All Episodes
Previous Next
June 23, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:25
Confessions of a Black Conservative | Glenn Loury
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Look at this cops and young black men, cops killing young black men.
I mean, what an absurd narrative.
When the real violence on the streets of America today is these miscreants and these THUGS running around with automatic weapons, firing them aimlessly out of automobiles at their gang rivals and stuff like that.
I mean, and you don't have any engagement with that problem.
Instead, You convert it into a white domination problem?
So that's the kind of truth that a black president needed to pull the covers off of and he failed to do it.
Glenn Lowry is an esteemed American economist and public intellectual whose research and commentary delves into the intersection of economics, race, and social policy.
Born on the South Side of Chicago, Lowry's academic prowess led him to become the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33.
Now, as a professor at Brown University, his research has challenged conventional wisdom and sparked critical discourse on issues like affirmative action, criminal justice reform, and racial inequality.
Lowry's salient commentary on the Glen Shawn substack and as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute highlight his depth of knowledge and often heterodox views.
In his recent memoir, Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative, Lowry reflects on his experiences in academia, moments of personal turmoil, and his political shifts over the course of his career.
In today's episode, we discuss the difficulty of political messaging and policy crafting around racial inequality, the trajectory of American race relations since the Obama administration, and Glenn's relationship with religion.
We also discuss what Glenn views as the real tragedy of race in America and the lasting damage from the national racial reckoning of the summer of 2020.
Stay tuned to hear Glenn Lowry's profound insights on these issues and much more on
this episode of the Sunday Special.
I really appreciate it.
I've been a big fan for a long time of an extraordinary amount of your work.
You have a brand new book out called Late Admissions Confessions of a Black Conservative.
I want to get into all of that.
First, I kind of want to start, I mean, it does cover the topic of your book, obviously, with sort of your history politically, because here you call yourself a black conservative.
For a long time, you consider yourself a moderate or a liberal mugged by reality.
So now in the title of the book, you're calling yourself a conservative.
What do you think that means?
Well, I could approach it in a number of ways.
As an economist, I could talk about kind of libertarian ideas on the economy, markets, property, prices, limited government, free trade, that kind of thing.
As a person who is a born-again Christian at one point in my life and very fervent believer, Less so now, but still with great respect for these traditions of religious search for meaning in life.
You know, I tend to be conservative on the cultural side.
But from the racial point of view, the quote, conservatism has mainly to do, I think, with embrace of a kind of autonomy, self-determination, personal responsibility, not blaming the white man, more Booker T. Washington kind of, you know, bootstrapping kind of response to the existential challenge that being the descendants of slaves confronts Black Americans with.
And my reaction to that problem.
The problem of what do you do, what do you do now?
Do you have your handout?
Do you go around talking about racism and reparations?
Or do you get busy building your own community?
That makes me conservative too.
So I would say on all three of those, economics, culture, and Black self-determination, I have finally, at this late stage in my life, come to embrace a conservative identity.
I guess that's a dangerous political move because you can be as groundbreaking a thinker as Thomas Sowell and just get completely marginalized from the public debate, treated as though you basically don't exist if you are openly declared a conservative early enough.
I mean, I've been saying literally my entire political lifetime, which now goes back about 20 years, that if I could pick one person to be President of the United States, it would be Professor Sowell.
But Professor Sowell, in sort of mainstream economic discussions, has never even mentioned, despite so much of his amazing work on things ranging from race and discrimination to just basic economic knowledge and decisions type work.
Why do you think it is that black conservatives, particularly in the economic sphere, or people who even are perceived that way, you, say, Roland Fryer, why does that marginalization happen?
That's such a good question, Ben, and I'm so glad you mentioned Tom Sowell, who's a great man, an epic figure of the 20th century, one of the great intellectuals of our lifetime.
I mean, you know, you can name book after book and Jason Rowley's written a pretty good biography of him and whatnot, but Thomas Sowell is a towering figure.
I keep saying he should get the Nobel Prize, just like they gave it to Friedrich von Hayek and they gave it to Gunnar Myrdal.
They can give it to a generic thinker.
He doesn't have to be a technical, you know, kind of mathematics, kind of fetishizing, you know, he's a big thinker.
Yeah.
But anyway, I'm not answering your question.
And I think there's a certain expectation that if you're Black, you have a kind of progressive, what they're going to call progressive or kind of critical, you know, that you have to be in an anti-system mode, that there's some kind of rebellion that's part of the authenticity.
And so when you see somebody comes along who's whose worldview is grounded in something other than resistance to struggle or domination, who kind of embraces the reigning cultural paradigms and whatnot, then they want to marginalize them.
I don't know.
Did that make any sense?
I'm not sure I understand the problem, since I'm kind of, in a way, a victim of the same set of forces myself.
One of the things I wanted to ask you, and I want to get to your critiques of the left, which of course have made you very controversial, but one of the things that I think that's fascinating, from what I've read about your book and what I've listened to you talk about with John McWhorter and other people, is sort of your take on why the right has been Historically unable to reach out to the black community or to black voters, so to speak, in some ways that are kind of unique.
So when I hear you talk about race very often, or when you write about race, you write about race in a way that you've talked about here as Essentially, it should be made less relevant to the question of personal autonomy and responsibility, that people should be taught that the decisions to make their life better are effectively in their own hands because teaching them anything else is counterproductive and useless.
And yet, one of the things that you've talked pretty openly about is that conservatives, when they speak that language, are not speaking that language properly.
And then when they speak to black Americans very often about that sort of stuff, it comes off less as an act of sympathy and pragmatism and more as a sort of alienating language with regard to black Americans.
How it's said is maybe not how it's heard.
I've heard you talk about that, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what do you think are the main obstacles to a conservative or libertarian message in speaking to black Americans?
I think that's a hard question, at least it's a hard one for me.
The thing that came to my mind, I don't care what you know until I know that you care.
This is an old aphorism, you know.
You can't really get my attention and tell me anything that I might otherwise be disinclined to believe that I'll take credibly until I'm persuaded that your basic commitments are consistent with my flourishing and not antagonistic to it.
