Jeremy Carl is a scholar at the Claremont Institute and a former White House official who served in the Trump administration. He's also a frequent contributor to CNN and the New York Times, and a frequent guest on CNN's Morning Joe. Jeremy joins us to talk about what's going on with Joe Biden right now, and why he thinks it's time for him to go, and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party and the country, if he stays on the block. And, of course, we talk about why we should all be worried about what Joe Biden is up to these days, and how it could have a big impact on the upcoming mid-term elections, and whether or not he's going to be re-elected in 2020. Join us as we discuss all of that and much more on this episode of Firebrand! Firebrand is a production of the Firebrand Podcast Network. Copyright 2019 Firebrand Media, LLC. All rights reserved. This episode was produced and edited by Jeremy Carl. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts by clicking the linktr.ee/FirebrandMedia. Thank you for your support, and we'll be looking out for your continued support in the future episodes. Thanks again for listening and supporting Firebrand. -Jon Sorrentino, Jon Forecast, Inc. and The Firebrand Project, LLC., and our efforts to make this podcast a better place to connect the dots between the dots and the dots. and the truth about politics, and the real stories we tell us in the real world. Tweet us your thoughts on the truth and the lies we can tell us about it. . Timestimated, and share it so we can help spread it everywhere we can be a little bit more of it. Thank you, Jon Sorrentially, and your support is much more effective than you can be more effective, more impactful, and less of it helps us spread the word about it, and more like that, more of us can help us spread it around the word, more people like that helps us reach more people everywhere we need it, everywhere we see it, more like it. Tweet us out there. #Firebrand and we love you, too, thank you, more than we can do more of that. Love you, firebrand, more power, more firebrand
00:02:48.000We are broadcasting live from the Rumble Studios here in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. I've got a terrific guest who's going to join me in a moment, Jeremy Carl.
00:02:59.000He is a scholar at the Claremont Institute where we get so many of our ideas.
00:03:03.000Really, it's the group that's filling the intellectual vacuum that's been abandoned by so many of the compromised think tanks in this town.
00:03:10.000But before we get to his work critiquing DEI and the left's current incarnation of multiculturalism at the exclusion of a pretty substantial portion of the country, Jeremy, I've got to talk to you about just what has the Capitol abuzz right now.
00:03:25.000You've seen Pelosi offer something other than a full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden.
00:03:32.000Joe Biden has scurried off to the Congressional Black Caucus where he is being protected by the likes of Frederica Wilson and Maxine Waters.
00:03:44.000Congresswoman Beattie, you've seen Emmanuel Cleaver out there advocating for him.
00:03:49.000But then people like Richard Torres, a Democrat from New York, people like Michael Bennett, who went on CNN last night and just filleted Joe Biden.
00:04:13.000And there's really very little precedent that I can think, if any, for it.
00:04:17.000Some people talk about LBJ being pushed out or really pushing himself out, though, in 1968. But I think it's It's not a good comparison for what we have right now.
00:04:28.000It really is just a weird thing where the Democrats want to get him out, but to do so sort of exposes the lies that they've been telling about his fitness for years.
00:04:40.000And it's sort of a game of chicken because Biden's just saying, hey, I'm not going to go.
00:05:02.000I've served in the Department of the Interior, and so you know what it's like to be in the official admin as you've got a president who's embattled or taking criticism or seeing the media turn on them.
00:05:16.000That affects that vector, the morale of the admin.
00:05:18.000Then there is the political world, the campaign team.
00:05:22.000We've seen reporting that they have to continually do these all-hands calls to keep everyone from jumping out of windows in Delaware because they're ready to draw the warm bath and get the sharp blade out over there.
00:05:37.000And that's where I've had the visibility where there's this real deviation between how Members in really safe seats are thinking about Joe Biden, how frontliners are thinking about, and then what I call the new frontliner class.
00:05:50.000Because if you're in like a D plus eight seat, you really haven't had to campaign in a general election with great vigor.
00:05:58.000And now, like your pollsters and your consultants are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you won this district by 12, 16 points.
00:06:09.000So there are all those different vectors.
