Coleman Hughes and Glenn Loury on Race in America, Patriotism, and College Campuses ｜ Ep. 25
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 5 minutes
Words per Minute
171.26546
Summary
Coleman Hughes and Glenn Lowry are two of the smartest, most thoughtful, and most provocative thinkers in the country. In this episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn talks to them about what it means to be smart, smart, provocative, and contrarian.
Transcript
00:00:00.540
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.080
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
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I think you're going to find this really smart, really interesting, provocative, and contrarian, as they say.
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We've got Coleman Hughes and Professor Glenn Lowry, two guys who I really, really deeply admire.
00:00:31.640
And if you don't know who they are, you're going to deeply, deeply admire them very shortly.
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And now just a quick word about the two guys we're going to be talking to.
00:02:02.620
Coleman Hughes is 24 years old, a Columbia University graduate, and has become, I think, one of the most promising intellectuals of our time.
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He does not accept sort of these race narratives that have been shoved down our throats and has really been pushing back in a smart, forceful, respectful way on some of the narratives that we've been sold about our country and ourselves.
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I met Coleman Hughes shortly after I left NBC when I was still feeling bad and people were calling me names and I was down in the dumps.
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And I went to the comedy cellar with Doug, my husband.
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And before I left the comedy cellar, he came over and introduced himself.
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He knows a lot of the comedians and he himself is not one, but he was there enjoying everything as well.
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He introduced himself and we sat and he opened with, Megan, I just want to tell you that what was done to you at NBC and the accusations against you are bullshit.
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And of course, I was in such a dark period and place that I was like, oh, my God.
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It was like he was like an angel who came over to help me.
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And we talked, I mean, over an hour, maybe two hours that night about everything.
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Uh, and I left with such a better understanding of what had happened to me, where we were in the country, where we were about to go and felt so grateful to him.
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And just one other thing on him, he had me on his podcast recently and we did a really in-depth conversation and he never asked me about the NBC exit or the blackface thing.
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And I heard him later introduce the interview by saying, I'm not going to ask her about that because one of the downsides of cancel culture is the person who's been the victim of it keeps getting re-victimized by people who keep bringing it up like it's meant to be part of their story.
00:04:00.360
And that's what kind of a guy Coleman Hughes is.
00:04:03.880
He truly is a beautiful man in every sense of that word.
00:04:07.180
And so the reason for inviting him on is multifaceted.
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Glenn, Glenn is somebody I listened to all summer long in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
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And he is intellectually fierce and really fair to his critics on the other side.
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And when he talks, you're going to want to stand up and cheer.
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But I think they agree on the big things like the damage that's being done to our country by woke culture crusaders who are more bullies than true activists.
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Anyway, Professor Glenn Lowry and Coleman Hughes.
00:05:04.840
I just want to tell the audience that the entire summer as we were going through the George Floyd protests and all the racial unrest we saw in the country.
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You were who I read, Coleman, and you were who I watched, Glenn, on The Glenn Show, which I highly recommend to everybody.
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You and John McWhorter, who, you know, you come on.
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But it was these were all great debates where I learned.
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And it's just so hard to find open debates where people can still teach you as opposed to just preach to you in a way that's not really that informative.
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Let's just start because it's the most recent news of the day with Trump.
00:05:45.080
And I know, Coleman, you describe yourself as a liberal and Glenn, you've been a liberal, but you describe yourself now as a conservative.
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So do you guys mind sharing how you voted and and why you voted that way?
00:06:01.380
And I don't I don't get too hung up on these words, liberal and conservative.
00:06:09.660
And it's more accurate to say I voted against Trump.
00:06:14.640
I think a lot of the arguments in in favor of Trump that I that I hear are really arguments against left wing hypocrisy and media bias,
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all of which I think are real and worrisome phenomena.
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But when I see the way Trump conducts himself, the undignified way he holds the office, his boorish personality.
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I think all of it is is such a turnoff that and Biden is is has been fairly good at rejecting woke excesses thus far.
00:06:57.180
On the left that I Biden seemed like the clear pick for me.
00:07:07.660
But I could see why someone would would vote Trump simply as a rejection of of left wing identity politics and, you know, the.
00:07:19.540
The. Apologizing for riots and so on and so forth, but ultimately, I think, you know, for Trump to be the face of the the fight against woke excesses is is is not good.
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It's not good for for that that face to be someone so undignified.
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That's an interesting point, because there has been a debate about whether the fight against wokeness and cancel culture.
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Is it helped by having Trump in the office or is it hurt by having Trump in the office?
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And that's well articulated an argument that if if you oppose that stuff, as I definitely do, you'll do better without him.
00:08:00.960
And you're right. Biden has not signaled that he's in favor of this stuff, although he does say he's going to bring back the critical race theory mandated sessions for the federal government and contractors dealing with the feds and a couple of other things.
00:08:15.240
Like he's he's unfortunately today, the news broke that he's going to try to bring back these incredibly unfair anti due process standards for accused men on college campuses that Obama had in place and Betsy DeVos under Trump tried to remove.
00:08:32.260
I mean, the long and the short of it is you can't cross examine your accuser if you're a college guy accused of sexual assault.
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You have no right to an attorney in the room. You have no right to discovery.
00:08:41.620
So you can't see her texts or messages to friends. And once you get found guilty, which you are in virtually all cases, you have very limited rights of appeal.
00:08:50.700
You basically get labeled a sex offender. It's very hard to get into another college.
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It's just been crazy slanted in one direction. And now he's saying he's going to bring those unfair standards back.
00:09:01.980
Glenn, let me ask you, you're I've heard you defend Trump on a lot of things.
00:09:09.920
Megan, I want to defend Trump. I don't want to tell you how I voted.
00:09:12.940
What I say is I voted for Biden, but you shouldn't believe me.
00:09:16.000
And the joke is, if I had voted for Trump, I would never say it.
00:09:19.640
You can't ask me if I voted for Trump and expect me to say yes to that.
00:09:23.660
OK, so there's no information in my response to your question as to how I voted.
00:09:28.380
I voted for Biden, but you've learned nothing from me saying so.
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But I want to make the case for Trump because I think this personification thing is ridiculous.
00:09:38.400
I mean, we're we're now dancing on the grave of Trump.
00:09:42.460
I mean, the the energy of the moment is, oh, hallelujah, our long, dark nightmare is over.
00:09:49.180
Whereas the difference between Trump and Biden is what is your policy about building pipelines and about fracking and about global warming and about America's positioning in the in the climate change debate?
00:10:01.840
The difference between Biden and Trump is what are you going to do at the border?
00:10:06.940
What is exactly the philosophy of your view about the integrity of the American nation state?
00:10:13.040
The difference between Biden and Trump is who is secretary of the Treasury?
00:10:17.760
The difference between Biden and Trump is a lot of things.
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There's 70 plus million people voted for Trump, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:10:26.960
Huge forces are at play here that the press, that the coastal elites, that the pointy heads in the university,
00:10:35.340
that the three and five gender people would drive the agenda of American politics is a horrifying prospect that the deep state, that the phony Russia hoax.
00:10:49.040
I know my saying this will mark me because I'd bother to invoke the fact that the result of the 2016 election was never accepted.
00:11:04.900
I'm talking about the people who put out 1619 projects.
00:11:07.520
I'm talking about the people who give national book awards.
00:11:10.380
I don't want these people telling me what this country is about.
00:11:12.960
That's a legitimate position to reduce that argument to the personality of Donald J.
00:11:18.740
He is merely an avatar standing in for a whole lot of forces in the society.
00:11:25.680
I like the way the economy was going before the COVID thing came.
00:11:40.780
I mean, I don't think you disagree with a lot of that.
00:11:43.200
But what points would you take issue with, if any?
00:11:46.240
So I think what I would take issue with is everything you said about left-wing media bias and hypocrisy, I'm on board with, including the Russia story being a hoax and just being filled with confirmation bias since the beginning.
00:12:06.560
And the media being out to get Trump and being terrified at the prospect of 1619 being imported into schools and becoming the new story that America tells about ourselves.
00:12:22.840
You know, my question is, what about the past four years of the Trump administration has shown us that Trump is an effective bulwark against that?
00:12:37.060
Like, there's a first question about how much power the executive has over a cultural war of ideas to begin with.
00:12:45.180
And then there's a secondary question of what Trump's net effect on left-wing craziness is.
00:12:54.700
Like, the logic of Trump derangement syndrome presupposes that Trump deranges people on the left to a degree that a Mitt Romney or, you know, someone I would feel comfortable voting for, like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain, wouldn't.
00:13:11.420
And so I think, you know, it's not clear to me, I'm not saying that without Trump suddenly the stuff is going to go away.
00:13:19.440
What I'm saying is, it's not clear to me what the net effect of Trump, the personality is.
00:13:29.520
I want to give a concrete example, the race debate, the race debate, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, the NFL, Trump picking a fight about that, the cops, are the cops racist?
00:13:39.900
Going to the bedside of Jacob Blake, talking to the daughter of George Floyd, I mean, mothers of the movement, martyrdom in the black community from cops, okay, versus love your country.
00:13:57.440
You should be fortunate to be playing in the NFL and being a millionaire.
00:14:07.800
It's one of the toughest jobs you could ever imagine.
00:14:10.560
You're going to take the side of the quote-unquote thug over and against the cops, the riots?
00:14:18.460
Now, Trump is an imperfect tribune for a particular position in that discussion.
00:14:23.680
That position says, by and large, the cops are our friends.
00:14:26.960
After all, the murder rate in New York City went from over 2,000 to under 500 in a decade.
00:14:31.460
After all, most of these incidents involve people who are provoking whatever the altercation is that ultimately ends up in their end.
00:14:41.780
You're going to tell me that George Floyd is a hero?
00:14:57.700
You're going to roll that up until he's a racist and he's an imperfect representation of something?
00:15:15.720
If he's the embodiment of the I love America vote, and again, everything you say, these are things we pretty much see eye to eye on.
00:15:27.800
But if he's the embodiment of the I love America vote, what makes me angry as an American is when he doesn't respect the norms of democracy, such as conceding an election.
00:15:43.260
That seems to me, as the president that is the one to defend Thomas Jefferson statues, for example, which I'm completely on Trump's side of.
00:15:53.440
For him to then, you know, disrespect, you know, piss all over the founding fathers' graves by not respecting the transition of power is something that actually angers me in a patriotic sense.
00:16:09.120
And it makes, a blunder like that makes Trump's entire package more easily dismissible.
00:16:18.520
Like, he will always be remembered as the president to break that norm that is so fundamental.
00:16:25.580
And it makes the rest of it just, again, it besmirches everything he touches by association.
00:16:33.660
That's why the personality stuff is not irrelevant.
00:16:42.060
And I really hate having to play this role, but I have to play this role.
00:16:45.580
For the integrity of this conversation, I have to play the role.
00:16:54.780
I have no position about the legal claims that have been made.
00:16:56.940
You may recall in 2000, there was also a disputed election.
00:17:04.720
It does look like Biden won as far as I can see.
00:17:12.360
What I'm trying to say is the judgment about who's president of the United States will be rendered under the Constitution when the Electoral College casts its votes.
00:17:25.300
The interpretation of the election situation, just like in 2000, is a subjectively constructed, in real-time thing.
00:17:39.780
But when a foreign leader decides to call and congratulate Biden, he's actually casting a ballot, so to speak, in this process by which we're constructing how we interpret the thing.
00:17:59.040
I was four years old during Al Gore, George Bush.
00:18:03.160
Did either of them declare victory before the votes were even on 2 a.m. the day after the election?
00:18:27.060
It's embarrassing to have an American president.
00:18:30.260
Because I like to think of our nation as better than the nations that are routinely dealing with coups and people.
00:18:40.360
But it's embarrassing as an American to not be able to take that norm for granted.
00:18:57.820
Again, I'm going to echo talking points here because these talking points happen to actually be correct.
00:19:06.600
Stacey Abrams never conceded that gubernatorial election.
00:19:10.460
I've been whinging about that for two years, Glenn.
00:19:12.820
I've been I feel like I've been the only one talking about how fundamentally corrupt that is.
00:19:19.500
So to be consistent, I say the same about Trump.
00:19:22.940
Do you not think that the voter suppression phenomenon, this is Eric Holder and Barack Obama, okay?
00:19:35.340
It doesn't know any bounds that if a legislature changes a state law in such a way that an accountant calculates it will disadvantage the black vote, then we presume that the motivation of that legislator was to suppress that vote.
00:19:49.100
And we thereby cast into doubt the electoral consequences of processes that are under the governance of those state legislatures because we presume that the motives of those Republican state legislatures, many more of which exist after Obama was president than before, was somehow racially unjust.
00:20:05.440
Do you not think that that undermines the integrity of our electoral process?
00:20:11.180
And I've been I've been talking about that for years, about the the how the the, you know, the moral panic about voter suppression.
00:20:22.380
It hits me in exactly that same, you know, that same patriotic place in my brain, where, you know, concerns about, you know, inflated concerns about voter fraud hits me, it's like you you're playing with our democracy, you're playing with the trust in our democracy, and you better have a damn good reason to play with it.