So the suspicion that the motive is racist or a lack of concern altogether, that the prescription might be free market, bootstrap responsibility, but the motive for it might be indifference or hostility to the person as opposed to a desire that they flourish and a thinking that this is the best way to do it.
And, you know, if I were a white conservative being told that I had to curry favor with the sentiment of this population in order to get them to take me seriously, I might balk at that.
I remember back in the 90s when I started pulling away from conservatism a little bit for a period of time, being at a meeting where the great William F. Buckley said, In effect, the metaphor was, you can't say that the doctor doesn't care when he's dealing with a terminal patient, and he moves on to the next case.
And I thought at the time, oh, how horrible that was, how horrible.
And he was merely saying, You know, what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a way, was saying to Richard Nixon in that famous benign neglect.
He says, I think it's time for the race question to endure a period of benign neglect, meaning, you know, let's move on to other stuff.
And people get from that the message that you don't care.
You know, I want to go back to that period in your life because I find that particularly fascinating.
I want to get to kind of the before and then the after also.
But that period which you do talk about in your new book, that period where you moved away from conservatism, I think is instructive for conservatives in speaking about race.
So maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, what were the forces that propelled you away from conservatism and toward a sort of view of yourself as more moderate or even left leaning?
Okay.
Some of those forces were not as flattering to me as others.
I mean, so the unflattering was like, I was feeling alienated from other African-American intellectuals, and I wanted to be rehabilitated.
You know, in other words, I'd been out in the wilderness with Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams and people, and I kind of wanted to get back into good graces.
And with the likes of the Cornel West and the Henry Louis Gates Jr.s and the Anthony Oppys, the kind of what I call the Negro cognoscente in my book, I mean, the kind of intellectual elites amongst African-Americans, because You know, being from the South Side of Chicago, being a black guy, I mean, having a certain identity I wanted to be.
And, you know, I was getting pressure all over the place, even from my own family, even from my own children.
You know, I was getting pressure about my politics.
So maybe I was succumbing to that a little bit.
The mass incarceration issue, there was a while where I was very agitated about the sharp increase in the size of the prison population and the racial disparity in it and all of that, and I leaned left in those years on those issues.
But there were also other things that were going on.
So, the bell curve came out.
I had a real problem with it.
You know, the speculation about the intrinsic intellectual inferiority of African Americans.
I mean, you know, forgive me, as I told my friends at commentary when I wanted to write a critical review of the bell curve, and this Norman Podhoretz and Neil Casadoy, they said, no, thank you, because we're not piling on Charles.
And I felt bad about that because I felt like I was protecting my people.
There was this kind of thing.
Other stuff happened.
I, as I said, became a Christian and was moved in a way about social justice kind of questions from that point of view.
It was an African American congregation, AME, Pretty conservative theologically, but also a sense of responsibility for uplifting the Black community kind of thing.
So there were various pressures and stuff that were.
There were some books I write about in my book, my reaction to The Bell Curve, to Abigail and Stephen Thornstrom's book, America in Black and White, and to Dinesh D'Souza's book, The End of Racism.
I had problems with those books, which I could go into, but we don't want to waste our time on that kind of thing.
Actually, I might want to waste my time for at least five minutes on that sort of thing, because I think that it's instructive as to the approach that conservatives should take when they discuss these sorts of issues.
Because obviously, you're not only somebody who's open to conservatism, you're somebody who is.
Conservative.
And yet you found the messages of those books particularly alienating.
And I think that that is something that's worth conservatives, people who very likely listen to my show, talking about.
Like, what exactly is the best way to discuss issues that were being taken on by Charles Murray or the Thernstroms or Dinesh in those books?
And how do they differ from your message with regard to race, which is a message of taking ownership of your own life?
What is the distinction there?
Okay, well, I don't have to be right about this.
This is just my opinion, and this is 25, 30-year-old stuff, in a way, going back to the 90s.
But I already said my problem with Merriam-Hernstein, which was, in a way, a kind of defense of the race.
It was a kind of—the intellectual agenda here is hostile to the essential interests of African Americans to characterize our subordinate social status as the result of intrinsic or inborn deficiency.
Now Charles Murray, who is a friend of mine, would say that's not what I was saying.
But certainly that message was in the air and there was a disquiet that I had with that whole project.
He has a long career now to stand on, and you can look at his corpus of work.
That book, The End of Racism, and I wrote a review in the Weekly Standard about the book.
I thought it was just snide.
I thought it was a smirk.
I thought it was too clever by half.
I thought he was kind of dancing on the graves of people.
I mean, he's a young immigrant from, is he from Mumbai?
Dartmouth?
He had this political correctness book, Illiberal Education, which I thought was a good book.
And then he comes along with this, and he undertakes to sort of summarize from a 20-something conservative intellectual activist kind of perspective.
And I thought he made light.
I mean, I could go into details, and some of it was maybe personal.
Some of it was my reaction to him at that stage in his life.
But I had a problem with the book.
I wrote that review in the Weekly Standard.
And as far as American Black and White is concerned, it was sort of this point that I made earlier, which is, you know, are we going to stop caring about whether we get this problem right?
The problem being the residual subordinate status of African Americans given slavery and Jim Crow and all that, or are we just going to move on?
And in a way, I thought they wanted to move on and I didn't want to move on.
So I took the opportunity of a long review in The Atlantic, which Cost me their friendship.
To say that.
So let's talk about the residual effects of racism in American history.
It seems very often when we have this conversation that two sides almost talk past one another.
I have this conversation a lot.
I've debated this question a lot.
And I can be fully sympathetic and agree with the argument that history has consequences because of course it does.
And of course things that are baked into the cake for hundreds of years are going to have long tails.
There's nothing new about that.
But the task of any policymaker is to determine Number one, what would be the most effective corrective to that, if it can be corrected without violating the rights of others?
And two, trying to actually Create some sort of metric whereby you can determine how much of a given disparity is a result of past discrimination.