00:06:11.000I want to get your take on What you think is going on in kind of Biden White House world and admin world from your perspective as a former admin official?
00:06:19.000Yeah, well, I think probably the folks in the admin are kind of panicking.
00:06:24.000They're probably getting a lot of signals from different places.
00:06:27.000I think, ironically, Biden, for all his incapacity, has actually done a pretty good job of staying on message to the best of his ability, which is he hasn't kind of deviated at all about, hey, I'm not going anywhere.
00:06:47.000So I live in Montana, where we have John Tester, who, and this is really stiff competition, but he may be the biggest fraud in the United States Senate.
00:07:08.000Part of it is because we just have a terrible media that just doesn't cover him.
00:07:11.000But literally, from a political science perspective, if you look at a dot of the kind of partisan lean of states and the dot of where people vote, everybody's kind of in a bunch, as you just alluded to.
00:07:22.000And then Jon Tester's all the way out by himself Just, you know, on the far extreme, just completely out of touch with the state.
00:07:30.000And now he's getting very nervous because he said these nice things about Biden.
00:07:34.000And now he's kind of like, well, I'm not sure that Biden, he's sort of changing his tune.
00:07:38.000So I think there's a lot of panic in these close congressional races as well, as you mentioned.
00:07:42.000And it's the Sherrod Brown, the John Tester, the Mark Warners who are actually getting together and really talking about this, and Michael Bennett now giving a lot of life to that argument with his recent appearance on CNN. So there's two schools of thought in the House conference right now, and I want to get your reaction.
00:09:58.000I mean, and, you know, just showing again how much better your political skills are than me.
00:10:01.000I hadn't even thought of Really doing that on the floor, and I think that would be really effective.
00:10:06.000I'd say the one kind of shade I would have on it is, because I would like them to keep Biden, because I think they just lose with Biden, whereas with the other, they could lose worse, okay?
00:10:16.000I think Kamala could be a disaster and we could win in a true landslide, but there's just more variability in the system, and I'd rather take a more obvious W. So I wouldn't want to put pressure on them in such a way that makes them probably stick with Biden, but take the really painful vote.
00:10:31.000Yeah, no, and I actually think that would be the most likely outcome, because if Chip Roy has his mental competency test legislation on the floor, I don't think you're going to see a lot of Democrats rushing to vote for that, right?
00:10:44.000They'll quibble on some basis that that's not an appropriate action for the House, and they'll vote no, which kind of forces them into the arms of Biden.
00:10:52.000Because let me tell you something, the conversation is coming where Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice and Ron Klain and a few of these gray-haired buddies from the Senate, Chris Coons, they'll bring in Obama, and they'll sit down and say, Joe, Jill, Hunter, it's time for your next grand act of patriotism, and it's time for you to step aside for Kamala Harris to be the nominee.
00:11:15.000And if what you're saying is right, you prefer the nursing home patient as opposed to what's behind door number two.
00:11:22.000Then I think you almost want to arm Biden in that discussion by being able to say, look, every house Democrat just voted to not take my nuclear codes away.
00:11:36.000At the end of the day, we are really spectators at the moment.
00:11:40.000And the question is whether or not as this, and it is a moment in history, as it plays out, do we want to be the non-playing characters or do we want to define our Our own destiny with the use of the house.
00:11:50.000I do want to get to your area of study.
00:11:53.000You're a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
00:11:55.000I'm a huge fan of the scholarship that comes out of the Claremont Institute, but explain to people the mission of the institution first before we get into your specific area.
00:12:05.000So we are a public policy think tank, but we're a little bit different.
00:12:08.000You alluded to that in some of your earlier areas.
00:12:10.000We're less kind of like writing white papers on what marginal tax rates should be and more about trying to educate people about our founding principles and attempting to restore our founding principles to kind of a governing role in society, which we would argue that for some time they've essentially been displaced.
00:12:25.000So that's the kind of central principle thing.
00:12:28.000So it actually sort of tends to be A kind of very high-minded and elevated and philosophical conversation.
00:12:35.000And in fact, I've kind of been very grubby in this book and kind of getting into a very messy area of public policy.
