed to say and brings up statistics that are actively
suppressed, and so he joins a very small number of people who have bravely
been working in this field, like Heather MacDonald, Steve Saylor, Zach Goldberg,
a young guy that we referenced several times in our conversation to follow.
And so, you know, it's lucky that I'll put it this way,
Jeremy lives in a remote location, far away from where the troublemakers might want
to put up a tent encampment for Gaza or something on his front lawn.
But nonetheless he's going to start attracting a lot of hate because, of course,
you know, hate speech these days is defined as any speech that a
liberal doesn't like, and racism is defined in my lexicon as any opposition to
the political agenda of the left. So, without further ado, let's get
into some of the highlights of The Unprotected Class with Jeremy Carl. Well,
Jeremy Carl, Welcome back to the power Line podcast. I think this is
your third or fourth appearance with us, but you have really done it now
with your new book, The Unprotected Class. How anti white racism is tearing
America apart. And I guess my first question is, I mean I first
met you, I don't know fifteen years ago through our mutual environmental work,
which was yeah, i'd like to say kind of mainstream. But the point
is what prompted you to commit this heresy? I mean, you are saying
things that you're not allowed to say, right, So what prompted you to
do this book links treatment that is guaranteed to embroil you in lots of controversies
and make people call you names? Right? Well, I think Steve,
you just you hit on it. It's always, of course great to be
back when somebody says I'm not allowed to say something. Maybe that's a little
bit more of my inner toddler coming out, but I'm, well, guess
what I'm going to say it? And I mean, I think the reason
why they don't want us to say it is because it's an important issue,
and I felt like I had the background and interest to write it. I'd
been writing some of this stuff before, and I think, you know,
I think one of the things that I've sort of compared it a little bit
to Jonah. You know, God tells him to good in Nineveh, and
he's like, I don't really, not really sure I want to do that,
and then the fish swallows him up. And gets spit back up on
the beach, and then the next time God tells him to get in Ninva,
He's like, okay, okay, you know, I'll go. That
experience for me was I'd written about these issues pretty candidly when I'd been at
the Hoover Institution and in my early days at Claremont, and I think gotten
some attention. But it was when I had been running away like Jonah and
gone into the Trump administration, was serving in a senior role having nothing to
do with this in the Department of the Interior, and then all of a
sudden, the Washington Post and other folks began to take a much greater interest
in some of my writings, and I said, well, hey, it
looks like I'm not going to actually be able to run away from this,
so maybe I should really just double down at this issue really seriously. And
kind of out of that experience came this book. Ultimately. Yeah, so
in other words, lean into it, which makes perfect sense. So for
listeners who don't know Jeremy or this work or the subject, I'll just sort
of say, as a summary statement, Jeremy, that you include in the
book a lot of statistics, facts, facts, and figures on what's really
going on with racial matters in America. Listeners who are familiar with the work
of Heather McDonald or Steve Saylor or tour three other people, but only tour
three other people will know a lot of the story. I mean, myths
about redlining, the truth about crime and education, and so forth. I
think you assembled it in a very readable and crisp way. But you also
get at some things here that also are sort of known by people who follow
this closely. But I think most Americans don't follow this closely, and I
want to get to some parts of all that. But I guess maybe I'll
start here and you get into the sum toward the end of the book.
Is the problem of well, first of all, I should I should have
you just defined a little bit. I'm assuming that listeners know too much already.
What do you mean by anti white racism? Give me some definitions and
two or three features of what you mean by that. Sure, Well,
let me do a few things first. I mean, you kind of touched
on the fact that other people have been around this issue, and in fact,
Heather MacDonald you mention she was the first person I called when I decided
to do this book because I think she's really probably done some of the best
work on this, and I thought she'd have some good advice, which she
did. I think the difference in what I've done is, well, there's
a couple of things. When is my book is much broader in scope.
It's really a survey course. So like somebody like Heather has done, you
know, like a really awesome book on crime, and other people have done
really awesome books on wokenesses and education and any or whatever, and or the
civil rights law like Richard and Nani has done, or my Claremont College Christopher
Caldwell, and I'd recommend all of their books. But what I've tried to
do is kind of say, you know, it's the peribial blind man touching
the elephant. Any of them are kind of touching a part of the elephant.
And I kind of tried, by looking at twelve different areas where this
is going on, to kind of say the elephant is an elephant. You
know, there's the same thing underlying this, And that kind of gets to
your question about so what is anti white racism kind of mean atly says I'm
using it, So I think it's it's racial discrimination and animous against white Americans.
It's just that simple. And sometimes, you know, I actually thought
about using the term discrimination in the title as opposed to racism. But the
problem is that there are sometimes things going on that are discriminatory that maybe are
not explicitly done for racist reasons. And there's also a lot of things out
in the culture, and this particularly came out and say, my chapter on
Hollywood that are quite explicitly racist but don't necessarily manifest themselves is exactly what you
call discrimination. And so I kind of use racism ultimately as a catch all
for kind of this phenomenon. But it's everything from employment discrimination to preferences in
jobs, to an entertainment culture that is telling white people that they're less,
to a military that is penalizing white people, to racial preferences in terms of
healthcare treatment. You kind of name it. So that's kind of my short
definition of what we're seeing. Yeah, right, I mean, you have
fifteen chapters, and you know, you mentioned you have a chapter in entertainment.
