I listened to this a couple of days ago, and feel compelled to comment about Al Sharpton. Can someone who was actively involved in multiple events where people were murdered, ever have "forgiveness" - to the point that it's okay to have them in a position of public prominence? Does that not require any expression of contrition or regret on his part? And barring any such expression (which I don't think he's ever made), it's impossible for me to not see his current actions-where he has zero regard for the truth of his inflammatory claims or their consequences-as of a piece with his earlier despicable behavior, just that he's gotten a little smarter about it.
On a different note, I'll point out regarding the coverage of the Jacob Blake shooting, that I think it was a couple of days before the Wisconsin AG announced that there was a knife present at the scene, and several months before it was announced that Blake was holding it at the time when he was shot.
Glenn: I left comments about your Obama rant on the abridged version of this video. But regarding Al Sharpton…….I feel the exact same way about Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Rudy Giuliani snd their spiel about election fraud. I guess ‘election fraud’ is to old white, grumpy Christian Republicans that ‘systemic racism’ is to poor, young, black Democrats.
I didn't want to say this because my respect for Dr. Loury is paramount.
But Jesus, man. I hope somewhere in your memoir you explain this deep antipathy for Obama--in REALISTIC terms.
Meaning, something that doesn't sound like a speech on Fox News.
And particularly against the backdrop of the absolute blankety-blank that you FINALLY acknowledged after 1/6 lol
Dr. G, if Obama did everything you said he should have done, how much of a difference do you think it would have made? Seriously. I am genuinely curious.
You know what the Republican party and his opposition eventually became. We all do.
And, in fairness, Obama DID do some of those things you said he should have done in terms of speaking out against violence and irresponsibility.
Sure. He could have done more.
I guess I'm like John on this. I don't think Obama was a god by any stretch, but damn, bro lol.
Clearly we have a new context at work today. I don't get how anybody of your brilliance (and forbearance) can so blithely overlook the society, as it is, in FULL.
But that's just me. Still a proud paid subscriber =)
- act as the Great Unifier of a nation on issues of race and factionalism
- stop aggressive wars
- end disgraceful practices like the torturing of people who in many cases hadn't even committed a crime
- defend/ restore the American Constitution
- more broadly, restore classical American values of Liberty and Justice, which had been severely compromised during the Bush years and the "War On Terror"
When he left office...
- America was more racially and politically divided than ever before, with some particularly divisive forms of hucksterism (identity politics and the casual, insincere use of -ism allegations for example) being openly embraced by Obama's political coalition and himself; the alleged Great Unifier was followed by a president whose main strategy was to channel the resentment of those who felt constantly gaslit by Obama's "intersectional coalition"
- Obama had not just continued but extended the War On Terror, replacing torture-on-suspicion with straight murder-on-suspicion
- aside from Obama's own violations of the Constitution, he had his attorney general argue that "due process doesn't neccessarily mean a legal process", thus casually denying the most basic foundation of the rule of law
- the scandalous transgressions of one administration had become fully-entrenched bipartisan Beltway consensus; Obama himself adding a globally unprecedented surveillance behemoth to the equation
Obama's post-presidency behavior (from his self-serving and divisive political interjections to the Chicago scam) further paint him as an unprincipled opportunist. If anything demonstrates the American (and Western) level of discomfort on race issues, it's surely the fact that despite his record, Obama is almost universally hailed in mainstream circles as a great president and visionary based on virtually nothing except his "symbolism" (and his ability to sound perfectly sincere while telling the most outrageous lies).
"America was more racially and politically divided than ever before"
With all due respect, this is not a logical statement. It continues to blow my mind to hear people make this claim over and over. The United States of America has *clearly* experienced periods of more racial division LONG before Obama ever came along. That's not even debatable.
"If Obama just did X and Y, race relations in America would be SO much better!"
This is like Alice in Wonderland to me. More importantly, McWhorter is correct (John just doesn't like to get in unnecessary fights =)): The profound societal effects of social media and ubiquitous cellphone cameras is flat-out undeniable. To suggest anything else is, well, like Alice in Wonderland.
It's like saying television had no real effect on the Civil Rights Movement.
Ask #MeToo about the value of social media. Regardless, my question to Glenn remains the same: "How much different would America be today, racially, if Obama did all of the stuff Glenn said he should have done?"
And it's important to note that we cannot -- or at least *I* cannot -- pretend like nothing else was going on while Obama was president. That is to say, for example, it's not like the current-day GOP was some bastion of serious thought or colorblindness during Obama's term -- it wasn't.
And it is certainly no different today. There's a reason why George Will, Jonah Goldberg and other rightist thinkers bailed on Trump/the GOP, and it ain't because they suddenly became liberals.