00:12:43.000But I think it's actually one that really does implicate some of these fundamental founding questions about unalienable rights and equality and things that are promised to us in the Declaration and Constitution.
00:12:54.000So here with Jimmy Carl and he focuses his research on multiculturalism and race relations.
00:13:00.000So it must be fascinating conferences that you get to go to at the race relation multiculturalism booth that you hang out at.
00:13:07.000And I'm sure you get to meet a lot of interesting people.
00:13:10.000But in all seriousness, you're out with this very hot book right now, The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.
00:13:18.000And so Lay out your fundamental critique of the system that is destructive and divisive right now.
00:13:28.000Yeah, well, it's just that right now we actually do kind of have systemic racism in the United States.
00:13:33.000It's just the opposite way of the way that the left is talking about it, which is we have systemic racism against white Americans.
00:13:39.000Now, of course, I'm not suggesting this is the only type of racism that exists in 2024, but I argue that it's the politically most salient And so what I do in the book after kind of setting up a little bit of the terrain and walking through the civil rights law and the civil rights revolution is in 12 different areas of American life,
00:13:57.000everything from crime to looking at the military to health care to even the church and entertainment, I attempt to kind of lay out What anti-white policies and anti-white attitudes are kind of pervading and the sort of very negative effects they're having and then at the end I kind of sketch out why is this happening because it doesn't everything happens in politics for a reason right it's not just like a random occurrence and then I sort of say well what can we we do about it and that's that's sort of the the the
00:14:53.000And in fact, one of the things I have talked about in interviews and also talk about in the book is I am not looking to create a new victim group here, right?
00:15:00.000Like, I'm just simply saying, like, white people should have enough self-respect that we should stand up for equal treatment.
00:15:07.000So I'm not trying to create a politics of whiteness.
00:15:09.000I'm trying to create a politics of we should all be treated in an fair and equal way.
00:15:15.000And you are seeing this, by the way, you're seeing when a lot of times when I've talked to more challenging interviewers, you know, they say, well, you know, what's the evidence for this?
00:15:22.000White people seem to be doing pretty well.
00:15:24.000Well, I talk in the book about some of the ways in which white people are not doing so well in 2024. You discussed the sort of drug overdose epidemic as one of those.
00:15:32.000But beyond that fact, you see in the census and in other data A flight from whiteness.
00:15:40.000So if you can identify as anything other than white, you do.
00:15:44.000In 1960, we had about 550,000 Native Americans on the U.S. Census.
00:15:49.000In 2020 U.S. Census, we had 9.7 million.
00:15:53.000Now, this is not due to a Native American fertility explosion in those 60 years.
00:15:58.000It's because I want to know what's going on in the wigwam.
00:16:01.000No, it's because people figured out that, hey, it's a lot better to be a Native American.
00:16:12.000I don't know if she checked the box, but she did pretty clearly get benefits in her academic career.
00:16:18.000She went to a really mediocre law school, but somehow wound up at Harvard Law.
00:16:22.000So what's the answer to the criticism we are frequent?
00:16:24.000Well, actually, let's hear the criticism.
00:16:26.000We've got a number of my colleagues in Congress and other leftist commentators who make this argument that it is indeed the need to target white people that animates their public service.
00:16:47.000One of the things we have to do is really find a way to tell the Army story to as many young Americans as we can.
00:16:55.000When we have a military that seems to invoke this sense of wokeness and where we're like on a snipe hunt for white supremacy every day in the military, I think that that causes people who might otherwise sign up for the Army to not do so.
00:17:10.000Mr. Gates is the very first person to mention white supremacy or wokeness.
00:17:15.000The only person on this committee who seems obsessed with white supremacy and wokeness is Mr. Gates.
00:18:11.000I mean, that's an amazing supercut, by the way.
00:18:14.000And I'm glad you actually put up that military thing in general, because it's actually one of the most discouraging trends that we have.
00:18:20.000And I talk about this in my military chapter of the book, because while race relations have not been perfect in the military, they've been probably better in the military for longer than just about anywhere else in society.