One of my favorites is the unbearable whiteness of the Green movement. I
mean, the whole that that's a subject that's long been of interest to me
and explains of course why climate justice and and what climate and race have attempted
to be fused so many times, big business, the military. Right,
So yeah, you really bring together all the different flash points, uh and
show that it's everywhere. Right. Yeah. By the way, you know,
it's it's popular to say that Brooks has said he couldn't make Blazing Saddles
today, Right, sure, even though the script was written by the most
prominent black comic of the time, Richard Pryor. I think the movie that
I think you couldn't make today was made by liberal was true lies. You
remember that from the mid Night Yeah, and you know the bad guys were
Arab terrorists known as Crimson Gihad. Well, there's no way a studio would
allow you to make them the bad guys today, right, Okay, this
is sort of widely known, but there's more serious problems here. You know,
this is playing out in employment, Screa, nation, college admissions.
We're familiar with. One of the things that I've been onto for a while,
and you get at is this really does seem to be a problem of
that emanates more from white liberals. Guilty white liberals. Now, I think
really the root of the problem. I mean, you cite the great Zach
Goldberg, who I know a little bit, Yeah, work on this,
but say a little bit about that, because I think, you know,
the problem is it's our not our team exactly, but it's guilty white liberals
are driving this. Yeah, And Zach's work is great, and I cite
it, and in fact, I expect I've got a couple follow up books
in mind, and I think one of them will go a lot more into
some of the great work that Zach has done. But I think there's a
there's a couple of different things going on with white liberals. I mean what
I do think that they're probably the biggest contributor to the problem, and therefore
it's really important to talk to them about them. At the same time,
I don't want to whitewash no pun intended, the rule or the role of
kind of my Nordy political activists and leaders here and say they don't have agency
or you know, it's just these bad liberal white people, because then I'm
kind of committing the same sin that I'm sort of accusing other people, which
is sort of like inflating the role of whites and everything that might be bad
out there. But that having been said, I think they are a real
problem. I have a couple kind of thoughts on why that is. I
mean, and Zach Goldberg's work is actually really interesting because he's gone through and
he's at the Manhattan Institute for folks who don't know him, He's gone through
a lot of general social survey data, and what he finds really fascinatingly is
with pretty much every group and every ideology, you have what's called an in
group preference, so people sort of prefer their own group. This is not
surprising, and you get a little more of it in conservatives typically and a
little less in liberals. But as long as this doesn't go overboard, this
is not a problem. I mean, just like people prefer their own mother
to some random woman on the street, right like this, this is not
necessarily concerning except white liberals and white liberals. And I'm not aware of this
in any other country, with any other group. I'm not saying it hasn't
happened, but I'm not aware of it. Have an outgroup preference, so
they think that other white people are dumber, more criminal, you know,
you kind of name it. They feel very coldly toward other white people.
And I can almost only explain this in a couple of ways. I mean,
one is that at some level it's a status thing. So you can
go talk about white privilege a lot if you've got one hundred million dollars and
you know that you're going to be able to get around any sort of deficit
that I put on you for being white, maybe either literally because you literally
can gain the system, or fine, you're going to discriminate against me.
And so I'm only going to have ninety seven million dollars, right, and
so it doesn't really matter to me in a way that it will matter to
a middle class white person. So I think that's one thing that's going on.
The second is that I think you see a huge prevalence and I think,
again this is pretty well established in the literature at this point that it's
not a weird statistical artifact of mental illness in white liberals, right. I
think that's a lot of what's going on. These are just kind of unhappy,
depressed people, and they're lashing out and they don't like themselves and they
kind of transfer that to their feelings about other white people, and unfortunately,
they run a lot of the institutions. So we're stuck with that. Yeah,
No, I've seen some of the data on that. It's really quite
startling. But let's stick with that point for a minute. You know,
you you include some of the polling data that goes back decades about you know,
wide approval of interracial marriage attitudes that have changed dramatically from the forties and
the fifties. Right, there's really almost nobody who opposes interracial marriage. You
know, ninety five percent of Americans say, well, we did vote for
a black manster president, just not that long ago, right, Yeah,
And so all the old markers of racism show that it's just declined to the
vanishing point. One of the things that I'm curious about is, I mean,
I have a sense, and we can say more about this in a
moment, perhaps, is that an awful lot of Americans, to the extent
they pay attention to this, are really tired of it. Everything's racist.
It's been promiscuously overused, right. Polsters and surveyors seem uncurious about this.
You know. Zach Goldberg has had to go through a lot of general social
service data and do a lot of very fancy statistical analysis to investigate these questions.
