How Anti-White Discrimination Became a Conservative Issue

News Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Court Rules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sailer Rides Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But can greed beat creed?

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

Facing ‘Anti-White Racism’

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Carl defended his approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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