This week, Jeremy Carl joins High Noon. With a background that starts in the Utopianism of the early internet and winds through policy in the Trump administration, Carl tells the story of American crisis, including the devastating close of the frontier, our more complicated relationship with immigration post Ellis Island, and the disappointed dreams of tech oligarchs.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people and none more interesting than our guest this time around. Jeremy Carl has a incredible professional biography that I’m actually going to let him get into, but suffice it to say that he started out in the early days of tech in the Silicon Valley and then transitioned into different kinds of policy, energy policy. He worked for the Hoover Institute in Stanford University, and then transferred over to Claremont Institute, where he is today. He also writes for Claremont Institute’s various publications, including the American Mind and the CRB, and also, he writes pretty frequently at American Greatness. Isn’t that right?
Jeremy Carl:
Absolutely.
Inez Stepman:
So Jeremy, welcome to High Noon by the way, first off.
Jeremy Carl:
Thanks so much. And we of course have the thing in common of both having suffered through Palo Alto at various stages of our life. So that’s a good point of entry.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I actually wanted to start off there. You really were in Palo Alto and in Silicon Valley, in ground zero of this explosion of the tech industry that has then brought the region since not only a ton of money, but a ton of power over the course of American life, or of people who used their products. What was that initial explosion like? What were the hopes that a lot of these tech people had, about connecting the world? Or some of these initial internet-enabled connections and products, and what was the ethos like? What was it like, the scene, and in that real ground-level birth of what it’s now a very, very powerful industry?
Jeremy Carl:
Sure, and I wrote about this at greater length in an article called Web 1.0, that described my experiences for Return Magazine. And you can check that out online. But the executive summary is, it actually was really exciting and probably the formative experience of my life. I mean, it really was. I got involved in the web, I was still an undergraduate at Yale. It was 1993. When I got on the web, there were probably less than a hundred websites in existence in the world, as opposed to the several billion we have today. So I started in the earliest days, I took jobs at some of the earliest internet firms, some of which I did while I was still even a student, hadn’t graduated yet. And there was an incredible sense of idealism and hope. And an immediate sense, among those of us who did get it, that these technologies were going to be transformative.
However, I have to say that, ultimately, I was a little naive about on whose behalf there would be doing the transforming. Having said that, I’ve met, as you have, through Twitter and all these other things that were not even a twinkle in people’s eyes in 1993, ‘94, ‘95, I’ve met a number of amazing people. There’s so many things that we do in our lives, including this very conversation, that are enabled by the internet. But I think there was very much a feeling that there was this sort of electronic frontier foundation and oh, information wants to be free. And it was this libertarian paradise. And of course, that’s not how it turned out. I saw something on Twitter just yesterday, that Gen Xers are the last people alive who remember what their really free internet was like. And we really did have it for a few shining years, before the mandarins figured out that this was not good for business, and increasingly commoditized it and then took control.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I remember actually, talking with my father, who’s a software… Well, initially software, worked in software, but actually then worked in algorithmic programming and between the chip… And I don’t quite understand frankly, what he did, there’s something very smart people do. But his initial impulse, with maybe to use your terminology, might have been 2.0 the internet 2.0, when I was coming of age and in Palo Alto, it was all of the beginning, really, of social, the social… I wouldn’t even quite call it social media, a lot of it was message boards and then it became public-facing with MySpace and so on. But his initial impulse was, who is paying for this, where is the profit margin? And I was like, “Oh no, dad, you’re so out of touch, this is all free. Everything is free on the internet.” And he was like, “don’t know if I that’s actually the way that’s going to work. Maybe you’re the product, if it’s free.”
Jeremy Carl:
Exactly. I mean, if it’s free, you’re the product. That’s one of the most important lessons I teach my kids about things. And I think it certainly applies with respect to a lot of these services we see on the internet.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. So you lived through the disappointment, I think, a lot of the disappointment with these promises of the free internet. I think one of those underlying promises was the concept that if we could connect people all over the world, that we could homogenize and make more peaceful relations between human beings of different cultures. How much of that do you think has come true, particularly with homogenization, and then how much of it… I guess I’ll just lay out my theory and then you can tell me if I’m right or wrong. I think a lot of the censorious impulses in a lot of the folks in Silicon Valley is essentially disappointment that human nature has risen its ugly head once again. And it turns out if you connect people in Timbuktu with people in Florida, they actually don’t like each other more. They like each other less.
And in fact, even two neighbors who are now privy to each other’s very internal thoughts on a 24-7 basis, suddenly start hating each other rather than engendering a new era of the brotherhood of man. But I mean, where did some of those promises go, and how did people react to the disappointment that connecting the world did not result in a increase in the production of daisy chains?
Jeremy Carl:
Well, it’s interesting. I think there’s a lot to that. And that now I live in Montana, and I wouldn’t have to see the crazy sort of transgender deviance being taught to second graders, except that it’s on the internet. So I could get really angry about it. I mean, of course in Montana we don’t do that, but in a lot of places they do. And so what might have been “out of sight, out of mind” is now not. And I’d say, furthermore, sometimes you find that you actually really do like the person in Timbuktu, but then as you get more information discovery, you really don’t like your neighbor that much.