But I'm amazed that PEW or or any of the major poling and surveying
groups aren't asking questions along those lines. Are have we overstated racism? Do
you exploring some of these questions that bring up in your book? And they
all seem to be avoiding it. I'm guessing that's not an accident. No,
And I think it's some combination of bias and not kind of wanting to
talk about uncomfortable subjects. I mean, you know, it took me a
while even to just get comfortable talking about my own book in cocktail party conversation,
right because it's and I've gotten a lot better at it. And I
think one other thing that's been really encouraging is that I think the environment has
gotten much freer around these issues, even in the kind of two years since
I started writing this book. You know, at first, when I was
started writing it, I was like, whoa, you know, I'm kind
of on the narrow tightrope here. And now I feel like there's mainstream people
like Tucker, like Charlie Kirk, like Matt Walsho kind of were talking about
in the media, and even you had Donald Trump just last week kind of
made a comment about anti whiteness, and you know there were anti white and
that wouldn't be you know, good if we were doing that. So I
do think that these issues are being more mainstreams, but at the same time,
our establishment institutions are remarkably incurious about them, which is why I decided
to become curious about them. Yeah. I mean, one of the things
you say in your last chapter about remedies is a creative preference cascade against us.
In other words, the more people start speaking out openly about it,
the more more people will start feeling liberated to speak out against it, and
then suddenly you have a debate instead of just a few figures, even as
formidable as Charles Murray and Steve Sailor, who people can ignore. But if
there's more and more people, then you can't ignore them. So yeah,
I think that's uh. I think that's right. So, by the way,
here's something that I thought I knew an awful lot about this, But
one fact I learned from your book that I absolutely floored me is that this
cliche we've been hearing for a long time now that diversity is our strength originated
with dan quayle Yes what's astound? How would you find that out? By
the way, and that means tell that story. It's amazing. I can't
remember, but but the origin of it is in the week of the La
riots to Japan, and this is kind of Japan is not quite at its
peak yet, but it's still riding very high as our big competitor that we're
all worried about. And these Japanese businessmen say, I mean, I think
they kind of say, you have these problems with diversity, and that's why
you're having this, and Quail, you know, not known as the great
intellect of the Republican Party says no, actually, diversity is our strength,
and that's sort of where this phrase comes from. And so that's that's very
revealing to me, I think, and I mean again, I think an
assertion one of the controversial assertions I don't spend an excessive amount of time out
in the book is that I just believe that all things being equal, diversity
is a weakness. And I want to be very careful and quantify exactly what
I mean by that. So I'm not suggesting that a complete, uniform,
sort of fascist, you know, society is the way that we want to
go. And I'm not suggesting that diverse people are not good people. I'm
suggesting that any society, no matter how high the human capital in is of
anybody you're bringing in, as you have excessive amounts of diversity, this tends
to create social problems of all types, especially in a multi ethnic democracy,
rather than, rather than solve problems. And in fact, even my elite
men or Secretary of State Schultz, who I worked with for many years and
who probably did not have the same views on this sort of issue than me,
but he always felt that governing over diversity was the kind of great challenge
of the twenty first century, and that I agree with. Yeah, I
mean, well, so, first of all, let's do two terms together
that are become so charged. Diversity is one of them. The other one
that's linked to it in many ways, of course, is multiculturalism. You
remember that was the big phrase twenty thirty years ago. And on the surface,
no one can be against multiculturalism. And from the standpoint of common sense,
it's good to learn about other cultures. That used to me learning the
language of another culture, whether it's Italian or Swahili. Of course, in
practice, what it became was ideological and it meant hate every hate your own
culture, right, Western culture right, and diversity is kind of the same
thing. I mean, we'll come back to what diversity rightly understood is perhaps
in a moment, but or maybe right now is the great melting pot,
right right. You know the Lincoln's famous Fourth of July speech when was eighteen
fifty eight, talking about and everybody comes here and they become Americans. By
right, it's not just for British people. It was, you know,
it was part of his argument with Douglas. So diversity now has become this
cudgel of left. And actually, I guess I think that diversity is the
substitute for the proletariat that's just receded with the failure of Marxism. Right,
here's the thing I think, you know, the work of actually Robert Putton,
I'm a liberal. I mean you reference in my places, and you
know, he was startled by his findings that I put it this way,
when you do too much diversity, it reduces social trust. Right. And
by the way, there's some European social scientists who looked at this and also
concluded the same thing and run away and terror and avoided the subject right right,
and so sorry, I'm starting to ramble here. I'm trying to think
of a question, which is, well, let me do it this way.
Unless someone read your whole book, if they're only reading reviews and some
of the controversies, they may miss something, which is I think you get
diversity rightly understood, which is we all to get back to the old principle
that all men are created equal, that human beings are human beings first,
right in a particular ethnic identity separately. And anyway, I'll stop there and
finish my thought and do it better than I've just done. Because you're the
author, I'm not. No, that's great, and Putnam's work is really
interesting, and in fact, I think one of the most interesting things about
Putnam's work to me is not only does he find a decline in social trust
between groups, and to me, that's it may not be intuitive to everybody.
