From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthad, and this is interesting times.

The idea that white people and white men in particular face discrimination has become something of an obsession on the American right.

The age of DEI transformed affirmative action into something that felt more sharply discriminatory.

And now there's a big debate among conservatives.

Should they counter progressive identity politics with a colorblind nationalism?

Or treat white culture as something real and embattled and worth organizing around.

My guest this week ended up at the center of that debate when the Trump administration

nominated him for a State Department post.

So your belief is that white Americans face more discrimination than black Americans?

On average, Senator, yes, that's correct, and I'm not running away from that statement at all.

Jeremy Carl is the author of The Unprotected Class,

a book that argues that white Americans are in danger of becoming second-class citizens.

And we talked about what constitutes anti-white discrimination

and whether focusing on it leads inexorably toward

white nationalism.

Jeremy Carl, welcome to interesting times.

Thanks so much for having me, Ross.

So you are a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which is a well-known, especially in the Trump era, conservative think tank.

Your background, right, is in environmental policy and energy?

Yeah, that's right. I mean, my formal background is in nothing to do with any of the things for which I'm best known now, but I went and did many years of graduate study and have written books and articles on environment and energy policy and served in the Department of Interior in Trump One.

And then after Trump won, you did a career pivot where you became a guy who writes about anti-white discrimination, multiculturalism,

immigration. These are ideas that have a lot of currency on the right, and they've become the

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