Some time ago, John and I invited the writer and Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley onto the show. The topic under discussion was ostensibly Jason’s excellent biography of the great Thomas Sowell. But this conversation was recorded in the summer of 2021. The riots following George Floyd’s death were a recent memory, and the woke wave that elevated the likes of Ibram Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Robin DiAngelo to the apex of the culture was still on the rise. In this clip, you can feel the sense of urgency. John, Jason, and I were all, in our own ways, flapping our arms, warning against the intellectually bankrupt movement that was then overtaking public life, and we were frustrated by how few allies we seemed to have in our corner and how few liberals were willing to call out the insanity overtaking their end of the political spectrum.
Times have changed, albeit too slowly. The tide is rolling back. There are now more vocal left-of-center figures, like Tyler Austin Harper and Jay Caspian Kang, who evince the proper skepticism toward identity politics and DEI excesses. We don’t agree on everything—we may even disagree on most things—but they are smart, sane, and skeptical critics of their own “side” of the debate. That Jay writes for the New Yorker and Tyler writes for the New York Times and the Atlantic can only be considered a good thing—cracks in the doctrinaire identitarian edifice are showing, even in those liberal redoubts.
And yet, while we may be past “peak woke,” more work remains to be done. It is a travesty that the brilliant, iconoclastic Thomas Sowell remains relatively obscure outside of conservative circles. As Jason says in this clip, it’s possible that Sowell’s early exit from the academy allowed him the freedom to think, write, and speak as he sees fit, without the social pressure to conform to institutional biases. There is a price to that freedom—an unfair price but a real one. With no formal mentees and no legacy within the academy, Sowell has not accrued the kind of influence he merits.
It’s easy to imagine an alternate history in which Sowell remained in the academy, taught and mentored graduate students, built up institutional authority, and changed the character of mainstream social thought in the US. That didn’t happen, but it’s not too late to incorporate his work and insights into the canon of twentieth and twenty-first century intellectual history. If we had done so earlier, both for his work and others like him, perhaps we would have experienced a woke ripple rather than a wave.
This post is free and available to the public. To get early access to episodes of The Glenn Show, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, comments, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
JASON RILEY: John, you made the observation. One other person made the same observation, which was Charles Murray, for the book about Tom [Sowell]. The same observation was that [William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson] are academics, and they probably wanted to remain academics. It's very tough to say these things that got them labeled, for that brief period of time, conservative and remain in good standing in the faculty lounge.
John I remember saying, you want to be part of the social fabric of the college. You don't want to be despised on campus. You don't want to be a pariah. And maybe that had something to do with it. Tom left teaching and didn't have to worry about that anymore. But if you wanted to remain in teaching, maybe this was going to cause you some problems.
GLENN LOURY: Then how do you explain Glenn Loury? How do you explain John McWhorter?
JASON RILEY: I think you guys are the exceptions, not the rule. Come on, Glenn. You've had an on-again, off-again, relationship with movement conservative. So has John.
Yeah. I was about to confess it. I was about to add to the weight of your argument, though, which is that I was so lonely in the early-mid-1990s and so tired of the ostracism and the contempt and the sneering and the derogation and the ridicule and the marginalization from my coracialist academics with whom I was coming into contact on a regular basis that I probably tacked too far left from my position.
Norman Podhoretz of Commentary magazine wrote about me once, he says, “Loury has fallen into the loyalty trap.” He was throwing my own arguments back in my face, because ten years before I had published an essay in the Public Interest in which I said, “Beware the loyalty trap.” If you're a black intellectual, they think you're only supposed to say certain kind of stuff and that will make you less effective at actually contributing to the well-being of your people, because you can't tell the truth as you see it. Don't fall into the loyalty trap. I was accused of falling into the same trap.
But I've lived long enough to be able to reflect upon those ten, fifteen years from ‘95 to 2010. And I've come back to my senses, Jason.
