John McWhorter returns as Glenn and John reflect on the nation's 250th birthday and the state of Black America. Both express disappointment — not at racism's persistence, but at cultural attitudes that continue to hold Black Americans back. Using the Karmelo Anthony case as a touchstone, they push back hard against victimhood narratives that treat race as a mitigating factor for individual wrongdoing. But Glenn and John diverge on colorblindness: while John laments the persistence of racial identity, Glenn argues that race as a positive site of collective identification — embodied in institutions like the black church — remains valuable and shouldn't be abandoned in the name of an abstract principle.

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.

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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BB asks what Glenn and John think of Steven A. Smith’s political commentary. Russell Harvey wants to know what the role of debate is in our society, and whether a debate has ever changed Glenn's or John's mind on any substantial issues. Stan asks why college-educated white women support “wokeness” at such high rates. Jason asks whether Glenn and John ever had intellectual discussions with AI tools. Michael asks John for his opinion of Zohran Mamdani’s first six months as New York City mayor. Robert Redd asks how much damage Trump has done to conservatives’ image, and is it their responsibility to repair that damage. And finally, Max asks if Glenn and John have engaged with any arguments from natural theology, and whether they have intellectual—rather than spiritual—accounts of their own beliefs about the existence or non-existence of God.

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. Go to https://glennloury.substack.com

Recorded amid Glenn's vacation, this month's conversation with John McWhorter covers New York politics, crime, and culture. They discuss Mayor Zohran Mamdani's growing influence after his endorsed candidates swept their Democratic primaries, signaling a possible left-wing realignment within the party akin to the Tea Party's and MAGA's reshaping of the right. They also dig into the trial and sentencing of Karmelo Anthony for the killing of Austin Metcalf, weighing competing explanations — including a Sowellian theory of cultural inheritance — and Glenn's skepticism toward treating the case as fundamentally racial rather than personal and circumstantial.

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.

Longtime friend of the show Robert Wright joins Glenn to talk about The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which argues AI deserves serious attention — including from its doomers. Wright contends that responsible global coordination, however improbable it seems amid current geopolitical turmoil, is essential to steering AI toward humanity's benefit rather than catastrophe. He points to the near-miss global minimum corporate tax agreement as a hopeful precedent. Glenn reflects on how quickly once-speculative science fiction scenarios, like recursive self-improving AI, have become urgent real-world dilemmas.

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Harvey Mansfield, the eminent political philosopher who spent over seven decades at Harvard, joins Glenn to discuss his new book, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears. Mansfield argues that Harvard has traded its commitment to truth for an overbearing political emphasis on equality — fueling grade inflation, racially discriminatory admissions practices, and the erosion of genuine academic standards. Glenn reflects on the irony that meaningful reform began only after Mansfield's retirement, and suggests that decades of ignored warnings may have contributed to Harvard's recent string of public embarrassments. A searching conversation about elite institutions, democratic values, and what universities owe the students they serve.

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.

Glenn sits down with Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, to discuss the crisis facing American higher education. Despite the university system's extraordinary contributions to innovation and democracy, Poliakoff argues it is failing at a core mission: civic education. Students graduate without foundational knowledge of American history and principles, while faculty too often emphasize the nation's failures over its ideals. ACTA's new Broadside for the Nation calls for stronger trustee oversight and mandatory civics requirements. Glenn finds the recommendations promising, provided academic freedom is preserved — and offers a defense of genuine patriotism as something that includes, rather than forecloses, honest criticism of the country.

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Last month, John McWhorter and Glenn explored the latest tranche of questions from full subscribers. They start off talking with TGS writer and editor Mark Sussman about Christopher Nolan’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his new adaptation of The Odyssey. Aaron Kara asks if diverse societies can sustain social systems in which racial identities bear uneven cultural caches. Glenn often says “Tolstoy is mine” as a way to exemplify our shared inheritance of the Western tradition. John Bingham asks if non-African Americans would be equally authorized to say “Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are mine.” As a new mother, Maddie Fontaine asks whether one ever truly gets over the fear that comes with letting your children become independent and move freely through the world. Martha Rodgers Boyles asks Glenn and John to discuss the influence of the late Robert Woodson Sr.

Stan asks whether the country would react differently than it did in 2020 if there was another George-Floyd-type incident tomorrow. In the chat, Chris asks John to clarify a feature of Black English. TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill presents a clip of an actor reciting the prologue to Romeo and Juliet with a Southern drawl and asks John if it bears any resemblance to what an Elizabethan accent would have sounded like. Robert Redd and Clifton Roscoe have some comments about respectability politics. And finally, Yan Shen points out that, while tolerance for black grievance has decreased, tolerance for white grievance has increased.

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.

John McWhorter returns for another wide-ranging conversation, starting with his latest book-in-progress on American English dialects and his remarkable productivity as a writer. From there, Glenn and John tackle the social media controversy over Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's upcoming Odyssey adaptation, weighing in on race, casting norms, and where society should ideally be headed. They then take on the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and its implications for the Voting Rights Act — a take sure to generate pushback. The conversation closes with the Memorial Day "teen takeover" chaos in Chicago and Glenn's pointed criticism of Mayor Brandon Johnson's response.

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.

Glenn sits down with Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov to discuss his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong—a rigorous and deeply personal account of the contradictions at Israel's founding and how they've shaped the country's present. Bartov traces the legal, political, and religious tensions that have fueled belligerence in the occupied territories and eroded democratic norms at home, all while grappling with his own complicated relationship to his homeland. Glenn, neither Jewish nor an expert on Israeli politics, finds in Bartov a credible and emotionally honest guide through an extraordinarily complex situation. Whether you agree with Bartov or not, his expertise demands serious engagement—and that's exactly what this conversation offers.

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.

Glenn welcomes back actor and writer Clifton Duncan to discuss the challenges facing artists in an era of intense political polarization. Clifton is currently developing a one-man show about the life and work of Thomas Sowell, and also writes about art, politics, and identity on his Substack, The State of the Arts. The conversation explores a delicate tension: while politics has always inspired great art, ideological conformity can suffocate it. Clifton argues for art's intrinsic value and its unique power to illuminate universal human experience through the specific and singular. It's a crusade against philistinism, and Glenn happily counts himself an ally.

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.

Taking a break from headlines, Glenn turns inward — reflecting on family as a source of stability amid political and personal upheaval. He's joined by his son, Glenn Loury II, for one of their occasional recorded conversations. Together they explore how family relationships evolve over time, keeping the memory of Glenn's late wife Linda Datcher Loury alive through a reading group with son Nehemiah, and looking ahead to Nehemiah's first child. They also discuss their relationships with their partners and Glenn's retirement from teaching. Fans of his memoir Late Admissions will find this a welcome update. Honest, warm, and reflective — a reminder of what matters most.

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.

Glenn hosted a cross-spectrum foreign policy debate featuring Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, American Conservative writer Andrew Day, and University of Washington historian Daniel Bessner. The central question: what role should American power play in the 21st century? Hamid, author of The Case for American Power, defended robust U.S. military engagement abroad, while Day and Bessner — from the right and left, respectively — pushed back with skepticism of American empire. Surprisingly, the ideological poles found more common ground than expected. Glenn reflects on whether hawkishness has fallen out of favor across the political spectrum after decades of costly interventions, and what that might mean for America's future.

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.

Scott Dolan asks what our best path forward is after Trump. Aaron Cara presents a theory about Glenn and John's disagreement over Trump’s presidency. Michael Maloney asks what Glenn and John think of a recent study of deceptiveness and claims of consciousness by AI. Jason proposes an intriguing parallel between AI and the cotton gin. Yan Shen asks what, if anything, the Dune novels can teach us about the Trump era. And finally, BB asks how important Glenn and John think “technical expertise” is when commenting on issues of broad social concern.

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.

Glenn and John McWhorter reunite for their monthly conversation, starting with a familiar disagreement: Trump. John reduces Trump's governing philosophy to one word—"a*****e"—arguing his personality explains his chaotic, norm-breaking style. Glenn isn't so sure. He sees Trump as a more conventional figure responding to structural forces larger than any one leader, and argues that personality-based explanations substitute for the harder work of substantive analysis. This connects to Glenn's recent essay on moral language in public discourse—how loaded terms like "genocide" (or "a*****e") can short-circuit rather than advance reasoned debate. The conversation closes with John's New York Times piece on DEI and AI, and how both breed a corrosive, unresolvable suspicion around individual achievement.

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.

In this episode, Glenn hosts a virtual roundtable on incarceration, crime, deterrence, and community, drawing on two key texts. In the first hour, he spoke with Jeffrey Seaman, co-author of a Fordham Urban Law Review article arguing that true racial injustice lies not in the treatment of Black offenders but in the chronic under-provision of justice resources to Black victims. Better police clearance rates, they contend, would strengthen deterrence and make Black neighborhoods safer. In the second hour, sociologist Robert Sampson discusses his new book, Marked by Time, arguing that strong communal social bonds reduce crime more effectively than punitive policing. Political scientist Ben Peterson also joins the debate.

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.

Glenn and Ben Peterson discuss his forthcoming book on how informal institutions — families, churches, neighborhoods — maintain social order where law and markets cannot. Peterson argues that reputation enforces norms more effectively than regulation: your neighbor's judgment carries more weight than a police citation. They explore criminal justice reform, where Peterson observes that "the left misses morality, the right misses grace"; racial inequality as a supply-side problem — the failure to develop human potential through socialization and family structure; and the spiritual dimension of human agency, which Glenn defends even as he acknowledges many of his colleagues would dismiss it. The conversation echoes themes from Glenn's recent discussion with Steven Pinker on common knowledge and shared norms.

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.

Last week's livestream featured Robert Cherry, emeritus professor of economics at Brooklyn College and author of a new book, Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? Bob is a labor economist who spent forty years studying discrimination in the U.S. labor market. His involvement with NGOs working in the Arab sector eventually led him to apply that same analytical lens to the situation of Arab citizens within Israel proper—not Gaza, not the West Bank, but the two million Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. In this episode, Glenn and Robert Cherry debate the status of Arab Israelis and the policies of the Israeli government.

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 this edition of Glenn and John's monthly Q&A sessions, they tackle subscriber questions about funding for the Iran War, Trump Derangement Syndrome, meritocracy, Israel, and other topics.

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.

Glenn and John McWhorter agree the war in Iran is a bad idea—so why can't they agree on anything else? On last week's livestream, the two clashed over what's driving the conflict, how it's being conducted, and whether Trump is capable of strategic thinking. John isn't troubled by targeted strikes on Iranian leaders like Ayatollah Khamenei; Glenn calls those strikes what they really are—assassinations—and warns that normalizing such a policy would destabilize the world. Glenn also pushes back on John's view that Trump is acting without foresight, noting that experienced military leaders are guiding operations. Despite deep misgivings, Glenn hopes Trump succeeds—because the alternative is too catastrophic to contemplate.

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.

Glenn Loury welcomes Steven Pinker to discuss his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. Pinker—author of The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality—explains how “common knowledge” works in everyday life. Drawing on vivid examples—from a Soviet-era joke about dissent to the rise and fall of GameStop and crypto ads during Super Bowl LVI—Pinker shows how shared awareness shapes seduction, threats, markets, and politics. Loury and Pinker explore how strategic ambiguity, spirals of silence, hierarchy, and nuclear policy all hinge on a familiar question: not who knows what, but who dares to say aloud what everyone knows.

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.

Last week’s livestream presented a panel of guests whose political orientations and positions on the Iran War demonstrate the scrambling effect this conflict is already having on domestic political alliances. On the anti-war side, we have historian, foreign policy expert, and man of the left Danny Bessner of the University of Washington and the American Prestige podcast. He’s joined by Andrew Day, senior editor of the American Conservative. I haven’t made a side-by-side comparison of their political views, but I don’t imagine they agree on much. This war is an exception.

On the other side, we have my friend Larry Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, a liberal, and an adamant defender of the war in Iran. His Substack post after the initial bombing runs in Iran effusively praised Donald Trump’s leadership, which might come as a surprise to those who know Larry’s work—he’s had few compliments for the president before now.

Listen now to hear this (occasionally heated) debate.

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.

In this segment from last week's livestream, Glenn and Boston University economist Larry Kotlikoff talk about the national debt, social security, personal finance, fiscal policy, and China’s seemingly inevitable path to becoming the dominant world economic power. Are Trump's tariff policies as wrong-headed as they seem? And should we be putting boots on the ground in Ukraine?

Larry's Substack, Economics Matters

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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On this livestreamed edition of the Q&A, John McWhorter and I took questions from full subscribers here at the Substack. Austin Ball asked for our thoughts on Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. Art Eckstein asked for our thoughts on what he characterizes as the humanitarian left’s silence about the deaths of thousands of Iranian protesters last month (this stream happened before the U.S. and Israel’s strikes on Iran). TunaFortuna asked for our thoughts on originalism vs. the living constitution. BB asked us why so much of the black cognoscenti opposes respectability politics even as they embody it. Stan asked if the U.S. will someday “move beyond race.” And finally, Robert Patton-Spruill and Mark Sussman pop into the stream to suggest that I, Glenn Loury, may be the founding father of the “quarter-zip movement,” even though I’d never heard of it.

Recorded February 21, 2026

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.

On this segment from my latest livestream, John McWhorter and I are joined by journalist Tyler Austin Harper of the Atlantic. We discuss Tyler's latest piece for the magazine, which focuses on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's influence over humanities research in the U.S. Tyler argues that the half-billion-plus dollars Mellon awards each year has allowed it to shift humanities scholarship toward an activist model, with identity-based social justice as its main concern.

Tyler's Atlantic article, "What Is the Mellon Foundation Doing to Higher Education"

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&As with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Click here to become a full subscriber.

Video Links

0:00 Chloé’s theory of enchantment

3:54 Can a legal remedy solve a spiritual problem?

4:29 The human problem of stereotyping

8:26 Why Chloé thinks the rise of white identity politics was “totally predictable”

10:56 Ground News ad

12:46 Derrick Bell’s case against Brown v. Board of Education

14:49 The subject-citizen in Israel and the U.S.

17:01 Chloé’s year of mourning

19:09 Can a listening campaign help ease tensions in Israel?

23:26 An “aha” moment in Bethlehem

28:34 Chloé critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s analysis of Israel-Palestine

31:56 Does race have a future?

Recorded February 13, 2026

Links and Readings

Theory of Enchantment

Chloé’s Substack post, “The First CRT President”

Derrick Bell’s essay, “The Unintended Lessons in Brown v. Board of Education”

Derrick Bell’s book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

Chloé’s Substack post, “The G-Word”

James Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood and Rethinking Race

Báyò Akómoláfé’s home page

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this episode of The Glenn Show, Glenn hops on the Friday livestream just hours after landing at Logan Airport following a Stanford lecture on self-censorship at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. Still running on adrenaline from the event, he talks with editor Mark Sussman about the influence of Kenneth Arrow, why self-censorship should be analyzed as a value-neutral phenomenon, and how the audience responded. In the second half, Glenn is joined by writer and Theory of Enchantment founder Chloé Simone for a wide-ranging conversation about race, identity, spirituality, and politics—from the effects of recent DEI rollbacks to Israel, Palestine, and the future of racelessness.

In this excerpt from last Friday's livestream, Glenn formally introduces a familiar face to the audience: Robert Patton-Spruill. A regular presence on and off camera, Rob shares the winding personal and professional journey that shaped him, from growing up in a politically connected extended family in Boston to working in film and finding his own voice as a writer and director. He reflects on the influence of his father, James Spruill, his experiences in the film industry, and encounters with figures like Public Enemy's Chuck D. The conversation ranges widely, linking Rob’s lived experience to broader ideas about social capital, community, and practical paths to progress.

Livestreams are available to full subscribers, both as they happen and later in video and podcast form. We’ll release shorter segments to the public later, but if you want the whole shebang, become a full subscriber today. The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience supported. We need your help in order to keep delivering the show week after week, along with all the other content we post here. So to those of you who are already full supporters: thank you for all you do. And if you’re not yet a supporter, please consider becoming one.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

On this edition of my monthly Q&A session with John McWhorter, we invited a handful of subscribers to record their video or audio to be played during our livestream. I think it worked great—I loved hearing everyone’s voices and seeing their faces. We’re definitely going to keep this feature around. And if you want to hear and see your fellow TGS fans, and you’re not yet a subscriber, please consider becoming one.

