Jeremy Carl on the Lost Generation

Welcome, once again, to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And I am so pleased today, at the end of the year,

I know you had your Christmas already, and you're ready for New Year. But there's a lot of questions about what's going to happen in the

New Year. And we have a special guest who's going to talk about one of the main things we've been talking about, which is anti -white discrimination, which has happened over the last few years.

There's been actually an article. Some people nominate this article for the, or they say that it should be nominated for the

Story of the Year. It's called The Lost Generation by Jacob Savage. It appeared in Compact Magazine. And our guest is

Jeremy Carl. To talk about that, Jeremy, you had some critiques of this. I'm really appreciative that you have come on and been willing to talk about it.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. And it's a pleasure to be on, John. And I should add, I do have some critiques of this.

I wrote them in my own response, kind of the lost opportunity of the lost generation,

I think it is, on my sub stack. Jeremycarl .substack .com. It got quite a bit of attention.

Having said that, I should say I did actually reach out to the author, Jacob Savage, who had read my book and enjoyed it.

And he was very gracious in terms of how he accepted my critique. Not saying he necessarily agreed with it, but he accepted it.

And we had a very kind exchange. So I don't want my critique of some of the things he did, because I think a lot of the things in the article are great, to sort of overshadow that or look like I'm really kind of going after him in a negative way.

I think it's overall very positive that we're talking about this, that this issue is getting out into the mainstream.

I just had some sort of, there were some sub aspects of it that I would have liked to have seen improved.

Yeah, and I think a lot of what we're going to say is going to be positive about this, that it's receiving any attention at all, that white people have been gatekept out of legacy institutions.

But you are an expert, because you wrote The Unprotected Class, which I have recommended and will still recommend.

Everyone should go, if you don't have it, get it. Read it. It will really open your eyes. It goes into so much more detail than that article in Compact Magazine.

And you're also nominated for Assistant Secretary of State. And I would just encourage people during this time to, because I really am a big fan of your work, write your senator if they're on the

Foreign Relations Committee, because we want to get you approved. And so the chairman is James Risch.

And if you can write him or write any member of the committee, do that. You are a bulwark.

You are very wise, in my opinion, one of the people that I love to follow on social media more than anyone. And I just would love to see you in that position.

So thanks for sharing your expertise on this. Why don't we start here? What was good about the article that Jacob Savage wrote?

What do you like about it? And then we'll get into some of the critiques. Yeah, great question,

John. And by the way, thank you for the very kind words. Big fan of your podcast and all the work you're doing. I'd say in terms of the specific article itself, there would probably be three things that were good.

One is it just raised the issue at all. I mean, I can tell you as the person who has tried to mainstream this conversation more than probably just about anyone else in kind of mainstream conservatism that a lot of progress has been made.

Infinite, compared to when I came out with this book in April of 2024, the discourse is in a very new place.

And that's part of the reason an article like this could come out. Having said that, this, I think, brought it to an entirely new level of visibility where VP Vance is talking about it.

And really, everybody was talking about this story for a few days. And so I think that's a great thing, just A, that it was successful enough to do that.

And that's because it's frankly quite well written and it has a kind of compelling story to it. I think the other really good things

I'd say about it is he has gathered some of his own data, which is new. My own book has quite a bit of data, some of it secondhand, some of it new.

But he did put in a fair bit of original research to kind of come up with a really compelling story that shows just how much white people have really, particularly young white men, which is the focus of this article, have kind of seen their places go down a lot over the last 10, 15 years.

And so he's pretty compelling there. I think the third thing that he does that's really good, I think this is actually probably the biggest.

If I put on my scholar's hat and we start talking about intellectual contributions, I think this is the biggest one, which is he makes this a generational story.

And that's something that maybe people like myself have not paid as much attention to and should have. And I think he does a very good job here.

So he's really telling a story about people like himself who are millennial white men.

And what he shows is that, or I think he said like himself, for people like me who are

Gen X and up, there were challenges even when

I was coming. I'm 53. But even when I was coming up, there were challenges. But we weren't totally shut out, especially if you were somebody like me who kind of had the right credentials and the right skills and the right connections.

