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in Gaza as a collective punishment that I don't think is justified. And I got notified the next day the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow. If you'd said that about the United States, would you have gotten the same reaction? Ah, good question.
Do you think you've been bamboozled? Are we really gonna go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast a ballot in Georgia? I watched a couple of Malcolm X speeches. And it was like a totally different person from the one I was presented in high school. And I was like, well, why isn't this guy much more famous than he is now? One of the speeches, he goes off after white liberals and he's like,
you know, whites are bad, whites are a problem, but the real problem is white liberals. I was like, you go Malcolm X. It almost feels like his message has been suppressed. Thank you, professor, for coming. So you just, you told me last night at dinner that you just, after about 50 years, taught your last course at Brown. You just left Brown. Big picture question first. You've taught for so long. How has it changed? You've taught it, you know, the...
most prestigious universities in the world. How have the schools changed? How have the students changed to leave more hopeful or more concerned? Ah, good question. Yeah, that's a big question, I'll admit it. Well, I graduated high school 60 years ago. Whoa. And where? John Marshall Harlan High School, public school in Chicago. How is it now? I don't know, to be honest with you.
I know that the community that houses it has gone into decline and it's become a part of the South Side problematic, which is Chicago with the violence and so on. It was a modest working upper, working lower middle class. community. When I was at that school, it was integrated. There were 30 or 40 percent of the student body was white. I'm sure it's all black now and has been for some time. But I've lost touch with what's going on back there.
But I'm just saying I've been around for a long time. Yeah, it's a long time. So... I remember as I did my undergraduate at Northwestern University, graduated in 1972, the intensity of the intellectual experience of coming to the university. I remember encountering the German language. I remember studying mathematics and economics and philosophy and politics. And I remember both. And I remember there being a certain devotion to the life of the mind.
I don't know that we've lost that, but it's I think less intense for our students today. than it was when I was in college. It was the shadow of the Second World War. It was still only 25 years after the end of the conflict. that had I think its effect it was the Vietnam era and that had its effect but Even though it was the Vietnam era, it wasn't, in my experience, as political as I see the university has become today. which are right at the... I mean, there are probably...
You got to campus in 1968? I got to campus in 1970 at Northwestern. I started out at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1965. I dropped out. I attended a community college for a couple of years, and then I re-enrolled at a major university as a scholarship student in 1970, graduated in 1972. So there were Vietnam War protests going on on campuses all over the country. There were. But it was still, you think, less political than it is now?
Yeah, frankly, I do. First of all, not everybody was a protester or enmeshed in the ethos of protest. Some of us were just trying to get to class. In my own case, I was a full-time employee at a printing plant and a young father with a wife and two children even as I was taking classes at Northwestern. My case is very unusual. I didn't really have time to protest. But it wasn't even for the other students. It wasn't all consuming. There were intense, engaged protests.
students, but there were also kids just going about their business. Not to sidetrack the conversation, but what were you doing at the printing plant? What was your job? I was a clerk. They called me a timekeeper and a bonus estimator. We had these decks of IBM punch cards. and I would write on each one the employee's name, the number of hours they spent on what task, and sometimes I'd have to estimate whether or not their productivity count entitled them to bonus payment.
I'd take, at the end of the shift, my deck of IBM punch cards to the offices where the young women would key punch them up, and then they would go into the... process of mainframe computer congestion. It was pretty antiquated but that's how we kept track of the accounting so I was a clerk. What did they print at the plant? Everything. This was R.R. Donnelly and Sons, a big concern. Lakeside Press is what they call the campus.
Couple of miles three miles south of the loop on the lakefront in Chicago. Maybe a dozen or so Factory style buildings Railroad tracks running alongside huge rolls of printing paper. These monstrous machines which were the presses. craftsmen everywhere from the people who ran the presses to the people who engraved the plates to the people who cultivated the photographs that had to be made into images. They printed Time magazine.
Life Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek. They printed telephone books. They printed Sears catalogs. And it was a massive operation. So it was like the size of a steel plant. It was like a hole. It was a dozen buildings. It's all spread out over a mile along the lakefront. Maybe three quarters of a mile. Is it still there? I think it's condos now. Of course it is. And in fact, the guys, you know, the union guys who I worked with, I wasn't in the union, I was a clerk.
could see it coming. They could see the jobs going to South Carolina and then going to Southeast Asia. They didn't see the technology revolution coming that made a lot of what they were doing obsolete, but they knew that their days were numbered. And they said that out loud? Uh, yeah. Wow. Were they mad about it? Uh, yeah. And to a certain extent resigned. But, you know, fight the good fight, you know, resist. But the wheel was turning. Amazing.
So you get to campus, you're married with two kids, you're working in a printing plant, and you probably don't have time to throw tear gas on the quad. Now, I talk about this in my memoir that came out last year, Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative. I review the bidding of my life and... Yeah, I tell a story. So I'm at the community college before getting to Northwestern. The year is 1970, the spring of 1970, the strike, the incursion into Cambodia and the strike.
And I'm taking calculus and I'm loving it and there's an exam coming. You loved calculus? Pardon? I loved calculus, yeah. I was a math major in calculus and trigonometry and abstract algebra and differential equations. How could you love something like that? Oh man, it was just fun solving those problems. I got a feeling of mastery in solving the problems. And they're tricks in calculus. How do I reduce this expression to a form that I can actually integrate it and apply, you know, what I know?
I liked it. And I had a great teacher, Mr. Andres was his name. He was an engineer. He had retired. He was a Northwestern alum, which is how I ended up at Northwestern. He referred me to their admissions committee. And I'd go to his office hours and he'd show me problems and tricks and, you know, we were having a good time. But in any case, I'm saying I wanted to study for the exam, and the librarian had barricaded herself in because she was afraid that the rampaging students
who were all up in arms about the strike, were gonna somehow come in and deface the library and so on, so she had barricaded herself. And I had to persuade her. It took me 15 minutes to persuade her to open the door and let me in so that I could sit down and study because I had to get to that 4 o'clock shift, the second shift that day to my job, and I needed to use what hours I had to study.
So you were working second shift, so that's four to midnight? Yeah, I was working on second and sometimes third shift, but mostly second shift, yeah, four to midnight, right. How old were your kids? Lisa and Tammy were born in 1967 and 1968, respectively. So this was 1970. They were two and three. Did your wife work? She did. She worked at the post office.
Man, that's a busy family. So you have no time at all. We had our hands full, to be sure. We were very young parents, and we were determined to improve ourselves, and we were doing the best we could. What did you think of the protests, given everything else you had to do? Well, first of all, I thought the war sucked. You know, I was against the war. Fair. And I thought the protests were justified. I mean, Kent State, you know, these kids got shot and all that.
