A Disinfectant for Bad-Faith White Supremacy

It’s a funny thing to watch: A big, strong man, a member of what he might call the Master Race, panicking and scurrying for cover when asked to explain his repellant politics. 

Expose these blackpilled freaks to a little sunlight and the bad faith on which their politics hinge evaporates. They are suddenly and completely exposed. They scuttle away from their edgy white power online posts and try their best to explain away their clearly-stated worldview. They flail and stammer. They know they have been seen. For them, nothing could be more frightening. 

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You might hear in the coming days that our authoritarian president nominated a guy named Jeremy Carl for the job of assistant secretary of state for International Organizations. He most certainly did not. 

One of the brain-poisoned groypers in the regime – someone aligned with open white supremacist Stephen Miller – likely chose Carl for this spot because he’s demonstrated the white power bonafides that ensure he would carry out a white supremacist agenda: Targeting and harassing and perhaps starving people with black and brown skin in foreign nations while denying them entry into the United States during this, the howling death throes of white supremacy, headed by a group of men who sincerely and foolishly believe they can permanently end multicultural democracy. This was the drive behind Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID, which, according to recent data, has led to more than 700,000 deaths worldwide. Musk’s grandfather, wherever he is, nods approvingly. 

Carl on Thursday was humiliated during his Senate committee hearing. Democrats on the committee, including the increasingly feisty Chris Murphy, used One Weird Trick to sink Carl’s chances of landing the high-ranking State Department gig: They confronted him with his own words, the ones he has used in the safety and warmth of fascist online communities like the X platform formerly known as Twitter. (A Republican senator says he'll cast the deciding vote against Carl's confirmation)

I'm not going to go through every one of Carl's heinous X posts, thousands of which he furiously deleted in the days before his Senate hearing (he recently posted about mass deportations leading to lower rent for Americans, an increasingly common right-wing lie). He has had various disgusting antisemitic posts, posts about the intelligence levels of Black folks, and the widespread conservative theory that white Americans are being systematically replaced by people of color from foreign nations. This Tucker Carlson-approved theory is often cited by mass shooters, naturally.

Carl, who works for the Claremont Institute – a far-right think tank laying the legal groundwork for the repeal of birthright citizenship, the Racist's Final Boss – is a born poster, a poster's poster, like JD Vance. During his Senate committee Carl outright refused to stop posting while he awaited word on his confirmation. The idea behind Carl halting his posting, I think, was to provide sufficient cover for Republican senators to rush him through confirmation proceedings and get him in the State Department, where he could help enact a murderous agenda against those he hates.

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Just watch Carl scramble for rhetorical and ideological safety when asked about his statements on the "erasure" of white culture in the US during his Senate hearing. You can see it in his ugly mug: Carl knows respectable people have seen his wretched and reckless statements about the supposed genocide against white people in America, and he does his best to explain it away.

But first he asks for a moment to "think about this" because he has never really thought about it. A man like Carl has only acted (and posted) out of pure hatred that resides in the gut, the sort of fear and anxiety and existential terror that hardens into dehumanization, and ultimately – like all fascist politics – the void. There is no thinking about anything. There is only feeling, and giving into base instincts, sometimes to legitimize one's hate and sometimes to bring a smile to fellow online groypers who swim in an ocean of nihilism, the beating heart at the center of fascist thought.

It's all, as usual, about bad faith. Carl has to feign concern for the poor white people of the United States in the 21st century, besieged by shadowy forces dumping immigrants into their previously pristine communities. Carl and his ilk pretend to believe this because they must, because it offers cover for the politics they want to embrace and the revolting agenda they want to enact.

Carl stumbles and bumbles when asked about his belief that white people are aggrieved in the US, and he reaches for a book about the Scott-Irish military tradition, a book written by former Senator Jim Webb, a right-wing Democrat. Carl then talks about Italians, once a reviled minority group, now sufficiently white enough to join the cause.

"You're retreating to ethnic identity," Murphy says, popping the bad-faith bubble of Carl's sudden concern for Italian and Scottish cultures. "Tell me the values that stitch together white identity and make it different than Black identity. ... Underlying your comments is a sentiment that white culture is simply better."

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Carl uses the term "common, majority American culture" as a catchall for homogenized culture of the pre-Civil Rights era, an era the American right is determined to recreate today by any means necessary. Of course Carl whines to Murphy and his Senate colleagues about Bad Bunny doing the Super Bowl halftime show, a performance that has been greeted by the American right as an extinction level event.

It's instructive, I think, to see a guy like Jeremy Carl – a keyboard warrior fighting the good fight against multiculturalism – caught outside his cocoon of fascism, asked to explain his views of how the United States should look, how it should be run, and who should be running it. He sounds like an idiot because once you strip away the bad faith cover – the comical idea that Carl is a freedom fighter for an oppressed American minority group – he has nothing but racism.

There is no intellectual foundation for a man like Carl. There is only hate and fear, and a total absence of love. Daylight is a disinfectant for this kind of professionalized white supremacy. Senator Murphy, with barely any effort at all, took away Carl's bad faith cover in a setting far from the impenetrable fascist online bubble in which he resides. And in this environment – with senators and their staff looking on, with the TV cameras trained on him – Carl resembled a maggot scurrying away from the light. His hate had been seen by all.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social