We could still sort of navigate our way through these sorts of barriers reasonably well.

And what I think he shows is that for millennials and to a lesser extent for Gen Z, he doesn't talk about that. But I think his data shows this.

Those pathways, really, if they weren't totally shut off, they just narrowed dramatically. And I think it is important to talk about that generational story because it shows why we're having some of the problems we're having today.

Yeah. I think that's absolutely true. I know that there were barriers. And I think it's important to also maybe highlight the fact that it depended where you were.

And he's writing about legacy institutions in places like California. He goes on about the entertainment industry quite a bit and the education, so Ivy League schools, so primarily in the

Northeast. These regions are probably the worst places where this happened and also in corporate

America. And I think of my own dad. My dad's a boomer. His brothers are boomers.

My dad and my uncle both took very different career paths specifically because they, well,

I should say a big part of it was because they were white men. And living in California, it was not, back in, this is in the late 70s, early 80s, they did not want white men overrepresented, quote unquote, in things like forestry, which to me is like a very white band kind of thing to do anyway.

But they were already pushing this stuff. It's just gotten so much worse. And I think you're right.

This is a generation thing. You point out something, though, and maybe we can go back and forth between critique and praise here.

But I'm asking you to do a little critique. You pointed out that conservative white men have been gatekept for longer.

And I would extend this. I haven't studied it. But I would wonder if you agree with it, whether or not Southern and Midwestern white men have had it worse.

Because if we pull just for Northeastern white people, I think they're going to be overrepresented over people in other regions.

What do you think of that? Jon, I think you're absolutely correct. And I'd say Southern in particular is the word because then you're coming in, especially if you're very visibly

Southern, with all the sort of negative stereotypes, negative media and Hollywood portrayals.

And I'm not saying they're always negative, but there's a frequent negative portrayal out there.

You're kind of the ultimate bad guy, whether implicitly or explicitly.

I think Midwestern, less bad, but still you maybe don't have access to some of those networks.

Whereas if you're in the Northeast, if you're in that prep school type world, you're in the Ivy League type world, which I was in, you sort of maybe had more connections where you could get beyond that.

You knew the social cues. You know the right things to say. You know, metaphorically speaking, which fork to use.

So you sort of, there were ways to navigate around that. And then I think, this was another criticism

I had. Not only did he kind of really focus, I think, on liberal white men, and I can tell you as a conservative white guy coming up in,

I mean, there was just stuff that was closed off to me as a conservative, but I think there were regional and class elements.

And the other, the bigger critique, almost even than the fact that he ignores conservatives, is that if you're a working class white man, this story is not a story that starts in effectively 2014, which is where he starts it.

But you are chased from your neighborhood and you have your jobs shipped out to some other country decades ago.

Okay, not 2014. So there's a certain kind of provinciality of the author who is himself, you know, coastal and has some elite background, went to Princeton, and kind of coming from a more liberal background.

He's writing a compelling story, but he's talking really about his own experience to a significant degree.

And most white men have a somewhat different experience, and I think the problems that they face started well before 2014.

He brings up a bunch of statistics. So on the positive end here, writers in 2011 of TV shows, 11 .9%,

or sorry, 48 % white male, 11 .9 % by 2024. That seems like a pretty big jump.

Yeah. Says 39 % of Harvard Humanities tenure track positions in 2014 were white men, and then 18 % in 2023.

And he goes on and on with just, it's like every field had this kind of a problem.

And as a millennial, he's looking at this and he's talking about stories from people in his peer group and how this has done,

I think he's saying it's done psychological damage to them, that they did all the right things, they had expectations that this would work out, and then it doesn't, and it's the most frustrating thing for their generation.

And it's probably more frustrating for Zoomers, although Zoomers maybe have learned to just accept that this is the reality, and they're upset about it.

What do you think, and I'm asking you to get into the minds a little bit here, what do you think is going through the minds of a liberal white boomer male who, let's face it, if they were in charge of the majority of legacy positions, they were the ones that essentially closed the gates?

Yeah, I think that's true. Although I do wanna say there was a criticism. I didn't make it as much, but some other people did make it.