We start off the Q&A with a question from John Bingham, who wants to know if a PhD in economics is still worth pursuing when AI works so well as a substitute teacher, even at that high level. Neil asks whether excessive attention to the Israel issue within academia is leaving the larger biases within the university unaddressed. Lennart asks Glenn to comment on an exposé about a behind-the-scenes political struggle at UATX. RAO asks what colleges are doing to promote civil discourse across identity lines. Adam Gorski asks John an insightful question about his categorization of wokeness as a religion. Joe Nalven asks who’s to blame for the ICE shootings in Minneapolis: protesters, law enforcement, or the media? Neal Gittleman asks whether John and I were being irresponsible in speculating about the motivations of the mass shooter at Brown University before the facts were in. And finally, Jason expresses his appreciation for the show and John’s role in it.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in and sent us recordings, and to all of my subscribers. 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation on identity politics and global disorder. Glenn opened by discussing his recent UnHerd column on Elon Musk’s warnings about race war and calls for white solidarity, arguing that Musk exemplifies a troubling turn toward identity politics on the right and serves as a powerful “permission-granting” figure for fringe ideas. Robert Wright then joined to assess the unraveling rules-based international order, highlighting the hypocrisies exposed by Mark Carney and the broader implications of U.S. power. John Mearsheimer added a realist critique of Donald Trump’s disregard for international norms. The discussion also addressed Gaza, free speech, and the risks of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, before closing on Trump’s actions in Greenland and Venezuela and signs of resurgent American imperialism.

These livestreams will now be available only to full subscribers, both as they happen and later in video and podcast form. We’ll release shorter segments to the public later, but if you want the whole shebang, become a full subscriber today. The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience supported. We need your help in order to keep delivering the show week after week, along with all the other content we post here. So to those of you who are already full supporters: thank you for all you do. And if you’re not yet a supporter, please consider becoming one.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Glenn and John examine the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot by ICE agents despite video suggesting he had been restrained and disarmed. They debate whether ICE and CBP should be operating in city streets at all, the scope and priorities of immigration enforcement, and the tension between border security, limited resources, and proportional enforcement.

The discussion then turns to Davos, where Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sharply criticized the current international order and implicitly challenged US economic coercion. Glenn and John disagree over how to interpret Trump’s posture—from reckless bluster to strategic calculation—and what consequences a more confrontational U.S. stance may provoke globally.

This episode features the first half of the livestream. The Q&A will be available to full subscribers on Sunday.

Video Links

0:00 The crisis of belief and the crisis of speech

4:30 Michael: Deport the criminals, leave the gardeners

10:37 Michael’s list of the biggest, craziest, and most dangerous conspiracy theories

15:47 When trust in institutions breaks down

22:06 Why well-meaning people make absurd claims

26:01 Is Trump uniquely dangerous to American institutions?

29:04 Where Michael gets his news

31:49 How liberal institutions lost the plot

36:15 The roots and appeal of QAnon

41:06 Down the Jeffrey Epstein rabbit hole

44:47 Michael’s definition of truth

51:23 The stakes of religious belief

58:47 Can we live with “I don’t know” as the answer to the big questions?

Recorded January 19, 2026

Links and Readings

Skeptic magazine

Michael’s new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters

Michael’s book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

Michael’s book, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

The Free Press

Glenn’s most recent conversation with Charles Murray

Murray’s book, Taking Religion Seriously

Martin Rees’s book, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe

Video Links

0:00 Trump’s ambitions in Venezuela

2:09 The downsides of American empire

5:44 Is Trump protecting US interests or engaging in regime change?

13:42 Ground News ad

15:38 Danny’s critique of realist foreign policy

23:11 The perverse domestic effects of American militarism

32:00 America’s very real but rather weak democracy

35:22 Viewer question: Could wars of conquest revivify America?

38:20 Rob’s question: Won’t a $500 billion increase in the military budget create massive inflation?

42:11 Danny: Why buy Greenland when we already have a military presence there?

47:49 Trump’s real estate instincts on the global stage

51:42 The trials and tribulations of a humble Housing Provider

Recorded January 9, 2026

Links and Readings

Danny’s podcast, American Prestige

Lindsey O’Rourke’s book, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War

John Mearsheimer’s book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Michael Sherry’s book, In the Shadow of War: American since the 1930s

Richard Waterman’s book, Constitutional Ambiguity and the Interpretation of Presidential Power

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

The Glenn Show kicks off 2026 with a strong episode featuring Murtaza Hussain on the Epstein Files and Daniel Bessner on U.S. actions in Venezuela. The episode opens with discussion of the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent, urging caution and fact-finding amid polarized reactions and official statements. Hussain explores Jeffrey Epstein’s opaque financial dealings and rise to power, while Bessner analyzes the strategic motivations behind recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela, situating it within broader patterns of American empire.

Read Murtaza Hussain's reporting for Drop Site.

Check out Daniel Bessner's podcast, American Prestige.

Video Links

0:00 Why another biography of FDR?

3:41 David’s dispute with the “heroic” view of FDR

5:56 David: “The main focus of FDR was FDR”

10:05 The surprising continuity between FDR’s and Hoover’s monetary policy

16:01 Canada’s avoidance of the banking crisis

19:50 FDR’s failed attempt to unilaterally set gold prices

26:14 Why did FDR intern Japanese Americans, despite his advisors’ opposition?

30:45 FDR’s apparent indifference to lynching

35:00 David: Roosevelt actively opposed Jewish refugees entering the US

41:42 The “unconditional surrender” policy’s negative consequences

47:31 Stalin’s victory at Yalta

51:28 How David thinks we should teach FDR and WWII history

53:54 David weighs in on Darryl Cooper

Recorded December 30, 2025

Links and Readings

David’s new book, FDR: A New Political Life

David’s book, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance

Larry Kotlikoff’s book, Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World’s Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking

David S. Wyman’s book, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945

My suspicions turned out to be correct. In this episode, Patricia offers a nuanced account of terrorism, religious radicalism, interethnic conflict, and government corruption and neglect that has led to the deaths and displacement not only of many Christians in northern Nigeria, but of many Muslims as well. Patricia provides a rich account of the region and its history. It was recorded weeks before the US conducted an aerial strike on Sokoto, a predominately Muslim state that many have described as an unusual choice, if the goal was to inflict damage on major terrorist networks.

In this conversation, Patricia expressed skepticism at the efficacy of US military intervention. The strike seems to have done little to change her mind. In an email to me sent after the attack, she wrote:

Due to the urgency of the matters under discussion, I’m releasing this episode today, to everyone, for free Normally, only full subscribers get new episodes on Mondays. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Video Links

0:00 Intro: Last week’s military strikes in Nigeria

00:36 Getting beneath the headlines in northern Nigeria

3:55 What is Boko Haram?

4:28 Childcare intermission: How Glenn and Patricia started working together

7:19 Boko Haram’s attack and recruitment strategies

11:44 Patricia: Boko Haram targets both Christians and Muslims

13:33 Ground News ad

15:25 The complex religious demographics of northern Nigeria

19:16 The history of Nigerian jihad

23:27 The state’s complacent reaction to anti-Christian violence

33:57 Patricia’s fieldwork with internally displaced Nigerians

36:16 Patricia: Fear and government dysfunction, not poverty, motivate people to join Boko Haram

41:14 The surprising popularity of US intervention among Nigerians

43:32 Patricia: If the US wants to help, it should sanction politicians and their families

54:10 The pointlessness of US military intervention

58:01 The best case scenario for Nigeria’s next decade

Recorded December 4, 2025

Video Links

0:00 The shooting at Brown University8:09 The Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach11:42 Ground News ad13:34 Searching for a narrative in an information-thin environment17:34 Is the pro-Palestine movement about “whiteness”? 23:26 Glenn: There’s more to Israel-Palestine than race29:44 What does a representative American look like?36:50 Trump’s inflammatory comments about the murders of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer42:40 Trump’s allegedly declining help 51:26 Why John won’t write a memoir

Recorded December 18, 2025

Links and Readings

John’s book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

William Greider’s 1981 Atlantic article, “The Education of David Stockman”

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

On this episode, shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach, race or colonialism in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer, Trump’s apparently poor health (and John’s speculations thereon), and John’s reasons for not writing a memoir.

Plus, our monthly subscriber Q&A.

Note: This episode was recorded before the identification of the Brown University shooter.

In this episode, in conversation with Robert Patton-Spruill, Mark Sussman, and Nikita Petrov, I provide an introduction to the life and work of Thomas Schelling and consider how a “Schellingesque” point of view might influence our interpretation of current events, like the Ukraine War, the “human shields” argument in Gaza, the Trump administration’s new national security strategy, nationalist and populist movements throughout the world, and nuclear deterrence today. We also talk about Schellingesque approaches to AI, but that segment of the conversation is available only to full subscribers.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported. To gain access to all our content and to get all future premium and bonus content, become a full subscriber today. Thank you to all free and full subscribers—I couldn't do what I do without you.

Video Links

0:00 Who was Thomas C. Schelling?

8:51 The Schellingesque

13:22 Ground News ad

15:05 Battlefield commitment and signaling

27:00 How deterrence works

35:14 Schelling's role in conceptualizing Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove

49:08 Europe, Ukraine, and Trump's new national security strategy

1:04:41 Why does the US care about immigration in other nations?

1:09:02 Glenn: Bill Maher is either dishonest or wrong about asymmetrical war in Gaza

17:54 Schelling and Glenn on new nuclear powers

1:26:00 The problem of self-command

Recorded December 12, 2025

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this episode, in conversation with Robert Patton-Spruill, Nikita Petrov, and Mark Sussman, I pay tribute to Tom Schelling’s major contributions and the personal affect he had on me, as a colleague, friend, and, at times, surrogate father figure. We talk about Schelling’s understanding of battlefield commitment strategy, signaling, interstate conflict, and the nuclear weapons “taboo.” We watch a clip of Tom talking about helping Stanley Kubrick to conceptualize his film Dr. Strangelove by gaming out how a doomsday machine capable of launching ICBMs would affect the decisions made by the US and the USSR. I often find myself asking, “What would Tom think?” about one question or another, and here I try to answer that question as it pertains to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. And finally, Tom died before AI developed to its present state. He would have had a field day thinking through its implications, and we try to do him justice.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

This is a free segment from a two-hour livestream of The Glenn Show. To watch the whole thing, become a full subscriber. You’ll get access to all TGS content, including video of livestreams, audience Q&As with me and John McWhorter, and lots of other great content. The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience supported. Thank you for all you do.

In this TGS Live segment, Glenn Loury and TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill discuss Larry Summers's withdrawal from teaching at Harvard and expulsion from the American Economics Association. Glenn and Rob talk about how Glenn's own experience with public disgrace shapes his thinking about Summers's case.

Watch the video here.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

On this recording of last week's livestream, we discuss my conversation with a Nigerian development economist, Trump's moves against Venezuela, Pete Hegseth's boat strikes, flooding and winter weather in Gaza, and Bernie Sanders's call for government regulation of AI.

Last week, Larry Summers stepped back from teaching at Harvard and was banned for life from the American Economics Association after it was revealed that he maintained a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein even after Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008. I talk about my own experience with public disgrace, and explain why I think the AEA has acted too hastily in this instance.

This recording of the stream is available to full subscribers. We’ll make a long-ish clip available for free subscribers on Friday. But if you want the whole thing, consider becoming a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Video Links

0:00 Paul: The past shows us there’s a basis for hope for this country3:40 The origins of Paul’s new book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now11:07 Is the push-pull between liberation struggles and institutional resistance a uniquely American phenomenon?13:31 Ground News ad15:39 The black freedom struggle as a template for change21:37 From civil rights to progressive overreach24:31 Can the Democrats take back lost ground? 30:58 Paul: Trump’s immigration crack-downs are acts of political revenge 35:53 The social triumph and political tragedy of immigration45:54 How modern media fragmented American society52:59 Paul: We need to restrain executive power57:39 The importance of remembering our past without being shackled by it

Recorded November 20, 2025

Links and Readings

Paul’s new book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood’s article, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII”

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future

Paul’s American Prospect article, “The Social Triumph and Political Tragedy of Immigration”

Paul’s book, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Since we’ve got the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of the week, I’m releasing the first half of the conversation to everyone today instead of this Friday. For access to the entire conversation, including the Q&A, become a full subscriber.

This episode's central topic: the vulgarity of our present discourse. Though “vulgarity” doesn’t quite capture what we’re talking about on this show. It’s not news to say that the tenor of public speech has coarsened over the decades—words and phrases that would have been utterly taboo in the media of the 1960s hardly give us pause today. But what does seem new is the sometimes shockingly racist, sexist, and homophobic sentiments that have become a part of “ordinary” political debate.

The Overton window is shifting, and it’s not doing it on its own. One force moving it is surely the wide availability of online platforms. Everyone has a camera and a microphone, and as more and more people avail themselves of the communication tools available to them, views that were once filtered out by mainstream and legacy outlets are finding their way to the center of the conversation. But another force moving the window is what’s going on in the world. While I may roll my eyes when, for example, Nick Fuentes touts the virtues of Jim Crow, he’s responding to items in the news, like violent crime committed by black youth, that do need to be taken seriously.

Then it’s on to our subscriber-only Q&A session, where John and I took questions about God and morality, the Democrats’ electoral prospects, Black English vernacular, China’s outpacing of American economic growth, AI and education, Looney Tunes, and socialism vs. social democracy, plus questions from the YouTube chat.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Video Links

0:00 Howard’s new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing

5:58 The failed utopianism of American public housing

12:04 The dispossession of urban African American communities

14:54 Ground News ad

16:40 Did reformers have a reason for demolishing the slums?

22:01 Changing the culture of public housing

30:13 What’s working in public housing

33:35 Trump’s plan for a two-year limit on public housing

35:25 Howard’s criticism of Zohran Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze in NYC

41:13 The causes of homelessness

44:21 The “Move to Opportunity” experiments

48:11 What does it take to ensure that poor neighborhoods are also good neighborhoods

Recorded November 19, 2025

Links and Readings

Howard’s new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing

Scott Davis’s book, The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community

Le Corbusier’s book, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization

Catherine Bauer’s book, Modern Housing

Herbert Gans’s book, Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans

HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program

Zohran Mamdani’s “freeze the rent” ad

Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

UCSF’s homelessness study

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In my latest livestream, TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill and I talk about rising tensions with Venezuela, New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani and his proposed policies, Jeffrey Epstein wreaking havoc from beyond the grave, Nick Fuentes’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show and ideological rifts on the right, my conception of Black Patriotism, and the uses and pleasures of AI.

This recording of the stream is available to full subscribers. We’ll make a long-ish clip available for free subscribers on Friday. But if you want the whole thing, consider becoming a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Video Links

0:00 Charles’s new book, Taking Religious Seriously

8:31 Why Charles finds the idea of divine creation plausible

13:54 Charles’s “road to Damascus” moment

19:25 The appeal of Christianity

24:51 The evidence for life after death

31:38 Charles: “The relative positions of science and religion have flipped”

36:42 The trouble with scientism

40:17 Glenn’s steps toward and away from religion

51:04 Was The Bell Curve putting making a deterministic argument?

Recorded November 4, 2025

Links and Readings

Charles’s new book, Taking Religious Seriously

Charles’s book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980

Richard Herrnstein and Charles’s book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

Charles’s book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

Charles’s book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

Martin Rees’s book, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe

James Q. Wilson’s book, The Moral Sense

C.S. Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity

Raymond Moody’s book, Life after Life: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Near-Death Experiences and the Transformative Insights into the Afterlife, Backed by Scientific Study and Personal Testimonies

Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

The first half of the show consists of a pre-recorded interview with political scientist Charles Murray. He’s best known for books like Losing Ground and The Bell Curve—controversial though they may have been, they were grounded in the empirical methods that characterize modern social science. His new book, Taking Religion Seriously, is a somewhat surprising departure from social science into the realm of religion and religious experience. Murray has had, if not a conversion experience, then a kind of awakening regarding the claims of religion: the existence of a divine creator, miracles, and life after death. In this conversation, I ask him how a staunch materialist who, by his own account, doesn’t have a natural capacity for religious feeling has come to value metaphysics.