But I thought also that a lot of the participation in the protests was kind of indulgent and saddish and, you know, it was a fun thing to be doing. It was a part of a kind of manufactured alienation that I didn't share. I wasn't about to burn my draft card. The guys that I was working with, most of them were ethnic at the printing plant. Most of them were Italian or Irish or Jewish or Polish or Greek. second generation immigrants to the United States and they were pretty conservative.
But there was the black power stuff that was going on as well in those years, and I was enmeshed in that on the south side of Chicago and had family members who were pretty radical. So, you know, if you had to give me a label, I would have been left of center. I would have been a liberal, but I was mainly a nerd. What did your radical relatives think of your life path?
Of your life path of going to college. Oh, they were proud of me. Well, I graduated with a very strong academic record from the high school. I got a scholarship to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology. My girlfriend, who became my wife and the mother of my first two children, had dropped out of high school to give birth. And they were worried that I was going to lose my way.
So when I, and my father, my mother and father broke up when I was quite young, five years old, but my dad was an important part of my life and I very much, wanted his respect and approval and he You know, when I told him that Charlene was pregnant, he said he had rolled his eyes. And, you know, he said, you have to do the right thing and take care of that kid and stuff.
This is not the way that I had imagined you living your life. And when I told him I was dropping out of the Illinois Institute of Technology and going to work, he said, well, you better have a plan. So when I finally kind of pulled myself together and did well at the community college and then got the scholarship at Northwestern and then made the dean's list in my first semester, he was like, okay, this is better.
They were proud of me. And when I graduated with awards and stuff, I was the a prize-winning mathematics major in my class of 1972 at Northwestern, and I got admitted to MIT as a graduate student that very same year. They were over the moon. They loved the idea that I was overcoming the odds. Yes. What did your dad do? My dad is no longer living. He was a lawyer and accountant. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service. Sorry, Tucker. Sorry.
Spent his life as a federal employee, as a bureaucrat. He worked his way up to being the director of the Kansas City Service Center, which is a huge... income tax return processing operation in Kansas City. And it suited him. He was a revenuer. Revenuer. I'm telling you, man, this guy would drive around. He lived in Overland Park, Kansas. which is a tony suburb of Kansas City. And you drive around and you see a boat sitting in somebody's driveway. And he'd ask himself,
I wonder how that guy paid for that phone. And I'm not going to put it past him to go and look up the thing and maybe direct an audit in that direction. So he believed in paying your taxes? Yeah, he believed in it very religiously. Yeah. Or his politics. Ah, it was fun. moderate Democrat, but not especially political. He was mainly a bureaucrat. I mean, he loved the internal politics of who's getting promoted, what budget is going on, who's the regional director.
and how much power has so-and-so got, and what about this or that. You know, he loved calling people on the carpet. He was a patent. George C. Scott. Yeah. That was his favorite movie. The scene where Patton slaps the recruit. That was his favorite scene. So he was the patent of the Kansas City IRS office? Yeah, something like that. So did you go to MIT? I did go to MIT. I did a PhD in economics at MIT in the 70s. What was the atmosphere like there then?
Well, in economics, MIT was riding high. Then there were people, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton. all of whom became Nobel laureates in the fullness of time. Samuelson had been honored in 69 or 70, I think. It was a very, very strong department of economics. It was very Jewish on both the faculty and the student body, and that was noticeable to me. They were notes to the grindstone. They were... How many black students were studying for a PhD? Black students? Yeah.
I'd say maybe 12 out of 150. Something like that. They had a program MIT determined to respond to the time. they were liberal democrats and they had a kind of affirmative action thing now i will say I'm quite sure I would have been admitted to MIT based on the record that I had established at Northwestern, the prize-winning record.
A's in everything, taking graduate courses in math and economics when I was still an undergraduate and so on. I think I would have been admitted regardless of their program, but I was among three, a cohort of three African Americans and a class of 25. who were admitted in 1972, and they had been admitting since 1970, and they continued this on through, I think, 75 or 76, three black students.
I was told later that the way that that was done was they had their regular budget for graduate students, and then they had additional funds that would allow them to admit three more students who were African American. So there were about 12 of us, 12 to 15. Did you keep in touch with the other two guys in your class? I did one, didn't finish. He was from Kansas City by coincidence.
He left after a couple of years and never finished his degree. The other teaches at Harvard now and is a dear friend whom I've known for 50 years. People are the one thing that actually matter in this world. Every life is holy and sacred and beautiful. That's a fact. But it's also true that unplanned pregnancies rattle people. They can be shocking and make people very emotional. What's going to happen to my future? Редактор субтитров А.Семкин
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Just visit preborn.com slash Tucker to help today or dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby. Life is what matters. How serious was the academic environment when you started at MIT? um it was uh absolutely top-notch i mean it was This is technical stuff. And, you know, you were challenged. And the people that you were studying with and competing against
They'd come from Israel and India and Japan and the UK and Russia, and they were the best in the world. A cohort of young, prospective economists, and it was very rigorous. Very mathematical. It was MIT, after all. It was Paul Samuelson, after all. They were green eye shade types with the math and the equations and the statistics and the analysis. But they also had something of an interest, a political flair. As I say, moderate Democrat, left of center, but not really socialist.
appreciating the market but thinking about a mixed economy and regulation and stuff. Sanderson wrote a column for Newsweek every month and Milton Friedman wrote a column for Newsweek and they kind of Friedman, the conservative from Chicago, the University of Chicago, and they were kind of in dueling perspectives. I remember. But I was in the midst of that. That was back when people talked in public about economics. They don't anymore? No.
There's not a lot of public... It's all about race or sexuality or whatever, but I don't think... that I've heard at dinner. a debate about economics in 25 years. Well, there was a lot of debate about economics and about monetarism and Keynesianism and whatnot, about regulation and laissez-faire and whatnot. Have you noticed that, though, that the incidents of public debate about just people talking about what's the right system, that you don't hear that?
Yeah, I've kind of Falling away from economics, to be honest with you, these last 10, 15 years, I've become a guy that talks more about the culture issues myself. And now with the new administration, Trump, and with the tariffs and the changes in economic policy, there's more talk. It's very arch, it's very partisan, but there's more talk. So how would you compare the environment at MIT to the one that you're now leaving at Brown on an academic level?
