The Tucker Carlson Show - Glenn Loury： Ousted for Opposing Middle Eastern Wars, MLK Files, & the One Thing Malcolm X Got Right

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00:00:30.000 And I said, what has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified.

00:00:36.220 And I got notified the next day the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow.

00:00:43.520 If you'd said that about the United States, would you have gotten the same reaction?

00:00:47.260 Ah, big question.

00:00:48.700 Do you think you've been bamboozled?

00:00:50.620 Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? 0.92

00:00:55.480 Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast the ballot in Georgia?

00:01:01.200 I watched a couple of Malcolm X speeches and it was like a totally different person from the one I was presented in high school.

00:01:07.820 And I was like, well, why isn't this guy much more famous than he is now? 0.98

00:01:11.160 One of the speeches, he goes off after white liberals and he's like, you know, whites are bad, whites are a problem. 0.99

00:01:15.580 But the real problem is white liberals. 1.00

00:01:17.120 I was like, you go Malcolm X.

00:01:18.240 It almost feels like his message has been suppressed a little bit, maybe.

00:01:43.520 Thank you, Professor, for coming.

00:01:45.020 So you just, you told me last night at dinner that you just, after about 50 years, taught your last course at Brown.

00:01:51.120 You just left Brown.

00:01:54.500 Big picture question first.

00:01:56.160 You've taught for so long.

00:01:58.120 How has it changed?

00:01:59.780 You've taught at, you know, the most prestigious universities in the world.

00:02:04.720 How have the schools changed?

00:02:06.000 How have the students changed?

00:02:07.300 Do you leave more hopeful or more concerned?

00:02:12.080 Ah, big question.

00:02:13.180 Yeah, that's a big, that's a big question.

00:02:14.680 I'll admit it.

00:02:15.800 Well, I graduated high school 60 years ago.

00:02:20.340 Whoa.

00:02:20.740 And where?

00:02:22.160 John Marshall Harlan High School, public school in Chicago.

00:02:26.180 How is it now?

00:02:27.780 I don't know, to be honest with you.

00:02:30.540 I know that the community that it houses it has gone into decline and it's become a part of the South Side problematic.

00:02:42.280 Yes.

00:02:42.640 Which is Chicago with the violence and so on.

00:02:45.280 It was a modest working upper, working lower middle class community.

00:02:52.980 When I was at that school, it was integrated.

00:02:56.700 There were 30 or 40 percent of the student body was white.

00:03:00.160 I'm sure it's all black now and has been for some time. 0.51

00:03:03.160 But I've lost touch with what's going on back there.

00:03:06.700 But I'm just saying I've been around for a long time.

00:03:10.560 Yeah, it's a long time.

00:03:11.960 So, I remember as I did my undergraduate at Northwestern University, graduated in 1972, the intensity of the intellectual experience of coming to the university.

00:03:29.480 I remember encountering the German language.

00:03:32.860 I remember studying mathematics and economics and philosophy and politics.

00:03:38.940 And I remember books.

00:03:40.900 And I remember there being a certain devotion to the life of the mind.

00:03:47.260 And I don't know that we've lost that, but it's, I think, less intense for our students today than it was when I was in college.

00:03:59.920 It was the shadow of the Second World War.

00:04:02.520 It was still only, you know, 25 years after the end of the conflict.

00:04:07.880 That had, I think, its effect.

00:04:10.780 It was the Vietnam era and that had its effect. 0.64

00:04:13.360 But even though it was the Vietnam era, it wasn't, in my experience, as political as I see the university has become today.

00:04:26.380 Wait, so right at the, I mean, there are probably, you got to campus in 1968?

00:04:31.540 I got to campus in 1970 at Northwestern.

00:04:35.560 I started out at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1965.

00:04:40.480 I dropped out.

00:04:41.580 I attended a community college for a couple of years.

00:04:44.920 And then I re-enrolled at a major university as a scholarship student in 1970, graduated in 1972.

00:04:53.220 So there were, Vietnam War protests going on on campuses all over the country.

00:04:57.640 There were.

00:04:58.440 But it was still, you think, less political than it is now?

00:05:03.040 Yeah, frankly, I do.

00:05:04.920 First of all, not everybody was a protester or enmeshed in the ethos of protests.

00:05:12.980 Some of us were just trying to get to class.

00:05:15.640 In my own case, I was a full-time employee at a printing plant and a young father with a wife and two children, even as I was taking classes at Northwestern.

00:05:25.680 My case is very unusual.

00:05:27.100 I didn't really have time to protest.

00:05:31.520 But it wasn't even for the other students.

00:05:34.580 It wasn't all-consuming.

00:05:35.940 There were intense, engaged protest students, but there were also kids just going about their business.

00:05:44.560 Not to sidetrack the conversation, but what were you doing at the printing plant?

00:05:48.700 What was your job?

00:05:49.760 I was a clerk.

00:05:50.700 They called me a timekeeper and a bonus estimator.

00:05:54.120 We had these decks of IBM punch cards, and I would write on each one the employee's name, the number of hours they spent on what task.

00:06:02.600 And sometimes I'd have to estimate whether or not their productivity count entitled them to bonus payment and take, at the end of the shift, my deck of IBM punch cards to the offices where the young women would key punch them up. 1.00

00:06:21.240 And then they would go into the process of the mainframe computer congestion.

00:06:28.180 It was pretty antiquated, but that's how we kept track of the accounting.

00:06:33.820 So I was a clerk.

00:06:36.500 What did they print at the plant?

00:06:38.100 Everything.

00:06:38.820 This was R.R. Donnelly and Sons, a big printing concern.

00:06:42.720 Lakeside Press is what they call the campus.

00:06:45.500 A couple of miles, three miles south of the loop on the lakefront in Chicago.

00:06:49.780 So maybe a dozen or so factory-style buildings, railroad tracks running alongside huge rolls of printing paper, these monstrous machines, which were the presses.

00:07:03.480 Craftsmen everywhere from the people who ran the presses to the people who engraved the plates to the people who cultivated the photographs that had to be made into images.

00:07:15.100 They printed Time magazine, Life magazine, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek.

00:07:23.020 They printed telephone books.

00:07:25.140 They printed Sears catalogs.

00:07:28.320 And it was a massive operation.

00:07:30.140 So it was like the size of a steel plant, which was like a whole campus, you said.

00:07:34.000 Yes.

00:07:34.020 It was a dozen buildings or so spread out over a mile along the lakefront, maybe three-quarters of a mile.

00:07:40.560 Is it still there?

00:07:42.120 I think it's condos now.

00:07:44.020 Of course it is.

00:07:45.340 And in fact, the guys, you know, the union guys who I worked with, I wasn't in the union, I was a clerk, could see it coming.

00:07:54.560 They could see the jobs going to South Carolina and then going to Southeast Asia.

00:07:59.120 They didn't see the technology revolution coming that made a lot of what they were doing obsolete.

00:08:03.960 But they knew that their days were numbered.

00:08:07.060 And they said that out loud?

00:08:08.260 Yeah.

00:08:10.280 Wow.

00:08:11.460 Were they mad about it?

00:08:12.480 Uh, yeah.

00:08:16.620 And to a certain extent resigned.

00:08:19.980 But, you know, the fight the good fight, you know, resist.

00:08:24.140 But the wheel was turning.

00:08:27.420 Amazing.

00:08:27.820 So you get to campus, you're married with two kids, you're working in a printing plant, and you probably don't have time to, like, throw tear gas on the quad.

00:08:38.640 Now, I talk about this in my memoir that came out last year, Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative.

00:08:45.660 I review the bidding of my life.

00:08:47.680 And, uh, yeah, uh, I, I tell a story.

00:08:51.980 So I'm at the community college before getting to Northwestern.

00:08:55.380 Uh, the year is 1970.

00:08:56.720 The spring of 1970.

00:08:58.280 The strike.

00:08:59.560 The incursion into Cambodia.

00:09:01.480 Yes.

00:09:01.620 And the strike.

00:09:02.160 And, uh, I'm taking the calculus, and I'm loving it, and there's an exam coming.

00:09:09.940 Uh, the kids.

00:09:10.780 You loved calculus?

00:09:12.000 Pardon?

00:09:12.420 I loved calculus.

00:09:13.440 Yeah, I was a math major in, you know, calculus and trigonometry and abstract algebra and, you know, differential equations.

00:09:21.400 How could you love something like that?

00:09:23.660 Oh, man, it was just fun solving those problems.

00:09:25.620 I got a feeling of mastery and, you know, solving the problems.

00:09:32.840 And there are tricks, you know, in calculus.

00:09:35.300 How do I reduce this expression to a form that I can actually integrate it and apply, you know, what I know?

00:09:42.820 I liked it.

00:09:43.980 And I had a great teacher.

00:09:45.280 Mr. Andres was his name.

00:09:47.520 He was an engineer.

00:09:48.760 He had retired.

00:09:50.420 Uh, he was a Northwestern alum, which is how I ended up at Northwestern.

00:09:53.480 He referred me to their admissions committee.

00:09:57.160 Uh, and I'd go to his office hours, and he'd show me problems and tricks, and, you know, we were having a good time.

00:10:04.540 But in any case, I'm saying I wanted to study for the exam, and the librarian had barricaded herself in because she was afraid that the rampaging students who were all up in arms about the strike were going to somehow come in and deface the library and so on.

00:10:20.040 So she had barricaded herself, and I had to persuade her.

00:10:24.600 Uh, it took me 15 minutes to persuade her to open the door and let me in so that I could sit down and study.

00:10:30.140 Because I had to get to that 4 o'clock shift, the second shift that day to my job, uh, and I needed to use what hours I had to study.

00:10:38.940 So you were working second shift, so that's 4 to midnight?

00:10:41.220 Yeah, I was working on second and sometimes third shift, but mostly second shift, yeah, 4 to midnight, right?

00:10:48.220 How old were your kids?

00:10:50.100 Uh, Lisa and Tammy were born in 1967 and 1968, respectively.