JOHN MCWHORTER: When I was at Berkeley, which is now a long time ago, it was '95 to 2002. The reason I left had nothing to do with the shit that I was taking, but I had to deal with a lot. People cat-calling me as I walked across campus and down Telegraph Avenue, coming up to me when I was in lines at stores and saying nasty little things, calling my office phone. None of these things happened every day, but it was still part of the atmosphere. And I know if I had stayed, it would have gotten to the point that, when I served on a committee, there was gonna be somebody there who didn't like me. There were awards I was almost certainly never gonna get because I was in bad odor.
And to be honest, I would have withstood that because I'm strange and a lot of my life when I was at Berkeley was about being a performer at night with people who didn't care about any of these issues. I would have withstood it. But I'm an odd person who doesn't mind that sort of thing, I think, as much as many people do. And at Columbia, I suspect I'm about to undergo a little bit more of that because of the way I've gotten louder since last year, once we're all back on campus. And I will withstand it again. But I've got a thick skin. Some people would say too thick of a skin, in a way.
Most people, they don't want that. And I completely understand. It doesn't mean that they're not being true to themselves. If anything, maybe they think harder. But yeah, that's hard. You don't want to be a pariah.
JASON RILEY: I said I'm hopeful, because I see more people than there were out there talking and writing like Sowell. But I am very dispirited at the rise of the sort of progressive left and the woke movement and Black Lives Matter and the ascendancy of people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram Kendi.
The idea that [Thomas Sowell] is not as well known as them, or that his work is not as well known, I find just tragic. It infuriates me. I think he's written circles around these guys. Cornel West I would include in this group, as well.
And not only just in terms of his range, but the depth and the rigor of Tom's thinking I don't think they come close to matching. And yet these folks are elevated as these deep thinkers on race. I think that I find that very disturbing that this is what passes for deep thinking on race today. Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
JOHN MCWHORTER: The race discussion is about feelings, it's not about thought. And that's what is conditioning the sort of thing that you're talking about. Just for example, if Ibram Kendi had short hair and his name was Anthony Jones, nobody would have any idea who he is. I think that's a very obvious thing. If his name was Tony Jones and he just had short hair, he didn't have the dreadlocks, even with whatever he's done, nobody would have any idea. I'm just saying that it's feelings. That's why he's more famous than Tom. And I hate that too.
JASON RILEY: It's more than that.
Yeah, it's more than that.
JASON RILEY: Think about Nikole Hannah-Jones—and you get at this in Woke Racism. Where is all this deference to her coming from? There are no shortage of books on slavery or the US founding. She's written none of them. Why are so few historians willing to call her out? Why isn't the head of every history department at every notable institution in this country calling her out? I think it's cowardice, intellectual cowardice.
Jason, we've been calling her out here at The Glenn Show for years.
JASON RILEY: But you're the exceptions. That's my point.
We've been pointing out that Ibram X. Kendi was an empty suit here. I've been calling for erudition, mastery, deep learning, and a sophisticated intellectual frame from people who write about race for years.
JASON RILEY: Why do you have so few fellow travelers? Why are so few joining you?
The mania behind the Ta-Nehisi Coates phenomenon had a lot more to do with the cultural orientation of white newsroom elites than it had to do with the actual experience—lived experience, they say—of African Americans. You asked me a question. Why haven't we got more people who are fellow travelers? I don't have the answer to the question. But I know where to look for it, and it's not in the black community. It's in the structure of American intellectual and political culture—center and left-of-center—in journalism, in the academy, in corporate America more broadly.
And I think there's a general loss of confidence in the virtues of the American project, in the American experiment. How can Colin Kaepernick have defenders? Including you, John?
JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh, in the beginning? Yeah. I understood where he was coming from.
An athlete representing the United States of America on a global stage who thinks that holding their fist up is an appropriate gesture—is a dignified act of virtue, is a moral stand—is a coward and a fool. No, it's playing into a trope.
