It’s August, which means that many of those who have the means are retreating from the cities to woodsy redoubts, trying to get away from the heat and concrete for a while. I’m sticking around Providence for the most part, but John is ensconced in his Catskills bungalow colony, where he’s organizing a cabaret performance with his fellow part-time upstaters and refereeing his daughters’ sibling disputes. I recently had to do a little family refereeing myself, which you’ll hear all about in this episode.
We start with a discussion of Trump’s penalties on Columbia, John’s university. According to him, some of them are justified, not least because of what he views as the pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Jewish students. We debate whether those pro-Palestine demonstrations were so rife with antisemitism that they had to be shut down. I wonder whether the shifting perceptions of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has any bearing on the question. Even John has found himself aghast at some of the reports of starvation coming from the region, though he wonders whether we’re getting an accurate picture. To which I say: aren’t the images enough? Strange to consider that we were once “the Black Guys at Bloggingheads,” who mostly stuck to the race beat. But what’s become of that beat? Is it over? Or are we, as John thinks, in a lull, with the next wave of racial outrage soon to come?
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0:00 John: Not all of Trump’s demands on Columbia are crazy
3:45 Are the accusations of antisemitism at Columbia apt?
12:43 Ground News ad
14:22 The shifting public perception of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza
24:30 The historical legacy of Gaza’s starvation
27:40 Glenn: There are ways to destroy Israel without an army
32:21 The lull in American race politics
38:22 Has the race debate devolved to Sidney Sweeney’s jeans?
47:27 John’s theory of violent crime among black youths
Recorded August 5, 2025
Links and Readings
Peter Beinart’s book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Glenn’s conversation with Beinart
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me
Courtney Moorehead Balaker and Ted Balaker’s documentary, The Coddling of the American Mind
Sidney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad
John’s NYT column, “Do These Jeans Make My Ads Look Racist?”
Glenn and John’s conversation with Randall Kennedy
Glenn and John’s conversation with Keith Ellison
Thomas Sowell’s book, Black Rednecks & White Liberals
