The Charlie Kirk Show - Timeless Wisdom from Thomas Sowell with Biographer Jason Riley

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 A great conversation with the terrific Jason Riley.

00:00:02.000 If every young person in the country knew about Thomas Sowell, the world would be a better place.

00:00:07.000 If you are a parent, tell your kids about Thomas Sowell.

00:00:09.000 If you're a student, learn about Thomas Soule.

00:00:11.000 In fact, I am so inspired by this conversation.

00:00:13.000 I had an idea that Turning Point USA should start the Thomas Soule Project.

00:00:18.000 Just 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.

00:00:29.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom, at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:35.000 Here we go.

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00:02:28.000 Hey, everybody.

00:02:28.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:30.000 With us today is Jason Riley.

00:02:32.000 I'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.

00:02:45.000 First of all, Jason, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:48.000 Thank you for having me.

00:02:50.000 So 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.

00:02:59.000 And that is a book about Thomas Soule.

00:03:02.000 Tell us about the book and why you decided to write it.

00:03:05.000 Well, I share your praise of Seoul, obviously.

00:03:09.000 That's the main reason I wrote the book.

00:03:13.000 It's the first biography of Seoul.

00:03:15.000 He'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.

00:03:29.000 And I thought that was incredible.

00:03:31.000 And I thought that he should have someone to chronicle his life.

00:03:35.000 And so started sort of getting on his case to let me write the book.

00:03:42.000 I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago, actually.

00:03:46.000 And he's going to be 91 years old this year.

00:03:48.000 So maybe I just wore him down.

00:03:50.000 And he finally, finally gave me the green light.

00:03:54.000 But Seoul is someone I discovered way back when I was in college in the early 1990s.

00:03:58.000 And I was working on the school paper and having a conversation with some of my colleagues about affirmative action.

00:04:05.000 And someone said, Jason, you sound like Tom Sowell.

00:04:08.000 And I said, who's that?

00:04:10.000 And the person wrote down the name of a book on a sheet of paper.

00:04:14.000 And 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.

00:04:23.000 And I've been hooked ever since.

00:04:25.000 He's someone who's had a huge influence on my own intellectual development, on my journalism, on my writing.

00:04:32.000 And so I've been a fan for a very, very long time.

00:04:36.000 Well, and you deserve great praise too.

00:04:38.000 I really enjoy your commentary.

00:04:40.000 It's always fair. 0.64

00:04:41.000 It's reasonable, especially in this moment of insanity we're living through right now, where everything's about racial identity politics.

00:04:48.000 You've been terrific.

00:04:49.000 Thank you.

00:04:50.000 And 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.

00:05:01.000 They hear it every so often on our program.

00:05:03.000 I just did a whole segment on Thomas Sowell today, actually, kind of teasing our conversation around my favorite work of his, Discrimination and Disparities.

00:05:12.000 I think it's especially today super applicable.

00:05:15.000 But tell us about why Thomas Sowell matters.

00:05:18.000 What is different about this man?

00:05:20.000 Because his story is rather remarkable.

00:05:22.000 And I only know very, I know the broad part growing up in poverty in Harlem and getting a PhD under the great Milton Friedman.

00:05:30.000 What makes his story so compelling?

00:05:32.000 Well, it's more than his biography.

00:05:35.000 I think it's the way he's carried himself as a scholar and as an intellectual.

00:05:40.000 And the way he's distinguished himself, Charlie, it's really unfortunate that this is how he's done it.

00:05:48.000 But it's basically by being an honest intellectual, a straight shooter.

00:05:53.000 And that is so rare today among our intellectuals and among our scholars that that alone makes Soul stand out.

00:06:01.000 He's someone who follows the facts where they lead.

00:06:04.000 He is not concerned with whether they lead to inconvenient conclusions, unpopular conclusions, politically incorrect conclusions.

00:06:12.000 He thinks his role as a scholar is simply to tell the truth.

00:06:16.000 And simply telling the truth these days and being more worried about truth than popularity makes you a standout among our intellectual elites today.

00:06:26.000 And that is really how Seoul has distinguished himself.

00:06:30.000 And 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.

00:06:41.000 And 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.

00:06:50.000 And again, it's about following the facts.

00:06:52.000 And 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.

00:07:04.000 And that's frankly one of the reasons why so many young people haven't heard about Thomas Sowell.

00:07:10.000 Yet 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.

00:07:20.000 Thomas Soule was sort of canceled before it was cool.

00:07:23.000 He was someone that the left went after a very long time ago for saying politically incorrect things.

