00:00:00.000A great conversation with the terrific Jason Riley.
00:00:02.000If every young person in the country knew about Thomas Sowell, the world would be a better place.
00:00:07.000If you are a parent, tell your kids about Thomas Sowell.
00:00:09.000If you're a student, learn about Thomas Soule.
00:00:11.000In fact, I am so inspired by this conversation.
00:00:13.000I had an idea that Turning Point USA should start the Thomas Soule Project.
00:00:18.000Just running advertisements and awareness of Thomas Soule's stuff to give people the knowledge that they need around Thomas Soule, a gift to our country.
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00:00:57.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:32.000I'm a big fan of his, and he has a new book coming out, which I think is going to be one of the most important books written of this year and quite honestly of the last decade because about someone that I just think is an American hero.
00:02:45.000First of all, Jason, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:50.000So your new book is called Maverick, and it's about someone who, quite honestly, got me to look at the world differently, and I would say correctly.
00:02:59.000And that is a book about Thomas Soule.
00:03:02.000Tell us about the book and why you decided to write it.
00:03:05.000Well, I share your praise of Seoul, obviously.
00:03:09.000That's the main reason I wrote the book.
00:03:15.000He's written a memoir and put out a book of correspondence that he had had with people going all the way back to the 1960s, where he talks a lot about his personal life, but he didn't have a biographer.
00:04:10.000And the person wrote down the name of a book on a sheet of paper.
00:04:14.000And I went to the school library that evening and checked it out and read it in one sitting and went back the next day and checked out my school's whole collection of Thomas Sowell works.
00:04:50.000And so I want to get into more about Thomas Sowell because one of the reasons I really was looking forward to this conversation, we have a lot of younger listeners and viewers, and they've never been exposed to Thomas Sowell.
00:05:01.000They hear it every so often on our program.
00:05:03.000I just did a whole segment on Thomas Sowell today, actually, kind of teasing our conversation around my favorite work of his, Discrimination and Disparities.
00:05:12.000I think it's especially today super applicable.
00:05:15.000But tell us about why Thomas Sowell matters.
00:05:35.000I think it's the way he's carried himself as a scholar and as an intellectual.
00:05:40.000And the way he's distinguished himself, Charlie, it's really unfortunate that this is how he's done it.
00:05:48.000But it's basically by being an honest intellectual, a straight shooter.
00:05:53.000And that is so rare today among our intellectuals and among our scholars that that alone makes Soul stand out.
00:06:01.000He's someone who follows the facts where they lead.
00:06:04.000He is not concerned with whether they lead to inconvenient conclusions, unpopular conclusions, politically incorrect conclusions.
00:06:12.000He thinks his role as a scholar is simply to tell the truth.
00:06:16.000And simply telling the truth these days and being more worried about truth than popularity makes you a standout among our intellectual elites today.
00:06:26.000And that is really how Seoul has distinguished himself.
00:06:30.000And of course, where he's gotten into trouble, and you mentioned discrimination and disparities, one of his books, is when he's talked about racial controversies.
00:06:41.000And he's brought the same empirical thinking to those issues that he's brought to writing about economic history and some of the other topics that he's tackled over the years.
00:06:50.000And again, it's about following the facts.
00:06:52.000And so when it comes to writing about discrimination, writing about racial preferences, writing about the priorities of the civil rights movement, he said some very politically incorrect things over the years, and they've got him in trouble.
00:07:04.000And that's frankly one of the reasons why so many young people haven't heard about Thomas Sowell.
00:07:10.000Yet they do know who Ibram Kendi is or who Nicole Hanna-Jones is or who Tanahese Coates is or Cornell West and so forth, but they don't know Thomas Sowell.
00:07:20.000Thomas Soule was sort of canceled before it was cool.
00:07:23.000He was someone that the left went after a very long time ago for saying politically incorrect things.
00:07:28.000And it's one reason he's not as well known as he should be.
00:07:32.000But I will say that that seems to be starting to change.
00:08:45.000So, I found Milton Friedman on YouTube, and this was in the wild west of YouTube before all their censorship and all of that.
00:08:51.000And then the next video recommendation was Thomas Soule.
00:08:55.000And I assumed, and I was young, that Thomas Sowell was going to be a liberal because I had never heard of a black intellectual that was a conservative.
00:11:07.000And Seoul's most popular book, his best-selling book, is just called Basic Economics.
00:11:12.000And all it is, is an economics textbook with no graphs and charts and jargon.