And that one is really, really hard.
It seems as though the conversation goes, okay, I fully acknowledge that the terrible history of early redlining, let's say the 30s, 40s and 50s, that that has tail effects in terms of familial wealth.
But how does that measure into today's income disparities?
How does that measure into today's wealth disparities?
And even if you acknowledge that it measures in a certain percentage, In today's wealth disparities, how is that wealth disparity corrected for by, say, bad mortgage policy as opposed to increased income trajectory, which would lead presumably to future wealth?
I mean, the reality is that there are a number of minority groups who had literally no familial wealth when they arrived in the United States and now have tremendous wealth because of those income trajectories that actually generate wealth generationally.
You know, it seems like whenever you get down to those brass tacks, Very often, people want to avoid that second question.
They want to go back to the original question and then suggest that you're just not acknowledging the reality of historic discrimination and its aftereffects in modern life.
And then they conflate that with the idea that there is current discriminatory policy, which, as you talked about, even in Anatomy of Racial Inequality, the idea of contract racism, the idea of legal racism, that's been gone for a long time in the United States.
There might be contact racism, as you talk about.
I agree up and down the board.
I agree 100% on this overhang of history.
I mean, of course it's there.
There's no disputing it.
It's also very difficult to determine, as you suggest, what proportion of any given disparity that you see today is due to that as opposed to other things.
In economics, we have this concept of stocks and flows.
The stock is the wealth you have at hand.
The flow is what you're incrementing and adding to that on each annual or monthly basis.
And the long-term disposition of the stocks depends upon the flows.
So people are looking at a wealth disparity and they're saying, see, history has bequeathed this, but they're not asking where does wealth come from?
Wealth doesn't fall from the sky.
It has to be created.
So there's a kind of fallacy there.
If you don't get the flows right, the stocks are going to revert back to their disparate condition in the long run anyway.
You're not going to really solve the problem.
Wealth creation, I think, is the issue, not wealth inheritance.
I think too much emphasis is placed on inheritance.
But I want to say this to African Americans and anybody else who's listening.
We're in the 21st century, and to live looking backward and to base your argument on what you owe or are owed, what, you know, repair, repair for the historical, as opposed to the forward-looking, Which is the 21st century where, you know, China is coming and is here, technology is moving, telecommunications politics is so fluid.
I think this backward focus is both kind of analytically wrong, the issue is going forward, but it's also kind of corrupt.
I mean, it's a politics of dependency.
Who is the audience when you say wealth disparity?
It's the people who have wealth whom you're asking to give you some.
You empower them with the ability to determine whether or not you flourish, when it's really your responsibility whether or not you flourish.
Now, that last point that you're making there obviously has been made by people like Shelby Steele, which is that, you know, when it comes to the sort of white guilt community, so much of this politics is not being aimed at black Americans.
A huge percentage of this politics is being aimed at upper-crust white liberals who seem to regain moral superiority by declaring that only they can correct this problem.
If you just give them enough power, then they will correct all the wealth disparities.
And so, they're very happy to use the revolutionary fuel of this sort of argument in order to generate power for
themselves because then only they can fix.
They gain both moral superiority in the sense that they have
beaten their chest and talked about the historic discrimination of the country,
but not me. I'm dissociated from that. And also, if you give me the power, I alone can fix.
I agree. I agree 100%.
I like that characterization of Shelby.
But I'd ask the question, if you were on the victim's side of that, why would you give them that kind of power?
Why would you want them to have that kind of power over you?
You willingly accept the position of a helpless client?
Why would you do that?
That's undignified.
That's not manly, is what my friend Harvey Mansfield would say.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
I mean, come on.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, an eternal truth.
Vegetables.
Unpleasant.
Take Brussels sprouts, for instance.
They taste like trash.
They haven't decided on what texture they want to be.
Are they soft?
Are they crunchy?
What are they supposed to be doing?
I don't know, and I don't have to.
Neither do you with Balance of Nature Fruits and Veggies.
Balance of Nature Fruits and Veggies.
The most convenient way to ensure you get your daily intake of fruits and vegetables.
Balance of Nature uses an advanced cold vacuum process that encapsulates fruits and veggies into whole food supplements without sacrificing those natural antioxidants.
The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides, or added sugar.
The only thing in Balance of Nature's fruit and veggie capsules are, like the fruits and the veggies.
You need nutrients to function at your best each and every day.
Balance of Nature helps you do just that.
It is, in fact, kosher, so I can just dump it into that protein smoothie And that means the gun show continues to go strong.
Go to balanceofnature.com, use promo code SHAPIRO for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice.
That's balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
Once more, balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
So when I look at kind of the state of racial America right now, one of the things that's happened even in my lifetime, and I'm still relatively young, I'm 40, and so, you know, even in the course of my lifetime, I feel like the sort of apex of racial harmony in the country was approximately 2007-2008.
And you can see this in the polling data, that about 2008, there starts to be a slight decrease
in sort of how Americans are feeling about race.
And then it just dives off the table in 2014.
In 2013, 2014, it just falls completely off the table.
You opposed Barack Obama for president in 2008.
You opposed Barack Obama for president in 2008.
I did also, when I read Dreams from My Father, on an ideological level, it seemed to me
I did also, when I read Dreams for My Father, on an ideological level, it seemed to me
that he was arguing for a pretty Marxist, materialist view of the world,
that he was arguing for a pretty Marxist, materialist view of the world,
that the reason that people do bad things is because of wealth inequality.
He has a section in the introduction to Dreams from My Father that I still cite
as I think one of the most damaging things that he ever said that nobody ever noticed,
where he says that, when I see the despair, whether it's in Jakarta, Indonesia,
whether I see it in young, dispossessed terrorists, basically, in the Middle East,
or whether I see it in the South Side of Chicago, it's always coming from the same sort of feeling
of material dispossession.
I thought, that's a bizarre argument.
The notion that black Americans in the South Side of Chicago are committing terror acts
in the same way as, say, a radical young Muslim who's 18 living in the Gaza Strip or something.