00:07:28.000 And it's one reason he's not as well known as he should be.

00:07:32.000 But I will say that that seems to be starting to change.

00:07:38.000 Sele has a fan account on Twitter.

00:07:41.000 It has more than 700,000 followers, Charlie.

00:07:46.000 That's remarkable for someone who's not on social media himself.

00:07:49.000 You know, he has videos of him on YouTube that have millions of views.

00:07:55.000 I did a documentary film about Soul for public television that came out earlier this year.

00:08:00.000 And we were able, and it was available on YouTube and on Amazon as well.

00:08:04.000 And we were able to look at some of the demographic data who was watching it.

00:08:08.000 And we were very glad to see that it skewed younger people were watching it.

00:08:12.000 So, yes, a lot of young people don't know about Seoul, but maybe that's starting to change.

00:08:18.000 I think it is starting to change.

00:08:19.000 So, my first exposure of Thomas Soule was different, but in some ways similar to yours.

00:08:26.000 So, when I was a senior in high school, I was a conservative, but I didn't quite know how to articulate why I believe that I believe.

00:08:34.000 So, I stumbled across a man that someone said, Hey, you should go check out Milton Friedman.

00:08:39.000 I said, Who's that?

00:08:40.000 Of course, they never taught Milton Friedman in my AP economics class, right?

00:08:44.000 That would be a thought crime.

00:08:45.000 So, I found Milton Friedman on YouTube, and this was in the wild west of YouTube before all their censorship and all of that.

00:08:51.000 And then the next video recommendation was Thomas Soule.

00:08:55.000 And 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. 0.86

00:09:05.000 That was the world I was raised in. 0.75

00:09:06.000 I started listening to him, and he started talking about the negatives of minimum wage, and he started talking about affirmative action.

00:09:14.000 And you probably remember this debate.

00:09:16.000 It has 20 million views probably now.

00:09:19.000 It's him and Milton Friedman sitting next to each other debating a socialist and kind of a collectivist.

00:09:25.000 And it's kind of this one-two punch.

00:09:28.000 And there is kind of this dark web momentum behind Thomas Soule, the likes of which that very few intellectuals ever get to enjoy.

00:09:36.000 Maybe Jordan Peterson's the closest that I've seen in the modern era.

00:09:40.000 And I've always said Thomas Soule has been canceled before cancel culture even exists.

00:09:45.000 Can you talk about how he got himself in trouble and how he navigated that, especially kind of before the internet age?

00:09:51.000 Well, I think the clip you're referring to comes from a program that Milton Friedman did called Free to Choose back in the early 1980s.

00:10:00.000 And Soul was a guest on that show.

00:10:02.000 And they would come on and debate.

00:10:06.000 Intellectuals would come on and debate each other in forums.

00:10:10.000 And Friedman set that up, and it was a huge hit.

00:10:13.000 And you're right, on YouTube, a lot of people have been reintroduced to Friedman and Soule that way.

00:10:20.000 It's also fitting that after you looked up Friedman, the algorithm took you to Seoul.

00:10:26.000 I mean, it gives me some faith in algorithms because it should have.

00:10:30.000 It should have done exactly that.

00:10:33.000 Friedman taught Seoul, mentored Seoul at the University of Chicago.

00:10:37.000 Seoul studied economics.

00:10:38.000 That's where he earned his PhD under Friedman at the University of Chicago.

00:10:43.000 And Seoul sort of modeled himself as a public intellectual on Friedman's public intellectualism.

00:10:52.000 After Friedman left teaching, he did things like that Free to Choose program.

00:10:57.000 He spoke on college campuses.

00:10:59.000 He wrote popular books.

00:11:01.000 He felt the need to explain economics to non-experts.

00:11:04.000 And Seoul took that to heart.

00:11:07.000 And Seoul's most popular book, his best-selling book, is just called Basic Economics.

00:11:12.000 And all it is, is an economics textbook with no graphs and charts and jargon.

00:11:17.000 And 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.

00:11:29.000 And so Seoul has gone to great lengths to write book after book after book in plain English for general interest readers.

00:11:37.000 And that's another one of his legacies and the way, one of the ways he has distinguished himself.

00:11:42.000 And he's accessible.

00:11:43.000 He's very, very accessible.

00:11:45.000 And he thinks that's very important.

00:11:48.000 And 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.

00:11:55.000 He 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?

00:12:03.000 And you're kind of like, I can't listen to Buckley without a dictionary.

00:12:08.000 Yeah, yeah, he makes it.