Well, I want to distinguish between a specialized program of graduate study at MIT and a general education program for undergraduates at Brown. I think if I were going to compare economics PhD study at Brown today to that at MIT in Italy. it would be a different kind of comparison. There the issue would be how the field has changed. the questions that are prominent, the techniques that are employed to investigate them. And there I would focus a lot on the revolution of data analysis.
laptop and desktop computers, the data availability and so on, and also the change in the set of questions that people are asking which are applied and are Experimental economics, for example, has become a big thing. Nobel Prizes are given in development economics and stuff like that where People are trying to figure out how to make the best use of resources to raise living standards in poor countries and stuff.
and economics was more self-consciously theoretical and abstract when I was a student. You could make a living without ever carrying one of those boxes of computer cards over to the computer processing center. You could just with a pencil and a yellow pad sit and off the top of one's head, as it were, invent. models of interesting economic phenomena and get yourself published in the journal and make tenure and all of that.
And I think it's been much, much harder to do that now. Well, that sounds like a good thing. Yeah, I think on the whole it is a good thing. But that would be if I were comparing economics in 2025 to economics in 1975. much more empirical, much more data intensive, much more applied, and a wide range of questions. But if I were comparing college, in the period when I was a young student to now.
I think the assault that we're seeing, the confrontation that we're seeing of elite higher education with anti-woke sentiment coming from the Trump administration. uh, critics, uh, like, uh, the young Christopher Rufo, but there are many, uh, bespeaks the ideological drift that has characterized higher education in the last decades. It's become much more political, much more self-consciously radical, much more anti-establishment and, as it were, woke, faddish.
You know, I've lived through the French theorists and deconstruction and whatnot. I'm not a literary argument. humanist, I'm a social scientist, but I can see, looking across the aisle, as it were, at what my colleagues are. And I've lived through the anti-racism mania. I've lived through the various enthusiasms of feminism. sexual liberation and whatnot, the debate about capitalism, you know.
a different argument now than it was when I was coming along. When I was coming along, you read Karl Marx because you wanted to be educated and you knew that that was an important part of the intellectual inheritance. You write it with a skeptical eye because you know that, wow, the radical agitator and bomb thrower. of Marx was an important historical figure, you didn't think that the economic analysis was really very colchette or incisive.
And you didn't read it as a Bible. You read it as a... Okay. There is a problem here about how to understand the implications of the transformation, which is industrialization and so on. There are real issues about how the fruits of economic cooperation get divided amongst participants in the process, the people who bring capital, the people who own natural resources and land, the people who rely on their labor as the
source of their income. And there's an analytical issue about how to think that through. And we saw Marx as something of an oddball in that respect. But, and I think In the center of the economics establishment, that would be the judgment. But I think... I can't stop the sociologists from reading Marx. I can't stop the anthropologists from reading Marx. I can't stop the literary critics from reading Marx. I can't stop the historians from reading Marx. And they've taken that.
kind of sensibility that kind of criticism of established social relations and the kind of radicalism and enthusiasm as I say for the fads that come along of equality and so on where they've taken it. The university has become, to a certain degree, captured by that sensibility, and we're seeing a backlash against that. You said you've seen various waves of sexual liberation movements. And over the last 50 years, there have been a number of them. Was anyone liberated, do you think?
I don't see how you can say that women were not empowered if, you know, we just go to, who was it, Betty Friedan or...
Simone de Beauvoir or somebody like that and the set of issues that they were talking about and you looked at where... ideas are about equality for women now and the appropriate role of women in political and social life I think you can say I don't know if you want to say they were liberated because they are confronted with challenges in life that are intrinsic to the way in which we reproduce and the way in which the species has evolved.
Some of that stuff is hardwired and it's going to always be a part of the... of the issue, but I think the presumptions about the entitlement of women to an opportunity to fully develop their human potential is a move forward. Um, were blacks liberated? Well, I just read an interesting book by Jason Reilly, The Conservative African American. Wall Street Journal editorialist. He calls it the myth of affirmative action, and he basically argues in the spirit of the great Thomas Sowell. That.
Blacks were really doing pretty well between 1940 and 1960. And when you look at the acceleration of wages and the breakdown of barriers of segregation and whatnot, that that was a golden age. for African American advancement and that advancement after 1960. was less rapid and that the ballyhoo about liberation of African Americans associated with black power and the civil rights movement and the advent of affirmative action is overstated.
that there were downsides significant downsides to those developments both in terms of abetting economic empowerment for African Americans, but also in terms of the credibility of the political claims that blacks were making on the rest of the society, and things became more. partisan and divisive and this is Riley's argument and I have some sympathy for it. It's a very complex subject, and you've obviously lived in the middle of it for a long time, but...
What is the verdict? Was all of that good for African Americans or not? Or probably a mix of both, but how would you describe what we know now? Well, you know, if you were to pick up a typical work wanted, page in 1960 in a major American city, you would see explicit kind of no blacks need apply type language. If you were to look at controlling for the skills that people had, the anticipated earnings of a worker.
you would see that there being African-American was a negative, and it was a non-trivial negative in 1960. If you were to look at the way the housing market operated or at the allocation of public educational resources, you would see significant discriminatory barriers that impeded African American development of their skills and participation in the society. And all of that has changed. I think, for the good, without any question.
That having changed, let's call it the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the change in the ethos of the country with the rise of the civil rights movement and so on, that having changed. The question becomes, we get to 1970, let's say, and the question becomes, what next? And there, I think the story is less clear, and I think that there are developments that are very distressing.
I think there's a wonderful book that I want to plug here called The World of Patience Gromes, G-R-O-M-E-S, by a man called Scott Davis. patients grooms, is a woman born in the late 19th century, like 1890 or something like that. to a yeoman farmer, a black person who owned his own land, her father. And she's a princess. She takes piano lessons. She dresses up for church on Sunday.
They have a very strict behavioral code. They're devout Christians. They are Booker T. Washington-esque in their orientation. And she marries and migrates to Richmond, Virginia and starts a family. in the 1920s, and Scott Davis, the author of this great book, traces her family life through the early 1960s. And what you see from Patience Groms is her kids' struggle. the neighborhood, which is not wealthy, but stable. Her husband works for the railroad. He's got a very good job.
neighborhoods declines, model cities and various kinds of federal programs come through that end up remaking the community in ways that actually work in an adverse effect. public housing which is initiated with the idea that the poor were going to be sheltered. ends up creating ghetto type phenomenon. The kids who used to be interested in earning the respect of their peers by keeping their nose clean.
keeping your nose to the grindstone, not having kids before they were married and stuff like that, end up embracing a much looser and less helpful set of cultural practices and by the time you get to the 1970s it's a mess So, there's a lot of mess. I mean, these are statistics that people cite all the time. Black family life used to be much healthier than it is out of wedlock births and all of that.
