An Interview with Jeremy Carl

Contributed by Isaac T. Jirak

Jeremy Carl is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where his work focuses on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America. He is the author of The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, and his writing has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, National Review, Politico, and the Economist. He received a BA with distinction from Yale University, holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and did doctoral work at Stanford University, where he was a Packard Foundation Stanford Graduate Fellow.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SALIENT: What is an American identity?

CARL: We have a historic people, that's primarily, although not exclusively, derived from Europe and, more specifically, the culture of Britain. There are ideas. There is belief in the free enterprise system, belief in free speech. We could go down a certain openness, a certain adventurousness. All these things are prototypically how I would distinguish America. It's a people. It's some combination thereof. It is the best way to see us as a country.

SALIENT: What is the role of assimilation in drafting immigration policy?

CARL: You can't have a reasonable immigration policy without assimilation. And we can't have assimilation if we're having immigration at the scale we've been having it. So the question becomes: what are they assimilating to?

Because we've been so overrun by immigration over the past few decades without enough meaningful attempts at assimilation, the whole question of what an American identity is is up for grabs. We need to slow down the flow because we're not going to get any assimilation at all.

SALIENT: What do you believe are the most effective methods for assimilation?

CARL: A proper education system would do it. Our education system has been totally captured by the left. There are things that we can do with full free school choice and destroying the ed schools requirement, which are left-wing indoctrination factories. For the average student, they're in an anti-American indoctrination factory from K through 12, if they're in public schools, which poor immigrants are going to be. We need to fix that.

It also comes from our leadership. This is one of the great things about having somebody like President Trump, who is unapologetically American and pro-American. People from all ethnic backgrounds intuit this about him. This is why he got record numbers of Hispanic voters, record number of Asian American voters. They intuit that this is a guy who's proud of being in America. Most of them are here, and they want to become Americans. That guy [Trump] is American, and he's proud of it. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris maybe less so.

SALIENT: What do you think about using assimilation and immigration to shape American culture?

CARL: The question is, ‘What are they assimilating to?’ If they're assimilating to this incoherent, multicultural nonsense pushed for decades by the left, that's not useful.

Go back to the early 20th century, and they're teaching patriotic immigration and education to immigrants We should be encouraging people to identify with our founding. It's not about telling a saccharine story where everything was perfect. I'm 52—we heard about the shortcomings and failures of the founders. It's not about telling a fake story but about telling a story where we're proud of our country, its history, and its heritage.

SALIENT: You recently published a book titled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, in which you discussed the retributive counter-discrimination against white individuals. How can we promote social cohesion in a positive manner as opposed to an approach like counter-discrimination?

CARL: One of the most important things you can do is what Trump is doing, which is taking an ax to all of these anti-white preferences programs. And they're not all anti-white; some of them are hitting Asian Americans. Some of them are actually targeted anti-white policies, and others are targeted at merit, and they get whites and disproportionately Asian-Americans swept up in them.

There's also problems within culture, even the ways in which Hollywood treats white Americans; these have been negative for a long time. So it's not like you can snap your fingers and it's all going to go away. The biggest thing you can do is realign the incentives. That doesn't mean you are going to have some pro-white discriminatory policy. It means that, as John Roberts put it, ‘the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’

SALIENT: An example of using these incentives in an improper way is Harvard in their recent case against their admissions process. What do you think is the direction of these institutions, especially with these policies coming out with Trump?

CARL: The feds are going to have to sue almost all of them, because virtually all of them—and I certainly include Harvard—are in violation of this Supreme Court order.

The left has been culturally ascendant for so long that they don't think the rules and laws apply to them. What the right needs to show is, “No, in fact, you have to follow the Supreme Court.” The evidence that was introduced in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard of what a race-blind Harvard admissions policy would look like was some reduced population of, say, African-American and Hispanic admits who were the people who were being most helped by the old system, but nothing like what you would have seen from the numbers introduced in evidence. You're going to have to sue them and say, ‘Your clever way of racist discrimination is still racist discrimination. We're not going to put up with it, and we're happy to cut off all federal funding to your university until you stop discriminating on the basis of race.’