00:20:52.380
I understand that Trump is abnormal in many ways.
00:20:58.800
And it's, of course, also why he was elected in large part.
00:21:02.400
But I don't you think, Coleman, that he has some reason to distrust systems at this point, you know, given that so many of them are very clearly against him.
00:21:12.920
And given how the apparatus has worked for four years to ruin him, to tear him down, to actually boot him out of the presidency.
00:21:20.340
I if I'm Trump, I don't have a lot of reason to trust anyone, especially vote counters in Philadelphia or places that I know are controlled by Democrats who you have.
00:21:32.400
You know, you have more than a decent reason to believe might think the ends justify the means.
00:21:38.100
That's why I've been saying, go ahead and kick the tires, kick the tires all day long, do do better than Stacey Abrams did, who just ginned up controversy in the press, but never actually pursued a lawsuit.
00:21:50.520
I believe the courts are fair and they will have the final say and then we'll all feel better one way or the other.
00:21:55.660
We'll know a winner or a loser and we can lick our wounds one way or the other.
00:21:59.620
But I feel like don't don't you think he has a reason to have some healthy amount of distrust?
00:22:06.880
And the media has been out to get him since day one.
00:22:09.800
I mean, it's it's it's obvious if you if you, you know, care enough to look at it.
00:22:16.600
But listen, I think people kind of implicitly have lowered their bar for for over the past four years.
00:22:24.520
It's like, yes, he from his position, the media has been out to get him, you know, the Russian investigation.
00:22:32.220
He has to be paranoid and thinking that any criticism of him is unfair.
00:22:40.620
But to begin, he's also, you know, can't we shouldn't we have a bit of a higher standard of our president, right?
00:22:50.040
Like even if you get unfairly criticized for four years.
00:22:54.240
Does that mean I just have to accept any level of paranoia and mistrust in the system that I shouldn't put the burden on you to try to distinguish a legitimate criticism from, you know, complete bias?
00:23:08.640
I can understand it, but this is the president, right?
00:23:14.420
You just asked him to concede when he doesn't think that he lost the election and he wants to go through due process.
00:23:23.900
The quote declaration of victory, close quote, was an offhand comment that he made and a thing that he shouldn't have said.
00:23:32.600
He said it twice in the span of like three minutes.
00:23:34.640
You just asked for him that you just asked for him to concede.
00:23:37.440
And then when he says, no, I'm actually going to fight because I think I've been wrong.
00:23:41.160
You call him a miscreant who has destroyed the integrity of American government.
00:23:55.360
Well, the election night, he said, frankly, we won.
00:24:07.300
We've changed the bar because we understand he's he's like a friend that we're used to
00:24:13.140
And we just we price it into our judgment of him.
00:24:17.560
I'm not going to get down into the, you know, Trump is crazy.
00:24:23.740
Well, that's therein lies the whole part of the election.
00:24:26.860
If if Biden could make it about Trump, he was going to win.
00:24:30.100
And if Trump could make it about policy, he was more likely to to win.
00:24:35.700
And to me, what I when I see when I see Trump doing what he's doing and I I'm not in Trump's
00:24:41.480
head, I can't tell you whether he believes he's in fact the victor or whether he's trying
00:24:48.680
I don't know, but I'm reminded of do you guys remember this guy, Harry Markopoulos?
00:24:54.260
He was the guy he he showed up over and over at congressional hearings and elsewhere trying
00:25:01.180
And the guy was he was some sort of former securities executive and an investigator and
00:25:14.820
He just did not look like somebody we should listen to.
00:25:17.600
And on the other end of his accusations was Bernie Madoff.
00:25:22.640
He was completely respected and lauded by all these white shoes firms on Wall Street.
00:25:28.980
And everybody's like, all right, Harry, bitter much.
00:25:38.460
He he was the one guy who saw it and was like setting himself on fire trying to say, this
00:25:49.840
And so I kind of look at Trump, not necessarily in this instance.
00:25:54.160
I'll listen to what the courts tell me because I've spent enough time litigating in them that
00:25:59.060
They get things wrong, but they're going to get this one right one way or the other.
00:26:02.020
There's too many cases and there's too much data.
00:26:03.540
Um, I think Trump is sort of at this point, almost a Harry Markopoulos figure, as we've
00:26:09.220
seen on a couple of these accusations against him, you know, and he's jumped up and down and
00:26:13.680
said, I did not collude with the Russians and all the media and all the Democrats and
00:26:23.760
And Trump was coming in saying the media is the enemy.
00:26:27.600
And people are like, it's disgusting and it's deplorable.
00:26:32.520
They're certainly his enemy and they are the enemy of his supporters.
00:26:35.940
I mean, you don't have to look far for evidence of that.
00:26:38.940
So I almost see this, whether he wins or loses as his final Harry Markopoulos moment.
00:26:44.120
Can I ask you, um, now what you take away from the black vote?
00:26:48.700
Because the numbers have changed from election night to now.
00:26:52.040
It looks like he got 8% of the black vote overall.
00:26:58.660
He did a little bit better with black men than he did with black women.
00:27:01.680
And that's, that's not a huge surprise given the gender split.
00:27:07.140
Um, but you know, the Republicans are spinning.
00:27:08.940
This is like, he improved his margins with black voters.
00:27:12.220
Despite four years of being called a white supremacist.
00:27:23.240
Uh, I wouldn't put so much weight on the numbers.
00:27:25.580
I'm not a numbers person in terms of elections in any case, but.
00:27:30.320
You know, just, you know, think about six to eight is also 94 to 92.
00:27:36.440
So, so, but the nature of the conversation is definitely shifting.
00:27:41.540
I mean, you had African-American, uh, political candidates.
00:27:44.240
There was a challenger to Maxine Waters seat out in Los Angeles.
00:27:49.920
You, you had, uh, the Jones, uh, the, this guy in, uh, um, I'm sorry, I forget his name
00:27:55.360
in Michigan who ran for the Senate and, uh, uh, did a very, uh.
00:28:02.300
Uh, you, you have Tim Scott, uh, has played a role, the Senatorial Campaign Committee and
00:28:09.120
You have these rappers, uh, I mean, you know, it's froth on the top of the, uh, public culture,
00:28:15.560
but it's still, I think, indicative of something.
00:28:19.940
I, I mean, I, I think if he had, uh, been, um, more of an effective populist, uh, he might
00:28:27.000
have been able to, to, to, uh, pry this, uh, kind of lock that Democrats have on, uh, African-American
00:28:35.080
Uh, certainly I think he had the potential to do so.
00:28:38.480
Um, so I, so I, I think we have opened up a conversation about, uh, the, uh, political
00:28:48.280
tenor of African-American, uh, leadership and such that, uh, I think in the years ahead
00:28:54.140
will, will be interesting to see what, what develops.
00:28:57.040
Do you see any sort of a trend happening here, Coleman?
00:29:02.500
Um, uh, apparently I was speaking with David Shore, who is Obama's in-house Nate Silver type.
00:29:10.700
And, um, he, he pointed out that ever since either 2000 or 2004, every four years,
00:29:18.280
the, the percentage of the black vote that goes red has increased.
00:29:22.680
And so this 2% increase could just be, it could have nothing to do with Trump per se,
00:29:32.540
Um, and it's, of course, the trend is starting out with such small numbers that it's easy to
00:29:39.040
But, uh, and frankly, I don't know exactly what is causing the trend, but there certainly is
00:29:48.840
And it's possible that 30 or 40 years from now, that, that, that might be a really significant
00:30:00.540
I said, I said, I don't plan on waiting that long.
00:30:08.180
Well, one thing I will say about it, one thing I will say about it, and this might, I'm shooting
00:30:13.760
I have no idea whether this is true, but I have to imagine.
00:30:17.880
And, and the, the, the other point to realize is that this trend insofar as it exists, apparently
00:30:25.860
is mainly among younger black voters, 35 and below and more secular voters rather than Christian
00:30:36.060
black voters, to the extent that that's true, at least the, the youth part, what it, part
00:30:43.600
of it could be is that younger black Americans are growing up in, in a country that is less
00:30:52.140
racist than it's ever been in a condition where racism will never be completely gone.
00:30:57.660
But where, you know, I just talked to my father, I talked to my grandfather, they had more experiences
00:31:08.940
And most black people I know have that same dynamic with their parents and grandparents.
00:31:14.480
And so if you're met with a, a narrative that is a new narrative, that's telling you racism
00:31:23.260
It's pervasive and you combine that with a generation that is on a day-to-day basis, experiencing
00:31:29.600
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00:31:47.240
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00:31:50.900
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The wake of the George Floyd killing and the riots and just incendiary talk about race in
00:33:39.980
the country that took a direction, I found downright alarming, alarming.
00:33:45.680
And having been in the media, I had seen the media take random cases involving white police
00:33:51.900
officers and black suspects and blow them into a huge thing time and time again.
00:33:58.940
And it coincidentally always seems to happen in an election year.
00:34:02.840
And so many cases just get totally ignored when they're not in an election year.
00:34:08.020
But if you look at the actual statistics of police shootings of black men, they do not,
00:34:15.460
this is data, they do not support the narrative that police are hunting black men in the streets.
00:34:22.520
And yet that was said, that was said this summer by LeBron James and others and accepted.
00:34:30.800
And it's become a narrative that I think large factions of the Black Lives Matter supporters
00:34:40.000
We are literally hunted every day, every time we step foot outside the comfort of our homes.
00:34:47.660
And Coleman, I thought you had a very brave article.
00:34:51.300
You're at the Manhattan Institute now and writing for City Journal, among other places.
00:35:00.580
And I wonder if you can put some meat on that and help us understand why people refuse to believe
00:35:08.680
Well, first thing I want to point out is, I often think of the analogy to Islam as terror.
00:35:17.640
If you heard someone say, I fear being killed by a jihadi every time I walk out of my home
00:35:23.700
in Virginia, say, you would think to yourself, well, this person has imbibed a narrative so
00:35:36.760
And you would feel no compunction at all pushing back against them and saying, well, actually,
00:35:42.120
only 30 people died from Islam as terror last year.
00:35:53.140
You would understand, at least people on the left would understand instinctively why it's
00:35:58.040
important to pour cold water on crazy exaggerations of a problem.
00:36:03.640
So, you know, when I say that around 50 unarmed Americans get shot dead by the cops every year.
00:36:14.440
To me, it feels like I'm pouring water on a cold, cold water on a narrative just in the same way that
00:36:23.060
But it's received completely differently on the left.
00:36:25.980
I would say probably most protesters don't know that the number is that low to begin with.
00:36:31.100
They don't know that the biggest, the race that, you know, takes up the majority of that number is
00:36:41.840
And the other thing that people people really don't know, if they don't, if they're not paying
00:36:45.700
attention closely, is that every time you see a video of a black person unarmed getting shot by a
00:36:52.100
cop, there is almost an identical video or situation that has happened to a white person, probably in
00:36:58.960
the same year that you don't know about, because they don't get elevated into your Instagram feed,
00:37:05.560
into your Facebook feed, into the areas that, into the medium, that media that people consume
00:37:12.440
nowadays. So in my piece, I, I took a random year, I took 2015, and just listed 10 or 12 different
00:37:19.480
white, unarmed white people that were shot and killed by cops. In most cases, the police did not
00:37:25.000
receive any kind of punishment. One of them was a six year old kid. Each of these is different and
00:37:30.220
should be analyzed on its own terms. Some of them are straight up murders. Others are completely
00:37:34.820
defensible. Um, and, and it happens to Americans of every race, every year.
00:37:44.140
To your point, community requests tend to determine police deployment. Someone inside an urban community
00:37:53.280
calls the police, they show up, and then there's an interaction with a suspect. And if you, if you
00:37:59.580
survey most black women inside of these communities where there are high crime rates, they want
00:38:04.760
more police, not less now in black men to more police, not less. They're worried about their
00:38:09.120
kids getting shot. They want, they say, they talk about feeling relieved when they see a cop in the
00:38:14.320
vestibule of their building and getting a little worried when he's not there. And that just to add
00:38:19.500
to the statistics, there are about 7,500 black homicides a year, a black homicide victims a year.
00:38:26.860
Uh, and in 2019, uh, there were, according to the Washington post, 14 of those were black unarmed
00:38:36.120
suspects dealing with police. So that is 0.2, 0.2% of the total of black homicide victims, 0.2%.
00:38:44.120
This in a country where we have an average of 27 deadly weapons attacks on cops a day,
00:38:49.340
a day, 27 deadly weapons attacks on cops a day. And, and, you know, when cops make between 10 and 11
00:38:56.040
million arrests a year. So, you know, Glenn, people don't like to talk about that.
00:39:02.340
And even I, when I talk to people about the stats, you, they'll look at you like,
00:39:08.300
I don't want to hear your stats. Your stats are contrary to my lived experience.