To me, that's kind of intuitive that you'd find that. But I
think the fascinating thing about Putnam's work is that he finds even within groups,
so you know, Asian Americans in a diverse society will even mistrust other Asian
Americans more, And that to me is not an intuitive finding, but he
does find that and as far as I know, it's a robust finding.
So that's that's kind of very interesting. And yeah, I mean I do
it was one of the things I'm kind of proud of about this book and
I've gotten I mean, it's sold really well and it's had lots of very
nice reviews, and more I've heard coming down the pipeline is that I've had
some folks who are pretty pretty far out on the extremes say, wow,
you know, this is kind of a groundbreaking book that that doesn't really it
doesn't it doesn't kind of hold back very much. It's it's really pretty tough.
And then I've had a lot of other people, I think correctly say,
you know, this is written in a very even handed way. And
I've and I've really tried to do that. I've I've tried the subject is
it's combusted. It's combustible enough that I didn't feel a need to kind of
add a bunch of overheated rhetoric or overheaated proposals for how we'd address the problem.
And so you know, that's something that's actually I've really been pleased with
about the book. But I do think that these sorts of problems adversity.
In One of the ways that I try to be moderated is that I'm not
suggesting that we are going to somehow magically roll back the clock to some alleged
perfect era that wasn't, by the way perfect anyway, but that I've just
said, hey, there are some eternal principles, and you and I,
as Claremont guys, will we'll kind of gravitate towards this. There's some eternal
principles that, even if we haven't always lived up to them as a country,
are good principles about equality and treating people with individual respect, et cetera.
And we should try to organize our social and political systems so that we're
elevating those principles as opposed to kind of, you know, trying to start
race wars, which is sort of what our policies seem to be doing right
now. Yeah. Right, I mean, your book directly says America's future
is multiracial, multi multi ethnic, and and that blaming white people for everything,
the sort of these courses on whiteness and universities, right, that's not
a formula for people getting along. That's a formula for division, and okay,
let me bring in sort of a thought that I know you have.
Well that's slightly beyond the scope of your book, but it bears on it
a bit, and I want to do it this way. So you know,
a lot, I'm not sure if it's a lot, but some young
especially white males, college age and so forth. Maybe it's too strong to
say that some of them are attracted to white nationalism, but you know,
you think of that ragtag, a small mob of people in Charlottesville in twenty
seventeen that got people so exercised, right, And one explanation for that is
not simply the perception that they're being made the scapegoat for everything wrong with America.
But second, especially if you're of a conservative disposition of any kind,
you have grown up in the last twenty years with nothing but a record of
fail right eleven in the Iraq War, the seat doesn't go very well,
the financial crash, the rise of this ideology that you're after. Whereas you
know, people are our age. We lived through the Reagan years in winning
the Cold War and restoring the economy and turning things around after Vietnam and the
horrible seventies, so you and I have actually known a great measure of success
and young people haven't. And so you can understand why. By the way,
I have some friends of mine who are very conservative parents tell me they're
shocked at how radicalized their young sons are. Radicalized to the right, not
the left. Understands it's the opposite of the sixties, right, And yeah,
so this is I think worrying, And so what do you have to
say about that? I think your book does have a lot to bear on
that. But this is actually great, Steve, and I'm glad you asked
about this, even though it is a little bit beyond this cope of this
book, because I think there's actually a lot that you can say about it.
First of all, I hadn't even like fully internalized it quite in that
way, although I definitely hear a lot of the younger people I talked to
it. I do actually end up talking to a lot of younger people in
the conservative space, and they kind of lament for them. Kind of like
the nineties, but between eighty nine, when the Berlin Wall kind of falls
in two thousand and one, that was the Great American era where we're kind
of unchallenged, We're pre nine to eleven and this. But a lot of
these younger people have just grown up with this legacy of failure. So I
do think that that's important to talk about. And I mean, and you
are a sort of half generation up for me, but both of us.
I mean, I was an older teenager when kind of Morning in America was
happening under Reagan, and so you know, I kind of grew up at
a time in which things felt kind of ascendant, and then I grew up
more as a young adult in this time up through two thousand and one where
we were the unipolar power and everything seemed to be going great. So I
do think that's some of it. And then on the radicalism bit, I
think this is right on. And I one of the first big interviews I
did on this book was with Charlie, and Charlie was who, of course
has founded the biggest and most important youth conservative organization out there, Turning Point
USA. He was talking to me about how when he he did this on
aras, I'm not sharing anything out of school, when he kind of goes
to his donors and talks about this type of issue that they're like, oh,
you know, you can't say that it might be racist, Whereas when
he talks to young people on college campuses, particularly young white guys, they're
like, of course, this is our life, you know, this is
where we are, and they're I mean, I don't want to use the
term radicalized, because I think that that has a slightly negative, you know,
connotation, obviously, but I think they they understand the situation is not
good for them, and they are unabashed about talking about it. Yeah.
