Normally I’d have a post-show episode for you today, where I discuss Monday’s conversation with my team. But the holidays have me thinking about the ones closest to me, and I wanted to post something in that spirit. I’d like to invite you into my home, in a way. And as guests, I’d simply ask that you participate in the spirit of the season and, in your comments (if any), be kind to my loved ones.

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In October, the American Philosophical Society invited me to Philadelphia for an event about Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative hosted by Peter Dougherty. The first half of the event features me answering questions about the book from Peter, and the second half features questions from the audience. If you’ve read the book or taken in any of the related content I’ve posted here over the last eight months or so, you have a sense of what the book is about. (It makes a great holiday gift, by the way.) But I wanted to focus on a couple audience questions, because they speak to issues broader than the book. You can watch the whole video above, and the questions under discussion start here.

Two questioners ask about my conversations with Amy Wax over the years. We were in Philadelphia, after all, very close to the University of Pennsylvania, where Amy is on the law school faculty. I might have expected she would come up. Two questioners ask about Amy’s appearances on my show, and they seem perplexed. Why would I repeatedly invite a figure who is, in their view, so toxic, so prejudiced, so wrong?

I don’t think Amy Wax is wrong about everything, though I do disagree with quite a bit of what she says. But as I say to the questioner, in some sense her “wrongness” is precisely why I do keep having her on. Whatever Penn says about the reasons behind its sanctioning of Wax, it’s unthinkable to me that they would take such punitive measures against an analogous figure from the left. I do think that, whatever else she’s accused of, she is being punished for her political views.

If Amy Wax is as “wrong” as she’s made out to be, then tell me why. Make a case that’s better than hers. If she’s as backward as she’s made out to be, it shouldn’t be hard. As I say in response to the questioners, she’s allowed to be wrong. If Penn is trying to shut her up, I’m going to give her space to talk (occasionally). We debate each other here, and the audience can decide whose evidence is stronger and who makes the more persuasive argument.

Apparently my willingness to talk to Amy drives some people up a wall. Good. It’s important to encounter ideas that vex you, and interrogating those ideas is a healthy thing. I understand my own ideas a little better after working them out in a sparring match—that’s the only way to truly test them. Removing “wrong” ideas from the ring only weakens “right” ideas. Without exercise, they’ll atrophy. And if they can’t win the fight, maybe those ideas weren’t so right after all.

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QUESTIONER 1: Hi. Thank you. I would not describe myself as a black conservative. I probably would describe myself as a black liberal. But I have a feeling that you and I would agree about 99 percent of the things that there are in the world to agree or disagree about. So I don't think there's some huge, [unbridgeable] divide between people who are more conservative and black or more liberal and black.

But there's one aspect of your recent affiliations I'd love you to share some thoughts about, because I'm very puzzled by this. You're here in Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School is up the street. And there's a professor at our law school—I'm on the faculty there as well—called Amy Wax. She often appears on your podcast with you. She has said some of the most demeaning and outrageous things about people of all different backgrounds and colors. And I'm wondering, what is it about her that you find interesting, compelling, important that has led her to be invited to your podcast so many times.

I'm just very curious. Thank you.

GLENN LOURY: I don't know about how many, but yes, she's appeared on the podcast over the last five, six years, more than once. And she appeared most recently ... oh, five times? You counted? She appeared most recently in the wake of her sanction by the authorities at the University of Pennsylvania for conduct unbecoming of a member of their faculty, as they phrase it.

Now, I think you would have to acknowledge that when she has appeared and has given voice to some of her controversial opinions, I've pushed back. I haven't agreed with her, I haven't endorsed her views. I've argued with her. But it's a free speech point for me. She gets to have noxious opinions, and the best response to her noxious opinions are arguments, not cancellation or condemnation for having those opinions. They are refutations of those arguments.

I thought and think that she's been railroaded at the University of Pennsylvania for basically having views that people regard to be unpopular. I think the we could go into the particulars and the details. She's a racial realist. That is to say, she thinks that there are deep differences on average between racial population groups relevant to accounting for disparities in the achievements of the members of these racial groups. I take issue with her on that, but she's not the only person who thinks that. Thinking those erroneous and disturbing thoughts should not be a crime.