JOHN MCWHORTER: Jason, do you think it's so bad? Do you feel like Coleman Hughes is obscure compared to them?
JASON RILEY: Oh yes.
JOHN MCWHORTER: Coleman is about to do TED. I happen to know.
He's about to do what?
JOHN MCWHORTER: He's about to do TED. He's being embraced by all the proper places. I don't feel like Glenn and I are so deeply obscure.
It's not about us. And more power to Coleman. I'm talking about the heartbeat of the culture. I'm talking about major institutions. I'm talking about the MacArthur Foundation. I'm talking about the Pulitzer committee. I'm talking about the faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism. I'm talking about the newsroom at the New York Times. I'm talking about the people who publish your pieces at the Atlantic.
JOHN MCWHORTER: Why are they “the culture”? All of those places are politically saturated.
I'm talking about the Democratic Party. I'm talking about the White House. I'm talking about Barack and Michelle Obama. I'm talking about Netflix. I'm talking about Amazon and YouTube.
JASON RILEY: Glenn, you mentioned in passing that in, in the late 1980s, Randall Kennedy had written this critique of critical race theory that appeared in the Harvard Law Review, named names, took them down, and basically said, “This is a glorified argument for affirmative action. That's all this is.” The academics at Harvard, who are the people he sent the piece out to look at before it was published, urged him not to publish it, because they said it'll hurt their chances of pushing for more affirmative action. They were very upfront about it. Kennedy wrote it anyways.
Why aren't there more left-wing critiques of the progressives today? Why is it left to people who are more right-of-center to do this? Am I imagining things, or was there a time when the left did a better job of policing its own?
Yeah, you think of George Orwell or somebody like that. There's Adolph Reed, emeritus now, of the University of Pennsylvania, a political scientist who I just saw interviewed by Matt Taibbi on one of these podcasts where he was offering a left-of-center critique of the careerist interest of the race mongers who are getting paid and who are getting a lot of cash out of what they do.
They have a schtick. They have a performative dimension on race mongering. Reed wants to say, no, it's not race, it's class. And if you paid attention to the structure of profit production, corporate power, money, finance, if you had a real labor movement, you'd have a different politics. He's a Bernie Sanders guy. He is a Democratic Socialist. This is Adolph Reed. But he is a man of the left who has been openly critical of the race of the Ta-Nehisi Coateses of the world.
JOHN MCWHORTER: Britain is better at having that left, I'm thinking. Over there, there are more people who are left-of-center who are criticizing the people who are left-of-center. It doesn't happen as much here. I suspect that I'm just flying blind here, because maybe in Britain—until maybe recently—they were a little bit less afraid of being called racist. I think in the culture, it has not been as deeply inculcated.
If you're liberal but not hard left, you're so afraid of being called a racist—and especially with social media, but even before that—you're probably just going to keep quiet and buy your groceries. There's maybe a little bit less of a muzzle. Lately, since about last summer, now there is. But before that, in other places, there was a little bit less of that sense of a muzzle. But yeah, you're right, Jason. If you're talking about critique from the left, not much. No, you're right.
An open letter to psychology departments at various universities (Brown and Columbia in particular here):
Subject: From the Earth to the Moon to “WUT”
To Whom It May Concern:
"That the reaction is not to think it through, not to question, not to assemble facts, not to make arguments — but instead to wave banners and spout slogans such that you could hardly distinguish what they were doing from a manifesto that would come out of [does it matter?]"
— Glenn Loury
When the context suits you, such words are solid gold. What you do when it doesn’t — determines the worth of your word. The first time I ever heard of John McWhorter was in a 2017 interview. In talking about (take a wild guess), he said, “He has a rather narcotic joy in dismissal and belittlement.” Alas, the likes of Loury and McWhorter miserably fail to see how they are unwittingly conditioning people to behave the same way. And they’re hardly alone, as it’s everywhere. This nation needs a national conversation — on how to have conversation.