After that I bring on Robert Patton-Spruill to talk a little more about religion, the death of Dick Cheney, Zohran Mamdani's win in the NYC mayoral race, the government shutdown, and Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the conservative schism over U.S.-Israel policy.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Watch and listen to the full, 2-hour episode: https://glennloury.substack.com/p/tgs-live-democrats-leadership-crisis

Video Links

0:00 John’s misgivings about Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Zionism

7:22 Is anti-Zionism reducible to “good black people vs. bad white people”?

11:53 Ground News ad

13:40 Democrats try to pull out of a death spiral

20:05 John: If Trump can end some wars, I’ll take it

22:49 What do Kamala Harris fans see in her?

30:09 Here’s what Obama should be doing in his post-presidency

40:11 Mourning the end of race

50:15 Glenn: Eliminating racial disparities requires developing communities

Recorded October 31, 2025

Links and Readings

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s NYT column, “A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness”

Michelle Goldberg’s NYT column, “I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind.”

Kamala Harris’s book, 107 Days

David Brooks’s NYT column, “Hey Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game.”

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Last Friday, John McWhorter and I took our ongoing conversation into new territory: we streamed it live. Eighteen years into our partnership, and we’re still finding ways to keep it fresh!

In the first half of the show, we talk about New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s position on Israel, which John believes is merely woke moralism. While I’m no fan of Mamdani’s plans for free grocery stores and rent freezes, I press John on whether Mamdani’s views on Israel are as simplistic as he makes them out to be. Perhaps Mamdani’s shocking success in New York is a sign that Democratic voters are sick of the party’s lack of direction and looking for an infusion of new blood. John and I agree that substance-free leaders like Kamala Harris aren’t going to cut it. Trump is running the table at home and abroad, and Democratic leadership seems overwhelmed or, in the case of Barack Obama, strangely passive.

Obama was at one time a community organizer, wasn’t he? What happened to that commitment to local communities? I recently witnessed the power of effective grassroots organizing—I tell John about my trip to San Antonio in honor of my friend Ernesto Cortés’s 50th anniversary at Communities Organized for Public Service, an extremely impressive organizing operation. Black communities need leadership like that, and it is in short supply.

In the Q&A segment, we answer questions submitted by full subscribers and talk to a couple of them on camera. We take questions on black conservatism in American institutions, AI, race reductionism, test scores in college admissions, the Civil Rights Act, and the government shutdown.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Click here to subscribe!

Last week’s conference in honor of Thomas Sowell was the culmination of a long year of anticipation, planning, reading, and thinking. In this long excerpt from my most recent livestream, I talk with my editor Mark Sussman about the conference events and my own contributions. I explain the importance of Friedrich Von Hayek to Sowell’s thought and work, and how Sowell extended Hayek’s work. The actor-writer Clifton Duncan drops in to talk about his experiences at the conference. And I recount a conversation that I sat in on between the former secretary of state and the Supreme Court justice that would leave their critics speechless. Legacies are about the resources—intellectual, material, and spiritual—the past leaves to the future. If what I saw over those two days is any indication, those of us who inherit Sowell’s legacy will be very rich indeed.

Today’s episode is just one segment from last week’s livestream. If you missed it and want to watch the full recording, click below to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 full recordings of our livestreams, weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this edition of TGS Live, I talk about the events of the conference, my contribution, and one of the ideas informing my new book project. The conference honored the past accomplishments of Thomas Sowell, but it also pointed to the future. I heard the effects of Sowell’s writing and thinking coursing through vital new work, I met the two young winners of an essay contest about Sowell’s ideas, and I sat in on a conversation between Rice and Thomas that would stun their progressive critics.

And speaking of the future, the actor-writer Clifton Duncan, who is working on a one-man show about Sowell’s life and work, came to the conference as well. He dropped into the stream to talk about what he saw and to let us know how his work in progress is shaping up.

From there, it's on to politics. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to American cities may anger his detractors, but crime disproportionately affects black Americans, and some of them are saying they like what they’re seeing from Trump’s actions. Given the broad perception that illegal immigration is bad for black workers, it makes perfect sense that some of them are throwing their support behind Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.

We look over some pro-Trump clips from black content creators, and I note that market demand will incentivize the creation of supply. As long as Black MAGA remains a source of fascination for supporters, detractors, and the agnostic, creators will supply the market in search of clicks. It’s hard to say whether those creators are truly as dedicated to the cause as they seem, but they’re going to be here as long as people keep watching.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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, click here to become 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Tucker Carlson has been suggesting that a new civil war may be coming to the US. Is he trying to warn us? Or is he purposefully stoking the fire? Glenn takes Tucker to task.

Today’s episode is just one segment from last week’s livestream. If you missed it and want to watch the full recording, click below to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 full recordings of our livestreams, weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Note: Due to the AWS outage, many online services experienced disruptions throughout Monday. To ensure that everyone receives the episode, I thought it best to hold the episode until Amazon fixed the problem. Apologies for the delay.

In this edition of the livestream, we're talking about the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, creative destruction, nuclear war, Trump's multi-billion-dollar currency swap with Argentina, military strikes on "narcoterrorist" boats, sending the CIA into Venezuela, a combination War on Terror and War on Drugs, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, "This Week in White Crime," and Tucker Carlson's warning about (or attempt to incite) a new civil war waged over immigration and white Christian nationalism.

Recording of the full stream is available to full subscribers right now. An abbreviated episode will be available for free subscribers on Friday. The Glenn Show is almost entirely subscriber-supported. To those of you who are already full subscribers: thank you! If you like what you hear and want more, go to my Substack and become a full subscriber today.

Video Links

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

This week on The Glenn Show, Robert Patton-Spruill and I get into a detailed analysis of a conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein. The show begins as a debate on their divergent reactions to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, expressed in a New York Times column by Klein and a Vanity Fair piece by Coates. I find Coates’s smug, morally hectoring characterization of Kirk as a hate monger hard to stomach. As much as I admire parts of The Message, his vision of African American history as a struggle against an apparently timeless and all-encompassing white supremacy cannot go unchallenged, and Klein was simply not up to the task. But I am.

This is a long segment from my Friday, October 3rd livestream, and there’s lots more in the full episode. To watch that, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. I’m doing another stream next Friday, October 17—we’ll post an announcement with links next week. And John McWhorter will return on Monday for a regular episode for full subscribers (free subscribers will have to wait until next Friday). John and I really get into it on some of the same topics: Charlie Kirk, the Coates-Klein debate, and what being a “black writer” means in the twenty-first century. It’s one of the best episodes of the year, if I do say so myself. You won’t want to miss it.

And you’ll want it as soon as possible! To get early access to episodes, video from my livestreams, and much more, become a full subscriber by clicking below. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Last Friday’s livestream was a hot one. Today I’m posting the video for all who missed it (you have to be a paid subscriber to hear the full version now, but everybody else will get it on Friday). But trust me, this is appointment viewing. I’ll be at Stanford later this week for a conference on the work of Thomas Sowell. But the livestream will return the week following.

In the first half of the stream, Nikita Petrov, Robert Patton-Spruill, and I talk about …

Note: Links and info for my next livestream, which is happening this Friday, October 3 at 1:00 PM EDT, can be found at the end of this post.

Normally, I release TGS episodes to full subscribers on Mondays and then to the general public on Fridays. But this conversation is a repost from my conversations with Bob Wright at his Nonzero podcast, so I figured I’d make this one an early public release. If you like starting your week off with The Glenn Show, and you’re not yet a full subscriber, consider becoming one by going here. We at The Glenn Show are almost entirely subscriber supported. We need your help to keep the show going. So if you’re already a paying subscriber, thank you for making The Glenn Show possible.

Video Links

0:00 A message from Glenn

1:34 How this conversation came to be

2:59 What surprised Glenn most about the Kirk killing

8:56 Who (or what) is driving our polarization?

17:36 Cognitive empathy for MAGA

25:24 Reacting to Charlie Kirk on affirmative action

45:04 Are we re-running the 1960s?

51:50 Glenn’s latest book, Self-Censorship

54:11 Why the Manhattan Institute dropped Glenn

1:04:02 Glenn on Gaza: “I can’t bear it.”

1:17:27 “Genocide” and other Israel speech code flashpoints

1:26:58 Has Trump’s anti-antisemitism push chilled campus speech?

1:36:58 A few kind and less kind words for Bari Weiss

1:46:44 Are Israel’s defenders hurting their cause?

1:52:14 Glenn’s next big project

Recorded September 15, 2025

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In our latest Q&A, John McWhorter and I take questions on troubled black communities, the N-word, issues on which we've changed our minds, ratcheting down political tensions in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, and how we handle personal security.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer supported. If you like what you hear, head over to my Substack and become a full subscriber. You'll get monthly Q&As with John McWhorter, and a whole lot more.

You can keep tabs on Clifton’s progress and support his work at his Substack, Becoming Thomas Sowell.

Video Links

0:00 A Hard Day’s McWhorter

3:51 Jimmy Kimmel and the collapse of the“bluegeois” paradigm

9:47 Ground News ad

11:30 Ideological gatekeeping in the arts

17:02 The Gamergate-ification of everything

25:50 John: Wokeness isn’t dead, it’s changed shape

33:11 Clifton’s one-man show in-progress, Becoming Thomas Sowell

35:21 Sowell at Cornell

40:10 The challenge to Sowell’s conception of “the civil rights vision”

43:36 The pressures of bringing Sowell to the stage

45:58 Clifton: I think of Sowell as “the people’s intellectual”

Recorded September 20, 2025

Links and Readings

John and Clifton’s previous conversation on The Glenn Show

Clifton’s Substack, Becoming Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

Sowell’s book, Knowledge and Decisions

Thurgood on Amazon Prime

Sowell’s book, Black Education: Myths and Tragedies

Donald Downs’s book, Cornell ‘69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University

Sowell’s book, On Classical Economics

Mark Whitaker’s book, Saying It Loud: 1966—the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

Sowell’s book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

Jason Riley’s latest appearance on TGS

Jason’s book, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s memoir, A Personal Odyssey

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Last Friday, I hosted a livestream featuring Nikita Petrov, Robert Patton-Spruill, and call-ins from viewers. Once again, our topic is the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

We talk about my own cancelation by the Manhattan Institute, warding off the tyranny of the majority, the worrisome comments of truly powerful people like Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Pam Bondi, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s intervention in the Kirk debates, and what I dream the leader of our nation would say (and still can say) as the post-assassination temperature continues to rise. I talk with callers about the dynamics of backlash, plausible deniability, and the spiritual impetus to ease political tensions.

Listen, I need your help.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 measly $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Subscribe at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 Why Marc thinks nothing works

6:45 Who decides the winners and losers in public trade-offs?

12:50 Penn Station and public interest logjams

20:29 Marc: We have Trump because people feel that government doesn’t work

28:17 Two progressive conceptions of power

33:03 Finding the balance between centralized and dispersed power

39:05 Ok, nothing works. So how do we get things working?

51:28 Marc: We need a return to Hamiltonian governing

55:03 The new class of moderate Democrats trying to get things done

Recorded September 6, 2025

Links and Readings

Marc’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

Marc’s book, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Robert Caro’s book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance

Jennifer Pahlka’s book, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Yoni Applebaum’s book, Stuck: How the Privileged and Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this episode, co-hosted with my editor Mark Sussman, I talk with viewers about the murders of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, the “black crime” canard, the effects of immigration on black employment, and other weighty topics. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. A call from Richard Kim—a newly tenured professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago—gave me the opportunity to reminisce about Father Richard John Neuhaus, a friend who offered me great comfort during one of the most difficult periods of my life. And of course, we hear from Robert Patton-Spruill aka the Landlord Guy aka the Housing Provider aka the Evil Landlord.

In order to keep doing these streams and recording weekly episodes of The Glenn Show, I need your help. Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen. But if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 measly $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

To subscribe, go to https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 The upcoming Hoover Institution conference honoring Thomas Sowell

5:37 Sowell’s apprentice work at the University of Chicago

12:58 Ground News ad

14:45 Hayek’s influence on Sowell

19:55 Jason: No one is smarter than the market

24:58 The unconstrained vision vs. the constrained vision

33:04 Sowell’s contribution to economic literacy

37:44 Sowell’s tough early life and his path to Marx

]47:55 Jason: Sowell’s willingness to weigh in on race hurt his career

53:58 Sowell’s evisceration of The Bell Curve

Recorded on August 25, 2025

Links and Readings

Jason’s writing for the Wall Street Journal

Jason’s book, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Thoma Sowell’s memoir, A Personal Journey

Sowell’s book, Knowledge and Decisions

Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Conflict

Sowell’s book, Ethnic America: A History

Sowell’s book, Race and Culture

Sowell’s book, Migration and Cultures: A World View

Friedrich Von Hayek’s essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”

Hayek’s review of Knowledge and Decisions

Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein

Sowell’s book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

Sowell’s book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

Milton Friedman’s TV show, Free to Choose

Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

Sowell’s American Spectator review of The Bell Curve, “Ethnicity and IQ”

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

On this week's livestream, Nikita and I are joined by filmmaker, professor, master distiller, and "housing provider" Robert Patton-Spruill. And he does not disappoint. He begins by informing me of a connection between us: his father, then a professor of acting and directing at Boston University, used to smoke weed in front of my house. From there we get into a range of subjects, including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the role of faith and the church in our lives, the power of wealth to create change, AI and ChatGPT, and October 7th. Robert then cedes the stage for a while, and I take calls from viewers Jack Apple, Eric Ingram. William Schafer, Rouxbe, and Scott Kushner.

Putting viewers in the spotlight has opened a whole new dimension of the show, and we’re going to keep exploring it. So if you want to talk to me directly, tune into the next livestream, which we’ll be announcing soon. But in order to keep doing these streams and recording weekly episodes of The Glenn Show, I need your help. Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen. But if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 piddling $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Subscribe at https://glennloury.substack.com

For the full episode and to support The Glenn Show, visit https://glennloury.substack.com

On this recording of my latest livestream, I sit down with my editor, Mark Sussman. Inspired by a recent memo posted by liberal moderate think tank Third Way, Mark and I talk a bit about the communicative dynamics of progressive nomenclature, e.g., “chestfeeding” rather than “breastfeeding” and other awkward neologisms. Can the Democrats afford to get mired in these debates while they’re facing so much anger and dissatisfaction from their own constituency? We take comments and calls on the subject from viewers familiar and new. Scott Kushner and Robert Spruill pop in to give their views. Mark and I debate Trump and what will happen to MAGA when he eventually either cedes the stage or passes away. We talk about the Minnesota school shooter’s gender identity and what, if anything, it has to do with the awful slaughter at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. And of course, Gaza comes up.

I’m loving this new feature of the show, but in order to keep it and all things TGS afloat, I need your help. Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, and we’re making this one available to everyone, but normally if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 piddling $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

To subscribe, go to https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 What Thomas Sowell means to Emily

3:54 What’s the difference between a conservative and a classical liberal?

10:59 Ground News ad

12:45 Sowell’s interventions in price theory and microeconomics

19:31 The parallel careers of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams

24:51 Emily: Trump is not fulfilling Sowell’s vision of liberty

33:37 A Sowellian critique of expert-driven COVID policies

45:08 The risks of uncertainty in Trump’s economic policies

53:46 The future of classical liberalism

58:01 The Mont Pelerin Society’s intellectual landscape

1:01:15 Glenn’s departure from classical liberalism

Recorded August 19, 2025

Links and Readings

Friedrich Von Hayek’s book, The Constitution of Liberty

Hayek’s essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative”

Thomas Sowell’s book, Knowledge and Decisions

Bart Wilson’s book, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century

The Mont Pelerin Society

John Cochrane’s review of Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Hayek’s book, Law, Legislation, and Liberty

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this edition of the Q&A, Glenn and John take questions on MLK and white moderates, audience capture, civilian casualties in Gaza, "I have to do X" vs. "I get to do X," Trump's performance as president, the role of trustees and administration in determining university policy, and race and genes.

Order Glenn's new book, Self-Censorship, here or where you get your books:

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/683p6kk3 Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/4yvz4fta Bookshop: https://tinyurl.com/44rznxww

Video Links

0:00 How woke campus culture degrades mental health

5:47 The rise of “microaggressions”

'8:21 The harms caused by discourses of harm

13:47 The digital lives of children

19:08 Why Courtney and Ted produced Coddling themselves

24:56 A Nigerian immigrant’s encounter with campus progressivism

32:36 Is Trump’s anti-DEI posture aiding free speech on campus?

