In February, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy asked Jeremy Carl, Trump's nominee for a top State Department job, a question so soft it should have bounced right off his forehead: define white identity. Carl, who has built a career insisting white Americans are an endangered species, couldn't do it. Not even close.

Carl, a 53-year-old Claremont Institute senior fellow and author of *The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart*, warned that "white Americans increasingly are second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded." During his confirmation hearing, Murphy pressed him for specifics. Carl eventually offered "Scotch-Irish military culture" as an example, then added that "the white church is very different than the Black church" and that "foodways could often be different." Murphy, laughing, asked if access to white churches, white food, or white music was being erased. Carl's nomination failed, but his movement is thriving.

For a growing cadre of right-wing figures, white people are now the aggrieved party. With DEI in retreat, they're pushing a more ambitious goal: organizing whites as a racial group to demand protection and restitution. Carl told me directly, "Whites need to be able to organize to assert their rights not to be discriminated against as a racial group." Never mind that he couldn't define the group he's organizing. When I asked him who counts as white, he offered a tautology: "people who would legally check that box." Asked to define white identity again, he admitted, "It gets very tangled very quickly," and punted to professor Eric Kaufmann, who listed rodeo, heavy metal, NASCAR, and hiking as "predominantly but not exclusively enjoyed by whites."

The white-persecution complex has gone mainstream since the 2017 Charlottesville march, where far-right activists chanted "You will not replace us." The second Trump administration has embraced the Great Replacement theory's central premise, retooling the refugee program to prioritize white South Africans and scolding European allies for isolating hard-right parties. Carl, who disavows white nationalists but shares their skepticism of diversity, supports mass deportation and severe immigration restrictions, arguing that diversity is "farcical" and that immigrants have "declared war on America's historically European-centered identity."

Carl has identified a real issue: elite institutions do sometimes discriminate against white people, as alleged in a recent EEOC lawsuit against *The New York Times* over a deputy real-estate editor hiring. But his claim that white Americans suffer more discrimination than any other group is hyperbolic, and his solution - organizing whites via zero-sum race-consciousness, akin to Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement - is dangerously counterproductive. King was responding to an era when basic civil rights were conditioned on race. The situation of white Americans today is, shall we say, incomparable.