00:10:55.980 So this was 1970.

00:10:57.700 They were 2 and 3.

00:10:58.780 Did your wife work? 0.98

00:11:00.440 She did.

00:11:01.500 Uh, she worked at the post office.

00:11:03.340 Man, that's a busy family.

00:11:07.220 So you have no time at all, then?

00:11:08.680 We had our hands full, to be sure.

00:11:10.480 We were, you know, very young parents, and, uh, we were determined to improve ourselves, and we were doing the best we could.

00:11:19.940 What did you think of the protests, given everything else you had to do?

00:11:23.620 Well, first of all, I thought the war sucked. 0.73

00:11:26.180 Yeah. 0.85

00:11:26.480 You know, I was against the war.

00:11:27.780 Fair.

00:11:28.020 Um, and I thought the protests were justified.

00:11:31.740 I mean, Kent State, you know, these kids got shot and all that.

00:11:36.500 Uh, but I thought also that a lot of the participation in the protests was kind of indulgent and saddish, and, you know, it was, uh, a fun thing to be doing.

00:11:50.000 It was a part of a kind of manufactured, uh, alienation that I didn't share.

00:11:56.320 Um, you know, I wasn't about to burn my draft card.

00:12:01.100 Uh, the guys that I was working with, most of them were ethnic at the printing plant.

00:12:05.880 Most of them were, you know, Italian or Irish or Jewish or Polish, um, or Greek, uh, uh, second generation immigrants to the United States.

00:12:17.200 And, uh, they were pretty conservative, uh, but there was the black power stuff that was going on as well, uh, in those years. 0.96

00:12:26.320 And I was enmeshed in that on the south side of Chicago and had family members who were, uh, pretty radical.

00:12:33.460 So, you know, I, I was, if you had to give me a label, I would have been left of center.

00:12:38.720 I would have been a liberal, but I was mainly a nerd.

00:12:41.480 What did your radical relatives think of your life path?

00:12:50.300 Of my?

00:12:51.000 Of your life path of, you know, going to college.

00:12:53.460 Oh, they were proud of me, you know.

00:12:55.980 Well, I graduated, uh, with a very strong academic record from the high school.

00:13:02.100 Um, I got a scholarship to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

00:13:08.420 Uh, my girlfriend, who became my wife and the mother of my two, uh, first two children, um, uh, had, uh, dropped out of high school, uh, to give birth.

00:13:19.420 Um, and they were worried that I was going to lose my way.

00:13:24.180 So when I, and my father, um, my mother and father broke up when I was quite young, five years old.

00:13:30.480 But my dad was an important part of my life.

00:13:33.000 And I very much, uh, uh, wanted his respect and approval.

00:13:38.360 And he, you know, when I told him that Charlene was pregnant, he said he had rolled his eyes.

00:13:43.660 And, you know, he said, you have to do the right thing and take care of the kid and stuff.

00:13:48.180 But, uh, this is not the way that you, you know, I had imagined you living your life.

00:13:53.940 And when I told him I was dropping out of the Illinois Institute of Technology and going to work, he said, well, uh, let's, you better have a plan.

00:14:03.040 Uh, so when I finally kind of pulled myself together and, uh, did well at the community college and then got the scholarship at Northwestern and then made the dean's list in my first semester, he was like, okay, this is, uh, better.

00:14:18.180 Um, they were proud of me.

00:14:21.240 Uh, and when I graduated, uh, with, uh, uh, awards and stuff, I was the prize-winning mathematics major in my class of 1972 at Northwestern.

00:14:31.660 And I got admitted to MIT as a graduate student that very same year.

00:14:36.740 They were over the moon.

00:14:37.840 They, they, they loved the idea that I was, uh, overcoming the odds.

00:14:43.100 Yes.

00:14:43.340 You know.

00:14:43.600 What does your dad do?

00:14:44.920 My dad is no longer living.

00:14:46.560 Uh, he was a lawyer and accountant.

00:14:49.180 Uh, he worked for the Internal Revenue Service.

00:14:52.380 Sorry, Tucker.

00:14:54.140 Sorry.

00:14:56.120 Spent his life as a, uh, as a, uh, federal employee, as a bureaucrat.

00:15:02.260 Uh, he worked his way up to being the director of the Kansas City Service Center, which is a huge income tax return processing, uh, operation in Kansas City.

00:15:14.440 Uh, and, uh, it suited him.

00:15:17.780 Uh, he was a revenuer.

00:15:19.400 Yeah, a revenuer.

00:15:20.660 I'm telling you, man, this guy would drive around, uh, he lived in Overland Park, Kansas, uh, which is a tony suburb of Kansas City.

00:15:28.600 Uh, and he'd drive around and he'd drive around and he'd see a, a boat sitting in somebody's driveway.

00:15:33.920 And he'd ask himself, I wonder how that guy paid for that boat.

00:15:38.260 And I'm not going to put him, put it past him to go and look up the thing and maybe direct an audit in the, in the direction.

00:15:45.380 I mean.

00:15:45.480 So he believed in paying your taxes.

00:15:47.020 Yeah.

00:15:47.400 He believed in it very religiously.

00:15:49.980 Yeah.

00:15:51.680 What were his politics?

00:15:53.640 Uh, he was a moderate Democrat.

00:15:57.000 Yeah.

00:15:57.280 But not especially political.

00:15:59.620 He was mainly a bureaucrat.

00:16:01.380 I mean, he loved the internal politics of who's getting promoted, what budget is going on, who's the regional director, uh, and how much power has so-and-so got and what about this or that.

00:16:13.360 You know, he loved calling people on the carpet.

00:16:15.860 He, he was, uh, uh, Patton, uh, George C. Scott.

00:16:21.600 Yeah.

00:16:22.400 That was his favorite movie.

00:16:24.080 Let's see.

00:16:24.860 The scene where, uh, uh, Patton slaps the, uh, recruit.

00:16:29.020 That was his favorite scene.

00:16:31.380 So he, he was the Patton of the Kansas City IRS office.

00:16:35.260 Yeah.

00:16:35.460 Something like that.

00:16:37.220 So did you go to MIT?

00:16:39.160 I did go to MIT.

00:16:40.500 Did a PhD in economics at MIT in the 70s.

00:16:44.940 What was the atmosphere like there then?

00:16:49.780 Well, in economics, MIT was riding high.

00:16:53.160 Uh, then there were people, Robert Solo, Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, uh, all of whom became Nobelists.

00:17:01.380 Nobel laureates in the fullness of time.

00:17:03.000 Samuelson had been honored in 69 or 70, I think.

00:17:06.840 Um, it was a very, very strong department of economics.

00:17:10.760 It was very Jewish, uh, both the faculty and the student body.

00:17:14.260 And that was noticeable to me.

00:17:16.900 Um, they were notes to the grindstone.

00:17:20.040 They, they were soft left.

00:17:21.120 How many black students were studying for PhD?

00:17:23.540 Black students?

00:17:24.320 Yeah.

00:17:25.700 Uh, I'd say maybe 12 out of 150.

00:17:31.420 Something like that.

00:17:33.240 Uh, they had a program, uh, MIT did, determined to, uh, respond to the time.

00:17:39.600 They were liberal Democrats.

00:17:41.460 Uh, they had a kind of affirmative action thing.

00:17:44.140 Now, I will say, I'm quite sure I would have been admitted to MIT based on the record that I had established at Northwestern.

00:17:51.220 The prize winning record, A's and everything, taking graduate courses in math and economics when I was still an undergraduate and so on.

00:17:58.320 I think I would have been admitted regardless of, uh, their, their program.

00:18:01.540 Um, but I was among three, a cohort of three African-Americans and a class of 25, uh, who were admitted in 1972.

00:18:11.340 And they had been admitting, uh, since 1970.

00:18:14.700 And they continued this on through, I think, 75 or 76, three black students.

00:18:20.560 I was told later that, um, the way that that was done was they had their regular budget for, uh, graduate students.

00:18:27.500 And then they had additional funds that would allow them to admit three more students, uh, who were African-American.

00:18:35.120 So, they were about 12 of us, 12 to 15.

00:18:38.020 Did you keep in touch with the other two guys in your class?

00:18:41.560 Um, I did.

00:18:42.600 One didn't finish.

00:18:44.300 Um, he was from Kansas City by coincidence.

00:18:47.360 And, um, uh, he left after a couple of years and never finished his degree.

00:18:52.540 The other is, um, teaches at Harvard now and is a dear friend.

00:18:57.500 Uh, whom I've known for 50 years.

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00:22:02.540 How serious was the academic environment when you started at MIT?

00:22:08.940 It was absolutely top-notch.

00:22:14.360 I mean, it was, it's just technical stuff.

00:22:19.040 And, you know, you were challenged.

00:22:25.080 And the people that you were studying with and competing against, they had come from Israel and India and Japan and the UK and Russia.

00:22:36.780 And they were the best in the world, a cohort of young, prospective economists.

00:22:43.220 And it was very rigorous, very mathematical.

00:22:46.620 It was MIT, after all.

00:22:49.840 It was Paul Samuelson, after all.

00:22:52.940 They were green-eye shade types with the math and the equations and the statistics and the analysis.

00:22:59.460 But they also had something of an interest, a political flair.

00:23:05.060 As I say, moderate Democrat, left of center, but not really socialist.

00:23:11.280 Appreciating the market, but thinking about a mixed economy and regulation and stuff.

00:23:18.120 Samuelson wrote a column for Newsweek every month.

00:23:21.860 And Milton Friedman wrote a column for Newsweek.

00:23:24.400 And they kind of, Friedman, the conservative from Chicago, the University of Chicago.

00:23:28.740 And they were kind of in dueling perspectives.

00:23:31.140 I remember.

00:23:32.820 But I was in the midst of that.

00:23:34.620 That was back when people talked in public about economics.

00:23:37.820 They don't anymore?

00:23:38.820 No.

00:23:39.040 There's not a lot of public comment.