37:58 Ted and Courtney’s decision to homeschool their child

41:48 How comedy brings us together

48:26 Ted and Courtney take on the Rob Henderson story

Recorded August 8, 2025

Links and Readings

The Coddling of the American Mind doc

The Coddling of the American Mind book

Dead Poet’s Society

The Canceling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff conversation

Can We Take a Joke

Coddling movie Substack

Noam episodes

Rob Henderson, Troubled

Rob Henderson episode

Subscribe to The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

The livestreaming experiment continues here at TGS. I never know what’s going to come at me. I’m operating outside my comfort zone. Of course, that’s what makes it fun. The callers often ask me to weigh in on a whole range of subjects I’d never think up on my own, like embryo screening and the frustrations of Connecticut landlords. (And speaking of landlords, filmmaker and property owner Robert Spruill is back!) I have no meaningful knowledge in these areas, but now I get to learn a little about them, or at least think them through on the fly. Other topics, like Israel-Palestine, student debt, and election security, are more familiar. But I’m still never quite what kind of spin my callers will put on the ball.

In other words, the calls are keeping me sharp and engaged. And I love getting to meet my audience in these brief encounters.

But in order to keep this going, I need your help. Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, and we’re making this one available to everyone, but normally if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Subscribe at https://glennloury.substack.com

This episode was originally recorded for Danny and Derek's podcast American Prestige and cross posted here. Subscribe to American Prestige at https://americanprestige.supportingcast.fm/join

Order Glenn's new book, Self-Censorship, here or where you get your books:

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/683p6kk3 Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/4yvz4fta Bookshop: https://tinyurl.com/44rznxww

Video Links

0:00 The origins of Self-Censorship

4:11 Black and conservative in Reagan’s America

8:30 The social science hall of fame

12:45 Jews, assimilation, and the quantitative revolution

17:56 Human universalism vs. ethno-national particularity

21:42 Historicizing “the Jew”

23:47 Danny: Larry Summers can’t see outside his own neoliberal paradigm

27:50 Are we entering a period of, as Marx wrote, “mutual ruin”?

30:46 Is capitalism leading us toward nuclear war?

37:18 What the Manhattan Institute incident taught Glenn about his own book

42:02 Glenn: “I’m rethinking everything”

46:40 Is the right reverting to a pre-New Deal political paradigm?

51:37 Is Israel a reversion to an Early Modern model of nation-building?

58:07 American Jews’s role in Israel’s creation and perpetuation

1:03:04 Why Glenn previously censored himself on Gaza

1:09:30 Glenn: So far, I’m disappointed in Trump

Recorded August 6, 2025

Links and Readings

Danny and Derek’s podcast, American Prestige

Glenn’s new book, Self-Censorship

John Murray Cuddihy’s book, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity

Corey Robin’s book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Glenn’s City Journal essay, “Clarence Thomas and Me”

Seth Schwartz’s book, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhamad

Omar El Akkad’s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Glenn’s post, “I Was Fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here’s Why.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch’s book, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire

Avi Shlaim’s book, Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine

Peter Beinart’s book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

Glenn’s conversation with Beinart

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In our latest livestream, TGS editor Mark Sussman and I discuss Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel Submission and its rather unpleasant but compelling critique of modern existence, after which we take questions from viewers and callers. We get into some unexpected territory, like life after death (I don’t believe in it), the existence of alien intelligence (it seems probable to me), and psychedelics (that one’s on Mark). I’m truly enjoying these face-to-face conversations with viewers, and I encourage everyone who can call in to do so on our next stream.

Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, and we’re making this one available to everyone, but normally if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Subscribe at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

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

John’s April 23, 2024 NYT column, “I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.”

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

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Order Self-Censorship here or wherever you get your books:

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/683p6kk3 Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/4yvz4fta Bookshop: https://tinyurl.com/44rznxww

In this conversation, my editor Mark Sussman and I discuss Kamala Harris’s forthcoming book, 107 Days, and the dire state of publishing. I’ve been reading a lot of Thomas Sowell in preparation for a major address I have to deliver about his work in the Fall, and I suggest that Sowell might say that the declining profitability of writing and publishing might well be a good thing, insofar as it signals the market’s responsiveness to consumer demand and desire. This leads to a debate about the distinction (and perhaps the conflict) between aesthetic and economic value. Then it’s on to a broader discussion of Sowell. Next we move onto the story of a group of people establishing a Christian, LGBTQ-free, whites-only community in Arkansas. We close out with viewer questions about Brown University’s deal with the Trump administration, which somehow leads to a debate about climate science and the epistemological limitations of modernity. And finally, an evergreen topic: black patriotism.

In the course of this conversation, Mark and I reference Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, Submission. That’s because we plan to discuss the book on our next livestream, which we’ll announce in the coming days. So if you want to participate in the discussion or simply follow along, read the book. We’ll be taking calls, and I’m very curious what you all have to think of this brilliant, provocative, and (be warned) sexually explicit book.

Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, and we’re making this one available to everyone, but normally if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Video Links

0:00 Columbia’s $221 million-deal with the Trump administration

4:11 Rajiv: The charges about antisemitism at Columbia are mostly pretextual

13:34 How is Columbia’s resolution monitor going to assess merit in admissions?

25:31 What really matters in college admissions?

29:47 Why Brown’s agreement differs from Columbia’s

34:16 Rajiv: If the Trump administration wants to destroy universities, it has the resources to do it

40:07 Is Columbia’s Middle East Studies department cooked?

43:15 Free speech is dying in universities and flourishing on podcasts (and Substack)

50:19 Is a full-scale antisemitic backlash on the way?

55:25 The question of genocide

59:45 The Gaza War’s historical legacy

Recorded August 1, 2025

Links and Readings

Rajiv’s post, “The Columbia Deal” at Imperfect Information

Rashid Khalidi’s open letter announcing the withdrawal of his course

Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017

Roland Fryer’s WSJ piece, “DEI Is Worth Saving from Its Excesses”

Glenn’s new book, Self-Censorship

Colin Wright’s WSJ piece, “Cornell University Discriminated against Me”

Dave Smith and Douglas Murray on the Joe Rogan Experience

Green Beret vet Tony Aguilar on the Tucker Carlson Show

Israeli journalist Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps speaks with The Daily about starvation in Gaza

Avi Shlaim’s book, Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine

Omer Bartov’s NYT piece, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

It’s the middle of the summer, it’s hot, and John McWhorter and I are back for another Substack subscriber only Q&A session. In this episode, we take questions about leadership in the black community, critical listening, Percival Everett's novel James, immigration, white women studying black women's history, right-wing identity politics, and the Free Press.

The Glenn Show is supported by listeners like you. To watch and listen to the full version of this episode and get all kinds of other benefits, become a full subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com.

In lieu of a regular episode this week, I’m presenting a version of our latest livestream. Last week we debuted what I hope will be an ongoing feature of these livestreams: viewer call-ins. Nikita has been working on setting this up for a while now, and as you’ll see, we’ve still got some kinks to work out. We were able to take a number of calls from viewers, and on that score, this experiment was a resounding success.

Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, and we’re making this one available to everyone, but normally if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Become a full subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 Glenn and Cornel’s early correspondence

2:20 Cornel: “Brother Glenn ain’t never been just a black conservative”

9:34 Ground News ad

11:10 One-eyed and two-eyed reason

19:33 The Loury family legacy

25:01 Does race still matter?

34:32 The black intellectual in a declining empire

45:56 Keeping nihilism at bay in the black community

51:42 Keep the funk, and die with a smile on your face

55:40 The Democratic Party plantation

Recorded July 18, 2025

Links and Readings

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Toni Morrison’s book, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Ralph Ellison’s book, Shadow and Act

Thomas Sowell’s book, The Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle

Cornel’s book, Race Matters

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Cornel’s book, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of Clara Ward’s, “How I Got Over”

John Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme

Niall Ferguson’s book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

Glenn’s book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brother’s Karamazov

Joseph Conrad’s novel, Victory: An Island Tale

Cornel’s 2024 Gifford Lectures

Video Links

0:00 Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC Democratic primaries

12:07 Ground News ad

14:05 The War on Terror and the War in Gaza

28:54 Should Trump fear Mamdani?

32:02 Glenn: Trump is running the table

42:26 John: Glenn, you’re getting caught up in the Trump Show

48:05 Buckley, Reagan, Goldwater, and the legacy of conservatism

53:56 Glenn’s encounters with Willian F. Buckley

59:30 Remembering Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom

Recorded July 7, 2025

Links and Readings

John’s NYT column, “Wokeness Will Always Be with Us”

Peter Beinart’s NYT guest essay, “Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast”

“One Last Time” from Hamilton

Adam Clayton Powell’s “What’s in Your Hand” speech

Sam Tannenhaus’s new book, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

Glenn’s 1991 appearance on Firing Line

Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s book, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible

Glenn’s 1997 Atlantic review of America in Black and White

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

My latest book, Self-Censorship, is coming out in a couple weeks, and I’m excited to share it with you. As a kind of apéritif, Mark Sussman and I livestreamed our wide-ranging discussion of all things self-censorious. We talk about the book, of course, but also the economics of addiction, the trouble with streaming music, the best and worst of airplane socializing, and many other topics. It’s a good introduction to the book, which you can preorder now on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books.

In this stream, Mark and I discuss the incoherence of racial and ethnic nomenclature, the utility of self-censorship in political coalition-building, uncovering consensus within the spiral of silence, objectivity in public discourse, the joy and pain of in-flight chit-chat, the truth-seeking value of debate, de gustibus non disputandum est, the paradox of choice, what we’re self-censoring about today, anti-antisemitism, Václav Havel and the power of the powerless, minor and major self-censorship, speaking your mind without tenure, Israel and self-censorship, risking deportation for self-expression, the return of Old Glenn / New Glenn, and the line between cowardice and strategic silence.

Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, but if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 less than the cost of an IPA at your local dive bar, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Become a full subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 The return of the “speech is violence” argument

6:05 Who’s the arbiter of “misinformation” and “disinformation”?

8:06 The University of Virginia topped FIRE’s college free speech rankings

14:08 The Victorianism of the Woke

22:10 The comedian as gadfly

24:40 Do we need to “protect” Jewish students from pro-Palestine speech?

31:23 Harvard Derangement Syndrome

37:13 FIRE’s defense of Amy Wax

39:59 Using Title IX to restrict speech

46:24 Complicating the left-right speech distinction

49:34 FIRE enters the AI debates

Recorded June 2, 2025

Links and Readings

FIRE

Greg and Nancy Strossen’s forthcoming book, War on Words: 10 Arguments against Free Speech—and Why They Fail

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 NYT op-ed, “When Is Speech Violence?”

FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings

FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire Database

Rajiv Sethi’s post, “Under Fire”

Glenn’s forthcoming book, Self-Censorship

Musa al-Gharbi’s book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

Greg and Rikki Schlott’s book, Canceling the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens Us

The IHRA definition of antisemitism

Steven Pinker’s NYT guest essay, “Harvard Derangement Syndrome”

Greg’s Atlantic essay, “Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard”

Cosmos Institute

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

I’m back with my creative director Nikita Petrov on our latest livestream. As you may know, Nikita is Russian. He’s spent some time in the US, but he’s still got a lot of questions about how we do things here and why. This was recorded the day before the Independence Day holiday, and we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to address some of Nikita’s questions (and yours) about the strange folkways of the American people

In this installment, we talk about the meaning of the American flag, ChatGPT’s 50 unique facts about the US, voter ID laws, the validity of the 2020 election, border security and immigration, ICE, the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide (if that’s what it was!), Christian Zionism, advice for aspiring authors, free speech, the Big Beautiful Bill, taxes, spiritual conflict within the family, the X-Files, and third-party politics.

Anybody can watch our livestreams as they happen, but if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer 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 less than the cost of three tacos at your neighborhood food truck, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content. Go to https://glennloury.substack.com

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In my latest livestream with my editor Mark Sussman, we talk about the state of the academic labor market, teaching writing to undergrads, Zohran Mamdani’s remarkable victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, the wisdom or folly of a federal minimum wage, the work of Thomas Sowell and upcoming conference in his honor, and race and economics. We take questions on libertarianism, self-censorship, black conservatism, AI and teaching, and how to coax Glenn to your town to read from his forthcoming book, Self-Censorship.

Full subscribers have access to the full audio and video of this recording. We at The Glenn Show rely on the generosity and support of our subscribers. So if you’re already a subscriber, thank you for all you do. And if you’re not one, consider becoming one. It’s about the cost of one beer a month, and less than that if you purchase a full year’s subscription.

Sign up at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 How Jens got interested in American gun violence

2:45 What’s “unexpected” about the origins of gun violence?

5:29 Race and the culture of gun violence

9:30 Ground News ad

11:20 Are high rates of gun violence a cultural issue or an equilibrium?

17:09 Is urban gun violence the result of rational behavior?

24:34 The link between Kahnemanian “fast thinking” and violent conflict

36:46 Are gun violence interruptions scalable?

40:52 The role of urban design in reducing crime and violence

47:31 Jens: Gang-motivated crime may not account for as much violence as its seems

50:43 Rehabilitating “Broken Windows”

53:47 Jens’s “pathological pragmatism”

Recorded June 13, 2025

Links and Readings

Jens’s new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence

Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow

William Julius Williams’s book, Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Social Policy

Jane Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s classic Atlantic article, “Broken Windows”

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

This month, John and I tackle questions about grade inflation, the Great Courses, Chapt GPT, race and public art, Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine, the end of race-based affirmative action, Trump, Christopher Rufo, and my most recent appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show.

The Glenn Show is supported by listeners like you. To watch and listen to the full version of this episode and get all kinds of other benefits, become a full subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Last week, I did my second ever livestream, this time with my editor here at the Substack, Mark Sussman. We covered a lot of ground: self-censorship in both intimate and public settings, the golden age of MIT, the death of the influential economist Stanley Fischer, political correctness then and now, the use of the term “blood libel,” immigration, labor disputes and anti-trust in the tech industry, and class-based affirmative action.

Full subscribers have access to the full audio and video of this recording. We at The Glenn Show rely on the generosity and support of our subscribers. So if you’re already a subscriber, thank you for all you do. And if you’re not one, consider becoming one. It’s about the cost of one beer a month, and less than that if you purchase a full year’s subscription.

Sign up at https://glennloury.substack.com

Last week we tried something new at TGS. I had a conversation with my lovely wife, LaJuan Loury, and my creative director, Nikita Petrov, live on three platforms at the same time: the TGS Youtube channel, the TGS Substack, and on Nikita’s Substack, Psychopolitica.

We went for two hours and covered a lot of ground: LaJuan and I reported on our visit to Tucker Carlson’s “barn” in Maine, and I speculated about why LaJuan and Tucker, contrary to my expectations, really hit it off. LaJuan spoke a bit about her religious upbringing, we reminisced about where The Glenn Show was four years ago, when Nikita and I started working together, and we tried to assess how we fit into the very different political and media landscape of 2025, which required us to first discuss how we see this said landscape. We capped it off with a short Q&A at the end, where we responded to questions asked during the stream.

I should also mention the conversation includes some very raw and emotional moments, especially when we discuss the dire situation in Gaza.

The experiment continues! I’ll be livestreaming again this Thursday, June 12, at 6:00 PM Eastern on YouTube and Substack. This time I’ll be joined by my editor, Mark Sussman. Planned topics include my forthcoming book Self-Censorship, the future of elite universities, how to get proactive on racial disparities in the wake of affirmative action and DEI rollbacks, faith and reason, and the recent death of Stanley Fischer, an economist I got to know back in MIT days. But it’s a live conversation—you never know what’s going to happen or what we’ll end up talking about.

The button below allow you to add the Substack version to you calendar:

And if you navigate to the YouTube page of the stream, you can add a notification to alert you when the stream starts:

The Glenn Show will be taking a pause in the month of June. In this brief episode, Glenn explains why.

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:25 The response to Glenn’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show

4:03 Are institutions like the University of Austin the future of higher ed?

11:31 Ground News ad

13:14 When social justice musicology came for John’s syllabus

17:42 What role should social justice play in academic study?

28:40 John’s trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture

35:50 Will the museum survive Trump’s assault on DEI?

44:47 Are Glenn and John complicit in anti-DEI overreach?