So not to overly do the partisan angle on this, but that's your book
as that I love, and I have about Some of these quotes independent of
you, too, are from Joe Biden back in the seventies when he opposed
bussing, when he was a critic of the civil rights movement, when he
called out anti white racism by with that phrase, right yeah. And then
we think in between that and now you had the famous sister Soldier moment of
Bill Clinton. Right. You know, there's an old quote I found once
of Clinton in eighty eight, when you know, he was trying to help
Michael Ducaccus win that election and frustrated du Caucus was such a technocratic nerd and
wouldn't listen to him. And one of things Clinton said. The reporter in
eighty eight was says, I don't what did he say? He said,
we don't have to we don't have to oppose Jesse Jackson. We need to
disagree with him. And of course that's what Clinton does four years later when
in the famous Sister Soldier moment calling out her amazing rhetoric of you know,
it's okay to kill whites, right, he did that in front of Jesse
Jackson. And if you're and that seems to be utterly gone now, Joe
Biden is totally down for the whole race mongering of the progressive left these days.
I don't know, do I need to add to that? I mean,
you wut on observations about this? No, I think that's totally right.
And it's hard to know. I mean, I'm not one of these
people who completely overdoes the meme of Joe Biden's senile, etc. I mean,
I think he's enough there to at least kind of know what's going on,
although I don't think that he's in any functional way really running his White
House. But I think it's interesting in that if you just kind of view
Joe Biden as a cipher, empty suit who will say, whatever the Democratic
platitude is, it is fascinating to observe Joe Biden in the nineteen seventies that
the media has tried to bury for political reasons for the most part, versus
Joe Biden today. And there really is. There is no resistance functionally to
this radical agenda within the Democrat Party. And as I point out, part
of the problem is, while the Democrats are flat out war on whites without
even any shame at pretty much every the area, the GOP, partially because
this is a difficult subject for a lot of people to talk about, is
at best usually kind of tepid defenders. And it's really only among the grassroots
right that are kind of stiffening some spines. And we do we do have
some good congressmen who will kind of raise these issues, but there's still a
lot of nervousness. And I think, look, this is going to go
away because reality is going to demand that it goes away. That's what I
haven't discovered any grand new theories here. It's just the time is right to
write this book and talk about it because reality is it gets a boat,
and that's what's happening. Reality. It's a boat. Yeah, that's an
updated version of the famous Herb steinleine. I know, you know, which
if something can't go on forever, it won't. And as this isn't okay,
it isn't working for the for the left, but well, okay,
they keep it any more radical as you note that, you know, demands
from reparations that are completely preposterous, like San Francisco. I quote you on
reparations in the book, Steve so I missed that. I've skimmed through two
fast talk about it was like I quote you talking about how it was like
a recipe for all out racial conflict or something you have. It was even
darker than that. I was like, well that's probably right. I mean,
yeah, well I won't chase after that rabbit hole too much right now.
One more thing about sort of white liberal guilt and who the real racists
are I mean again, Zach Goldberg and a few other people have pointed out
that it's actually liberals who believe the most negative stereotypes about minorities. And one
there was one study that skimed your book. I haven't read it every page
carefully. There was that study by actually a black woman at Yale Business school
four or five years ago that analyzed the rhetoric of speeches by liberal democratic politicians
and noticed that they talked down to minorities. Maybe they may not even realize
they're doing this, right, But the proof of this was yeah, sorry,
you think they do? Or you know, I agree, I actually
think they don't. I think dare I say it? Not a figure I'm
particularly fond of, but this is the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yes,
yeah, I will. You see that. You know, well,
you saw a great example of this just a couple of weeks ago when Governor
Hokel of New York said, gosh, you know, blacks and Harlem don't
even know the word computer, right, I mean seriously, I mean,
oh, I misspoke, you know, And no you didn't. You know
that's what you really think, right, I mean, it's unbelievable, and
you know that's something you can't get them to acknowledge. Yeah, all right,
let's talk about a couple of things down in the weeds that I know
Heather McDonald's starting to write about, and you mentioned a lot in your book.
You tell a story, the great story of the Baki case from the
late seventies of Alan Baki, you know, who was one at the Supreme
Court to be and struck down explicit racial quotas that you see Davis Medical School.
Uh. And of course that's the decision that gave us diversity. For
listeners who don't know the background of the case, Justice Palell was the swing
vote in a five to four decision. He said, no, you can't
have fixed racial quotas, but you can allow diversity as a factor in admitting
a class. And they also strangely justified it on First Amendment grounds. Well,
this is really a matter of academic freedom. Universities have an interest in
wanting to compose their class to represent the from that we began the great diversity
racket. And by the way, this shows you, I'm coming to a
very pointed question for you in a moment about this. It reminds me a
little bit in a different realm of the Chevron case, which, you know,
the case that the conservative legal movements now working to overturn. I always
remind people that that's the case the Reagan administration won in nineteen eighty four,
and they thought that this was the grounds of sensible bureaucratic reform, and it
turned out to be the opposite. Likewise, with Baki, what looked like
an important step to returning to a sensible understanding of civil rights turned out to
be disaster in the cornerstone of the diversity racket. So we'll get into disparate
impact more in a moment in the Griggs decision. But here's my question.