00:18:30.000Military communities, the most integrated communities in America, We've always said, you know, whether it's not black or white or anything else, you all bleed red.
00:18:39.000We've had a notable integration in the military for longer than we had it in the broad society.
00:18:45.000And the Democrats seem intent on completely undoing that.
00:18:48.000You and others have kind of unmasked this in various investigations of what's going on.
00:18:54.000And you touched on this while numbers are going down.
00:18:59.000So in the last five years, we've had a 40% drop In white recruits to the military, no drops in any other group.
00:19:07.000And that's I mean, that'd be a problem for any reason.
00:19:10.000But what makes it a particularly big problem is those people are much more likely to be the tip of the spear.
00:19:15.000They're much more likely by percentage to be in special forces kind of like really doing the most dangerous and important work we have in the military.
00:19:22.000And we're telling them you're not wanted.
00:19:24.000Yeah, it's as if a lot of my colleagues are on a white supremacy snipe hunt.
00:19:30.000And I wonder what you've really studied as the political incentive for that.
00:19:36.000I mean, is it just as simple as you've got some self-loathing white libs who think that if they demonstrate that they too are on a white supremacy hunt, that that will appeal to other voters?
00:19:48.000Because, I mean, I've never seen a Republican Build a more multicultural coalition than Donald Trump.
00:19:55.000And so what is it about what you study about the political science of this that draws people into this fiction of white supremacy around every corner?
00:20:34.000We're more mentally ill, but we just aren't enlightened enough to be able to self-diagnose all of our different frailties.
00:20:42.000Well, yes, but they're actually, this is usually the way the question is asked is, has a provider diagnosed you with a mental health thing?
00:21:26.000I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but I'm just trying to tell this story really quickly.
00:21:31.000Now, for minorities, I think it's a little more complicated.
00:21:34.000And again, there's lots of things going on, but I'll pick what I think is the biggest.
00:21:38.000So the late sociologist C. Wright Mills, who was very, very influential, came up with a concept of what's called a legitimating ideology.
00:21:44.000And that's basically a fancy way of saying a story that you tell yourself and others to kind of do the thing that you want to do anyway.
00:21:52.000So in 2024, you can't just have minority groups or members of them going up to white people saying, like, you know, hey, like, give me your stuff, right?
00:22:00.000Like, that's not considered acceptable in America.
00:22:03.000So in some jurisdictions, in LA, New York...
00:23:32.000This was on the corporate side, like the business side.
00:23:35.000DEI says it's what's on the outside that counts.
00:23:39.000How many left-handed lesbians do you need?
00:23:41.000Have you have enough women of color on your board?
00:23:43.000Have you hired enough illegal immigrants lately?
00:23:46.000And so it's probably fair that Disney would say, we don't want a white person to play this role.
00:23:52.000Yeah, I mean, I think they're very careful about what, they're very careful about messaging because they don't want to get to a discrimination in either direction.
00:24:02.000But certainly there have been times where, you know, there's no way we're hiding a white male.
00:24:23.000We cannot hire and promote and pay people based on the skin color or the traits they cannot change.
00:24:29.000we must hire and promote and pay based on merit and merits alone.
00:24:36.000We're back live with Jeremy Carl, author of The Unprotected Class.
00:24:44.000So Jeremy, talk a little bit about how we see DEI specifically playing out in the corporate world, in the purveyors of DEI, and how you study that impacting these fundamental issues of culture.
00:24:56.000Yeah, well, and corporations have tremendous power, and I think even more, and certainly not the sole focus of my corporate chapter, but the one I probably spend the most time in is the tech world, because the culture of big tech, that's where all the big money is right now, has a huge effect, and it's so far left.
00:25:14.000You even had some in the kind of peak of Post-COVID, they said, we're going to do...
00:25:21.000They had a different word for it, and I put it in the book.
00:25:23.000I'm blanking on what it is all of a sudden.
00:25:25.000But essentially, they were doing racially preferential firing because it was like equity, right?
00:25:31.000So that basically meant if you're white, you're out the door first when they needed to do a cutback.
00:26:00.000I was on Andrew Klavan's podcast, a really good guy, but not like a fire-breathing, you know, right-winger or anything.