55:30 The racial animus question in anti-DEI reform

Recorded on May 21, 2025

Links and Readings

Glenn’s recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s interview with Glenn

Glenn’s forthcoming book, Self-Censorship

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

John’s conversation with actor Clifton Duncan

The BBC’s 1973 production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, starring Lynn Redgrave and James Villiers

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

Victor Herbert’s operetta, Babes in Toyland

John’s NYT piece on the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Glenn’s conversation with Brown University student Alex Shieh

Video Links

0:00 Intro

0:50 Glenn takes a shot at defining “cryptocurrency”

5:28 Yaya fills in the gaps

10:15 Solving the double-spending problem

15:58 The partisan divide on crypto

21:27 North Korea’s crypto hackers

26:29 How crypto protocols create value

33:23 The case of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX

35:13 How stablecoins can open up global financial markets to nations with weak or unstable currency

36:32 Memecoins: Buyer beware

41:07 China’s use of digital currency to expand its surveillance apparatus

47:35 Should a non-expert invest in crypto?

Recorded May 15, 2025

Links and Readings

Yaya and Emily Jin’s report, “China’s Digital Currency: Adding Financial Data to Digital Authoritarianism”

Yaya podcast’s, Designated

Yaya’s audio thriller, The Jabbari Lincoln Files

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this installment of my monthly Q&A with John McWhorter, we tackle questions about elite universities and wealth, the value of DEI, Trump's expansion of executive power, The Great Gatsby, and ethics in higher education.

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:00 What is the “affirmative action myth”?

8:02 Black progress before and after affirmative action

11:41 Ground News ad

13:29 How far does Jason’s critique of affirmative action extend?

17:03 Contesting The Shape of the River

26:37 Respectability, responsibility, and upward mobility

32:40 Is Jason blaming the victims?

35:54 Jason: No one’s buying the reparations argument

43:26 How do figures like Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones end up at the center of progressive discourse?

Recorded May 7, 2025

Links and Readings

Jason’s new book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed

Jason’s book, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

Jason’s book, False Black Power

Jason’s book, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Derek Bok and William G. Bowen’s book, The Shape of the River: Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions

Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

An Amos & Andy YouTube playlist

Julia pilot episode

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations”

Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist

The NYT’s 1619 Project

The Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites Project

Video Links

0:43 Ross: Trump's economic policies are the worst I've seen in my life

7:36 Glenn's new book, SELF-CENSORSHIP

12:00 Trump’s bid to become the most powerful person in the history of the world

21:17 The disruptive effects of tariffs, financial regulatory manipulation, and extraordinary debt levels

27:58 Ross: Alienating our allies is only going to strengthen China

33:41 Glenn: Those who lost out to globalization are getting their way

41:04 Will Trump heed economic warning signs?

48:10 Can Congress constrain Trump?

Recorded April 19, 2025

Links and Readings

Edward Luce’s Financial Times piece, “Trump, Truss, and the ‘Moron Premium’”

Larry Kotlikoff’s Substack

Larry Kotlikoff’s post, “30-Year TIPS Are Looking Mighty Attractive”

Glenn’s most recent conversation with Larry Kotlikoff

Michael Sandel’s book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

Video Links

0:00 Intro

00:31 Prefatory remarks

4:15 Glenn: The Trump administration’s defunding of the universities is mischievous in the extreme

9:06 Ground News ad

11:01 Doesn’t maintaining the preeminence of American universities require diversity of thought?

18:47 John McWhorter has entered the building

20:25 How did higher ed lose the general public’s support?

23:05 The university’s role in public discourse

26:26 Was affirmative action a success or a failure?

31:36 The partisan balance in education funding

42:21 The costs and benefits of tenure

50:09 Can education preserve democracy if students aren’t doing the reading?

1:01:59 Are we irrevocably polarized as a nation?

1:07:28 Q&A: You don’t seem as excited by Trump as you once were. What is disappointing you?

1:11:40 Q&A: If higher ed serves society, why do so many elite grads use their degrees to get rich?

1:16:01 Q&A: How do you teach diversity to students who’ve never spent time around people different from them?

1:19:15 Q&A: What’s the difference between contrarianism and provocation?

1:21:23 Q&A: Should fewer people go to college?

Recorded April 22, 2025

Links and Readings

Michael Sandel’s book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

John Stuart Mill’s book, On Liberty

John Milton’a Areopagitica

Alan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

John’s new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

The Great Courses

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov

Leo Tolsty’s novel, War and Peace

Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina

Plato’s dialogue, The Republic

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this bonus episode, I talk with my grandson Will Kelly about his weight-loss journey, which he is documenting on social media. We talk about his desire to live out loud, our family history of addiction issues, and his strategies for healthy, sustainable weight loss.

Check out this episode on Substack to see clips from Will's TikTok and instagram

Follow Will on Instagram and TikTok

Pre-order Glenn's forthcoming book, SELF-CENSORSHIP. Available here or wherever you get your books: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=self-censorship--9781509567409

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:10 Glenn meets the young Marx

2:32 The new wokeness of the political right

8:30 What is the democratic counterpart of foreign policy and national security run by experts?

17:04 Russia’s motivations: Fear of NATO or imperial ambitions

21:41 Danny: Zelenskyy made a huge misstep in the Oval Office

26:12 Does China have global security ambitions?

35:09 Ending the Middle East’s post-Ottoman redefinition

39:42 Danny: It’s gotta be rough to be Peter Beinart

43:46 Why we don’t need Hitler to explain Trump’s authoritarianism

56:29 Danny: We’ve been in the midst of a constitutional crisis since the 1940s

57:58 Can the nuclear taboo hold?

Recorded April 19, 2025

Links and Readings

Danny’s podcast, American Prestige

Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s paper, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”

Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion

Danny’s book, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual

Transcript of Matt Lauer’s 1998 interview with Madeline Albright

Paul Thomas Chamberlain’s book, The Cold War Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace

Lindsey O’Rourke’s book, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War

Peter Beinart’s book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

Glenn’s conversation with Peter Beinart

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Danny’s Jacobin piece, “This Is America”

James Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

Carl Schmitt’s book, The Concept of the Political

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this bonus episode of The Glenn Show, I talk with Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh about Bloat@Brown, his website calling out Brown administrators whose roles, he says, may violate federal discrimination laws. We talk about why he started Bloat@Brown, diversity of thought on campus, class-based affirmative action, and the role of diversity on campus.

This bonus episode is available in its entirety to full subscribers, without whom The Glenn Show would not be possible. If you want to listen to the full version of this episode and our other bonus content—including monthly Q&As with John McWhorter—go to https://glennloury.substack.com and sign up.

Pre-order Glenn's forthcoming book, Self-Censorship. Available here or wherever you get your books: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetai...

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:12 Attacks on the university from within and without

9:50 Ground News ad

11:43 Reshaping institutions by force and by argument

20:56 Critiquing the Gaza War without antisemitism

22:30 Reforming para-academic institutions

32:07 Is there a potential conflict between commitments to truth and commitments to diversity of thought?

39:19 Caught between “casual relativism” and “fierce absolutism”

52:18 Cornel: There is no “mic drop” argument on Gaza or anything else

55:19 The straight-jacket of emotional over-investment

1:00:36 The role of faith in the search for truth

1:10:19 Finding faith beyond reason in Stephen Sondheim

Recorded April 12, 2025

Links and Readings

Robbie and Cornel’s new book, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division

Plato’s Republic

Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Eugene Genovese’s book, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

Antonio Gramsci’s book, The Prison Notebooks

William Blake’s poem, “London”

Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio

Genesis 22, King James Version

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Mandy Patinkin sings “Finishing the Hat” from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George

VIdeo Links

0:00 Intro

0:45 Why Trump’s tariffs alarm economists

8:18 Are the tariffs designed to offset Trump’s tax cuts?

11:30 Larry’s break with Senator Ron Johnson

14:16 Larry: We’re not in a trade war with other countries, we’re in a trade war with other people

22:44 Is Trump under the sway of a foreign power?

28:45 What measures should investors take to protect themselves from tariff-generated market volatility?

35:46 The possible silver lining in the economy under tariffs

41:32 The hypothetical third-party billionaire who could defeat Trump

44:46 The social security Ponzi scheme

54:50 Larry’s plan for fixing social security

57:29 Are other aging nations facing the same social security crisis as the US?

1:02:23 The failure of checks and balances

Recorded April 4, 2025

Links and Readings

Larry’s Substack

Larry’s company, Economic Security Planning

The MaxiFi Planner

TIPs Ladder

Rajiv Sethi’s Substack, Imperfect Information

Larry’s book, You’re Hired: A Trump Playbook for Fixing America’s Economy

For the March 2025 Q&A, John and I take questions on getting outside our bubbles, the first hundred days of the second Trump administration, the Department of Education, contemporary black writers, race and advertising, the assumption of good faith, and undocumented immigration.

The Glenn Show is supported almost entirely by listeners, viewers, and readers. If you're not year a full subscriber, please consider becoming one at https://glennloury.substack.com. You'll get access to monthly Q&As, commenting privileges at the newsletter, and lots of bonus content. And if you're already a full subscriber, thank you for all you do.

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:03 How Rick feels being a “liberal maverick,” according to the NYT

4:18 Rick’s advocacy for class-based affirmative action

6:39 Rick: “The Trump administration has gone too far” by trying to eliminate racial diversity

13:02 Opening up the elite university’s old boys club

21:21 Will economic diversity in admissions come with test score disparities?

23:55 Ground News ad 25:56 What’s Edward Blum’s deal?

29:36 Rick: The Democratic Party needs to ask itself why it lost to Trump

34:48 The black allies of class-based affirmative action

40:53 Is vocational training a viable alternative to four years of college?

44:48 Addressing the development problem among black students

52:52 Rick’s hopes for a new Democratic Party

Links and Readings

Rick’s new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges

Pew poll on race and ethnicity in college admissions

Glenn and John’s 2023 conversation with Peter Arcidiacono

The 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity

Rick’s book, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

Rick’s Atlantic piece, “Liberal Suburbs Have Their Own Border Wall”

Progressive Policy Institute

Video Links

0:36 How Rajiv saw Trump’s assault on elite higher ed coming

4:26 The Trump administration’s legitimate complaints against higher ed

9:41 Rajiv: The crackdown on campus protest would have happened even without the October 7 protest

17:10 How test scores can marry merit and diversity on college campuses

21:06 Glenn: Doesn’t SFFA v. Harvard justify JD Vance’s criticisms of higher ed?

25:30 Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump administration

33:06 Columbia’s new measures against antisemitism

38:09 The opportunistic adoption of contested phrases

43:27 How bad is the antisemitism problem at Barnard and Columbia?

50:44 Who has the authority to police Columbia’s MESAAS scholars?

1:00:55 Facing the prospect of Trump-generated American brain drain

Recorded March 23, 2025

Links and Readings

Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information

Rajiv’s post April 2024 post, “Minority Report”

FIRE’s 2024 Faculty Survey

Rajiv’s post, “The Lion Hath Roared”

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Working Definition of Antisemitism”

Eli Lake’s X post questioning the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil

Preorder Glenn’s book, Self-Censorship

Noam Dworman moderates a debate between Eli Lake and Norman Finkelstein

Lex Friedman hosts a debate between Norman Finkelstein, Mouin Rabbani, Benny Morris, and Destiny

Dworman interviews Rashid Khalidi

Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Mari Matsuda’s Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment

Killer Mike’s 2024 FIRE keynote

I spent part of last week visiting Stanford University, and John is off taking care of business in Australia. The time difference, travel, and speaking obligations made scheduling a recording impossible. So this week, I’ve got something a little different for you. Instead of recording a conversation on the day’s news with John, I decided to record one on my own. In this episode, I talk through some opinion pieces that grabbed my attention and give my take on the topics. I address Trump and the economy, Trump’s predictability and unpredictability, DOGE and MAGA’s slashing of the federal government, Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, antisemitism, and attacks on Tesla cars, dealerships, and charging stations. This is a bit of an experiment—my team and I wanted to see what would happen if I gave it a shot. Let me know how it’s working for you in the comments.

These pieces are all quite relevant as of this posting, on Monday afternoon. But by Friday? Who knows. So I decided to release this episode simultaneously to both free and full subscribers. If you like getting The Glenn Show a few days early, consider becoming a full subscriber. You’ll get new episodes early, plus access to monthly Q&As with John McWhorter, bonus episodes, and other exclusive content.

Become a full subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

2:31 The opportunities and risks of Trump's economic plans

6:50 Is Trump as unpredictable as he seems?

16:00 DOGE and MAGA take a chainsaw to the federal government

22:30 An argument against Mahmoud Khalil's detention ...

32:49 ... and one in favor of Khalil's detention

41:38 Is it time for an official ban on antisemitism?

49:14 Teslas are burning

Recorded March 14, 2025

Links and Readings

Steve Cortes’s RCP piece, “Trump and the Economy: Opportunities and Risks”

Susan Glasser’s New Yorker piece, “Uncertainty Is Trump’s Brand. But What if He Already Told Us What He’s Going to Do?”

Tim Murtaugh’s Washington Times piece, “Why the Democrat Brand Is in the Toilet”

Jeff Mayhugh’s Hill piece, “The MAGA Revolution Is Playing with Fire”

Ross Barkan’s NYMag piece, “Mahmoud Khalil’s Arrest Will Backfire on Trump”

Josh Hammer’s Daily Signal piece, “Mahmoud Khalil and the Red-Green Assault on American Sovereignty”

Mackenzie France’s RCP piece, “Congress Should Pass Antisemitism Awareness Act”

Rich Lowry’s New York Post piece, “Tesla Terrorism Only Reveals the Left’s Impotence”

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this episode, Nikita, Mark, and I talk about steelmanning, what people want me to say about Gaza, what I want to say about Gaza, and why I offer disclaimers when I talk foreign policy.

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:33 The relationships Peter has lost and gained

4:14 Why Peter thinks this is a “watershed” moment in Jewish history

6:50 Who can criticize Israel?

9:44 The challenge of October 7’s aftermath to Jewish self-understanding

15:54 Peter: Jews should support non-violent Palestinian protest, not criminalize it

20:12 Shouldn’t the Palestinians have taken the deals they were offered?

25:48 Peter’s argument for a one-state solution

34:34 The “dirty little secret” of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Jewish critics

37:12 The idolatry of the Jewish state

39:45 The mutual liberation of Jews and Palestinians

41:37 Why aren’t the critics of snowflakes and trigger warnings defending pro-Palestinian campus protesters?

46:01 Peter: Antisemitism is on the rise, and ethno-nationalism is the reason

50:20 Peter: If Gaza is unlivable, then Gazans should be allowed to live where they want

Recorded February 21, 2025

Links and Readings

Peter’s Substack, The Beinart Notebook

Jewish Currents magazine

Peter’s new book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Eitan Hersh and Laura Loyden’s article, “Antisemitic Attitudes across the Ideological Spectrum”

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this month's Substack subscriber Q&A, John and I answer your questions on the NAACP, Trump and January 6, Western civilization, how we deal with angry viewers, and more.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this bonus episode, Mark, Nikita, and I discuss Trump's chaotic Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, parsing positions from principles, and the fate of Ukraine.

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:55 Did Trump and Vance bully Zelenskyy or give him a dose of reality?

5:16 Glenn: Trump is trying to wind down an unnecessary war

13:49 - Ground News ad

28:58 The “deep game” of European security

32:06 Glenn: America First appeals to me, World War III doesn’t

36:40 Teaching the reparations debate in a post-October 7 world

43:06 MSNBC axes Joy Reid’s show

Recorded March 1, 2025

Links and Readings

Trump and Zelensky’s Oval Office meeting

Tucker Carlson’s onstage interview with Hungarian president Victor Orbán

The latest episode of Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi’s podcast, America This Week

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations”

Today I'm posting a bonus episode of the Glenn Show with University of Pennsylvania Law professor Amy Wax. Unfortunately, Amy experienced some recording difficulties, which resulted in an episode that does not meet our usual standards for audio fidelity and clarity. Rather than post it here in the podcast feed, we've opted to post only the video with subtitles under Amy's side of the conversation. You can find that video right now by going to glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

0:00 A note on audio quality

1:08 Glenn: I may not agree with Amy about everything, but I defend her right to speak her mind

4:17 Amy: What’s wrong with Trump evaluating how federal research money is spent?

12:54 The accusations against Amy

19:17 Did Amy violate students’ privacy?

21:44 What it’s not okay to say at Penn

31:52 Amy’s lawsuit against Penn

36:21 Glenn: Aren’t your free speech claims and you civil rights claims contradictory?

