Sometimes when you’re asked to give a talk, you find that it’s already been titled for you. I was informed when I got the program that the title of my talk was “On the Persecution of Whites in America.” And I thought, persecution—is that really accurate? I say a lot of edgy things in my book, but persecution is a very strong word. So, of course, like any good scholar, I went to the dictionary, and I found persecution defined as “hostility and ill treatment especially on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or political beliefs.” Okay—so maybe persecution is a fair description of what’s going on here.

In my new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, I’ve talked a lot, particularly when I’ve given interviews about the book, about not wanting to create a new victim class. I’m not here to encourage white people to whine to the refs, because the refs don’t like you anyway. But I am encouraging us to work in concert with non-white allies who are interested in equal justice under the law and will stand up for our unalienable rights that are guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence.

My book has been received very enthusiastically both by reviewers and the general public. More importantly, and I say this not to toot my own horn but because I think it indicates a shifting of the zeitgeist which we should all welcome, it’s received a lot of interest on the Hill. Just yesterday I was asked by a number of senior Hill staffers to give a presentation on the book. Afterwards, a staffer of a very mainstream, well-known member took me aside and said, “My boss would like to talk to you.” I spent an hour talking to him about my book, which is a clear indication that the Overton Window on this issue is shifting in some very interesting ways.

I asked myself when I decided to write the book, why write on such an unpleasant subject? Ultimately, I think it’s because we can’t really save the country without addressing this. It’s certainly not a sufficient condition, but it is, I argue, a necessary condition. What I found encouraging was talking to just about everyone on the genuine Right, and not just people who were kind enough to endorse the book like Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Victor Davis Hanson, or Peter Kirsanow, who’s about to become the longest serving member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But regular conservatives want to have this conversation. I think the Left is not ready to have this conversation, but if we’re only going to have the conversations the Left decides we’re going to have, we might as well just pack up and go home.

One question I get a lot from skeptics is, “What evidence do you have that white people are being treated badly by our current system? White people seem to be doing pretty well.” Well, first of all, that’s just wrong empirically. For those of you familiar with the work of Angus Deaton, the Nobel-prize winning economist at Princeton, and his wife Anne Case, also a distinguished economist, we find that white people in record numbers, particularly the white middle and working classes, are dying deaths of despair from alcohol, drug overdoses, and suicide.

Secondly, it depends on what you’re using as a comparison. Whites are obviously doing better in certain areas than some other groups. But if you compare whites to Asian Americans, a group the Left loves to erase in these comparisons, we’re worse off in every single category, whether it be health, wealth, or education. One of the things I talk about in my book is the average white incomes and social outcomes as compared to immigrants from Africa, South America, and Asia. Whites actually trail these immigrants pretty significantly. That’s one indication that whites are not doing well. Whites in Silicon Valley are doing well. But there’s almost nobody in America doing worse than Appalachian whites, the people who are the single most likely group to check off “American” on their census form.

Other evidence you can look at is what Steve Sailer has called “a flight from white,” or the explosion of non-white identification. We see this in a variety of different spheres. I’ll just give you one example: in 1960, there were about 550,000 self-identified Native Americans in the census. That was 0.3 percent of the population at the time. Now in 2020 we have 9.6 million, which is over 3 percent. This is not due to a Native American fertility explosion. It’s a bunch of white people with at least some traceable Native American ancestry who’ve decided that’s a much better horse to ride in 2024—and by the way, they’re not wrong to think that.

Ask any job applicant or college applicant, “Do you check the white box?” Not if you can avoid it. This is often called diversity, but as I show in my book, diverse is almost inevitably a synonym for less white. In fact, I point out a number of places where adding whites to a particular system would actually improve diversity, but nobody’s interested in doing that, because all they’re interested in is having less white people.

The Great…

The original title of my book was somewhat impish. It was going to be called It’s Okay to Be White, and I actually got that by my editors to my slight surprise. But a couple of months later, they came back to me and said, “Sorry the sales staff says that we’re not going to be able to sell that at Costco and Barnes & Noble with that title.” The trivial thing is that if I had a book that was titled It’s Okay to Be Hispanic or It’s Okay to Be Black or It’s Okay to Be Asian American, nobody would think twice. But if I say It’s Okay to Be White, I might as well just put on my KKK hood right now. I think that’s indicative of how whiteness is viewed by society.

There are some more serious questions that I think are raised by this trajectory. What happens when an ethnic community that is largely and historically responsible, just as a matter of pure numbers if nothing else, for building American society and its institutions goes from a dominant position to being one group among many—and a legally and culturally disfavored group at that? What does a post-white America look like, especially when a post-white America actively denigrates much of the cultural, political, and social legacy that built the country? Can America and its institutions survive that kind of transformation? How do we avoid the sort of civil strife and ethnic violence that has characterized a huge percentage of multiethnic societies in the past?