So that is the disappointment, the lost hopes that maybe were inherent to the technology. I also just had the experience in that, I mean, Silicon Valley was so much more of a marginal place in the early nineties when I got involved. I mean, obviously, it was a big industry, even at the time. It was a substantial economy, but nobody thought it was the center of the known universe in any way. And I think just even in the few years that I was really in the business, watching the suits, for lack of a better term, descend upon what was this idealized utopia and just be all about profit margins and commoditizing. It did kill some of that early excitement pretty early on, I’d say.
Inez Stepman:
So you’re saying Silicon Valley is basically Burning Man.
Jeremy Carl:
And it’s funny, I almost went to Burning Man three or four, because it was still this edgy thing that nobody knew about it. I was like, oh, that kind of sounds interesting. And I was young and single and, I mean, this wasn’t even a tech person thing. It was like a weird San Francisco Bay Area thing. But then I didn’t, and then by the time I really would’ve seriously considered it again, it was just the epitome of awfulness and everything that I hate. And when I saw the dust storm that enveloped everybody at the last Burning Man, I was sort of smiling that God’s wrath was being visited upon folks.
Inez Stepman:
And this isn’t just the internet. It is larger connectivity in the world. The fact that you can fly almost anywhere in the world, 24 to 48 hours max, you can get from any point in the globe to almost any other point. What is the fate of the nation-state? We throw around the word globalists a lot, and it does represent something, but it occurs to me now talking about the internet and the connection between, you said sometimes they find out they like the person in Timbuktu better than their neighbors. It seems to me that that’s happened on a much larger scale with our elites. They’ve found out that they actually have a lot more in common with the elites in other nations than they do with their national countrymen. How do we reestablish or save the idea of the nation-state at all, in a globalized world where those elites are going to know that they have a lot of interest in common, they’re going to know each other in a way that just wasn’t even possible, before a lot of this technological advancement.
Jeremy Carl:
Well, I think it’s a good question. And it’s a tricky question, and it’s interesting because you touched on globalists, and I think that’s a really important group. And then the other group you might call provincials or localists or whatever you want to call them. And I really live around that group of people. Even the city I live near in Montana, Bozeman, is the most fancy city probably in Montana, but that’s Montana, right? It’s still a very, and I don’t say this critically, I mean, I’m here for that reason. It’s a very provincial located place, where people’s horizons tend… Not exclusively, of course; there’s all types of people here, but they tend to be very focused on Montana. Or even the small town in Montana where they live in and not communing with Davos or even Tokyo or something like that.
And so my day-to-day existence here is much more around those sorts of people. So I’m very aware of that contrast. To me, I think one of the main ways to get around this, and this is something I’ve talked about a fair bit and write a lot about, is the immigration question. Which is, if you just have this total permeable border of your country and you have elites with the attitudes you have, just national identity just completely ultimately disappears. And I think you’re seeing this, I think so much of the fractiousness that we see is because of the explosion of demographic diversity in this country. People don’t get along with each other. They don’t come from the same cultures. They don’t have the same values or goals or systems.
And it’s not even a question of one being right, or one being wrong. It’s the inherent… I mean, I would just challenge inherently the notion that diversity is a good. To me, unity more or less, is a good. I mean, obviously you can have too much unity and then you sort of head in the direction of fascism or some other type of control. But in general, the wonderfully diverse panoply that we’re always propagandized about here in the United States has a lot of real downsides and fractiousness. And if you look historically, these sorts of hyper-multicultural states or empires, if you want to look historically, have tended not to turn out so well. And there’s just tons of examples of that.
Inez Stepman:
Obviously, I don’t think diversities are strength in the same sort of platitudinal in a way that it’s repeated. But I do see a strength in the ability to assimilate the best of other cultures. I think the Roman empire had that: eventually provinces became more powerful than them, but that was a long timescale. I mean, all human things die. It’s probably the most successful empire in history. So I don’t call that a failure on its part. But it’s true that we had a balance in America between the Pluribus and the Unum. We have always had a certain amount of Pluribus, more than other nations, even from the founding. But that has been balanced or at least was balanced in the past, by almost a civic religion surrounding the American foundings, surrounding the principles.
And that wasn’t a bloodless idea. It was also a tradition of self-government into which, on a local level people were assimilated. You have this piece, it’s really interesting. It’s in American Mind, your Settlers’ piece. Yeah, so you have this interesting piece in the American Mind where you make a distinction between the so-called nation of immigrants and the nation of settlers. Could you maybe lay out your argument in that piece, and then we’ll go from there?
Jeremy Carl:
Sure. Well, it’s a historical look at the term “nation of immigrants” and where it came from and understanding that it’s, in fact, not really a description of the U.S.; it’s a platitude. It’s something that literally came out of John F. Kennedy wanting to be president in the early 1960s. And for those of the listeners who are going “Wait a second, we’ve always had immigration” — and of course we always have — what I distinguish is, if you look at the early history of America, especially when you go back to the earliest founding days as a colonial society, we had more settlers. They weren’t people coming into an existing society. There were people going and creating de novo a new society. Now that isn’t of course to erase native Americans who were obviously here, although not necessarily permanently settled in that many locations. But there was obviously a lot of fractiousness between those two communities, as well as some cooperation at times, and even intermarriage, famously.