38:33 Amy: This is bigger than me

42:11 Can university research infrastructure survive defunding under Trump?

48:32 Glenn: I’m unnerved by the implications of the anti-DEI movement

Recorded February 17, 2025

Links and Readings

The Harvard Salient magazine

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this bonus episode, Glenn, Nikita, and Mark discuss Elon Musk and Steve Bannon's alleged "Nazi salutes," whether Trump is serious about Canada and Greenland, and what counts as a serious question.

Video Links

1:00 Conn’s career in the conservative movement

4:34 The four sexual revolutions

14:17 What about feminism and LGBTQ rights?

20:25 Conn: “We spend over a trillion dollars a year on means-tested programs that punish marriage”

24:30 How online gambling is hurting working-class men

29:02 What are the benefits of marriage?

34:03 Why Conn thinks single-parenthood disproportionately harms boys

37:12 The link between political and domestic structures

44:49 Will Trump enact policies that promote marriage?

48:42 Conn: We should strengthen obscenity laws in order to restrain online porn

55:52 The conservative case for birthright citizenship

Recorded February 11, 2025

Links and Readings

Conn’s new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy

David Blankenhorn’s book, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem

Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese’s report on pornography

Conn’s Washington Examiner piece, “The Conservative Case for Birthright Citizenship”

George Borjas’s books on labor and immigration

Video Links

0:55 The myth of a secret black language

6:36 The terror of slavery in James

12:13 Essential fictions

15:45 Ground News ad

17:30 Liberal panic over Trump and DOGE

24:10 Is NYC mayor Eric Adams under Trump’s thumb?

26:54 Glenn: What’s wrong with telling illegal migrants to leave?

33:40 ACTA ad

35:54 The differing challenges of European and American immigration

44:08 The significance of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance

52:17 What’s wrong with Ye?

Recorded February 16, 2025

Links and Readings

John’s latest NYT column, “The Truth and the Fiction of Black English”

Percival Everett’s novel, James

Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure

Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye

Allan Gurganus’s novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Francis Burney’s novel, Evelina

R.F. Kuang’s novel, Babel, or, the Necessity of Violence

Gil-Scot Heron’s song, “Whitey on the Moon”

Tucker Carlson interviews Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán

Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show

John’s book, All about the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America

Glenn and John take questions from Substack subscribers in this Q&A episode.

1:02 Pat Rimell presents a list of propositions about general poverty in urban communities

17:54 Samuel D. James asks if John has any writing advice

23:35 Tom Wojciaczyk wants to know if what the difference is between an accent and pronunciation

30:50 Michael asks why we’re not more worried about Trump taking us back to the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War

39:03 Karen Dawn Norris offers two defenses of reparations

43:34 Young Törless asks, since we use the term “blackness” so often, if we could come up with a definition of it that would satisfy such disparate figures as Al Sharpton, Charles Barkley, Condoleezza Rice, Raven-Symone, and Iman

Video Links

1:10 Which race-conscious programs stay and which go?

11:05 Ground News ad

12:42 Glenn: I’m afraid some African Americans might get left behind

19:25 More programs won’t address the problems of “the underclass”

27:49 John: Maybe this is the best it can be

31:22 The great benefits of HBCUs

35:35 ACTA ad

37:48 Ibram X. Kendi decamps for Howard

44:49 Studying the African diaspora

51:35 The passing of Belle da Costa Greene

1:02:29 Is colorism within the black community still an issue?

Recorded February 2, 2025

Links and Readings

Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism

Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist

The Woodson Center

James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses

John’s NYT column, “Black and White Weren’t Always as Black-and-White as They Seem”

Hilton Als’s New Yorker piece, “The Hidden Story of J.P. Morgan’s Library”

Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible

Karen and Barbara Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

In this post-show bonus episode, Glenn, Mark, and Nikita discuss Trump's tariff threats, madman theory, competing racial myths, and colorblindness vs. indifference.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Video Links

1:04 Rajiv’s role in getting Glenn’s forthcoming book published

7:39 Self-censorship and racial passing

9:29 Rajiv’s work on parental investment and educational attainment

17:01 Rajiv: Prediction markets outperformed forecasting models in 2024

23:36 Are Trump’s tariff threats having their intended effects on foreign markets?

31:53 Why Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008

35:07 Rajiv recommends some public-facing economists

39:26 Secular backsliding in India

43:51 Trump’s revocation of LBJ’s 1965 anti-discrimination executive order

Recorded January 25, 2025

Links and Readings

Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information

Rajiv post Substack post, “Self-Censorship, Passing, and Natural Cover”

James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Glenn and Rajiv’s 2014 conversation about self-censorship

Glenn and Young-Chul Kim’s article, “To Be, or Not to Be: Stereotypes, Identity Choice and Group Inequality”

Glenn and Rajiv’s previous conversation

Rajiv and Dyotona Dasgupta’s working paper, “Educational Standards and Parental Investment”

Rajiv’s post, “The Tariff Threat”

Paul Krugman’s post, “The Dollar and the Trade Deficit”

John Cochrane’s review of Late Admissions

Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution

Gyan Mukherjee’s 1943 film, Kismet

Rajiv and Brendan O’Flaherty’s book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In this post-show bonus episode, I talk with Mark, Nikita, and LaJuan about Trump's inauguration, this week's debate between Eli Lake and Matthew Cockerill, and whether we need Medicare for All.

Video Links

1:08 Intros

4:24 Matthew: The IDF recklessly disregarded civilian life in its October 2023 bombing campaign

9:01 Eli: Israel made efforts to warn civilians ahead of bombings

15:31 Ground News ad

17:35 Are Gazan civilian deaths part of Hamas’s strategy or merely an effect of its strategy?

23:39 Counting casualties in the fog of war

30:04 If Hamas is still partially intact, can a ceasefire hold?

33:28 ACTA ad

38:53 Why Matthew thinks Israel was intentionally killing civilians early in the war

48:41 Is Matthew holding Israel to a different standard than he would hold the US?

52:39 Alternative strategies for prosecuting the war

56:16 Do civilian warnings negate the question of murderous intent?

1:01:46 Eli: I don’t think Jewish critics of the war are speaking for the larger diaspora

1:10:05 Is further normalization between Israel and the rest of Middle East coming despite the war?

1:15:10 Matthew: Israel clandestinely continued its initial starvation strategy in Gaza for monthsRecorded January 17, 2025

Links and Readings

Trailer for Eli’s forthcoming Free Press podcast, Breaking History

Matthew’s YouTube show, History Speaks

Airwars

Airwars’ Gaza Patterns of Harm report

Yuval Abraham’s +972 piece, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza”

Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies’s Guardian piece, “‘The Machine Did It Coldly’: Israel Used AI to Identify 37,000 Hamas Targets”

Patrick Kingsley et al’s NYT piece, “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians”

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim on X

Glenn’s conversation with Omer Bartov

Motty Perry and Ariel Rubinstein’s Haaretz piece, “It’s Impossible Not to Know What’s Going on in Gaza”

In this post-show bonus episode with Nikita, Mark, and LaJuan, we talk about what's required of a black intellectual, shifting alliances and ideological orientations, and the utility of the police.

Video Links

0:55 Peter’s new book, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop

5:27 Why policing went off the rails over the last decade

11:03 Peter: I’m done with police abolitionists

19:22 Why don’t we hear about unarmed black men getting shot anymore?

22:00 Remembering the lessons of ‘90s New York

28:07 Dealing with the racial disparity problem

35:46 Is there a suicide problem among cops?

39:31 The Ferguson Effect

43:12 The utility of pretextual stops

48:29 The pride felt by the 1990s NYPD

50:30 What cops think of Darren Wilson and Derek Chauvin

Recorded January 10, 2025

Links and Readings

Peter’s forthcoming book, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop

Peter’s book, In Defense of Flogging

Peter’s book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District

Tracy Mears on police legitimacy and the future of policing

Heather Mac Donald’s book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer’s paper, “Policing the Police: The Impact of ‘Pattern-or-Practice’ Investigations on Crime”

I'm reposting an episode of the Invisible Men podcast, hosted by Ian Rowe and Nique Fajors. They had me on to talk about Late Admissions, the bias and development narratives, and a lot more. Ian and Nique have a stellar lineup of guests who are having the important conversations about race in America, so check them out at invisible.men. You can find video of this episode there or at my newsletter, https://glennloury.substack.com.

Order Glenn's memoir, "Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative" here or wherever you get your books: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881349

Subscribe to The Glenn Show on Youtube:  @GlennLouryShow 

Subscribe to The Glenn Show Clips Channel on Youtube:  @GlennLouryclips 

It may be cold outside, but the first Q&A of 2025 is a hot one. John and Glenn talk negotiating the modern mediasphere, the German language, education after affirmative action, code switching, social media and AI, and maintaining a friendship in spite of political differences.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

In retiring from academia, I'm giving up what was once a vital source of intellectual inspiration. How should I go about replacing it? I'm talking through the problem with Nikita and Mark.

Video Links

0:00 Intro

1:10 John feels Glenn’s pain

2:36 Glenn: “I’m tired of being the black guy who has to call b******t on the race narrative”

9:21 The monotonous groove of the race discourse

12:35 John: “This is the most seismic sociopolitical shift of my lifetime”

19:17 Ground News ad

21:10 The H-1B conflict on the right

26:24 The hard truths of global competition

30:09 Luigi Mangione, folk hero?

36:09 ACTA ad

38:22 Glenn and John’s 2025 status

44:52 Living on the edge of a weekly deadline

46:45 Why did Al Jolson wear blackface?

Recorded January 5, 2025

Links and Readings

Charles Sheeler’s painting, “River Rouge Plant”

Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Matt Taibbi on coverage of Luigi Mangione’s personal style

Glenn’s forthcoming book, Self-Censorship

Richard Bernstein’s book, Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer

Trailer for Al Jolson’s film, Mammy

In this bonus episode, I sit down with my son, Glenn Cartman Loury II, to talk about the big topics: life, death, and change. This is a heavy, real conversation. We “reminisce” about caring for Linda—my wife and Glenn’s mother—during the final stages of terminal cancer. We talk about who we were then, who we are now, and why we work so hard to change our lives. I’m seeking solace from my son, and true solace can only come from confronting reality, rather than turning away from it and taking refuge in comforting illusions.

This episode is available only to full subscribers to my Substack. If you're listening to the full episode, thank you for all your support. And if you want more of The Glenn Show, in addition a host of other benefits, go to https://glennloury.substack.com and become a full subscriber.

0:00 Intro

3:01 January 15, “Why Glenn wrote a memoir”

9:18 February 2, “The three dimensions of black conservatism”

15:50 Ground News ad

17:52 February 16, “Were Glenn and John too credulous about The Fall of Minneapolis?”

23:07 March 22, “What do we mean by 'colorblindness' today?”

34:39 April 5, “John: We weren’t wrong to ask the questions we asked, even if our answers came up short at first”

37:40 May 17, “Has Israel gone too far in Gaza?”

41:53 ACTA ad

44:07 June 14, “Inside the collapse of Ibram X. Kendi’s research center”

49:22 June 28, “Can John account for his 'emotional and irrational conclusions' about Trump and his recent conviction?”

59:35 August 16, “Glenn: Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama”

1:05:08 August 28, “Vladimir X asks Glenn and John about Gaza”

1:18:19 October 11, “Glenn: Ta-Nehisi Coates's book is brilliant”

1:26:32 October 25, “John: Coates is a beautiful writer, BUT …”

1:28:54 November 4, “A revisionist history of the Trump presidency (or presidencies)”

1:35:47 November 22, “Glenn: Wake up! It’s time to take Trump seriously!”

LaJuan has appeared in a handful of episodes, but I don’t feel like you really know her yet. I wanted to use this episode to introduce you to my lovely wife. We talk about how her difficult early life shaped her political views, how she developed her love of reading and ideas, her alienation from Democrats and the liberal center, and her personal connection to Beyoncé.

This episode is available only to full subscribers to my Substack. If you're listening to the full episode, thank you for all your support. And if you want more of The Glenn Show, in addition a host of other benefits, go to https://glennloury.substack.com and become a full subscriber.

0:00 The uncertain future of AI

4:46 What would it mean to “lose the AI race” to China?

8:15 The promise and peril of artificial general intelligence

12:01 The international policy challenges of AI

14:32 Can Trump deliver peace between Russia and Ukraine?

18:46 Are there any good argument for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense?

23:55 Bob: With Iran weakened, Israel faces a decision: bombs or diplomacy

28:29 The continuing assault on Gaza

32:33 Antiwar speech codes

37:57 Apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing

43:15 Missed opportunities to turn the temperature down in Israel

51:29 Bob: The international community has little sway over Israel

54:25 The advantages of cognitive empathy

Recorded December 17, 2024

Links and Readings

Bob’s Substack, the Nonzero Newsletter

Nonzero on YouTube

Thomas Nagel’s essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Bob’s most recent conversation with Thomas Friedman

Glenn’s essay, “Self-Censorship in a Time of War”

Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid

Ilan Papé’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Bob’s Nonzero essay, “The Truth about Hamas”

Bob’s 2002 Slate essay, “Was Arafat the Problem?”

Right after I taped this week’s episode with John McWhorter, I got on a call with my creative director Nikita Petrov, expecting some follow ups.

We talked about Syria, the world’s reaction to Trump’s victory, P. Diddy’s parties, the reasons the labor movement never got the same kind of momentum in the US as it did in Western Europe, and more. But we started by connecting two topics from my conversation with John: the surprisingly cheerful reactions to a killing of an insurance firm CEO in New York, and the seeming demise of DEI as a movement.

Video Links

1:33 Demonization on the right and the left

6:23 Is Trump’s election the nail in the coffin for DEI?

13:50 John: It’s no use pretending that racism in America is as bad as it was 50 years ago

16:33 Ground News ad

18:36 Has Elon Musk “encouraged” or “permitted” more racism on X?

19:30 John: It’s a tragedy that Jordan Neely died, but he needed to be restrained

30:12 If Daniel Penny had been a cop

34:05 ACTA ad

36:18 The glorification of Luigi Mangione

47:06 Cheering for the villain

55:43 Will New York remain a sanctuary city?

Recorded December 13, 2024

Links and Readings

John’s NYT column, “How to Dangerously Misread a Very Important Verdict”

Briahna Joy Gray and Nathan Robinson on Luigi Mangione

Become a subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com

Mike Spooner wants to know how I came around to supporting Trump

Substack Reader wants to know if Trump’s reelection signals that we’re entering an era where “reason and common sense once again prevail.”

Michoel Stern senses that I’m becoming more isolationist, and that I don’t want America to be the world’s policeman. So what is the alternative?

Robert Odear asks if there is “an accepted metric for linguistic complexity,” and if there is one, whether linguistically complex societies also tend to be advanced societies.

Nancy wants to know if the triumph over “wokeness” represented by Trump’s election is being felt on campus.

Jonathan E. Burack wants to know why I haven’t responded to this review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message.

Pete Bradshaw asks what we think of the use of political slurs like “fascist,” “Hitler,” and “commie.”

Cara C. suggests that, while it was wrong for Democrats to use lawfare against Trump, it is acceptable for Republicans to use it against Democrats, if only to teach them a lesson.

Recorded December 1, 2024

In this post-show recording with Mark and Nikita, I talk about the holiday blues, the contradictions of racial heterodoxy and racial self-identification, and learning from Yiddish-speakers.

This episode is available only to full subscribers to my Substack. If you're listening to the full episode, thank you for all your support. And if you want more of The Glenn Show, in addition a host of other benefits, go to https://glennloury.substack.com and become a full subscriber.

0:00 Thanksgiving with Glenn and John

0:45 Thanksgiving with Glenn and John

6:50 Glenn the patriarch

10:35 John Lewis’s legacy

15:48 Ground News ad

17:49 From John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael to Jesse Jackson to BLM

25:21 To isolate or to integrate?