First of all, lumping all that together in sort of this Marxist materialist way is bizarre.
But it then led to him creating, in 2012, in that campaign, a sort of coalition of the dispossessed.
And we're still seeing that politics played forward today.
I've made the argument that basically 2012 broke the country and we're all living in the after effects of 2012.
That Barack Obama was elected by a large margin in 2008 on the promise that he would be a post-racial president.
That he and his very person, by uniting black and white, was going to move America beyond the key issue of division in the United States, that of race.
And now we are going to be one America.
Not white America and black America, just America.
Not red America and blue America.
That whole shtick.
And then it turns out in 2012, when he was a pretty unpopular president, he decided to start saying things like, Trayvon could have been my son.
And Henry Louis Gates, the officer, acted stupidly.
And he started pretty obviously pandering to particular racial constituencies, not just black Americans.
He also started making overtures to Latino Americans with policies on illegal immigration.
And it was basically, I'm going to cobble together this coalition of non-white Americans
and college educated white liberal women.
And that will be the winning coalition from here on in.
And when he actually lost votes between 08 and 12, and then he won the presidency
over the most milquetoast human being ever to run for president, Mitt Romney,
characterizing him as a vicious racist in the process.
That actually set up this bizarre nether region we've been inheriting politically since 2012,
in which Democrats believe that they can just get out the racial base by pandering over and over.
And Republicans in response have said, okay, fine.
Well, if you're going to turn white people into a racial constituency,
then I guess they're a racial constituency now.
And so you have this really bad racial dynamic that was set up in fact by a politician
who was afraid of losing re-election.
Okay, that was a mouthful.
Yeah, it was.
Let me see what I think about that.
2012 is the hinge year.
Well, it was Trayvon Martin, and you're right.
He did say, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
And Eric Holder was there whispering in his ear, and so was Michelle and all these other things.
He wasn't what looked like it could have been a more challenging re-election campaign than it turned out to be, but I agree about Milk Toast Mitt Romney.
A strategy that the Democrats have doubled down on.
I don't know if Biden's craven, obscene kind of pandering to the black vote with this very insulting and infuriating patronization and this dwelling on, you can't make it in America ten times better.
You have to pretend, you know, the Ku Klux Klan is coming to get you and I'm the only thing that'll save you from it.
Well, I mean, you know, and maybe it does have its origins in 2012.
I never really thought about that.
So my take on Obama was, what's the point of having a black president if he doesn't tell the country the truth about race?
You have an opportunity, I mean, to really move the needle on race.
And actually, race relations get worse, not better, after he serves.
And my account for that was, I never thought about the 2012 effect that you're talking about.
My account for that was more forward-looking.
It was like, he's only 60 or 60, 58 or whatever he is when he leaves the presidency.
He's going to be ex-president a lot longer than he was president, and he's got a kind of reputational management problem.
He can't be that guy who pulled the cover off of the fraud, which is the racial narrative of white supremacy and structural racism, when the real story is A failure to seize opportunity opened up historically at the end of the 20th century, and to take advantage of the possibilities of developing, acquiring, accumulating, building, and achieving on the part of African Americans.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, look at this cops—I'm sorry, I don't mean to digress—but look at this cops and young Black men, cops killing young Black men.
I mean, what an absurd narrative.
When the real violence on the streets of America today is these miscreants and these THUGS, Running around with automatic weapons, firing them aimlessly out of automobiles at their gang rivals, and stuff like that.
And you don't have any engagement with that problem.
Instead, you convert it into a white domination problem?
So that's the kind of truth that a black president needed to pull the covers off of, and Obama was as far away from doing that as you could possibly be.
Al Sharpton?
He brings Al Sharpton into his White House as an ambassador to black America.
He has contempt for the historic responsibility which was bequeathed to him when he was elected president to change the conversation on race in this country.
He could have done it, and he failed to do it.
I think that there are also some political aftereffects from 2012, to give my hinge theory some more meat on the bones.
The theory that Obama trotted out politically, which was that there would be an emerging minority-majority coalition that would be undefeatable for the rest of time.
When he beat Romney, I think the Democratic Party swallowed that line wholesale.
And so Hillary tried to campaign on that same coalition.
The problem for Hillary is that there was no way she was going to generate the kind of turnout numbers that Barack Obama did in the black community.
And so when she lost, instead of them saying Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and Obama was a uniquely good candidate in many ways, instead the Democratic Party said, well, this must be racial revenge.
This must be America rejecting the legacy of Barack Obama and swinging over to this Racialist, racist, terrible, white, supremacist Donald Trump.
And meanwhile, on the Republican side of the aisle, because there was this buy-in to the idea that Democrats would now win every election from here on out because of the demographic changes in the country, when Trump won, it became he's a miracle worker.
Because only a miracle worker could defeat that machine.
And so that meant, when you fast forward to 2020, that Democrats kept doubling down on the same Barack Obama strategy from 2012, but all the rules had changed because of all the early voting and all of this.
And meanwhile, when Trump said, I didn't lose.
A lot of Republicans went, well, of course he didn't lose.
He's a wizard.
I mean, wizards don't lose.
He's a miracle worker.
So there's no way that he lost, right?
He had to have been cheated.
And so now you fast forward to 2024, Biden's running the same campaign, except he's been president for three and a half years and been terrible at it.
And he is experiencing the Hillary 2016 effect, which is people don't want to vote for him.
People aren't going to show up for him.
And meanwhile, Trump has the right believing that he's a miracle worker.
So we're now set up for a situation in which either way the election goes, There's a high probability, I would say, of significant chaos.
I wish I could argue with that, but I can't.
I wanted to say something about something you said earlier, which was that they make, with the affirmative action and the structural racism narrative and the white supremacy shibboleth, They make whiteness into this bugaboo.
Then when white people start actually trying to defend themselves, they call it racism.
Okay, those were not your words, but that was something I took from what you said.
If you keep labeling people a constituency group, they start to actually see themselves as a constituency group.