00:39:12.580
And that's racist. That's a racist's defense to what our own lion eyes are telling us, right? We can
00:39:21.220
see, and, and a lot of black men will say, I have had a lifetime of negative interactions with the
00:39:27.380
police. So don't tell me there isn't systemic racism in the cop, in the police department.
00:39:32.260
Uh, Megan, what we're dealing with here is a, uh, uh, kind of delusion on a grand scale and a kind
00:39:40.820
of denial of brutal and very disturbing facts. And those facts have to do with black crime.
00:39:51.060
Now I have to apologize in advance for even saying this. Okay. Because I don't take any pleasure in
00:39:56.080
saying this. Uh, I'm not some ideologue who's, who's on some crusade. I'm not a racist.
00:40:03.140
The reality of life in the communities where these encounters between police and, uh, black citizens
00:40:10.320
take place, these problematic encounters is basically driven by the violent behavior of
00:40:17.680
people. I mean, look at the homicide rate, look at the robbery and Berkeley rates, look at what's
00:40:21.860
actually going on on the ground. Uh, the reason that you have a disparity in the number of African
00:40:27.820
Americans who are killed by cops relative to population is because you have a disparity in
00:40:31.580
the encounters between African Americans and cops, which is based upon the behavior of African
00:40:36.880
Americans, not the behavior of cops. The reason that you have a prison disparity, a monumentally
00:40:43.140
humongous disparity in the incidents of incarceration is because you have a huge disparity in the
00:40:50.200
incidents of criminal offending, not because the system is so configured as to hunt down and
00:40:56.320
lock up black men. This is humiliating and shameful. If you're an African American, if you're a lifelong
00:41:03.360
liberal, uh, if you're somebody who believes in civil rights and racial justice, the failures reflected
00:41:09.520
in this disparity of uncivil behavior by race in the country are unbearable to accept. And therefore
00:41:17.420
fantasies get invented. Michael Brown had his hands up. Don't shoot. Mass incarceration is the result of, uh,
00:41:24.700
white supremacy. Who could believe it? White supremacy? Certainly if you're one of these police officers or he's
00:41:33.140
your uncle or your brother or your cousin, and you live in, I don't know, uh, Staten Island somewhere, one of
00:41:39.160
these enclaves of working class, uh, uh, white people around here, Providence, Rhode Island, Johnston, Rhode Island,
00:41:44.960
or something like that. You don't believe that for a minute. And you're worried about the future of your
00:41:49.280
country. That's what's at stake in this debate. The stats that I've seen say that 60% of the violent crime in our
00:41:55.560
major cities are committed by black defendants. And so necessarily their interactions with police will
00:42:01.820
go up, but you know, the response to that Glenn is, well, why is that? Why are more black people
00:42:08.500
offending in a criminal way? Why? That's, that's where racism comes in, that their system has kept them
00:42:15.720
in poor communities, uh, where they don't have any economic advantages, where their education system is
00:42:21.900
awful, leading to bad choices that the rest of society doesn't seem to give a damn about.
00:42:27.920
Okay. Um, we can have that conversation. I don't think I need to know the answer to the question why,
00:42:33.820
as I don't think anybody actually does know the answer to that question, to be able to decide about
00:42:38.400
order, law, and civility. I mean, I, I think I get to ask of citizens, don't hurt the other person.
00:42:46.140
I get to ask that of them, regardless of their socioeconomic experience. That's a bedrock of
00:42:51.300
civilization. Uh, I get to expect that people are going to actually conform in such a way that they
00:42:56.740
don't take the lives of six-year-olds sitting on their auntie's lap on the front porch. That's
00:43:00.780
barbarity. Uh, so, um, uh, yes, people are going to say the system should be so configured, but I think
00:43:10.580
it's time to take responsibility for what's actually happening in African-American communities.
00:43:15.940
Uh, and that's why I'm speaking in the, uh, tone of voice that I'm speaking right now.
00:43:21.480
What do you make of that piece of it, Coleman, when you get down to
00:43:24.380
the reason what the, that's, that's where the discussion goes with that. What is the reason
00:43:32.240
Yeah, the, uh, again, I, I echo Glenn's frustration with the question itself and the,
00:43:40.920
the assumptions that are embedded in the question. Um, the assumptions that are embedded in the
00:43:46.640
question is that criminal behavior is, you know, completely unnatural. If someone has violent
00:43:53.040
impulses that, that couldn't possibly be, um, how some people are, uh, it has to be something
00:44:00.560
society injected into them. Um, I'm not sure that we know that. I mean, the, the history of our
00:44:08.960
species is, is, is the history of a lot of beautiful things, but a lot of ugly things and a lot of ugly
00:44:14.660
things that are done for no reason other than pure selfish nature, red in tooth and claw. And in many
00:44:23.940
ways you could make the argument as Steve, as Steven Pinker has that, um, the, the, the, really the
00:44:31.680
thing to explain is why, how populations have come to commit less crime, at least in the parts of the
00:44:39.180
West and the, the East that have incredibly low crime rates, that that's the phenomenon to be explained
00:44:45.340
beyond that. I would say, I, I have never heard a compelling explanation from the people that have
00:44:54.640
a theory about what the quote unquote root causes of crime are. Um, I've never heard of really a
00:45:01.720
compelling explanation of why crime spiked in the seventies, sixties, seventies, eighties, and early
00:45:07.640
nineties. And then suddenly came down in the nineties. Um, you know, and the, the truth is, as Glenn said,
00:45:18.560
you don't need the, the unified theory of what makes a person choose a criminal lifestyle over
00:45:28.660
a non-criminal lifestyle in order to get the ethical question, right. Which is that you have no right to
00:45:36.580
hurt your fellow citizens. And as a matter of keeping civilization in order, we have to prevent
00:45:44.140
you from doing that or punish you when you, when you, when you do it. So people have the, people have
00:45:49.780
this unthinking and naive, um, uh, I think belief that poverty causes crime. And therefore, if we
00:46:00.540
eliminate poverty, which said bar, how, how exactly does one do that?
00:46:06.580
Uh, fully, then the crime problem will just sort itself out. And I think that's incredibly naive.
00:46:13.940
It doesn't accord with the picture, certainly with my picture of human nature. Um, and that that's
00:46:22.380
how I would sum it up. Well, and does it, does it comport Glenn with what we've seen government try to
00:46:29.180
do historically to try to address poverty, like the welfare programs that came into place in,
00:46:35.320
in the great society, which were meant to help, you know, poor people, black people. And we saw a real
00:46:41.340
flip in the black marriage rate. And I guess some, some would dispute it, but in the, the number of
00:46:48.840
homes that don't have a father living in them in the black community, all of which have been cited as
00:46:54.340
possible reasons for black crime rates, black kids struggling in schools and so on.
00:46:59.460
Sure. I've, I've cited that myself to a certain degree, although it's very hard to draw any,
00:47:05.520
you know, ironclad quantitative, uh, you know, proof of, uh, the causal, causal links, uh, the link
00:47:14.700
between the welfare state and the decline or the unraveling of the black family. These are very
00:47:19.580
controversial things. People would go ballistic in the seminar rooms that I'm familiar with. If you were to
00:47:24.860
say these things out loud and, and I'm not going to take a stand of, of causality, but, but common
00:47:31.280
sense tells me that if you've got 70% of the kids born to black woman, born to a woman without a
00:47:39.200
husband, that this is a reflection of something not healthy in the social fiber of, of the community
00:47:45.360
for reasons that, you know, you could spend a lot of time talking about welfare state or, uh, bad
00:47:50.920
economy or whatever. Um, but, uh, I wanted to underscore the, the consequence of this racial
00:47:59.460
disparity and crime and criminal offending, which is that it makes it hard for us to stand against
00:48:04.440
crime and criminal offending because the society, this is really Shelby Steele's argument, but I think
00:48:09.160
he's right. I mean, the society as a whole is guilty about the fact of past racism. And we know we
00:48:14.340
have collectively speaking with regard to the treatment of black people, blood on our hands,
00:48:18.360
as America does. And so when you have this huge racial disparity in, um, in, uh, uh, crime and
00:48:27.200
criminal offending, incarceration and whatnot, uh, it, it makes it hard to stand up for law and order
00:48:32.660
that the very idea that you would invoke law and order would be thought to be racist. I mean, think
00:48:36.680
about that. Uh, there's something bizarre about that. It's racist to insist on law and order. Well,
00:48:42.440
only because the insistence on law and order would have you confronting, oh, I don't know,
00:48:46.860
mobs of people looting, uh, high-end boutiques on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. And who are
00:48:51.900
those people? And so you find yourself with a rhetoric about the causality of, you know, their
00:48:57.080
sense of dissatisfaction with society. And you even find yourself blaming the president of the United
00:49:01.240
States who might take the position against them as inciting them to something. Uh, when in fact,
00:49:07.280
you know, they, they are, uh, you know, uh, an embarrassing reflection of, uh, of structural failures
00:49:14.740
that we don't exactly know how to, how to deal with. Well, is there, is there something else at
00:49:20.900
play here? You know, the, was it Condi Rice who said the soft bigotry of low expectations? Um,
00:49:28.040
as we look at it first, George, uh, W. Bush used to say it though. Yeah. I think you got it from Condi.
00:49:34.440
Um, it's, uh, you look at some of the black crime rates and you look at how black kids are struggling
00:49:41.140
in our education system and how some schools are dealing with it. And in too many schools,
00:49:47.340
it's just to lower the standards or just assume they can't do it or pass them anyway, even though
00:49:51.860
they're reading and their, their math is entirely too low for their grade level. And I think this is
00:49:57.360
done by a lot of people who are trying to be allies, right? They're trying to sort of excuse
00:50:03.440
the crime rate in the one instance as, you know, they're victims of circumstance and excuse poor
00:50:09.680
performance in school, you know, for, for different, but maybe related reasons, but both
00:50:15.240
have the same net effect, which is to not really help anyone. And I think, you know, if we can focus
00:50:19.940
on schools for a minute and Glenn, you're of academia and Coleman, you, you just graduated
00:50:24.120
from Col, from Columbia. So you're not too far out of it yourself. I, I would love to talk about
00:50:29.360
the achievement gap because we've had huge, huge federal spending on trying to fix it, but it keeps
00:50:35.160
going up and, and the government, you know, they've tried to prioritize poor children to try
00:50:41.080
to equalize spending between poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, but still the test scores
00:50:45.360
and math and science of reading, they've remained flat for 40 years. And, um, the, the question is
00:50:52.980
why, right? Why just to give you a couple of stats. So the audience is up to speed. Uh, there was a,
00:50:58.280
I think there was a study in 2012 by the department of education, 79% of eighth graders in Chicago could
00:51:06.560
not read. Uh, and that was, it was split basically down the middle black and Hispanic in Detroit.
00:51:11.320
Only 7% of eighth graders were proficient in reading. Only 4% were proficient in math. And it was
00:51:21.520
something like in five out of seven categories, a majority of blacks were scoring at the lowest level
00:51:27.900
possible. So it's just, the stats are alarming and bad. And what we're hearing right now is that's
00:51:35.560
because of systemic racism. I'll give that one to you first Coleman. Yeah. So it strikes me that
00:51:43.780
when you talk about the bigotry of low expectations, the measure of how, of how much you respect a person
00:51:55.000
is what you would blame them for if they mess up. If, if I'm looking at the best chess player in the
00:52:05.260
world and he makes a blunder, I blame him. I say I'm disappointed in him. If, if on the other hand,
00:52:13.840
I'm looking at someone for whom it's true to say that nothing they could do would be so bad
00:52:19.460
that I would blame them and them only. What I'm saying about them is that I do not view them
00:52:26.360
as a full human being with agency and autonomy. You're saying about them, the opposite of what
00:52:35.920
you, you would say about the best chess player in the world, right? You're saying you view them in
00:52:41.800
precisely the opposite way as someone so low that nothing is beneath them. They cannot be blamed for
00:52:47.420
anything. They're like a child. Um, that's, that's the approach that is, is generally taken because
00:52:55.620
a lot of liberals feel that given the choice between quote unquote, victim blaming and, um,
00:53:07.540
and this kind of soft bigotry, they would prefer the soft bigotry because the victim blaming to them,
00:53:14.220
it, it, it, it seems like hard bigotry. And I think, um, a lot of, a lot of people look at these
00:53:22.260
stats and they feel dejected. They feel, I have no idea. I've, I don't really know how we could
00:53:28.900
make them much better. Um, because it's, it's a very tough thing, raising test scores. As you say,
00:53:40.060
we've been trying to do it for 50 years and, and it's not so easy at the same time, the, the charter
00:53:47.900
schools that occasionally have some success with it, for some reason, those are opposed by the left.
00:53:56.120
So it's, it's, it's, isn't it teachers unions? Isn't that the reason they're opposed?