Blaming an eight-year presidency -- any of them -- for the state of race relations in the United States of America is almost funny. Like life was all hunky-dory until Obama came in and messed it all up. Or that he "sabotaged the opportunity of being the 1st African-American POTUS".
I can't pretend to take arguments like these seriously. They are not serious arguments in my view.
Your points about foreign policy and Obama, I believe, are fair -- not airtight, but fair. That said, I am not here to argue that stuff, and I'm not even sure Glenn agrees with you on Obama's foreign policy.
My outburst (for lack of a better word) was spurred by Glenn's (ongoing) passionate disdain for Obama (particularly over race) after I witnessed Glenn -- and forgive me for saying this -- rationalize and explain away Trump for four years beyond anything I could comprehend or accept coming from a man of his intelligence and decency.
Glenn (eventually) admitted he was wrong about the 45th POTUS after witnessing that breathtaking anti-democratic post Election 2020 behavior; not to mention the freak show that went down on January 6th.
I'll never ever understand why it took Dr. G so long. I hope that's in his memoir, too.
Glenn got my applause immediately for that concession. I'll take better late than never every time.
1) “America has *clearly* experienced periods of more racial division LONG before Obama ever came along“ – you’re perfectly correct, I don’t know how the “ever before” slipped in there. Maybe because I was thinking “since I started following politics”, which was in the Clinton era, when open race-baiting was almost universally frowned upon.
2) John’s response here is way too simplistic in my opinion. True, Social Media has led to a further polarization of politics and decline of honest debate, so have cable news, the internet, digitalization and half a dozen other long-term developments.
But the fact that Obama’s re-election campaign deliberately went for “intersectional coalition”, embracing “structural racism” and many other extremely divisive concepts certainly didn’t help. Obama campaigned and talked a lot about uniting the nation, but much of this was pure gaslighting (see his latest autobiography, where he in essence claims that most of the people who didn’t like his politics were motivated by racist bias).
What would the effect have been had Obama ever had a Sister Souljah moment in regard to BLM or the woke movement? We can only speculate, but I find it hard to imagine the BLM riots, the struggle sessions in arts and the media, or the ideological cleansing of academia would have happened quite so unobstructed, had they not become orthodoxy among the political mainstream that formed during the Obama (and Trump-opposition) years.
I wasn’t trying to make Glenn Loury’s argument for him, and I think he may well disagree on what I wrote. The point I was trying to make - though I didn’t state it well – was that Obama was largely a failure when judged by his and his supporters’ stated goals (I used to read a lot of left-wing media back in the day, and the Obama of reality had virtually nothing to do with the Messiah-like character they fell in love with). It is therefor amazing that such a critical position is almost never heard (except, as you wrote, on explicitly right-wing media). On the left, dissatisfaction with Obama is relegated to the extreme fringe or to some like Glenn Greenwald, who are consequently disowned and shunned by everyone “in the mainstream”.
Again, sorry for that “ever”, which does indeed put a completely deranged spin on my entire first post.
On average the progressive left didn't like Obama. They thought he was too much of a compromiser. Establishment-leaning, so to speak.
Like you said, the War on Terror never ended. Not to mention his record with deportations. And I recall a number of moments when Obama spoke against rioting/woke culture/etc., before, during and after his presidency. (Baltimore comes to mind.) The idea that he wholly embraced woke culture is not a fair charge.
I do recall the public idolatry around Obama, particularly during the '08 campaign and in his earliest years as president. But for Pete's sake, if the hero-worshipping we witnessed with Obama was so inexcusable, how are we supposed to classify Trumpism?
Again for me, so much of this comes down to context. That's really the source of my (reluctant) disappointment w/Glenn on this issue. It took a lot--too much--for him to boldly recognize Trump for what he is/was in the negative sense.
But Obama saying "Trayvon would have looked like me" just sets him off like fireworks. I don't get it.
Fwiw, I generally find the Greenwald's and the Pool's of the world to be a little suspect. They seem to have found a lucrative niche that too often avoids a true and full picture of things.
For John, if you want to forgive someone for an action to which you object, is it unreasonable to expect an apology from them? I'm Jewish and I can't imagine forgiving Al Sharpton for inciting a pogrom (and other race riots) at least until he acknowledged that he did something wrong.
And if it's reasonable for me to withhold forgiveness, why is it reasonable for you to forgive him?
Y'all need to get back to the Bloggingheads look, gents. What the heck was this? lol
No need for all that skyline and "closeup profile shots to wide shots"--huh?--and all that extra-extra lighting? Distracting as hell. Whose idea was this? =)
And from AUGUST? (Please tell me it's because the memoir is coming soon.)