You can be forced into a room with other people, and if everybody outside the room is clamoring for you, that they're coming after you, you're going to start to see some solidarity emerge inside that room.
You're the interviewer, but I almost want to ask you whether you think Trump is going to win the election here in 2024.
So I do think that he's going to win.
I mean, listen, I don't, I wouldn't put money on this election, you know, not for hell or high water.
Although I have, I went from a person who did not vote in the 2016 election because I was so dissatisfied with the candidates to a person who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, knowing all of his flaws to a person who literally fundraised for Trump this time around.
Largely because of Joe Biden, right?
Number one, I know what Trump looks like as president, and I do believe that the system has done a pretty good job of keeping Trump in check.
This is why when people talk about Trump's a threat to the democracy, the only person who's been institutionally checked in my lifetime is Donald Trump, actually.
For good and for ill, as it turns out in this latest criminal conviction case, where the institutions are being militarized against him for ridiculous reasons.
Joe Biden, because he actually knows how the system works, He's an actual dangerous potential tyrant.
I mean, I think the amount of tyranny that he's been able to actually pursue
as president of the United States is so far beyond anything that Trump pursued.
Whether you're talking about using the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
to try to cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans, or whether you're talking about the militarization
of the DOJ to go after Donald Trump, while simultaneously the DOJ is exonerating him
for the same kind of stuff Trump did on classified documents
by claiming that he's senile.
But then he goes out and rips his own DOJ for saying he's senile.
Or the DOJ trying to let his son...
Joe Biden, to me, because he knows how the government operates and because there are so many people sympathetic to him inside the executive branch, I think a lot of poison slips through the cracks.
The way I tend to think of it, in metaphorical terms, is that if American government and American institutions act as sort of a sifter, They are designed to sift out the worst elements and let the sand that's okay kind of drop through.
Well, Trump is like a case in point of a person for whom the sifter works beautifully because everything that he does that's incredibly dumb is a giant rock.
Everything that he does that's incredibly dumb is like, the election was stolen.
I'm not leaving.
And then it turns out the institutions are built for that.
And so the rock just remains in the sifter.
And so what you end up in the after effects of Trump's presidency are pretty good economic policy, really good foreign policy, too much spending, but nothing that is really kind of earth shattering.
Whereas for Biden, because all of his sins are ground down to fine dust, it just goes right through the sifter into whatever the politics are.
And so he's able to get away with an enormous amount because he's doing kind of smart people corruption as opposed to stupid people extremism.
Well, okay.
I have a hard time forgiving Trump not stepping aside after the 2020 election, notwithstanding the fact that I...
agree that there were irregularities and there were dynamics at work in that election that he had every right to feel he was unfairly dealt with by.
I mean, the suppression of that laptop story, the massive mail-in voting and stuff, the delay in announcing the outcome of... I mean, anyway, he had his day in court.
It didn't work out.
He should have stepped aside.
That's my opinion.
That's my humble opinion.
I agree with that, by the way.
Hold that against him.
In 2024, people are going to have different opinions about that.
I haven't really decided what I'm going to do.
I mean, I'd vote for Joe Biden, though, I can tell you that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, by the way, I think that's an enormous number of people.
And that's why I think RFK Jr.
is polling in the double digits.
I think that there's a huge number of Americans who are just going to stay home this time.
This is why I think that Trump does have some systemic advantages.
People who really like Trump, especially people who are now militarized by what just happened in New York in this criminal trial, I think that those people are going to walk over broken glass to vote for him.
That includes me.
I mean, I'm going to, again, I went from somebody who did not vote for either candidate in 2016 to somebody who literally donated money to Trump's campaign in 2024 and co-hosted a fundraiser for him specifically because Joe Biden is a terrible, awful, no good, very bad president and he cannot be president.
This is why I say like the institutions of the country, when people say that it was a coup, well typically a coup requires you to actually have control over the military to the extent that you're going to like walk into Congress and just declare that Donald Trump is remaining president.
Nobody was doing that.
Nobody was doing that.
I mean, what you had was a, was a riot that got out of control.
Many of the people who went in, Actually, we're just kind of foolish and wandering around.
I mean, I know some of the people who went in and literally not everybody who went into the building, even like treating all those people as though they were committing the same criminal offense is ridiculous.
But, you know, the idea that that was on par with like the Civil War, for example, that to me is such a deep misread.
And it's now being used to justify such exorbitant use of the institutions to stop Trump, that this is the kind of political dynamic that looking historically really does scare me, is that when you have a political dynamic, Where the other side is so quote-unquote dangerous that literally any and all means at your disposal are useful and necessary and okay, morally justifiable.
In order to stop that side, nothing good comes from that.
Ever.
Ever.
I mean the instruments of tyranny typically pre-exist the tyrant.
And this is what I'm seeing is that the instruments of tyranny are being created in real time.
The militarization of law enforcement, the expansion of executive orders, the willingness to end around the Supreme Court, like all these things are being created in real time and we're watching it happen.
And both sides are now just figuring out, okay, who can I elect to use that against the other guy?
That's incredibly dangerous.
Well, this might be a biased opinion, but I think the left are much more sinners with respect to the trashing of institutions for short-term political gain than the right.
I think the effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court because of this abortion issue is just horrible.
It's, you know, they want to, you know, pack the court.
I mean, I think the lawfare thing, we're going to disqualify Trump.
How did my partner, whom I disagree with strongly, John McWhorter at the Glenn Show, I disagree with, he said, tie his shoelaces together, just, you know, encumber him.
And I said, you're messing around with the rule of law.
You're going to mess around with the rule of law in order to handicap a candidate?
I mean, think about the trade-off there.
That's horrible, man.
But they're doing it.
I don't trust anything I read in the New York Times.
Not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, but because the New York Times sold its soul to the devil to keep Trump from being able to be president or to run the country once he became president.
So they've created a bonfire of their own credibility, and they're sacking the institutions along the way, largely to keep the populist sentiment that Trump embodies from finding its expression at the top of American government.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
First, are you still struggling with back taxes or unfiled returns?