00:23:41.140 It's all about race or sexuality or whatever. 0.56

00:23:45.060 But I don't think that I have heard, like at dinner, a debate about economics in 25 years.

00:23:53.300 Well, there was a lot of debate about economics then, about monetarism and Keynesianism and whatnot.

00:23:59.780 About regulation and laissez-faire and whatnot.

00:24:02.880 Have you noticed that, though, that the incidence of public debate about economics, just people talking about it?

00:24:09.820 Like, what's the right system?

00:24:11.620 You don't hear that.

00:24:13.880 Yeah.

00:24:14.700 I've kind of fallen away from economics, to be honest with you.

00:24:19.180 These last 10, 15 years, I've become a guy that talks more about the culture issues myself.

00:24:24.980 So, and now with the new administration, Trump, and with the tariffs and the changes in economic policy, there's more talk.

00:24:36.720 It's very arch.

00:24:37.680 It's very partisan.

00:24:38.980 But there's more talk.

00:24:41.780 But, yeah.

00:24:44.200 So, how would you compare the environment at MIT to the one that you're now leaving at Brown, on an academic level?

00:24:52.400 Well, I want to distinguish between a specialized program of graduate study at MIT and a general education program for undergraduates at Brown.

00:25:09.140 I think if I were going to compare economics PhD study at Brown today to that at MIT in the early 70s, it would be a different kind of comparison.

00:25:19.100 There, the issue would be how the field has changed, the questions that are prominent, the techniques that are employed to investigate them.

00:25:29.900 And there, I would focus a lot on the revolution of data analysis, the laptop and desktop computers, the data availability, and so on.

00:25:43.380 And also, the change in the set of questions that people are asking, which are applied and are experimental economics, for example, has become a big thing.

00:25:56.300 Nobel Prizes are given in development economics and stuff like that, where people are trying to figure out how to make the best use of resources to raise living standards in poor countries and stuff.

00:26:08.600 And economics was more self-consciously theoretical and abstract when I was a student.

00:26:17.600 You could make a living without ever carrying one of those boxes of computer cards over to the computer processing center.

00:26:26.600 You could just, with a pencil and a yellow pad, sit and, off the top of one's head, as it were, invent models of interesting economic phenomena and get yourself published in the journal and make tenure and all of that.

00:26:41.760 And I think it would be much, much harder to do that now.

00:26:46.300 Well, that sounds like a good thing, that change.

00:26:48.040 Yeah, I think on the whole it is a good thing.

00:26:50.940 But that would be if I were comparing economics in 2025 to economics in 1975, much more empirical, much more data intensive, much more applied, and a wider range of questions.

00:27:05.820 But if I were comparing college in the period when I was a young student to now, I think, you know, the assault that we're seeing, the confrontation that we're seeing of elite higher education with anti-woke sentiment coming from the Trump administration and critics like the young Christopher Rufo.

00:27:34.040 But there are many, bespeaks the ideological drift that has characterized higher education in the last decades.

00:27:48.460 It's become much more political, much more self-consciously radical, much more anti-establishment and, as it were, woke, faddish.

00:28:00.800 You know, I've lived through the French theorists and deconstruction and whatnot.

00:28:08.480 I'm not a literary or humanist.

00:28:10.840 I'm a social scientist.

00:28:11.880 But I can see, looking, you know, across the aisle, as it were, at what my colleagues are doing.

00:28:18.020 And I've lived through the anti-racism mania.

00:28:23.940 I've lived through the various enthusiasms of feminism and sexual liberation and whatnot.

00:28:30.840 The debate about capitalism, you know, is a different argument now than it was when I was coming along.

00:28:43.220 When I was coming along, you read Karl Marx because you wanted to be educated and you knew that that was an important part of the intellectual inheritance.

00:28:51.380 But you read it with a skeptical eye because you know that while the radical agitator and bomb thrower of Marx was an important historical figure, you didn't think that the economic analysis was really very cogent or incisive.

00:29:13.480 And you didn't read it as a Bible, you read it as a, okay, there is a problem here about how to understand the implications of the transformation, which is industrialization and so on.

00:29:27.940 And there are real issues about how the fruits of economic cooperation get divided amongst the participants in the process, the people who bring capital, the people who own natural resources and land, the people who rely on their labor as the source of their income.

00:29:46.520 And there's an analytical issue about how to think that through.

00:29:51.420 And we saw Marx as something of an oddball in that respect.

00:29:59.300 But, and I think in the center of the economics establishment, that would be the judgment.

00:30:07.660 But I think I can't stop the sociologists from reading Marx.

00:30:11.620 I can't stop the anthropologists from reading Marx.

00:30:13.780 I can't stop the literary critics from reading Marx.

00:30:16.280 I can't stop the historians from reading Marx.

00:30:18.400 And they've taken that kind of sensibility, that kind of criticism of established social relations, and the kind of radicalism and enthusiasm, as I say, for the fads that come along of equality and so on.

00:30:38.540 And they've taken it where they've taken it, the university has become, to a certain degree, captured by that sensibility.

00:30:47.640 And we're seeing a backlash against that.

00:30:50.540 You said you've seen various waves of sexual liberation movements.

00:30:55.380 And over the last 50 years, there have been a number of them.

00:30:58.440 Was anyone liberated, do you think?

00:31:00.240 I don't see how you can say that women were not empowered. 0.99

00:31:05.820 If, you know, we go to, who is it, Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or somebody like that, and the set of issues that they were talking about.

00:31:15.040 And you look at where ideas are about equality for women now and the appropriate role of women in political and social life.

00:31:26.420 I think you can say, I don't know if you want to say they were liberated because they are confronted with challenges in life that are intrinsic to the, it seems to me, to the way in which we reproduce and the way in which the species has evolved.

00:31:45.360 And some of that stuff is hardwired and it's going to, you know, always be a part of the issue.

00:31:52.360 But I think the presumptions about the entitlement of women to an opportunity to fully develop their human potential is a move forward. 1.00

00:32:06.820 Were blacks liberated?

00:32:09.280 Well, I just read an interesting book by Jason Riley, the conservative African-American Wall Street Journal editorialist.

00:32:18.360 He calls it the myth of affirmative action and it basically argues in the spirit of the great Thomas Sowell that, you know, blacks were really doing pretty well between 1940 and 1960.

00:32:29.900 And when you look at the acceleration of wages and the breakdown of barriers of segregation and whatnot, that that was a golden age for African-American advancement.

00:32:41.000 And that advancement after 1960 was less rapid and that big, the ballyhoo about liberation of African-Americans associated with black power and the civil rights movement.

00:32:55.800 And the advent of affirmative action is overstated that there were downsides, significant downsides to those developments, both in terms of the abetting economic empowerment for African-Americans, but also in terms of the credibility of the political claims that blacks were making on the rest of the society.

00:33:21.000 And things became more partisan and divisive and this is Riley's argument and I have some sympathy for it.

00:33:31.800 So what, I mean, it's a very complex subject and you've obviously lived at the middle of it for a long time, but what is the verdict?

00:33:41.840 Was all of that good for African-Americans or not, or probably a mix of both, but like, how would you describe what we know now?

00:33:49.340 Well, well, you know, if you were to pick up a typical work wanted ad page in 1960 in a major American city, you would see explicit kind of no blacks need apply type language. 0.78

00:34:09.980 If you were to look at controlling for the skills that people had, the anticipated earnings of a worker, you would see that there being African-American was a negative and it was a non-trivial negative in 1960. 0.99

00:34:28.100 If you were to look at the way that housing market operated or at the allocation of public educational resources, you would see significant discriminatory barriers that impeded African-American development of their skills and participation in the society.

00:34:49.960 And all of that has changed.

00:34:51.360 So that's, I think, for the good, without any question, that having changed, let's call it the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the change in the ethos of the country with the rise of the civil rights movement and so on, that having changed, the question becomes, we get to 1970, let's say, and the question becomes, what next?

00:35:14.580 And there, I think, what, is the right thing?

00:35:16.340 And there, I think the story is less clear.

00:35:20.380 And I think that there are developments that are very distressing.

00:35:27.160 I think when you, there's a wonderful book that I want to plug here called The World of Patience Gromes, G-R-O-M-E-S, by a man called Scott Davis.

00:35:39.700 Patience Gromes is a woman born in the late 19th century, like 1890 or something like that, to a yeoman farmer, a black person who owned his own land, her father.

00:35:58.960 And she's a princess.

00:36:00.320 She takes piano lessons.

00:36:02.420 She dresses up for church on Sunday.

00:36:05.900 They have a very strict behavioral code.

00:36:09.280 They're devout Christians.

00:36:11.140 They are Booker T. Washington-esque in their orientation.

00:36:14.940 And she marries and migrates to Richmond, Virginia, and starts a family in the 1920s.

00:36:22.000 And Scott Davis, the author of this great book, traces her family life through the early 1960s.

00:36:31.000 And what you see for Patience Gromes is her kids' struggle.

00:36:39.980 The neighborhood, which is not wealthy, but stable.

00:36:46.060 Her husband works for the railroad.

00:36:47.780 He's got a very good job.

00:36:49.000 Neighborhoods declines.

00:36:52.240 Model cities and various kinds of federal programs come through that end up remaking the community in ways that actually work in an adverse effect.

00:37:04.080 Public housing, which is initiated with the idea that the poor were going to be sheltered, ends up creating ghetto-type phenomenon.

00:37:14.620 And the kids who used to be interested in earning the respect of their peers by keeping their nose clean, keeping their nose to the grindstone, not having kids before they were married and stuff like that, end up embracing a much looser and less helpful set of cultural practices.

00:37:37.120 And by the time you get to the 1970s, it's a mess.

00:37:43.200 So there's a lot of mess.

00:37:48.200 There's, I mean, these are statistics that people cite all the time.

00:37:54.240 Black family life used to be much healthier than it is out of wedlock bears and all of that. 1.00

00:37:59.960 And, of course, there was crime.

00:38:03.040 Du Bois, the Philadelphia Negro at the turn of the 20th century, is quick to point out that there was crime. 0.99

00:38:12.040 But the violence, the gangs, the drugs, the lawlessness, the contempt for order.

