The Trump administration is apparently trying to place yet another raging bigot — this time, one who’s called for the execution of a political opponent — into the upper echelon of the State Department.
A report last week from CNN on Jeremy Carl, President Donald Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary of state for international organizations, highlights the Republican hypocrisy over their recent attempts to portray liberals as the primary drivers of political violence and division. CNN used the Wayback Machine, part of the Internet Archive, to resurface some of Carl’s old tweets and matched a unique ID number associated with one username to a previous username associated with Carl’s account. Posts under the earlier username were still accessible.
CNN notes that the effort to delete Carl’s online history of extremist and bigoted comments missed more than a few spots. Here’s a taste of the extreme rhetoric CNN unearthed:
Sometime before his nomination, Carl deleted at least 5,000 tweets from his account on X, formerly known as Twitter, including posts expressing sympathy for rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — whom he repeatedly described as ‘political prisoners.’ In a post from May 2023, Carl claimed the Capitol riot defendants had it worse than Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. A week later, Carl further escalated his rhetoric, writing that ‘if the U.S. were a serious nation,’ American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten would be ‘tried for crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.’
Along with tweets promoting the racist “great replacement theory," which alleges that undocumented immigrants are part of a nefarious Jewish-led plot to change America’s demographic makeup, the report cites tweets from Carl claiming white people who celebrate Juneteenth have “surrendered” and repeatedly downplaying instances of police violence against Black people.
Despite being quoted calling for (among other things) Weingarten’s execution, the State Department dismissed the report in a quote to CNN:
CNN reached out to Carl directly for comment and received a statement from State Department deputy spokesman Tommy Pigott defending Carl. ‘He’s never called for political violence. We look forward to Jeremy Carl’s contributions in support of the America First foreign policy agenda where he will ensure we are bringing international organizations back to their core mandates,’ Pigott said.
Trump and his associates are elevating extremists and racists throughout the upper levels of American government. If Carl is confirmed, he would join the likes of far-right activist and senior Department of Homeland Security official Paul Ingrassia, an avid defender of white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Jan. 6 insurrectionists who has gone on the record with his belief that “exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage — and are conversely hurt the most, at a spiritual level, by its destruction.” Carl would work in the same agency as Darren Beattie, the Trump-appointed head of the U.S. Institute for Peace who’s previously appeared at a white nationalist conference, promoted works of racist pseudoscience, and declared that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work” in the United States.
Noticing a trend?
The president of the United States is quite literally stocking the federal government with racist extremists. Jeremy Carl is merely the latest example of this troubling trend. The president routinely claims that liberals are the real extremists, but his own staff reads like a list of the most radicalized, racist white men in America.