But it is to say the early folks who came here were really settling and creating a new society, not simply joining an existing society. And that, in fact, when you look back at the history of the United States, this makes up a tremendous amount of our history. And so when we read de Tocqueville, for example, who’s writing in the 1830s. And at a time we are actually closer to de Tocqueville in time than de Tocqueville was to the 1620 pilgrims or Jamestown, or what have you. I mean, we’re 190 years or so from de Tocqueville, and he’s writing after 200-plus years of European settlement. De Tocqueville doesn’t mention immigration or immigrants at all in democracy in America, not even once.
And it’s not, of course, because there weren’t any immigrants there or that there was no immigration. But that in fact, de Tocqueville writing before the first big wave of non-British immigration happened in America. And this was the central European German immigration, that happened in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, and then the Irish immigration in the wake of the Irish potato famine. But writing at that time, it wasn’t as salient. And de Tocqueville himself actually makes this distinction between, he talks about people seeing themselves, and commentators onto de Tocqueville have written about how people saw themselves as settlers.
Now, obviously at various points then, starting in the mid-19th century, in particular, you begin to get more and more people arriving, largely from Europe. Although not exclusively, we had Chinese immigrants here as early as the 1840s, but you begin to get people arriving into more settled societies. And so then, throughout the mid to late 19th century, you get this mix of settlement and immigration. And then in 1890, the U.S. census bureau famously declares the era, the frontier is closed. Essentially that America is settled.
And at that point, a couple years later, Frederick Jackson Turner, who was probably the greatest of the late 19th century American historians, gives this very famous speech at the Columbian exposition in Chicago, entitled the Significance of the Frontier in American History. And he talks a little bit about the incredible importance of the frontier and settlement, in terms of creating this very unique American identity. And that the kind of transformation we were undertaking now is that first great era closed. And then from 1890s on, you began to get… 1890 through 1920s, a very, very heavy immigration into a settled society. But then in reaction to that, because a lot of people freaked out and didn’t like it, you got what was probably the lowest immigration period we’ve had in American history. From the early 1920s to the mid-1960s, where you had very, very low levels of immigration, and largely from places that had represented the country backgrounds of people who’d been living here in the first place.
And then that is the environment in which Kennedy, toward the tail end of that, writes this book, a Nation of Immigrants. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, at least among white Americans, and obviously the white-Black relations were still very fraught during this time, you almost had a mythical sense of unity during this 1920s to 1960s period, punctuated by these sorts of World War II films. You can almost see where we became the melting pot, and ever the races of Europe, as Israel’s vangal said, come to America and melt and reform into something new. But it was only when Kennedy begins to make this argument, on the tail end of other people’s arguments. And then in 1965, we get the Hart-Celler Immigration Bill, and the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. Then we really move toward this sort of system that we are in now.
Again, it’s kind of a long answer, but it’s a long story. It’s just a way of saying we are not always been a nation of immigrants. We’ve been a nation with immigrants and immigrants have certainly been an important part of the story, balancing that Pluribus and the Unum in the way that you just talked about. But when we just tell ourselves that story of being a nation of immigrants, we’re essentially just buying into a left-wing propaganda about what America is. And it doesn’t really tell the full story of our history.
Inez Stepman:
So let’s return to the key point here in the story you just told, which is the closing of the frontier, and what we might call the Ellis Island era. When people really start to think of America as a nation of immigrants, even if they didn’t use that phrase because you have this extraordinary high volume from places that are more culturally distinct. Still within mostly European countries but are very distinct from the native population. First, you have an influx of Catholics, later of Eastern Europeans and Jews, very culturally distinct from the immigration that had come before. Although as you say, there have always been, I mean, there have always been Jews in America. There have always been Muslims in America. There have always been different strains of Protestantism and folks with German and Scandinavian background. And anyway, but it’s true that the predominant immigration, until that point, came from largely Protestant countries that were in the Anglosphere and then a little bit of German.
Jeremy Carl:
Yeah. 85% British at the time of the revolution, and then the rest sort of German and Dutch, and then 1% everything else.
Inez Stepman:
So we have these simultaneous incidents, the closing of the frontier and the end of settlement, as you would call it. And then this new influx of immigration. And people always point to this as like, okay, well, we can replicate this period. And I think it’s true that we could possibly replicate, and I tend to think we could assimilate plenty of immigrants if certain other cultural conditions were met that I don’t think are. But this was not, as you alluded to, this was not a un-tumultuous internal period for the United States. There were a lot of clashes, especially over schooling, which I think are being replicated now. And it did actually fracture a Pan-Protestant consensus in America, where we really didn’t have to work out some of the tension between America’s early fervent Christianity and indeed, state-level establishments, in many cases. Various strains of Protestant Christianity, and this somewhat secular federal government.
