The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Team TGS will hold down the fort while I’m gone. They’ll be posting new videos, including a conversation between me, John McWhorter, and Tyler Austin Harper on the Jason Arday fiasco. Next Friday, August 21st, I’ll still be in Australia, but the livestream will return with John filling in as host. The team will have more information on that as the date approaches.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Israel is winning its campaign against Hamas. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel has waged a siege on Gaza that has reduced most of the territory to rubble. Hamas has been decapitated, their infrastructure is in ruins, and well over a million Gazan civilians have been displaced. Israelis and Palestinianians will be dealing with October 7th’s fallout for decades to come. But as of this moment, Israel is largely getting its way.

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How can we find a way to make sense of such a situation, in which both sides have committed terrible acts in the name of what they see as righteous causes, without reverting to platitudes like “it’s complicated”? With so much blood shed and so many people displaced over so many decades, the human instinct is to take a side. But merely picking a side can sometimes substitute superficial partisanship for moral and analytical insight.

Last Friday’s guests—Norman Finkelstein and Eli Lake—have, I think it’s fair to say, chosen their sides, though there’s nothing superficial about their reasons for doing so. I wanted to have both of them on the show to articulate what they see as the most pressing issues facing Israel, Palestine, and the United States. But I also felt that having them debate each other directly could result in conflict without clarity. Instead, I had them on in succession, first Norman and then Eli, to present what they see as the most pressing concerns today, nearly three years after the October 7th attacks.

Norman’s forthcoming book, Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places, examines the international human rights community’s response to Gaza, and argues that some institutions have failed in their responsibility to protect vulnerable populations, like the Gazans. As he admits, it is very difficult to see any kind of Palestinian future for Gaza. Still he remains focused on analyzing the truth and morality of the conflict.

In his position as a columnist for the Free Press, Eli Lake has argued that Israel’s response to Hamas has been, on the whole, justified, despite some horrific missteps. He worries over the growing popularity of anti-Israel sentiment here in the United States, especially among Democratic and democratic socialist politicians. He’s argued that Michigan senatorial candidate and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed represents a dangerous anti-American ideology on the left, in which criticism of U.S. support for Israel is a major factor.

In these two linked conversations, John McWhorter and I interrogate both positions. The result won’t fully satisfy everyone, and it isn’t supposed to. We all need to expose ourselves to ideas and analyses with which we disagree, and we must do so in good faith. That’s what John and I are trying to do here.

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That doesn’t mean the debate is futile. On the contrary, it’s necessary. Until such time as the major issues at play in Gaza are settled—and I doubt they will ever be settled to everyone’s satisfaction—this conversation must continue. Every side of this conflict believes it is existential, a matter of the life and death for two peoples, and an inflection point in the Middle East.

On tomorrow’s show, I’m going to give two ardent representatives of their respective positions a chance to make their cases in turn. First up is Norman Finkelstein. His forthcoming book, Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places, takes aim at the figures and institutions who have, he claims, furnished post-facto justifications for Israel’s invasion and destruction of Gaza, minimized the extent of the casualties, and perpetuated falsehoods about the nature of the Hamas’s attack. Anyone even vaguely aware of Norman’s politics and personality—TGS viewers have gotten a taste in the past—knows that he does not hold back when he believes matters of truth and justice are at issue, and Gaza certainly qualifies.

After Norman departs, I’ll welcome veteran journalist Eli Lake, who is currently a columnist for the Free Press. Eli is, I think it’s fair to say, broadly a supporter of Israel, though not an uncritical one. He has also been tireless in refuting what he sees as exaggerated and outright false claims leveled against Israel and undue leniency toward Hamas. He does not think the October 7 attacks were “defensive” in any meaningful sense, and he’s offered fierce pushback (including on this show) against what he sees as the lionization of an antisemitic terrorist group.

John McWhorter and I will serve as the interlocutors for both Norman and Eli. John and I each have our own views, but the name of the game is fairness. I happen to think that, whatever my personal views, in this case, both sides do require a fair hearing. John and I will do our best to provide just that.