00:12:10.000 Soule is his scholarship is widespread, but also very rigorous in its depth.

00:12:19.000 And 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.

00:12:28.000 And it's a skill.

00:12:30.000 It'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.

00:12:38.000 But few economists can write like Thomas Sowell.

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00:13:27.000 So Thomas Sowell has a unique biography.

00:13:29.000 I'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.

00:13:45.000 But he was educated during a time where schools were largely segregated and that he kind of saw the Civil Rights Act come up.

00:13:55.000 So can you talk a little about his biography?

00:13:57.000 He grew up in poverty, obviously a very smart man, but he would talk a lot about the schools he went to.

00:14:03.000 Did he go to Stuyvesant or something?

00:14:05.000 Maybe I'm wrong, but he did.

00:14:07.000 He was born in rural North Carolina in 1930.

00:14:10.000 So this is during the Great Depression.

00:14:13.000 And he was orphaned at a very young age.

00:14:16.000 His father died before he was born.

00:14:18.000 And his mother died giving birth to a younger sibling.

00:14:22.000 So Seoul was taken in by a great aunt and raised by her and her two adult daughters, one of whom was married.

00:14:32.000 And 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. 0.69

00:14:46.000 They were part of that.

00:14:47.000 They settled in Harlem and that's where he was raised.

00:14:49.000 So before reaching New York, he had attended segregated schools.

00:14:55.000 And he gets to New York and realizes how far he's behind.

00:14:58.000 Even back then, southern education of youngsters was behind northern education.

00:15:04.000 And when the kids would move from one place to another, that became very apparent.

00:15:08.000 And so he had some catching up to do right away.

00:15:11.000 But he was very bright.

00:15:12.000 From the start, he was bright.

00:15:13.000 As 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.

00:15:23.000 You had to take a test to get in and so forth.

00:15:25.000 One 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.

00:15:33.000 And these days, the black percentage of people accepted is quite small.

00:15:38.000 I mean, you know, three, four, five, six percent is very, very low. 0.97

00:15:44.000 More whites are accepted. 0.52

00:15:46.000 And then the group that has the most representation are Asians.

00:15:50.000 When 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.

00:16:05.000 And of course, there was much more discrimination.

00:16:08.000 And all the things that are cited today as the reason for the racial disparity existed much more extensively back then.

00:16:16.000 Yet it was a smaller racial disparity.

00:16:19.000 It 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.

00:16:32.000 So in any case, Seoul attends Stuyvesant, but he has a very tumultuous home life and ends up dropping out before graduating.

00:16:40.000 He was a high school dropout.

00:16:42.000 And then he left home.

00:16:43.000 He moved out of the house when he was 17 years old, lived in a homeless shelter for a period of time.

00:16:49.000 Eventually, he was drafted into the Marines during the Korean War and got some discipline there, obviously, spent a couple of years in the Marines.

00:16:58.000 And 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.

00:17:09.000 He has the GI bill money, so this is enabling him to go to college.

00:17:12.000 And then he transfers from there to Harvard, where he finally gets his undergraduate degree at the age of 28 years old.

00:17:20.000 And 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.

00:17:28.000 You know, he didn't write his first book till he was 40.

00:17:33.000 So, you know, think of what might have been if he'd had the traditional trajectory of a college student and a scholar.

00:17:42.000 So that was where he got the start.

00:17:44.000 He 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.

00:17:53.000 And then he spends the 1960s teaching.

00:17:58.000 He taught at Howard University, where he had attended.

00:18:02.000 He taught at Cornell in the 60s.

00:18:05.000 In 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.

00:18:18.000 And then he joins the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1980 as a senior fellow.

00:18:24.000 So those days of teaching were over then.

00:18:26.000 And that's where he's been ever since.

00:18:27.000 Since 1980, he's been at Hoover at Stanford University.

00:18:31.000 And Hoover does a phenomenal job.

00:18:33.000 What I always loved about Thomas Seoul is he was able to weave economic truth and data through his biography.

00:18:40.000 That's why I remembered Stuyvesant.

00:18:42.000 Now, what was, how did, what did he attribute that to?

00:18:46.000 The fact that blacks had a higher percentage when he went there versus now?

00:18:50.000 What would his explanation be?

00:18:52.000 Or what would he point to as the prerequisites that caused that disparate outcome?

00:18:57.000 Well, I think Tom would point to a number of factors, but they would be mainly cultural factors.

00:19:03.000 And 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.

00:19:27.000 And 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.

00:19:46.000 And 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.