00:38:20.880 This was a development that we can see emerging in the post-civil rights environment.

00:38:32.740 So it's a mixed bag, I think.

00:38:35.240 I mean, you know, you can speculate, and people do, about the sources of this dissolution.

00:38:41.760 And I think there are many.

00:38:42.740 I think there are the incentives of welfare transfer programs which encourage people to live in ways that were ultimately not socially productive.

00:38:52.040 I think the change in the larger culture in which these liberatory sexual revolutions gave the back of their hand to a set of conventions, expectations, and restraints that were, yes, freedom limiting.

00:39:10.740 I mean, you can just do anything you want to do and maintain the respect of your peers, but we're also order-inducing.

00:39:18.520 Freedom limiting, but order-inducing.

00:39:20.660 And provided a framework within which people could manage the difficult problem of how do we live decently?

00:39:28.440 What do we do with our temptations?

00:39:30.000 How do we restrain our appetites?

00:39:32.960 How do we understand and then live up to our responsibilities?

00:39:37.720 And I think that's a society-wide development, not just something that happens in black communities.

00:39:44.460 But I think the politics of racial claiming, the victim psychology and mentality that ends up with reparations, as you're arguing point, I don't think those are healthy things.

00:40:09.020 These are things I've written about in my own work.

00:40:11.020 So, I experienced all of this from sort of the other side.

00:40:15.860 I didn't grow up around a lot of black people, only kind of rich black people. 0.50

00:40:20.220 But I grew up around a lot of white liberals who were very invested in talking about the civil rights movement.

00:40:29.840 And from that, they derived moral authority, great moral authority.

00:40:34.340 Like, I'm on the side of black people, therefore, I'm a good person.

00:40:37.280 And it does feel like maybe they were the great beneficiaries of the whole thing.

00:40:42.700 Like, there was sort of no downside for them.

00:40:49.040 They got to pat themselves on the back about being virtuous, even if what they were doing at the end of the day wasn't helping to solve the problem.

00:40:56.620 It does feel that way.

00:40:58.080 I mean, again, I've never lived on the south side of Chicago, but I've heard a lot of rich people talk about it.

00:41:05.020 But here's what I think, Tucker.

00:41:07.380 I think, and I've written about this in essays and so on, I think that there are basically two dispositions that you can have in thinking about the persistence of racial inequality.

00:41:23.420 What I call the bias narrative.

00:41:26.420 And the bias narrative is that we're behind because they have kept us out.

00:41:30.700 Right.

00:41:31.420 And that affords your white liberal do-gooders an opportunity to side on the historical imperative of let's stop the bias.

00:41:42.120 Let's fight racism, anti-racism.

00:41:43.860 And there's the development narrative.

00:41:46.420 And the development narrative basically says, the long history of enslavement, Jim Crow exclusion, and segregation has left African Americans with an imperative to develop our human potential more fully.

00:42:01.360 We were denied the complete opportunity to do so.

00:42:05.320 The doors, however, have opened substantially, and the ball is in our court.

00:42:09.640 That is the existential challenge, in my opinion, that African Americans have faced for a half century, since the end of the civil rights movement, to grasp the nettle and to seize the imperative of measuring up, of fulfilling our potential, of development.

00:42:32.260 The white liberals that you were just referring to, who are interested in being on the right side of history by doing the right thing by black people, embrace the bias narrative and give us an excuse to not take up the challenge of the development narrative.

00:42:51.600 Meanwhile, the country is moving on.

00:42:54.700 The world is moving on.

00:42:55.880 The world gets small.

00:42:57.360 You get globalization.

00:42:58.880 The world gets shaken by one after another technological revolution, which changes everything.

00:43:05.360 And we're in the midst of one right now with the AI and all that that's going on.

00:43:10.260 The demography changes.

00:43:12.380 You get tens of millions of people coming from non-European ports of call and making their lives in this country.

00:43:19.360 There are more Hispanics by far than there are blacks in the United States right now.

00:43:23.280 The Asians, if you can speak in those generic terms, are here to stay. 1.00

00:43:30.180 The world is getting small. 0.99

00:43:32.340 So not confronting the development challenge, continuing to take the victim stance, continuing to rely on the largesse and the beneficence of supposedly supportive white liberals is a disaster for black people.

00:43:52.980 It's not a disaster for the, what I call Negro cognoscenti, the anointed ones, the Shell Obamas of the world, with respect, as much as I can muster. 1.00

00:44:04.540 Not a disaster for those who are the ambassadors to white America on behalf of black America, like your friend Al Sharpton.

00:44:11.920 But a disaster for that kid who can't read, a disaster for that mother with three children and she doesn't know how she's going to feed them and she hasn't gotten an education. 0.97

00:44:21.300 A disaster for the gangbanger who's running around firing his pistol aimlessly out the window at a gang rival and killing a three-year-old sitting on her auntie's lap.

00:44:30.460 It's a disaster for those people.

00:44:33.420 There's no escaping the imperative to develop.

00:44:37.360 There's no substitute for being effective, for having a mastery over skill, for having solved the basic problem of life.

00:44:47.320 Which, again, I say is how do I comport myself in a way that is both dignified and consistent with my own and my children's prosperity?

00:44:54.760 That problem has to be faced.

00:44:56.240 It still has to be faced.

00:44:57.540 So I always blamed, again, not my world, and I've never really been that focused on these questions, but I live here, so it's like everyone's always talking about it.

00:45:05.420 And I always blamed the black leaders for this, for what you just described to agree with everything you said. 1.00

00:45:09.800 It seems obviously true.

00:45:11.060 But I always thought, you know, it's Sharpton's fault or Jesse Jackson's fault or whatever.

00:45:15.020 And it took me a long, I'm still trying to figure it out, but it does seem like they themselves were pawns, actually.

00:45:23.020 That's my current thinking on this.

00:45:24.760 I don't know if you've thought about this or noticed this or know what I'm talking about, but it does feel like, you know, you can criticize Sharpton or whatever, and you should. 0.87

00:45:32.920 It's obviously corrupt and it's all silly and all that, the shakedown and all that stuff.

00:45:36.280 But, like, he's not doing that by himself, actually. 0.99

00:45:39.400 He's being used by other people, probably not black people, who are deriving some bigger advantage from the status quo. 0.59

00:45:50.000 I don't disagree with that.

00:45:53.700 And they never get any attention.

00:45:56.240 You know, like, so if you're NBC and you're hiring Sharpton, again, I personally, as I told you last night, probably horrified you.

00:46:01.380 I kind of like Sharpton because I think he's smart, he's amusing.

00:46:04.300 But he's, you know, I think been probably pretty bad for the country.

00:46:07.000 I don't think he's helped black people at all.

00:46:08.740 But, like, if you're NBC, why are you, you're driving an advantage from the system that is not helping the people Sharpton says he supports.

00:46:20.060 Like, why?

00:46:20.720 They're never blamed for that, I guess, is what I'm saying.

00:46:23.880 Yeah.

00:46:24.180 Well, who would blame them?

00:46:26.080 Conservatives.

00:46:27.180 Yeah.

00:46:27.760 Republicans would blame them. 0.96

00:46:29.740 And they're racist, you know. 0.95

00:46:31.360 Yeah.

00:46:32.400 But they both, conservatives mostly don't, actually.

00:46:34.880 They blame Sharpton.

00:46:35.660 Or I'll speak for myself as a conservative lifelong, I would always be like, Sharpton's the problem.

00:46:40.860 And it's like, no, I think the whole, I'm just really struck, I don't know too much about it, but I'm really struck by the difference.

00:46:47.480 Like, I grew up thinking, you know, Martin Luther King was like a great man.

00:46:50.760 I still think great things about him.

00:46:52.920 And Malcolm X was a really sort of evil figure.

00:46:56.800 But if you listen to Malcolm X, he's a lot closer with some big differences.

00:47:03.220 But in general, to what you're describing as positive.

00:47:06.960 Correct.

00:47:07.980 And he got murdered.

00:47:10.380 And so did King.

00:47:12.260 No, I have enormous respect for the straight-backed, manly, autonomous, independent, responsibility-embracing posture of Malcolm X.

00:47:26.440 You know, he says, nobody is coming to save us.

00:47:31.200 We had better take care of our own.

00:47:32.920 Are you raising your children?

00:47:33.940 Did you pick up the trash in front of your house?

00:47:35.560 Exactly.

00:47:36.280 Will you start a business?

00:47:37.500 You don't have wealth?

00:47:38.400 You're waiting with your hand out for somebody to give you wealth?

00:47:41.720 Why don't you start a business?

00:47:43.640 Why don't you take care of your own community?

00:47:45.640 What, what, what, what, what, you know?

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00:49:36.620 So why, okay, so like all high school students, I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which

00:49:41.820 I don't even know if it was written by Malcolm X, was written by Alex Haley, but I don't know

00:49:46.440 to what extent it reflected his real views.

00:49:47.960 But then with YouTube, I watched a couple of Malcolm X speeches and it was like a totally

00:49:52.960 different person from the one I was presented in high school and much more along the lines

00:49:57.760 of what you just said.

00:49:58.560 And I was like, well, why isn't this guy much more famous than he is now?

00:50:02.320 One of the speeches, he goes off after white liberals and he's like, you know, whites are 0.99

00:50:05.940 bad, whites are a problem, but the real problem is white liberals. 1.00

00:50:08.380 I was like, you go, Malcolm X. 0.99

00:50:10.120 Why isn't he, it almost feels like his message has been suppressed a little bit, maybe.

00:50:18.120 Yeah.

00:50:19.280 I don't know.

00:50:20.040 I'm not a historian, but I see what you say.

00:50:23.240 And I do think there are aspects of his message that are extremely threatening to established

00:50:28.460 order.

00:50:28.920 And it's, it's, you know, he was a Muslim.