00:54:00.880
That's fine. The contrast between the, uh, reception on the left of teachers unions and police unions to
00:54:05.720
be very, very interesting. Uh, teachers unions are unions and they're in the business of protecting
00:54:11.300
the interests of their members and the interests of their members are not perfectly aligned with
00:54:14.960
the interests of the kids. It's obvious given the statistics that you were talking about that
00:54:19.940
these institutions are not succeeding. Now there are home life issues and peer group issues and such
00:54:26.500
that, uh, have to be also taken into account, but the schools that are serving the kids in Baltimore
00:54:33.100
or in St. Louis or on the South side of Chicago or in South central Los Angeles or Oakland,
00:54:37.780
California, they're not succeeding. Uh, that system needs to be blown up. I, I, I mean, I know I'm
00:54:43.980
saying a very radical thing. Experimentation there should be welcome. Let a hundred thousand flowers
00:54:49.920
bloom. Charter schools, yeshiva schools in the equivalent of that in the Afrocentric world, whatever,
00:54:55.820
let a thousand flowers bloom. It's time for, uh, breaking up that system and getting these kids
00:55:00.660
better educational services. It wouldn't be a panacea. Uh, I wouldn't mind spending a little
00:55:05.440
bit more money if I thought it could be well spent. I'm not just going to shovel it into,
00:55:09.280
uh, this bureaucracy that is, uh, politically protecting itself. And that's not serving these
00:55:14.160
kids very well. It's like the teachers unions, all of us love our teachers. That's not the same
00:55:21.080
as loving your teachers union, which is really, they care about one thing, which is the union. I mean,
00:55:26.220
they didn't even put teachers first, that the union itself is what's most important in supporting
00:55:29.800
democratic causes. Uh, maybe teachers come up someplace after that, but students aren't even
00:55:35.040
on the list. Students are not their concern. Right. The other thing, I mean, so the teacher's
00:55:40.140
union explains why left-wing politicians, uh, are against charter schools. The argument I counter
00:55:48.100
from normal people are, you know, people who listen to podcasts and liberals who say, what are you
00:55:53.020
trying to say, Coleman? Uh, is that, uh, it takes money away from government and it's anti-public
00:56:01.860
school. And it occurs to me, this is kind of like, uh, there's a phrase market fundamentalism.
00:56:09.260
You know, if you're a libertarian, you think the market is always better than the government. In
00:56:12.680
every case you will be accused, I think justly of market fundamentalism and blind faith in markets,
00:56:18.100
but there's the opposite problem as well. Blind faith in government. Why should I have more of
00:56:23.360
an allegiance to the public education, public education system in itself? That's not an end.
00:56:29.500
The end is to educate kids by whatever means necessary.
00:56:34.340
What about, can I ask you, I read among the other works I was, I was into this summer was, uh,
00:56:39.580
Jason Riley's, please stop helping us. Right. Which is a great book. And he's writer for the wall
00:56:45.640
street journal. And he cites in there another, another problem, which is culture, culture. And
00:56:53.080
this is, I, I be honest with you, I feel uncomfortable even saying this as a, as a white
00:56:57.700
woman, but he, he talks about some study by a guy named John Ogbu of UC Berkeley and an anthropology
00:57:03.480
professor who went to Shaker Heights, Ohio in the late nineties. And, uh, try, and this is a,
00:57:09.740
an area that had black students. It was like one third of the, the residents were black. The school
00:57:14.660
district was pretty equally divided, but saying blacks trail significantly by GPA, by college
00:57:20.380
placement, by dropout rate. And, and a lot of these were affluent families and they were trying
00:57:25.700
to figure out what, why, why is that? And what, what Ogbu apparently concluded was that there is,
00:57:32.820
um, a culture at least at that school. And he extrapolated it where it wasn't cool. It was
00:57:40.780
considered quote white to get good grades, to take AP classes, to achieve honors, to talk properly.
00:57:49.720
That's the term used, um, in the book. And that there was peer pressure within the black student
00:57:57.220
community, not to work too hard. It wasn't prized or considered cool. Now, if that's a factor,
00:58:03.480
it's a problem. Like that's a, that's a, that's a big problem, but I don't know, as I say, it's a,
00:58:09.920
it's an uncomfortable thing to even raise. What are your thoughts, Glenn?
00:58:12.720
Megan, I would say it's actually an opportunity. Maybe it's both of those things, because if that's
00:58:17.160
the case, it can be changed. I mean, for example, if you make a genetic argument and you say the
00:58:21.740
blacks are, you know, just the IQ they've inherited and they don't have it. Well, there's not a lot can be
00:58:26.640
done about that. But if indeed, to the extent that it is the case that peer group norms and
00:58:32.780
social patterns and behavior, valorization, and what's thought hip, hip and cool is implicated,
00:58:40.040
well, you can have a campaign against that. You can, you can, uh, raise the consciousnesses of
00:58:44.300
people. You can, you know, redefine. I mean, I, I think this is an underestimated thing. Uh, African
00:58:49.900
Americans became black from being Negro sometime between, I don't know, 1950 and 1970, because,
00:58:57.360
uh, people started thinking it was okay for their hair to be natural and not have to be
00:59:01.580
straightened and that the light color of the skin was not necessarily a thing to affirm and things
00:59:06.120
like that. That's not nothing. That's something. So, so I would say that I think there's a lot of
00:59:10.920
evidence, not just Agbu. Agbu is dated the late, uh, great, uh, anthropologist, uh, that there,
00:59:17.220
you know, Friar even has some evidence on this. I could go into it, but it would take too much time
00:59:21.080
that there, that there is something to it. It's also, uh, verboten to say so in the enlightened,
00:59:27.500
uh, racial advocacy circles. It's like blaming, uh, blaming black people. But, uh, uh, yeah, I, I think,
00:59:35.560
uh, I, I think it's okay to, by the way, there's a flip side to this. Why are the Asian students
00:59:41.360
suing Harvard and Princeton or Yale, wherever they're suing, uh, insisting that they're being
00:59:46.460
discriminated against because these institutions should probably be 50% Asian student body if they
00:59:52.620
were admitting just based on academic merit instead of 20 or 25%. Um, is it, does it have
00:59:59.000
anything to do with culture, with how those communities organize, with what those peer groups
01:00:03.560
value, with how those families, uh, carry out their duties, with what expectations those, uh,
01:00:09.260
communities have for their people, with the institutions that they develop, the patterns
01:00:12.860
and practices and habits that they cultivate? I mean, so obviously culture, it seems to me
01:00:18.060
obvious that culture is, uh, a legitimate part of the account that you would give for disparity
01:00:25.700
in academic performance between groups. Yeah. I want to, yeah, go ahead. I just want to underscore
01:00:31.600
something. A couple of things Glenn said. One is one reason people don't like the culture argument
01:00:37.180
is because as Glenn said, they, they think it's not easily changed. They think it makes them
01:00:41.660
helpless. Oh, well, if it's culture, then I can't do anything about it. And, you know,
01:00:46.800
a thought occurred to me, which is that implicitly what that argument says is that if it's systemic
01:00:52.540
racism, then it's much easier to solve. And I'm not sure that that's true. So for example,
01:00:58.360
if you think about, let's say that prosecutors or real estate agents are, you know, have, have,
01:01:06.000
are, are, are racially biased, right? Like, like that, that documentary where they send identical,
01:01:13.780
otherwise identical white and black people to go apply for a mortgage and the real estate agents,
01:01:18.920
you know, treat them differently. Right. How that's very hard to root out too. I'm not sure that it's,
01:01:25.140
I'm not sure that it's easier to, to, you would have to have some kind of panopticon watching
01:01:30.380
every real estate agent in their private moments. And even then it would, you would have to like see
01:01:37.780
into their mind. And then, then once you know their races, how do you then change their behavior if
01:01:42.700
it's not in their self-interest to do so? My point is just that it's not so clear to me which one of
01:01:47.960
these is easier and which one of the, which one of which, which one is harder. As for the acting
01:01:53.820
white thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, it's something Obama has talked about. It's something
01:02:00.340
Jay-Z has talked about. Um, it's something I've experienced. There's a great book by Stuart Buck
01:02:07.560
called Acting White, which is, uh, just a treasure trove or data dump of examples of people complaining
01:02:17.640
about this since roughly the sixties. And, um, apparently there were not so many examples,
01:02:26.040
uh, before that time. So it's, it's something that is relatively new in American history. And,
01:02:32.600
uh, I will say one time I remember mentioning this at a charter school in the South Bronx run by,
01:02:40.180
uh, our mutual friend, uh, Ian Rowe. And that was the, one of the few times I've gotten a,
01:02:47.360
uh, an ovation from, uh, uh, a crowd of entirely, you know, black and Hispanic parents is when I
01:02:56.480
mentioned this notion of acting white being pernicious. So clearly it resonated in some way
01:03:01.540
with people. Um, and I think it's more present in some places than other places. A lot of black
01:03:07.220
people I've mentioned really don't, didn't grow up with it, but it's pervasive enough that it ought to
01:03:13.040
be talked about, um, and opposed. Coming up in one second, we're going to talk more with Glennon
01:03:22.320
Coleman about the 1619 project, academia, and also patriotism and what's being sold in our schools
01:03:32.480
today instead of patriotism. How do you raise a patriot? They've got some thoughts I think you're
01:03:37.040
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dot com. All right, back to Glenn and Coleman in one second. But first, we're going to bring you a
01:04:47.240
feature we call Asked and Answered. And this is where we bring in our executive producer, Steve
01:04:52.160
Krakauer, to do the Asked part of this feature. Steve? Hey, Megan. Yeah, lots of great questions
01:04:57.880
continue coming in. Send those to questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. This one comes from
01:05:04.420
Jennifer Bell. Sort of a general question that I thought is a good little look behind the scenes.
01:05:08.580
She says she's been enjoying the show, enjoys the middle of the road approach, and wants to know,
01:05:12.120
how do you select guests that come on your show? Well, it depends. I mean, some people I just love
01:05:18.760
and I want to talk to and I, you know, gave my team a list. And like the interview you're listening
01:05:23.080
to right now, I would fall in that category. Like I, there was zero chance of me doing the show
01:05:27.680
without talking to those two guys. And I want to have them back on over and over and over. And I
01:05:31.520
hope you feel the same way. I could have picked any one of those subjects and we could have done an
01:05:35.160
hour with those guys on, you know, racial preferences, on police, on Black Lives Matter.
01:05:39.800
They're just brilliant. There's just not enough time in the day. But then, you know, there's also just the
01:05:46.060
work of my team where we sit down and we ask ourselves, what are the issues in the news and
01:05:50.120
who would be the best guest for it? What are the books coming out and which ones have our interest?
01:05:56.140
I don't know who's sort of a provocateur out there who might be fun to talk to. Like when I saw Kim
01:06:00.560
Klasik on The View take on Joy and Sunny, I was like, I want to know her. So some of it is just
01:06:07.520
fulfilling my personal wish list based on what the team finds interesting too. I will tell you without
01:06:14.080
revealing the guests. All right. I'm not going to tell you who it is. But I said to my team,
01:06:19.900
there is one set of guests that if you could get them, it would be my dream come true. Like I could
01:06:26.320
retire. I don't, I don't have to interview anybody ever again after I speak with this set. And they
01:06:32.620
were like, okay. And we got them. And there, and, and my team, Steve, I'm talking about you. You just,
01:06:40.020
you sent me an email update about the guests. You were like, okay, so on the 10th,
01:06:43.160
we have this person. And on the 12th, we have that person. And on the 14th and I,
01:06:46.920
and you just threw them in there. Like it was a nothing. I was like, ah, I was on the couch with
01:06:53.340
my family and my kids were like, what, what, what happened? Like, oh my God. So, I mean,
01:06:58.920
this is a great tease for the interview. Everybody home is wondering who the hell it could be,
01:07:02.820
who could generate this most excitement. They're almost sure to be disappointed now. Anything I say
01:07:06.900
is going to be a disappointment, but it's a collective effort is the bottom line. And
01:07:12.100
sometimes it's really, it brings a lot of delight into my life and hopefully into yours. Do I think
01:07:17.720
I, did I sum it up? Okay. What do you think? Yeah. I don't think anyone will have any idea
01:07:21.320
what it, what it is, but they will, they will find out next month. That's a good tease.
01:07:26.340
Yeah. We don't, I don't think we're going to air it until right December. So
01:07:29.500
I haven't done the interview yet. Um, I don't know why I'm not telling you, but it's, it's fun
01:07:34.360
to keep the mystery alive a little bit, just a little bit to keep you guessing. Uh, I'm taking
01:07:38.440
your submissions. People who know me well might know who, who that would be for me. It's not
01:07:43.960
Judge Judy. I do love her, but I've interviewed her many times. These are people I've never,
01:07:47.480
ever spoken to, but have long, long, long loved from afar. Okay. I'm going to leave it at that. But,
01:07:52.580
uh, Hey, if you guys have guest suggestions, I'll take them. I actually do look, we, we have,
01:07:56.980
we monitor our Instagram page and, uh, Twitter and the reviews that people post at Apple.
01:08:04.260
And I've actually gotten a lot of great ideas from there. Uh, somebody was like,
01:08:07.180
have on Sam Harris. We're having on Sam Harris. So I appreciate that and keep them coming.
