In this episode, Dr. Carl Gregg talks about how the world has changed since he was a kid growing up in the 60s and 70s. He talks about what it was like to be a student at Brown University, how he got into politics, and what it's like being a professor at Brown now.
00:03:11.960So, I remember as I did my undergraduate at Northwestern University, graduated in 1972, the intensity of the intellectual experience of coming to the university.
00:03:29.480I remember encountering the German language.
00:03:32.860I remember studying mathematics and economics and philosophy and politics.
00:05:04.920First of all, not everybody was a protester or enmeshed in the ethos of protests.
00:05:12.980Some of us were just trying to get to class.
00:05:15.640In 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.
00:05:50.700They called me a timekeeper and a bonus estimator.
00:05:54.120We 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.
00:06:02.600And 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.
00:06:21.240And then they would go into the process of the mainframe computer congestion.
00:06:28.180It was pretty antiquated, but that's how we kept track of the accounting.
00:06:38.820This was R.R. Donnelly and Sons, a big printing concern.
00:06:42.720Lakeside Press is what they call the campus.
00:06:45.500A couple of miles, three miles south of the loop on the lakefront in Chicago.
00:06:49.780So maybe a dozen or so factory-style buildings, railroad tracks running alongside huge rolls of printing paper, these monstrous machines, which were the presses.
00:07:03.480Craftsmen 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.
00:07:15.100They printed Time magazine, Life magazine, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek.
00:08:27.820So 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.
00:08:38.640Now, I talk about this in my memoir that came out last year, Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative.
00:09:50.420Uh, he was a Northwestern alum, which is how I ended up at Northwestern.
00:09:53.480He referred me to their admissions committee.
00:09:57.160Uh, 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.
00:10:04.540But 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.
00:10:20.040So she had barricaded herself, and I had to persuade her.
00:10:24.600Uh, it took me 15 minutes to persuade her to open the door and let me in so that I could sit down and study.
00:10:30.140Because 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.
00:10:38.940So you were working second shift, so that's 4 to midnight?
00:10:41.220Yeah, I was working on second and sometimes third shift, but mostly second shift, yeah, 4 to midnight, right?
00:11:28.020Um, and I thought the protests were justified.
00:11:31.740I mean, Kent State, you know, these kids got shot and all that.
00:11:36.500Uh, 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.
00:11:50.000It was a part of a kind of manufactured, uh, alienation that I didn't share.
00:11:56.320Um, you know, I wasn't about to burn my draft card.
00:12:01.100Uh, the guys that I was working with, most of them were ethnic at the printing plant.
00:12:05.880Most of them were, you know, Italian or Irish or Jewish or Polish, um, or Greek, uh, uh, second generation immigrants to the United States.
00:12:17.200And, uh, they were pretty conservative, uh, but there was the black power stuff that was going on as well, uh, in those years.
00:12:26.320And I was enmeshed in that on the south side of Chicago and had family members who were, uh, pretty radical.
00:12:33.460So, you know, I, I was, if you had to give me a label, I would have been left of center.
00:12:38.720I would have been a liberal, but I was mainly a nerd.
00:12:41.480What did your radical relatives think of your life path?
00:12:55.980Well, I graduated, uh, with a very strong academic record from the high school.
00:13:02.100Um, I got a scholarship to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
00:13:08.420Uh, 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.
00:13:19.420Um, and they were worried that I was going to lose my way.
00:13:24.180So when I, and my father, um, my mother and father broke up when I was quite young, five years old.
00:13:30.480But my dad was an important part of my life.
00:13:33.000And I very much, uh, uh, wanted his respect and approval.
00:13:38.360And he, you know, when I told him that Charlene was pregnant, he said he had rolled his eyes.
00:13:43.660And, you know, he said, you have to do the right thing and take care of the kid and stuff.
00:13:48.180But, uh, this is not the way that you, you know, I had imagined you living your life.
00:13:53.940And 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.
00:14:03.040Uh, 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.
00:14:21.240Uh, 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.
00:14:31.660And I got admitted to MIT as a graduate student that very same year.
00:14:56.120Spent his life as a, uh, as a, uh, federal employee, as a bureaucrat.
00:15:02.260Uh, 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.
00:16:01.380I 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.
00:16:13.360You know, he loved calling people on the carpet.
00:16:15.860He, he was, uh, uh, Patton, uh, George C. Scott.
00:24:44.200So, how would you compare the environment at MIT to the one that you're now leaving at Brown, on an academic level?
00:24:52.400Well, I want to distinguish between a specialized program of graduate study at MIT and a general education program for undergraduates at Brown.