00:19:58.000 And 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. 0.54

00:20:22.000 And their focus was on the development of that human capital.

00:20:31.000 There 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.

00:20:50.000 And that was the focus of the civil rights movement starting in the 1950s.

00:20:54.000 That's what Martin Luther King was talking about as well.

00:20:57.000 That changed in the 1960s.

00:21:01.000 The focus became less on equal opportunity and more on equal outcomes.

00:21:07.000 The focus also became on getting political clout, electing more black officials. 0.67

00:21:13.000 The thinking being if we just get more of our own in office, the rest will take care of itself.

00:21:18.000 And 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.

00:21:32.000 And 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.

00:21:46.000 And 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, 0.95

00:22:04.000 you 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.

00:22:17.000 Post-60s, things either stall or begin to reverse course actually. 0.96

00:22:23.000 And then that's what you're seeing the legacy of today.

00:22:27.000 And Thomas Seoul, he was so, he was unapologetic at taking this position in the way he wrote.

00:22:33.000 He wasn't trying to win.

00:22:35.000 He wasn't only unapologetic.

00:22:37.000 He predicted that this would be the outcome. 0.81

00:22:42.000 He 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. 0.87

00:22:57.000 They're operating on the assumption that all black problems are caused by whites and can be solved by whites getting their own act together. 0.59

00:23:08.000 And Seoul was saying way back in the 1960s, the problems of black people today run far deeper than what whites are doing to them. 0.94

00:23:19.000 And he saw that coming a long time.

00:23:21.000 And you look at today, I mean, I'll give you a quick example.

00:23:25.000 In Chicago in 2019, there were 492 homicides.

00:23:31.000 Three of them involved police.

00:23:33.000 Black Lives Matter looks at that statistic and says, Chicago has a policing problem.

00:23:38.000 We need to talk about policing.

00:23:41.000 Obviously, any rational person who looked at that statistic would say, the problem there is not police or police shootings.

00:23:48.000 The problem is non-police shootings. 0.97

00:23:50.000 Nor are there white supremacist groups riding around Chicago shooting up black neighborhoods.

00:23:56.000 So 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.

00:24:07.000 And we need to get our own act together.

00:24:09.000 We can't keep on blaming things on white society.

00:24:12.000 And yet, you know, that is what prevails today when it comes to the focus of the civil rights leadership.

00:24:20.000 But Seoul saw this going sideways, 40, 50 years ago.

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00:26:00.000 So there is a deliberate campaign, and you mentioned this earlier, to not just cancel Thomas Sowell, but people like Thomas Sowell.

00:26:08.000 And I don't like that word cancel.

00:26:10.000 It's almost to stick them down a memory hole, to use an Orwellian term.

00:26:14.000 They never existed.

00:26:16.000 Delete their books and don't ever mention them.

00:26:18.000 But it's not just them.

00:26:19.000 It's people like Frederick Douglass and Clarence Thomas.

00:26:22.000 And 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.

00:26:34.000 Part of your project is to try to have more people aware of Thomas Soule and kind of his writings and most importantly, his beliefs.

00:26:42.000 That's probably what you had to use to win him over.

00:26:45.000 Said, listen, you know, enough about you.

00:26:48.000 I want your ideas to get out there.

00:26:49.000 And that's what he wants.

00:26:50.000 He wants his ideas to get out there.

00:26:53.000 And he's not particularly interested in who gets credit for the spread of these ideas.

00:26:56.000 He's more interested in that the right ideas are widespread.

00:27:02.000 And I agree.

00:27:03.000 He's been right for a very, very long time. 0.99

00:27:06.000 And 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? 0.87

00:27:24.000 And Tom would always correct the premise of the question.

00:27:26.000 He'd say, you don't mean I'm out of step with other Blacks.

00:27:30.000 You mean I'm out of step with other Black elites. 0.92

00:27:33.000 And he would say, black elites are no more representative of Black people than white elites are of white people. 0.61

00:27:39.000 And you can't conflate the two here. 0.95

00:27:42.000 And that's what we have going on today in the so-called cancel culture.

00:27:46.000 You know, I talked about the emphasis on policing. 0.86

00:27:50.000 You 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. 0.90

00:28:08.000 Those are not the views of Black people. 0.97

00:28:10.000 Those are the views of Black elites. 0.85

00:28:13.000 And the media too often does not make a distinction. 0.82

00:28:17.000 And 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. 0.63

00:28:34.000 And of course, that's exactly backwards. 0.84

00:28:36.000 They 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. 1.00

00:28:49.000 So Soul has had to make this point over and over again over the decades and it still needs to be made today. 0.98

00:28:55.000 Yeah, 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.