I call her “my friend, Amy Wax,” and it's a bit of an ironic framework, because I don't know her very well at all. We're not actually friends. But I know that's going to drive a listener, perhaps you, crazy to hear her befriended by this African American, given the noxious views that she holds. And perhaps there's a certain amount of irony in it.

That's what I intend. I intend to push her into your face to a certain degree, on behalf of the principle that she gets to be wrong. It's a university. It should be an open discourse here. We can't preclude people from participation in it because we disagree with them That's my response to you

QUESTIONER 1: Very briefly. Just for your benefit and the benefit of others in the room who may have similar concerns, it wasn't for her beliefs that she was sanctioned by the university. Because indeed, many Penn professors have had noxious beliefs over the years. I've been the vice provost for faculty at Penn, and I can tell you lots and lots of people say horrible things. It's for her conduct. She has actually hurt people and violated university rules, not just vague concepts and principles of academic freedom, intellectual inquiry.

We can talk later, but I just wanted to make sure it's not about the beliefs, it's about the conduct. And I understand as an outsider, you're not privy to the conduct.

Okay. She disputes that, but okay.

QUESTIONER 2: Thank you. It's great to hear from you and this great conversation. I guess I would just ask, though, you said this was a matter of free speech. Does that mean she deserves to be on your show five times? Does that mean of all the voices that you say she represents, that she gets the legitimacy of being in your company like that?

And I guess that goes to the heart of the question I actually had for you, which is this question about identity politics. I'm making an inference, and I apologize if I'm wrong. But the inference I'm making is that identity politics is a kind of an imminence within those communities from which it springs, rather than sometimes it being imposed by those reactionary forces you just mentioned. Amy Wax feels like one of those reactionary forces you mentioned. And I feel like free speech as a principle is something that is vindicated when the right needs to be vindicated. But it doesn't mean that her status or her presence on an Ivy league faculty grants her more freedom in a way, which it sounds like what she's getting.

I know there's a question in there.

This is the Nazis marching in Skokie, and the ACLU saying they get to march. This is the burning of the flag during wartime, and somebody's saying they get to burn it.

QUESTIONER 2: She's created an atmosphere where it's impossible for African American law students to succeed. I don't think it's the same thing.

I think that can be argued. And don't make me defend Amy Wax, here. I'm not responsible for Amy Wax. Five times over however many years, whatever. But I would appreciate it if you would attend to the actual conversations that I've had with her, not the caricature of her, this demonic thing. What were the contents of those conversations?

Oh, but I am in Philadelphia. I just figured it out. Penn is probably a stone's throw from here in one direction or another. I just figured it out. I should have come prepared.

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Last week, a New York City jury acquitted Daniel Penny on all charges in the death of Jordan Neely. John is a frequent subway rider, and he say that, as terrible as Neely’s death is, Penny did the right thing by stepping in. Perhaps he should have loosened his chokehold earlier, but Neely was a threat with a history of violence. There’s no telling what he would have done had someone not taken action. This is not the last time we’ll see an incident like this. As I understand it, and as John confirms, figures like Neely are all too common on the New York City subways. One doesn’t want to condone vigilantism, but clearly the systems and services built to treat, or at least contain, people like Neely are failing. In this clip, we discuss the terrible conundrum that failure poses for the millions of people who ride the subway every day.

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

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We’re closing in on the end of the year, and it’s natural to search out themes that emerged in my conversations with John. There are some old standards: DEI, the rise and fall of wokeness, the changing social role of race, and so on. But there are some new ones as well. Shortly after the summer of 2020, Trump was voted out of office, and it looked like his political career might be over. Now he’s on his way back into office, seemingly more popular than ever, and bringing with him an uncertainty about the future that excites some of us and makes others uneasy (to say the least). Trump hasn’t changed. Has the country? Are we reverting to the pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd, pre-Biden status quo ante? Or is a new alignment emerging?

John starts us off by bemoaning the ways ideological opponents demonize each other rather than trying to understand each others’ thinking and motives. (And he avers that he does not do this to Trump supporters.) With “peak woke” a thing of the past, affirmative action struck down, and Trump set to re-enter the White House, I ask whether DEI programs are next. As John says, old-school racism is relatively rare today, and parts of our discourse need to acknowledge it. A jury acquitted Daniel Penny, who was accused of negligent homicide after putting Jordan Neely in a chokehold that killed him. Would a white man who killed a black man, even unintentionally, have beaten the charges in 2021? Penny committed an act of vigilantism John thinks was necessary, if tragic. On the other hand, self-professed fans of another vigilante, Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, conjure sickening memories of those who said the US got what it deserved on 9/11.