00:50:33.920 He was succeeded in his leadership of that movement, ultimately by Louis Farrakhan, who

00:50:40.260 was a notorious anti-Semite, quote unquote.

00:50:43.480 So there's that.

00:50:45.820 But Malcolm X was uncompromising about, well, you remember his comment after the Kennedy assassination,

00:50:52.560 chickens come home to roost and whatnot.

00:50:56.640 What do you think he meant by that?

00:50:57.660 I've never understood what that meant.

00:50:58.960 I think he meant U.S. entailment and global affairs has created enemies.

00:51:04.620 The U.S. has undertaken various operations that are, in effect, responsible for the blowback

00:51:15.580 that we're seeing.

00:51:16.420 That's what I think he meant.

00:51:17.460 Yeah.

00:51:17.560 There are probably some, probably some truth in that.

00:51:21.680 Well, you're the conspiracy theorist.

00:51:23.720 No, hardly.

00:51:25.720 I'm just trying to understand the world.

00:51:28.200 Are we ever going to see all the documents related to that?

00:51:31.440 No, of course not.

00:51:31.780 Of course not.

00:51:32.580 And, you know, to the three, so the president issued an executive order on January 23rd,

00:51:39.520 one of the first things that he did, after the inauguration, commanding, commanding with

00:51:44.700 the force of law, the federal agencies, the executive branch should declassify all documents

00:51:50.580 pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy

00:51:56.320 in 1968.

00:51:58.020 And that hasn't happened.

00:52:01.740 But you have to ask yourself, well, you know, why 60 years later are they still classified

00:52:07.120 in the first place?

00:52:07.800 Like, what is that?

00:52:08.700 And I don't think it's because the truth is easy to deal with.

00:52:13.180 I mean, I still think the truth 60 years later is really threatening to somebody, clearly.

00:52:19.020 Because on some level, like, why would you care?

00:52:20.860 If you found out there was a, you know, complex conspiracy who would assassinate Garfield,

00:52:24.600 you'd be like, okay, you know, it's long over.

00:52:27.340 Like, I think we can tell the truth.

00:52:29.160 Everyone's dead.

00:52:29.960 Exactly.

00:52:31.020 So it does make you wonder, like, well, what is this actually?

00:52:34.200 And I know for a fact, a verifiable fact, that the pushback against declassifying this

00:52:40.060 stuff within the government has been very intense.

00:52:43.060 Very intense.

00:52:44.040 So that tells you that there's something worth hiding.

00:52:47.140 I certainly hope, because I believe in disclosure and honesty, that it all comes out.

00:52:51.660 But you do get the feeling, not as a conspiracy nut, but as an honest person trying to make

00:52:57.080 sense of history in the present, that a lot of our assumptions are based on things that

00:53:02.400 aren't true or fully true.

00:53:04.320 Do you sense that?

00:53:05.760 I do.

00:53:06.520 And it's deeply disquieting to me, actually.

00:53:08.820 Yeah.

00:53:09.000 Because it means that the reality that I take for granted is orchestrated or manufactured,

00:53:16.960 and there are forces, I would have to presume, dark forces at work that I don't fully understand.

00:53:23.160 And then if this is not what it appears to be, what else that I take for granted is a charade

00:53:29.620 or a fantasy?

00:53:30.840 I mean, in some ways, I mean, obviously, you've been an African-American conservative for a

00:53:36.200 long time, moved around, but basically, you've been against the conventional view of things

00:53:41.800 for a long time, I would say.

00:53:43.160 Yeah.

00:53:43.860 But you're also working within, like, the very heart of the system.

00:53:48.080 I mean, Harvard, Brown, MIT, like, you're, you know, you have every possible credential.

00:53:54.720 So, at what point did it occur to you that maybe some of this was fake?

00:54:01.040 When did you start to think that?

00:54:04.360 I don't really know the answer to that question.

00:54:10.600 I'm going to make a personal reference.

00:54:12.600 I married my wife, LaJuan, whom you've met.

00:54:15.880 I had, like, the best dinner with her last night, yes.

00:54:20.740 She's awesome. 0.83

00:54:21.380 And I would say that that relationship has been a wake-up call for me in that she brings

00:54:30.620 a perspective that's very different from my conventional—I read the New York Times,

00:54:36.140 and I pretty much believe when I'm reading, I read the Washington Post, I read the Wall

00:54:39.740 Street Journal, I read the Chronicles of Higher Education, I, you know, and, you know, that's

00:54:47.280 what they're saying.

00:54:48.020 And, you know, I take it seriously, and I watch television, I watch the Sunday shows,

00:54:52.440 and whatnot, and she's like, man, that is all manufactured consent.

00:54:58.380 She's going to pull out Noam Chomsky on me.

00:55:02.540 So, I say all that to say, while I am not necessarily going to parrot her perspective on

00:55:08.460 things, they have caused me—encountering her perspective has caused me to revisit some

00:55:13.160 of my own assumptions.

00:55:14.860 And it's been uncomfortable, you said.

00:55:16.040 Yeah, I think so, sure.

00:55:18.160 Why?

00:55:20.740 Because it turns out that—and this actually relates to the book that I have coming out

00:55:27.640 from Polity Books called Self-Censorship in a Couple of Months—it makes me aware of the

00:55:36.840 fact that the discussion of controversial and sensitive matters that is sanitized and acceptable

00:55:47.020 in the mainstream venues is only the tip of the iceberg of legitimate discussion and debate.

00:55:55.140 If you don't do your, quote-unquote, your own research, if you don't exert an effort, if you don't

00:56:03.080 look around, if you don't listen to alternative voices, if you don't access independent media,

00:56:10.020 which we are awash in now, but which is relatively new, last quarter century or so, you're being

00:56:19.020 led around by the nose. You're being—how did Malcolm X say? You're being bamboozled. You're

00:56:25.280 being hoodwinked. You're not exercising your full critical capacities. You have to exert the

00:56:36.740 effort to look beyond what's right in front of your nose.

00:56:39.080 Do you think you've been bamboozled?

00:56:45.240 A little bit, yeah.

00:56:46.960 How?

00:56:48.560 Well, for example, I pretty much take what my government says to be, until proven otherwise,

00:56:55.020 true and reliable. And, you know, I have reason now to be more skeptical about that.

00:57:05.660 You are the master of understatement, I must say.

00:57:09.080 I have reason now to be skeptical of that. You do. I think we—look, I can confirm that.

00:57:15.080 Well, man, I mean, we've been at war since forever.

00:57:19.120 Yes.

00:57:19.660 Do we really need to be at war since forever? There were no weapons of mass destruction,

00:57:26.660 were there?

00:57:27.900 No.

00:57:28.200 In Iraq. Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? 0.84

00:57:35.760 Is that what we're about to do? These are important questions.

00:57:39.080 Must we risk nuclear war with a nuclear-armed Russia over the conflict in Ukraine as an imperative to prevent the reemergence of a dominant force coming from the East to occupy civilization? 0.97

00:57:52.720 I'm being told, or let me get more prosaic, is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast a ballot in Georgia?

00:58:04.240 I mean, if I don't ask myself some of those questions, I'll be being led around by the nose over the cliff.

00:58:13.840 Yeah.

00:58:14.160 I'm younger than you, but I've had a similar—I'm not even sure it's awakening.

00:58:24.520 I don't know the answers to most of the questions that you just asked, but I know that they're valid questions, and it's important to push back a little bit, right?

00:58:32.120 Because—but how weird is it to—especially for you, because, again, you have pushed back against the status quo for a long time.

00:58:40.380 It's why you're famous.

00:58:41.840 So you've been, to be blunt, much more of a free thinker than most people, certainly at the university level.

00:58:47.660 So it's not like you were just, like, following orders anyway.

00:58:53.540 It must be particularly weird for you to realize that some of your assumptions may not be true.

00:59:02.280 Yeah.

00:59:04.920 I got used to being the contrarian and thinking of myself as the guy who thought outside the box and who was not bound by convention.

00:59:13.560 But I came to realize, though, that I wasn't quite as independent a thinker as I imagined myself to be, and that there were traps, you know?

00:59:31.900 So, yeah.

00:59:34.460 So if you don't mind, if you just describe the process of realizing that, what made you come to that conclusion?

00:59:43.560 So, um, I'm going to talk about my relationship with the Manhattan Institute.

00:59:54.020 And can you—for those who aren't in right-wing world like me and you, can you just describe the Manhattan Institute?

01:00:00.680 The Manhattan Institute is a think tank based in New York City, published in a magazine called City Journal.

01:00:07.460 So, uh, puts out reports and houses scholars who are investigating different aspects of social policy, largely urban-related issues.

01:00:17.760 Um, and, uh, they've been around for a while.

01:00:20.740 I used to write for them.

01:00:22.020 Uh, did you?

01:00:23.740 Yeah, Myron Magnet was the editor.

01:00:25.440 Oh, yeah.

01:00:25.720 He was a wonderful man, ran City Journal.

01:00:27.740 Yeah, they were—

01:00:28.560 And, and they are a—

01:00:30.180 They were great.

01:00:30.640 They are, uh, a highbrow, uh, serious, uh, intellectually, um, robust, uh, critical, from-the-right, uh, uh, observer, uh, about, uh, all manner of issues, about housing, about crime, about welfare, uh, and, uh, other things, uh, mostly American domestic, uh, politics.

01:00:55.300 Um, and, uh, I signed on there a few years ago as a senior fellow, uh, and, uh, my podcast, The Glenn Show, uh, which I, uh, put out, uh, content every week, uh, was being sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, and—

01:01:12.060 Can I say, just, you made such a point that I think is worth underlining.

01:01:16.560 The Manhattan Institute, and particularly City Journal and its flagship publication, are concerned, have been for 30 years with domestic issues.

01:01:23.420 This is, this is not the Hudson Institute, this is not AI, this is, like, a overwhelmingly domestic-focused organization.

01:01:31.360 Is that fair?

01:01:32.040 Yeah, yeah, that's correct.