Tomorrow’s show—that’s Friday, August 7 at 1:00 P.M. EDT—is going to be a vital entry in a truly important ongoing debate. You won’t want to miss it. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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On last Friday’s livestream, my guest was Delano Squires, director of the Heritage Foundations’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing and author of the new book The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable. I last had Delano on the show in 2023, and the publication of his book provided the perfect opportunity to get him back on.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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The Vanishing Black Family is a book that, if it gets the sizable audience it deserves, will start some arguments. While I think it’s undeniable that the black family is facing serious problems—especially sky-high rates of single-motherhood—some people do deny it. And that denial is a problem in itself. As Delano sees it, failures of leadership in black political circles and in the church have helped to perpetuate and worsen these problems over the last 60 years. The virtual disappearance of two-parent households in some black working-class areas, Delano says, requires immediate attention. Welfare has done more harm than good, while Delano sees in the black church a turn away from “biblical ethics” and toward social justice, even when the tenets of the latter contradict those of the former.

One of those tenets, Delano says, is gay marriage, which he opposes. If anything is going to set off an argument, it’s a position like that. And I do offer some push-back. I also have a hard time understanding why, as Delano argues, children have a right to be raised specifically by their biological mothers and fathers, especially when that right, if it exists, cannot always be honored. It is probably true that children are usually better-off being raised by their biological parents, but I don’t know that it is definitely true. There definitely are some circumstances in which children are better-off with parents other than those who conceived them. Delano believes that we need to reorient our notion of parenthood toward the rights of the child rather than the rights of the parents, and to Delano, a child’s rights are specific, demanding, and engendered at conception. He seems to want not only a reformation of the black family but a reformation of the Family writ-large.

That’s a big ask, and that kind of ambitious thinking is what makes Delano so worth talking to. People need to hear what he’s saying, even the parts which with I don’t agree. What Delano and I do agree on—the need for a return to black, working-class, two-parent households—is too important to get sidetracked by anything else.

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I’ll be talking to Delano Squires, director of the Heritage Foundations’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing and author of the new book The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable. You can get a sense of Delano’s perspective from that subtitle. In his view, liberal-minded programs and social movements meant to increase freedom and prosperity, especially among less-empowered segments of society, have done the opposite. This has been especially harmful, Delano argues, to African Americans.

Additionally, the black church, which was once the most important African-American-led institution in the U.S., has seen its influence wane and its mission shift. Delano laments what he regards as churches preaching social justice from the pulpit, even when the specific causes they promote—like abortion and gay marriage—contradict “biblical ethics.”

I am generally in sympathy with many of Delano’s claims. There would have been no civil rights movement were it not for black churches and religious leaders, who saw the call for equal rights and their Christian duties as one message. And I’ve often criticized the perverse incentives that welfare programs created, including those that made single-motherhood a precondition for benefits. Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw the downsides of single-motherhood from the outset. Yet when he wrote about them in his 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, he was lambasted by the very leaders who ought to have been listening to him. Sixteen years ago, almost to the day, First Things published a review essay of mine defending Moynihan. The problems he wrote about were still with us in 2010, as they are in 2026.

But there are points where Delano and I part ways, and we’ll get into those tomorrow as well. TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill has his thoughts, too, so he’ll join us. So tune in tomorrow, Friday, July 31 at 1:00 P.M. EDT for what is sure to be a fantastic discussion and a vital debate.

And if you like what you see, consider becoming a full subscriber to The Glenn Show. Our full subscribers keep the lights on over here, allowing my staff and I to give you discussions you won’t find anywhere else. Independent media is more important now than ever, and we’re proud that we’re supported directly by our audience. So if you can, consider subscribing to receive the full range of benefits we offer.

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Last Friday, before John McWhorter and I got into questions submitted by full subscribers here at the Substack, we talked about John’s recent New York Times column, which addresses the very small number of black students admitted to New York’s Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant is one of several New York public high schools that admits students based on the results of a single test. Last year, eight out of 781 new admits were black. This year, it was three out of 777.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Predictable calls have issued from predictable figures calling for the elimination of the test on the basis that it is racist, and that the inductive reasoning required by calculus, statistics, and other technical subjects is simply not a black thing. As you might imagine, John has no patience for such an argument, and neither do I. Black students once performed quite well on these tests. The historical record contradicts the notion that black students simply aren’t suited to excelling at them. If black students are no longer doing well on the test, the problem is not that the test is racist but that the test takers are inadequately prepared. There are ways to ameliorate that.