27:41 What black activism could have been

32:02 John: The Black Panthers accomplished nothing

40:04 ACTA ad

42:18 James Baldwin’s “nutty” late work

44:45 James Q. Wilson’s prescient attitude toward Glenn’s leftward shift

52:43 The “conservative” absence at the National Museum of African American History

55:11 John’s investigation of contemporary Yiddish speakers

Recorded December 1, 2024

Links and Readings

David Greenberg’s book, John Lewis: A Life

Barbara Fields and Karen Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton’s book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

Trailer for Raoul Peck’s film, I Am Not Your Negro

James Baldwin’s book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen

Glenn’s book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values

John DiIulio Jr.’s review of Late Admissions in the Claremont Review of Books

John’s NYT column, “Yiddish is a Supposedly Dying Language That’s Thrillingly Alive”

In this post-show recording with Mark and Nikita, I talk about my conversation with Yaya Fanusie, the sub rosa activities of the CIA, the US's authorization of ATACMS strikes in Russian territory, and more.

This episode is available only to full subscribers to my Substack. If you're listening to the full episode, thank you for all your support. And if you want more of The Glenn Show, in addition a host of other benefits, go to https://glennloury.substack.com and become a full subscriber.

0:47 The Jabbari Lincoln Files, Yaya’s audio spy thriller

5:40 Is Jabbari Lincoln a fictional surrogate for Yaya?

10:05 How Yaya joined the CIA

16:18 What does a CIA analyst do, anyway?

20:42 The lessons of the WMDs debacle

23:08 A Muslim convert at the Agency

28:40 How the 2005 London Underground bombings got Yaya interested in counterterrorism

30:28 Terrorist recruitment and the search for self

35:57 Why Yaya doesn’t use the term “Islamophobia”

38:52 Yaya: Not even freedom fighters have license to kill with impunity

45:06 What would Malcolm X think about African American support of Palestinians?

52:22 Working for the CIA in the post-COINTELPRO era

Recorded November 9, 2024

Links and Readings

1776 Unites

The Jabarri Lincoln Files

Sam Greenlee’s novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door

Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film adaptation of The Spook Who Say by the Door

Yaya’s essay for the Journal of Free Black Thought, “Hamas Are Not Muslim Freedom Fighters”

December 2, 1963 NYT article on Malcolm X’s “Chickens coming home to roost” comment

Yaya’s other podcast, Designated

In this post-show recording with Mark and Nikita, I talk about my conversation with John McWhorter, my elation over Trump's victory, and why I wasn't forthcoming about my preference for him over Harris.

This episode is available only to full subscribers to my Substack. If you're listening to the full episode, thank you for all your support. And if you want more of The Glenn Show, in addition a host of other benefits, go to https://glennloury.substack.com and become a full subscriber.

0:43 John reconciles himself to Trump’s win

4:06 Glenn: Wake up! It’s time to take Trump seriously!

12:16 Why Glenn feels a sense of excitement about the present moment

14:54 Ground News Ad

16:40 Is Glenn’s attitude all about contrarianism?

21:00 Does John hope that Trump’s administration fails?

26:08 ACTA ad

28:22 John’s trip to Dublin with Richard Dawkins

36:44 John’s questions for Dawkins

41:51 What Dawkins might think about race, culture, and IQ

Recorded November 18, 2024

Links and Readings

John’s NYT piece, “What if I’m the ‘Friend’ Donald Trump Referred To?”

John’s Atlantic piece, “Trump’s Unmonitored Speech”

Max Boot’s book, Reagan: His Life and Legend

Richard Dawkins’s latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie

Dawkins’s book, The Selfish Gene

Dawkins’s book, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion

Dawkins’s book, The Ancestors’ Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

In this post-show conversation with my creative director Nikita Petrov, I review this week's episode with historian Daniel Bessner. We also talk about Trump's policy proposals, capitalism, Russia and Ukraine, NATO, and why I sometimes pull back from speaking my mind.

This episode is available only to full subscribers to my Substack. If you're listening to the full episode, thank you for all your support. And if you want more of The Glenn Show, in addition to a host of other benefits, go to https://glennloury.substack.com and become a full subscriber.

Order Glenn's memoir, LATE ADMISSIONS: CONFESSIONS OF A BLACK CONSERVATIVE. Available here or wherever you get your books: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881349

1:21 Have Glenn’s intellectual shifts been misread?

5:45 Danny: Francis Fukuyama was right

10:30 Capitalism won. Is that a good thing?

14:18 The climate under capitalism

20:24 Danny: “People said 'f**k you' to the Democratic Party”

23:51 Why the “Trump is a fascist” argument makes no sense

27:53 Whither the working class coalition?

33:10 How the US foreign policy establishment won the argument and lost Ukraine

36:28 Danny: There is no way the US can maintain influence in East Asia

38:26 Does Jewish survival require a Jewish state?

43:50 The limits of social science

49:36 The media’s obsession with polling

53:55 Is the US reaping what it’s sown on immigration?52:34 Is the US reaping what it’s sown on immigration?

Recorded November 9, 2024

Links and Readings

Dann’s podcast, American Prestige

Danny’s conversations with Glenn about his intellectual history, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4

Francis Fukuyama’s Financial Times piece, “What Trump Unleashed Means for America”

Danny’s Nation essay, “The Liberal Discontents of Francis Fukuyama”

Adam Tooze’s podcast, Ones & Tooze

Danny’s Harper’s essay, “The Life and Death of Hollywood”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s manifesto, The Communist Manifesto

Danny’s Harper’s essay, “Empire Burlesque”

Danny’s Boston Review piece, “Mass Destruction”

Glenn’s recent conversation with Rajiv Sethi

JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

John Murray Cuddihy’s book, The Ordeal of Civilization: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity

Yuri Slezkine’s book, The Jewish Century

In this month's Substack subscriber-only Q&A session, we talk about Donald Trump's "Nazi rally" at Madison Square Garden, Martha Raddatz's comments about Venezuelan gangs in Colorado, Glenn's retirement, John's comments about Trump and Vance, my comments about Israel and Palestine, and, of course, Trump's victory.

This is the Post-Show episode following this week's conversation with John McWhorter. In it, Glenn sits down with his editor Mark Sussman and his creative director Nikita Petrov to talk about the election, why he understands where Trump's supporters are coming from, the meaning of voting, and the possibility that Trump might release sealed documents relating to the JFK assassination.

If you're a paying subscribing, you're receiving the full episode. If you're not, you're receiving a preview clip. Consider becoming a subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com, and receive early access to weekly episodes, exclusive content like post-show episodes, monthly Q&As with John McWhorter, and a host of other benefits.

Subscribe to The Glenn Show on Substack at https://glennloury.substack.com

[Note: In the episode, John mistakenly referred to the author of a biography of Ronald Reagan as George Will. He meant to reference Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legacy.]

1:39 Pre-election jitters

3:23 Will Democrats contest the election if it goes Trump’s way?

4:44 A crisis for democracy, maybe, but not the end of democracy

10:02 John’s case against Trump’s proposed second administration

15:36 Ground News ad

17:28 The Obamas’ attempted intervention and post-presidential performance

26:58 The mind of the informed Trump voter

34:20 A revisionist history of the Trump presidency (or presidencies)

41:15 Is Trump losing it or just tired of campaigning?

44:25 The Washington Post and the LA Times decline to endorse

47:48 Glenn and John’s election night plans

50:48 The nightmare scenario

Recorded November 3, 2024

Links and Readings

Shelby Steele’s book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win

Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

John’s NYT column, “Donald Trump Is Bored”

Max Boot’s book, Reagan: His Life and Legacy

Everybody Loves Raymond: The Complete Series DVD box set

Douglas Murray’s Free Press piece, “Things Worth Remembering: Whoever Loses, They Should Lose Like Nixon”

0:00 Rajiv’s report from the FIRE conference

3:11 Roland Fryer’s keynote address

13:26 Ta-Nehisi Coates’s humanist universalism

17:25 “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”

18:50 Rajiv’s reading of Coates’s stand on “apartheid”

31:55 The gap between election forecasting models and prediction markets

36:52 The limits of models and markets

39:59 Rajiv: The markets show us a balance between narratives about the election

44:17 Is one crypto trader manipulating the prediction markets in favor of Trump?

53:12 Rajiv: Prediction markets may have sent early signals about January 6

55:19 Rajiv’s family history with Kamala Harris

57:45 The new prominence of Indian Americans in politics

1:03:07 The axiom of antiessentialism

Recorded October 27, 2024

Links and Readings

Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Lara Bazelon’s 2022 Atlantic essay, “The ACLU Has Lost Its Way”

Glenn’s 2021 conversation with Bazelon

Glenn’s 2023 conversation with Erec Smith

Eugene Volokh on the Hamline University-Prophet Muhammad painting controversy

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Coates’s 2010 Atlantic essay, “The Ghost of Bobby Lee”

Ralph Wiley’s book, Dark Witness: When Black People Should Be Sacrificed (Again)

Last week’s TGS debate about The Messsage

Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study

Glenn’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Polymarket

Recorded October 27, 2024

Links and Readings

Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Lara Bazelon’s 2022 Atlantic essay, “The ACLU Has Lost Its Way”

Glenn’s 2021 conversation with Bazelon

Glenn’s 2023 conversation with Erec Smith

Eugene Volokh on the Hamline University-Prophet Muhammad painting controversy

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Coates’s 2010 Atlantic essay, “The Ghost of Bobby Lee”

Ralph Wiley’s book, Dark Witness: When Black People Should Be Sacrificed (Again)

Last week’s TGS debate about The Messsage

Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study

Glenn’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Polymarket

1:22 The Coates debate continues

3:18 John: Coates is a beautiful writer, but …

5:44 John: … The Message is suffused with incuriosity and simplistic thinking

13:45 Glenn: Coates is talking about humanism and power, not race

18:11 Ground News ad

20:25 Is it “all about whitey”?

22:11 Glenn: Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this book. What am I doing?

27:40 What kind of historical imagination is at work in The Message?

34:11 Moral clarity or abdication of responsibility?

36:30 Pro-Palestinian writers John considers acceptable

41:54 The next entries in Glenn and John’s book club

42:04 Coates’s now notorious interview on CBS Mornings

48:45 What is the black intellectual’s role today?

52:16 The counterexample of South Africa

Recorded October 19, 2024

Links and Readings

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Glenn and John’s previous conversation

John’s NYT column, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility”

Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Jeffrey Sachs on YouTube

Judge Andrew Napolitano on YouTube

Trevor Noah’s conversation with Coates

Ezra Klein’s conversation with Coates

Peter Beinart’s conversation with Coates

David Greenberg’s new book, John Lewis: A Life

Karen and Barbara Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

James Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”

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1:41 Penn’s sanctions against Amy

7:47 What’s at stake in the charges against Amy?

14:03 The trouble with “hate speech”

17:48 Should we abolish the nation-state?

21:38 The debates that can’t happen in the university

26:44 Ethnonationalism and group differences

33:11 Amy’s defense of maintaining an “Anglo-Protestant” American majority

42:32 Amy’s concerns about Asian migration

47:52 Are immigrants bringing lax attitudes toward property rights with them?

52:52 Glenn: Immigrants impart dynamism to a culture that’s always been in flux

1:01:13 Glenn and Amy talk about porn

1:07:51 The absence of virtue in political discourse

1:13:05 Amy’s next steps

Recorded October 12, 2024

Links and Readings

Amy’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture”

Glenn and Amy’s 2017 conversation, “The Downside to Social Uplift”

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message

William Vogelei’s Claremont Review of Books review of Robert Kagan’s Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again

Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Daniel Di Martino’s recent appearance on The Glenn Show

Irving Kristol’s 1971 essay, “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship”

Glenn’s essay, “The Case for Black Patriotism”

4:28 Glenn: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book is brilliant

13:16 John and Coates’s ancient beef

15:31 Coates’s “blistering” critique of Zionism

18:22 Ground News ad

20:39 Do you have to solve the problem of “apartheid” in order to criticize it?

33:10 Glenn’s reappraisal of Coates (and John’s bemusement)

34:53 ACTA ad 36:39 Will the race card play for Eric Adams?

42:31 What has Eric Adams accomplished?

43:57 Why John defends Amy Wax

49:17 Glenn: Amy Wax gets to have her opinion

Recorded October 5, 2024

Links and Readings

The Vance-Walz VP debate

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Coleman Hughes’s Free Press review of The Message

Coates’s book, Between the World and Me

Coates’s Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations”

Glenn and John’s in-person TGS episode

Andrew Yang’s Newsweek piece, “I Ran against Eric Adams. I Saw This Coming.”

John’s NYT piece, “She Is Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous. She Shouldn’t Be Punished.”

Amy Wax’s December 2021 TGS appearance

Wax’s August 2022 TGS appearance

Wax’s March 2024 TGS appearance

Richard Sander’s Stanford Law Review article, “A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools”

A couple weeks ago, I did my own solo Q&A session. Now John is back, and I decided to put him in the hot seat. Let’s get into it. Yan Shen asks our opinion of the contretemps between Nancy Mace and Michael Eric Dyson. Stan asks if we’ve seen Matt Walsh’s film, Am I Racist?. Eli, noting the rampant grade inflation at many institutions, asks if we have a way of fixing the problem and wants to know if our own grading standards have changed over the years (here’s the Yascha Mounk post she references). RAO wants to know what we think of alternative education, like home schooling, micro-schools, charter schools, and so on. Jerry Zuriff wants to know why John likes hip-hop. Given that, on average, American girls perform better than American boys in high school, Michael asks if colleges should give preferences to males over females. Or would that run afoul of SFFA v. Harvard? And finally, DG wants to know why John never got interested in sports.

1:15 Why Daniel immigrated to the US

5:14 What went wrong in Venezuela?

8:45 Daniel: Both the Biden administration and global trends are to blame for the border crisis

11:19 Trump promises to deport record numbers of illegal immigrants. But can he?

13:00 What’s it take to fix immigration? Money.

18:39 The flawed strategy of making immigration into Mexico’s problem

20:48 The bad information and rumors fueling asylum-seekers

23:18 Should residency visa programs prioritize the richest immigrants?

32:13 The labor market consequences of immigration

37:27 Daniel’s large-scale proposals for national immigration policy

43:00 How many unauthorized immigrants are in US right now?

45:23 The political realities of immigration reform44:08 The political realities of immigration reform

Recorded September 23, 2025

Links and Readings

Daniel’s writing for City Journal

Daniel’s report for the Manhattan Institute, “The Lifetime Fiscal Impact of Immigrants”

1:28 John corrects some Wikipedia-driven misconceptions about his work

4:12 ChatGPT pays homage to Glenn and John

6:41 John: JD Vance actually is what I’m merely accused of being

17:59 Ground News ad 20:08 Are there any true sellouts among black conservatives?

28:32 And what is a sellout, anyway?

36:01 What goes on between Clarence and Ginni Thomas?

40:19 An addition to the book club reading list

42:08 ACTA ad

43:54 Remembering Linda Datcher Loury

49:00 Should having children be the norm?

56:34 Glenn sightings in the wild

57:32 Working without a net

Recorded September 23, 2024

Links and Readings

Glenn’s Wikipedia page

John’s Wikipedia page

John’s NYT column, “Why JD Vance Dropped into My Inbox”

JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

John’s book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

Randall Kennedy’s book, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal

David Greenberg’s forthcoming book, John Lewis: A Life

David Lodge’s novel, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses

Barbara and Karen Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Percival Everett’s novel, James

RF Kuang’s novel, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence

Clint Smith’s Atlantic piece, “George Floyd Was Also a Father”

0:14 Larry Kotlikoff for President?

5:40 Larry’s plan to save social security

9:30 Reincentivizing work, saving, and staying in the US

14:55 Rewriting the story about income and labor

21:08 Why a 10% tariff could amount to a new national sales tax or worse

23:33 Glenn: Trade with other nations is not a zero-sum game

29:15 Taxing billionaires on consumption rather than income

34:43 The price of shame

38:40 Maintaining competitive conditions with universal health insurance

44:49 What’s causing inflation?

52:26 How big of a problem is the national debt?

Recorded September 4, 2024

Links and Readings

Larry’s Substack

Larry’s homepage

Larry’s book, with Philip Moeller and Paul Solman, Getting What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security

Larry’s book, with Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future

Larry’s book, Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World's Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking

Larry’s financial planning program, MaxiFi

Larry’s book, You’re Hired: A Trump Playbook for Fixing America’s Economy

Larry’s book, The Healthcare Fix: Universal Insurance for All Americans

Martyn Clark asks how economists factor idiosyncratic, unpredictable human behavior into their abstract modeling. Young Törless asks Glenn to weigh in on the presidential candidates’ approaches to—or avoidance of—the problem of the national debt. BB asks Glenn which economic theories or concepts haven’t stood the test of time. Stan asks what three policies would make the biggest difference in improving the lives of black people. Eli asks if technological progress and our ever-increasing knowledge about the world may end up being a bad thing for humanity. Luke Englund asks if the conservative movement has compromised too much for the sake of Donald Trump. And finally, therealnewyorker asks what issues I would feel compelled to talk about if racial politics disappeared tomorrow.