00:11:17.000And he's very proud of that book because, like Friedman, he believed that the role of a scholar was not just to sit around and talk to other scholars, but to explain your discipline to people who have no background in it.
00:11:29.000And so Seoul has gone to great lengths to write book after book after book in plain English for general interest readers.
00:11:37.000And that's another one of his legacies and the way, one of the ways he has distinguished himself.
00:11:48.000And he and he and I think Milton Freeman was the trailblazer here, but I think Thomas Sowell perfected it, had a very matter-of-fact way of speaking.
00:11:55.000He didn't, he was almost a little bit of a critic of Buckleyism, who just used long words for the sake of using them, right?
00:12:03.000And you're kind of like, I can't listen to Buckley without a dictionary.
00:12:10.000Soule is his scholarship is widespread, but also very rigorous in its depth.
00:12:19.000And yet he can write in a way that is extremely, extremely accessible, but nevertheless shows that he has full command of his subject in all cases.
00:12:30.000It's a skill that I wish more economists in particular had because I think economics is such an important subject that more people should understand.
00:12:38.000But few economists can write like Thomas Sowell.
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00:13:27.000So Thomas Sowell has a unique biography.
00:13:29.000I'd like to get into this, and I don't know it very well, but born in 1930, if I'm not mistaken, he came of age in a time where World War II was raging, obviously, and then went down when he was 12, 14, 15 years old.
00:13:45.000But he was educated during a time where schools were largely segregated and that he kind of saw the Civil Rights Act come up.
00:13:55.000So can you talk a little about his biography?
00:13:57.000He grew up in poverty, obviously a very smart man, but he would talk a lot about the schools he went to.
00:14:18.000And his mother died giving birth to a younger sibling.
00:14:22.000So Seoul was taken in by a great aunt and raised by her and her two adult daughters, one of whom was married.
00:14:32.000And the four of them moved to Harlem when Seoul was around eight or nine years old, part of that big black migration from rural areas to urban areas and from the south to the north that took place in the 1930s and 40s.
00:15:13.000As you mentioned, he was accepted to Stuyvesant University, which your viewers should know and your listeners should know is one of the most selective schools in New York City and was even back then.
00:15:23.000You had to take a test to get in and so forth.
00:15:25.000One of the ironies of Stuyvesant is we have these debates in New York City every year because you still have to take a test to get into the school.
00:15:33.000And these days, the black percentage of people accepted is quite small.
00:15:38.000I mean, you know, three, four, five, six percent is very, very low.
00:15:46.000And then the group that has the most representation are Asians.
00:15:50.000When Seoul was attending Stuyvesant, there were a higher percentage of blacks attending Stuyvesant than today, which is quite remarkable, given that the Black population of New York was smaller back then relative to the white population.
00:16:05.000And of course, there was much more discrimination.
00:16:08.000And all the things that are cited today as the reason for the racial disparity existed much more extensively back then.
00:16:16.000Yet it was a smaller racial disparity.
00:16:19.000It just, it's one of these examples, and Seoul is an expert at pointing this out, how people who cite racism and discrimination as an all-purpose explanation for disparate outcomes don't know their history, frankly.
00:16:32.000So in any case, Seoul attends Stuyvesant, but he has a very tumultuous home life and ends up dropping out before graduating.
00:16:43.000He moved out of the house when he was 17 years old, lived in a homeless shelter for a period of time.
00:16:49.000Eventually, he was drafted into the Marines during the Korean War and got some discipline there, obviously, spent a couple of years in the Marines.
00:16:58.000And then he gets the, comes out of the Marines after two years and enrolls at Howard University, the historically black college in DC, where he takes night courses.
00:17:09.000He has the GI bill money, so this is enabling him to go to college.
00:17:12.000And then he transfers from there to Harvard, where he finally gets his undergraduate degree at the age of 28 years old.
00:17:20.000And then, you know, when you think about how many books he's written and all the rest, it's amazing what a late start he got at doing this.
00:17:28.000You know, he didn't write his first book till he was 40.
00:17:33.000So, you know, think of what might have been if he'd had the traditional trajectory of a college student and a scholar.
00:17:44.000He then goes from Harvard to Columbia to get a master's in economics, and then he goes on to the University of Chicago, where he studies under Mon Friedman to get his PhD.
00:17:53.000And then he spends the 1960s teaching.
00:17:58.000He taught at Howard University, where he had attended.