Of course there was crime. Du Bois and the Philadelphia Negro at the turn of the 20th century is quick to point out that there was crime. But the violence, the gangs, the drugs, the lawlessness, the contempt for order This was a development that we can see emerging in the post-civil rights environment. So it's a mixed bag, I think. I mean, you know, you can speculate and people do about the sources of this.
dissolution, and I think they are many. I think they are the incentives of welfare transfer programs which encourage people to live in ways that were ultimately not socially productive. I think the change in the larger culture in which these liberatory sexual revolutions gave the back of their hand to a set of conventions, expectations, and restraints that were, yes,
freedom impulse, freedom limiting. I mean, you can just do anything you want to do and maintain the respect of your peers, but we're also order inducing. freedom limiting but order inducing and Provided a framework within which people can manage The difficult problem of how do we live decently? What do we do with our temptations? How do we restrain our appetites? How do we understand and then live up to our responsibilities?
And I think that's a society-wide development, not just something that happens in black communities. Um. But I think the politics of racial claiming, the victim psychology and mentality that... ends up with reparations is your arguing point. I don't think those are healthy things. These are things I've written about in my work. So I... I experienced all of this from like sort of the other side. I didn't grow up around a lot of black people, only kind of rich black people.
But I grew up around a lot of white liberals who were very invested. in talking about the civil rights movement and from that they derived like moral authority great moral authority like i'm on the side of black people therefore i'm a good person yeah And it does feel like maybe they were the great beneficiaries of the whole thing. Like there was sort of no downside for them.
they got to pat themselves on the back about being virtuous, even if what they were doing at the end of the day wasn't helping to solve the problem. It does feel that way. I mean, again, I've never lived... on the south side of chicago but i've heard a lot of rich people talk about Here's what I think, Tucker. I think... And I've written about this in essays and so on.
I think that there are basically two dispositions that you can have in thinking about the persistence of racial inequality, what I call the bias narrative.
And the biased narrative is that we're behind because they have kept us out. Right. And that affords your white liberal do-gooders an opportunity to side on the... historical imperative of let's stop the bias let's fight racism anti-racism and there's the development narrative and the development narrative basically says The long history of enslavement, Jim Crow exclusion, and segregation has left African Americans with an imperative to develop our human potential more fully.
We were denied the complete opportunity to do so. The doors, however, have opened substantially, and the ball is in our court. That is the existential challenge, in my opinion, that African Americans have faced for a half century, since the end of the Civil Rights Movement. to grasp the nettle and to seize the imperative of measuring up, of fulfilling our potential of development.
The white liberals that you were just referring to who are interested in being on the right side of history by doing the right thing by black people embrace the bias narrative. and give us an excuse to not take up the challenge of the development narrative.
Meanwhile, the country is moving on. The world is moving on. The world gets small. You get globalization. The world gets shaken by one after another technological revolution which changes everything and we're in the midst of one right now with the AI and all that that's going on. the demography changes. You get tens of millions
of people coming from non-European ports of call and making their lives in this country. There are more Hispanics by far than there are blacks in the United States right now. The Asians, if you can speak in those generic terms, are here to stay. The world is getting small. So... Not confronting the development challenge. continuing to take the victim stance, continuing to rely on the largesse and the beneficence of supposedly supportive white liberals is a disaster.
for black people. It's not a disaster for the, what I call, Negro cognoscente. the anointed ones, the shell obamas of the world, with respect, as much as I can muster. Not a disaster for those who are the ambassadors to white America on behalf of black America. Like your friend Al Sharpton. But a disaster for that kid who can't read. A disaster for that mother with three children and she doesn't know how she's going to feed them and she hasn't gotten an education. A disaster for the gangbanger.
who's running around firing his pistol aimlessly out the window at a gang rival and killing a three-year-old sitting on her auntie's lap. It's a disaster for those people. There's no escaping the imperative to develop. There's no substitute for being effective, for having a mastery over skill, for having... solved the basic problem of life. Which again I say is how do I comport myself in a way that is both dignified and consistent with my own and my children's prosperity?
That problem has to be faced. It still has to be faced. So I always blame, again, not my world, and I've never really been that focused on these questions, but I live here, so it's like everyone's always talking about it.
And I always blamed the black leaders for what you just described. I agree with everything you said. It seems obviously true. But I always thought, you know, it's Sharpton's fault or Jesse Jackson's fault or whatever. And it took me a long, I'm still trying to figure it out, but it... Does seem like they themselves were pawns, actually.
That's my current thinking on this. I don't know if you've thought about this or noticed this or know what I'm talking about, but it does feel like, you know, you can criticize Sharpton or whatever, and you should. It's obviously corrupt and it's all silly and all that, the shakedown and all that stuff, but like... He's not doing that by himself, actually. He's being used by other people, probably not black people, who are deriving some bigger advantage from the status quo.
I don't disagree with that. And they never get any attention. You're like, so if you're NBC and you're hiring Sharpton, again, I personally, as I told you last night, probably horrified I don't like Sharpton because I think he's... Smart, he's amusing, but he's, you know, I think been probably pretty bad for the country. I don't think he's helped black people at all. But like, if you're NBC, why are you, you're driving an advantage.
from the system that is not helping the people Sharpton says he supports, like why they're never blamed for that, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, well, who would blame them? Conservatives. Republicans would blame them. And they're racist, you know. Yeah. But conservatives mostly don't, actually. They blame Sharpton. Or I'll speak for myself as a conservative lifelong. I would always be like, Sharpton's the problem.
And it's like, no, I think the whole, I'm just really struck. I don't know too much about it, but I'm really struck by the difference. Like I grew up thinking, you know, Martin Luther King was like a great man. I still think great things about him. And Malcolm X was a really sort of evil figure. But... If you listen to Malcolm X, he's a lot closer, with some big differences, but in general to what you're describing.
as positive. Correct. And he got murdered. And so did King. No, I have enormous respect for the straight-backed, manly, autonomous, independent responsibility embracing the posture of Malcolm X. You know, he says, nobody is coming to save us. We had better take care of our own. Are you raising your children? Did you pick up the trash in front of your house? Will you start a business? You don't have wealth? You're waiting with your hand out for somebody to give you wealth?