Or perhaps black students have learned they’re not expected to do well on the test, so they don’t bother trying. If it’s the latter, we know who to blame. It’s not the kids, and it’s not systemic racism. It’s the so-called antiracists telling our young people that math just isn’t a black thing. Maybe these self-appointed arbiters of the “truth” about race ought to think about how that would sound coming from a white person’s mouth.

After that, we go on to the questions. In that segment, we take up queries on AI, the phonics of unconventionally spelled names, the difference between heterodoxy and contrarianism, means-testing social security, and balancing the need for both individuality and socialization in children. John’s response to that last question swerves into some unexpectedly personal territory—you won’t want to miss it.

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Note: Originally this bonus episode of The Glenn Show was released only to full subscribers.. But I think the issues Steven and I discuss are too important to keep behind the paywall, so I’m releasing it to all.

On July 17th, I had two guests on the livestream. The first was Andrew Day, who came on to talk about Iran. The other was my friend Steven Teles, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a force at that university’s new initiatives, the Agora Institute and the School for Government and Policy. Both of these new endeavors address the problem of ideological homogeneity in the university. University faculties, with a handful of notable exceptions, tend to lean far further left than the general population and, often, their own student bodies. It’s a rare thing to encounter a tenured conservative on campus.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if all faculty confined their politics to their private lives and off-campus activities. But, as we all know, that’s not how it works. Some fields in the humanities and social sciences are so dominated by left politics that even mild dissent can turn the dissenter into a pariah. If a scholar violates political orthodoxy, she may find herself isolated in her department and shut out of professional opportunities and prestigious publishing venues.

The result is a major signaling problem. Those with right-of-center politics may not even bother pursuing disciplines like anthropology or sociology, because they perceive they aren’t welcome. As a result, the discipline becomes ever more ideologically closed and ever more beholden to a single set of political and intellectual assumptions. Anyone who would complicate those assumptions has been filtered out by the signal: conservatives, and even centrist liberals, need not apply.

Those with heterodox views who nevertheless pursue the discipline quickly learn to self-censor. The discipline closes itself off to the intellectually healthy process of internal critique and debate. The tenets of academic freedom get compromised, not by outside pressure but from within the disciplines they are designed to protect.

That is a bad situation for faculty, students, scholarship, and the university. It’s a contributor to the plummeting reputation of higher ed in the U.S. The Trump administration’s open hostility to DEI programs and left-wing politics exacerbated the matter by threatening crucial funding. What was an epistemological and pedagogical dilemma is now an existential threat. One might argue—and I would agree—that the government has no business deciding what is studied at a university, how it’s studied, or who is hired to study it. Then again, we should never have come to this point.

This is the problem that Steven is trying to remedy, for both the financial viability of our universities and the intellectual viability of the institutions. In this episode, I talk with him about his decades-long attempt to build cross-ideological bridges. He wrote an excellent article on the topic for National Affairs and he was quoted extensively in recent Real Clear Investigations piece on Hopkins’s efforts. Now, with the endorsement of his university’s president and significant outside funding, he’s building institutions within the school that can help point the way for others. This is a crucial episode for anyone concerned about the future one of America’s greatest success stories, our higher ed system. We’re down, but with the energy and commitment of people like Steven, we’re not yet out.

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In the second hour, we’ll be joined by the literary scholar Tess Chakkalakal, the author of A Matter of Complexion, a wonderful biography of the writer Charles Chesnutt. If you don’t know who Chesnutt is, you’re not alone. Chesnutt was a pathbreaking African American novelist and short story writer publishing in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Despite his accomplishments, his work fell into semi-obscurity after his death in 1932. Yet he is arguably the first major African American novelist. A subtle ironist and a significant figure in turn-of-the-century race debates, he was part of the first generation of black Americans to come of age post-Emancipation. His life and work provide a fascinating window into a period—“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem,” as he calls the era in his last speech—that has received comparatively little attention in the literary history of African American literature.