America really didn’t have to work out a lot of those knotty problems in practice, largely because, essentially, we had this sort of soft Protestant establishment. They read the King James Bible in school. And that wave of immigration of Catholics, in particular, comes along, and actually does fracture that and causes a lot of consternation. And you have a lot of anti-Catholic backlash, and so on. Do you think that post-1965, that describes the period that we’re in, where we have high levels of immigration, and then domestic fracturing over things that were previously consensus items about American society, but that perhaps are not written into our constitution? Or not explicitly protected in law, that have nevertheless underpinned a lot of our institutions. Or do you think that we’re in a similar period, is what I’m asking you?
Jeremy Carl:
I think so. And I think, you kind of touched on this just a little bit — I think a really important adjunct — which is you talked about, “Well, I’m not sure that we have those conditions anymore.” When we had the late 19th century, early 20th century, and you had this massive immigration from these very different places. We did a few things. One is, we actually called halt for a 40-year period to allow… Effectively what happened is those groups to all assimilate with the people who’d already been there into some sort of a common identity. And by the way, of course, that wasn’t just a one-way street. You can read, I remember reading Lee Iacocca who, kind of a guy of my childhood, a great auto executive from Chrysler, who is Italian-American. And talking about when he was a kid and he would have a pizza party, and all of the sort of native, old-stock American kids would make fun of him because they’re like, “Well, pizza, what’s that?”
Whereas now, when we think of American food, pizza would be right up there with hamburgers, which of course, presumably originally from Hamburg, Germany. So the point is not that these are just one-way assimilation, but at least when you had that pause in immigration, you allowed that identity to cohere. Secondly, you didn’t have a big welfare state. So that removed a set of incentives, and huge percentage of people actually went back because they couldn’t make it. Third, you didn’t have a race-based spoil system, which we have now. In fact, if anything, you had the reverse, immigrants were often discriminated against, for very obvious reasons. Whereas now legally, in lots of ways, depending on what they look like, immigrants are discriminated for.
And I think, finally, the other challenge, I’d say that I think we have now that we didn’t have then, and again, it’s not insurmountable is… I myself, I’m not descended from old-stock Americans in any way. I’m part of that mid-19th century post de Tocquevillian immigration, from central Europe mostly, my family. My wife is largely from an old-stock American background, but if you look at our kids, they’re kind of indistinguishable from George Washington. Not that they literally look like George Washington, but you can’t tell a physical difference. And then I think just the reality. It’s an unfortunate reality, but of where we are is that when you have a multiracial society, as we have now, that’s not going to be evident, at least for a few generations of a lot of intermarriage. And maybe it’ll happen to varying degrees. You see a lot of Hispanic and non-Hispanic white marriages right now.
But I think those physical differences that are always the cause of strife in many different countries. Razib Kahn, a popular writer on genetics on our side of the aisle, he just had a piece out this week. That’s like, other than sex, skin color is the first thing you tend to notice about somebody when you might meet them. It’s the most obvious physical manifestation. And so I think that those problems are just thornier for us. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t solve them. And it doesn’t mean that, God forbid, we want some sort of racial caste system in the U.S. But it means that we need to be very realistic about what we are doing, the societal structures and incentives that we’re setting up. And think about whether this is really getting us to an Unum that we’re happy about, or whether in fact, what we’re just going to have is a bunch of fracturing along lines that are really going to cause a lot of long-term conflict.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I think I agree with you in so far as I frequently find myself frustrated by the lack of appreciation of the difficulty of the project. I think as I said about the Roman empire, I think the project is worthwhile. I think it does have enormous advantages, that are then offset with certain weaknesses. And those weaknesses were mitigated, not entirely taken away or negated, but were mitigated by a very, very strong assimilatory culture and almost a civic religion in America. But there’s only one counter-model within America that perplexes me because that was how I thought about it. We need this very, very strong assimilatory model. We need the civic religion, we need…
And that is New York City. Partially I think because people are really from so many different parts of the world, but it is kind of balkanized. You have neighborhoods, ethnic neighborhoods, that rise and fall in New York City. And there is quite a bit of social strife, and there are conflicts between these ethnic enclaves, but on the whole New York City seems to function and continue to function over time. No thanks to the government. I’m talking here on the scale of centuries. And it is a counter to the way that I have been thinking about, perhaps you might call it actually genuinely what the left used to be in favor of, which is more of a salad bowl than a melting pot. It is genuinely this very strong series of ethnic identities, none of which is totally dominant because there are so many of them.
Jeremy Carl:
Well, and that may be an advantage that New York has, just because there is such a multiplicity. On the other hand, and this just reflects the difference in people, you choose to live in New York. So I … presumably you really like living there, right? And I choose to live in Montana because I like living here. If Montana was New York, I don’t think I’d really be happy. And if New York were Montana, I don’t think you’d be happy. I think having that multiplicity even on a local level is appealing. And I remember as a kid from North Carolina, I would go and visit, I had an aunt and uncle who lived in San Francisco. And I would go to Chinatown, and it was just the most amazing thing to me. Because it was like, here I was in America, but there were all these, it was just all Chinese people.