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1:33 Demonization on the right and the left

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

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

16:33 Ground News ad

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

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

30:12 If Daniel Penny had been a cop

34:05 ACTA ad

36:18 The glorification of Luigi Mangione

47:06 Cheering for the villain

55:43 Will New York remain a sanctuary city?

Recorded December 13, 2024

Links and Readings

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

Briahna Joy Gray and Nathan Robinson on Luigi Mangione

Democrats have tried to use the courts to delegitimize Donald Trump. They’ve gotten him convicted on felony charges. They’ve tried to bankrupt him through the courts. These efforts were not only wrong, they turned out to be bad strategy. It all backfired, as many predicted it would. Trump’s prosecution—and his mugshot—only amplified an image he himself had consciously created: the rebel whose legal infractions are an expression of disdain for a corrupt system rather than mere graft and greed.

In prosecuting Trump, Democrats did him the favor of transforming him into an outlaw, a classic American type—Jesse James, Clyde Barrow, Donald Trump. He emerged from the courtroom a felon, yes, but a romantic one in the eyes of his supporters, a perception cemented by his bloody, fist-pumping reaction to a failed assassination attempt. As they say, you can’t buy that kind of publicity, and Democrats seemed more than happy to provide it. Their belief that lawfare could solve the Trump problem was a tacit admission that they could not compete with him in the voting booth, where it really counted.

Trump will soon take office, and he’s promised to respond to Democrats in kind by using the executive branch to prosecute his political opponents. As I say in this clip, I think it’s a bad move. It was wrong when the Democrats did it, and it will be wrong if Republicans do it. Escalating the conflict could have disastrous consequences. But it would also, I think, repeat the Democrats’ strategic error. Trump has capitalized on the perception that he is a triumphant underdog. Video of Democratic politicians in courtrooms or even jailhouses would dispel that perception. If Trump makes good on his promises, Democrats could then claim it is they who are being persecuted, and it would be hard to deny.

Trump won the popular vote and he won the electoral vote. The electorate put their chips down on him. If he wants to maintain the image he’s worked so hard to construct, and if he wants to do what’s best for the country, he’ll forgo “vengeance.” If he can get his policies through without lawfare, he’ll have proved he really can do better than his opponents. But if he relies on it, he’ll be no better than they are.

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GLENN LOURY: This next question is from Cara. She asks,

Glenn, do you seriously think that the Democrat lawfare will ever stop unless there's mutually assured destruction? If they couldn't handle return fire, the Democrats shouldn't have started the war. What they did was wrong. But there will be no incentive for them not to repeat it unless they are taught a very hard lesson. I'm sick of people urging one side to rise above the fray, when we know bloody well the Dems, unchecked, will continue their weaponization of the courts.

Okay, and I'm going to answer that I don't agree with you, Cara. I think the high road is better than the low road. When they go low, we go high. Who said that? I think that was Michelle Obama.

I think it's the institutions that we need to keep our eye focused on, not the particular outcome of any election cycle. I think the Democrats use of the courts to try to discredit, disqualify, and defeat, prevent from being able to run and then, if to run, to cover with slime so that he would be unelectable—Donald Trump. A felon. [Alvin] Bragg, the DA in New York City got [34] felony convictions out of the flimsy case that he brought under questionable conditions before a jury in Manhattan. Or Letitia James trying to bankrupt the guy with, again, questionable use of her office and prosecutorial powers. Financial mismanagement and inappropriate financial claims of the Trump Organization.

I think you don't want that. That corrupts institutions. You say, will the Democrats ever stop? I don't know. That's for the Democrats to decide. I think people who were appalled by their behavior shouldn't encourage behavior in the same vein. I think that's a race to the bottom. Nobody wins.

I don't know whether they would stop or not. I doubt that engaging in the same behavior would be an effective deterrent. I think it would be actually another step down a slippery slope that goes all the way down, in which all bets are off and everybody is slinging mud at each other.