01:01:33.580 Um, they worry about, uh, race issues, they worry about crime and punishment-type issues, they worry about, you know, housing, about, uh, city politics, uh, and, you know, things like that.

01:01:43.840 Um, um, and, uh, they have, uh, you know, estimable scholars, uh, who are, uh, a part of the shop that produces these, um, studies and commentaries, uh, and so on.

01:01:58.240 And I signed on there as a senior fellow, uh, John Paulson, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and, um, we, uh, part of company, uh, recently at their behest, uh, both their sponsorship of my podcast and their employment of me as a senior fellow because of some of the, uh, public comments that I have made at my podcast and some of the, uh, people whom I have interviewed there, uh, where the issue of the conflict, uh,

01:02:28.220 in, uh, Palestine and, uh, Middle East and Gaza and Israel, uh, has come up.

01:02:34.140 And I ran afoul, uh, of the sensibility of the, uh, my friend, uh, Rayhan Salam, who's president of the Manhattan Institute, wrote me saying that we review our scholarly relationships from time to time.

01:02:48.780 This is practically a quote, uh, for productivity, and there's no question about my productivity.

01:02:53.940 I've put a dozen articles in their city journal over the last five years, uh, and shared priorities.

01:03:01.180 And so I assume it's that we don't share priorities and, uh, the priorities that I assume we don't share have to do with, uh, me inviting a historian colleague of mine, uh, on the show, the Glenn show, to talk about, uh, the post-October 7th, 2023 incursion of the IDF into Gaza.

01:03:22.580 Uh, which he characterized in the same kind of language that international human rights organizations have used as being, if not genocide, then in the same ballpark and something that one needs to be concerned about from a human rights perspective.

01:03:39.220 He thinks the international criminal court and the international court of justice are right to take initiatives that are, uh, holding, uh, Israeli officials to account for the prosecution of that conflict.

01:03:50.040 And I had him on the show.

01:03:51.300 Now, who, who is he?

01:03:52.680 His name is Omer Bartoff.

01:03:55.140 Omer Bartoff.

01:03:55.980 He's a student of, uh, the, uh, Holocaust of the Nazi, uh, extermination campaign in Eastern Europe and has written books about that.

01:04:05.840 And he's been my colleague for 20 years at Brown.

01:04:08.760 I've gotten to know him and I knew that he was engaging these questions in a controversial manner and I wanted to hear from him.

01:04:16.120 So I had him on the show.

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01:04:53.120 So, um, he's a professor at Brown.

01:04:56.060 Yeah.

01:04:56.540 He's a very distinguished historian.

01:04:59.100 Um, and I, I think it's fair to say he's not an anti-Semite.

01:05:02.780 He's Israeli.

01:05:04.040 Oh, okay.

01:05:05.240 I, I, I just wanted this to be clear to everyone listening.

01:05:07.680 So it's not like you didn't have Louis Farrakhan on the show to like call Judaism and got a religion or something.

01:05:12.120 You had an Israeli historian of the Holocaust on.

01:05:15.600 No.

01:05:15.780 And, uh, there were objections, uh, coming from the staff at MI and they asked that we not, uh, in promoting the show, make mention of the Institute of the Manhattan Institute in connection with this particular episode.

01:05:27.660 Um, and there were other incidents, um, the black American writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, uh, came out with a book called The Message, uh, in which he describes writing about politics.

01:05:42.480 And there are several chapters.

01:05:45.100 One reviews his, uh, first visit to Africa and talks about his encounter with, uh, the Senegalese and the complex dynamic of an African American thinking of himself as an African, but not really being an African.

01:06:02.400 Yes.

01:06:03.180 Uh, in Africa. 0.85

01:06:03.940 Uh, another essay describes him going to a small town in South Carolina that had banned one of his books, uh, because it's critical race theory and finding that the people there were more complicated and interesting and malleable, uh, that is open to, uh, discourse than he would have imagined and sort of exposing the complexity of this moment in our cultural history of, uh, anti-racism and anti-anti-racism.

01:06:31.640 Um, but the main, uh, uh, bulk of the book is devoted in Coates's, uh, book, The Message to, uh, recounting his experience, uh, as a visitor on the West Bank of, uh, uh, uh, Palestine.

01:06:47.020 And, uh, he's appalled by what he sees, uh, and he says so, uh, and in conversation with, uh, John McWhorter, who is, uh, a regular, uh, conversation partner of mine at the podcast,

01:07:01.640 I allowed is how I admired the book.

01:07:04.580 Uh, I said it was not without its flaws and it should be understood that I have been sharply critical of Ta-Nehisi Coates' other writings.

01:07:12.980 Oh, I remember very well.

01:07:14.500 He had a very famous essay in The Atlantic, I think 2014 or 2015, called The Case for Reparations, which I objected to and said so at length.

01:07:22.720 And then he published a best-selling book called Between the World and Me, which, uh, was, uh, very widely praised and, uh, widely read.

01:07:33.220 And I had, uh, deep problems with it, which I discussed at length on the podcast.

01:07:38.400 So I'm generally disposed to be a conservative critic of Coates, but I admired the book.

01:07:45.080 And I admired in particular the essay in which he reflected on what he saw in the West Bank.

01:07:49.080 I didn't necessarily agree with all of his, uh, sensibilities and so on, but I thought it was, um, a, um, interesting, provocative, insightful, uh, humane engagement with a difficult, very difficult set of issues.

01:08:06.980 Well, the party line on the book, including at the Manhattan Institute, is this is unspeakable.

01:08:13.980 This is a, uh, black guy who doesn't know what the F he's talking about, wandering around on the West Bank in the company of some anti-Zionist, uh, uh, Jews. 0.77

01:08:23.880 And, uh, coming back and talking about it as if it were, he, he uses the word apartheid. 0.98

01:08:30.700 Coates uses the word apartheid.

01:08:32.260 He said, what I saw in the West Bank.

01:08:35.340 This is the West Bank, not Gaza.

01:08:36.980 Uh, was, uh, reminiscent to me of what I saw in South Africa.

01:08:42.820 And I didn't like what I saw.

01:08:44.360 And it's wrong.

01:08:45.180 And I'm going to tell you why I think it's wrong.

01:08:47.480 And I don't care what, uh, account you're giving of the history.

01:08:51.980 Uh, he has read some of the history, but he's not, uh, deeply versed in the, um, uh, historical record of, uh, how, uh, the circumstance in Palestine has come to be.

01:09:04.200 But his basic point is, look, I'm telling you what I'm seeing there is not healthy, it's not humane, and it's not right.

01:09:12.000 And I had some appreciation for his courage to say so and for the artful way in which he said so.

01:09:21.880 Uh, and I said so on the show.

01:09:24.760 In the same restrained, non-radical way you're describing it now to me?

01:09:30.920 Yeah.

01:09:31.960 Uh, yeah.

01:09:32.940 I, I, I just basically said, this is something that has to be reckoned with.

01:09:36.440 I said to John, my partner in conversation, who's, who's also an African-American.

01:09:41.340 He teaches at Columbia University and writes a regular piece, a newsletter for the New York Times.

01:09:46.920 Uh, and, uh, he's, he took exception.

01:09:50.420 And he and I, John and I went back and forth about this, but, uh, and it came to, like, me saying what I actually thought about what was happening in Gaza.

01:10:01.900 And what I thought was October 7th, 2023 was horrific.

01:10:05.700 What Hamas did was barbaric.

01:10:07.840 Uh, I'm against it.

01:10:09.120 I have no brief for it whatsoever.

01:10:11.440 However, however, what I saw proceeding in the aftermath of that was a campaign of collective punishment that was horrific in the extreme.

01:10:22.580 And I didn't want to have my country having anything to do with it.

01:10:25.960 And I wasn't afraid to say so.

01:10:28.500 Now, I didn't say it quite that directly, but that's pretty much the burden of what it is I had to say.

01:10:35.500 So that's it?

01:10:36.160 You didn't say, you didn't, like, espouse violence or?

01:10:41.440 No, no, I, I, I basically took up the cause that has animated, uh, a lot of agitation, not just on college campuses in the United States, but in public opinion throughout the world, to say, stop it.

01:10:59.800 I called for a ceasefire with the release of the hostages, of course.

01:11:04.780 Uh, but I said, this is not what a civilized...

01:11:11.440 country should be doing, and I object.

01:11:17.460 That doesn't seem...

01:11:18.940 I mean, people could disagree with you, for sure, but it doesn't seem, like, radical or crazy.

01:11:24.460 No, and, you know, and a lot of Israelis agree with me.

01:11:26.920 For sure.

01:11:27.460 Well, including the one you interviewed, I guess.

01:11:30.100 Your colleague at Brown.

01:11:31.240 Oh, yeah.

01:11:31.820 I mean, Omer, of course, but, um, many. 1.00

01:11:34.560 Yeah.

01:11:34.840 Oh, I know.

01:11:36.100 Um, so what, what happened next?

01:11:38.300 Uh, well, next, uh, the, um, outfit called Air Wars, A-I-R-W-A-R-S, Air Wars, which is a, uh, initiative to study the consequences of aerial bombardment in conflict,

01:11:55.260 put out a report documenting the extensive civilian casualties that were being engendered by the bombing attacks that Israel was conducting in Gaza.

01:12:07.560 Uh, and I had one of the, uh, people who was sympathetic to the report on the show to discuss the report about civilian casualties.

01:12:18.280 Basically, he was arguing that the number of women and children killed relative to the number of combatants killed was exceptionally high and reflected tactics that, uh, you could question as to whether or not they were, uh, absolutely necessary.

01:12:32.740 I mean, he made a collective punishment argument.

01:12:35.580 Uh, and I had him in a debate.

01:12:37.680 This guy's name is Andrew Cockerell.

01:12:40.440 Uh, he's a historian, Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics.

01:12:45.960 Uh, I had him in one with Eli Lake, who's a journalist, writes about, uh, Middle East and other international affairs.

01:12:53.160 But it was a debate, so you had both sides.

01:12:54.360 Yeah, I had both sides.

