Jeremy Carl appeared on the YouTube show of Christian nationalist Joel Webbon in order to promote his new book, The Unprotected Class. While discussing how to use right-wing “strategic radicals” to their advantage, Carl said that letting far-right “crazies” back on X (formerly Twitter) could make his views appear “mainstream.”

Carl, a senior fellow at the hard-right Claremont Institute and former Trump administration official, has been making appearances on right-wing shows to promote the claim that there is systemic racism against white people in America. He has espoused other white nationalist beliefs as well, including the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

Joel Webbon remarked that he can say things today that he would not have been able to get away with saying in 2017, and that even Carl’s book received a better reception than Carl had anticipated. Webbon credited this shift in thinking to people he dubbed “strategic radicals.”

“The Left has them. The Right has them,” Webbon said. “You don’t have to agree with ’em. So I’m not saying [if] somebody says something and you have to retweet them, and say ‘Yeah!’ You know, somebody says ‘Adolf Hitler was the last Christian prince.’ ‘Yeah, I agree!’ You don’t have to do that.”

But he claimed that the Right “shoot[s] our own” radicals “far more than the Left.” Carl said Webbon’s point about “radicals” was “well taken,” and praised Elon Musk for letting far-right figures back on X because doing so may help make his own beliefs appear more moderate.

“Because what it allowed to do is [sic] a lot of these voices that are well to my right — I’m like, you know, actually, like, what I’m asking for is very mainstream here, you know?” he said. “Like I’m not asking for [a] thousand-year American Reich or something really weird, right? I’m just saying ‘Hey, we should all be treated equally.'”

“But what it actually shows, when you have those voices back in the debate as opposed to being taken off the playing field as all the other social media sites had done, and Twitter had done before Elon [Musk] bought it, is I can say ‘Hey, there are these crazies to the right of me.’ And I’m not kidding,” he continued.

Some of the “crazies” whose accounts were restored by Elon Musk include Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Nazi-sympathizing rapper Kanye West, QAnon conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin, Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones, Islamophobic extremists Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson, and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate.

Carl added that this would hopefully lead left-wingers to conclude that he “isn’t so crazy after all,” and that they “could do business with him because it’s a lot more preferable to compromise with somebody who’s saying what he is” than with “the totally crazy nutcase over there on the far-right.”

Although, as he admitted, there are “not that many to the right” of him because he’s “pretty conservative.”

Joel Webbon: And I think of, you know, the things that I can say today, if I had said these things in 2017 I, like, it’s over.

Jeremy Carl: Yeah.

Joel Webbon: I would’ve been, you know… And the point that you made. Like, when you started the book two years ago, you were pretty nervous. When it came closer to publication, you were like, “Hey, this might land okay.” And then it landed better than okay it sounds like.

Jeremy Carl: Yeah.

Joel Webbon: I mean, sure, you’ll get pushback but —

Jeremy Carl: Yeah.

Joel Webbon: — there’s been a large, positive reception. And so things have been mov[ing] — but part of the reason they’ve been moving is because of your strategic radicals.

Jeremy Carl: Yeah.

Joel Webbon: The Left has them. The Right has them. You don’t have to agree with ’em. So I’m not saying [if] somebody says something and you have —

Jeremy Carl: [Inaudible]

Joel Webbon: — to retweet them, and say “Yeah!” You know, somebody says “Adolf Hitler was the last Christian prince.” “Yeah, I agree!” You don’t have to do that.

Jeremy Carl: Right.

Joel Webbon: But the Right, we — man, I just, I feel like we shoot our own —

Jeremy Carl: Yeah.

Joel Webbon: — far more than the Left. Any thoughts on that? The no enemies on the right kind of political strategy and idea?

Jeremy Carl: No, I absolutely agree. And you cited the phrase “beautiful losers” a couple times, and perhaps not coincidentally it’s a title of a book of essays by Sam Francis who was a really powerful conservative political theorist who had a lot of stuff that was outside the Overton Window, and not even all of which I agreed with, but, you know, a person who 30 years ago in that book really kind of diagnosed a lot of the problems that conservatives had: Their lack of fighting spirit, their kind of fixation on essentially being beautiful losers. A subtitle of that was “Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism.” So to write that book in 1992, and unbelievably published by a mainstream university press at the time that he wrote it, was indicative that the Right has had this problem for quite a while.

And I think absolutely your point is well taken on radicals. And it’s one of the reasons why it was so important, and I said so at the time — I was even quoted in major news outlets — the importance of Elon [Musk] taking over Twitter. Because what it allowed to do is a lot of these voices that are well to my right — I’m like, you know, actually, like, what I’m asking for is very mainstream here, you know? Like I’m not asking for [a] thousand-year American Reich or something really weird, right? I’m just saying “Hey, we should all be treated equally.”

But what it actually shows, when you have those voices back in the debate as opposed to being taken off the playing field as all the other social media sites had done, and Twitter had done before Elon [Musk] bought it, is I can say “Hey, there are these crazies to the right of me.” And I’m not kidding. I mean of course a lot of them really are kind of crazy. But the Left can see “Well actually those people actually have a lot of following. Maybe this Jeremy guy, he actually isn’t so crazy after all. Maybe we could do business with him because it’s a lot more preferable to compromise with somebody who’s saying what he is than trying to, you know, compromise with the totally crazy nutcase over there on the far-right.”

I’m not of course saying everybody to the right of me falls into that description. There’s a lot of good friends of mine who are probably to — maybe not that many to the right of me, I’m pretty conservative. But there’s certainly a lot of people out there who certainly have much more radical political prescriptions than I have. And just even making them visible on a — on X/Twitter —

Joel Webbon: Right.

Jeremy Carl: — has been enormously helpful. And, again, we just need to get much smarter. We need to get much tougher. I kind of echo all your comments about Trump. And again it’s sort of, like, Trump loves winning. And he hates losing. And for whatever his moral shortcomings that matters a lot because the Right needs a lot more of that mentality rather than the beautiful loser mentality.