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I don't know to what extent it reflected as real views, but then with YouTube, I watched a couple of Malcolm X speeches. And it was like a totally different person from the one I was presented in high school and much more along the lines of what you just said. And I was like, well, why isn't this guy much more famous?
than he is now. One of the speeches, he goes off after white liberals and he's like, you know, whites are bad, whites are a problem, but the real problem is white liberals. And I was like, you go Malcolm X. Why isn't he... It almost feels like his... Message has been suppressed a little bit, maybe. Yeah, I don't know, I'm not a historian, but I see what you say, and I do think there are aspects of his message that are extremely threatening to established order.
He was a Muslim. He was succeeded in his leadership of that movement, ultimately by Louis Farrakhan, who is a notorious anti-Semite, quote unquote. So there's that. But Malcolm X was uncompromising about, well, you remember his comment after the Kennedy assassination, chickens come home in the roost. What do you think he meant by that? I've never understood what that meant. I think he meant US entailment in global affairs has created enemies. The US has undertaken various
operations that are in effect responsible for the blowback that we're seeing. That's what I think he meant. Probably some truth in that. Well, you had a conspiracy theory. No, hardly. I'm just trying to understand the world. Are we ever going to see all the documents related to that? No, of course not. And, you know, to the three, so the president issued an executive order on January 23rd, one of the first things that he did after the inauguration.
commanding, commanding with the force of law, the federal agency's executive branch should declassify all documents pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. And that hasn't happened. but you have to ask yourself, well, why 60 years later are they still classified in the first place? What is that? And I don't think it's because
The truth is easy to deal with. I mean, I still think the truth 60 years later is really threatening to somebody, clearly. Because on some level, why would you care if you found out there was a complex conspiracy to assassinate Garfield? you'd be like okay you know it's long over like i think we can tell the truth everyone's dead exactly So it does make you wonder like, well, what is this actually? And I know for a fact, a verifiable fact, that they push back against declassifying this stuff.
within the government has been very intense, very intense. So that tells you that there's something worth hiding. I certainly hope, because I believe in disclosure and honesty, that it all comes out. But you do get the feeling, not as a conspiracy nut, but as an honest person trying to make sense of history in the present. that a lot of our assumptions are based on things that aren't true or fully true. Do you sense that?
I do and it's deeply disquieting to me actually because it means that the reality that I take for granted is orchestrated or manufactured and there are forces I would have to presume dark forces at work that I don't fully understand and then if this is not what it appears to be what else that I take for granted is a charade or a fantasy. I mean, in some ways, I mean, obviously you've been an African-American conservative for a long time.
moved around, but basically you've been against the conventional view of things for a long time, I would say. But you're also working within the very heart of the system. Harvard, Brown, MIT, you have every possible credential. So at what point did it occur to you that maybe some of this was fake? When did you start to think that? I don't really know the answer to that question. I'm going to make a personal reference. I married my wife, LaJuan, whom you've met.
Just about eight years ago. Tender was fur last night, yes. She's awesome. And I would say that that relationship has been a wake-up call for me in that she brings a perspective that's very different from my conventional. I read the New York Times, and I pretty much believe what I'm reading. I read the Washington Post. I read the Wall Street Journal. I read the Chronicles of Higher Education. I, you know, and, you know.
that's what they're saying and you know i take it seriously and i watch television i watch the sunday shows and yeah and she's like Man. That is all manufactured consent. She's going to pull out Noam Chomsky on me. So, I say all that to say, while I am not necessarily going to parrot her perspective on things, they have caused me, encountering her perspective has caused me to revisit some of my own. Assumption. And it's been uncomfortable, you said. Yeah, I think so. Sure. Why?
Because it turns out that, and this actually relates to the book that I have coming out from polity books called self-censorship in a couple of months. It makes me aware of the fact that they... discussion of controversial and sensitive matters that is sanitized and acceptable in the mainstream venues.
is only the tip of the iceberg of legitimate discussion and debate. If you don't do your own research, if you don't exert an effort, if you don't look around, if you don't listen to alternative voices, if you don't access independent media, which we are awash in now, but which is relatively new last quarter century or so. You're being let around by the nose. You're being bamboozled. You're being hoodwinked.
not exercising your full critical capacities. You have to exert the effort to look beyond what's right in front of your nose. Do you think you've been bamboozled? A little bit, yeah. Huh? Well, for example, I pretty much take what my government says to be, in total proven otherwise, true and reliable. I have reason now to be more skeptical about that. You are the master of understatement, I must say. I have reason now to be skeptical of that.
You do. I think I can confirm that. Well, man, I mean, we've been at war since forever. Yes. Do we really need to be at war since forever? There were no weapons of mass destruction. Were there no in Iraq are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? Is that what we're about to do? These are important questions.
Must we risk nuclear war with a nuclear-armed Russia over the conflict in Ukraine as an imperative to prevent the re-emergence of a dominant force coming from the east to occupy civilization? I'm being told, or... Let me get more prosaic. Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast a ballot in Georgia? I mean... If I don't ask myself some of those questions, I'll be being led around by the nose over the cliff. Yeah.
I'm younger than you, but I've had a similar... I'm not even sure it's awakening. I don't know the answers to most of the questions that you just asked, but I know that they're valid questions, and it's important to push back a little bit, right? Because... But how weird is it to, especially for you, because again, you have pushed back against the status quo for a long time. That's why you're famous.
So you've been, to be blunt, much more of a free thinker than most people, certainly at university level. So it's not like you are just following orders anyway. It must be particularly weird for you to realize that some of your assumptions may not be true. Yeah... Okay. I got used to being the contrarian and thinking of myself as the guy who thought outside the box and who was not bound by convention.
But I came to realize, though, that I wasn't quite as independent a thinker as I imagined myself to be and that there were traps, you know. So, yeah. So if you don't mind, if you just describe the process of realizing that, what made you come to that conclusion? So, um... I'm going to talk about my relationship with the Manhattan Institute. And can you, for those who aren't in right-wing world like me and you,
Can you just describe the Manhattan Institute? The Manhattan Institute is a think tank based in New York City, published in a magazine called City Journal, puts out reports. houses scholars who are investigating different aspects of social policy, largely urban. related issues, and they've been around for a while. I used to write for them. Did you? Yeah, Myron Magnet was the editor of Wonderful Man, Ran City Journal. Yeah, they were great. And they are a highbrow, serious, intellectually robust.
critical from the right about housing, about crime, about welfare, and other things, mostly American domestic politics. And I signed on there a few years ago as a senior fellow and my podcast, The Glenn Show. which I put out content every week, was being sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. You made such a point that I think it's worth underlining.
The Manhattan Institute, and particularly City Journal, its flagship publication, our concern have been for 30 years with domestic issues. This is not the Hudson Institute. This is not AI. This is like a... overwhelmingly domestic focus. organization. Is that fair? Yeah, that's correct. They worry about race issues, they worry about crime and punishment type issues, they worry about, you know, housing, about city politics, you know, things like that.