And this was a mind-blowing thing. I mean, I thought it was really neat and cool. I was like, “wow, I can’t believe this.” And I think when you have that in New York and San Francisco and a few places, that can work really well. When everywhere is just a panoply of people from everywhere with, and they may all be in their ethnic communities and there’s no common culture and identity, I think that works a lot less well.
Inez Stepman:
That may be true. The other aspect of this is that, there was an identity offered. Here I’m thinking about Teddy Roosevelt’s famous, “No hyphenated American” speech where he both has a carrot and stick, right. There was this carrot-and-stick approach to new immigrants. Especially as you finish out the 19th century, you start the 20th century. Which is the stick part was, as you say, there was no welfare state to speak of. And immigrants didn’t qualify even for those benefits that were there. There were strict standards, you had to learn English. People wouldn’t communicate with you. There were no official documents in 20 different languages. So there was this very strong demand that people learn English. They assimilate to American customs, that they participate politically in a way that is comprehensible to the political system. But on the other hand, there was this offer of American identity. And that is quite unique in the history of the world. And maybe the Roman empire, I think is the only real antecede. And even though they really didn’t start out that way, but then they started —
Jeremy Carl:
Yeah, they became that way over time.
Inez Stepman:
They became that way over time, but there’s this real offer of American identity. That you can become an American. And that is not on offer in most European countries, for example. I mean, certainly not in France or in Germany, even countries that are quote unquote “more liberal” than the United States or more left-wing than the United States, that identity is not truly offered. It’s not on offer. Tolerance is what’s on offer, not acceptance into a larger identity.
Jeremy Carl:
No, I think that’s exactly right. And it is a strength that we used to have. And we don’t have any choice, I’m not suggesting, we’re not going to undo where we are. So we’ve got to make the new citizen, wherever they’re from, feel like they’re as American as the first American who landed on Plymouth Rock. And that they’re just as invested in the American project. I firmly believe that. We can’t go around having again different classes of citizenship or Americanness or the sense of you’re no longer able to access this identity that you’ve talked about, because you’re not from the right place or your skin doesn’t come in the right shade that we’ve decided, or what have you. I firmly believe we have to do that. The question is, given the scale of immigration and the types of immigrants we’re bringing in, many of whom are ill-matched for our particular economic needs or whatever have you, are we setting ourselves up in the current regime to be best able to do that?
And I would argue we absolutely aren’t. And the only way that I think we can get around that is, you have to have a pretty hard pause on, certainly mass immigration. And you still always… As America, I think we always want to get the best and the brightest from everywhere. I think that is a great asset that we have as a country. You certainly have seen this as I did living in Palo Alto, that certainly that area runs to a great degree off bringing in really bright people from elsewhere. But to just think that we can import, as I suppose we’ve done under Biden, 5 million illegal immigrants in 18 months, from anywhere with no particular match to what the skills we need are, in America. And that this is not going to have profoundly negative long-term effects on our social cohesion, on our economy, on everything else. I just think it’s very naive and out of date with 2022 reality of where we are now.
Inez Stepman:
It’s funny, I have the opposite instinct perhaps out of that same Palo Alto observation. I have this opposite instinct actually about our, for example, our H1B programs and stuff. Although, yes, I like that we import Nobel prize winners from around the world. That’s obviously been a benefit to America, but oftentimes people who are coming here who have a lot of options are coming from the top of their own societies at home, they have no desire to assimilate. I mean, the number of Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley who will tell you straight up the Chinese system is far superior. I’m like, well then why are you here? They’re, “Well, because I can get this job for a quarter million dollars a year.” I’m actually more worried about that kind of immigration in some sense than I am about low-skill immigration.
But it’s interesting. The identity question also is sort of personal to me because it seems like… I’m actually worried that we will offer nothing in exchange. There is this natural impulse to create these kinds of enclaves, just to be around people who speak the same language, as you understand your cultural customs, to intermarry within those groups. And there was this very strong offer from America that said, “No, you can be part of this other identity. You have to give up this old thing and it costs you something, right? It costs something, but there’s something on offer.” And I guess I don’t worry that America isn’t assimilating immigrants anymore. I wonder what we’re assimilating them to.
Because it seems to me that what’s on offer now in place of this civic religion and strong American identity, is a series of propositions about oppressed groups. And as you say, a racial spoil system, there’s enormous incentive. I mean, we are subsidizing, encouraging, and indeed demanding that balkanization. And we’re telling new immigrants, not what Teddy Roosevelt told them at the turn of this century, that “You’ve been granted this great gift of entrance into this project”, but we’re telling them the opposite. We’re telling them, in fact, that America is an evil country, that you have every right to bring every grievance you possibly can. And in fact, every… Immigrants naturally look to their neighbors, their schools, the institutions, the newspapers that are being printed to learn about their new country. When all of those institutions are saying, “Actually this is a bad place you’ve come to. And in fact, you are right and we’re wrong.” I don’t know how we can continue to not… It seems like we are assimilating, we’re assimilating people into a balkanization that’s created here at home.