So why don’t you know who he is? Tess is going to talk us through his work, his life, and his afterlife, and explain how this great writer fell out of favor and why he’s the object of renewed interest.

Join me tomorrow, Friday, June 24 at 1:00 P.M. EDT for what is sure to be another blockbuster livestream. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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The foreign policy plank of the MAGA agenda, which included promises not to get the U.S. into any more wars, seems to be warping. Seventeen Americans have been killed in the Iran War as of this writing. That’s a low death toll for a war, but Andrew Day, senior editor of The American Conservative, suggests that we could have avoided the war and its casualties entirely, were it not for pressure brought to bear by our regional ally, Israel. Attempts to broker peace, or even an extended cessation of hostilities, continue to founder.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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The war remains unpopular among Americans, not only from the center to the left, but also among many Republicans and conservatives. I wanted some clarity on the war-skeptical right’s thinking, so I invited Andrew back on the show to talk about it.

As Andrew sees it, Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran is very difficult to reconcile with his American First messaging, since it is not at all clear how devoting resources to the conflict does any good for our nation and its citizens. If anything, it’s made things worse, at least in the short term, with supply chain disruptions and fluctuating oil prices affecting prices and market confidence.

Many Americans believe that Israel is the sole reason we are at war. As Andrew sees it, going to war with Iran for Israel's sake is a losing political position, given Americans’ increasingly unfavorable view of Israel, even among Republicans, and especially among young Republicans. Israel's reasons for seeking the destruction of its larger, more populous regional rival are not necessarily our reasons. Andrew warns that, if the U.S. continues to act in lockstep with Israel, the MAGA movement may not survive past 2028, if it even makes it that far. Call it yet another victim of yet another ill-advised war in the Middle East.

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In the first hour, Andrew Day, senior editor of the American Conservative, returns to the show to talk about American power abroad. Iran and the U.S. have been exchanging strikes again for the better part of a week. The war continues, but the prospect of an American victory appears just as faint as it did a month ago, while we’ve seen no sign that the U.S. is prepared to withdraw. How long are we going to be stuck in this mess? I’ll get Andrew’s perspective on the situation, along with his takes on his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Marco Rubio’s de facto leadership of Venezuela, and the blockade on Cuba.

In the second hour, I’ll welcome my friend Steven Teles, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, to his first TGS livestream. Steven was featured in a recent Real Clear Investigations piece about Johns Hopkins’s attempts to solve the ideological diversity problem in academia. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute is one of the major results of that effort. It encourages cross-ideological debate and open discussion while remaining true to the university’s mission as a site of free inquiry. As you might infer from the institute’s full name, it’s well-funded, a fact that has ruffled some feathers within the university’s traditional departments. I’ll talk with Steve about why he sees places like the Agora Institute as a necessity, and what it took to stand it up.

So join me tomorrow, Friday, July 17 at 1:00 P.M. EDT for two hours of fantastic discussion and debate. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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Of course, you can only comment and view the stream if you’re a full subscriber. So if you’re not yet a full subscriber, and you want to put your question to us, now is the perfect time to become one. For only $6/month (great deal) or $50/year (incredible deal), you’ll get access to all things Q&A, along with our archives, weekly livestreams and recordings thereof, and other exclusive content. We at TGS are almost entirely subscriber-supported. Without your contributions, we cannot keep doing the show, the livestreams, or anything else. So if you’re able, throw a few bucks in the hat. You’ll be happy you did.

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Last Friday, I had John McWhorter back on the stream to pick up some of the threads we dropped on his last appearance. Perhaps inevitably, when talking about the nation’s recent 250th birthday, our thoughts turned to the place of African Americans in our nation’s history, where we have come from, and where we are headed now.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Followers of this newsletter won’t be surprised to hear that, when taking the long view, John and I are both a little disappointed by the problems that continue to plague Black America. We don’t mean racism and prejudice—though, of course, those problems still exist. Rather, what we have in mind are some of the pervasive cultural attitudes exhibited not only by those who are still struggling, but also many of those who are doing quite well.

