How Anti-White Discrimination Became a Conservative Issue

Tucker Carlson (L) with Charlie Kirk in 2018. Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0

News Analysis

It’s become a theme. For years now, right-leaning commentators from Matt Walsh to Ann Coulter have accused the GOP establishment of failing to address discrimination aimed at white Americans.

“Republicans are terrified of stating the obvious: Discriminating against white people is unfair to white people. Instead, the preferred argument is: ‘It’s not good for black people, either!’” Ms. Coulter wrote on her Substack several weeks ago.

Yet the mood is rapidly shifting among elite conservatives, including those who could shape a future Republican presidential administration.

Against the backdrop of a landmark Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, a practice intended to remedy past discrimination against black Americans that has become a persistent barrier for white and Asian Americans, conservative intellectuals have refined their case against anti-white discrimination while curbing some of the internal policing that once silenced discussion.

Steve Sailer, a writer canceled by the old neoconservative establishment, has returned from exile. And Jeremy Carl, a Trump administration alumnus, is working the conservative super-influencer circuit in support of his new book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.” He’s speaking publicly with Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and other big names about topics once suppressed on the mainstream American right.

His interview with Mr. Carlson drew a response from X owner Elon Musk: “Concerning.”

Even former President Donald Trump is responding to the national mood.

“I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country, and that can’t be allowed,” he said in a recent interview with Time.

“The environment is vastly freer than it was just a few years ago. To speak of anti-white racism is no longer universally taboo,” Mr. Carl wrote in his book.

The Court Rules

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, super-charging the national debate on abortion. Almost exactly one year later, the court’s ruling in a case pitting Asian American applicants against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina delivered another jolt to the American system.

In a 6–3  decision, the court found that the schools’ race-based affirmative action programs ran afoul of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

Although the case was brought by students from Asian backgrounds, the results promised to change admissions expectations for white students, who have also long chafed under affirmative action standards. The same patterns emerge when looking at law school and medical school admissions—some groups need stronger credentials to make the cut.

In the Students for Fair Admissions case, Harvard’s dean of admissions testified that white and Asian students had to score higher than black and Hispanic students to elicit interest from Harvard.

Edward Blum, a long-time opponent of affirmative action in higher education and founder of Students for Fair Admissions, leaves the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 31, 2022, after oral arguments in cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But schools are just the start. Race-conscious practices in the workplace are also being contested.

In early 2024, America First Legal, a group created by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sued Paramount Global, CBS Entertainment, and CBS Studios over alleged discrimination against a white, heterosexual male.

And legal observers are saying an April 2024 Supreme Court ruling will make it easier for employees to challenge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision was much bigger news than another story in the summer of 2023—namely, the attempted cancellation of social scientist Richard Hanania before his book, “The Origins of Woke,” was published.

But Mr. Hanania’s fate matters. It’s a major indicator of how conservatives’ attitudes are shifting.

Reporting from the Huffington Post revealed that Mr. Hanania had published far more controversial material earlier in life under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.

Richard Hanania (Courtesy of Richard Hanania).

He wrote a mea culpa on Substack, “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do,” renouncing many of his past stances.

Even after the story broke, Mr. Hanania appeared across conservative media, including Mr. Kirk’s podcast.

In the end, the pressure on his publisher failed, and his book was released.

“I think the conservative movement is sort of moving in the right direction,” Mr. Hanania told The Epoch Times. He argued that it’s become impossible to be canceled in conservative media “for something that leftists don’t like.”

“There’s nobody you can pressure about me,” he said, noting that Mr. Musk and Substack CEO Chris Best like his work.

Yet, future bylines from Mr. Hanania in The New York Times and The Washington Post, establishment mainstays that once published his work, might not be in the cards.

Sailer Rides Again

Mr. Hanania survived cancellation, at least from the right.

But two decades ago, another provocative, statistically literate star of the conservative media world had a very different experience.

Steve Sailer once wrote for relatively mainstream outlets, including National Review.

While his controversial writing on race, crime, and genetics was always a hard sell to the establishment, he wasn’t kicked out of the conservative media’s version of polite society until 2005, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. He opined that the city’s motto, “Let the good times roll,” was an “especially risky message” for poorly educated African Americans in the city.

Pundit John Podhoretz, one of the staunchest defenders of the Iraq War, led the charge against Mr. Sailer’s article, which also excoriated then-President George W. Bush. Coolness to Mr. Sailer from the neoconservative elite deepened into a glacial freeze.

Nevertheless, he persisted. Mr. Sailer continued writing for various publications, including Taki’s Mag. He also emerged as a prolific poster on X, frequently responding to liberal wonk Matt Yglesias.

Now, the man from the San Fernando Valley is returning from exile.

“The rehabilitation of Steve Sailer is a very interesting and important phenomenon,” University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Amy Wax told The Epoch Times.

Ms. Wax recalled a meal in Washington with The American Conservative’s senior editor, Helen Andrews, soon after Ms. Andrews was named to that role. Ms. Wax said she encouraged Ms. Andrews to lead the charge in bringing back Mr. Sailer and another canceled conservative writer, John Derbyshire. Ms. Andrews corroborated Ms. Wax’s recollection.

Ms. Andrews’ March 2023 article on Mr. Sailer for Compact Magazine helped initiate his rehabilitation.