Jeremy, and I've raised this a few times with people, and our mutual
friend Gail Harriet's horrified when I do it. But I'm starting to say maybe
the Baky case was incorrectly decided. I don't mean that on principle, although
there is no principle the Pale's swing opinion. But my point is, what
if the Supreme Court had gone with the liberals and said, you know what,
racial fixed explicit racial quotas are fine. I think the whole thing would
have eventually collapsed of its own weight if you had done that, because that
would have been unpopular and being would have set all the minority groups at war
with one another for their share of the pie. Is that a completely crazy
idea or what do you think? It's not completely crazy, it's kind of
a fun and provocative idea. I don't know, right, I mean at
some level. So much of this anti white kind of regime depends, as
power often does, on being hidden to a degree, and so bring it
out when you bring out the racism and the discrimination so explicitly arguably. I
mean, Ulysses S. Grant actually had a great quote about this about laws.
He sort of said, the best thing you can do. I'm going
to mangle the quote, but roughly, you know, for some obnoxious law
is it's really stringent and effective execution. You know that I'll kind of teach
everybody, well, this is really bad. We don't want to do that.
So I think maybe that would have been the case. It's sort of
an interesting thing, as you point out in Palell's opinion, without getting too
much into the weeds, so much of the controlling thing that the regime put
here was literally in a footnote he had. It's not even in the main
part of the opinion at all. And the affirmative action case, the Baki
case you cite, I mean, it was a real mass You had nine
justices and six separate opinions and Baki, who's eventually admitted, but they don't
totally strike down the racial preference. As I kind of recount in the book,
the kind of very memorable story that not as many people know about the
African American student who was kind of always held up as the great example of
the guy who replaced Baki, and Ted Kennedy was lionizing him on the floor
of the Senate, and the New York Times did a huge puff piece profile
on him in the magazine that went on for ten pages. This guy was
working in the inner City. He ended up killing a patient and abandoning other
patients and losing his medical license and eventually kind of winds up shot dead by
the side of the road and mysterious circumstances. And so meanwhile Baki goes on
to have a very successful career as best I can tell, at the Mayo
Clinic, a very prestigious medical institution. And so in many ways, I
would say, yes, this is the great example of affirmative action, as
take Kennedy said at the time, but not in the way that he meant
it. Yeah, I mean, I mean one sentence summary, which I
should have done, is what Baki said was you can have quotas as long
as you don't call them quotas, right, And you know, one thing
that I think is in one of my Reagan books. Maybe I cut it
out, but I do. I did follow in nineteen eighty four a big
fight at the Democratic platform meetings in San Francisco because Jesse Jackson was insisting the
Democrats embrace racial quotas for employment and everything else, and the party resisted it
because they knew that that word is simply anathema. And that's when they adopted
goals and timetables instead. Right. That became the euphemism for it. Right,
Okay. A lot of this goes back to the This is a case
of people know even less than the Baky case and the Griggs case from Griggs
versus Duke Power in what nineteen seventy seventy one, seventy one? Yeah,
and this is what gave us the disparate impact treatment. You have a very
good account of this, So why don't you summarize it briefly for listeners?
Yeah, So, Gregs versus Duke Power is one of the most important Supreme
Court cases. And in fact, when the American Conservative did a symposium of
a number of writers on what's one Supreme Court decision would you overturn? And
I picked this one and wrote about it. So Griggs gives us and our
mutual friend Gail Harriet has actually written a good piece on this, and she's
a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights and a political independent. She
wrote a Law Review article about disparate impact doctrine. The title of which I
cited my book is roughly disparate impact makes virtually everything presumptively illegal. And I
think that's basically accurate. I mean, with another way of saying, is
it just gives complete power to the bureaucrats to declare anything racist and illegal that
they would like to. So what Gregs versus Duke Power just did briefly is
it's in this nineteen seventy one case, is there is a an employment qualification
test. Whites and blacks past that test at very different rates. There is
no even allegation that this was done with a attempt to discriminate. But the
Supreme Court rules in this Griggs case in nineteen seventy one that even if there
is no intent to discriminate, if you have kind of a result of an
employment test or anything like that that has a disparate impact. In other words,
the end result varies significantly from the kind of overall population sizes, then
it's presumptively considered a league. Another there are these various hoops that you can
jump through to sort of show that they were business necessities, et cetera.
But most companies just decide, hey, we're not going to play in that,
and so they just do a bunch of things to effectively put in quotas.
Now, even for the liberal Supreme Court at the time, this ended
up being too radical a decision. And what a lot of people don't know
is that in nineteen eighty nine, in a case called words Code versus Antonio,
they actually walk back a lot of this decision. I mean, very
unusual for a Supreme Court that soon after to effectively break their own presit.