00:26:06.000You know, just like a good, solid, sort of normal conservative.
00:26:09.000And he just mentioned offhand, and this is something I've heard elsewhere, but he indicated, you know, personally aware of this, Of situations where he and Hollywood, you know, basically had seen an African-American person be put on a script, getting a credit for something that they didn't have anything to do with because somebody needed to, you know, check a diversity box, right?
00:26:44.000Because it seems as though it creates a market inefficiency around talent.
00:26:48.000And where market inefficiencies exist, ultimately people go to exploit those inefficiencies for profit.
00:26:54.000Are we going to see the days when the companies go to the headhunters that specifically find people who weren't sufficiently diverse but who might be sufficiently talented or skilled in order to add value to a company for the almighty dollar?
00:27:10.000Well, I think that you already are beginning to see little bits of this.
00:27:13.000A friend of mine named Nate Fisher has a group, New Founding.
00:27:15.000And again, it's not sort of doing anything explicitly on race, but I think it kind of indirectly touches on a lot of this for kind of people who are getting pushed out of the system, whether it be because of their ethnic background or because of their religious values or whatever else.
00:27:29.000And there's real market inefficiencies to exploit there.
00:28:11.000So I think there's a generational change at foot and it's going to develop in some interesting and unpredictable ways.
00:28:17.000Yeah, and it seems as though the awareness of it among those most impacted by it would be a natural outgrowth.
00:28:22.000But then how that manifests, I never thought about it in terms of the growth of entrepreneurship and then what that does also to America's great corporations.
00:28:32.000I grew up a guy rooting for America's businesses.
00:28:35.000You're not rooting for Alibaba to win, right?
00:28:41.000But if our businesses become just sort of servants of DEI rather than the great centers for innovation and progress that we've seen throughout our lives, that has a cascading impact too.
00:28:54.000And I think the good news maybe for our bigger corporations is we're seeing more pushback finally.
00:28:59.000And you look at folks like our friend Stephen Miller at America First Legal, they're pursuing a really aggressive legal strategy of beginning to sue some of these companies that are doing blatantly It's just illegal under the current law, anti-white stuff.
00:29:13.000And so I think where you'll see is that the people who still really want to discriminate in corporations against white people will find a way to do it.
00:29:21.000But there's a lot of them that are just kind of going along because that's the system.
00:29:25.000And they would actually kind of like to do merit hiring.
00:29:27.000And what our job is, I think, as Republicans in the very short term is to kind of open the door and make it easy for those companies to do the right thing because you know that you're putting a threat on the other end now, too.
00:29:40.000I think that's the short-term thing you can do.
00:29:42.000Final question, but I've got a lot of constituents in my district who are farmers, who live in rural areas, who they're not part of any Fortune 100 corporate structure.
00:29:55.000And when you just see the words diversity, equity, and inclusion, There's nothing naturally about those words that's scary, but when you put them together, it has resulted in this incredibly racist and divisive and destructive policy.
00:30:09.000So how would you describe DEI to someone who didn't have a natural apprehension toward it and wanted to understand what it meant to them?
00:30:23.000And it's one of the reasons that I was actually very insistent.
00:30:27.000So originally, I wanted to title this book, It's Okay to Be White, which would have been very impish.
00:30:32.000And I actually got that by the editors.
00:30:34.000And then two months later, the publishers came back and said, you know, we can't sell a book with that title in Walmart or Costco or Barnes and Noble, which is interesting because, of course, if I'd said it was okay to be Asian American or Hispanic Yeah, or Native American.
00:31:02.000But I also think it's very important that we kind of take the battle now to a new front, and we don't mystify what DEI means, which is DEI, I mean, there's more at stake, but at its core, it's about anti-whiteness.
00:31:15.000And it is about the opposite of merit.
00:31:17.000And it's not just for folks in your district.
00:31:20.000I mean, I live in a rural area outside a small city in Montana.
00:31:25.000So I sort of have friends who are dealing with the same thing.
00:31:45.000And thank you so much for your perspective, for all the work that we see done at the Claremont Institute as well.
