With a history of bigotry and racism, Trump nominee Jeremy Carl gets a Senate hearing

A nominee selected by President Donald Trump will get a Senate hearing on Thursday for a top State Department position, in spite of a long, documented history of “violent” and “racist comments.” 

Jeremy Carl, the president’s pick for assistant secretary of state for international organizations, is set to appear Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He previously served in Trump’s first administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior. If confirmed, Carl will oversee more than 100 diplomats worldwide and work closely with the United Nations agencies on human rights, immigration, refugees, and global development, including UNICEF and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. 

“It’s quite a powerful position,” Desirée Cormier Smith, former U.S. Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice at the State Department, told Salon. “He would be in charge of determining how the U.S. works with those bodies.”

However, a long trail of inflammatory and divisive comments is following Carl to his hearing.

In September, a CNN KFile investigation found that he attempted to delete thousands of social media posts before his June nomination. Among his comments were calls for the execution of the head of the American Federation of Teachers, a refusal for “peaceful coexistence” with the “evil” Democratic Party, and claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were treated worse than Black people during the Jim Crow era.

Carl also referred to Juneteenth as a “race hustling and white-shaming” holiday. “If you’re a white person celebrating Juneteenth, you’ve already surrendered,” Carl wrote in 2021.

The Trump administration defended Carl in the wake of the investigation, vowing to stand by Trump’s pick. “Jeremy Carl did great work during President Trump’s first administration, and he is highly qualified to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told CNN in October. “The administration stands by our nominees.”

If Carl’s many comments were limited to political violence and a misunderstanding of racial history in the U.S., then he may find himself in the same highly scrutinized boat as other Trump nominees. Yet Carl has continued to make inflammatory statements on social media since the CNN investigation and has a long history of bigotry besides, detailed in articles, speeches and podcasts.

In December, Carl claimed on X that Supreme Court Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson was an “unqualified nominee,” picked by former President Joe Biden “solely because of her race and gender.” He also criticized the idea of “believing” in birthright citizenship in response to a Wall Street Journal report of Chinese billionaires building “mega families” in the U.S.

In the same month, he espoused his long-held belief in anti-white racism, targeting “horrible people” whom he alleged championed it at “elite institutions.”

“They, and the corrupt institutions that they have run for decades, must be either reformed completely with their incumbent leadership ousted—or else destroyed,” Carl wrote in an article on his Substack in December.

Carl is a vocal proponent of the Great Replacement theory, which posits that white people in the U.S. are being “replaced” by non-whites, largely Asian and Black people, and that the “replacement” is being overseen by Jews and some Western elites.

“We must utterly defeat the Great Replacement as a political strategy, and permanently remove from power all who advance it,” Carl said in a post from 2022. Carl said that white Americans are “victims of a cultural genocide” in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2024, calling the rising population of immigrants “an uncontrolled social experiment.”

“Dare I even say it, a great replacement of whites,” Carl said.

Carl has also faced intense ire for instances of open antisemitism, appearing to justify historical Jewish persecution by claiming they did “many things that Christians didn’t like.”

“Throughout history, Jews chose some professions that made them more oppressive, and they can’t be surprised that the average descendants of Cossack peasants would be resentful towards them,” Carl said in October 2024 on The Christian Ghetto podcast. Carl also claimed that Jews “loved to play the victim,” and downplayed the Holocaust as “a trauma in their past,” referring to communal remembrance of the genocide as “a little distasteful.”

Smith says these statements alone “automatically disqualify” Carl from consideration. “Someone with racist and anti-Semitic views cannot credibly promote global equality. Nor can he credibly engage with the rest of the world as equals,” she told Salon.

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Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Carl’s “antisemitic views plainly disqualifies” him from serving in a diplomatic role. “To call Jeremy Carl a radical and a bigot and unqualified is all far too kind,” Schumer said on Monday on the Senate floor.

“No person who thinks Jews should get over the Holocaust and spreads pernicious Jewish stereotypes can claim to have the character or judgment necessary to serve as a diplomat for this country,” Schumer said, demanding Carl “be forced to answer during testimony” for his prior statements.

Carl, himself from a secular Jewish family, converted to Christianity and has blamed other Jews for not converting. “I think this reflects very poorly on Jews,” he said on the podcast. “I guess you can explain it because the existing Jews that survived [the Holocaust] have a fair bit of stubbornness.”

As such, Carl is a vocal proponent of Christian nationalism. “I want America to be a Christian nation, defined not in total but in part by its European historic identity,” Carl wrote in an article entitled “Is It Okay To Be White?” for The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank where he is a senior fellow.

Appearing on The Will Spencer Podcast in 2024, Carl acknowledged that the country would never be “ethnically” or “racially uniform,” which he called “manageable.”

“That’s okay,” Carl said, hoping that the country would have “a majority tradition” and a “majority religious practice.”

Carl has also spoken out against transgender people, referring to “transgenderism” as “a fundamental spiritual violation,” railing against what he described as a “social contagion” for kids.

“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 grey area,” Carl said in 2022 on the High Noon podcast. “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have it. It just means that’s more tenuous … but I do think that we should say it’s wrong and that it’s damaging.”

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations called on committee chair Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, and Ranking Member Janeen Shaheen, D-N.H., to “reject Carl’s nomination.”

“Mr. Carl’s repeated inflammatory public statements about immigration, race, and non-white populations in the United States are alarming and suggest he will not be an effective advocate in this diplomatic position,” the organization said in a statement on February 6.

“This type of unhinged, inflammatory rhetoric should disqualify him from consideration for such an important diplomatic position.”

Smith says Carl’s appointment would have lasting consequences for the U.S. global image, further isolating a nation already retreating inward. “I think it would send a dangerous message to the rest of the world that this administration believes in the supremacy of white, Christian straight men and no one else.”

The post With a history of bigotry and racism, Trump nominee Jeremy Carl gets a Senate hearing appeared first on Salon.com.