But at that point the civil rights advocates freak out the Bush Senior Civil Rights
Department. They simply lacked the stomach to have the fight that they should have
had and told those guys to go pound sand. And so as a result,
we end up codifying effectively grigs into a civil rights law in nineteen ninety
one that George HW. Bush signs. And there's a lot bunch of really
interesting inside baseball that have been written in individual accounts of conservatives in the civil
rights bureaucracy at the time, political appointees who knew how bad that this was
going to be, but simply the political leadership lacked the courage to do anything
about it. Yeah. No, that was a shameful episode. I mean,
I I remember the time following all that. And one just one aspect
of it I remember was, you know, testing, and there used to
be a practice which I think was allowed. They sup mostly banned. They
really allowed it anorming, which meant, you know, if someone got ninety
percent on a you know, one hundred point scale of a test, okay,
ninety percent, but if minorities were in the ninetieth percentile, Let's say
minority got seventy five percent, but that put them in the ninetieth percentile among
their minority group. They call that ninetieth percentile overall. So other words,
you're calling unequal test results equal for employment purposes. And really, I mean,
we're gonna do this level of dishonesty, and yeah, the Bush administration
as in so many other areas well. Okay, I don't need to finish
that sentence, but uh well, all right, so oh, one more
thing and then we'll get some remedies. You you embrace I'm going to miss
lead listeners for a minute. You embrace net zerodormally if that means carbon emissions
and climate change and energy. But you're applying it to a different realm,
and which I think is brilliant and I like it. So tell people what
net zero you will you will embrace. So net zero means deat zero immigration
for a significant period of time, and that means for every immigrant we're bringing
in, we're deporting at least one. And of course, I mean you
start out with we just need to deport every person who's here illegally, and
I think not to call up the ghost of Mitt Romney, but of course
a fair number of this can be self deporting at a certain point when you
actually show you're serious about enforcing your law. And of course, are we
ever going to get every single illegal person who's an illegal immigrant who's here.
No, of course we're not. But even if we can get to like
eighty or ninety percent, it will send a real message to people. And
if we combine that with real border enforcement, I think we'd see a big
change in where we are. But I kind of argue that for any sort
of national unity for a new American identity, for what scholars would call an
ethnogenesis, or as Eric Kaufman, a Canadian scholar, puts it in another
book that he's written that I cite a few times, called white shifting.
But if you're going to have this kind of new American identity form kind of
it's it's necessary that we get control of our border, stop having the levels
of mass immigration that we have. And then in the same way that we
did that, the fifties kind of became in certain ways the kind of almost
cliche Heyday of Americanism. I don't think that's a coincidence that you have that
at the tail end of a time in which we've had almost no immigration or
very little immigration, and a tremendous time, particularly in World War Two,
where everybody's thrown together from these different backgrounds, a chance to cohere a new
American identity. And I think we really need to do something like that now,
to cohere a new American identity. Yeah, I mean, you you
make the point that other people made before, But I think you that I
haven't heard a lot lately, which is what our foreign born population is now
something like forty five million which is a sort of high proportion of our total
population. Yeah, and you know it's pretty high, and the around the
you know, the nineteen twenties when we decided to slow down immigration because that's
a large number of people too. You know, assimilate into your country.
Assimilate. It's supposed to be a word you don't use, but I think
it's coming back into fashion. And so you know, people have been saying
for a while now we need some time to assimilate people and have a successful
multi racial country. You know, you said all that, And do you
mention your book. You know, I may have seen this somewhere else in
the last few days. As you know, the joke is you mentioned the
nineteen fifties and and coming out of the war experience about how this was working
well. And by the way, as you know, black progress in particular
was very strong the nineteen fifties relative to weights, right, income growth was
higher, home ownership rates were higher. It you know it this is not
a new thought, but it arguably stops with the expansion of the welfare state
in the sixties. And yeah, I mean that is a true hate fact.
By the way, that you've just cited that very few people are aware
of outside of nerdy policy communities. Right that you get the huge progress in
the African American community, largely before the civil rights movement really takes off,
and our reversal and immigration it opened our borders up right, right of course,
so those two go together. The joke I've heard is that, you
know, suggestive joke is that conservatives want to live in the nineteen fifties and
liberals want to work in the nineteen fifties. Right, Yeah, there is
something to all that, and we could figure that out. We you know,
Paul Krugman has this economic nostalgia for the fifties. It's kind of funny,
but yeah, okay, let's go. You have several remedies in the
back, but we've already mentioned a couple of them. But you know,
one is find some way to challenge or roll back desparate impact, because that's
at the root of so many things. Second, what else we already mentioned,
Create a preference cascade that liberates more and more people, talk plainly and
openly about these issues, and go ahead, you visit civil rights laws pretty
fundamentally. I mean that again, I'm actually not quite as provocative in my
take on this as implicitly my colleague Christopher Caldwell, is I mean, Christoph
or whatever. I mean. He's a really clever writer, so he doesn't
always show you all of his cards, but effectively I think he's you know,
would I don't think it would be unfair to say that he thinks the
entire regime was a mistake, whereas I'm a little more historically generous and that
I think, look, I mean, it was responding to very real problems
that we had in society. It was a blunt instrument. I think it
was two blunted instrument arguably. But I don't see a grand need to kind
of like re litigate the wisdom of the sixty four Civil Rights Act. I
think the right thing to do is simply to say, look, we're as
far away from that sixty years on as they were from the right, brothers.