And I think it's fair, which is even so my followup book that I'm working on right now is all about liberal white people and how destructive of forces they've been.

So I'm not trying to dismiss the liberal boomer or any other liberal white guy or woman as a problem here.

But I think there is a concern that when you make these sorts of arguments, you sort of are giving minorities a free pass and you're not looking at demographic change and the role that that all played in some of these things.

And to quote George W. Bush, we're not going to have the soft bigotry of low expectations here.

So I do think it's important to hold all the groups that were involved in discriminating and continue to be involved in discriminating against white men, young white men in particular to account.

And I'm not trying to erase that minority role because it is important. On the other hand, I do think, as you pointed out, as I believe, otherwise

I'd be writing this followup book, older white guys are still kind of at the commanding heights of culture to a degree.

I mean, obviously every year, a little bit less so. And so what sort of went through their thinking?

It's a great question. I mean, it's sort of like you want to feel good about yourself, right? So it's like,

I'm going to go share and equalize the playing field and do all those things.

And as long as I don't have to sacrifice my own job, then that's fine, right?

And that's sort of maybe how they can kind of justify it. But they sort of are ignoring the fact that of course they're not sacrificing their own prestige, their own positions, any of those types of things.

So they're making things equal, quote unquote, for the generations after them. But that's the best

I can come up with is a justification. I should say, I mean, if you just look at voting, older white guys are still pretty conservative overall as a group.

So it's not like every one of them is doing that. But I think probably in these sorts of elite coastal environments in Hollywood and the

Ivy League and the TV writers rooms and in some of these other kind of elite institutions that he talks about, you're going to probably have a higher percentage of white men who are going to be kind of involved in that.

I think it is important to listen to your critique, which by the way, people can check that out. And I would suggest if you're on Substack, subscribe to jeremycarle .substack

.com. I love Substack. I just started one of my own and now it's like my favorite platform. But go check that out and read the entire article if you're interested in more of this.

When you, going back to something you said before and expanding a little, when you talked about conservative white males getting gatekept previously,

I think there's something, so I see this emerging with younger millennials especially and then

Zoomers where they want to blame Boomers for a lot of things. And there's a fair critique here that Boomers did some damage.

But I do think the full story and the scope needs to be set at an earlier date, like you said.

And conservative white men did not make the decisions that led to what we're living in today.

I think that is an important part of what you're trying to say. Cause you could just make a simplistic narrative and say, well, those awful

Boomers, you know, like those white Boomers, they're the problem. And it really was,

I think what you're saying is a pathology that not only white

Boomers, others, but white Boomers also shared that was this DEI liberalization kind of, we're going to level the playing field to make it fair because they had some kind of a revolutionary instinct that satisfied a desire to feel that they were making the contributions and making society better.

And that was the way to do it. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of what I'm kind of trying to do in this book is put these guys on the psychiatrist couch where frankly they love to be anyway.

But like to just try to really understand it and actually to do it because, and people who've read

The Unprotected Class will know this. It's, I don't write, at least in these book settings, I'm really trying to convince a person who might not be totally convinced.

So I'm not writing in an angry way. And I'm not trying to write this next book in a like, oh, you know,

I mean, what happened, what these guys did was really bad, but I'm not trying to write a book that's saying, oh, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

And that you should hate these people. Trying to understand like why they did what they did. So I'm spending a lot of time trying to think about it and look at the evidence in front of me and say like, how does any of this make sense?

And I think there are sort of broader terms. There's a term called oikophobia, which is essentially your hatred of your own group.

And it was popular. I mean, I go into the book about the whole history of it, but it was really popularized by the great

British conservative contemporary philosopher, Roger Scruton, who wrote an article where he kind of introduced this.

But one of the things that you show when you look at oikophobia, and there's actually a good book that I referenced with that title in it, is that this type of civilizational self -hatred is actually characteristic of advanced slash decadent, as you prefer, whatever your term, societies throughout history.

That it's, again, there's nothing new under the sun, as we believe as Christians, right? To, you know, sin is always there.