John points out that a black victimhood narrative emergent in the mid-1960s remains with us, despite our gains. Some of the reaction to the plight of Karmelo Anthony—the black youngster convicted and sentenced to serve 35 years in prison for murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf—is a case in point. There is no excuse for what Anthony did. Yet we hear critics complaining that systemic racism and racial trauma ought to be seen as, in effect, mitigating circumstances.

That’s a grave mistake. The fact is that right and wrong are right and wrong, no matter your race, creed, or color. If we accept that Anthony’s race in any way accounts for why he did what he did then we would also have to accept that, whatever its ultimate source, this tendency toward brutality and violence is an indelible part of the African American character. You can’t have one argument without the other. John and I reject both.

Even so, I cannot go as far as John does in lamenting the persistence into the twenty-first century of racial identity as such. Martin Luther King’s dream, that his children would “be judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is admirable. But what King is calling for in that famous phrase is for judgment on an individual basis, rather than via recourse to vulgar stereotypes. I agree wholeheartedly. I insist, however, that such a “colorblind” vision need not preclude an embrace of racial identity in itself. That is, King’s “dream” need not foreclose the use of race as a category of self-understanding, or as the grounding for the intergenerational transmission of tradition.

Indeed, I worry that the renewed calls for colorblindness we hear echoing across our political culture these days, and even for the eventual end of racial identity tout court, risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For there are good reasons to maintain and promote the cognizance of race as an historical and lived phenomenon. Thus, total commitment to a colorblindness norm inhibits mobilizing collective actions and effective self-help initiatives among black people. While it is true that outmoded and racialized victimhood narratives do far more harm than good, it is also true that many racially identifying institutions, like the black church, still have the ability to do more good than harm.

In the coming chapter of American history, we’ll be far better off strengthening the influence of such nourishing and responsible mediating black American institutions than by abandoning them in the name of an abstract principle. If that means a cognizance of race persists, as a positive site of identification rather than an excuse for bad behavior, then so much the better.

As my late friend, the great Robert Woodson, was fond of pointing out, black people have agency and we should use it. Once, of necessity, we built our own institutions, economies, and healthy communities. While the days of racial segregation are long past, we black Americans still have that capacity for collective action within us and can bring it to fruition once more, if only we can muster the will.

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In the second half of the show, TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill will join the stream to talk about real estate, redlining, and black wealth in his native Boston. The political commentator Sabby Sabs recently released a documentary about what she sees as the erasure of Black Boston, a once-thriving site of African American community that has since fallen to gentrification and racist policy. Rob sees things differently, to say the least. Over at his Substack, he’s in the midst of a three-part series that both critiques Sabby’s documentary and tells the story of how his fellow Black Bostonians turned on him and his plans to create wealth and a permanent home for his family while providing affordable housing. Here’s part one, and here’s part two.

So join us tomorrow, Friday, July 10 at 1:00 P.M. EDT for another scintillating installment of TGS Live. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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Last week’s Independence Day installment of The Glenn Show brought the team together—along with special guest Rajiv Sethi—to talk about American identity, broadly conceived, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th birthday. Who were we, and who are we? What face do we present to the rest of the world? What makes American culture “American”? How do we manage the social challenges facing a coherent nation comprising an uncountable plurality of ethnic, racial, religious, and political groups?

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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We don’t arrive at any definitive answers, because there aren’t any. That’s all in the nature of the American experiment, which is and may ever remain unfinished, with only provisional responses available. Change is built into our country. On the nation’s bicentennial, in 1976, it would have been very unusual to hear a naturalized citizen born in India, like Rajiv, providing his perspective on the questions above, because there were so few Indian immigrants in America. Now there are millions of them, and most of us (though not all) tend to regard their presence here as unremarkable, a remarkable fact in itself. Nor is it at all strange to hear Rajiv lauding what he regards as core American values while, where appropriate, criticizing the nation’s deviations from those values, just as any other American would. Nor, for that matter, is it strange that we consider a Russian like Nikita to be an essential member of a team led by an African American with a Ph.D. in the social sciences.