Jeremy Carl:
Well, I would agree with both of your statements. First, regarding skilled immigration, I would definitely have a tighter cap than what we do have. I’ve looked a lot at the H1B immigration in particular. And I think again at the level that we’re importing folks, and not just the best and the brightest, but a lot of B-level guys who just end up displacing American software engineers. I don’t think that serves our interests. And I do worry about some of the balkanization. And then I think you touch on the bigger issue is, what are we assimilating these people to? And we’ve just had a total collapse of cultural confidence in this country.
But to some degree, I think that you have to look at, well, why did this happen? This didn’t just spring, fully armored, like Athena out of Zeus’s head. I mean, there had to be an origin story. And at least to me, a plausible significant element of this is that we have weakened our majority culture significantly and made it marginal enough demographically that a lot of these people are coming in and saying, “Hey, these founders, they’re not telling a story that’s about me. My family is not the hero of the story. My family doesn’t get to belong in this story.” And so then you get people tearing down statues, right? Because they’re like, “Well, we don’t believe in the founding myths of these bad, bad guys. So we’re going to create our own American story that stars us.” Which by the way, does not make them bad people. It makes them humans. I mean, that’s a natural human tendency to want to do that, but I think it’s in many ways-
Inez Stepman:
The Italians certainly put up all the statues of Columbus that are now being torn down, yeah.
Jeremy Carl:
I think it’s been caused by the pace of demographic change that we’ve had in this country. And again, I think if we have a pause where we can pause and reform, whatever this new American identity is going to be, I think that will really be the one thing that’s going to save the American project at this point. Just, it’s hard for me to see us getting rid of this racial spoil system or any of the other woke nonsense that we have running around. And I think absent that, it’s really hard to imagine cohering this unified American identity around a set of propositions or ideas that we’re all supposed to believe in. I think it’s very hard because America has traditionally, it’s been a set of propositions, but it’s not just a set of propositions. We’ve been a people and we have chosen to transform pretty radically who the American people are, from a demographic perspective. And I think that’s going to have a lot of unintended and not-so-pleasant consequences.
Inez Stepman:
It’s interesting because it’s difficult to suss out where the origin of this is, ‘cause I have a totally competing narrative, but I can’t really quite… I can’t say that what you’re saying is not the correct one because there’s this confluence, really interesting confluence, right around 1965 of a whole bunch of traditions, both domestic and immigration. There’s in the same decade, you have a sexual revolution, a cultural revolution, and largely spurred through academia. You have domestic racial conflict that is endemic to the United States, i.e. Between white and Black Americans. And then you have these floodgates opening to large groups, large ways of immigration from places that had not come to America in such large numbers before. And so it’s very difficult to, because I tend to see a lot of this as coming actually from academia.
To the extent that it really comes from anything related to the racial conflict, I think it’s an outgrowth of an original sin problem in America to some extent. That there has always been conflict between Black and white Americans. And then that conflict has been… That the pattern for that conflict from the 1960s has been attached to successive groups of immigrants. I think Mike Gonzalez who I have had on here has written the history of that pretty convincingly, I think. But yeah, I can’t really say that this is not the case. I know we’ve had these discussions even specifically about California, where I see very much the progenitor of California’s decline as not coming from immigration, but coming from the academy and the acceptance of essentially mostly white elites that actually run a large part of the state, even if they don’t hold the voting majority.
Jeremy Carl:
Sure. It’s amazing to what degree they still do run the state actually. And it’ll be interesting to see what the transformation looks like. In no way am I suggesting a mono-causal model here, or that academia is not a part of it. Although then I think you have to go ask the prior question of, “Well, why did academia become the way it is?” To some degree, you touch on ‘65, so the baby boomers, the first ones are born in ‘46, they’re coming to college in 1964, right around then you begin to get changes. So is there a story partially about mass affluence in this post-war generation? I’m very open to a lot of different factors contributing here, but I think that certainly a necessary, if not sufficient one, was the dramatic unprecedented and frankly also un-voted-upon demographic transformation that we had in this country around that time.
But it’s interesting also again, to look at California, if you look at California as demographically, in other ways, a kind of progenitor, or a signpost for where we’re heading, it’s very disturbing in that it’s a place with unprecedented affluence at the very top. And it also, using the census bureau adjusted numbers, has the highest poverty rate in America. I mean, worse than Mississippi. And so is that the type of Brazilification of a society, Californification, that we’re heading to in America? I worry that it is the hollowing out of the middle class. And again, it’s not a model I think that we want to replicate nationwide.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, and I couldn’t agree more on that one. I mean, where do you go with… Because as you say, this is, I think there’s probably multiple causes to this. It is funny how many different issues, when I start to look into them, there’s some huge break in the mid-1960s. I mean, whether it’s immigration or men who don’t work, which was, I had Dr. Eberstadt on to talk about trends of essentially the needs, the men who are prime age and dropping out of the workforce. There’s a huge break in the mid-sixties, whether you’re talking about the sexual revolution, the number of sexual partners, the rates out of wedlock, there’s this huge break in the 1960s that I can’t tell you that it’s not what you’re saying. It might very well be that a large part of that break was the previous large influx of immigrants from all over the world.