00:25:09.140I 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.
00:25:19.100There, the issue would be how the field has changed, the questions that are prominent, the techniques that are employed to investigate them.
00:25:29.900And there, I would focus a lot on the revolution of data analysis, the laptop and desktop computers, the data availability, and so on.
00:25:43.380And 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.
00:25:56.300Nobel 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.
00:26:08.600And economics was more self-consciously theoretical and abstract when I was a student.
00:26:17.600You could make a living without ever carrying one of those boxes of computer cards over to the computer processing center.
00:26:26.600You 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.
00:26:41.760And I think it would be much, much harder to do that now.
00:26:46.300Well, that sounds like a good thing, that change.
00:26:48.040Yeah, I think on the whole it is a good thing.
00:26:50.940But 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.
00:27:05.820But 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.
00:27:34.040But there are many, bespeaks the ideological drift that has characterized higher education in the last decades.
00:27:48.460It's become much more political, much more self-consciously radical, much more anti-establishment and, as it were, woke, faddish.
00:28:00.800You know, I've lived through the French theorists and deconstruction and whatnot.
00:28:11.880But I can see, looking, you know, across the aisle, as it were, at what my colleagues are doing.
00:28:18.020And I've lived through the anti-racism mania.
00:28:23.940I've lived through the various enthusiasms of feminism and sexual liberation and whatnot.
00:28:30.840The debate about capitalism, you know, is a different argument now than it was when I was coming along.
00:28:43.220When 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.
00:28:51.380But 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.
00:29:13.480And 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.
00:29:27.940And 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.
00:29:46.520And there's an analytical issue about how to think that through.
00:29:51.420And we saw Marx as something of an oddball in that respect.
00:29:59.300But, and I think in the center of the economics establishment, that would be the judgment.
00:30:07.660But I think I can't stop the sociologists from reading Marx.
00:30:11.620I can't stop the anthropologists from reading Marx.
00:30:13.780I can't stop the literary critics from reading Marx.
00:30:16.280I can't stop the historians from reading Marx.
00:30:18.400And 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.
00:30:38.540And they've taken it where they've taken it, the university has become, to a certain degree, captured by that sensibility.
00:30:47.640And we're seeing a backlash against that.
00:30:50.540You said you've seen various waves of sexual liberation movements.
00:30:55.380And over the last 50 years, there have been a number of them.
00:31:00.240I don't see how you can say that women were not empowered.
00:31:05.820If, 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.
00:31:15.040And you look at where ideas are about equality for women now and the appropriate role of women in political and social life.
00:31:26.420I 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.
00:31:45.360And some of that stuff is hardwired and it's going to, you know, always be a part of the issue.
00:31:52.360But I think the presumptions about the entitlement of women to an opportunity to fully develop their human potential is a move forward.
00:32:09.280Well, I just read an interesting book by Jason Riley, the conservative African-American Wall Street Journal editorialist.
00:32:18.360He 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.
00:32:29.900And 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.
00:32:41.000And 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.
00:32:55.800And 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.
00:33:21.000And things became more partisan and divisive and this is Riley's argument and I have some sympathy for it.
00:33:31.800So 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?
00:33:41.840Was 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?
00:33:49.340Well, 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.
00:34:09.980If 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.
00:34:28.100If 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.
00:34:51.360So 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?
00:35:14.580And there, I think, what, is the right thing?
00:35:16.340And there, I think the story is less clear.
00:35:20.380And I think that there are developments that are very distressing.
00:35:27.160I 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.
00:35:39.700Patience 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.
00:36:52.240Model cities and various kinds of federal programs come through that end up remaking the community in ways that actually work in an adverse effect.
00:37:04.080Public housing, which is initiated with the idea that the poor were going to be sheltered, ends up creating ghetto-type phenomenon.
00:37:14.620And 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.
00:37:37.120And by the time you get to the 1970s, it's a mess.
00:38:42.740I think there are the incentives of welfare transfer programs which encourage people to live in ways that were ultimately not socially productive.
00:38:52.040I 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.
00:39:10.740I mean, you can just do anything you want to do and maintain the respect of your peers, but we're also order-inducing.
00:39:32.960How do we understand and then live up to our responsibilities?
00:39:37.720And I think that's a society-wide development, not just something that happens in black communities.
00:39:44.460But 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.
00:40:09.020These are things I've written about in my own work.
00:40:11.020So, I experienced all of this from sort of the other side.
00:40:15.860I didn't grow up around a lot of black people, only kind of rich black people.
