Failed Trump candidate dismisses conspiracy theory that inspired mass shootings as a joke

One of President Donald Trump’s former appointees to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee spoke with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat on Thursday about the controversies that ultimately led to him withdrawing his nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs.

“I can show how totally disingenuous my critics have been,” former Trump appointee Jeremy Carl told Douthat when asked about his use of phrases like “cultural genocide.” “I mostly just kind of saying this, I literally say, to troll the libs.”

Adding that he was trying to take “some genuine ironic distance,” he added that “I don’t actually think that we are in a cultural genocide per se. I’m trying to kind of push people.” After Douthat pointed out that far right conspiracy theorists push the baseless theory that white people are being deliberately replaced by elites with non-whites, he said that he does not believe in a conspiracy but argues Democrats want to “hyperdiversify the country because they perceive — and we’ll see whether it actually works out for them; the Hispanic vote suggests that maybe it won’t.”

When Douthat pointed out that Carl’s response seemed to exist on a slippery slope toward the explicit far right conspiracy theories he ostensibly eschews, Carl replied that liberals found “a few things that they dug out in their intellectual proctological exam of everything I’ve ever tweeted or written or said on a podcast that I was really like, ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’”

He added, “I’m not going to defend everything I’ve said. I would also say that I have become more aware of — even though I consider tweets to be a lot less important than books and articles.” When Douthat said tweets are also important, Carl agreed.

When Carl was appointed by Trump, he faced intense controversy for comments about a supposed attack on “white culture,” beliefs described as “anti-Semitic” and the so-called “great replacement theory.” The last conviction has motivated a number of violent far right shootings and was described in 2022 by historian Kathleen Belew as integral to the white power movement.

“It’s not immediately obvious how the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, often framed as anti-immigrant doctrine meant to preserve predominantly white societies, is connected to the shooting of Black customers and employees at a grocery store in Buffalo last weekend,” Belew wrote, referring to a then-recent mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York that took 10 lives. “Those at the store, who lived over 100 miles away from the man accused in the killings, were simply going about their lives: picking up groceries, buying a birthday cake, taking their children for ice cream.”

She added, “But the explanation for both the choice of targets and the brutality of an attack that killed 10 people can be found in the history of the theory. In the American context, it has in its cross-hairs a host of future targets — among them, democracy itself.”