Glenn Loury recounts his ousting from the Manhattan Institute for criticizing Gaza’s "collective punishment," contrasting it with potential tolerance of U.S. military critiques, while noting Malcolm X’s suppressed radicalism. He laments academia’s shift from rigor to ideological fads, citing Brown’s hostility to dissent and federal policies undermining Black family stability. Loury dismisses systemic bias narratives as enabling, blaming elites like Al Sharpton for exploiting racial tensions, and questions declassified documents on JFK/MLK while warning of manufactured consent. The episode exposes how institutional fear of Zionism backlash stifles debate, with YouTube’s censorship mirroring broader threats to free discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
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 books.
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.
The shadow of the Second World War, it was still only, you know, 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.
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.
First of all, not everybody was a protester or enmeshed in the ethos of protests.
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 protest students, but there were also kids just going about their business.
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...
The process of the mainframe computer congestion.
It was pretty antiquated, but that's how we kept track of the accounting.
This was R.R. Donnelly& Sons, a big planning concern.
Lakeside Press is what they call the campus.
A 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.
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, like, throw tear gas on the quad.
I got a feeling of mastery in, you know, solving the problems.
And they're tricks, you know, in calculus.
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 going to 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.
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.
You know, 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.
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.
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, I 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 the kid and stuff, but this is not the way that, you know, 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 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.
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.
They had a program, MIT did, determined to respond to the time.
They were liberal Democrats.
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.
unidentified
So there were about 12 of us, 12 to 15. Did you keep in touch with the other two guys in your class?
I mean, it was just technical stuff, and you were challenged, and the people that you were studying with and competing against, They had 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.
Samuelson 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.
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 the early 70s.
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, that laptop and desktop computers, that...
Data availability and so on.
And also the change in the set of questions that people are asking, which are applied.
And our 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.
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 and critics like the young Christopher Rufo, but there are many, 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 or 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 and sexual liberation and whatnot.
The debate about capitalism, you know, is...
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, but you read it with a skeptical eye because you know that while the radical agitator and bomb thrower of Marx was an important historical figure,
you didn't think that the economic analysis It was really very cogent or incisive.
And you didn't read it as a Bible.
You read it as a, okay, there's 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.
The participants in the presence of 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.
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.
They've taken it where they've taken it.
The university has become, to a certain degree, captured by that sensibility.
I don't see how you can say that women were not empowered.
If, you know, we go to, who is it, Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or somebody like that, and the set of issues that they were talking about, and you look 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...
It seems to me to the way in which we reproduce and the way in which the species has evolved and some of that stuff is hardwired and it's going to, you know, always be a part 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.
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, you know, 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.
Well, you know, if you were to pick up a typical work-wanted ad 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 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.
So that's, I think, for the good, without any question.
That having changed, let's call it the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I think?
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 when you 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.
Patience Gromes 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.
Scott Davis, the author of this great book, traces her family life through the early 1960s.
And what you see for Patience Gromes is her kids' struggle, the neighborhood which is not wealthy but stable.
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 their 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.
There's, I mean, these are statistics that people cite all the time.
Black family life used to be much healthier than it is out of white libraries 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 limiting.
I mean, you couldn't just do anything you wanted to do and maintain the respect of your peers, but were also order-inducing.
Freedom limiting, but order-inducing, and provided a framework within which people could 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.
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 own work.
So I experienced all of this from 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 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 *laughs* 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 it.
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 bias narrative is that we're behind because they have kept us out.
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.
The world is getting small.
So, not confronting the development challenge, continuing to take the victim's 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 cognoscenti.
The anointed ones.
The Michelle 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?
So I always blamed, 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 this, 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.
No, I have enormous respect for the straight-backed, manly, autonomous, independent, responsibility-embracing 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?
So like all high school students, I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which I don't even know if it was written by Malcolm X. It was written by Alex Haley, but I don't know to what extent it reflected his 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.
I was like, you go Malcolm X. Why isn't he?
It almost feels like his message has been suppressed a little bit, maybe.
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 with the force of law, the federal agencies, the 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, you know, why 60 years later are they still classified in the first place?
I mean, I still think the truth 60 years later is really threatening to somebody, clearly.
Because on some level, like, why would you care?
If you found out there was a, you know, complex conspiracy who would 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, it's 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.
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.
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 when I'm reading, I read the Washington Post, I read the Wall Street Journal, I read the Chronicles of Higher Education.
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 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.
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 the...
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.
You're, you're, uh, um, Not exercising your full critical capacities.
You have to exert the effort to look beyond what's right in front of your nose.
There were no weapons of mass destruction, were there, 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 reemergence 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.
The Manhattan Institute is a think tank based in New York City, published in a magazine called City Journal, puts out reports and houses scholars who are investigating different aspects of social policy, largely urban.
They worry about crime and punishment type issues.
They worry about housing, about city politics, and 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 Pulse, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
And we parted a 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 had made at my podcast and some of the people whom I have interviewed there.
Where the issue of the conflict in Palestine and Middle East and Gaza and Israel has come up.
And I ran afoul 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.
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.
And 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 are right to take initiatives that are holding Israeli officials to account for the prosecution of that conflict.
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, I allowed 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 Coates' other writings.
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 cults.
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.
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, and 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 going to 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.
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.
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, to say, 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.
Well, next, the outfit called Air Wars, A-I-R-W-A-R-S, 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 the 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, Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics.
I had him on with Eli Lake, who's a journalist who writes about Middle East and other international affairs.
Yeah, both sides were represented, and they had their back and forth about how do you interpret the data.
On civilian casualties and the bombardment, aerial bombardment of this campaign.
And then I did a kind of meet 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?
And I said, what was I going to learn?
And 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 that dissuaded 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.
I got a note from Raihan saying, as I've mentioned, that we do review our scholar connections from time to time for productivity and shared priorities, and we've decided not to continue to work with you.
I think the Manhattan Institute's been a force for good, and they've been kind to me.
You know, 30 years ago, when I didn't have any money, I worked for them on the side.
They were great, and I really like Raihan.
I like everyone I know there.
Chris Rufo, I think, is there.
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?
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, the project of Zionism, a project of defending the project of establishing the State of Israel, which is under threat.
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 Weiss or Douglas Murray or 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, I'm 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, you know, 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, whose prominent identity as 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, you know?
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.
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...
make a point out of Zionism being racism at that conference and I wouldn't attend it.
I didn't endorse that position then, and I'm not endorsing it now.
I think that's a too facile and a historical 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 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 and development studies kinds of courses, and it's this sentiment of European influence throughout the global South and whatnot gets applied in the context of Israel-Palestine by some critics, and they are now on the run.
The critics who would apply that sentiment are part of this Woke incumbency in American higher education, which is being run out of town on a rail as we speak.
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.
I think, though, the influence of the Israel lobby, as it's called, in some quarters.
It's not insubstantial.
I think the 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.
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.
And I just read an interesting piece by Peter Berkowitz.
I don't know if you know who he is.
It's out at the Hoover Institution.
He's 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 its enforcement of restraint on the anti-Israel demonstrators and had gotten very woke in its kind of latter-day modernist relativism of the humanities and the social sciences.
And 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...
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 to the university?
Well, I've 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 is 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.
U.S. universities are sources of excellence and of exquisite human achievement.
We have the best institutions in the world.
And that's a tremendous boon, 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.
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.
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...
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 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 kid 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 the 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, well, they won't need me, will they?
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
Subscribe.
Hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video.
That way you'll have a much higher chance of hearing actual news and information.