01:08:18.440
Well, as you guys know, now we're at a place where things like self-reliance, determination,
01:08:24.540
belief in the American dream, according to the Smithsonian, at least those are all white terms
01:08:30.040
that are racist. If you encourage them in, in black people or students, you know, it's gotten
01:08:34.640
to the point now where ideals that we used to attach to academic achievement or striving to be
01:08:41.060
a professional success are now being dismissed as racist and not laudable. You know, and you've got
01:08:47.460
that example. You've got the example at Rutgers Glenn, where they decided to, to change the,
01:08:53.140
the grammar standards because they thought they were racist against black students as, you know,
01:08:57.540
as if they, they're not capable of, of something higher or better, you know, that, that it's racist
01:09:04.800
to expect that. And I, I do wonder where all of this goes. Like where, where does this wind up?
01:09:11.480
Oh, it's very troubling. Um, and I think the character of the country in some ways is being tested.
01:09:17.520
Um, I like to think about it in terms of, you know, the history of discrimination cannot have,
01:09:24.620
but had the consequence of hindering the full development of African-American potential.
01:09:30.020
So when we come through the era of the civil rights movement, where we are now, where
01:09:34.360
pretty much we have reckoned with, you know, uh, that legacy. I mean, we have equal rights laws all
01:09:41.660
across the board, there will still be disparity because there's a disparity of development.
01:09:46.140
Um, and that's going to manifest itself in a lot of, uh, in a lot of ways, including in the
01:09:50.700
performance of kids in these educational institutions, maintaining the standard and,
01:09:55.520
uh, addressing the developmental deficit. So as the raised kids to the standard is the way to
01:10:00.560
respond to that situation. But the temptation is to avoid the hard work of actually addressing the
01:10:07.540
residue of the historical oppression and to lower the standard in the interest of quote-unquote
01:10:12.780
equality. And the thing that I find most troubling about it, uh, not only the loss of human potential,
01:10:18.740
but the loss of integrity and, and dignity in, in, in the society, because everybody actually knows,
01:10:24.900
uh, the difference between, uh, fit, uh, healthy, uh, you know, uh, performance and, and, uh,
01:10:33.080
unfit and, and, and deficient performance. And you can't read, you can't read.
01:10:36.920
There's no way to hide that. Um, so the, um, inequality of history, which led to the
01:10:45.080
underdevelopment of the black population or some segments of it, when that development is under
01:10:50.560
development is papered over and not addressed, continues in a, in a, uh, in a, in a kind of
01:10:57.740
unexpressed way. It continues, uh, with people pretending that it doesn't exist. Uh, and, and I think
01:11:04.780
that's, uh, that's, uh, uh, a very bad place for us to be here. You know, this summer, all these
01:11:12.580
schools, including yours, Glenn Brown university, uh, rushed to send out self-flagellating letters
01:11:18.600
about how racist they are, how racist America is, how sorry they are. And then it wasn't enough to
01:11:24.140
say you're a racist. You had to say you're an anti-black racist anti, you know, like it lists
01:11:27.700
the things that you've done and said that are bad. We got, our kids are in a, we have a daughter.
01:11:32.980
She's at an all girl's school. We have two boys and an all boy's school. So both of the schools
01:11:36.780
sent almost identical letters, just we're terrible. The U S is terrible. So sorry. We're going to do
01:11:42.580
everything within our power to make it up to everybody. And I think a lot of us were looking
01:11:45.900
at this, like, what specifically did you do? What did, what'd you do? I mean, there really wasn't
01:11:50.640
anything specific. It was just an attempt to appease, uh, some of these student groups that were
01:11:57.600
popping up, you know, black at this school, black at that school recounting alleged incidents of
01:12:02.420
racism that had happened 30 years ago. Some deeply disturbing, some milk toast, you know,
01:12:07.280
like I, I sat alone at the lunch table for a year. Meanwhile, I was like, well, that that's
01:12:11.300
called middle school, white or black. Um, but I know that you spoke up at Brown when, cause
01:12:17.920
you were ticked off because it, it had sort of the air of, let me speak on behalf of the
01:12:25.440
university to tell you how awful we are and what we're going to do about it. And you people
01:12:30.600
will not be surprised now that they've gotten to know you on, on this, um, spoke up. It's
01:12:36.160
referred to as the Paxton letter Paxton, because it was written by Christina Paxton, Brown's
01:12:41.500
president. And it asserted that oppression as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and
01:12:46.120
hate directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation, every
01:12:49.220
minute and every hour committing the university to programming courses, research opportunities
01:12:53.180
to promote equity and justice, and went on and on from there to do some of the self
01:12:57.500
flagellating that I just discussed. Why did you have such a problem with it?
01:13:01.840
This was in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Uh, I had a problem with it because it was signed
01:13:06.420
by every top administrator in the university, the person who runs the university's portfolio,
01:13:10.860
the general counsel of the university, the provost of the university, dean of the faculty,
01:13:14.480
dean of the school of public health, and so forth. Uh, it was a manifesto. You read some of
01:13:20.040
the language. I mean, think about that language. Uh, I can imagine the professor at
01:13:24.500
African-American studies who, uh, sent the memo that ended up getting adapted into the letter
01:13:30.740
that had a sentence in it that every hour of every day and so forth and so on. It was
01:13:34.920
preachy. Um, it, it declared as if there were no argument that the killing of George Floyd
01:13:41.260
was a manifestation of white supremacy run amok among us and that all decent people must
01:13:46.620
stand on the right side. And I thought that, um, Christina Paxton could have had that opinion
01:13:52.260
as her personal opinion, but to have that sent to every student, every member of the faculty and
01:13:57.000
staff and every alumnus, we're talking about many, many tens of thousands of people
01:14:01.340
with the imprimatur of the entire university leadership, uh, that it was precluding the very
01:14:09.680
intellectual deliberation about these sensitive and complex matters that the university exists
01:14:16.700
to carry out in the first place. I thought it was the most horrific abuse of the responsibilities
01:14:22.540
of management of this precious institution, which is a university to put it on a bandwagon,
01:14:29.520
to have it join a parade of people marching down the street with a banner. It's as if the university
01:14:34.300
had taken a position in the presidential election, or if it had declared a position in the conflict
01:14:39.320
in the Middle East or something like that, the cops, the riots, the civil disturbances, Black Lives Matter,
01:14:45.560
these are not straightforward, unambiguous, monodimensional, uh, issues. These are very
01:14:52.680
profound things. We're there to think it through. The university exists to think matters through.
01:15:00.520
Um, this politicization is horrible. It is poisoning the well. We be careful that we don't be able to
01:15:09.240
get it back, that we can't get it back, okay? This is not good. Um, so, uh, the, the idea that
01:15:18.040
all right-thinking people in Brown's community agree that Derek Chauvin's killing of George Floyd, if indeed
01:15:24.440
he did do so, was a reflection of a, every hour of every day Black people live under the whatever, that is
01:15:31.480
clearly, uh, uh, a, uh, propagandistic, ideological, uh, uh, pose. Uh, it was horrible that the president
01:15:41.160
of a university took that position. Horrible. So can I tell you, this resonated with me for personal
01:15:47.960
reasons. Um, at our, I should say that we're, we've decided to move. New York City is, it's out of control
01:15:58.040
on so many levels. And, uh, after years of resisting it, we're, we're going to leave the
01:16:03.960
city. Um, and we, we pulled our boys from their school and our daughter's going to leave her soon,
01:16:09.640
too. Um, but the schools have already, they've always been far left, which doesn't align with my
01:16:15.320
own ideology, but I didn't really care. You know, it's just like I, most of my friends are liberals.
01:16:19.080
It's fine. I come from Democrats as a family. I did. I don't, I'm not offended at all by the ideology.
01:16:23.800
And I, I lean center left on some things, but they've gone around the bend. I mean,
01:16:29.000
they have gone off the deep end and I wanted to get your reaction to a letter that was circulated
01:16:35.400
at the school. We've now left my, my, my son's school, former school this summer in the wake
01:16:43.480
of George Floyd, they circulated amongst the diversity group, which includes white parents
01:16:48.120
like us, you know, just people who are want to be allies and stay attuned to what we can do.
01:16:54.360
Um, uh, an article and afterward they, they recirculated it and wanted every member of the
01:17:00.200
faculty to read it. It was written by a woman named Nalia Weber, who says she's the executive
01:17:06.680
director of the Orleans public education network. She works in education advocacy.
01:17:10.920
And just give me one minute to tell you some highlights of what she writes that my school
01:17:17.880
wanted circulated to all the faculty. She says, um, there is a killer cop sitting in every school
01:17:26.920
where white children learn. They gleefully soak in their whitewashed history that downplays the
01:17:33.440
Holocaust of indigenous native peoples and Africans in the Americas. They happily believe they're all white
01:17:39.340
spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against black bodies to
01:17:44.060
keep those spaces white as black bodies drop like flies around us from violence at white hands.
01:17:50.620
How can we, in any of our minds conclude that whites are all right.
01:17:56.780
White children are left unchecked and unbothered in their schools,
01:18:00.060
homes and communities to join, advance and protect systems that take away black life.
01:18:03.900
I am tired of white people reveling in their state sanctioned depravity,
01:18:10.300
snuffing out black life with no consequences. Where is the urgency for school reform for white kids
01:18:17.420
being indoctrinated in black death and protected from the consequences? Where are the government
01:18:23.860
sponsored reports looking into how white mothers are raising culturally deprived children who think
01:18:30.220
black death is okay? Where are the national conferences, white papers, and policy positions
01:18:36.060
on the pathology of whiteness in schools? And here's the last part. This time, if you really want to make a
01:18:44.140
difference in black lives and not have to protest this shit again, go reform white kids because that's
01:18:51.660
where the problem is with white children being raised from infancy to violate black bodies with no remorse
01:19:16.940
You can't be racist against white people, Glenn. You know that.
01:19:23.740
I want to point out one thing. I think I hold out a little bit of hope.
01:19:28.940
Because the problem right now is that woke is cool.
01:19:36.460
Being a woke anti-racist, you know, if you're at the age where you very much care about being
01:19:44.540
seen as cool by your friends, obviously not if you live in a red part of the country, but if you live
01:19:49.660
in a city, if you live in a liberal suburb, it's cool to be woke. It feels anti-establishment in
01:19:57.980
some ways, even though I think I could make a case that it's not, given that, you know, Walmart and
01:20:03.740
Target are saying black lives matter at this point. Nevertheless, for many people, it feels like
01:20:10.460
they didn't necessarily get woke from their kindergarten and sixth grade teachers. So they
01:20:14.700
still feel you can tap into that sense of edgy, identity-seeking adolescents by being woke.
01:20:25.580
As this stuff pervades the school systems, and as people start hearing woke ideas from
01:20:31.980
their kindergarten teachers, there's nothing that will make it less cool more quickly. And
01:20:37.420
I hold out hope that that will happen as a result. Maybe that's optimistic.
01:20:43.180
You mentioned the term, they're poisoning the well. And that's, that's how I felt when I read that
01:20:48.780
letter. Which, which boy in my kids' school is the future killer cop? Is it my boy? Which boy is it?
01:20:57.740
Because I don't happen to believe they're in there.
01:21:01.020
It's based on your whiteness. I mean, do you really, if you're a person interested in the
01:21:06.620
well-being of Black people, want to invite a close scrutiny of the race of people who hurt other
01:21:14.460
people in this country? Because if you do, you'll find that Blacks attacks on whites are outnumbered.
01:21:21.740
I'm sorry, whites attacks on blacks are outnumbered probably by an order of magnitude by Blacks attacks
01:21:27.180
on whites. I don't have statistics in front of me, but I'm very fairly confident that that's true.
01:21:32.940
True. So, so why are we racializing this thing? Why is it the essentialization of race? A person in
01:21:40.460
that situation should be asked at the letter that you read to defend the position that the race of
01:21:47.340
the person is the thing that's relevant. I don't see that killer cops are white. White kids are at
01:21:54.060
risk of it. Think of flipping the script on that. Suppose you imputed anything of that sort
01:21:59.180
to Black people based upon our race. That would be horrific. It is indeed racist.
01:22:05.740
Mm-hmm. I feel like pieces like that, and listen, she was sort of a floating academic before
01:22:13.660
our school circulated it, you know, within the parent body and the faculty. That's, that's a different
01:22:19.500
level. But I feel like they are, they're trying to create racism where none existed. You know,
01:22:25.900
I mean, honestly, think of how the, most of the white parents felt in response to that.
01:22:31.260
You know, some, because they're far left liberals here in New York are like, yes, yes. Self-flagellation,
01:22:36.300
more of it. Right. That's just what we need. But I will tell you, I was like, listen, lady,
01:22:41.980
my, my sons are not future killer cops. Neither are his little classmates. And you're out of line.