I just don’t know. It’s hard to suss out where all of these effects began. But you’re a practical guy, as you’ve noted multiple times, we are where we are demographically. There does seem to be some hope that demography is not political destiny, these days, in a way that perhaps seemed fanciful even as late as 2012 or 2015. So what do you think about the shifting basis of politics, considering the fact that we have Hispanics in larger and larger numbers voting for the right?
Jeremy Carl:
Well, and it’s interesting. There’s an author in the UK whose last name is Kaufmann, at the university of Birkbeck who wrote a book called Whiteshift, that you might be familiar with.
Inez Stepman:
He’s been on this podcast.
Jeremy Carl:
Okay, so great. So you know him. And I think he’s really good. I think he’s really interesting. I think he’s thought about these issues in a very thoughtful way. And I think we are maybe headed in a more positive direction. To use the term that people made fun of a while back, but multiracial whiteness; that may be the kind of happy story that we end up telling. Where we all end up looking tannish in some form or fashion, but we still identify with George Washington. That could happen. And I think that’s probably realistically the best outcome that I think is really plausible that we’re going to have now. Certainly, if you look at a big group like Hispanics, they have in many ways, very strong claims to Americanness and parts of our history. I mean the first European settlement, after all, in the America was not in fact Plymouth Rock, but in St. Augustine, Florida, a Spanish settlement.
So I think that we can integrate more groups into the American story. I do think, at some level, it may be that the Democrats’ relentless racial demagoguery is running up against diminishing returns in a pretty dramatic way. And that you’re seeing, for example in South Texas, a lot of Hispanics looking both at their economic situation, at the border, which of course affects them more than anybody else. I mean, they’re taking a thousand Martha’s Vineyards and Eagle Pass, Texas each year. That they are looking at values from everything from abortion to what have you. And they’re like, “Huh, maybe I’m not going to go with the guys who are relentlessly hitting ourselves against each other.”
That’s a more hopeful story I can tell. I don’t think it’s crazy. I don’t think that we’re going to wind up with, over the long term, one party for white people and one party for everything else, much as the Democrats might really desire that to be the case. But there’s a lot of landmines on the way to get there. And there’s a lot of ways for us to step on them and that’s just a continual worry that I have, certainly.
Inez Stepman:
Well, for the last part of this discussion here, I didn’t want to let you go without asking you. You wrote this tour de force of a piece on transgenderism, on the way that we are failing to impart even the most basic imprint of reality of male and female to children. And that that’s a shame on the adults of the country. I think that’s how I would summarize what you wrote. You have six kids, you moved them away from Palo Alto because of some of the things that we’ve been talking about. Where do you see this issue going, and who really… I mean, we are seeing some kind of shift on it, where we do have more of a middle sort of people who are not as kooky right-winger as you and I, who are starting to pick up on what this does to children. So how would you lay that out?
Jeremy Carl:
Well, I think it’s interesting because, at one level, it actually ties into everything we’ve been talking about before, and that it’s sort of the tip of the spear. And the last position on transgenderism is so crazy. And it’s so self-evidently crazy and destructive, particularly when you’re talking about children. The notion that, with almost 2% of Gen Z kids or something identifying as trans, that they were just being repressed and that they didn’t have this identity… They really had this identity, but it was just, people were telling them that it was bad. Rather than we’ve got a social contagion, and we shouldn’t be castrating 14-year-olds or giving double mastectomies to 15-year-olds.
It’s such a crazy position that the Democrats have on this, and yet they’re doubling down on it. And it’s because, at some level, I feel like transgenderism is the tip of the spear. They know that if they get crushed on any element of this identity politics, then transgenderism is just one more group in the Democrat’s identity coalition that they want to have against the evil straight white male slash married female GOP. They realize if they lose here, if they have to concede here, there may be a bunch of other things that fall off as well. And so they’re put in this ridiculous position of defending this position, that even with the entire might of the media and everything else, and all the institutions they control in Hollywood, they’re just not going to be able to convince the majority of Americans, I think, on this issue.
I mean, people get it. As a parent, you get it with your kids. I mean, even here in Montana, we have some trans kids in schools. I don’t think it’s being encouraged or vetted in the way that it is in a lot of other locations, but this social contagion has just taken over from the internet. And when it’s your kid, and when you’re talking about sterilizing your kid or mutilating them, and the lifetime that is going to ensue because of that, I mean, it’s a very personal issue to me as a parent. And I’ve said this, and I’ve written this, a lot of issues, I love to have the issue, I love to just beat up on the Democrats because we can win on it politically. Not that I don’t really believe in it, and not that I don’t really want to win it for the substantive reason, but the politics of it is also attractive.
This is such a spiritual violation. If I could get zero political points, even if I took a slight political hit, but I could just make this contagion go away, particularly when we’re involving our kids, I would do it. Because I see as a parent, the risk that… Even, like I watch my kids, fortunately they all seem to be in good position as regards to this, but this happens, this happens, and I know parents this has happened to, who are normal parents. So I think that’s such a personal thing. So I mean, that’s really what I can say about it.
