The growing prevalence of so-called anti-racist programs and policies under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion have come under intense scrutiny in recent months. Critics say that they are promoting racism rather than combating it. In this episode, we talk with Jeremy Karl, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, about what he warns is an increasing acceptance of anti-white racism. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief, John Bickley. It's Sunday, May 26th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Jeremy Karl, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute. Hey, Jeremy. So in your book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America apart. You make the case that anti-white racism, of course, exists and that it's destroying the country. First, can you sum up in your view how this arose, how white people became the unprotected class, as you call them?

Yeah. I I think that there are a variety of things that happened. First, we have the growth and metastasis from its original purposes of the civil rights regime on steroids, so to the point that we stop making it about protecting everybody's rights and begin protecting some people's rights more than others. And that really accelerates as the administrative state gets more involved and begins putting a bunch of things in the Civil Rights Act that were not originally part of law as it was conceived. You then have court cases and a bunch of other things going on that move that along. But then beyond that, you have other sorts of situations, particularly, I think Obama's second term. We see a lot of acceleration, and we don't actually have a neat explanation for why that is. But really, right around 2013, you begin to see things like the Trayvon Martin case and Ferguson, Missouri, where you have Hands Up, Don't shoot, and a variety of other things where you just really see attitude towards Whites turns sharply negative, particularly among, actually, interestingly, white leftists, but also among other groups. And a lot of this confrontation really starts to go on steroids.

In which institutions do we see this form of racism most prevalent? Academia comes to mind, of course, and we're seeing some of this actually play out on college campuses right now. Where does this form of racism have the most significant effect?

That's a great question. I don't know that I can come up with an easy ranking of this is number one. I'd certainly say academia is a place that it's most severe. And then the question becomes, is that the most influential as opposed to the job market or some other things? In my book, what I do, and it's a very empirical look, it's not an angry polemic without data attached to it, is I look at 11 different areas, one per chapter. And so I look at academia, I look at the military, I look at health care, I look at entertainment. Again, just going down the line, looking at our immigration policy. And I'd say that all of them, you really see a lot of growing anti-white animus going on. Certainly right now, I think we're seeing a lot of things in academia where it's important. And in fact, I think a lot of these anti-Israel protests that we're seeing on campuses right now are... I mean, some of them are traditional anti-Semitism going on, but a lot of it is downstream, to me, of anti-whiteness. And the Jews and the Israelis in particular are the Whites in this scenario in the mind of the protesters, and therefore they are exploiters, and the Palestinians are brown, and therefore they are oppressed, and they are therefore to be sacralized.

And of course, that's not really the situation as anyone who's been to Israel knows that that's not really maybe such an accurate description of Israel, but I think that is very accurate in the minds of the protesters.

Now, you mentioned the terms oppressor and oppressed. That's a very neo-marxist worldview. And in this case, the white race is always on top, always the oppressor, no matter the scenario. In the end, is this idea where this is all stemming from?

I think that's part of it. And it's interesting because I get this as a line of discussion, a fair bit. And I think that I don't want to minimize this neo-marxist element of it because I do think it's absolutely present. At the same time, I think that a lot of this really is being targeted at white rights on a purely racial basis. And then if we just look at it only through Marxist lens or class-based lens or an oppressor-oppressed lens, we miss some important things where this is really ultimately about the very real power dynamics that are going on, the very real battle for the control of resources that is going on. And if they can use oppressed or oppressed as what the sociologist who might write bills would call a legitimating ideology, Then they're going to do that. But if they could grab something else, they'll do that as well.

One of the things that you address in-depth in your book is how the criminal justice system is impacted by this, our understanding and interpretation of civil rights acts, et cetera. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us?