SALIENT: If you were to forecast the next four years as we consider American culture at large, what do you think is going to be the general trend? Where is the current administration heading?

CARL: Right now, this is probably just about the high point. This is not specific to Trump, but any administration they've come in, it's been shock and awe. It's been impressive. There will be durable gains for the right from everything that's happened—even if, by the end of the administration, Trump is not popular.

The reason the gains are durable is that in 2024, every single tactic, legal and illegal, against Trump—there was lawfare, demonization, and a full-bore media attack, you name it—didn't work, and the left showed itself to be a paper tiger. They will never quite have the same deterrence aspect again because they showed that for all their snarling, there wasn't much real strength behind that.

It's one of the reasons why the left has been more subdued in their response to Trump. They're chastened by the fact that the guy they were screaming about—a racist who hates Hispanics—took 46% of the Hispanic vote, including majorities in swing states.

The second way is that even if Democrats reverse it with some future executive order, all of a sudden it's on the table—the question of why you're having this DEI. All of a sudden USAID, it's on the table. No matter what, the future administration has that.

The left, which has gotten fat, lazy, and happy, is suddenly having to fight. It's going to have to relearn how to fight for these first principles, and they will not win all of those battles. I'm optimistic that the fever is broken. But we're going to have to fight tooth and nail to keep our gains.

SALIENT: Do you think this is the fall of identity politics? And if it is, is something going to take its place? Who is going to determine that?

CARL: It's the fall of the stupidest forms of identity politics because the trans stuff is so unpopular with every normal person. This is finally the step the left has taken that is too crazy for average Americans to put up with. There's no way you can convince them that it's a good idea to chop the privates off healthy kids. They had hubris, and they overreached.

I do not think identity politics is dead because we're going to have to totally dismantle the incentive structures for people to agglomerate by race in this country and push for special benefits by race. But it's potentially chastened, and some of their overreach is going to be difficult for them to reconstitute. There will be some groups, including minority groups, who are going to realize that identity politics doesn't work for their interests. It would be fruitless to speculate on exactly what identity politics will look like, but it will be less toxic in its effects. But it will be something that we'll have to fight against on the right, and it'll be more tricky because they're going to cast off the most destructive elements of it because those destructive elements also turn out to be political losers.

SALIENT: What do you think would be the best way for the right to fight against it? Is it pointing toward the absurdity of it all, or is it doing some form of reflecting, essentially using some counterexample?

CARL: Extract political pain; that's the number one way. Show them it's a political loser. If we’re going to have anti-racism be the official policy of America, then whites need to be able to politically organize against that, not in service of white identity politics, but in a multiracial coalition that is going to oppose that sort of thing. White people cannot be afraid to say, ‘You don't get to discriminate against me. That's not okay. And if you do that, I'm going to punish you, politically and in other ways.’

SALIENT: Shifting to a bit more of a personal note, what motivated you to speak out against anti-white racism?

CARL: It wasn't for professional reasons. I thought about writing this book for years, and I kept hoping somebody else would write it. I’ve compared it to God telling Jonah to go to Ninevah. I had a couple of experiences like that, including being in the first Trump administration where I was dealing with professional work I do in other areas that had nothing to do with this. But my writings on this subject were the subject of hit pieces in the Washington Post and elsewhere.

I realized I can't run away from this issue, and it’s important to deal with this issue. Finally, one has a breakthrough in their maturity when they realize the cavalry isn't coming; you're the cavalry. I was in a position to write it, and I felt it was really important for somebody to write it. Ultimately, I just sat down and did it.

SALIENT: Has it influenced either your thought or the shape of your career?

CARL: It's been wonderful; the way the book has been received by the mainstream. I've given several talks in Congress about it. I've been reviewed positively by mainstream people from every single ethnic background, even different political backgrounds.

People were ready for a mature, nontoxic book on this subject that wasn't there to grind axes but just laid out the facts as they were and was not out to say all these other people are terrible but to say we shouldn't discriminate. We're doing that, and we should stop.

A lot of people commented that it was a very even tone. I'm proud of that because I really did try to write it not just for activists who will agree with me anyway but that they could give it to somebody who is not as political, maybe even a bit skeptical.