Conventional means have no chance of breaching the envelope of intransigence around armies of unreachables in the trench warfare of our times. But integrate those same tools into an unconventional framework for honest debate — and now you’ve got something. Your field is forever fighting the forces of human nature whereas my idea banks on it.
A student wrote of her psychology professor: “[He] taught me the importance of breaking problems down into more manageable pieces.” Lo and behold, at the bedrock of my idea is exactly that. If you want to start solving problems, first you need to clear the clutter that’s crippled this country. To do that, you don’t go after everything, you go after one thing that ties to everything. And you do it by holding one man to his own “standards”: A professional know-it-all with a cult-like following unlike anything I’ve ever seen. As I’ve been in the trenches battling hermetically sealed minds for decades, that’s saying something.
His disciples see him as some kind of saint-like Sherlock Holmes. And that — is an opportunity!
How do we make people realize they’ve been lied to? You have to knock down one small pillar that’s easier to reach. I’ve got the perfect pillar — on the biggest and most costly lie in modern history (which shaped everything you see today). To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know.
I have a very specific target audience to get this in gear, so it wouldn’t take much. One email could set off a chain of events that could open the door to the kind of conversation this nation’s never had. Imagine! There was a time when we did.
From the Earth to the Moon to “WUT”: https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2024/04/24/from-the-earth-to-the-moon-to-wut/
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Richard W. Memmer
"Politeness and consideration for others is Like Investing Pennies and Getting Dollars Back”
"One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans — anything except reason."
“It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.”
"Compared to what?"
"At what Cost?"
"What hard evidence do you have?"
*********************
If you're a fan of Thomas Sowell and you respond to my arguments by flagrantly ignoring his bedrock beliefs above, what does that say about you? And what does it say that for over 3 years, I've been practically spit on by people promoting principles I followed to find Sowell didn't. On irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty (the manipulation of which shaped everything you see today): He flagrantly ignored the evidence -- opting to peddle partisan hackery that poisons political discourse to do this day.
My words: Out of 31 tubes in subsequent testing, only one was successfully spun to 90,000 RPM for 65 minutes — which the CIA seized on as evidence in their favor. . . . DOE’s standard is to spin a tube at 20% above 90,000 RPM before failure — so 48,000 short is a pretty loose definition of “rough indication.”
Sowell's words: “People who talk glibly about ‘intelligence failure’ act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything.”
Which ones strike you as glib?
The story I’m out to tell takes both parties to task on the biggest and most costly lie in modern history — along with some other issues at the core of America’s decline. Sowell is simply a conduit through which to tell that story (and how his role within it could be harnessed for good). Compelling him to admit where he’s wrong will work wonders for where he’s right. But rather than discovering that, his crowd immediately makes excuses for him (which is egregiously out of line with the principles upon which he's put on a pedestal).
"So you found one small crack in Sowell’s character where he defended Iraq having WMD, does that hurt his credibility?"
This man muddied the waters of debate to serve himself: On a "little" matter of war in the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11. On top of unconscionably ignoring irrefutable evidence of world-altering consequence, he has a habit of toeing the party line. Not only did Sowell flagrantly fail to follow the facts on all-things Iraq — he brazenly ignored the debauchery in his own party to "politely" pounce on the other.
In light of his history being wildly out of sync with his sanctimonious claims: That “one small crack” is a wide-open window into his character and credibility. I wouldn’t care if Sowell cured cancer: You don’t get a pass for basking in baseless beliefs that cripple the country — and have the bottomless nerve to preach responsibility and accountability to boot. That is a cancer of its own. The poison he pumped into the atmosphere helped destroy the internal organs of America. So we have very different standards as to what qualifies as a “National Treasure.”
Please review his quotes above should you decide to respond.
The Thomas Sowell Affair: “You Walked Into the Party Like You Were Walking Onto a Yacht”
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2024/03/27/the-thomas-sowell-affair-you-walked-into-the-party-like-you-were-walking-onto-a-yacht-v2/