“Everybody reads him. Stories that Sailer broke can be traced like blue dye as they seep through the rest of the media,” she wrote.

In October 2023, for the first time in about a decade, the American Conservative published an article by Mr. Sailer.

And Passage Press has issued a compendium of the author’s greatest hits, “Noticing,” complete with a blurb from Mr. Carlson: “If the meritocracy were real, Steve Sailer would be one of the most famous writers in the world.”

Tucker Carlson speaks in West Palm Beach, Fla., on July 15, 2023. Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images

Mr. Sailer has been on tour this spring promoting the book at high-dollar private “salon events” across America. He’s also appeared on various podcasts, including Mr. Kirk’s.

“I think progressive excess after George Floyd and BLM [Black Lives Matter]—attributing every group difference to white supremacy, along with zealous enforcement of these radical ideas—has left people searching for alternative explanations on matters of race. Steve offers these alternatives and does so in a way that is easy to digest, empirically rigorous, and has strong predictive power,” said “Lomez,” a pseudonymous X user behind Passage Press.

Even many conservatives appear to believe that white supremacy, or something similar, can explain away all group differences.

A 2021 YouGov/University of Massachusetts Amherst poll found that 26 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of conservatives believe students in public middle or high schools should be taught that “any gaps between whites and blacks are caused by racism.” That is dwarfed by the 72 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of liberals endorsing such lessons.

In assessing why so many blame white prejudice for every uncomfortable gap, it’s hard to ignore left-wing intellectuals’ long history of hostile rhetoric aimed at “whiteness” and white people, from Noel Ignatiev’s call for the abolition of the white race to Susan Sontag’s 1967 assertion that the white race was “the cancer of human history”—though Ms. Sontag later walked that back in an interview with Pat Buchanan. Half a century later, white liberals’ unprecedented racial self-deprecation suggests that the messages from Ms. Sontag and her many successors, both intellectual and popular, have left a mark.

In “The Origins of Woke,” Mr. Hanania seeks answers to modern racial discrimination through changes to the law—for example, revisions to LBJ-era executive orders and court decisions overruling affirmative action-like “disparate impact” standards.

He told The Epoch Times he believes the private sector, unlike academia, would respond positively to that: “The universities have been very ideologically driven… Businesses just want to make money.”

But can greed beat creed?

In a review of the book for the American Conservative and her interview with The Epoch Times, Ms. Wax suggested that Mr. Hanania underestimates the hold of “wokeness” on Americans, including many conservatives. Americans’ equalitarian commitments are too foundational.

“Republicans have gone along for so long with the civil rights regime[’s] double standards and the like because they don’t want to confront and deal with what would happen in a true meritocracy—they just turn away from it,” she said.

Facing ‘Anti-White Racism’

Like “The Origins of Woke,” “The Unprotected Class” doesn’t dig deep into the causes of group differences. Yet, while Mr. Carl’s solutions to racial discrimination overlap with Mr. Hanania’s, his work offers a broader and more full-throated rejection of publicly sanctioned anti-whiteness—what he unapologetically describes as “anti-white racism.”

“The Unprotected Class” opens with Ms. Sontag’s infamous “cancer” line.

American whites, Mr. Carl argues, face hostility in the media, false hate crime allegations, discriminatory DEI bureaucracies, disproportionate blame for the global evil of slavery, and more—all while declining as a percentage of the population and ending their lives at a rising rate through suicides, overdoses, and other “deaths of despair.”

Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute who served in the Trump administration. (Courtesy of Jeremy Carl).

He even likens American whites to Native Americans “back when whites were asserting their dominance on the North American continent.”

To Mr. Hanania, it starts to smack of resentment. He questioned the notion of, in his words, “going to white people and saying, ‘You’re another victim group, and you have to fight back.’”

Mr. Carl defended his approach.

“It’s not a politics of resentment, but a demand for justice. It’s a statement that white Americans should stop acting like battered spouses and stand up for themselves without apology,” he said.

Some Republican politicians are taking action, or at least promising they’ll do so.

In January, with the backing of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Department of Education passed a rule outlawing DEI programs in the state’s college system.

President Trump has pledged to reverse a Biden administration executive order mandating racially focused “agency equity teams” throughout the federal government. He has also vowed to cut funding to critical race theory (CRT) programs for children.

The media has noted conservatives’ increasing seriousness about anti-white discrimination. A recent Axios article warned that “Trump allies plot anti-racism protections” for whites, citing, among other developments, America First Legal’s lawsuits.

“A lot of Trump’s Agenda 47 will help matters if he implements it (and that’s a big if),” said Mr. Carl, the Trump administration alumnus. He stressed the need for a strategy for likely court battles and “very talented, loyal, and hard-working aides to put things in place.”

Former President Donald Trump attends his trial for allegedly covering up "hush money" payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 2, 2024, in New York City. Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

“The biggest thing he [Trump] could probably attempt is a wholesale reform of some of our civil rights regime and radically transforming our anti-white civil rights division at [the Department of Justice]—which means firing a lot of people. We'll have to see if he has the appetite for that fight,” Mr. Carl said.

One aspiration for America—a vision in which equal protection under the law buttresses healthy self-respect, and the free individual can seek organic balance within the group—may hang in the balance.