I thought the discussion gained from having Glenn and John in the same room. Bloggingheads allows discussions between many who would otherwise not be available for a discussion, but that format, like Zoom, also tends to create a certain level of flatness, deflection, and evasion because the participants are to some extent abstracted by the medium. Many of the high points cited by Mark Silbert in his September 27 post, above, were due in part to Glenn and John being face-to-face and to the greater emotional involvement engendered thereby.
Just this morning I was going through my substack subscriptions deciding which I was going to keep and at what subscription level I was going to renew. When I came to Loury the recent Bessner and Wright posts were fresh in my mind and I said to myself: "why am I subscribing as a founding member for this kind of content?"
Thank goodness for today's discussion with McWhorter, which reminded me what drew me to Glenn Loury in the first place. While it got off to a slow start, and I never thought of "motherfucker" as a particularly black term, it kicked into high gear at 20:58 with the discussion about Eric Adams and then went full bore on Obama, Sharpton and Jacob Blake. What I liked most about the discussion was that Glenn was all about the facts while John tended to revert to his feelings and perceptions and political correctness.
I loved Glenn's full throated condemnation of Al (go on down to Del Rio and decry white racism at the border because of the border patrol on horseback trying to control thousands of illegal border crashers from Haiti) Sharpton as a race baiting anti semitic hustler.
I also enjoyed seeing Glenn take off the gloves with John and challenge him on his numerous shibboleths.
My decision was easy. A founding member I will remain.
I like your post. You are right about the twenty minute mark. Their honest expressions is why we love them! Why we tune in! And Glenn's rants are awesome.
Thank god for Glenn on this one!
Keeping it real!
I listened to this a couple of days ago, and feel compelled to comment about Al Sharpton. Can someone who was actively involved in multiple events where people were murdered, ever have "forgiveness" - to the point that it's okay to have them in a position of public prominence? Does that not require any expression of contrition or regret on his part? And barring any such expression (which I don't think he's ever made), it's impossible for me to not see his current actions-where he has zero regard for the truth of his inflammatory claims or their consequences-as of a piece with his earlier despicable behavior, just that he's gotten a little smarter about it.
On a different note, I'll point out regarding the coverage of the Jacob Blake shooting, that I think it was a couple of days before the Wisconsin AG announced that there was a knife present at the scene, and several months before it was announced that Blake was holding it at the time when he was shot.
I looked up Blues Opera and found this link on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Harold-Arlen-Andre-Kostelanetz-And-His-Orchestra-Blues-Opera/release/4760115
Is this the what JMcW is talking about? the cover art is all white folks, probably a weird 1950's racism thing.
Great to see you two in the same room together.
Glenn: I left comments about your Obama rant on the abridged version of this video. But regarding Al Sharpton…….I feel the exact same way about Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Rudy Giuliani snd their spiel about election fraud. I guess ‘election fraud’ is to old white, grumpy Christian Republicans that ‘systemic racism’ is to poor, young, black Democrats.
I didn't want to say this because my respect for Dr. Loury is paramount.
But Jesus, man. I hope somewhere in your memoir you explain this deep antipathy for Obama--in REALISTIC terms.
Meaning, something that doesn't sound like a speech on Fox News.
And particularly against the backdrop of the absolute blankety-blank that you FINALLY acknowledged after 1/6 lol
Dr. G, if Obama did everything you said he should have done, how much of a difference do you think it would have made? Seriously. I am genuinely curious.
You know what the Republican party and his opposition eventually became. We all do.
And, in fairness, Obama DID do some of those things you said he should have done in terms of speaking out against violence and irresponsibility.
Sure. He could have done more.
I guess I'm like John on this. I don't think Obama was a god by any stretch, but damn, bro lol.
Clearly we have a new context at work today. I don't get how anybody of your brilliance (and forbearance) can so blithely overlook the society, as it is, in FULL.
But that's just me. Still a proud paid subscriber =)
Obama was elected on promises to:
- act as the Great Unifier of a nation on issues of race and factionalism
- stop aggressive wars
- end disgraceful practices like the torturing of people who in many cases hadn't even committed a crime
- defend/ restore the American Constitution
- more broadly, restore classical American values of Liberty and Justice, which had been severely compromised during the Bush years and the "War On Terror"
When he left office...