00:18:05.000In the 70s, he teaches at Amherst, at Brandeis, and then finally winds up at UCLA, where he gets tenure and teaches there through the end of the 1970s.
00:18:18.000And then he joins the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1980 as a senior fellow.
00:18:24.000So those days of teaching were over then.
00:18:26.000And that's where he's been ever since.
00:18:27.000Since 1980, he's been at Hoover at Stanford University.
00:18:52.000Or what would he point to as the prerequisites that caused that disparate outcome?
00:18:57.000Well, I think Tom would point to a number of factors, but they would be mainly cultural factors.
00:19:03.000And this is one of the things he's written about, that even if you're a group in society that a minority ethnic group or minority racial group that is discriminated against by the larger society, if you have the human capital, and by that he means the right cultural habits and behaviors and attitudes and skills, you can overcome that discrimination.
00:19:27.000And so you have example after example of groups the world over that have done this, from the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia to Jews in Eastern Europe, any number of examples he could cite of hated groups that nevertheless rose economically in these societies that they were hated.
00:19:46.000And not only rose, but what rose to exceed the very groups that had oppressed them, you know, the out-earned them, outperformed them academically, and so forth.
00:19:58.000And so I think what Seoul would say is that back in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, when he was growing up, Blacks had very different attitudes towards things like education, the rule of law, policing, and so forth.
00:20:22.000And their focus was on the development of that human capital.
00:20:31.000There was obviously a lot of discrimination, a lot of racism, but the focus of the civil rights movement was also on developing Blacks culturally to be able to take advantage of the opportunities in society once equality under the law had been reached.
00:20:50.000And that was the focus of the civil rights movement starting in the 1950s.
00:20:54.000That's what Martin Luther King was talking about as well.
00:21:01.000The focus became less on equal opportunity and more on equal outcomes.
00:21:07.000The focus also became on getting political clout, electing more black officials.
00:21:13.000The thinking being if we just get more of our own in office, the rest will take care of itself.
00:21:18.000And so there was a shift away from an emphasis on that development of human capital and more of an emphasis on electing black officials and so forth, particularly after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed.
00:21:32.000And I think Seoul would say that, along with the great society welfare expansions of the 1960s, were quite hard on the Black family, the Black nuclear family in particular.
00:21:46.000And so what you see today is not so much a legacy of slavery and a legacy of Jim Crow when you're looking at economic disparities and so forth, so much as a legacy of the Great Society programs of the 1960s and what they did and the damage that they did in terms of,
00:22:04.000you know, if you look at marriage rates among blacks or single parenting, violent crime rates and so forth, you look at what was happening in the black community in the first half of the 20th century, everything is moving in the right direction.
00:22:17.000Post-60s, things either stall or begin to reverse course actually.
00:22:23.000And then that's what you're seeing the legacy of today.
00:22:27.000And Thomas Seoul, he was so, he was unapologetic at taking this position in the way he wrote.
00:22:37.000He predicted that this would be the outcome.
00:22:42.000He saw this shift in emphasis in the civil rights leadership from equal opportunity to equal outcomes and focusing almost exclusively on the shortcomings of white society, which of course is what groups like Black Lives Matter do today.
00:22:57.000They're operating on the assumption that all black problems are caused by whites and can be solved by whites getting their own act together.
00:23:08.000And Seoul was saying way back in the 1960s, the problems of black people today run far deeper than what whites are doing to them.
00:23:50.000Nor are there white supremacist groups riding around Chicago shooting up black neighborhoods.
00:23:56.000So Seoul said, you know, and even if you go back to people like Martin Luther King, who saw this too, he said, yes, there are problems in the white world, but there are problems in the black world too.
00:24:07.000And we need to get our own act together.
00:24:09.000We can't keep on blaming things on white society.
00:24:12.000And yet, you know, that is what prevails today when it comes to the focus of the civil rights leadership.
00:24:20.000But Seoul saw this going sideways, 40, 50 years ago.
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00:26:00.000So there is a deliberate campaign, and you mentioned this earlier, to not just cancel Thomas Sowell, but people like Thomas Sowell.
00:26:19.000It's people like Frederick Douglass and Clarence Thomas.
00:26:22.000And I would put Thomas Sowell in the category of those people as the impact that they made on the American story and how important their contributions are to our nation.
00:26:34.000Part of your project is to try to have more people aware of Thomas Soule and kind of his writings and most importantly, his beliefs.