00:40:20.220But I grew up around a lot of white liberals who were very invested in talking about the civil rights movement.
00:40:29.840And from that, they derived moral authority, great moral authority.
00:40:34.340Like, I'm on the side of black people, therefore, I'm a good person.
00:40:37.280And it does feel like maybe they were the great beneficiaries of the whole thing.
00:40:42.700Like, there was sort of no downside for them.
00:40:49.040They 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.
00:41:07.380I 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.
00:41:43.860And there's the development narrative.
00:41:46.420And 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.
00:42:01.360We were denied the complete opportunity to do so.
00:42:05.320The doors, however, have opened substantially, and the ball is in our court.
00:42:09.640That 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.
00:42:32.260The 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.
00:43:32.340So 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.
00:43:52.980It'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.
00:44:04.540Not a disaster for those who are the ambassadors to white America on behalf of black America, like your friend Al Sharpton.
00:44:11.920But 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.
00:44:21.300A 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.
00:44:57.540So 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.
00:45:05.420And I always blamed the black leaders for this, for what you just described to agree with everything you said.
00:45:24.760I 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.
00:45:32.920It's obviously corrupt and it's all silly and all that, the shakedown and all that stuff.
00:45:36.280But, like, he's not doing that by himself, actually.
00:45:39.400He's being used by other people, probably not black people, who are deriving some bigger advantage from the status quo.
00:45:56.240You know, like, so if you're NBC and you're hiring Sharpton, again, I personally, as I told you last night, probably horrified you.
00:46:01.380I kind of like Sharpton because I think he's smart, he's amusing.
00:46:04.300But he's, you know, I think been probably pretty bad for the country.
00:46:07.000I don't think he's helped black people at all.
00:46:08.740But, 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.
00:57:28.200In Iraq. Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down?
00:57:35.760Is that what we're about to do? These are important questions.
00:57:39.080Must 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?
00:57:52.720I'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?
00:58:04.240I mean, if I don't ask myself some of those questions, I'll be being led around by the nose over the cliff.
00:58:14.160I'm younger than you, but I've had a similar—I'm not even sure it's awakening.
00:58:24.520I 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?
00:58:32.120Because—but how weird is it to—especially for you, because, again, you have pushed back against the status quo for a long time.
00:59:04.920I 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.
00:59:13.560But 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?
01:00:30.640They 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.
01:00:55.300Um, 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—
01:01:12.060Can I say, just, you made such a point that I think is worth underlining.
01:01:16.560The Manhattan Institute, and particularly City Journal and its flagship publication, are concerned, have been for 30 years with domestic issues.
01:01:23.420This is, this is not the Hudson Institute, this is not AI, this is, like, a overwhelmingly domestic-focused organization.
01:01:33.580Um, 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.
01:01:43.840Um, 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.
01:01:58.240And 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,
01:02:28.220in, uh, Palestine and, uh, Middle East and Gaza and Israel, uh, has come up.
01:02:34.140And 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.
01:02:48.780This is practically a quote, uh, for productivity, and there's no question about my productivity.
01:02:53.940I've put a dozen articles in their city journal over the last five years, uh, and shared priorities.
01:03:01.180And 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.
01:03:22.580Uh, 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.
01:03:39.220He 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.
01:05:15.780And, 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.
01:05:27.660Um, 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.
01:05:45.100One 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.
01:06:03.940Uh, 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.
01:06:31.640Um, 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.
01:06:47.020And, 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,
01:07:14.500He 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.
01:07:22.720And then he published a best-selling book called Between the World and Me, which, uh, was, uh, very widely praised and, uh, widely read.
01:07:33.220And I had, uh, deep problems with it, which I discussed at length on the podcast.
01:07:38.400So I'm generally disposed to be a conservative critic of Coates, but I admired the book.
01:07:45.080And I admired in particular the essay in which he reflected on what he saw in the West Bank.
01:07:49.080I 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.
01:08:06.980Well, the party line on the book, including at the Manhattan Institute, is this is unspeakable.
01:08:13.980This 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.
01:08:23.880And, uh, coming back and talking about it as if it were, he, he uses the word apartheid.
01:08:45.180And I'm going to tell you why I think it's wrong.
01:08:47.480And I don't care what, uh, account you're giving of the history.
01:08:51.980Uh, 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.
01:09:04.200But 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.
01:09:12.000And I had some appreciation for his courage to say so and for the artful way in which he said so.
01:09:50.420And 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.
01:10:01.900And what I thought was October 7th, 2023 was horrific.
01:10:36.160You didn't say, you didn't, like, espouse violence or?