- America was more racially and politically divided than ever before, with some particularly divisive forms of hucksterism (identity politics and the casual, insincere use of -ism allegations for example) being openly embraced by Obama's political coalition and himself; the alleged Great Unifier was followed by a president whose main strategy was to channel the resentment of those who felt constantly gaslit by Obama's "intersectional coalition"
- Obama had not just continued but extended the War On Terror, replacing torture-on-suspicion with straight murder-on-suspicion
- aside from Obama's own violations of the Constitution, he had his attorney general argue that "due process doesn't neccessarily mean a legal process", thus casually denying the most basic foundation of the rule of law
- the scandalous transgressions of one administration had become fully-entrenched bipartisan Beltway consensus; Obama himself adding a globally unprecedented surveillance behemoth to the equation
Obama's post-presidency behavior (from his self-serving and divisive political interjections to the Chicago scam) further paint him as an unprincipled opportunist. If anything demonstrates the American (and Western) level of discomfort on race issues, it's surely the fact that despite his record, Obama is almost universally hailed in mainstream circles as a great president and visionary based on virtually nothing except his "symbolism" (and his ability to sound perfectly sincere while telling the most outrageous lies).
"America was more racially and politically divided than ever before"
With all due respect, this is not a logical statement. It continues to blow my mind to hear people make this claim over and over. The United States of America has *clearly* experienced periods of more racial division LONG before Obama ever came along. That's not even debatable.
"If Obama just did X and Y, race relations in America would be SO much better!"
This is like Alice in Wonderland to me. More importantly, McWhorter is correct (John just doesn't like to get in unnecessary fights =)): The profound societal effects of social media and ubiquitous cellphone cameras is flat-out undeniable. To suggest anything else is, well, like Alice in Wonderland.
It's like saying television had no real effect on the Civil Rights Movement.
Ask #MeToo about the value of social media. Regardless, my question to Glenn remains the same: "How much different would America be today, racially, if Obama did all of the stuff Glenn said he should have done?"
And it's important to note that we cannot -- or at least *I* cannot -- pretend like nothing else was going on while Obama was president. That is to say, for example, it's not like the current-day GOP was some bastion of serious thought or colorblindness during Obama's term -- it wasn't.
And it is certainly no different today. There's a reason why George Will, Jonah Goldberg and other rightist thinkers bailed on Trump/the GOP, and it ain't because they suddenly became liberals.
Blaming an eight-year presidency -- any of them -- for the state of race relations in the United States of America is almost funny. Like life was all hunky-dory until Obama came in and messed it all up. Or that he "sabotaged the opportunity of being the 1st African-American POTUS".
I can't pretend to take arguments like these seriously. They are not serious arguments in my view.
Your points about foreign policy and Obama, I believe, are fair -- not airtight, but fair. That said, I am not here to argue that stuff, and I'm not even sure Glenn agrees with you on Obama's foreign policy.
My outburst (for lack of a better word) was spurred by Glenn's (ongoing) passionate disdain for Obama (particularly over race) after I witnessed Glenn -- and forgive me for saying this -- rationalize and explain away Trump for four years beyond anything I could comprehend or accept coming from a man of his intelligence and decency.
Glenn (eventually) admitted he was wrong about the 45th POTUS after witnessing that breathtaking anti-democratic post Election 2020 behavior; not to mention the freak show that went down on January 6th.
I'll never ever understand why it took Dr. G so long. I hope that's in his memoir, too.
Glenn got my applause immediately for that concession. I'll take better late than never every time.
Thanks for your reply.
1) “America has *clearly* experienced periods of more racial division LONG before Obama ever came along“ – you’re perfectly correct, I don’t know how the “ever before” slipped in there. Maybe because I was thinking “since I started following politics”, which was in the Clinton era, when open race-baiting was almost universally frowned upon.
2) John’s response here is way too simplistic in my opinion. True, Social Media has led to a further polarization of politics and decline of honest debate, so have cable news, the internet, digitalization and half a dozen other long-term developments.
But the fact that Obama’s re-election campaign deliberately went for “intersectional coalition”, embracing “structural racism” and many other extremely divisive concepts certainly didn’t help. Obama campaigned and talked a lot about uniting the nation, but much of this was pure gaslighting (see his latest autobiography, where he in essence claims that most of the people who didn’t like his politics were motivated by racist bias).
What would the effect have been had Obama ever had a Sister Souljah moment in regard to BLM or the woke movement? We can only speculate, but I find it hard to imagine the BLM riots, the struggle sessions in arts and the media, or the ideological cleansing of academia would have happened quite so unobstructed, had they not become orthodoxy among the political mainstream that formed during the Obama (and Trump-opposition) years.