00:31:50.000I did want to leave everyone with one final clip.
00:31:53.000Today in the House Judiciary Committee, we had a discussion over how the people who place advertising are using their market power in order to achieve political goals.
00:32:03.000And one of those political goals is censorship.
00:32:06.000Now, we saw a lot of these powerful companies, including Unilever, Who's chief executive, Harish Patel, I was questioning in the upcoming clip.
00:32:15.000They were saying, well, sure, we place hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, but we don't have any political tilt or political belief.
00:32:23.000And you'll see how that goes in the questioning.
00:32:26.000Enjoy, take a listen, and check back with us soon.
00:32:29.000Mr. Patel, are you part of an organization that uses market power for censorship?
00:33:47.000You had two vice presidents, Rob Master and Luis Tacomo, who were pressuring Facebook to utilize Facebook's policies to take down a Trump ad.
00:33:59.000So it's just hard to believe that your goal is to avoid politics when, like, not some intern at your company, but the vice presidents, At Unilever are writing Facebook saying, we want you to take this Trump ad down and apply these policies to do it.
00:34:16.000So I'm not sure what the intention of communication was, but that's...
00:34:20.000I'll tell you what, I'll read you the communication.
00:34:24.000It's your vice president, Tagarm, when they were trying to get the Facebook ad taken out, it said, honestly reprehensible.
00:34:31.000So you're using this $800 million plus power that you have over the marketplace.
00:34:38.000Facebook is craving your advertising dollars.
00:34:41.000You have two vice presidents hammering Facebook to take down a Trump ad about whether or not Joe Biden should have his ear inspected for an earpiece.
00:34:50.000That was what the ad was about, that you all found so reprehensible.
00:34:53.000Sir, respectfully, I'm not sure that word was done by a Unilever person.
00:34:59.000Okay, so Mr. DeComo didn't work for Unilever?
00:35:03.000He sits on the, if I did my homework right, I think that came from the GARM, Rob.
00:35:16.000Member entities to GARM. You pay GARM. You guys are GARM. I mean, as Mr. Jewell said, you guys have got, you have to have tools in order to help you place your ads, so you go fund GARM, and then here your vice presidents are commiserating with GARM over the fact that Facebook won't remove this.
00:35:32.000I guess, Mr. Shapiro, when we look at these big advertising platforms, and they're hearing the people with the advertising dollars hammer them with this ideological tilt, what does, what What does that do to the marketplace for ideas?
00:35:49.000Obviously it shuts down the marketplace of ideas, which is largely the intent.
00:35:53.000And one of the things that I've heard from some of the Democratic members of the committee today is an extraordinary amount of projection.
00:36:00.000Projection wherein they suggest that Republican members of the committee are trying to shut down free speech by trying to get answers to questions about the kind of political pressures that are being put on social media companies, for example.
00:36:09.000But it's been Democrats who for years have been spending their time trying to pressure social media companies into doing their bidding by limiting the types of information that are available to the public and how that information is actually distributed.
00:36:21.000One of the things that's worth noting here is that it's not just a matter of advertising dollars flowing.
00:36:25.000The way that it works on social media is that if you are demonetized, Then the reach of your actual content is also limited by the same social media companies.
00:36:34.000Do you think the frequency of those demonetization rises when you have vice presidents of companies at Unilever trying to hammer entities like Facebook into taking down Trump ads?
00:36:45.000There's no question that when you have internal pressures put on social media companies to take down right-wing material, That that has an impact on the reach of right-wing messaging.
00:37:03.000When the business community colludes and utilizes market power to shape the way social media companies or websites disseminate information, that the public doesn't even get to see that debate and engage it.
00:37:16.000And I think the fact that it's clandestine is actually even more corrosive to the values that undergird That's absolutely true.
00:37:22.000The complete lack of transparency with which GARM treats both the member companies as well as the consuming public is one of the major problems.
00:37:29.000If they simply wish to levy a boycott against a right-wing source, they should simply say that's what they're doing.
00:37:34.000Hiding behind fake standards in order to project objectivity is a major problem in transparency for the market.