Well, this year the IRS is coming after you.
They've been escalating collections.
They added 20,000 new agents.
They've been sending millions of demand letters.
Now that tax season is over, collection season has begun.
Handling this alone can be a huge mistake and cost you thousands of bucks.
In these challenging times, your best offense is Tax Network USA.
Upon signing up, Tax Network USA will immediately contact the IRS to secure a protection order ensuring that aggressive collection activities like garnishments, levies, or property seizures are halted.
providing you with peace of mind and financial security.
If you haven't filed in a while, need amended returns, or you're missing records,
Tax Network USA's expert tax preparers will update all your filings and eliminating the
risk of IRS enforcement. Tax Network USA will evaluate your financials and create
a settlement strategy to reduce or eliminate your tax debt, putting it behind you for good.
Don't wait any longer. Call our friends at Tax Network USA today.
For a complimentary consultation, call 1-800-245-6000.
I mean, I totally agree with that.
And one of the things that I find hilarious is there's all this attempt to intellectualize Trump or Trumpism.
What is Trump or Trumpism?
And what it is, is an impulse against these people.
That's what it is.
It's just an impulse, right?
Donald Trump is a giant, pulsating, throbbing, orange middle finger.
That's what he is to all of these people who believe that it's totally okay for them to Rip the guts out of the institutions and wear their faces around like Hannibal Lecter.
You mentioned it earlier, that vaccine mandate thing.
I mean, I remember that speech.
I remember feeling chills run down my spine when I heard him give that speech.
I said, this is a demagogic, you know... It really, really unsettled me.
It's a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
Yeah, I mean... And to have history prove them absolutely wrong on the medical facts.
Right.
I mean, between that speech and the worst speech I've ever seen a president give, Biden in front of Independence Hall declaring his political enemies basically traitors to the country.
This kind of language is never good in any country ever.
I mean, truly, when you have both sides declaring that this is the final election, this is a change from when I was growing up even.
I don't remember Republicans saying about 1992 or 1996 or even 2000 or 2004.
If John Kerry wins in 2004, there will never be another election for president in the country.
I don't remember that in 2008 either.
It was maybe a tinge of it in 2012, but it was really in 2016, I think, when Trump was running.
This is literally the end of it.
There will never be another election.
Now, nobody, here's the thing, nobody in America actually believes that.
No one in America believes that.
If you actually believe that, you would have a physical duty to go out and do something to the candidate of the other party.
If you truly thought that person was Hitler, you would actually have a moral duty to go out and do something about it.
If what you thought you were prohibiting and stopping was tyranny.
But I'm afraid that that's actually where we're going, is that if you keep saying it over and over and over, then an era of political violence that looks more like the late 60s and early 70s, I don't think that we're that far away from all of that.
The only thing I think that's preventing that is weakness and laziness, frankly, on the part of the radicals.
Well, let's be responsible in our position as public spokespeople to know that even when we talk about it hypothetically, we kind of feed into something that's not at all healthy for our body politic.
I mean, I'm not criticizing you.
I'm just saying, I hear you loud and clear, and I just assume you're not talking about it.
Yeah, I mean, so what this raises is if we're looking at, you know, the issues that face the country right now.
Given the polarization, given the fact that now so many institutions have been thoroughly corrupted in the minds of whichever party is sort of out of power, that if you're a Republican, you think that the media are completely corrupt and so you just don't believe anything they say, not just some of what they say, anything they say.
You look at the university system and you say, not only do I hate the universities, I'm not sending my kids there anymore, I might not hire from those universities anymore.
And if you're on the left, and right now the Supreme Court is controlled by people who
are originalists, you look at the Supreme Court and you say, I'm not going to pay any
attention to those institutions.
So if we don't have our institutions in common, and we don't have the federal government in
common, and we don't have religion in common, because religion has largely fallen away in
American public life, then where do we go from here?
Because, you know, I don't know if you're by nature an optimist or a pessimist.
To me, it seems the only way that anything can be rebuilt here is delegation of as much power as humanly possible to the most local level possible.
Because it seems to me that community and social fabric can only be built ground up and we just keep fighting over who gets to try to wield the baton to build the top down.
Yeah, I'm going to be a little bit more conservative in the small-c sense about the institution.
I mean, here I am at Brown University, so I'm embedded within the Ivy League and this whole machine that is, I think, sometimes rightly characterized as over-the-top and beyond the pale and unredeemable and so on, because there are a lot of problems here.
On the other hand, you know, I have some amazing students here at Brown, and they're not just whip-smart.
But they're really hungry to be liberated from the party line.
They long for engagement that's challenging and whatnot.
They may come in with a certain set of predictable views, but they love to be challenged about them.
I do have those kind of students.
So I'd hate to see it that we, in a revulsion at the elites, Threw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, because there's a lot of potential good here.
But I don't have a solution to the problem, so maybe I should just shut up.
I know, I mean, I think that nobody really has, I mean, there have been a few solutions positive.
Frankly, I'm glad to see some of the donors putting pressure on the schools to actually start trying to live up their supposed original principles as opposed to simply playing an inside-outside game with radicals on campus as we've been seeing over the past few months.
I mean, the insanity to me of you have people who are violating the law, who are sitting on campus.
We know that if their cause were a right-wing or racist cause, for example,
that those people would be cleared out forthwith.
There certainly wouldn't be full-scale negotiations with the boards of the colleges.
And so when you see people like that, I'm very glad that donors are starting to wake up to that.
Hopefully that will have some sort of impact on the running of these institutions.
But it really is sad.
I mean, again, if you are sort of, I would say, in your soul conservative,
you don't like the idea that all the institutions are to be trashed.
And you are seeing the right react with a sort of unbridled willingness to rip down the institutions and say that they are unsalvageable.
And some of them, I agree, are unsalvageable, but I think we've got to be really careful before we declare everything unsalvageable.
And that I think is a real danger.
I've been pleased to call myself now, I'm mostly pleased because I get to use the word non-ironically, an anti-disestablishmentarianist.