Sure. Well, you saw it, I think, particularly in the wake of what's been called the Great Awakening, starting in around 2013, which I mentioned, which is a play on words from the Great Awakening, which were previous religious revivals we had in the US. You saw, and even more on de-policing and after George Floyd, a lot of cases against minorities who were accused of criminal activities just being it dismissed, largely because they were a minority. You had so-called bail reform that, again, I think is very racially driven. All these things, as we look, I mean, pretty much every single one of these so-called reforms leads to a clear increase in criminal behavior. Of course, the great irony is that minorities themselves are disproportionately the victims of that. Now, I don't want to play that card cheaply because it wouldn't matter. I mean, if Whites were disproportionately the victims of that, it would be just as bad. But it is one of the ironies of this that in this radical view we've had of criminal justice, minority communities have really been most affected by it. But you have that going on. You have these false notions of institutional racism in policing.

There's a variety of just false narratives that really feed everything that we do about criminal justice from the left-wing media. And George Floyd doesn't happen in the same way it does if that drum beat of false narrative hasn't been going on for years. And so the George Floyd case just slides really conveniently into the left and the media's mental model.

We hear the term white supremacy a lot now, not only from the media, but also from Hollywood from the Democratic Party. Where did the roots of this idea that white supremacy is the greatest threat to the US come from and what impact is it having?

Right. Well, I talk about this a little bit in the book with an analogy, which is to say when we We have, in particular, the term white privilege come into the lexicon. It's used by a professor at Wesleyan, Peggy Macintosh. In, I think, 1987, she introduces this term. It's not coincidental that it happens right around then because in the same way that you wouldn't talk about Kim Jong Un's oppressive regime if you were actually living in it because you'd be killed. It's only when you're comfortably outside that that you can really begin to talk about it. We can't talk about white supremacy and white privilege when white supremacy and white privilege were actually reigning because that could actually be enforced. It's only when these are a distant memory and we have the exact opposite going on when we have white people and we see this in statistical data in terms of how people identify themselves, in terms of how people put themselves on job and university applications, as people are fleeing from a white identity in any way that they can, precisely because there is no overall privilege associated with it, that's when we begin to see people talking about white supremacy and white privilege.

Another point that you make is that while we see a lot of advocacy for various minority groups, there's not really any white advocacy. It's actually very controversial to write a book like you have to have this discussion we're having right now, in fact. Why is that? What impact is that having?

Well, you're absolutely right. And that's why I wrote the book, because I felt like this should not be a topic that's off limits. That white people should be able to speak out in their own defense without apology. I'm not trying to engage in white identity politics here. I talk about that. But it's just the reality that in the same way that you can't imagine Martin Luther King Jr. In the civil rights movement doing it without making reference to the fact that black people were the people being affected, even though, of course, he put together a multiracial coalition. You can't talk about this without mentioning who's being affected. Just as one of a million examples of this, even in writing the book, I'd originally called this book, It's Okay to be White, which should be an anodyne statement. And I actually, my editors had approved that. And then I got to the sales team and they just said, hey, we can't sell a book with that title in Costco and Walmart. And so I had to change it to a different title. But that in itself is indicative because, of course, it's okay to be black, it's okay to be Asian-American, it's okay to be Hispanic, it's okay to be Native American.

It should be also okay to be white. But yet when folks on the internet, trolls back in the day, use that type of phraseology and put posters up near college campuses, there was outrage because to even say that type of anodyne statement was seen as somehow hostile or white supremacy. I think that says so much about the actual environment that we're in with respect to how we talk about race as opposed to the environment that the left wants to pretend that we're in.

And on the other side, we have the DEI movement and this anti-racism movement. They're both very aggressive and pushing their message. What do you make of these movements and their current iterations, including on campus?

Well, it's really poisonous. And I think, I don't think any can make a separate piece with it. I think, just need to defeat it completely. But it's a movement that has accumulated a lot of political power. And again, it really needs to be seen as DEI is a legitimating ideology that the left can use to say, Hey, you haven't earned your job. You haven't earned the things that you have. We're going to come in and take those things. I mean, in 2024 in America, it's not considered good form for somebody to just come up and say, Hey, you've got stuff and we want it. We're going to take it. So you have to come up with this ideologies like DEI. And if you're familiar with the writing of Kendi, who's probably the most influential DEI theorist, he basically says any racial disparity and outcome that we have is prima facie, like a result of racism. There's no other explanation that could be at play. And so if you buy into that ideology, of course, it means that any disparity needs to be remedied, essentially at the metaphorical point of a bayonet, so that we're all having completely equal outcomes by race for everything.