Our problems are not like black people not being served at lunch counters.
It's white people being discriminated against employment, et cetera, et cetera. So
we need to fundamentally reform our civil rights laws, restore freedom of association,
and address the actual problems that really exist rather than kind of those exist in
the liberal fantasy world, which is essentially what our current civil rights regime tends
to to kind of focus on. Yeah, you emphasize reviving the rhetoric of
common citizenship instead of you separate baluklanized groups. Right by the way, you
know, the person you mentioned Trump, the person who actually does that a
lot or most is Trump. Whereas I remember, you know, Trump's first
inaugural address, which you know got panned because of you know, the air
of American carnage is going to end or whatever. But but what people don't
probably didn't pay attention to this. You know, he was introduced by Chuck
Schumer, who was as happens, you always have a senator who's chair of
the inauguration committee, and his his introduction of Trump or introduction of the proceedings,
I forget exactly how it works. He didn't introduce Trump, but he
all he did was emphasize different minority groups calling them out one by one,
right, I mean that's in the DNA now, people of sort of the
left. A couple others you have here that are starting to happen. I
mean, you know, you finished this book some months ago, of course,
but law Fair against the anti war establishment and you mentioned some of the
settlements that have happened for the discrimination, like the Starbucks manager and Philadelphia teachers
and some corporations. And now I think we're going to see some universities get
nick card on the tolerance or anti semitism on campus. Yeah, and then
you say eliminate DEI bureaucracies, Well, they seem to be falling about one
a day right now, right right, Although the key will be whether they
are really following or not right or whether they're just being reconstituted under other names.
And I think the answer there is going to be it's a mixed bag,
right, you know, it'll depend on the institution, It'll depends on
the state, the kind of blackpill to use the term of the younger kids
in looking at a lot of this is California has outlawed affirmative action twice now,
including in nineteen in twenty twenty when it went sixty three percent for Biden.
But if you actually look at the college admissions at the UC's right now,
if you swit really hard, you can maybe find where they're in.
We're seeing it a little bit, but they've largely figured out ways to just
get around it and so I worry without a real discussion and real popular will
or real elite will, because I mean the vote show that there's actually popular
will, we're just going to continue new types of discrimination or dei under different
names and guys' is yeah, right, Okay, last question is a fluffy,
frothy one. How many death threats have you gotten? You know,
that's actually been the big surprise, especially because the book has gotten quite a
bit of attention, is and because I've been harassed before, but as of
now, the left has not, you know, kind of gone after me
and my family and quite the way I would have expected. And I think
it's just a matter of time. In fact, I've seen some bad actors
start to follow me on Twitter, and usually if I see that, I
just block them, and not that they can't get there anyway, but at
least it adds another impediment. But I think if if this book continues to
grow in the way that I'm seeing and really begins to have a big effect
on the debate, I have no doubt that the left will be out with
their knives, hopefully only proverbially and not literally sharpened to well you know,
it could be I mean, I mean Ignoring their critics is a long time
tactic of the left, and it could be that some of them may think,
wait a minute, don't we don't want to acknowledge this book exists because
we'll call more attention to it, which is actually ironically a hopeful sign in
a certain way. Right, They can't you know, you had, I
mean, I think back to the Bell Curve thirty years ago now, and
you had long attempts at detailed refutation of distorted claims of what the book actually
said. But never mind that. The point is is, you know,
serious people from the left attempted to take it on, and now I think
there's there's just look the arguments that you present, and you know, Heather
and others of our few friends in this area are just simply so overwhelming that
it yeah, you know, the only thing they can do is trying to
ignore it. So yeah, well, and I think the good the good
news there, though, is that if we can get our side to really
begin speaking about it in more of a unanimous voice, it becomes I don't
want to say impossible, because the left is amazing at just ignoring the things
he doesn't want to talk about, but it becomes more and more difficult,
particularly if we're introducing it to Congress. And I have, in fact had
people without kind of naming names. First of all, I have multiple Congressmen
I know who are reading this book, so that's great. Secondly, I've
had some very senior staffers say, hey, let's go do something. Let's
do a DC symposium on the Hill around this book and civil rights slot some
other things. And so I do think that at least on the elite kind
of parts of the right, people are paying attention. And that's great.
Oh good, well that that, Jeremy is a great note on wish to
end and say congratulations on the unprotected class. This is an important book.
Thanks so much, Steve. It's a pleasure to be on Ricochet. Join
the conversation. H