01:12:55.300 I've never heard of Cockerell, I don't know anything about it.

01:12:57.380 Yeah, well, he's not very prominent.

01:12:59.420 Yeah, but, but Lake is prominent, and, um, but, but both sides were represented, I guess that's what I just want to establish for listeners.

01:13:07.940 Yeah, both sides were represented, and they had their back and forth about the, how do you interpret the data on civilian casualties?

01:13:15.960 And the, uh, bombardment, aerial bombardment, uh, of this campaign.

01:13:21.080 Um, and then I did a, um, a kind of, uh, me directly to the camera, uh, 10-minute or 15-minute, uh, reflection on the interview as a bonus feature of the podcast,

01:13:35.320 which we make available to paying subscribers and where I interact with my, with someone from my staff who's basically interviews me about the interview that I did.

01:13:44.980 And I was asked, uh, did I learn anything from Eli Lake?

01:13:49.140 And I said, what was I going to learn?

01:13:50.500 And I basically recounted my, uh, view, which I've already described here, of, uh, what was being proceeding, what has been proceeding there in Gaza as a collective punishment that I don't think is justified.

01:14:05.300 And I, I said, as much as I said, no, he said nothing that dissuade me from that point of view.

01:14:09.480 And that got posted, um, and, uh, I got notified the next day, uh, that, uh, the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow.

01:14:23.060 How did they tell you?

01:14:24.380 Um, I got a note from Raihan saying, as I've mentioned, that we do review our scholar connections from time to time for productivity and shared priorities.

01:14:35.480 And we've decided not to continue to work with you.

01:14:38.380 The next day?

01:14:39.340 Yeah.

01:14:40.340 Did he call you?

01:14:41.820 No.

01:14:43.660 No, it was a two paragraph email.

01:14:45.840 And that's it?

01:14:46.440 That's the only contact you had?

01:14:47.600 I haven't talked to him since.

01:14:51.060 I, I know Raihan is one of the, as it sounds like he was a friend of yours too, he's one of the world's nicest people.

01:14:56.200 I mean, he's very, very...

01:14:56.720 Yeah, I like Raihan a lot, actually.

01:14:58.040 Oh, of course, and very smart.

01:14:58.600 I'm a little bit disappointed about this.

01:15:00.040 Now, let me just say this.

01:15:01.020 But what do you think that was?

01:15:02.120 I assume it was somebody saying, this guy's got to go.

01:15:06.700 And I don't know who the somebody is.

01:15:08.380 I assume that that's somebody sitting on the board of the Manhattan Institute.

01:15:12.140 Or it may be that the internal deliberations had been, the warning signs had been flashing for some months.

01:15:18.820 And finally, this was, this was over the top and more than people could tolerate.

01:15:24.740 And maybe the John Paulson senior fellow, the John Paulson or someone like him, that is a heavy hitter who puts up funds for the Institute's operations said, this is unacceptable.

01:15:35.380 You got to do something about this.

01:15:36.760 But I'm speculating and saying that.

01:15:38.760 And I want to say something else, Tucker, which is that I'm not mad at anybody.

01:15:43.560 I am sobered.

01:15:45.380 And it's a cold bucket of water in the face.

01:15:48.760 And it's a reminder to me about the environment that we all operate in.

01:15:53.880 The Manhattan Institute had been good to me.

01:15:57.660 They helped me get my memoir written.

01:16:00.860 They have supported my work.

01:16:02.680 I've made friends there.

01:16:06.480 So it's not as if I'm feeling that, you know, I've been disrespected.

01:16:13.920 Although I imagine that the positions that I took on this issue just were simply not tolerable.

01:16:23.120 And this has been the consequence of that.

01:16:25.120 If you, it's, first of all, it's so sad.

01:16:27.240 And I would agree.

01:16:27.860 I think the Manhattan Institute's been a force for good.

01:16:30.140 And they've been kind to me.

01:16:31.180 You know, 30 years ago, when I didn't have any money, I worked for them on the side.

01:16:35.280 They were great.

01:16:36.080 And I really like Raihan.

01:16:37.080 I like everyone I know there.

01:16:38.060 Chris Rufo, I think, is there.

01:16:39.300 Good people.

01:16:40.620 But I think this is a really revealing thing that you're describing.

01:16:44.820 And I wonder if the conversation had been about an American bombing campaign somewhere.

01:16:50.020 There have been so many.

01:16:51.280 But of any country that we've been bombing, you know.

01:16:54.180 And you had said, I think this amounts to collective punishment.

01:16:57.280 And I think it's wrong.

01:16:58.020 This is not how civilized nations behave.

01:17:01.180 If you'd said that about the United States, would you have gotten the same reaction?

01:17:06.200 No.

01:17:06.660 In my opinion, not at all.

01:17:10.480 You know, the issue of Israel and the nature of the October 7th attack and the political climate that's been created since.

01:17:21.120 And the advent of vigorous protests on American campuses and the need to marshal, you know, all hands on deck here for the project.

01:17:34.540 The project of Zionism, a project of defending the project of establishing the state of Israel, which is under threat, requires people to get in line. 0.84

01:17:45.900 And I think that's what's going on here.

01:17:48.400 I just think it feels to me counterproductive.

01:17:53.100 I love the United States.

01:17:54.340 I'm never leaving tons of things about American history I would not defend.

01:17:58.140 Why would I?

01:17:58.940 Slavery.

01:18:00.160 You know, I like the American Indians.

01:18:01.980 I don't think they were treated very well.

01:18:03.640 That's part of our founding.

01:18:05.480 And it's depressing.

01:18:06.460 And I'm happy to say that.

01:18:08.080 I think the Vietnam War was a disaster.

01:18:10.240 Iraq was a disaster. 1.00

01:18:11.400 U.S. government did all that stuff.

01:18:13.060 And I say that as someone who really loves America.

01:18:15.520 And I'm not attacking America.

01:18:17.320 But, like, it's okay to say that.

01:18:19.760 It doesn't mean I hate America, right?

01:18:22.200 Don't you think that's a better way to approach public debate?

01:18:26.720 Rather than just, like, any, you must read these lines.

01:18:30.020 And anyone who disagrees is, like, a Nazi.

01:18:32.160 That's not, that doesn't help the people pushing it.

01:18:34.840 But I think my detractors, and I now speculate, wanted me to be a neutral arbiter and not to be a partisan, not to take a side.

01:18:44.440 I think they wanted me to hear from Barry Weiss or Douglas Murray or some such person to give the case against the position that I had stated.

01:18:56.340 I think also that I'm dabbling in something that people spend their lives on.

01:19:04.840 And the feeling was, I'm out of my depth.

01:19:07.600 And it's not, you know, you want to talk about race?

01:19:09.960 You want to talk about affirmative action?

01:19:11.240 You want to talk about reparations?

01:19:13.580 You want to talk about crime and punishment in American cities?

01:19:18.440 Sure.

01:19:19.000 Glenn Lowry.

01:19:19.600 He's, you know, the guy that we conservatives can rely upon to give a critical assessment of those issues.

01:19:28.600 You want to talk about Gaza?

01:19:30.080 You want to talk about Israel?

01:19:31.120 You want to talk about Zionism?

01:19:32.340 You want to talk about the West Bank?

01:19:33.660 You want to talk about the occupation?

01:19:36.120 Who is he?

01:19:36.760 This is not his bailiwick.

01:19:40.600 And I think also that the fact that I'm an African-American who embodies a kind of position of moral critique of anti-racism.

01:20:05.200 And so on, whose prominent identity as a, not a wild-eyed leftist, but a person of centrist to right-of-center sensibility,

01:20:22.680 who, however, speaks out on behalf of the Palestinian position, they're going to call me a Hamas sympathizer, you know?

01:20:35.640 I'm not a Hamas sympathizer.

01:20:37.180 I'm, like I said, appalled by what I've seen proceed in Gaza and don't want to be associated with it. 1.00

01:20:47.240 I don't want my country associated with it.

01:20:49.880 I think it's wrong.

01:20:51.300 I think it's excessive.

01:20:52.460 I think it's punitive in the extreme.

01:20:56.520 I think it's inhumane.

01:20:57.660 I don't think it's necessary.

01:21:01.960 Well, defend that position, will you?

01:21:04.580 People will say.

01:21:06.100 I think as a black intellectual of somewhat conservative sensibility, it's way out of line for me to be taking that kind of a position.

01:21:15.360 And I think that's why a point had to be made.

01:21:19.040 Because it's a threat to have someone like you say something like that?

01:21:24.640 Not to exaggerate my own importance, yes.

01:21:30.580 Well, I mean, I just have lived in that world for so long, 35 years, that, you know, in conservative world, very famous, you were a very famous guy.

01:21:41.740 And so I think you have real importance in that world, of course.

01:21:45.560 And, but why would it be more of a threat for you to say that than for one of your white colleagues with the same views to say that?

01:21:56.600 Well, let's, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide, world court, international court of justice.

01:22:07.640 I think the authorization of a certain kind of perspective that, of course, remember the huge debate about Zionism being racism.

01:22:25.900 I'm not making that claim.

01:22:27.920 I'm not either.

01:22:28.540 I don't want to get involved in any of this stuff, is my personal view.

01:22:31.920 I was in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 for the World Conference Against Racism.

01:22:38.280 And I remember Colin Powell, as Secretary of State, deciding not to attend the World Conference Against Racism because of the controversy that had emerged about anti-Zionist elements wanting to make a point out of Zionism being racism at that conference.

01:22:57.960 And Powell wouldn't attend it.

01:22:59.440 I didn't endorse that position then, and I'm not endorsing it now.

01:23:03.940 I think that's too facile and ahistorical of an equation to draw.

01:23:10.200 But I think that's the thing that the defenders of the Zionist project fear getting a camel's nose under the tent. 0.51

01:23:24.000 The idea that there could be some South Africa-like indictment of the political project that could emerge and could gain credence, and that's not acceptable.

01:23:41.380 I mean, that's why I think the not implausible set of observations about the settler colonialism aspect of the Zionist project must be nipped in the bud.

