This week I’m joined once again by my friend John McWhorter. It’s an auspicious occasion—we recorded this episode on his 60th birthday. Birthdays are often a time for retrospection, so it’s appropriate that we begin with the past: the summer of 2020. At the time, I felt like we were speaking with moral and political clarity, saying what so many others knew to be true but were afraid to articulate: George Floyd’s death was a tragedy but he was no hero, many of the “mostly peaceful protests” were better described as riots, Black Lives Matter is nothing like a modern-day civil rights movement. What I would give for a similar clarity today. The political and social wreckage of 2020 we confront in 2025 is far more difficult to navigate. In this episode, John and I discuss why that is.
We begin by taking ourselves back to 2020, examining what we offered our viewers then that they weren’t getting elsewhere and what we offer now. Are we still affecting the national conversation? Thomas Chatterton Williams has written that Charlie Kirk’s death serves the same function for the right today that Floyd’s death served for the left in 2020. But I’m not buying it. Whatever you think of Kirk’s politics, he certainly lived a more respectable life than Floyd did. While John, of course, regrets that Kirk was murdered, he doesn’t see him as a figure who promoted true debate. He was an advocate for his views, and he sought converts. But what’s wrong with that? We get into it over Kirk’s comments about a group of black women and affirmative action. I admit the comments were inflammatory, but that doesn’t neutralize his criticisms of affirmative action.
We’re at a very delicate moment in the racial history of our country. Something’s got to give, and it will. I offer that, while we cannot legitimate a view of blackness that excuses all manner of underperformance and moral decrepitude, neither can we abandon blackness as a site of social and existential meaning. I’m a black intellectual, and so is John. But how does one lay claim to that appellation at a time when race as an identity category is so overdetermined and, in the view of some, exhausted?
Note: In this conversation, I mistakenly assert that Caliban is a character in Shakespeare’s play Othello. He actually appears in The Tempest. Apologies to the Bard.
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0:00 Happy 60th, John!
2:20 2020 in hindsight
12:05 Ground News ad
14:01 Are Glenn and John helping to shift the Overton window?
18:25 Is Charlie Kirk the George Floyd of the right?
29:53 Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s conversation about Kirk
34:14 Glenn’s new book idea
41:43 Kirk’s comments on Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Joy Reid
48:05 The purging of the woke remnant
51:33 The responsibilities of the black intellectual
58:27 Glenn: There is meaning in blackness
Recorded October 6, 2025
Links and Readings
Glenn and John’s first discussion of George Floyd, from May 2020
Pete Hegseth’s speech before US military leadership
The Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”
Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Atlantic essay, “The Other Martyr”
Glenn’s October 3rd livestream, with Nikita Petrov and Robert Patton-Spruill
Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s NYT conversation following the assassination of Charlie Kirk
Coates’s 2015 Atlantic essay, “Letter to My Son”
Glenn’s recent conversation with Jason Riley on the life and work of Thomas Sowell