All the other problems are always there. And so at some level, we're just in that point of a civilizational cycle where, sadly, we begin to turn on ourselves.

Now, I don't think that there's no way to arrest this, otherwise I wouldn't be active in the way that I'm active.

But I do think that we need to be conscious that we're swimming up green civilizationally in some respects.

Yeah, that's kind of a black pill. We're gonna reach for some hope here, because obviously you haven't given up, and that's why you're doing the work you're doing.

One of the things I noticed in this article, and I think I wanna just take a real quick detour, if you will indulge me, is several

Jewish names came up. So Nate Silver, Jeffrey Goldberg, Darren Aronofsky, and others.

And these are treated in the article about the lost generation by Jacob Savage as these are white men, essentially, right?

So Jewish people are included in this. And one of the narratives that I see being told more and more online is that the problem and the reason that we have all of this anti -white discrimination, some people even think it is particular to Jewish people.

Jewish people are the ones who brought this upon us. And I just found it interesting that in the article, it seems like he's saying, actually, the new elites that are rising up because they've been hired are not

Jewish people as much either. Like they're actually losing a percentage in this as well. It seems like there's a third worldism and perhaps mixed with A, just a sentiment for other types of minorities.

Did you pick up on that as well? Yeah, it's just a great question. And I can unpack this from 50 different perspectives.

And let me just lay my own cards on the table, which are not secret cards in any case, but just because they might not be known to your audience.

So, I mean, interesting thing here, the author himself is Jewish of this piece. I think that does inform his thinking to a degree, although he doesn't go into it.

I'm sort of in this weird liminal space in that I was raised Jewish myself. I converted to Christianity as an adult.

I'm a member of a PCA church and very involved. I married a non -Jewish woman many, many years ago.

Raised our kids Christian. So I'm sort of in this weird in -between space in terms of my own analysis of this.

I think the candid answer is there are some times where it makes sense to lump

Jewish white people in with non -Jewish white people in your analysis. And my justification for doing that is very simple because I'm not trying to engage in racial mysticism.

If you go back to the 1790 US Naturalization Act where they talked about, basically, this is our original

Citizenship Act. Citizenship is reserved for white people. Jews were understood to be in that group.

They've always been treated as white under US law. And so that's how I was gonna treat them as a unit of analysis.

However, there are also clearly other times where you do need to step back and you need to say, well, are there certain things going on in Jewish communities or in the subset of Jewish community that have kind of pushed some of this over time?

I think there are sort of harder and softer versions of this. There's actually a really good piece out in Compact Magazine, ironically, which is where this piece appeared.

Today, by my friend, David Azarad, who kind of looks at this question, and David himself is also partially

Jewish, but of Moroccan descent. And he's very skeptical of sort of the harder version of this question that like, ah, there's some grand

Jewish conspiracy behind it all. That certainly comports with my own view as well.

But at the same time, he doesn't shy away, nor have I, from pointing out that you do have this disproportionate nature, particularly of left -wing

Jews who have been involved in some of these anti -white actions. That's not something that we should shy away from, or Jews should be held accountable just like any other group should be held accountable.

But at the end of the day, of course, individuals should be held accountable for individual behavior. Like, right, you're not accountable for the behavior of every other white

Christian. And so people need to be, there's no collective guilt that I'm trying to assign here, but we can look at social patterns and observe things.

And I think one thing to maybe kind of wrap this up in the closest thing I can to a bow that you sort of touched on is that I think this is also a moving target in that now maybe some elements of the

Jewish community that had gone along with some of this, while it didn't seem to be as problematic for them, have sort of realized, ah, actually, and this is a argument

I've made again and again, when you look at these antisemitism protests on campus, that really a lot of this is downstream of Jews are considered white and these groups don't like white people.

And so, yeah, that explains it. Not everything that's going on with the anti -Israel, I mean, protests, but a lot of it, right?

It's like the white guys are the bad guys. And so I think there is a change in thinking of some in the

Jewish community on this. And of course, there's folks who've always been strong on this within the

Jewish community who've been great on these issues. And so my view as a very practical political figure is that we always wanna get more friends and have fewer enemies.