01:22:47.640
You're out of line. And it makes you upset, right? It's like, I think all of these messages from
01:22:53.820
people like Robin DiAngelo that, you know, my main goal in life is to work on being less white
01:22:58.980
is not doing much good for, for our race relations. They're injecting so much tension
01:23:06.540
where it didn't exist before. And I understand the, the, the argument from some of these sort of
01:23:12.460
activists will be, that's your white privilege talking. That's your way. It's, it's been an
01:23:16.940
active matter for every black person. You're just too privileged to understand. And now we're just
01:23:20.740
bringing you into our world. So you can understand how hard it's been. And I don't really give a damn
01:23:23.880
if it's making you feel uncomfortable or pissed off. So what, what do we do with that?
01:23:29.760
It's not just Robin DiAngelo. It's Ibram Kendi. It's not just Ibram Kendi. It's Ta-Nehisi
01:23:34.140
Coates. It's not just Ta-Nehisi Coates. It's Nicole Hannah-Jones. It's not just Nicole Hannah-Jones.
01:23:38.080
It's Ava DuVernay. Uh, the, the drift of this, uh, white supremacist domination,
01:23:46.020
black bodies, uh, rhetoric is what, uh, is what accounts for this. I cannot tell you, Megan,
01:23:51.420
you're going to have to tell me why it is that white people are so susceptible to allowing themselves
01:23:57.060
to be, uh, uh, flagellated, uh, with this stuff because it's, uh, you know, it's not exactly
01:24:04.320
compelling. Cause we're scared. We're scared. We don't want to be called racist. You know, I mean,
01:24:09.560
the only reason I, I feel capable of discussing these issues as openly as I do is because I've been
01:24:14.600
called that word so many times it's lost all its meaning. And I figured out at this point in my
01:24:18.740
career, it's, it's a tactic. They don't actually think I'm a racist or maybe they do, but the reason
01:24:23.860
they're calling me that is to shut me up. You know, that that's why they're saying it. And, but I think
01:24:29.860
for most people to be called a racist is probably the worst thing they could be called. And they just
01:24:34.640
rather not say a damn word. They'd rather not touch it. Yeah. I mean, think of Kamala and Joe Biden,
01:24:41.180
you know, I'm not the first person to point this out, but you know, the whole subtext of her attack
01:24:45.920
on him, uh, over busing and, uh, uh, you know, making deals with segregationist senators back in
01:24:53.340
the day was you're a racist. And then all of a sudden when it's in her self-interest, that's
01:24:57.400
forgotten. And frankly, most people seem not to care. Most people who liked the Biden Kamala ticket
01:25:04.180
didn't, you know, they, they, many liked the attack of the activists. At least they liked the
01:25:10.440
attack on Joe Biden for racism, but suddenly when she paired up with him, it's totally fine to be in
01:25:15.220
bed with a racist. Not to, not to mention Anita Hill, not to mention, uh, Tara Reid. Yeah. I think
01:25:23.320
part of the, I think Shelby Steele has a very good line about this, uh, in his recent documentary and
01:25:29.160
in his writing, which is that white guilt is misnamed. It's not really guilt. It is a terror
01:25:33.600
at the thought of, uh, being accused of racism or the terror at the thought that one might actually
01:25:39.860
be a racist. Um, and I think there are many white people that haven't felt that. And so can't
01:25:49.440
understand why white people who have felt that terror act so insane and self-flagellating and
01:25:57.340
masochistic, but for those that do feel that guilt or that terror, um, it's incredibly attractive to
01:26:04.860
have this ideology that, you know, Robin DiAngelo, for example, what she says is yes, white people,
01:26:11.240
you're all racist, but it's not your fault. Society created you racist. So in the same way that one,
01:26:19.380
one can walk into a church and feel forgiven by Jesus, Jesus sees all my sins. He sees
01:26:26.600
my, my, my ugliness and still forgives me. Nonetheless, that feeling of release is what
01:26:32.460
white people are looking for and what attracts them to this absolutely otherwise unintelligible
01:26:37.760
ideology. Well, you know what I've realized in my, in my travails is most of the people who are
01:26:45.280
loudest in their insults toward me, at least when it comes to that charge are white liberals. I honestly,
01:26:52.540
and if somebody, if I ever meet a black person who has an issue like that, they tend to be very
01:26:56.400
progressive. I have yet to meet a conservative black person who has any problem with me whatsoever.
01:27:02.520
And so over time you realize this isn't a skin color issue. This is a politics issue. And once you
01:27:09.220
realize that it helps you reframe the whole thing, it helps you regain your willingness to talk openly
01:27:14.480
and honestly, but it's hard, man. It's hard. And I don't know a lot of white people who have,
01:27:19.920
even if they understand that, who would talk about it publicly? Well, you know,
01:27:23.060
I'll have a dinner where somebody will say, you know, tell me what you've learned. What do you
01:27:26.300
think about this? But they would never have that conversation in the public square at their
01:27:30.420
office place, especially now. Well, all of all that's happened over the summer has only
01:27:35.500
shamed people more into the closet from discussing racial issues. What do you think?
01:27:39.500
I think that must be true. It must be true. And it's so interesting,
01:27:42.980
the disparity between what it is you can say publicly and what it is that you might think
01:27:47.240
and how people negotiate with each other. I wonder what these dinner parties are like, where
01:27:51.420
quote unquote, white people are sitting around, all of them are getting the same stimulus of
01:27:56.220
the same news feed, the same public conversation about what's going on. And they know their
01:28:03.300
correct positions. How do they reveal to each other the fact that they might have doubts,
01:28:08.160
the fact that they might not really, really buy into the narrative that they're all racist?
01:28:12.520
How do they, you know, work around that? I mean, that's got to be some very interesting,
01:28:18.260
very interesting material for a novelist to, you know, if we had a Tom Wolfe, a kind of,
01:28:23.680
you know, satirist who could take us behind the scenes of, you know, white people letting their
01:28:28.000
hair down. I mean, that could be a comic routine or something like that.
01:28:32.620
Well, I've been open about this stuff for years, right? And it's like, I've been trying to discuss
01:28:37.500
race issues. I think you need more white people who are willing to take risks. Otherwise,
01:28:41.320
even, I said this to Coleman when I went on his podcast, even if you falter, even if you don't
01:28:45.840
do it perfectly, I can speak to that. So what? You got to try. How are we going to get past this?
01:28:51.060
If, if it's like white liberals in a silo, self-flagellating, and then guys like you who
01:28:57.440
are willing to have really open, honest discussions about it, but ne'er the twain shall meet. You know,
01:29:02.140
there's not going to be any debate. Even Coleman's been trying to get Ibram X. Kendi to debate him
01:29:06.160
forever. And Ibram's like, who? Huh? What? No, he won't do it. He won't defend the premise of his book.
01:29:11.320
To someone like Coleman Hughes, I think, cause he knows he's going to be outmatched. Anyway, so
01:29:15.980
I, I, I'll be at a party where I'll say, Hey, did you see this? You see this Coleman Hughes,
01:29:20.920
Hughes, please, peace or whatever. I'll try to race something. And I'm telling you, it's like,
01:29:25.060
and these are with people from all, all parts of the ideological spectrum. Cause as I say, I'm,
01:29:29.840
I was at Fox news for 13 years, but I live in the upper West side. So it's all,
01:29:33.360
it's all liberals. All my friends are liberals. And it's like crickets. No one will say
01:29:38.460
anything in response. They just don't want to touch race because it's become now a third rail.
01:29:45.580
And if you're white, the only proper response is, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
01:29:50.840
I don't know. It's annoying too. I find I've, I've, I'm, I would much prefer personally,
01:29:55.340
I would prefer to be friends with a white person that is unfiltered and sometimes goes too far
01:30:03.360
and says something that even rubs me the wrong way than someone who is just made themselves more
01:30:12.460
boring by giving into white guilt. What do you guys think people should do? You know,
01:30:18.280
I've been thinking about this. We've been talking about it openly. Now we're in an age where your
01:30:21.960
company says you got to go to anti-racist training and it really is. You, you, you have to,
01:30:29.160
this is being done at our schools, not our new school, but it's, you have to sit there and
01:30:35.480
for like three days at some of these seminars that you have to, you wind up having to put a placard
01:30:40.820
around your neck with your degree of racism, one through 10. So you get to wear your, your scarlet
01:30:48.000
letter. And then the black participants get to tell you about their experiences and, you know,
01:30:54.960
racism and so on, how it's affected their lives. The white people are not supposed to speak at all.
01:30:59.160
And then on the last day of the seminar, they're allowed to say like a couple of things, but they
01:31:02.520
need to be supportive. And most of the time you are told to quote, sit in the quiet of your own
01:31:07.100
white racism. I, so many people want to know, how do I not do that? I, I have no wish to do it. I've
01:31:15.580
no wish to put my kid through it at, again, at one of the schools we're leaving. It's now, there's a push
01:31:20.680
to make it mandatory for, for, for students to have to sit through that again, dividing boys who are
01:31:27.500
loving and friends, you know, a couple of months ago, now being told one of you is the oppressor
01:31:31.460
and one of you is the oppressed. So what do you guys think? What, what is the answer to that?
01:31:35.900
Megan, have you heard about Jody Shaw, the case of Jody Shaw? She's, I love her. Smith.
01:31:41.800
Oh, you know her. Okay. Yes, indeed. She's putting out these videos.
01:31:43.940
I don't know her, but I love her. And I watched her video.
01:31:46.980
Yeah. I've watched her videos as well. She's, she's a member of the staff of Smith college.
01:31:53.200
And she's complaining in the series of videos about how she's been treated inside of these
01:31:58.420
diversity training sessions. I won't try to recapitulate what she says, but it seems to me
01:32:04.320
Yeah. Well, that's the thing. What I love about Jody Shaw is she's kind of, you know,
01:32:10.140
meek. I would say she doesn't, she doesn't project very strong. And yet she's, she's doing
01:32:17.180
it, man. I mean, she's brave. She's like, this is baloney. I don't want to be shamed for the color
01:32:23.000
of my skin. And we should be able to have discussions without getting shamed by the university. Oh, and by
01:32:28.700
the way, everything I'm saying is protected by the law. So don't fire me.
01:32:31.780
But I do think unless people, unless we get more Jody's, um, or people just willing to say,
01:32:39.240
I'm just, as Douglas Murray keeps saying, you have to say, I refuse to let you re racialize
01:32:44.740
my company, my country and myself, but man, easier said than done.
01:32:51.480
And it, it occurs to me, I would like someone who defends this kind of diversity workshop where
01:32:58.740
white people are told to remain silent, to come up with a single example from human history,
01:33:05.360
where you have improved the relationship between two groups of people that see themselves to some
01:33:11.860
extent as groups, having some kind of group consciousness by, by ritual dominance, right?
01:33:20.500
Like, what is more, what is a more direct signal of social dominance than you cannot speak?
01:33:30.040
You must listen and not reply. That's, that's what a parent does to punish their child.
01:33:37.800
How, how, again, come up with one example in which that improved rather than created resentment
01:33:43.480
in the population that has to submit to the ritual dominance. I would never as a black person
01:33:49.860
submit to such humiliation. And I would never ask anyone else to.
01:33:55.200
It's a, it's so ironic because it's really based upon white power. I mean, the reason that they get
01:34:00.340
away with saying you can't speak is the presumption that in your whiteness, you are, you're this dominant
01:34:06.240
force that has oppressed. And so you have now to cede the ground to the, to the weak and whatnot.
01:34:13.020
And that's their power. Their power is pointing to white power in a way. I mean, it, it, it, it proceeds
01:34:21.540
at the sufferance of the oppressor. You declare the white to be the oppressor and you, you impose upon
01:34:28.580
him or her in this way. And you expect them to forbear and to allow you to impose because they accept
01:34:34.900
the fact that they are the oppressor. Uh, you give them all the power.
01:34:38.820
Right. I mean, I was saying after Robin D'Angelo's book, if I behaved the way this woman wants me to
01:34:44.580
behave, my black friends would laugh in my face. If I walked, can you imagine, let's see, I see you
01:34:51.080
next time at the comedy salary Coleman. And I walk in and I say, I just want to begin with, I apologize
01:34:56.160
on behalf of myself, on behalf of my race. And I promise to spend the rest of my life trying to make
01:35:01.740
a man's, I mean, it's, you'd be insufferable. You can't actually develop intimacy, whether as a
01:35:09.840
friend or more with somebody, if, if, if you presuppose that they trump you on, on whole domains
01:35:19.820
of, of reality, like race relations, right? Like your thoughts don't matter. Um, you have to remain
01:35:26.500
silent. You have to submit to them. It's just, it's, it's not, uh, you know, it's not a relationship
01:35:31.920
that I would want with any of my white friends. Like I said, I would rather have someone who's
01:35:36.860
unfiltered and wrong sometimes than someone who is so filtered that I have no idea who they actually
01:35:43.520
are, what they actually think, or if they even know what they actually think, you know, cause you
01:35:48.140
can get to a point where you don't allow yourself to think because you're so afraid of what you might
01:35:53.060
actually think if you, if indeed you really thought. That's exactly right. That is perfect.