01:10:41.440No, 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.
01:10:59.800I called for a ceasefire with the release of the hostages, of course.
01:11:04.780Uh, but I said, this is not what a civilized...
01:11:11.440country should be doing, and I object.
01:11:38.300Uh, 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,
01:11:55.260put out a report documenting the extensive civilian casualties that were being engendered by the bombing attacks that Israel was conducting in Gaza.
01:12:07.560Uh, and I had one of the, uh, people who was sympathetic to the report on the show to discuss the report about civilian casualties.
01:12:18.280Basically, 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.
01:12:32.740I mean, he made a collective punishment argument.
01:12:59.420Yeah, 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.
01:13:07.940Yeah, both sides were represented, and they had their back and forth about the, how do you interpret the data on civilian casualties?
01:13:15.960And the, uh, bombardment, aerial bombardment, uh, of this campaign.
01:13:21.080Um, 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,
01:13:35.320which 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.
01:13:44.980And I was asked, uh, did I learn anything from Eli Lake?
01:13:49.140And I said, what was I going to learn?
01:13:50.500And 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.
01:14:05.300And I, I said, as much as I said, no, he said nothing that dissuade me from that point of view.
01:14:09.480And 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.
01:14:24.380Um, 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.
01:14:35.480And we've decided not to continue to work with you.
01:15:08.380I assume that that's somebody sitting on the board of the Manhattan Institute.
01:15:12.140Or it may be that the internal deliberations had been, the warning signs had been flashing for some months.
01:15:18.820And finally, this was, this was over the top and more than people could tolerate.
01:15:24.740And 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.
01:17:10.480You know, the issue of Israel and the nature of the October 7th attack and the political climate that's been created since.
01:17:21.120And the advent of vigorous protests on American campuses and the need to marshal, you know, all hands on deck here for the project.
01:17:34.540The 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.
01:17:45.900And I think that's what's going on here.
01:17:48.400I just think it feels to me counterproductive.
01:18:19.760It doesn't mean I hate America, right?
01:18:22.200Don't you think that's a better way to approach public debate?
01:18:26.720Rather than just, like, any, you must read these lines.
01:18:30.020And anyone who disagrees is, like, a Nazi.
01:18:32.160That's not, that doesn't help the people pushing it.
01:18:34.840But 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.
01:18:44.440I 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.
01:18:56.340I think also that I'm dabbling in something that people spend their lives on.
01:19:04.840And the feeling was, I'm out of my depth.
01:19:07.600And it's not, you know, you want to talk about race?
01:19:09.960You want to talk about affirmative action?
01:21:06.100I 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.
01:21:15.360And I think that's why a point had to be made.
01:21:19.040Because it's a threat to have someone like you say something like that?
01:21:24.640Not to exaggerate my own importance, yes.
01:21:30.580Well, 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.
01:21:41.740And so I think you have real importance in that world, of course.
01:21:45.560And, 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?
01:21:56.600Well, let's, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide, world court, international court of justice.
01:22:07.640I think the authorization of a certain kind of perspective that, of course, remember the huge debate about Zionism being racism.
01:22:28.540I don't want to get involved in any of this stuff, is my personal view.
01:22:31.920I was in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 for the World Conference Against Racism.
01:22:38.280And 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.
01:22:59.440I didn't endorse that position then, and I'm not endorsing it now.
01:23:03.940I think that's too facile and ahistorical of an equation to draw.
01:23:10.200But I think that's the thing that the defenders of the Zionist project fear getting a camel's nose under the tent.
01:23:24.000The 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.
01:23:41.380I 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.
01:23:56.420And 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.
01:24:12.360And 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.
01:24:28.520And 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.
01:24:41.560And I think these things are all somehow connected with one another.
01:24:46.920I'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.
01:25:18.260I mean, I can only speculate about why that is.
01:25:22.260I think, though, the influence of the Israel lobby, as it's called in some quarters, is not insubstantial.
01:25:30.640I think the climate of opinion is influenced by a desire to avoid being accused of anti-Semitism.
01:25:42.120I 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.
01:27:50.240So, are you worried about it, the state of it, speech in the United States?
01:27:54.100I am, although independent media gives me hope, you know, that everybody has got the opportunity to be heard now.
01:28:04.200And pockets of influence can develop, emerge, and flourish.
01:28:11.660And 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.
01:28:30.940I think it's going to just get more capacious.
01:28:37.180I 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.
01:28:47.500Everybody's got an encyclopedia and a global translator in their pocket.
01:28:54.380Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint.
01:29:00.420So, 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.