And so that's great. And we can do that without erasing history or erasing facts.

And we can kind of deal with these sensitive issues in an adult way. So my, if you'll indulge me a little further down this tributary, my understanding has been that a lot of the radical movements in this country that eventually, through a lot of evolutionary processes and shifts and changes, led to the

DEI that we knew of in 2020, formed before there were large groups of at least

Ashkenazi immigrants coming to this country from the Russian program. So pre -1880s, you have feminism and socialism already here, mostly in the

Northeast. This is, I know, something you're writing about in the next book. By the way, real quick question. When is the next book coming out and what's the title?

Well, this is part of the trick is I'm working on it, but I can't, I've been sort of stuck for the last several months while my hearing and potential appointment has been out there because I can't formally,

I literally have the offer for a book contract, but I can't sign it because I'm under an ethics agreement right now with the

White House. And they're just like as ridiculous as it sounds. I mean, they don't want to make it look like there's some sort of quid pro quo where I'd be getting some big book advance because somebody, the publisher wants to influence government policy.

It also means I can't full bore write because I might be moved into government service at any moment.

If that doesn't happen, if I don't go in, I would be hoping to wrap it up within the next six months or so.

And then there's a timeline to publish it. But I'm really glad by the way that you raised this issue of, because this is the other problem of always looking at the

Jew behind the curtain and saying, ah, that's really the cause of all the ills that White people are suffering.

Because, and again, I point this out because I've got a chapter on Jewish leftists and also

Christian leftists in this book that a lot of liberalism, if you really want to trace where I would tell the origins of this, it really comes out of Unitarianism at Harvard College in the early 1820s.

I mean, interestingly for us as Christians, it's like once we break from Orthodox Christianity, that's when all the problems begin to start.

I mean, the Unitarians start out first, basically denying the

Trinity and doing other things that really put them outside of Orthodox Christianity.

And then that leads to all sorts of quote unquote social reforms, which we can trace as really the birth of modern leftism.

And you can watch all of this stuff really begin to become a major social factor in the United States before Jews are any meaningful portion, certainly of our society's elite.

And so, again, I think it is really important. It's why these sorts of, we can look at influence and we can look at disproportionate influence of groups and that's totally fine.

But if we want to be serious historians and not conspiracists we've got to look and say, oh, actually, you know what?

Some of the roots of this, some very meaningful parts of the roots of this happen far earlier. They happen when

America is basically a uniformly Christian country and we have these things going on.

And really in many ways, much of secular liberalism is effectively an attempt to have

Christianity without God. Yeah, I think of, and I couldn't agree more. I think of the radical abolitionists, feminists, even the anti -masonry cause, the prohibition cause.

These are all these social reform movements that essentially behind a lot of them is an egalitarian ethos that we can have this.

And at the time, I know there was a lot of sort of post -millennial hope. We can have this kingdom, but they've already kicked

Christ out of it. And I think when Jews come here in larger numbers, they're coming from a persecution context and they would really like to be in a country that does not see race, class, gender, and these things that have been used in their minds against them.

And so they join in on a project. But to just say one last thing that kind of hit me, there was a film that came out.

I don't know if you saw it. I'm not recommending it, but it was about Bob Dylan recently. It was a biopic of Bob Dylan.

Yeah, I saw it. I just didn't, I didn't watch it, but I saw that it came out. Yeah, it came out, right. So I was more curious just because this is local to the area

I live in now. So Pete Seeger lived down the road from me. I used to see him at the anti -war protests with his banjo growing up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my guitar teacher was friends with him and would play with him. I mean, he was just kind of a local legend.

And, you know, Pete Seeger was called a Puritan, which I found very interesting. He didn't believe in Christianity, but he even thought of himself as kind of a

Puritan. And I think he represents kind of what happened in that region where he's leftist on all these social causes, but he still stays faithful to his wife.

He picks up litter on the side of the road. And then there's Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan has like the same basic political views as Pete Seeger, except he's sleeping around and living a trashy life.