And they have estimable scholars who are a part of the shop that produces these studies and commentaries and so on. And I signed on there as a senior fellow, John Paulson senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
We are part of company recently at their behest. Both their sponsorship of my podcast and their employment of me as a senior fellow because of some of the... public comments that I have made at my podcast and some of the people whom I have interviewed there were the issue of the conflict in Palestine and Middle East and Gaza and Israel. Has come up and I ran a phone
of the sensibility of my friend, Raihan Salam, who's president of the Manhattan Institute, wrote me saying that we review our scholarly relationships from time to time. This is practically a quote. for productivity, and there's no question about my productivity. I've put a dozen articles in their City Journal over the last five years. and shared priorities. And so I assume it's that we don't share priorities.
The priorities that I assume we don't share have to do with Me inviting a historian colleague of mine on the show, the Glenn Show, to talk about the post-October 7, 2023 incursion of the IDF into Gaza. which he characterized in the same kind of language that international human rights organizations have used as being
if not genocide, then in the same ballpark and something that one needs to be concerned about from a human rights perspective. He thinks the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice Our right to take initiatives that are holding Israeli officials to account for the prosecution of that conflict. And I had him on the show. Now, who is he? His name is Omar Bartoff.
He's a student of... the holocaust of the nazi extermination campaign in eastern europe and has written books about that and he's been my colleague for 20 years ed brown i've gotten to know him and i knew that he was engaging these questions in a controversial manner and I wanted to hear from him so I had him on the show. I am completely obsessed with Alp, and we're totally focused on getting it into the hands of everyone who wants a tin of it.
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So, he's a professor at Brown? Yeah, he's a very distinguished historian. And I think it's fair to say he's not an anti-Semite? He's Israeli. Oh, okay. I just wanted this to be clear to everyone listening. So it's not like you didn't have Louis Farrakhan on the show to like call Judaism and got a religion or something. You had an Israeli historian of the Holocaust on.
No, and there were objections coming from the staff at MI, and they asked that we not, in promoting the show, make mention of the Institute of the Manhattan Institute in connection with this particular episode. And there were other incidents. The black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates came out with a book called The Message.
in which he describes writing about politics and there are several chapters One reviews his first visit to Africa and talks about his encounter with the Senegalese and the complex dynamic of an African American. thinking of himself as an African, but not really being an African in Africa. Another essay describes him going to a small town in South Carolina that had banned one of his books because it's critical race theory.
and finding that the people there were more complicated and interesting and malleable, that is open to discourse than he would have imagined, and sort of exposing the complexity of this moment in our cultural history of anti-racism and anti-anti-racism. But the main bulk of the book is devoted in Coates' book, The Message, to recounting his experience as a visitor on the west bank of Palestine.
And he's appalled by what he sees. And he says so. And in conversation with John McWhorter, who is a regular conversation partner of mine at the podcast, Eye Loud is how I admired the book. I said it was not without its flaws, and it should be understood that I have been sharply critical. of Ta-Nehisi Colts' other writings. Oh, I remember very well. He had a very famous essay in The Atlantic, I think 2014 or 2015, called The Case for Reparations, which I objected to and said so at length.
And then he published a best-selling book called Between the World and Me, which was very widely praised and widely read. And I had deep problems with it, which I discussed at length. on the podcast, so I'm generally disposed to be a conservative critic of cult.
But I admired the book. And I admired in particular the essay in which he reflected on what he saw in the West Bank. I didn't necessarily agree with all of his sensibilities and so on, but I thought it was an interesting, provocative, insightful, humane engagement with a difficult, very difficult set of issues.
Well, the party line on the book including at the Manhattan Institute, is this is unspeakable, this is a black guy who doesn't know what the F he's talking about, wandering around on the West Bank in the company of some anti-Zionist Jews.
coming back and talking about it as if it were he uses the word apartheid Colts uses the word apartheid he said what I saw in the West Bank this is the West Bank not Gaza was reminiscent to me of what I saw in South Africa and I didn't like what I saw and it's wrong and I'm gonna tell you why I think it's wrong and I don't care. what account you're giving of the history. He has read some of the history, but he's not.
deeply versed in the historical record of how the circumstance in Palestine has come to be, but his basic point is, look, I'm telling you, what I'm seeing there is not healthy, it's not humane, and it's not right. And I had some appreciation for his courage to say so and for the artful way in which he said so. And I said so. on the show. In the same restrained, non-radical way you're describing it now to me? Yeah.
Yeah, I just basically said, this is something that has to be reckoned with. I said to John, my partner in conversation, who's also an African American. He teaches at Columbia University and writes a regular piece, a newsletter for the New York Times. And he took exception, and he and I, John and I, went back and forth about this. And it came to...
Me saying what I actually thought about what was happening in Gaza and what I thought was October 7, 2023 was horrific. What Hamas did was barbaric. I'm against it. I have no brief for it whatsoever. However, what I saw proceeding in the aftermath of that was a campaign of collective punishment that was horrific in the extreme, and I didn't want to have my country having anything to do with it, and I wasn't afraid to say so.
Now, I didn't say it quite that directly, but that's pretty much the burden of what it is I had to say. So that's it? You didn't say... He didn't, like, espouse violence or... No, I basically took up the cause that has animated a lot of agitation, not just on college campuses in the United States, but in public opinion throughout the world. Just saying, stop it.
I called for a ceasefire with the release of the hostages of course but I said this is not what a civilized country should be doing, and I object. That doesn't seem... I mean, people can disagree with you for sure, but it doesn't seem like radical or crazy. No, and a lot of Israelis agree with me for sure. Well, including the one you interviewed, I guess. Your colleague at Brown. Yeah, I mean, only of course, but many. Yeah, oh, I know. So what happened next?
Uh, well, next, uh, the, um, outfit called Air Wars, A-I-R. WARS Air Wars, which is an initiative to study the consequences of aerial bombardment in conflict, put out a report. documenting the extensive civilian casualties that were being engendered by bombing attacks that Israel was conducting in Gaza. And I had one of the people who was sympathetic to the report.
on the show to discuss the report about civilian casualties. Basically he was arguing that the number of women and children killed relative to the number of combatants killed was exceptionally high. and reflected tactics that you could question as to whether or not they were absolutely necessary. I mean, he made a collective punishment argument. And I had him in a debate. This guy's name is Andrew Cockerell. He's a historian, PhD student at the London School of Economics.