00:26:42.000That's probably what you had to use to win him over.
00:26:45.000Said, listen, you know, enough about you.
00:27:03.000He's been right for a very, very long time.
00:27:06.000And one of the interesting things I came across when I was researching the book are a number of interviews he did with people who would start by saying, Tom, how does it feel to be sort of so out of step with other Blacks?
00:27:24.000And Tom would always correct the premise of the question.
00:27:26.000He'd say, you don't mean I'm out of step with other Blacks.
00:27:30.000You mean I'm out of step with other Black elites.
00:27:33.000And he would say, black elites are no more representative of Black people than white elites are of white people.
00:27:42.000And that's what we have going on today in the so-called cancel culture.
00:27:46.000You know, I talked about the emphasis on policing.
00:27:50.000You know, this idea that Black people want to defund the police or that Black people have a problem with voter ID or that Black people think that there should be racial preferences in college admissions.
00:28:08.000Those are not the views of Black people.
00:28:13.000And the media too often does not make a distinction.
00:28:17.000And so what these Black elites have been able to do over the decades is to convince the media at large and much of the public that people who don't think like them, black people who don't think like these black elites aren't really black and aren't really representative of black people.
00:28:34.000And of course, that's exactly backwards.
00:28:36.000They are the ones who are out of step with most black people and their views are out of step with most blacks, as the polling shows on things like policing and voter ID and affirmative action and so forth.
00:28:49.000So Soul has had to make this point over and over again over the decades and it still needs to be made today.
00:28:55.000Yeah, and the more people that are exposed to Thomas Sowell's idea, you know, ideas I find even conservatives at times, and I send them some Thomas Sowell clips or a Thomas Sowell book.
00:29:05.000They said, I can't believe how incredible his ability to articulate what's happening and how human nature operates and the different inputs.
00:29:16.000It's just like it opens people's eyes in such a powerful way.
00:29:20.000And so in a couple minutes we have remaining, talk more about the book.
00:29:27.000And other things we didn't touch on that you hope to accomplish in your book and the broader impact you're looking to make.
00:29:33.000Well, I also want to think that Soule deserves appreciation for or more recognition for his writings that have nothing to do with race and culture and ethnicity.
00:29:46.000He was a first tier and is a first tier social theorist.
00:30:04.000And these two, I think, have sort of been forgotten because of the way that Black elites have succeeded in sort of not giving him the recognition that he deserves.
00:30:19.000So I get into a lot of Seoul's scholarship on non-racial issues as well, some of which he's most proud of.
00:30:26.000I mean, Seoul would have had a distinguished career even if he had never written a single word about affirmative action.
00:30:33.000It's something he only started to do reluctantly, mostly in the 1970s.
00:30:38.000And he said it was because he saw things going in the wrong direction, particularly with what the civil rights leadership was focused on.
00:30:45.000And he knew that a lot of people would be reluctant to speak up truthfully about what was going on.
00:31:41.000And like if you're trying to run a successful endeavor or a business, meetings are the worst thing you could possibly have.
00:31:46.000And it was just kind of like a, it was kind of a tangent of kind of a little of a window into his, the way that he viewed the world, like just couldn't stand bureaucracy and the changing of ideas about action just for the purpose of having it.
00:32:00.000That one always just kind of sticks out to me.
00:32:02.000And then another thing, if you want to see Thomas Soule at his best and around legends, and this didn't get, this doesn't have as many views on YouTube.
00:32:11.000It was a debate of the New York public sector teacher unions against Bill Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Soule in front of a big auditorium.
00:32:20.000And it's three on three, and they just wipe the floor with him.
00:32:23.000He just talks about education, not about race.
00:32:29.000And one of the things, Charlie, that really drives me up a wall is that Soule is not mentioned when people talk about these great black intellectuals that we have.
00:32:40.000The idea that a Cornell West or Henry Lewis Gates or Nicole Hannah-Jones or Ibram Kendi or Tanahese Coates, Tom's scholarship is not only more far-ranging, far more far-ranging than their scholarship, the rigor and depth of his scholarship is incomparable to what they've done.
00:33:05.000I mean, and the idea that they are better known and better respected than Seoul is another reason I wanted to write the book and introduce him to more people.
00:33:57.000If every American under the age of 18 got properly exposed to Thomas Soule like they did Iber Max Kendi, that charlatan, America's problems would be largely fixed almost that easily.
00:34:08.000That's how big of a deal his scholarship is.