And I'm not saying all Jews are like that at all. I'm just saying it seems like what, and that may be a little micro view into this, that Bob Dylan being part of an immigrant group that came over, they attached themselves to this project, but they didn't uphold many of the

Puritan standards that I think are still maybe being, it's twilighting, but they're still sort of like this, oh, we can have immigrants come here from all over the world.

They'll just be like us. They'll pick up litter too. And it's like this sort of naivete. Anyway, I just figured

I'd throw that out there. I don't know if you have any thoughts that came to your mind as I was sharing that, but it made sense of some of this to me. Yeah, well,

I mean, I think you've actually encapsulated a number of the really interesting trends that we were just talking about in the personage of these individuals.

So Seeger, as I recall, who, for those of your viewers and listeners who don't know, I mean, he's like the original old left folk song guy.

I mean, he was like the guy nationally. It's like Woody Guthrie and then Pete Seeger. Right, Woody Guthrie and Seeger.

Those are the two guys, right? And he was a big time leftist. I mean, actually a Stalinist at one point, but incredibly culturally influential.

And I can't remember for sure, but I'm pretty sure descended from a very, very long line of kind of like old

New England, old New York, kind of distinguished family. He went to Harvard. And so he's sort of from this elite class that became subject to this

Unitarian tendencies and everything that followed from that in the early 19th century onward.

And then you've got Dylan, and he's coming from this group that has been to a large degree, fleeing persecution in Europe.

They're very maybe nervous about unified Christian polities and what that means for Jewish people today.

I can tell you some of the negative responses I get as a convert to Christianity from Jews, I think are kind of rooted in some of that.

There's a lot of anger, just other sort of psychological things going on there.

So I think that was very real. And he's also not maybe Dylan, schooled in the same type of American social mores than a guy like Pete Seeger was.

And there's actually a really fascinating book. This is now getting into very esoteric stuff, but for your listeners who are really interested in kind of a very thoughtful book on this, sadly,

I don't think any longer in print, although I think you can get it on Kindle called The Ordeal of Civility by a guy named

John Murray Cudahy. And Cudahy was a Catholic sociologist who was writing at,

I believe he was at NYU as a professor in the early 1970s. And he sort of looks at Jewish acculturation to American society and the difficulties that they had, how that was an ordeal for them that caused a lot of psychological anguish because they didn't kind of know the social codes.

And it's a fascinating book that explains a lot of things going out of itself. This is not some,

I'm not recommending to you some sort of horrible, he was a finalist of the National Book Award when it came out, although I think it was controversial even when it did come out.

But it's a really fascinating counter -cultural look at this broader phenomenon and how the

Bob Dylans of the world tried to enter into this world. And Bob Dylan growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota on the

Iron Range, very working class white community. I'm sure his own cultural background was somewhat different than that.

And so he's got to adjust and there's stress, social and psychological stress as a result of that. I'm sure that plays into some of his worldview, right?

And so - Well, you see it in entertainment, you see it in music. I think when the baton was passed and Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger are actually a good example of this.

The standards seem to lower for, so there's personal virtue and then there's your public political stance.

The public political stance didn't really change that much, it seems like to me. But the personal virtue and the excellence did change.

And that, I mean, I see that sort of rebel instinct even in Hollywood as the rise of the anti -hero in the 1970s.

Bob Dylan represents a lot of this. Rock and Roll represents a lot of this. I'm not saying it's all a Jewish project at all. I'm just saying there is this kind of like, let's rip down those old

Puritan standards or those old legacy kind of white standards that even have ingrained themselves in the middle class.

We don't want that anymore. We're gonna make our own rules and now we're kind of sitting in the rubble. And I think the piece by Jacob Savage is he's saying, well, hold on, we've lowered all the standards now.

We've devalued our own institutions. Who cares if someone gets a Golden Globe anymore? What difference does it make?

Right. And the stories that are being cranked out there are just lower quality. What do you see for our institutions as we go through the consequences of what's happened over the last 10 years in DEI and even before that?

Is this the end of the institutions? Are they replaced? What happens? Well, it's interesting and it's a good question.

So I think civilizationally, we've kind of just noticed that we've sawed three quarters of the way through the branch that we've been sitting on and that maybe that's not such a good idea, right?