We’re in the midst of a vast demographic transformation, an uncontrolled social experiment. If you looked at the 1960 census, which was right before the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 that radically transformed America’s demographics, we were about 86 or 87 percent white non-Hispanic, 10 or 11 percent African American, and 3 percent everything else, which mostly was Hispanic. Eighty percent of the latter group were native born Americans at that point as opposed to about 60 percent now, and some of whom, the Californians and the Tejanos, actually had roots in what had been U.S. territories going back hundreds of years. Compare that to where we are today, 60 years after Hart-Celler: we are now a 57 percent white non-Hispanic country. For those 18 and under, we are now a white non-Hispanic minority. This has just been a huge demographic transformation—and dare I even say it, a great replacement of whites.

Speaking of the great replacement, what we saw—because this is not just a U.S. phenomenon—in France with the recent election of National Rally is the same sort of phenomenon just on a different substrate. It is fascinating to me intellectually, because other parties in France claim to be about a lot of other things. Whether they’re literal Communists or alleged free marketers, ultimately, when the chips were down, when a gun was put to their head and they had to make a choice, their choice was to be the party of replacement—to be the party that was going to replace the French people with foreigners was the underlying principle that they would not compromise on. The Communists were willing to get in bed with the capitalists. At the end of the day, their belief in globalism, their belief in being ruled by Brussels, and their belief in replacing the French population animates those parties. Every single French party besides National Rally revealed itself to be the party of the great replacement.

Michel Houellebecq, the famous French author, comments that the Left always screams when you say great replacement, which is why I was shocked when they called it a theory; it’s not a theory—it’s a fact. I thought Vivek Ramaswamy put it well in the U.S. presidential debates. He said this isn’t some grand right-wing conspiracy theory—it’s a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.

I’ve spent several years of my life living and traveling in the developing world. I was talking to an Indian gentleman here a little bit earlier in the conference, and he was telling me about what he was doing in Indian politics, and I sort of cut him short. I said, “Actually, I used to live in India, so I’m pretty familiar with the Indian political context.” I wrote for the Indian Express. (I think it’s sort of indicative that a lot of the so-called far-right people I know are actually some of the best-traveled and culturally knowledgeable people I know, and it’s because we understand and respect other cultures, which is why we want to guard the integrity of our own.) I can understand why Modi wants India to be a Hindu nation, because I want America to be a Christian nation, defined not in total but in part by its European historic identity.

I don’t think it’s possible to talk about any of this without talking about civil rights, and there are some questions on our side of the aisle as to whether we should use civil rights law or fundamentally reform it. I think the answer is both. We need to use it right now for aggressive lawfare—but we also need to fundamentally transform a set of laws that were designed for a world that no longer exists. We have a very different set of problems today, and I think that’s obviously going to be a big political lift, but I think it’s a necessary political lift.

Persecution Complex?

Finally, I want to conclude by talking about persecution. In fact, I realized that in my book I actually talk about something even perhaps more extreme. American whites are victims of a cultural genocide, and I’m suggesting this partially again to troll any leftist media who might be in the room and furiously scribbling my unforgivable hate speech in their notebooks. But I’m not saying it entirely for that purpose.

What’s the historical justification for saying such an outrageous thing? Raphael Lemkin, who’s the Polish Jewish lawyer who invented the term genocide in 1948, was working with the United Nations and formulated the Genocide Convention. He had a broader definition of genocide than what ultimately was agreed to, but his definition of cultural genocide has subsequently been picked up by a number of leftist scholars. For Lemkin, a cultural genocide consisted of the mass distribution of intoxicants, the re-education of children, forced relocation, and the destruction of important cultural symbols. I discuss in my book how each of these things could accurately describe what’s going on with whites in America right now….

Why is this all going on? It doesn’t just spring fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s head—that’s just not how social phenomena work. I think that, ultimately, this is a justification for resource distribution. The late sociologist C. Wright Mills talked a lot about the concept of a legitimating ideology. In 2024, you don’t just go up to a group and say, “Hey, I’m taking your stuff.” What you do is say, “White supremacy, white privilege, white fragility, and by the way, you’re so awful. That’s why I’m getting your stuff.” Again, I spell this out in quite some detail. In my book, affirmative action, racially punitive taxation, reparations, the Land Back movement—all sorts of re-education can be understood as ultimately being viewed through that lens.

We do have anti-white persecution in America. Of course, I’m not suggesting that somehow every white American’s life has become a dystopian hellscape out of 1984. Clearly, that’s not the case. However, one interesting first big media interview I did on the book was with Charlie Kirk. Charlie said, “Jeremy, whenever I talk to my older donors, they get a little freaked out about this. They’re like, ‘Can you say that? Is that allowed?’” Every time I go on a college campus, every white student comes up to me and says, “Thank you. This is the number one issue for me right now as a young white American.” So, I think there’s a generational divide that is happening now.

I gave an enthusiastic talk to the D.C. Young Republicans last night, and they all get it, but the good news is that we have tools to stop this persecution. We are thankfully not a 1 or 2 percent minority in this country. We’re still the majority. We still have huge numbers of Americans of every ethnic background who are interested in America’s founding ideals, principles, and the idea of equal justice under the law. I have number of folks who endorsed my book who are very obviously and visibly not white, so I think that we have potential allies in the country in the room.

We just need to be brave enough and have enough integrity to take our own side in this fight.