I had one with Eli Lake, who's a journalist who writes about Middle East and other international affairs. But it was a debate, so you had both sides. I've never heard of Cockrell. I don't know anything about it. Yeah, well, he's not very prominent. Yeah, but Lake is prominent, and... But both sides were represented. I guess that's what I just want to establish. Yeah, both sides were represented, and they had their back and forth about how do you interpret the data.
on civilian casualties and the aerial bombardment of this campaign. And then I did a kind of me directly to the camera 10 minute or 15 minute reflection on the interview. as a bonus feature of the podcast, which we make available to paying subscribers and where I interact with someone from my staff who basically interviews me about the interview that I did. And I was asked, did I learn anything from Eli Lake?
I said, what was I going to learn? I basically recounted my view, which I've already described here. of what has been proceeding there in Gaza as a collective punishment that I don't think is justified. And I said, no, he said nothing to dissuade me from that point of view. And that got posted. And I got notified the next day that the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow. How did they tell you?
I got a note from Raihan saying, as I've mentioned, that we do review our scholar connections from time to time for productivity. shared priorities, and we've decided not to continue to work with you. The next day? Yeah. Did he call you? No. No, it was a two-paragraph email. And that's it? That was the only contact you had? I haven't talked to him since.
I know Raihan is one of the, it sounds like he was a friend of yours too, one of the world's nicest people. Yeah, I like Raihan a lot actually. I'm a little bit disappointed about this. Now let me just say this. But what do you think that was? I assume it was somebody saying, this guy's got to go. And I don't know who the somebody is. I assume that that's somebody sitting on the board of the Manhattan Institute, or it may be that the internal deliberations had been.
The warning signs had been flashing for some months. And finally, this was over the top and more than people could tolerate. It may be the John Paulson senior fellow, John Paulson or someone like him that is a heavy hitter who puts up funds for the institute's operation set. This is unacceptable. You gotta do something about this. But I'm speculating and saying that. And I want to say something else.
Tucker, which is that I'm not mad at anybody. I am sobered and it's a cold bucket of water in the face and it's a reminder to me about the environment that we all operate in. The Manhattan Institute had been good to me. They helped me get my memoir written. They have supported my work.
I've made friends there. So it's not as if I'm feeling that I've been... disrespected, although I imagine that the positions that I took on this issue just were simply not tolerable, and this has been the consequence of that.
First of all, it's so sad, and I would agree. I think the Manhattan Institute's been a force for good, and they've been kind to me. You know, 30 years ago, I didn't have any money. I worked for them on the side. They were great, and I really like Ryan. I like everyone I know there. Chris Ruffo, I think, is their good people. But...
I think this is a really revealing thing that you're describing. And I wonder if the conversation had been about an American bombing campaign somewhere. There have been so many. but of any country that we've been bombing, you know, and you had said, I think this amounts to collective punishment, and I think it's wrong. This is not how civilized nations behave. If you'd said that about the United States, Would you have gotten the same reaction? No, in my opinion, not at all.
You know, the issue of Israel and the nature of the October 7th attack and the... political climate that's been created since and the advent of vigorous protests on American campuses and The need to marshal all hands on deck here for the project of Zionism, a project of defending the project of establishing the state of Israel, which is under threat. requires people to get in line and I think that's what's going on here. I just think it feels to me counterproductive.
I love the United States. I'm never leaving tons of things about American history I would not defend. Why would I? Slavery. I like the American Indians. I don't think they were treated very well. That's part of our founding, and it's depressing, and I'm happy to say that.
I think the Vietnam War was a disaster. Iraq was a disaster. U.S. government did all that stuff. And I say that as someone who really loves America. And I'm not attacking America, but it's okay to say that. It doesn't mean I hate America, right? Don't you think that's a better way to approach... Public debate. Rather than just like, you must read these lines and anyone who disagrees is like a Nazi. That doesn't help the people pushing it.
I think my detractors, and I now speculate, wanted me to be a neutral arbiter and not to be a partisan, not to take a side. I think they wanted me to hear from Barry Wise or Douglas Murray. some such person to give the case against the position that I had stated. I think also that I'm dabbling in something that people spend their lives on.
And the feeling was out of my depth. And it's not, you know, you want to talk about race, you want to talk about affirmative action, you want to talk about reparations, you want to talk about crime and punishment in American cities. Sure, Glenn Lowry. He's the guy that we conservatives can rely upon to give a critical assessment of those issues.
You want to talk about Gaza? You want to talk about Israel? You want to talk about Zionism? You want to talk about the West Bank? You want to talk about the occupation? Who is he? This is not his bailiwick. And I think also that the fact that I'm an African-American who... embodies a kind of position of moral critique of anti-racism and so on who's prominent identity as a, not a wild-eyed leftist, but a person of centrist to right of center sensibility.
who however speaks out on behalf of the Palestinian position. They want to call me a Hamas sympathizer. I'm not a Hamas sympathizer. I'm, like I said, appalled by what I've seen proceed in Gaza and don't want to be. Associated with it. I don't want my country associated with it. I think it's wrong. I think it's excessive. I think it's Punitive in the extreme. I think it's inhumane I don't think it's necessary.
well, defend that position, will you? People will say, I think as a black intellectual of somewhat conservative sensibility, it's way out of line for me to be taking that kind of a position, and I think that's why. a point had to be made. Not to exaggerate my own importance, yes. Well, I mean, I just have lived in that world for so long, 35 years, that in conservative world, very famous, you were a very famous guy.
And so I think you have real importance in that role, of course. But why would it be more of a threat for you to say that than for one of your white colleagues with the same views to say that? Well, that's ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide, world court, international court of justice. I think the authorization of a certain kind of perspective that, of course, remember the huge debate about Zionism being racism.
I'm not making that claim. I'm not either. I don't want to get involved in any of this stuff, is my personal view. I was in Durban. South Africa in 2001 for the World Conference Against Racism. And I remember Colin Powell as Secretary of State deciding not to attend the World Conference Against Racism because of the controversy that had emerged about anti-Zionist elements wanting to make a point out of Zionism being racism at that conference and Paul wouldn't attend it.
I didn't endorse that position then and I'm not endorsing it now. I think that's too facile and ahistorical of an equation to draw. But I think that's the thing that the Defenders of the Zionist Project Fear getting a camel's nose under the tent. The idea that there could be some South Africa-like indictment of the political project.
that could emerge and could gain credence. And that's not acceptable. I mean, that's why I think the not implausible a set of observations about the settler colonialism aspect of the Zionist project. must be nipped in the bud. It has to be seen as absolutely ridiculous, and people who teach it, and I taught at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown as an economist for years, teaching international studies.
development studies kinds of courses and it's this sentiment of European influence throughout the global south and what not gets applied in the context of Israel-Palestine by some critics and they are now on the run, the critic. who would apply that sentiment. Part of the woke incumbency in American higher education, which is being run out of town on a rail as we speak. And I think these things are all somehow connected with one another. Clearly they are.