And so I think articles like this are part and parcel of that recognition. I do think the institutions have been weakened and have really become hollowed out shells in many ways.

And at some level, they just need to be kind of pushed and they're gonna topple over because they've been hollowed out to such a degree.

What you are beginning to see in these elite circles is particularly young white men who are shut out of these things going elsewhere.

So they become podcasters. I mean, this is one thing, right? That's one way that they've gotten out there.

And I particularly, I think of people like my friend Warren McIntyre, who's a guy who just like had no elite connections whatsoever.

He was teaching high school in Florida a few years ago, but had something compelling and different to say and put it out on YouTube and built an audience based on that, right?

Like that's the opportunity that we have in the wreckage of these institutions, but they're doing sub stacks.

I mean, you can read unbelievably good stuff, often pseudonymous from people who either closeted academics who don't want their political views known or ex -academics.

I'd also point to probably my closest friend out here in Montana where I live, Jonathan Kieperman, who goes by Lomaz online.

He runs Passage Press. It's interesting because Jonathan was in a very similar situation to Savage, the author of this piece.

He was a little slightly different. I mean, he was a closeted conservative teaching at UC Irvine. He finally was like, after COVID, he's like,

I can't take this anymore. So he quit, he and his wife were both teaching there. They quit their jobs. He starts this tiny press and it starts to kind of basically,

I mean, he's going the full gamut, but he's really concentrating on that white male audience that he feels like is underserved, bringing out forgotten classics, things like that.

And just yesterday or two days ago, maybe now, he was there on stage at Turning Point USA on the main stage talking to 20 ,000 people, right?

So that's the other opportunity. I mean, we're not seeing infinite amounts of that yet. And by the way,

I'd encourage all the folks here to check out Passage Press. They do some great stuff. But I think that young white men who have been locked out of these institutions, we're seeing these institutions degrade partially as a result.

They're beginning to form their own counter institutions. And I think that's gonna be something that's really exciting to watch.

And what I would certainly say, particularly to your young white male listeners who are listening to this is there's this tension, and I've talked about this a lot with Jonathan.

It's okay to call out and say, hey, this is unfair and stop treating us unfairly. But at the same time, you can't just adopt a victim mentality because you'll destroy yourself, right?

If you're gonna wait for the world to treat you fairly, you're just gonna be forever disappointed in life.

So you've gotta demand your rights and not apologize for that and keep pushing. But in parallel, you've gotta go be as great as you can with what you have and understand that there is still opportunity out there for you.

There are still things that you can do and to just be ultimately accountable for your own life even in a challenging circumstance.

That is the right tone. That's the message. I'm actually optimistic about the fact that the world does seem to be opening up.

There are a lot of opportunities. And I think of a few years ago, Mike Rowe was talking about how, hey, look, there's all these jobs that you can actually get.

They're high demand. Yeah, you might get dirty. It's messy stuff. It's hard work, but man, you're gonna get paid.

You're gonna level up. And there is very few people, well, there were some, but a lot of people don't want those kinds of jobs.

But I think looking at the next step as a stepping stone, instead of seeing the whole picture and everything arrayed against you, saying, okay, what's the next step

God has in front of you that he's provided and seeing yourself as in his providence. That's the only way

I know how to get through life. And I've essentially been gatekept as well from prestigious institutions, which is part of the reason we're talking now.

I never saw a podcast in my future. I didn't think that would ever make money. I didn't think that, my wildest dreams,

I thought I was gonna be a stodgy professor somewhere, teaching, nerding out on things and the

Lord had other plans. And so anyway, I'm grateful for that positive vision. What do you think happens to legacy institutions?

Are they gonna course correct? Are they gonna just fall? What's gonna happen? Well, I think there'll be some course correction.

I think the ones that won't will just ultimately over time lose their prestige. I mean, the lack of quality will become obvious.

You can't just take out a group like this from consideration. I mean, it's not just the racial thing.

I'm not just saying, oh, well, if you have no white men and to a lesser degree white women, then you're not gonna be able to do anything well.