01:36:02.460
I, you know, it's, I have to say as growing up as a Democrat, you know, a Democrat house and
01:36:07.980
going through academia, which tends to make you lean left anyway, I never really spent a lot of
01:36:12.660
time thinking about a lot of these issues. And one of them was affirmative action, but I was like,
01:36:16.820
I'm, I guess I'm pro affirmative action. Cause I'm, I'm pro equality. And that seems to be
01:36:21.820
something that my side when I was growing up was for. So that sounds good. And then, and the more
01:36:27.420
I've read about that, the more I've really had reason to second guess myself. And you know, I,
01:36:34.120
I read Heather McDonald's book and I, and I've been reading a lot of Shelby Thomas soul, you guys.
01:36:40.600
And I know there really are questions about how well that works out, right? Like when it comes to
01:36:47.060
student education, that's what I'm talking about in particular, like racial preferences in university
01:36:52.640
admissions, um, which, you know, they just tried to re-legalize in California. They had, they had
01:36:58.780
outlawed them and, and they tried to re-legalize them and the voters rejected that. But it does seem
01:37:05.800
like that may be part of the Jason Riley, please stop helping us, right? Cause it doesn't help at all
01:37:13.300
in the long run, because what, what the studies seem to show is that it creates a division for the
01:37:19.320
black student who gets into a university that he might not have otherwise have been admitted to.
01:37:22.940
Cause you know, people, uh, may hold it against him. They may assume he's there for reasons other
01:37:29.320
than he deserves to be. And that he may in fact not be able to handle the work or she may, you know,
01:37:34.740
if I, if I were admitted to Harvard, because somebody wanted to do affirmative action or, you know,
01:37:38.720
preferences for people who are Irish, it would have been a miserable experience for me. I can tell you
01:37:42.940
right now, I could not have handled that course load and Glenn used to work there. So, you know,
01:37:45.900
this, um, but I went to Syracuse and you know what? I was a star. It was great. Worked out great for me.
01:37:52.660
So it doesn't always work out to, to lift somebody up to a place that they're actually,
01:37:56.780
their raw academic merits couldn't have justified. What do you think, Glenn?
01:38:02.760
Yeah, well, I think it's a, we've been at this forever. Uh, affirmative action is going all the
01:38:07.420
way back to the 1970s. This is a half century. Um, it should have been, uh, and should be conceived of
01:38:13.960
as, uh, a transitional response to the underrepresentation of African-Americans that
01:38:20.400
is a part of a dynamic developmentally focused program that has as its end state, a institution
01:38:29.040
of equal standards of performance. Instead, it's become a crutch. Uh, it's, it's not a hand up,
01:38:35.980
it's a handout. Uh, it's not dealing with the fact that there were no blacks at places like Harvard
01:38:41.440
or Princeton or Yale in 1950. Uh, and that's not acceptable for our democracy to dealing with the
01:38:47.140
fact that, uh, what you said is true about, uh, primary and secondary education in so many
01:38:52.440
communities in this country that are not serving well, these African-American students. Um, I mean,
01:38:58.120
I think, uh, there's huge controversy about the empirical effects of affirmative action. I think you
01:39:05.740
can probably justify as Bowen and Bach, presidents of, uh, uh, Princeton and Harvard in the 1990s,
01:39:13.500
William Bowen and Derek Bach in their book, The Shape of the River, they try to justify what they're
01:39:19.140
doing. They said, no, we're not using the same standards, but by and large, our kids do okay.
01:39:22.900
They get through, they get their degrees, they become important people in their communities and
01:39:26.480
their professions, and they contribute to American society. And we need to integrate the elites of
01:39:31.240
American society. You can't have lily white elites. They're saying that, but that's a, that should be
01:39:36.600
a transitional thing. The institutionalization of it is horrible. It's, it's so corrupt. It, uh,
01:39:44.380
tarnishes the, uh, achievements. Uh, it, uh, uh, uh, creates doubt. It creates mediocrity. Uh, people are in
01:39:54.780
over their heads in so many venues and so many situations and the response rather than recognizing
01:40:00.640
that. And by the way, it's a statistical necessity. If you're the lead institution and you're selecting
01:40:05.860
from the very right tail of the performance of the kids, and you have different standards
01:40:10.400
by race, you're going to get different performance by race after the fact. The standards are correlated
01:40:16.380
with how kids do after they get in. If you're using different standards, you're going to get on
01:40:20.160
average different performance. And that creates a situation where, uh, in order to avoid acknowledging
01:40:26.240
the different performance, you end up watering down. You end up with great inflation. Uh, you end
01:40:30.420
up with African-American studies. I'm sorry, people get very angry with me for saying this, but you end
01:40:34.900
up with mediocrity. No, all African-American studies is not mediocre, but people switch out of the STEM
01:40:40.560
disciplines and they go into the soft disciplines in order to avoid the rigorous quantitative work that
01:40:45.780
things get, things get watered down. Um, and, and this is not equality.
01:40:52.700
So in other words, if you're at Harvard and you wouldn't have otherwise gotten in,
01:40:56.300
you, you maybe, if you had gone, you know, to Syracuse, you, you could have been an engineer.
01:41:02.200
You could have handled the workflow there to become an engineer.
01:41:03.760
This is a so-called mismatch hypothesis. This is the idea that the kids could match with the wrong
01:41:07.500
schools and that it's, there's a fair amount of evidence, uh, to support that, uh, as well.
01:41:12.360
I knew I was right not to even try to go to Harvard. I knew it. I feel totally validated.
01:41:19.020
I'm sure I, you know, probably could have gotten in. You know, you would have gotten by at Harvard.
01:41:25.720
Oh, contraire, sir. But it was fine. It worked out fine in the end. I always tell people who are
01:41:29.900
so obsessed about colleges and I know you guys have these esteemed, beautiful academic pedigrees,
01:41:34.820
but it can be fine if you don't go to Harvard, you know, Syracuse is definitely, it was,
01:41:38.860
it's the Harvard of Syracuse. Um, and then I went to Albany law school, which is at best,
01:41:44.120
you know, uh, I'll be charitable and say second tier. Uh, but it's fine. If you do well, you work
01:41:48.920
hard, you're a gunner, you figure out what you're good at. You can achieve great success in your life,
01:41:53.700
no matter the academic pedigree. I would say that the number one thing in my view, you get it,
01:41:58.060
these good schools. And my husband went to Duke and then Georgetown is connections. You don't
01:42:02.600
necessarily get connections to future powerful people at these other schools.
01:42:11.360
Good man. And, and I don't know, Colman, do you think you'll go back into academia at all?
01:42:22.800
It's a hard environment. I mean, I admire you, Glenn, but you know, even as an undergrad,
01:42:29.040
it, it, uh, takes a toll to be the only person in the class, you know, kind of coming into every
01:42:37.060
class with a chip on my shoulder. If, if at all these issues are going to be discussed,
01:42:43.620
feeling that I can't lie, but perhaps being the only one willing to speak up
01:42:48.160
and developing a reputation where, you know, people, your reputation precedes you. And,
01:42:55.920
and in many ways it's, it's negative. It's, it's not like given the choice, I'm not sure
01:43:02.380
it makes sense for me, you know, psychologically to go back unless there was some, something that
01:43:09.060
was, you know, was such a benefit that I felt I, I needed to.
01:43:16.060
I say that we, uh, institutions of higher education will have failed in our mission. If,
01:43:21.660
uh, qualities of mind, such as Coleman Hughes manifest, feel they have no place in our ranks.
01:43:28.700
I say, I'm almost motivated to start a program at Brown university, uh, with the, uh, intention
01:43:34.660
of having a dozen Coleman Hughes types decide that they're going to write a dissertation and
01:43:40.020
something really important. It's been two or three years. Just think of it as investing in this book.
01:43:44.500
That's going to make you a gazillion dollars when it finally comes out. And you're going to have a
01:43:47.920
PhD after your name afterwards, exploring in depth, some of the most important questions of
01:43:53.100
our time. I think the Academy is a place to go to reflect. It's to go to be challenged by the very
01:43:59.300
best that's been thought and written, uh, about the most difficult matters of human existence,
01:44:04.260
uh, and to be, uh, challenged and to be questioned and to, uh, learn from and, and to stimulate and be
01:44:11.000
stimulated by, uh, I would say it doesn't have to be your whole life. Uh, but I think there's still
01:44:16.340
something that we have to offer, uh, to a Coleman Hughes. And it's shame on us, uh, if we are so
01:44:22.000
configured that he doesn't, that he doesn't feel comfortable in our midst.
01:44:25.660
That's never a never ending cycle. People like Coleman don't want to go there and teach because
01:44:29.540
he feels unwelcome. And then more conservative students either hide the fact that they're
01:44:33.880
conservative or don't want to go there because they don't feel represented at all in the faculty
01:44:37.720
body or, or student body. And they go underground, they say nothing. And so they arrive at school and
01:44:43.960
they get the tour from, you know, a person who aligns with some gender defined by the astrological
01:44:50.200
spectrum and who's, you know, going to walk them through all of the prerequisites to being accepted
01:44:57.240
on campus, i.e. your progressive bona fides. And they're thinking, I'm just going to keep my mouth
01:45:02.260
shut for four years until I get out of here. Or, or they genuinely get turned and they emerge ready
01:45:08.900
to push the progressive agenda to call out their parents as racist and transphobes. And that's,
01:45:14.360
I think how we wind up with an, with a media, a media that's that thinks 71 million people are
01:45:20.160
racist and sexist and transphobic and xenophobic and awful. And, you know, need to be condemned at
01:45:26.360
every turn. Um, I want to mention Carol Swain because she's somebody who I think has gone through
01:45:32.260
it, right? She's like, she's somebody who was in the academic system and a professor who
01:45:36.660
got more conservative in her viewpoint and started writing books that were more conservative and she
01:45:43.100
got more faithful and she was basically pushed out. It's, it's, and she's, she's a woman of color.
01:45:49.740
She's a black woman. So you'd think if, if, if you can't keep Carol, like you'd think you'd be dying
01:45:59.700
Carol's an old friend and she's a brilliant woman and, uh, she is a woman of faith and, uh,
01:46:05.800
yeah, she's a contrarian. And, uh, she was at what Vanderbilt and there was a lot of brouhaha
01:46:12.300
down there about some comments that she made and so forth. People called her names and, and she was
01:46:17.300
blackballed. Um, but she, she certainly didn't deserve it.
01:46:21.960
Do you get called names? Do you get called like the uncle Tom kind of thing? Glenn, I mean,
01:46:25.720
you're more conservative. I hope, I hope not, but do you?
01:46:30.080
Probably. Maybe I'm just unaware. Maybe I'm oblivious to the corner of Twitter where they're
01:46:34.140
calling me all sorts of names. Uh, you know, I'm, I'm past that. Uh, I used to get called names when
01:46:40.440
I was a Reagan Republican back in the eighties, pathetic black mascot of the right is what one
01:46:47.040
of my colleagues at Harvard, uh, dubbed me. But, um, you know, I'm past that by now.
01:46:52.600
You don't care. Can we just talk about the 1619 project before I let you guys go? The 1619 project
01:46:58.600
has been debated a lot over the past couple of years. And I'm stunned by what this whole
01:47:03.920
thing has said about where we are as a country and where the media is. The New York times love
01:47:09.300
them or hate them. And their subscribers are, I think the latest stats were something like almost
01:47:13.200
90% liberal. Um, it used to at least be someplace that while biased did care about facts and fact
01:47:21.140
checking. So there'd be a slant, but they wouldn't necessarily be egregious errors that went
01:47:25.660
uncorrected all the time. Wow. Not so with respect to this piece. So Nicole, Hannah Jones
01:47:32.820
wrote originally that, you know, the country was founded in order to preserve slavery. There were
01:47:38.940
all sorts of challenges to that. Now we know before it was published, the New York times rejected them,
01:47:43.520
ignored them. It comes out, she gets the Pulitzer prize. All these historians come out and say,
01:47:49.860
this is totally factually wrong. Black scholars too. It's not just a bunch of white scholars
01:47:54.260
saying this is completely erroneous. It's just not true. The country was not founded to preserve
01:47:58.900
slavery. And the times was pretty silent about it. And then what happened recently was they quietly
01:48:05.280
and without calling any attention to it, started erasing those passages from the sort of preamble,
01:48:12.540
the introduction to her piece and not, not being open about it. And now you Glenn and some other
01:48:18.680
very esteemed professors have issued a call to have that Pulitzer prize revoked. First of all,
01:48:26.420
has, have, has anyone responded to that? And second of all, why do you think that's important?