In the course of the episode, Rajiv, Nikita, Mark, Rob, and I have much to praise and much to lament about the current state of the nation, from our profound cultural heritage to our foreign policy to our international reputation as a bunch of (hopefully charming) loudmouths. We range from Frederick Douglass and William Faulkner to Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. Is that a contradiction? Perhaps. But then, to paraphrase one of the nineteenth century’s great Americans, we contain multitudes.

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The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Happily, tomorrow’s livestream—Friday, July 3rd at 1:00 P.M. EDT—is an indoor affair. I’ll be talking with my team—Nikita Petrov, Mark Sussman, and Robert Patton-Spruill—about a 250-year-old question: What does it mean to be an American? I’ll also be joined by Rajiv Sethi, whose Substack Imperfect Information is essential reading. Despite two-and-a-half centuries of debate, with untold gallons of ink spilled on the topic, we’re no closer to a definitive answer now than we were at our founding. I expect that, should the country still be intact, we’ll be asking it 250 years from now.

Some of the contemporary framing of American identity hearkens back to old questions about the nation’s population and constitution. Are we a coherent “people,” as the Declaration implies, or are we defined by a creed, a shared set of beliefs? What do the current immigration debates, and the policies of the Trump administration, tell us about our self-conception? Do native-born Americans whose families have lived here for generations have a more valid claim on American identity than those who arrived relatively recently? Do African-American conceptions of Americanness vary from those of the rest of the country. If they do, should they?

I’m also going to take advantage of our own in-house non-American, Nikita, to get an outsider’s perspective. Nikita has lived and traveled in the U.S., and he’s worked for Americans for years while living abroad. Still, there are some things about this country he finds peculiar, if not outright baffling. The Americans on the team will do our best to clarify.

So join us tomorrow, Friday, July 3rd at 1:00 P.M. EDT, for the latest iteration of a centuries-old debate. If you’re celebrating early, be advised that you can watch the show with a hot dog in one hand and a very cold beer in the other. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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While I’m officially on vacation this week, I carved out some time to sit down with John McWhorter and record our monthly conversation. (I’ll post the Q&A later this week.) After all, talking to John hardly feels like work. We’ll hit our nineteenth anniversary as sparring partners later this year. But neither is it quite playtime, as we still find ourselves occupying opposing—or at least different—sides of the debates of our times, including where race is concerned.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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In New York City, where John lives, Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week shut down any remaining doubts about his political influence, when all three of the candidates he endorsed in the Democratic congressional primaries—Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—won their races, virtually guaranteeing them victories in the general. John professes unease with Chevalier, whose sometimes strident anti-American and anti-Zionist rhetoric he can’t quite take seriously. Is that what she really thinks? If so, why would she join a government whose legitimacy she doubts?

Good questions. But whatever the answers, I think the recent crop of left-wing candidates and officials shows signs of an upheaval in the Democratic Party. We’ve seen it twice in the last two decades on the other side, with the Tea Party and then MAGA reconfiguring the Republican Party and pushing it further to right. There’s no reason the same thing can’t happen to the Democrats, with an insurgent left wing powered by dissatisfaction with centrist, aging, and ineffective leadership.

The recent trial of Karmelo Anthony, the now-nineteen-year-old Texas resident convicted of stabbing seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf to death, returned a 35-year sentence, with an opportunity for parole at 17.5 years. Anthony is black and Metcalf was white, facts that have, predictably, affected the discourse around the crime, the trial, and the sentence. John describes the circumstances surrounding the stabbing, and I won’t recount them here, except to say that it should be clear that Anthony is responsible for Metcalf’s death, and the conviction was justified.

The question is why. Why did Anthony refuse to leave when told—apparently correctly—that he should not have been where he was? Why did Anthony respond to a shove with deadly force? As expected, some people are calling this an example of African-descended people’s inherent depravity, an explanation neither John nor I accept. If there is an answer, it may well be cultural. In an extended X post, John takes up Thomas Sowell’s thinking on the matter, which traces patterns of black masculine aggression back to slavery, where, Sowell claims, blacks acquired from Northern English, Scottish, and Irish immigrant laborers the practice of “forcefully” projecting their masculinity when encountering a perceived threat.