All these people are disestablishmentarians.
They just want to get rid of the establishment, and I'm anti that.
I think that it has to be good.
There has to be a good reason to get rid of the thing and a plausible alternative to substitute for the thing before you can just get rid of the thing.
Now that's from the UK, right?
Isn't that the religious wars of Protestantism?
Also the longest word in the English language, other than pneumo-ultra-microscopic-silico-volcanoconiosis, right?
I'm pleased to use it.
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about, so a lot of your book in late admissions is about sort of the combination of the personal and the political.
And that's really a fascinating thing that nobody else has done.
It's an audacious book in the sense that you really sort of bury your soul in the book.
And so, you know, can you talk a little bit about what you think that relationship is?
Because, you know, those of us who are in the realm of ideas, you know, and do it professionally, we like to think that the thing that's driving us is the ideas.
It's the thoughts.
It's the philosophy.
But in your book, you make very clear that that's not always the case.
How should we think about politics and philosophy in sort of a more realistic sense, in terms of how does that cross streams with just life and how we actually live?
Gosh, I don't know if I have anything of general importance to say about that.
I mean, I could only be anecdotal.
I could only kind of talk about my own experience.
And, you know, I was on the right, then I moved left, then I moved right again.
And I've talked about that a little bit already here with you.
I mean, I used to be a technical theoretical economist, an academic in the purest sense of the word, who wrote abstract mathematical modeling type economic theory papers for the academic journals and talked to 500 people around the world about those papers.
And that was my life and my graduate students.
And I got a job at Harvard, a young, talented black economist.
I was the first black to have tenure in the economics department at Harvard in 1982, and had the anticipation that I was going to go on in that vein as an academic theorist.
But I had a crisis of confidence.
The ideas weren't coming.
I wondered if I was good enough.
Maybe I had a little imposter syndrome.
Maybe there was this affirmative action kind of boomerang thing that happens when, you know, you move somebody along so fast and whatever.
But the bottom line is, I kind of lost confidence in my ability to succeed in that kind of work at Harvard, and I moved over to the Kennedy School of Government and became a more applied, policy-oriented, political economist.
And the race issue was rife.
It was something that I had worked on in my thesis, something that I had an interest in as an African American.
And so I became what fully developed as a Black conservative social critic of the neoconservative stripe in the 1980s.
So how does that relate politics and personal in a way?
I became more political because of a personal professional crisis that I was having, which relates to politics in a way because it's linked to affirmative action and the fact that I was brought in self-consciously as an African American to take that position at Harvard and that influenced the way that I handled those responsibilities or failed to handle them as the case may be.
And we've already talked about how I broke with some of my friends on the right like Dinesh D'Souza and Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom and Charles Murray about what was going on in the 90s and about how that had also personal connections for me because my identity, you know, longing to be, to come home again and to be embraced caused me to, I think, be more antagonistic to some of my conservative compatriots than I otherwise might have been.
You know, when I get asked a question about how my personal life should affect my politics,
I want to try to advocate for staying true to the sense of the intellectual framework that
you're committed to and not being pulled by the tug of war that goes on with popularity,
audience capture, appealing to other people, you know, going along to get along.
You know, even if you're cutting against the grain, you know, stay true to what you think is the actual right thing.
I mean, that's kind of the lesson that I draw from my various vacillations.
I've ended up back on the right, and I think I was right all along.
To be on the right.
I mean, I think the institution of the family is the foundation of modern civilization.
I think we know who men and women are based on their chromosomal inheritance.
And I think the idea that you would try to undermine that subtle understanding in human culture is pernicious in the extreme.
And I think the idea that that project of undermining that subtle understanding within human culture, the fact that it could go without being criticized within the academy in a systematic way, without seeing it for what it is in the long-term historical context, that terrifies me.
That's a kind of corruption of our intellectual life.
Stuff like that.
Anyway, I know I digress a little bit, but I mean, I was right in my conservative instincts all along, and I regret that I strayed from them in order to carry favor with my co-racialists.
So, you mentioned a little bit earlier your kind of journey religiously to Christianity, and then you said that you're to some extent a believer now, but how does religion play into all of this?
I've made the case, I had a book now, a few years ago, called The Right Side of History,
that was really about sort of the history of Western civilization and how predicated
Western civilization was on certain fundamental religious precepts.
Things like made in the image of God, equal before God, free will, the idea that you have
a mind capable of grasping actual objective truth, which is a point that Alvin Plottinga
made, this sort of idea that there is no such thing as abstract truth that is graspable
from an evolutionary standpoint.
That if you believe in abstract or objective truth, that's actually a religiously held jump that you have to make.
That there is a truth and that your mind, like a piece of meat, is capable of grasping that truth.
These are all religious principles.
How much do you believe that your religious belief plays into your belief system and where do you hold religiously?
You know, you're making me think about this wonderful book called A Certain Ambiguity.
It basically posits a confrontation between a Hindu and Indian immigrant to the United States who is a mathematician and an atheist.
And an American jurist who is a Christian believer, but is an open-minded man who ends up in a dialogue with the Indian.
And the point of view, the sort of punchline of the book is, they all have to have assumptions.
Axioms.
They have to have starting points of unquestioned commitment from which they then can deduce whatever they think of as true.
And religion is kind of like that.
And the idea that you would have to have some such embrace of an unproved, first-mover kind of primal commitment before you could even have anything that you called logic.
I mean, I think that's a nice and interesting idea.
In my own case, I was at a point in my life of crisis.
I was trying to stop using cocaine.
I had a real serious drug problem.
I was in recovery and whatnot.
I was vulnerable.
I crawled into the church on my hands and knees.
My marriage was on the rocks.
I had scandalized my wife with an extramarital affair that became public, and it was awful.
Read the book if you want to know all the bloody details.
And I needed respite from the noise of the world and from myself.
I needed to surrender to something.
And I think that made me more credulous than I otherwise might have been, you know, being a high-flown academic who doesn't believe in magic.