Inez Stepman:
Do you think we can make a distinction? Cause this is somewhere where I think the political benefits of this issue probably split from some of the things that I think are true and need to be said, in two ways. One, obviously as you just laid out, the rage around this with regards to children is very clear, to a wide swath of political backgrounds. You have people not just from the center, but even from the left, who are terrified about the effects on their children. And I think you’re right to say, “We can definitely do something about this”, provided we have spines enough to do it. We can absolutely do something about this issue, specifically with regards to children.
That coalition that’s coming together has, as you said about the demographic shift, has some landmines in it. One of which is something that I talk about, which is the extent the transgenderism… And I’ve expanded on this argument so many times elsewhere that I won’t go into it now, but I think transgenderism is a very cognizable consequence of the underlying principles of feminism. That differences between men and women are largely social constructs, and the disconnection of masculinity or femininity from biological sex. I think this is actually a logical conclusion. But there’s also not this firewall between adults and children that I sometimes hear folks, even on our side, talking about. Like, “Well, if you’re an adult, you do whatever you want, have all the surgeries you want. We’ll affirm you, but don’t touch the kids.” And certainly a colorable position. And I think it’s probably the most popular political position, but I’m not sure that this… Do you think we can build a firewall in this way?
Jeremy Carl:
Well, I think this is a really important point. And I was actually on a talk show here in Montana, just talking about this today, where the host, who’s a super conservative guy and very solid on everything, was kind of taking the “Yeah, okay, you adults, you do you, but don’t touch the kids.” I think that the kid stuff is so egregious that probably politically it’s a defensible firewall, but I wouldn’t want to go there. I do think it’s important to say that transgenderism at some fundamental level, for the overwhelming majority of people, if not everybody, is just a fundamental spiritual violation.
And as you point… I’m not going to lead politically with, well, this is an outgrowth of feminism, even though I think this is a totally defensible point and I’m very interested in gender in these issues. And I’m sure you and I would be actually in tight agreement on that. But right now we’re putting out the fire, so we can figure out who started the fire a little bit later as a point B. But I do think that we would make a mistake to just restrict it to kids. I think you start with kids and then with adults, I think what you do legally that gets into a gray area. Whether you’re going to say, you can’t do certain things surgically as an adult. I think that becomes a harder position to have. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have it. It just means that’s a more tenuous, but I do think that we should say it’s wrong and that it’s damaging.
And I don’t think that we should shy away from that. And I don’t think we should just say, “Oh, let you do you. It’s fine. Once you’re 18 years and one day old.” By the way, just as a small point to me, the age of buying cigarettes should be the age we’re talking about for this. Even if we’re going to allow it at all, age 21, not even 18, just to get some of the craziness out of the system. So I do think that it’s important to make the broader moral argument and not just think that we can totally firewall off the kids. But whether we take it back to its origins, I don’t know that I’d want to say the F-word because I think that will just get potential allies on the left, it will get their hackles up.
But I do think you can say things like, “Hey, we are erasing distinctions between men and women and maybe that’s not a good thing.” And then whether you call this something, that’s an outgrowth of feminism is maybe a little less important. And then I think you also just have to be able to say that there are feminine boys and masculine girls and everything in between, but that doesn’t change their fundamental sex. And it’s funny that the left has this totally reductionist almost 1950s way of, if you’re not this super feminine girl, well, maybe you’re trans. If you’re not this super masculine guy, well, maybe you’re trans, whereas it’s now the right thing, “Actually, there’s a continuum here of the way that people express their masculinity and femininity and that’s okay.”
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I definitely would’ve been trans as a kid a hundred percent. I wanted to be John Wayne when I was six. Well, Jeremy Carl, thank you so much for coming on High Noon. Where can people find your work? You’re At the Claremont Institute, you write for American Greatness; what’s your Twitter handle for the people?
Jeremy Carl:
I’m @JeremyCarl4, just the number four. It’s not the world’s most inventive Twitter handle, but I haven’t bothered to change it. And I tweet, add my stuff pretty regularly there. You can find me at American Mind, American Greatness, Newsweek, the American Conservative. If you go to my website, Jeremycarl.com, it doesn’t have a ton of stuff there, but I do link to my work there. So you can see a lot of my writings there. And at some point, I may, I’ve threatened to do a Substack and I may actually even do that and inflict that upon the greater reading populace, but that’s still a work in progress.
Inez Stepman:
Well, thank you very much for coming on High Noon.
Jeremy Carl:
It’s a pleasure to be on. Thanks so much, Inez.
Inez Stepman:
And I don’t have the script that I normally read at the end of these episodes because as you can see, if you’re watching on the video, there’s the dog that killed terrorists behind me. I’m recording out of the Federalist studio today, but generally speaking, this is an Independent Women’s production of the Independent Women’s Forum. And if you like this podcast, you should check out some of our other podcast offerings. One is called She Thinks with Beverly Hallberg and does more of a day-to-day politics and policy download. And then there’s something called At the Bar, which I along with my colleague, Jennifer Braceras, we talk about issues at the intersection of law, politics and culture. And we try to do them with a little happy hour flair on that spin. But it’s always helpful, if you like this podcast, please do share it. Please rate or review it. And all those evil tech platforms that you are using to stream this crimethink. So until then next time, be brave. And we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