01:23:56.420 And it has to be seen as absolutely ridiculous, and people who teach it, and I taught at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown as an economist for years, teaching international studies and development studies kinds of courses.

01:24:12.360 And it's this sentiment of European influence throughout the global South and whatnot gets applied in the context of Israel-Palestine by some critics, and they are now on the run.

01:24:28.520 And the critics who would apply that sentiment are part of this woke incumbency in American higher education, which is being run out of town on a rail as we speak.

01:24:41.560 And I think these things are all somehow connected with one another.

01:24:45.980 Clearly, they are.

01:24:46.920 I'm struck by something you said a few minutes ago that when you had Bartov, your colleague, the Israeli, on your podcast, his views are widely represented in Israel.

01:25:00.860 They are.

01:25:01.740 Well, having been to Israel a number of times, I know a lot of Israelis.

01:25:06.000 I know that that's true, that there is a robust debate about these kinds of things there, but not here.

01:25:13.560 What is that?

01:25:16.920 Well, I could ask you.

01:25:18.260 I mean, I can only speculate about why that is.

01:25:22.260 I think, though, the influence of the Israel lobby, as it's called in some quarters, is not insubstantial.

01:25:30.640 I think the climate of opinion is influenced by a desire to avoid being accused of anti-Semitism.

01:25:42.120 I think that powerful people can exert their influence in one way or another, and the anticipation of that influence being exerted is enough to keep people from straying too far from acceptable representations.

01:25:58.100 Well, it's not working.

01:25:59.260 It's making, you know, moderate people radical in a way that's not helpful to anybody.

01:26:04.560 I just want to say I'm against it.

01:26:05.880 I'm against radicalism in general.

01:26:08.760 And that's not the way to win people over.

01:26:11.520 I don't think it hasn't won.

01:26:13.320 Why didn't someone just call you and say, hey, Glenn, this is, like, not your area.

01:26:19.280 We're old friends.

01:26:20.800 Why don't we have lunch?

01:26:21.680 And I'll kind of give you my perspective and, like, just talk it through.

01:26:25.300 Well, some people have done it.

01:26:27.120 Nobody at the Manhattan Institute.

01:26:28.660 That's what I'm saying.

01:26:29.420 Like, it doesn't help, whatever cause they think they're advancing.

01:26:35.620 We're in the land of speculation.

01:26:37.360 I don't really know what happened.

01:26:39.060 Okay.

01:26:39.380 I don't know what conversations were ahead, and I don't know what was said.

01:26:42.640 I would have appreciated a call from Ryan Hunt.

01:26:45.160 Do you know how many lazy people are at think tanks?

01:26:48.140 Like, 99% of them, you're probably, like, the most productive person.

01:26:52.960 I mean, I'm not to be mean, but there are a lot of senior fellows at think tanks who don't do anything.

01:26:57.040 I do seem to have noticed that, yeah.

01:27:00.400 Yeah.

01:27:01.040 Well, I have lived and I've worked at a think tank.

01:27:03.400 And I'm not attacking anybody.

01:27:04.600 It's, like, it's an employment program.

01:27:05.820 I got it.

01:27:07.060 But I would think from the perspective of a think tank, like, well, that's why I guess they hired you in the first place.

01:27:13.900 It's, like, good to have someone who's well-known, can explain himself well, and, like, likes to work.

01:27:20.980 It's all good.

01:27:22.660 I am at the end of a long career.

01:27:25.460 I have, you know, a pretty good reputation as a scholar and as a public critic.

01:27:35.200 My podcast is flourishing.

01:27:37.520 I'm okay.

01:27:38.540 Are you worried about speech?

01:27:41.280 I mean, because, obviously, the ability to think freely is at the heart of education.

01:27:47.580 And, I mean, that is education.

01:27:50.240 So, are you worried about it, the state of it, speech in the United States?

01:27:54.100 I am, although independent media gives me hope, you know, that everybody has got the opportunity to be heard now.

01:28:04.200 And pockets of influence can develop, emerge, and flourish.

01:28:11.660 And you can't stifle the conversation in the same way that you used to be able to, because you could control a few of the portals of dissemination of information.

01:28:23.920 Now, that's not any longer possible.

01:28:27.940 How long do you think that'll last?

01:28:30.940 I think it's going to just get more capacious.

01:28:37.180 I think we're, I don't know, it's not my field, you know, about media, but I think we're on the verge of something, you know, revolutionary.

01:28:47.500 Everybody's got an encyclopedia and a global translator in their pocket.

01:28:54.380 Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint.

01:29:00.420 So, I actually wish that I were going to live long enough to see what would come of this, but I'm 76, soon to be 77, so, you know.

01:29:15.440 What happens to the universities?

01:29:16.900 Well, there's a confrontation now, and I just read an interesting piece by Peter Berkowitz.

01:29:31.400 I don't know if you know who he is.

01:29:32.640 It's out at the Hoover Institution.

01:29:34.540 He's a political theorist.

01:29:37.560 And he's talking about the Harvard-Trump administration confrontation.

01:29:42.800 And he's saying, on the one hand, yeah, Harvard had gotten a little lax in its enforcement of restraint on the anti-Israel demonstrators

01:29:54.840 and had gotten very woke in its kind of latter-day modernist relativism of the humanities and the social sciences.

01:30:07.040 And those are things that can be critiqued, he says.

01:30:10.540 On the other hand, he says, the Trump administration's cancellation midstream of commitments to funding and wholesale assault

01:30:20.160 and demanding to be able to dictate curriculum in hiring decisions of Harvard was over the top.

01:30:28.620 And some of it, he doubted what's going to survive in the courts.

01:30:32.220 He says, in effect, this is almost a quote,

01:30:34.360 both sides stand to get bloodied if they end up in court with one another for different reasons.

01:30:38.260 So what about a compromise?

01:30:41.180 And the compromise would involve, according to Berkowitz's thinking,

01:30:45.940 basically Harvard conceding that, yeah, its curriculum had gotten too far left and anti-Western.

01:30:54.900 And there should be an effort to stand up a school within the university who's of general education,

01:31:03.380 whose purposes would be more affirming of the Western cultural inheritance.

01:31:09.500 And that while the school would be an independent entity that has had its own faculty and whatnot,

01:31:15.680 the undergraduates would be required to take some courses in the school as a part of what a Harvard education would mean.

01:31:21.780 So that's a kind of a concession to the critics of the drift left of the curriculum and faculty.

01:31:32.040 And that the administration would back off of its peremptory gangster type tactics of trying to gut the whole enterprise.

01:31:41.560 And, you know, I think there's, that's worth thinking about.

01:31:47.900 What happens to the university?

01:31:49.220 Well, I've said recently in a public statement that I think, you know,

01:31:53.060 if you ask what's going on in the university outside of the politicized discourses,

01:31:58.960 what's going on in the sciences and so on,

01:32:03.280 what's going on in the social sciences at the very best places in terms of the,

01:32:08.900 you know, state of economics as a discipline, for example, psychology as a discipline,

01:32:14.080 for example.

01:32:17.140 What's going on in the humanities where people are writing important books,

01:32:20.860 where they're discovering new things about history,

01:32:23.840 where they are examining in a critical way culture,

01:32:27.000 not all of it is from the left.

01:32:28.360 But the U.S. universities are sources of excellence and of exquisite human achievement.

01:32:36.900 We have the best institutions in the world.

01:32:42.000 And that's a tremendous boon,

01:32:46.940 both in terms of the straight up people want to come here and study,

01:32:51.020 but also in terms of the spillover benefits.

01:32:52.980 And not only in the sciences and engineering and the patents,

01:32:55.720 but also in the quality of the American cultural footprint in global affairs.

01:33:05.440 We don't want to squander that over a politicized campaign to stamp out wokeness 0.81

01:33:13.000 inspired by the fact that people don't like anti-IDF demonstrations emanating from the student body.

01:33:19.680 Hey, that's the tail wagging the dog here. 0.98

01:33:24.000 Take the long view.

01:33:25.640 We want to cultivate these excellent centers of human intellectual achievement.

01:33:33.960 And I think that's the position I try to defend.

01:33:38.660 Why is a college better than YouTube?

01:33:40.420 Well, I'm a teacher who taught his last class at Brown University after nearly 50 years of college teaching.

01:33:53.360 In that last class, I engaged my students in open-ended conversation.

01:33:59.360 We talked about ideas.

01:34:01.740 And I reminisced about what we had done over the course of the semester.

01:34:04.860 The course was on race and inequality, and we'd read widely.

01:34:12.080 I got a letter from one of my students recently appreciating me

01:34:16.920 and hoping that my post-teaching endeavors would flourish

01:34:21.860 and saying that I had changed his life.

01:34:24.220 That I had shown him something that he didn't realize before,

01:34:30.280 which was the fact that even though he recoiled against the conservative tone of some of my arguments,

01:34:41.300 that he realized that there was stuff that he had never thought about before

01:34:44.640 that he needed to think about.

01:34:46.940 And he said he was better off for thinking about them, inspired by me, inspired by my example.

01:34:55.140 He says, your eloquence, this is me patting myself on the back,

01:34:58.660 but I'm just telling you what the kids said, and your passion.

01:35:04.960 And this is from face-to-face encounter, twice a week for 90 minutes,

01:35:08.920 with 20 people sitting around a table,

01:35:10.560 and me taking them by the hand and leading them through a corpus of work

01:35:15.220 on a sensitive and important set of questions.

01:35:18.740 I don't know that YouTube can do that for you.

01:35:22.580 When AI gets to the point that the bot on the other side of the screen

01:35:26.400 has the same degree of empathy, eloquence, erudition, passion, and curiosity that I have,

01:35:33.440 well, they won't need me, will they?

01:35:39.020 Professor, thank you.

01:35:40.560 My pleasure, very much.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - May 09, 2025

Glenn Loury： Ousted for Opposing Middle Eastern Wars, MLK Files, & the One Thing Malcolm X Got Right

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