00:29:05.000 They said, I can't believe how incredible his ability to articulate what's happening and how human nature operates and the different inputs.

00:29:16.000 It's just like it opens people's eyes in such a powerful way.

00:29:20.000 And so in a couple minutes we have remaining, talk more about the book.

00:29:24.000 It's called Maverick.

00:29:25.000 I encourage everyone to check it out.

00:29:27.000 And other things we didn't touch on that you hope to accomplish in your book and the broader impact you're looking to make.

00:29:33.000 Well, 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.

00:29:46.000 He was a first tier and is a first tier social theorist.

00:29:51.000 You mentioned Hayek earlier.

00:29:54.000 He's written on social theory.

00:29:57.000 He's written on political philosophy.

00:30:00.000 And he's written books on education. 0.79

00:30:04.000 And 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.

00:30:19.000 So I get into a lot of Seoul's scholarship on non-racial issues as well, some of which he's most proud of.

00:30:26.000 I mean, Seoul would have had a distinguished career even if he had never written a single word about affirmative action.

00:30:33.000 It's something he only started to do reluctantly, mostly in the 1970s.

00:30:38.000 And he said it was because he saw things going in the wrong direction, particularly with what the civil rights leadership was focused on.

00:30:45.000 And he knew that a lot of people would be reluctant to speak up truthfully about what was going on.

00:30:51.000 And he said, someone's got to do it.

00:30:52.000 It's the right thing to do.

00:30:54.000 And so I'm going to do it.

00:30:55.000 And he's paid a price professionally for going down this road.

00:30:58.000 I mean, I'm certainly thankful that he has.

00:31:01.000 I'm glad we have this body of work out there to push back at what's going on with the social justice warriors and so forth today.

00:31:08.000 So I thank heaven he did it.

00:31:10.000 But he has certainly, certainly paid a price.

00:31:12.000 But the book is a really comprehensive view of his scholarship going going all the way back to the 1960s.

00:31:19.000 Yeah, he talked about so many different issues.

00:31:21.000 One of my favorite essays, it might have an essay or chapter.

00:31:23.000 I have it somewhere, is his repulsion for meetings.

00:31:28.000 Are you familiar with this writing of his?

00:31:32.000 I remember I can barely recall some quip he's made about it was something about the type of people who like meetings.

00:31:40.000 That's exactly, yeah.

00:31:41.000 And like if you're trying to run a successful endeavor or a business, meetings are the worst thing you could possibly have.

00:31:46.000 And 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.

00:32:00.000 That one always just kind of sticks out to me.

00:32:02.000 And 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.

00:32:11.000 It 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.

00:32:20.000 And it's three on three, and they just wipe the floor with him.

00:32:23.000 He just talks about education, not about race.

00:32:25.000 It's just education.

00:32:27.000 Yeah, it is incredible.

00:32:29.000 And 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.

00:32:39.000 Totally agree. 0.81

00:32:40.000 The 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.

00:33:03.000 He has written circles around them.

00:33:05.000 I 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.

00:33:19.000 Yeah, I just love it.

00:33:21.000 Well, I know our time is running short.

00:33:22.000 It's called Maverick in 30 Seconds.

00:33:24.000 Why'd you pick that title?

00:33:26.000 He's he's just because he has this tell-it-like it is attitude.

00:33:32.000 And again, it's not something that should distinguish you as an intellectual or a scholar.

00:33:37.000 You would think these are people in the truth-telling business.

00:33:40.000 They just follow the facts.

00:33:42.000 But it's a rare quality.

00:33:45.000 And I thought that Maverick is a way that captured it, captured that attitude.

00:33:51.000 And he has courage.

00:33:52.000 He has never been afraid to tell the truth.

00:33:55.000 And I think I believe this.

00:33:57.000 If 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.

00:34:08.000 That's how big of a deal his scholarship is.

00:34:11.000 So it's Maverick.

00:34:12.000 Jason, you do a wonderful job.

00:34:13.000 Thank you so much for joining us.

00:34:14.000 I really enjoyed this.

00:34:15.000 Thank you for doing this.

00:34:16.000 Take care.

00:34:19.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:20.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:23.000 And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.

00:34:26.000 God bless you guys.

00:34:27.000 Speak to you soon.

00:34:30.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 26, 2021

Timeless Wisdom from Thomas Sowell with Biographer Jason Riley

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