I'm struck by something you said a few minutes ago, that when you had Bartov, your colleague, the Israeli, on your podcast, his views are widely represented in Israel. They are. Well, having been to Israel a number of times, I know a lot of Israelis. I know that that's true, that there is a robust debate about these kinds of things there, but not here. What is that? Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok
Well, I could ask you, I mean, I can only speculate about why that is. I think though the influence of the Israel lobby, as it's called in some quarters, is not insubstantial, I think. Uh, they, um... Climate of opinion is influenced by a desire to avoid being accused of anti-Semitism. I think that powerful people can exert their influence in one way or another, and the anticipation of that influence being exerted is enough to keep people.
from straying too far from acceptable representations. Well, it's not working. It's making moderate people radical in a way that's not helpful to anybody. I just want to say I'm against it. I'm against... radicalism in general. And that's not the way to win people over. I don't think it hasn't won. Why didn't someone just call you and say, hey,
Glenn, this is, like, not your area. We're old friends. Why don't we have lunch, and I'll kind of give you my perspective and, like, just talk it through? Well, some people have done it. Nobody at the Manhattan Institute. That's what I'm saying. Like, it doesn't help. whatever cause they think they're advancing. We're in the land of speculation. I don't really know what happened. I don't know what conversations were had and I don't know what was said. I would have appreciated a call from Raiha.
Do you know how many lazy people are at think tanks? Like 99% of them, you're probably like the most productive person. I mean, I'm not to be mean, but there are a lot of senior fellows at think tanks who don't do anything. I do seem to have noticed that, yeah. Yeah. I've lived and I've worked at Think Tank. And I'm not attacking anybody. It's an employment program. I got it. But...
I would think from the perspective of Think Tank, well, that's why I guess they hired you in the first place. It's good to have someone who's well-known, can explain himself well, and likes to work. It's all good. I am at the end of a long career. I have a pretty good reputation as a scholar and as a public critic. My podcast is flourishing. I'm okay. Are you worried about speech? I mean, because obviously the ability to think freely is at the heart of education.
I mean, that is education, so are you worried about it, the state of speech in the United States? I am, although independent media gives me hope that everybody has got the opportunity to be heard now and pockets of influence can develop, emerge, and flourish. and you can't stifle the conversation in the same way that you used to be able to. Because you could control a few of the portals of dissemination of information, now that's not any longer possible. How long do you think that'll last?
I think it's going to just get more capacious, I think. I don't know, that's not my field about media, but I think we're on the verge of something revolutionary. Everybody's got an encyclopedia and a global translator in their pocket. Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint. So I actually wish that I were going to live long enough to see what would come of this, but I'm 76, soon to be 77, so, you know. What happens to the universities?
Well, there's a confrontation now, and I just read an interesting piece by Peter Berkowitz. I don't know if you know who he is. The Hoover Institution is a political theorist. And he's talking about the Harvard-Trump administration confrontation. And he's saying on the one hand, yeah, Harvard had gotten a little lax in it. enforcement of restraint on the anti-Israel demonstrators and had gotten very woke and it's kind of latter-day modernist relativism of the humanities and the social sciences.
and that those are things that can be critiqued, he says. On the other hand, he says the Trump administration's cancellation midstream of commitments to funding and wholesale assault and demanding to be able to dictate curriculum and hiring decisions of Harvard was over the top and some of it he doubted what's going to survive in the courts.
He says, in effect, this is almost a quote, both sides stand to get bloodied if they end up in court with one another for different reasons. So what about a compromise? And the compromise would involve, according to Berkowitz's thinking, basically Harvard conceding that, yeah, its curriculum had gotten too far left and anti-Western, and there should be an effort to stand up a school.
within the university of general education whose purposes would be more affirming of the Western cultural inheritance. And that while the school would be an independent entity that has its own faculty and whatnot, the undergraduates would be required to take some courses in the school as a part of what a Harvard education would mean. So that's a kind of a concession to the critics of the drift left of the curriculum and faculty.
and that the administration would back off of its peremptory gangster-type tactics of trying to gut the whole enterprise. And, you know, I think that's worth thinking about. What happens at the university? Well, I said recently in a public statement that I think, you know, if you ask what's going on in the university outside of the politicized discourses, what's going on in the sciences and so on.
What's going on in the social sciences at the very best places in terms of the, you know, state of economics as a discipline, for example, psychology as a discipline, for example. What's going on in the humanities where people are writing important books, where they're discovering new things about history, where they are examining in a critical way culture, not all of it is from the left. US universities are sources of excellence and of exquisite human achievement.
we have the best institutions in the world and that's a tremendous boom both in terms of the straight up people want to come here and study but also in terms of the spillover benefits and not only in the sciences and engineering and the patents but also in the quality of the American cultural footprint in global affairs. Uh, we don't want to squander that.
over a politicized campaign to stamp out wokeness inspired by the fact that people don't like anti-IDF demonstrations emanating from the student body. That's the tail wagging the dog here. Take the long view. We want to cultivate. these excellent centers of human intellectual achievement. I think that's the position I try to defend. Why is a college better than YouTube? Well, I'm a teacher who taught his last class at Brown University after nearly 50 years of college teaching.
In that last class, I engaged my students in open-ended conversation. We talked about ideas, and I reminisced about what we had done over the course of the semester. The course was on race and inequality, and we'd read widely. I got a letter from one of my students recently appreciating me and hoping that my post-teaching endeavors would flourish and saying that I had changed his life.
that I had shown him something that he didn't realize before, which was the fact that even though he recoiled against the conservative tone of some of my arguments. that he realized that there was stuff that he had never thought about before that he needed to think about. And he said that he was better off for thinking about them.
Inspired by me inspired by my example He says your eloquence. This is me patting myself on the back, but I'm just telling you what the kids said And your passion You know and this is from face-to-face encounter twice a week for 90 minutes with 20 people sitting around a table and me taking them by my hand and leading them through a corpus of work on a sensitive and important set of questions.
I don't know that YouTube can do that for you. When AI gets to the point that the bot on the other side of the screen has the same degree of empathy, eloquence, erudition, passion, and curiosity that I have. Wow. They won't need me, will they? Professor, thank you. My pleasure, Tari. We want to thank you every day we know the news, things that actually matter, telling You follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.