01:48:33.460
No one has responded so far as I know. I did sign onto this letter that Peter Wood, the National
01:48:39.860
Association of Scholars circulated and a number of other people did as well in virtue of the egregious
01:48:47.660
behavior that you just described in terms of running with and, and, and putting so much of institutional
01:48:57.240
support behind a narrative that had problems. I mean, yes, she did assert that because a few of the,
01:49:07.620
of the founding generation of Americans feared the British potentiality of interfering with the
01:49:18.640
slave traffic. And for that reason, were motivated to fight in the revolution that therefore that was
01:49:24.380
the basic driving force behind the entire movement, which was false. She'd also claimed that 1619 and not
01:49:33.860
1776 was a better metaphor for understanding the large scale narrative of the country. And then
01:49:40.800
backed away from that saying, no, she didn't mean to replace 1776 with 1669. She just meant to somehow
01:49:47.160
recenter the narrative and elevate the role that African-American exclusion and then aspiration
01:49:55.200
for inclusion should play in the American narrative. The Pulitzer prize, I think they made a mistake,
01:50:00.560
but they're not going to, uh, they're not going to take it back. I think that's pretty clear.
01:50:06.800
And so what does that say to you about where we are as a country?
01:50:11.640
Um, I'm into talking about narratives these days. Uh, I talk about the development narrative and the
01:50:17.160
bias narrative when we're talking about race and the narrative about the American story, the, the
01:50:22.700
American project is fundamentally important. Is this a good country? Or is this a country that's
01:50:29.920
founded on genocide and, and slavery? The, uh, impact of Western settlement in the Western
01:50:37.620
hemisphere, the European settlement in the Western hemisphere on the native population was
01:50:40.780
devastating. There's not any doubt about that. And the commerce and chattel, which was a transatlantic
01:50:46.600
slavery was of a huge scale, mostly going to, uh, uh, Caribbean and, uh, South America, but of a huge scale.
01:50:54.220
It was monumental in world history. It was monumental in the foundation of the, uh, uh, events that led to
01:51:00.880
the American nation state. There's not any doubt about that, but the, uh, founding of the country,
01:51:06.500
uh, 1776, 1787, the, the creation of the United States of America was a world historic event
01:51:14.620
in which the enlightenment ideals got instantiated in government institutions. And as a matter of fact,
01:51:20.920
within a century, slavery was gone. And you know what? The people who had been African chattel
01:51:25.720
became citizens of the United States of America, not equal citizens, not at first, it took another
01:51:31.060
century, but they became in the fullness of time, equal citizens of the United States of America.
01:51:36.760
The United States of America fought fascism in the Pacific and fought fascism in Europe and saved the
01:51:45.400
world. American democracy became a beacon to quote unquote, the free world. We stood down under threat
01:51:52.480
of nuclear annihilation, the horror, which was the union of Soviet socialist republics. We have had the
01:52:00.500
greatest transformation in the social status of a serfdom people, which was the, uh, what have,
01:52:05.880
what the emancipation affected in the creation of the Negro of the African American, probably that
01:52:11.680
you could find anywhere in world history, 40 million strong, the richest people of African descent
01:52:17.980
on the planet by far. This is a question of narrative. Are you going to look through the
01:52:24.140
lens of the United States as a racist, uh, genocidal white supremacist illegitimate force? Are you going
01:52:32.220
to see it for what it is, uh, which in the last 300 years is the greatest force for human liberty on the
01:52:39.380
planet? That's worth fighting about that. These people at the New York times lay down to a latter day
01:52:48.000
woke ideology and debase their country is despicable.
01:52:54.860
I am going to write that down and post it on my Instagram, on my Twitter, on my Facebook and send it
01:53:04.440
in to every school that tells me and my children, America is systemically racist. It's always been
01:53:11.960
racist. We need to apologize for our racism at every turn and is fundamentally an awful place. I love
01:53:20.240
everything you just said, Coleman. Why aren't the kids talking like that? Why isn't patriotism
01:53:26.720
taught anymore? Why? By the way, our new school makes the boys say the pledge, which I like, you
01:53:31.620
know, like when I was a kid, it was okay to celebrate Columbus day. It was okay to celebrate
01:53:36.060
the 4th of July. It was okay to say you loved America and its military and its foundational ideals.
01:53:41.780
And now I think thanks to guys like Colin Kaepernick, just saluting the flag or standing for the
01:53:48.360
anthem. Now you've got people explaining why they're standing. Not people explaining why they
01:53:53.980
knelt, but explaining why they're standing to respect our flag and everything that's been
01:53:58.680
sacrificed for it. Well, I don't think you have to teach patriotism. I think all you have to teach
01:54:04.040
is balanced world history. And a rational person will come to the conclusion that there is something
01:54:11.620
special about America. America is not your average country.
01:54:15.260
Um, there is a reason why it's the number one destination for black and brown migrants,
01:54:20.960
migrants in general, black and brown migrants in particular across the world. There's a reason why
01:54:26.200
I could win money betting all day that the average migrant from West Africa or East Africa or India,
01:54:31.960
if they have one destination in mind, it's here. That is not a coincidence. It's because there is
01:54:38.540
something about America that is especially open, um, liberal in the classical sense, and that those
01:54:45.880
values have had good consequences for the ability of diverse peoples from all across the world to ascend
01:54:54.040
from, uh, third world poverty to first world poverty to president of the United States. That is why
01:55:02.860
there are there, why there's nothing, why, why, when you hear rags to riches stories in America,
01:55:08.380
you don't even bat an eye. You take it for granted because it happens so often. Um, when we talk about
01:55:16.180
history, you don't have to, you don't necessarily have to teach patriotic history per se. What you have
01:55:22.500
to teach is global history, balanced history. Uh, a lot of people have no idea about the worldwide
01:55:27.940
institution of slavery, slavery in the Middle East and China going back thousands of years, uh, the
01:55:34.060
Aztecs, you know, so people conceive of it as somehow uniquely American sin, and they have no concept
01:55:40.880
of how, how commonplace cruelty and human bondage has been on across every corner of the earth since
01:55:50.640
antiquity. Um, and so the fundamental question is whether you compare America to
01:55:57.440
the ideal nation you can have in your mind based on your 2020 morality or whether you compare it to
01:56:07.020
other nations at this moment. I mean, right now, China is lecturing us about systemic racism
01:56:13.740
while committing something bordering on ethnic cleansing with, with the Uyghur Muslims. It's,
01:56:20.720
it's absolutely laughable. Um, and you know, just, there, there's a contradiction at the center of
01:56:28.160
it too. It's like, what other country can you, can you picture China or India or Turkey or Russia
01:56:34.820
having a 1619 project, even reflecting on their own history in any negative way whatsoever?
01:56:43.960
Can you picture them having a, uh, a book like, um, the, the, the Howard Zinn book people's history
01:56:51.000
of the United States, which was a bestseller in like the eighties or something. Can you, can you
01:56:56.020
picture a Chinese version of that, a Turkish version of that? No, it's because, and that in a sense speaks
01:57:05.040
to our commitment to self-criticism, to freedom of speech, which is a novel idea, uh, in the, in the,
01:57:14.840
in the long view of history. Um, and so, and so I think ultimately it is, it is an ignorance of
01:57:23.620
the, uh, the rest of the world that leads people to be unreflectively anti-America. And I think
01:57:31.520
I have a much easier time talking to immigrants about this kind of thing, uh, than I do people
01:57:39.520
who, who've been raised here for so long that they don't know that other places exist.
01:57:46.020
I love that. You don't have to teach patriotism. You just have to teach history, world history,
01:57:50.680
and people will get it. I've got to ask you one last thing that I've, I've, I've been struggling
01:57:56.120
to answer myself. And I don't, I'm really curious to hear what your answers are going to be on this.
01:58:00.780
This is like one of the main things I wanted to ask you. So I think it's pretty clear that I'm not
01:58:04.840
a wokester and that I don't buy into all this, you know, racial division BS. Um, but I, like most
01:58:12.600
Americans also see that there is still racism in the United States and take it on a case by case basis
01:58:18.760
to make up my own mind overall, in general, as a human in this country, and certainly as a white human
01:58:26.580
here, what can I do? And what can the listeners do if, if they want to, without buying into all that
01:58:34.680
other stuff, be an ally, how, how can we be good brothers and sisters to people of color and be
01:58:43.720
helpful and be open-minded and, and take into consideration that there is a history that we
01:58:50.480
all are dealing with in a way that's helpful and helps bring us together and forward?
01:58:57.600
Oh gosh, I don't know what to say, Megan. I, I would, I, the first thought my mind was be honest,
01:59:02.440
please don't, don't, uh, hold back, tell people what you really think. Uh, you want to be an ally.
01:59:08.940
Um, and, uh, that means be, be, have the courage to criticize, have the courage of your convictions
01:59:16.440
and such like that. But, uh, and I also want to say, let's make it a decent society for everybody.
01:59:24.220
And then a lot of these racial disparity questions would take care of themselves.
01:59:28.080
And we don't have to get disparities down to zero in order to avoid the, you know, food insecurity,
01:59:33.740
people who don't have a decent place to live, schools that don't work,
01:59:37.140
unsafe neighborhoods and things like that. Let's make it a better society for everybody.
01:59:40.800
But that's not really what you asked. You want, you want, you want advice about how to have your
01:59:44.400
integrity intact and not succumb to this nonsense. And yet at the same time, feel that you're on the
01:59:49.240
right side of history with respect to the racial questions. And I'm very interested to know what
01:59:53.480
Coleman is going to have to say about that. No pressure. Well, thank you, Glenn.
01:59:59.520
Commit yourself to reason. Always be skeptical of yourself and your own tendency to confirm preexisting
02:00:09.820
beliefs. That's always good advice for everybody. Um, try to remain open-minded. And that doesn't just
02:00:18.800
some people, people interpret that as be open-minded to liberal activist ideas. Sometimes seriously be
02:00:25.580
open-minded to everything. Um, but don't, but, but have standards for what you believe.
02:00:33.080
Um, listen, it's a, it's a very tough thing to negotiate and, you know, everyone has to negotiate
02:00:41.580
it in a, in a different way, depending on their individual circumstances. So I don't have,
02:00:47.640
I don't really have the one size fits all platitude that is going to, you know, superficially help
02:00:57.220
people, uh, with this issue, but ultimately, you know, everything that is good advice for a human
02:01:07.460
being pursuing a happy life and a pro-social existence on this planet is also good advice
02:01:13.500
with respect to the issue of race and race relations. This is not personal advice, but this
02:01:19.220
may be advice for the society. Perhaps we should be working toward unlearning race. And by that, I do
02:01:24.300
mean, uh, you know, intermarriage, uh, by that, I mean, uh, the adoption, uh, by, by that, I mean,
02:01:33.020
mixing and getting out of this, uh, constructed, uh, uh, socially reproduced fiction that we're really
02:01:46.020
different. We're not. Um, so I think that's really the only answer in the long run that we have to
02:01:58.800
lower the amount of importance that we give to the superficial features of our physical
02:02:04.540
presentation. Um, we should have friends, we should have neighborhoods, we should have schools,
02:02:09.700
we should have families that are integrated across racial lines to the point that in the fullness
02:02:15.600
of time, we would give no significance whatsoever. Now people will go ballistic in me talk. They'll call
02:02:22.520
me an assimilationist. They will, you know, but I think I'm not saying this from the point of view of
02:02:27.780
being a black person. I'm saying this from the point of view of being a human being. You two are a
02:02:31.860
national treasure. I'm so, so glad we had this conversation and I really hope we can continue it.
02:02:39.480
And I just, I do want to say everyone should really check out conversations with Coleman.
02:02:43.420
Coleman, I subscribed and I paid more than was necessary because I support and love you.
02:02:48.520
And it's an option on there. And, and Glenn show the Glenn show you can get, I, you can get it
02:02:53.140
on podcast or YouTube, but I usually watch them on YouTube. Well, we got patreon.com forward slash
02:02:57.760
Glenn show. We, we now have a crowdsourcing site. If people want to go and give me some support,
02:03:02.740
I will give you more than you want to sign up because there's going to be extra, I'm following
02:03:07.240
in Coleman's footsteps. It's about time. Well, that is a nice way of just telling someone you love them.
02:03:15.420
You love what they're doing and you're behind them. You can't, you know, too often we hear what
02:03:19.260
Twitter has to say about us and maybe looking at the Patreon revenues is a better way of gauging it.
02:03:25.080
You guys, thank you again. So much love to you both.
02:03:29.280
That was amazing. Wasn't that amazing? Aren't you going to run right down that Glenn Lowry
02:03:36.200
answer and just think about it? That's how I felt when Dennis Prager said the other day,
02:03:39.560
and I said that, you know, the left has got the media and they control, uh, the big tech
02:03:44.060
and they control Hollywood and they control sports. What do conservatives control? And he
02:03:48.520
said, ourselves. So good. That's how I felt when Glenn spoke and Coleman with the patriotism,
02:03:55.400
right? You don't teach it. You just teach history. Yes. Hello. Love that. I'm learning
02:04:00.900
and being inspired. And I hope you feel the same. Um, before we go, I want to tell you that today's
02:04:05.240
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02:04:29.640
If you're feeling really kind and generous and, uh, a review too, with possibly guest ideas,
02:04:35.360
thoughts on Coleman and Glenn and, uh, anything else you want to share. Loving the experience you guys
02:04:41.180
talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
02:04:49.400
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