I wasn’t trying to make Glenn Loury’s argument for him, and I think he may well disagree on what I wrote. The point I was trying to make - though I didn’t state it well – was that Obama was largely a failure when judged by his and his supporters’ stated goals (I used to read a lot of left-wing media back in the day, and the Obama of reality had virtually nothing to do with the Messiah-like character they fell in love with). It is therefor amazing that such a critical position is almost never heard (except, as you wrote, on explicitly right-wing media). On the left, dissatisfaction with Obama is relegated to the extreme fringe or to some like Glenn Greenwald, who are consequently disowned and shunned by everyone “in the mainstream”.
Again, sorry for that “ever”, which does indeed put a completely deranged spin on my entire first post.
I hear you. But my memory is much more nuanced.
On average the progressive left didn't like Obama. They thought he was too much of a compromiser. Establishment-leaning, so to speak.
Like you said, the War on Terror never ended. Not to mention his record with deportations. And I recall a number of moments when Obama spoke against rioting/woke culture/etc., before, during and after his presidency. (Baltimore comes to mind.) The idea that he wholly embraced woke culture is not a fair charge.
I do recall the public idolatry around Obama, particularly during the '08 campaign and in his earliest years as president. But for Pete's sake, if the hero-worshipping we witnessed with Obama was so inexcusable, how are we supposed to classify Trumpism?
Again for me, so much of this comes down to context. That's really the source of my (reluctant) disappointment w/Glenn on this issue. It took a lot--too much--for him to boldly recognize Trump for what he is/was in the negative sense.
But Obama saying "Trayvon would have looked like me" just sets him off like fireworks. I don't get it.
Fwiw, I generally find the Greenwald's and the Pool's of the world to be a little suspect. They seem to have found a lucrative niche that too often avoids a true and full picture of things.
For John, if you want to forgive someone for an action to which you object, is it unreasonable to expect an apology from them? I'm Jewish and I can't imagine forgiving Al Sharpton for inciting a pogrom (and other race riots) at least until he acknowledged that he did something wrong.
And if it's reasonable for me to withhold forgiveness, why is it reasonable for you to forgive him?
Gentlemen, please! More of these!
Great Episode. These two men should meet a few times during the year for the same type of format.
Y'all need to get back to the Bloggingheads look, gents. What the heck was this? lol
No need for all that skyline and "closeup profile shots to wide shots"--huh?--and all that extra-extra lighting? Distracting as hell. Whose idea was this? =)
And from AUGUST? (Please tell me it's because the memoir is coming soon.)
I thought the discussion gained from having Glenn and John in the same room. Bloggingheads allows discussions between many who would otherwise not be available for a discussion, but that format, like Zoom, also tends to create a certain level of flatness, deflection, and evasion because the participants are to some extent abstracted by the medium. Many of the high points cited by Mark Silbert in his September 27 post, above, were due in part to Glenn and John being face-to-face and to the greater emotional involvement engendered thereby.
Word. I like the distinction Prof. McWhorter makes between passive competence and active competence. It is something many people do not get. 👌⭐
Just this morning I was going through my substack subscriptions deciding which I was going to keep and at what subscription level I was going to renew. When I came to Loury the recent Bessner and Wright posts were fresh in my mind and I said to myself: "why am I subscribing as a founding member for this kind of content?"
Thank goodness for today's discussion with McWhorter, which reminded me what drew me to Glenn Loury in the first place. While it got off to a slow start, and I never thought of "motherfucker" as a particularly black term, it kicked into high gear at 20:58 with the discussion about Eric Adams and then went full bore on Obama, Sharpton and Jacob Blake. What I liked most about the discussion was that Glenn was all about the facts while John tended to revert to his feelings and perceptions and political correctness.
I loved Glenn's full throated condemnation of Al (go on down to Del Rio and decry white racism at the border because of the border patrol on horseback trying to control thousands of illegal border crashers from Haiti) Sharpton as a race baiting anti semitic hustler.
I also enjoyed seeing Glenn take off the gloves with John and challenge him on his numerous shibboleths.
My decision was easy. A founding member I will remain.
Yes, Glenn was bracing - a relief. A blast of sharp, fresh air.
I like your post. You are right about the twenty minute mark. Their honest expressions is why we love them! Why we tune in! And Glenn's rants are awesome.
Thanks, Mark Silbert, for your support... (I think!!)
https://www.aei.org/events/sowell-williams-and-loury-woodson-centers-1776-unites-contemporary-scholars-series/?mc_cid=8aa47114b8&mc_eid=c2061960f1
Congrats. Williams, Sowell and Loury...................pretty fancy company.
Not sure what the (I think!!) means. I try to give both positive and negative feedback when I think warranted.
Just that I wasn't sure I had your full-throated "support"...
Interesting! The Glenn I watched today has by full throated support right up there with Bob Woodson. I am looking forward to your upcoming book.