So that's, I think, the real ideological purpose behind DEI. It's why we can't compromise in any way with the EI. We just have to uproot it, root and branch.

To bring up another controversial topic, there's been a lot of discussion about immigration policy as it relates to the changing racial makeup of America and how that benefits or hurts the two political parties. What's at the heart of this? What's driving this debate?

The left always likes to pretend that this is what the right is talking about when we talk about great replacement theory, where there's a conspiratorial nature to it. And what is actually going on is unquestionable, which is that Whites in America and Europe, just objectively, have been dramatically replaced and increasingly replaced as the majority ethnicity This is, I mean, Whites are still a 58% majority in the United States, but among under-18s, Whites are now just another minority. This is happening. We can debate about whether this is good or bad. I am very skeptical of large amounts of diversity diversity is a good method for organizing societies. So I think that they're bad. But you can make arguments otherwise. But to pretend that this is not going on, to pretend that the Democrats as a whole are not pushing this in many ways and pushing our border to be wide open because they perceive, correctly or incorrectly, a political advantage from having more non-whites who will vote Democrat. I think that's indubitable. I mean, the reality is, and the Democrats are perfectly aware of this, the Democrats haven't won the white vote for President since the Barry Goldwater-Lindon Johnson landslide in 1964.

And so they perceive that it is in their advantage in lots of ways to replace that white majority. And I don't think we should apologize for a pointing that out or be saying that, at least in my view, that's not a good thing. It's not consistent with America's history, culturally or otherwise. And we really need a pause, a slow down, and a time to reconstitute whatever a new American identity is going to look like with the people that we have here right now, the multicultural groups that we already have in America without adding to our difficulties.

Final question. In your book, you lay out a plan for how to counter anti-white racism. Can you share your suggestions for how to do that?

Sure. I have 12 suggestions, and I won't go over all of them here because we'd be here for a while, but six formal, six informal. I'll touch on the formal ones first. I think, one, we've talked about DEI. Two, I think we need to continue to push on the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling. I think there's a lot of things that we could do there to try to extend that to employment that would be really useful. I think we need to relook at all of our civil rights laws and consider some pretty fundamental reforms. Again, I'm not a person who feels like we need to relitigate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I think that it was a blunt instrument, but that it was used to address some real problems that were unquestionably going on in society. But we're now as far from that time as they were from the Wright brothers. And we have a different set of issues we're looking at. We're not worried about people being able to eat at lunch counters anymore. Often we're seeing lots of anti-white racial discrimination or even sometimes anti-Asian racial discrimination in terms of hiring, in terms of opportunities in education, et cetera.

So let's reconstitute civil rights laws to address real problems and to preserve freedom of association in a way that I think our existing civil rights regime does not do a very good job of. Then finally, informally, I talk about the work of a multi-ethnic scholar of race and ethnicity, Eric Kaufman, who's based in the UK, but is Canadian. He wrote a book called shift where he basically calls for what we would call provocatively multiracial whiteness. But what he's really calling for is a reconstitution of American identity among a variety of different groups of a variety of different backgrounds. So he points out, like Hispanic was an identity that was created out of whole cloth for the 1980 census. Some of these other things where we're choosing to slice and dice, or really, I should say, the left, very consciously is choosing to slice and dice Americans for their own purposes into as many minority identities as they can. And perhaps instead, the way to go is to figure out a way to identify Americans. So as much as possible, we are pushing groups to identify with the majority, with that culture, with that history. Of course, many of these minority groups have long, long histories in the United States that go back to before even the founding, and that if we were to do that informally, that would give us a basis for a much more unified country going forward, which I think is something that the right should be pushing for, while the left continues to push for ethnic Balkanization and ethnic conflict in a way that I think just doesn't serve anybody's interests very well.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. And great luck with this book. Important discussion that you're having here, and we appreciate your insight.

Thanks so much for having me, and appreciate your time.

That was Jeremy Karl, author of The Unprotected Class, and this has been an extra edition MorningWire.