Sowell’s idea seems plausible, though it is not definitive. It posits a theory of the pattern’s origin, but it doesn’t explain the patterns’ apparent continuity up through the present. Grand narratives such as Sowell’s are a great help in tracing out the broad strokes of social development. But I think, in this case, looking back to the nineteenth century may obscure more than it illuminates. Many of Anthony’s defenders and detractors are treating this as a “racial incident,” either because they believe Anthony’s race had something to do with the length of his sentence or because they believe his race had something to do with his decision to stab Metcalf.

In my view, none of that supplies sufficient evidence for viewing this as a “racial incident,” much less one that is best explained by the conditions of eighteenth-century Ulster, Ireland. The discourse surrounding the stabbing is indeed racially tinged, but that only demonstrates that the best way to turn something into a “racial incident” is to treat it as though it already was one. It’s a dangerous form of question-begging, and in any case, it ignores what is surely more pertinent information, such as Anthony’s personality and past, his upbringing and social environment. To treat all of that as mere detail cluttering our view of a supposedly essential truth about race risks abstracting away the material circumstances of any incident—a crime or anything else—involving blacks and whites. It turns everything from microaggressions to riots into scenes in a grand racial drama, in which there are clear heroes and villains.

Life is rarely that simple. Make no mistake, Karmelo Anthony is the guilty party. He alone bears responsibility for Metcalf’s death. While his sentence is long, it is not clear to me that it is too long. In the decade-and-a-half before his parole hearing, he’ll have the chance to demonstrate remorse and to reform himself. I hope to God he does, and not only for his sake. I believe that change is possible—for him, and for all of us. I believe that none of us, in our idiosyncrasies and particularities, are quite reducible to the narratives that describe our past, no matter how compelling they are. I have to believe this. To believe otherwise is to fall prey to fatalism, which virtually guarantees that what must change will not. I may not quite be “the master of my fate,” as the poem says, but neither am I its slave.

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On Friday, June 16, I had two guests, each with a new book. The first was Harvey Mansfield, who came on to discuss his latest, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears. The second was Robert Wright, who got me started in the podcast business almost twenty years ago. His new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, argues that we should take AI seriously as an epochal technological development. As Bob sees it, AI doomers, while sometimes hyperbolic, shouldn’t be ignored. There are real risks to this technology if its growth is not managed carefully. But if we do manage to turn AI toward the common good of humanity, it could change the way humans relate to each other and to the universe, bringing about more peace and advancements that will benefit all.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Following the path to AI prosperity rather than stumbling into dystopia will require coordination on a global scale, including an agreement among the nations with leading AI companies to slow development. That sounds like a dealbreaker, but Bob points out that we recently came very close to an analogous global agreement on minimum corporate taxes, until the U.S. scuttled it at the last minute. If AI will one day be capable of recursive self-improvement—gaining speed and functionality with no human intervention required—we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the future will become harder to predict. Better to get governments, AI companies, and researchers on the same page now, so that we can understand what it is we’re creating and what it is capable of, rather than roll the dice and let LLMs (and those who would use them maliciously) take the lead.

Given how quickly we’ve integrated AI into seemingly every aspect of our lives, it can pay to step back and consider how quickly it’s happened. Scenarios once confined to science fiction novels—like the development of artificial consciousness—are now actual dilemmas we have to confront. With wars and regional conflicts flaring up around the planet, the prospect of coordination seems highly improbably anytime soon. But perhaps it is another one of those science fiction scenarios: purely hypothetical, until it’s upon us.

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Summer is just about here, so I’m going to take a break and relax a little. I’m taking tomorrow (June 19) and next Friday (June 26) off, so there will be no livestreams on those dates. The team will, however, continue to release podcast episodes on Mondays. We’ll be back to our regular live schedule soon. See you then!

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Of course, you can only comment and view the stream if you’re a full subscriber. So if you’re not yet a full subscriber, and you want to put your question to us, now is the perfect time to become one. For only $6/month (great deal) or $50/year (incredible deal), you’ll get access to all things Q&A, along with our archives, weekly livestreams and recordings thereof, and other exclusive content. We at TGS are almost entirely subscriber-supported. Without your contributions, we cannot keep doing the show, the livestreams, or anything else. So if you’re able, throw a few bucks in the hat. You’ll be happy you did.

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