0:59 Glenn debuts his new studio

2:34 Life after academia

13:02 The challenge of having a lot of time on your hands

18:10 John’s new musical endeavors

20:20 Ground News ad

22:38 John’s forthcoming book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

25:07 Glenn and John form an impromptu book club

29:43 The first class of post-Students for Fair Admissions college freshmen

36:22 Are black students being shut out of the upper echelons of American society?

40:33 The Supreme Court’s “indirect beneficial endowment” to HBCUs

46:42 Glenn: “The wheel is turning” on race politics in America

52:18 ACTA ad

54:26 Plagiarism in Robin DiAngelo’s dissertation

57:02 John: I don’t recognize the world that Danzy Senna and Ketanji Brown Jackson describe, even though I lived in it

1:04:07 Did Thomas Chatterton Williams really say what he said to Danzy Senna?

Recorded September 8, 2024

Links and Readings

The Rest Is History on Apple Podcasts

Preorder John’s forthcoming book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

David Kaiser’s book, States of the Union: A History of the United States through Presidential Addresses, 1789-2023

David Kaiser discusses his book States of the Union on TGS

Sari Nusseibeh’s memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life

David Greenberg’s forthcoming book, John Lewis: A Life

Danzy Senna’s novel, Colored Television

Percival Everett’s novel, James

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, Lovely One

John’s book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

Michelle Obama’s DNC speech

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

0:59 How Harry met Glenn

3:44 Black girls and women are doing relatively well. Why aren’t black boys and men?

11:21 Harry: Some of the barriers are structural, some are cultural

18:20 The crude toolkit for fixing child support

25:15 Black teachers, tutoring, and “high-quality career and tech ed”

31:44 In schools, one size doesn’t fit all

35:22 Three ways to improve employment prospects

39:10 Glenn asks “the Chicago question”

42:09 Discrimination against ex-convicts

50:38 Immigration’s impact on black employment

53:29 Are too many people in prison?

56:07 Harry: Progressives are oblivious to the backlash they generate

Recorded August 20, 2024

Links and Readings

Harry and Glenn’s conversation about “racism, narratives, and backlash” with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Harry and Richard J. Freeman’s 1986 edited collection, The Black Youth Employment Crisis

Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

Isabel V. Sawhill’s book, Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage

Douglas Harris’s book, Charter School City: What the End of Traditional Public Schools in New Orleans Means for American Education

Glenn’s paper with Young-Chul Kim, “Rebranding Ex-Convicts”

William Julius Wilson’s book, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions

In this month's Substack subscriber-only Q&A session, Glenn and John tackle questions about supporting the Democratic Party, the departure of Columbia University's president, the Gaza War, Kamala Harris's promise to fight "price gouging" and more.

1:28 John heads back to the linguistic woodshed

3:55 Glenn’s nascent retirement plan

4:23 Glenn and John’s late summer reading

11:58 The “joy” of the Democratic National Convention

17:47 Ground News ad

20:11 The oratorical panache of the Obamas

25:37 John: What’s the point of all this performative joy?

30:16 Keywords from the DNC: “Weird”

34:17 Keywords from the DNC: “Freedom”

41:48 Keywords from the DNC: “Joy”

44:25 Keywords from the DNC: “Fight”

46:03 ACTA ad

47:52 Glenn’s distrust of Kamala’s candidacy

52:42 Why Glenn puts the “Hussein” in “Barack Hussein Obama”

56:04 RFK Jr’s endorsement of Donald Trump

1:04:51 Coming soon: Breakfast with the Lourys

Recorded August 25, 2024

Links and Readings

Percival Everett’s novel, James

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

James Baldwin’s essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me

Alex Haley’s novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Barack Obama’s DNC speech

Michelle Obama’s DNC speech

Oprah Winfrey’s DNC speech

John’s NYT column, “The Hidden Grammatical Reason That ‘Weird’ Works”

0:20 Stephanie’s new video series, Faces of X

4:18 Glenn: “You’re taking all the fun out of the culture war”

7:30 Could we have had modernity without capitalism?

17:28 Glenn: You’re taking a side in the debate without admitting it

20:35 What comes after “heterodoxy”?

24:10 Stephanie: Seeing race as a lie may be the greatest reparation of all

32:32 Glenn: Calling race a construction doesn’t get us “past race”

38:23 Race in the next century

42:42 Transcending race without abandoning it

46:20 Awe and humility as spiritual necessities

Recorded August 13, 2024

Links and Readings

Glenn’s previous TGS episode with Stephanie

Find Stephanie on X: @stephlepp

Glenn’s 2016 conversation with Stephanie on Reckonings

Faces of X

Faces of X, “Can We Reframe the Capitalism Debate”

Faces of X, “Can We Reframe the Race Debate”

Glenn’s conversation with Greg Thomas, “A Future for Black Tradition”

1:05 John: A Kamala Harris presidency won’t improve the discourse on race

9:12 Glenn: Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama

14:44 Why Glenn just can’t excited about a Harris presidency

18:07 Ground News

20:40 How Kamala measures up to Obama under the spotlight

23:07 Kamala’s code switching

25:50 Building the black political persona

33:51 White Ladies and White Dudes for Kamala

40:39 Are there white Sonya Masseys?

45:55 ACTA

48:03 Walz’s war on “weird”

48:14 The Dems get their hands dirty

55:48 Trump’s near-death experience that wasn’t

Recorded August 9, 2024

Links and Readings

Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Trump’s on-stage interview before the National Association of Black Journalists

NYT story about Trump’s alleged helicopter ride

1:32 Glenn's intro

3:10 Glenn's case against the Democrats

14:06 Why is Cornel West running for president?

18:58 A black, conservative defense of Trumpism

25:29 A leftist analysis of Trump's rising popularity among black men

30:45 Glenn's early call for Biden to step down

36:25 Trump's debate style

41:36 Glenn: Biden is a "singularly uninspiring" political figure

49:11 The presidential debate post-mortem

55:45 The “DEI” candidates

John and Glenn are back for the latest Q&A session, where they take questions asked by Substack subscribers. Topics include antisemitism, Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race, Kamala Harris's entry into same, and dinosaurs.

1:08 John’s work with Braver Angels

8:16 How Braver Angels gets its business done

13:09 Trying to bridge the partisan divide

20:27 Do some issues require taking sides?

27:37 Braver Angels's approach to the immigration issue

31:37 John: “Trump is more symptom than cause”

38:47 Are some political conflicts unavoidable?

41:38 John: “What we need in America is a ... spiritual transformation in our attitudes toward one another”

50:30 Braver Angels's American Hope Campaign

Recorded on July 25, 2025

Links and Readings

Glenn’s 2020 conversation with John

Braver Angels

A Braver Way podcast

Eliza Taylor Hawkins’s report, “Depolarizing During the Pandemic”

Braver Angels’s Trustworthy Elections Report

John’s speech before Braver Angels’s 2023 National Convention

Thomas Sowell’s book, Black Rednecks & White Liberals

Braver Angels’s American Hope Campaign

In this excerpt from the Memoir Tapes—recordings that served as the basis for Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative—Glenn describes the baroque procedures he would use in order to buy and cook crack.

7:21 Glenn: “We literally dodged a bullet”

9:09 John: Going MAGA is taking the easy political route

11:06 Glenn: There are good reasons to support some of Trump’s policies, if not his rhetoric

18:57 Does the 2024 election have a “summer of 2020” vibe?

23:38 Ground News ad

25:58 The fantasy Kamala Harris / Corey Booker ticket

33:27 Is “Make America Nice Again” a compelling campaign message?

38:22 Is “Trump is a threat to democracy” a lexically inept slogan?

45:53 It’s time for Biden to step down

49:50 John: “I'm honestly glad the assassin missed”

54:49 Do Glenn and John need couples counseling?

Recorded July 20, 2024

Links and Readings

Andrew Napolitano’s conversation with John Mearsheimer

Andrew Napolitano conversation with Jeffrey Sachs

Evan Vucci’s iconic post-assassination attempt photo of Trump and Secret Service agents

John’s NYT column, “Why Are Democrats Speaking to America in Ancient Greek?”

George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language”

Larry Kotlikoff’s Substack post, “Biden Must Step Aside—This Week!”

Yascha Mounk’s Substack, Persuasion

Glenn’s conversation with Yasha Mounk

Glenn and the team discuss the use of independent podcasts as platforms for world leaders and the use and misuse of AI translations and voice simulations.

2:29 Have we already forgotten the horror of October 7?

9:22 Ben: We can’t ignore the loss of innocent life in Gaza

13:58 “From the river to the sea” and “all lives matter”

22:00 Celebrating the deaths of Israelis

26:31 Drawing the line at BDS

33:05 Glenn: If you want free speech, prepare to be uncomfortable

37:44 Columbia University administrators put on leave after allegedly antisemitic text messages

41:41 How Glenn discovered Benjamin’s work

47:40 The social meaning of race

51:01 The invitation to empathy in Late Admissions

59:02 Benjamin’s work with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Recorded July 10, 2024

Links and Readings

Benjamin’s book, Juror’s Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality

Benjamin’s book, Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison

Benjamin’s book, Disposable Heroes: The Betrayal of African American Veterans

Glenn’s conversation with Omer Bartov

Glenn’s book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values

Glenn’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

Erving Goffman’s book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

Erving Goffman’s book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study

Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

Glenn’s conversation with his son, Glenn Loury II

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Student

7:47 Who’s running the country?

11:17 Presidential b******t

13:35 Ground News ad

15:56 Is Kamala up to the big job?

22:44 Kamala’s questionable climb to the top

27:53 The NYT Editorial Board’s surprising call for Biden to drop out

33:50 Trump at Gettysburg

35:45 Trump’s victory is now more probable. But is it more defensible?

40:42 Interrogating the “elitist backlash” interpretation of Trumpism

45:43 How should Dems proceed in a post-Biden election?Recorded July 4, 2024

Links and Readings

Full video of the Trump-Biden debate

Harry G. Frankfurter’s book, On B******t

Clip from Adam McKay’s film, Vice

Kamala Harris attacks Biden during a 2019 primary debate

Kamala Harris defends Biden’s recent debate performance

NYT Editorial Board calls on Biden to leave the race

Jill Biden’s Vogue cover

1:28 Biden’s abysmal debate performance

5:01 Billionaire survivalists

12:53 So you made it to your luxury bunker. Now what?

16:22 The postapocalyptic war of all against all

21:29 Is the very existence of billionaires the real doomsday scenario?

26:20 The doomsday tax

32:24 Will the bunker dwellers have a reason to live?

40:39 The problem of government after nuclear holocaust

46:08 The literal bunker mentality

52:08 Was Mark responsible for Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall? Who can say for sure?

Recorded June 28, 2024

Links and Readings

Evan Osnos’s 2017 New Yorker piece, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich”

Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Douglas Rushkoff’s Guardian piece, “The Super-Rich ‘Preppers’ Planning to Save Themselves from the Apocalypse”

Ingrid Schmidt’s Hollywood Reporter piece, “Billionaires’ Survivalist Bunkers Go Absolutely Bonkers with Fiery Moats and Water Cannons”

Andre Mayer’s CBC News piece, “From Luxury Bunkers to Tactical Vehicles, the Ultra-Rich Are Preparing for the Big One”

Cixin Liu’s trilogy of sci-fi novels, The Three Body Problem

Everybody Loves Raymond complete series DVD box set

Louis van Gasteren’s documentary, Now Do You Get Why I Am Crying?

Paul Celan’s Selected Poems and Prose, translated by John Felstiner

Tadeusz Borowski’s book, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman

Glenn, Nikita, and Mark’s previous conversation, “The Ethics of Giving in the Very Long Term”

3:20 Glenn: I am my book’s primary audience

8:00 Glenn the Rationalist vs Glenn the Believer

18:00 How much did Glenn’s socio-economic status affect his sense of black belonging?

24:26 The radical rhetoric of privileged African Americans

29:38 Against reparations

33:57 A raised fist, but not a hand out

40:27 Colorblindness in theory and practice

50:11 Is race orthodoxy the first step on the road to totalitarianism?

1:03:01 Self-reliance and individualism

Recorded June 26, 2024

Links and Readings

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

Jennifer and Winkfield’s book, Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race

Stephen Shames and Ericka Huggins’s book, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party

Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker’s cookbook, Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen

Glenn’s essay, “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of ‘Political Correctness’ and Related Phenomena”

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

Sheena Michele Mason’s forthcoming book, The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism

Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

Winkfield and Jennifer’s conversation with Angel Eduardo

Free Black Thought

Václav Havel’s book, The Power of the Powerless

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance”

4:04 Joe asks John to account for his “emotional and irrational conclusions” about Trump and his recent conviction

15:28 Ground News ad

17:49 Did John really mean it when he implied he hoped someone would assassinate Trump?

23:00 Lauren wants John to justify his “casual endorsement” of gender fluidity in pronoun usage

32:37 Jerry asks why “external factors” like poverty are often used to explain lagging African American scholastic performance, those factors haven’t hindered them from achieving wildly disproportionate success in the cultural realm

38:34 Patrick calls out Glenn for his frequent use of the word “irregardless”

41:26 kgweiland asks Glenn if the Pamela Foster story in my memoir was “yours to share”

46:17 Scott Alex has some technical questions about linguistics for John

50:01 Jakon Joi asks for advice dealing with the tragic, possibly racially motivated murder of her father

Recorded June 23, 2024

Links and Readings

June 2024 thread of subscriber questions

John talking about Trump voters on Real Time in 2023

Daniel Bessner and Glenn on Real Time in 2023

Richard Dawkins interviews John

John’s book, The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language

2:17 Glenn II: Dad, you’re not really a “conservative” in the present-day sense of the term

13:20 Glenn and Glenn II agree that the “systemic racism” argument is overblown but disagree over what to do about it

22:04 What social conditions lead to the kind of behavior Glenn often condemns?

31:36 The luck and privilege that allowed Glenn to recover from his mistakes

39:19 Glenn II: “I found myself getting angry at someone who doesn’t exist anymore”

46:59 The conversation Glenn never had with his father

51:06 What Late Admissions taught Glenn II about his father

57:32 Grace in the face of public scandal

1:01:28 Love, death, and the Lourys

Recorded June 15, 2024

Links and Readings

Glenn’s essay, “Self-Censorship in a Time of War”

Scenes from The Wire, Season 4

Glenn and Glenn II’s September 2018 Bloggingheads conversation

Glenn II’s book, Invisible Funerals: A Tale of Nine Burials

Glenn II’s book, Love Letters & Elegies: Tales from Beyond the Pale

Glenn II’s book, What Death Can Touch

0:00 Glenn and John’s summer plans

3:56 Glenn’s forthcoming book on self-censorship

9:53 John’s forthcoming book on pronouns

17:25 Ground News ad

19:45 Inside the audiobook recording process

21:13 Why John isn’t celebrating Trump’s conviction

27:34 What’s so “monstrous” about Trump?

32:17 Is Trump demonizing immigrants or proposing sensible border regulation?

39:17 Inside the collapse of Ibram X. Kendi’s research center

44:42 Does Kendi’s fall mark the end of the woke moment?

49:15 The willful incomprehension directed at Byron Donalds

55:11 Joe Biden’s outdated speech at Morehouse

Recorded June 8, 2024

Links and Readings

Glenn’s 1994 essay, “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of ‘Political Correctness’ and Related Phenomena”

Henry Frankfurt’s book, On B******t

Glenn and John’s conversation with Mark Goldblatt

Rachel Poser’s New York Times Magazine piece, “Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own”

Herbert Guttman’s book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925

Joe Biden’s commencement address at Morehouse

After a two-month hiatus, John and I are back for a Q&A session. This time around, as an experiment, we asked subscribers to submit non-political questions. Let’s see what you came up with.

0:00 How Josh got Glenn started in podcasting

3:05 Early career advice to Glenn: Don’t be an a*****e

6:30 A recent loss in Josh’s life

8:36 Did Trump’s prosecution and conviction set a dangerous precedent?

15:37 Biden’s uninspiring presidential campaign