You know, you tell me a man was Dead, and now he's raised from the dead and he lives on?
That's the vehicle to connect me to the creator of the universe?
That's asking a lot from a guy with a PhD from MIT who thinks of himself as a modern man.
But I did come to believe, and it did really revolutionize my life.
And it's a long story, perhaps longer than I can tell here, as to how it is that I came to have doubts.
The doubts became creeping, and the crevice got bigger and bigger, and suddenly I couldn't find my faith.
And I try to talk about that in the book.
But I say, even here, I'm in my eighth decade of life.
I'm 75 years old.
I'm not going to live forever, you know, mortality and all of that.
I think it's kind of an open question.
I think I don't want to be so arrogant to presume that I know the answer to the question, you know, about the existence of God and so on.
So anyway, call me an agnostic at this stage in my life, but I have great respect for the fact that people are grappling with this enormous issue of what is the meaning of life?
What's the foundational belief that grounds all of our strivings?
I think there's nobility in the quest for an answer to that question.
So when it comes to, you know, go back to the racial issue briefly, when it comes to the racial debate,
it seems like the racial debate has gotten markedly stupider over the course of my lifetime.
You know, when I was at Harvard Law, one of my professors, there's Randall Kennedy.
Randall's a really interesting guy, right?
He has some very heterodox views.
Yeah, Randy's a great guy.
Yeah, I mean, there is this kind of fascinating conversation among racial academics that has completely been sidelined in favor of Ibram X. Kendi and Kimberly Crenshaw and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most overrated writer I have ever read in my entire life, bar none.
The idea that Ta-Nehisi Coates is some sort of phenomenal author He is so purple, his metaphors are mixed.
I just, I can't stand it.
But it's not just that I hate his writing.
Like I think that his thinking is incredibly messy and deliberately attempting to obfuscate issues.
And I feel like to that end, I actually would prefer Ebermack's Kennedy
who just says the dumb thing out loud.
Ta-Nehisi seems to sort of paste over the dumb thing with layers of colorful adjectival use.
And Ebermack Kennedy is just like, nope, I'm gonna say the thing right here in front of you.
But it does feel like our racial debate now is incredibly, incredibly dumb.
And I don't know whether that's a good thing because maybe that means that it's clarifying
in a certain sense and we've reached sort of apex woke and now we're receding.
Or we kind of keep sliding down that chute.
Well, I have an interested position in this debate.
I am also a contributor on the questions that people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi address, and I have issued my very negative assessments of both of those authors on many occasions in the past.
I won't try to I like your formulation, though.
At least Ibram X. Kendi is straightforwardly dumb.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has to give me a long set of paragraphs and metaphors in order to make the same dumb point.
I think there's merit in that assessment.
Is it getting dumber?
Yeah, it's definitely getting dumber.
I'm doing my best, man.
I'm hoping that the memoir will raise my profile a little bit.
That's Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative, everybody, just out from Norton.
And we'll see.
God's not finished with me yet, but it's definitely an uphill struggle.
You know, we said what we said about Obama.
I think all this Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd stuff.
I mean, riots in the cities.
I mean, people have no idea what that's costing politically to the country.
They talk about January 6th, but the summer of 2020, I think, towers over January 6th in terms of the damage to the fiber of the country, the serial disorder, defund the police.
Anyway, I could go on for a long time about that.
I mean, I think that the summer of 2020, which is the great ignored period in American history,
because it is clearly the most, between the COVID lockdowns and the giant riots
in the middle of the summer, it is clearly the most,
it is an inflection point in American history, the summer of 2020.
And the willingness to sort of gloss over it as though it never happened,
and to pretend that none of it ever happened, the lockdowns never happened,
that you didn't have Kamala Harris talking about bailing people out of jail,
the fact that the Democratic Party was kind of complicit in those riots, and trying to use that,
as I've said before, the revolutionary jet fuel in the engine of the Biden election.
You want to talk about breaking trust with the American people that I don't think has really ever been repaired or even attempted to be repaired.
That's it.
I mean, like, it led to serious life changes for people.
Summer of 2020 is the reason I live in Florida, right?
I grew up in Los Angeles.
I lived my entire life in Los Angeles.
They locked us in our houses starting in March and then they would not let us come out unless we were rioting on behalf of George Floyd.
And so at about the time that my wife was being Double locked down because we weren't allowed to leave our house because there was curfew because of the riots that were happening blocks away.
And she was hearing the helicopters swirling over our house in a fairly nice area of Los Angeles.
And we were also locked down because of the lockdowns.
It was about that time she turned to me and said, maybe we ought to take a look at Florida.
And I don't feel like I'm alone in that.
I mean, that's sort of... Again, the willingness to just pretend that none of this ever happened or that it was normal is the part that's astonishing to me.
Yeah, and I think you have to blame the journalist establishment and the academy because these are really fundamental things in American history.
I mean, here's an anecdote.
So Jacob Blake.
Jacob Blake was a guy who got shot in the back by cops in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and it caused riots.
The circumstances of him getting shot by cops was, long story short, he was kidnapping his girlfriend's children, who may have been his own kids, and her car, without her permission, and she called the cops.
He had a knife.
He was resisting arrest and not responsive to commands to cease and desist.
He turned with the knife in his hand and the cop shot him.
Now, to make a long story short, Kamala Harris and Joseph Biden called his bedside in the hospital.
To inquire of his well-being.
That's despicable.
And it goes without commentary.
It's forgotten.
If I hadn't told you, you wouldn't even know about it, audience.
So that's just to say I agree with you.
Well, Glenn, you're out there doing God's work.
The good news is you're 75, which means that if you run for president, you're young.
You're a spring chicken.
So maybe that's still in your future.
I'd vote for your nomination more than pretty much anybody else out there.
Glenn, really appreciate your work.
Really appreciate the new book.
Folks, go check out Late Confessions right now.
Glenn, thank you so much.
You're welcome, Ben.
Good be with you.
Associate producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.
Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.
Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.
Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.
Executive producer, Justin Siegel.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
▲
Export Selection