It's the political angle that goes along with that type of exclusion that ensures that over time you're gonna just create work that's mediocre.

So I think some of them will just die and then some of them will course correct and they'll begin creating spaces again for young white men to come in.

In fact, again, part of my critique of this article was that I didn't put it quite this way in my own article, but the thing that I wanted to caution is, he sort of starts out with, well, and up to 2014, everything was great.

My contention is if you reversed everything and you could just snap your fingers and we'd be back in 2014, no, that would not be an acceptable solution.

There'd be a lot of nice little cushy positions in that very rotten still establishment elite for a certain type of liberal white man, but we would not be anywhere near a sort of just outcome.

And so we need to get much more fundamental in terms of the critique. So I think what we need to watch for and be careful on our side is that we're not just kind of carved out our own little space in the

DEI sphere and the people who are good boys and want the pats on the head get to be included.

I think that would be a big mistake. I think we need more fundamental change toward getting much closer to a pure, true merit -based approach for how we're gonna hold these institutions.

And if we can't get that, we need to get rid of the institutions. So where do you see hope?

Do you see the administration right now as contributing to a solution? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, again, there's so much, look,

I know so many people in this administration who are terrific, patriotic

Americans, who are smart, who understand the problem, particularly, I think, the younger guys, because they've been through this, who are working really, really hard.

And so, you know, it's easy to say, well, we're not doing this, we're not doing that. In some cases, that's true, but we are doing a lot.

I would say Harmeet Dhillon, a very much non -white man, a Sikh American immigrant woman who's running the

Department of Civil Rights, is doing a terrific job at DOJ. She has prosecuted anti -Christian bigotry.

She has looked at anti -white bigotry. The EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, similarly run by a young white woman who

I've encountered, but she's putting out very explicit stuff saying, hey, if you're any race and you're being discriminated against based on that, and that includes white people, let us know, file a case.

And so I think that we are doing this. And I think part of the good opportunity that we do have here is that at some level, this discrimination has been hiding in plain sight.

I mean, people like me would write about it and say like, hey, by the way, this is illegal, but nobody was really doing anything about it.

Now that we have the Trump administration in office and they're saying, hey, this is illegal. Under existing civil rights law, you can't do this.

And in most cases, the university, the business is folding because they actually know what they are doing is illegal.

And so I think we're going to get rid of a lot of the worst stuff because of that. And then I think there's other things that we're going to get rid of because people didn't really want to do it, but they felt like they had to do it.

And now that there's some legal exposure for them to continue to discriminate against white men, they didn't really want to do it anyway.

And so now they have an excuse to kind of get rid of it. So in no way am I saying that all the problems are going to be solved, but I do think there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we are beginning to pick at this point.

And that really, I would never say that we're hitting peak woke because I think there's going to be a lot of people who have incentives to keep this going.

But I do think that if we have not, as Winston Churchill said, reached the end or even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning of kind of turning this around and getting back to a better system.

That's encouraging. What I hear you saying and what I want people to take away as an application is don't black pill, expand on the winds that are being made, build on what's happening, take the step in front of you and go.

And at the same time, don't blame, don't place the blame on particular people necessarily for what's happened.

Like it would be wrong to blame a black person because of DEI kept you out of a job or something. Blame the ideology that has infected people's minds that has led to this.

And there's all kinds of participation in that but that's what we have to defeat. We have to defeat this ideology.

And yeah, and then I just appreciate your voice. I think you're measured, you uphold standards of decency which

I really appreciate. So I'd ask people if you are not following Jeremy Carl on Substack, do so. And also on X, you can go to,

I don't have it in front of me. Real Jeremy Carl. Real Jeremy Carl. I guess Donald Trump started the real thing.

So we're all real this and that. So real Jeremy Carl, check it out. No, that's great. And again, it's always a pleasure to be on.

And what I would just remind your listeners, they all know this anyway, but God is in control.

Jesus is in control. We know how this ends. It ends in a good way. In the meantime, we need to do our part to make sure that we are advancing the cause in the here and now as best as we can, both in our churches and in our communities.

And if we do that, I'm very optimistic that this is gonna have a happy ending even in the near term.