Here's an analogy. You're in the early stages of nuclear war. Somebody uses a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield and they win the battle. Or they lose the battle. Another battle comes along. The opportunity to use or not use a tactical nuclear weapon presents itself. We'll make sure that they don't use another one by using ours now. Maybe it will have the effect that you anticipate or maybe it'll have exactly the opposite effect, and it'll push us yet another step up the ladder of escalation in the use of nuclear weapons, legitimizing, not delegitimizing, their use.

Two wrongs don't make a right. So I would say no. Just like Obama didn't want to go to prosecute Dick Cheney and George W. Bush after he got into power in the wake of the questionable use of American security institutions during the post-9/11 environment, on the theory that that's not the game that we want the government of the United States to be in, coming after formally serving officials for arguable judgments that they made while in office. Likewise here, I don't think it's a good idea.

JOHN MCWHORTER: That question was for you. I know this is an unpopular view, but I saw those things—yes, there was a deliberateness about it—as institutions trying to reverse the possibility of something extremely disturbing and potentially catastrophic happening.

And sometimes, even when you're running a big, giant nation like this with rules, a little improvisation might be necessary when we're talking about the return of somebody who—the daily calendar of Trump misdeeds—is talking to the president of Ukraine, Zelenskyy, and basically saying, I am predicating giving you aid on you helping me gin up a scandal against Joe Biden's son.

He wasn't ginning it up. We know he wasn't ginning it up.

You mean that Biden had actually done these things.

He had done something, yeah. And his son. It wasn't like there was no there there.

No, that is correct. To say you don't get aid unless you help us bring all of this to light, that's not presidential. To try to avoid that person coming back into office, slightly desperate moves, I cannot say that I did not sanction that. Lawfare, yes, it is. And yes, Democrats will keep doing that. And when it comes to that particular man, I would like them to.

There's not gonna be another election with that particular man. But Democrats will likely keep doing it. And as I said, when you said what you just said, your argument is not with that man. Your argument is with the people who might or might not vote for him. And if you can't win that argument, you don't have a chance of winning anything.

You go after that man if you want to, but if you don't attend to the reason that the people voted for him and not you, you're going to be toast for a long time. The Democrats are losing their grip on the working classes and lower-middle classes of the country. They're losing their grip on the immigrant population. They're losing their lock on the black population. There clearly is a problem in Democratic political land. And as long as you've got Trump as the avatar of your your reaction is against him and you're not attending to what it is you're not doing that people want you to do, you're going to lose.

Yes. But for me, the prime factor, the thing that I ranked above everything else, is whatever's going to happen to the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party, whoever working class people, especially of color, are going to vote for, it would have been better if that man had not been part of the equation. That's all.

Maybe there would be the same problem if it had been Vance or if it had been DeSantis up there. Yeah. But trying to make sure it isn't Trump? That was patriotic, as far as I'm concerned. But here we are.

And now we patriots—and I include you in that “we”—for the sake of our country, have to hope that he succeeds.

That is true. We have to deal with what we have.

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I’ve received a number questions about my positions on foreign policy and America’s role in the world. Some seem to think that I’m an isolationist who wants to see the US withdraw from world affairs. I don’t. In this clip from this week’s episode, I explain that I want to see the US pursuing its interests, but I don’t think those interests include wars that we can avoid getting involved in. A war with Iran would be a disaster. Likewise a war with China in defense of Taiwan. Using the military as a deterrent is often wise strategy, but politicians who would rather drop bombs and deploy troops than sully themselves with negotiations are going to be the end of us.

This is a clip from the episode that went out to subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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Kamala Harris is a communist. Donald Trump is a fascist. How seriously are we meant to take these sorts of charges? In one sense, this is just name-calling, and it’s probably been a part of politics since the advent of politics itself. As one viewer notes in his question from my Q&A session with John McWhorter, nineteenth-century American presidential politics was rife with insults, smears, and slurs. Our present-day politics are no different, and there’s no reason to think they should be.

But insults like those listed below also serve an insidious discursive function. They’re ad hominem attacks designed to shift the audience’s attention from the substantive claims, deeds, and policies of a politician to that politician’s imputed character. We’re meant to infer from those insults that the problem with the target is not what they do but what they are. The insult “Donald Trump is a fascist” implies that fascism is essential to his political identity. Therefore everything he does is, ipso facto, fascist, even the things he does that don’t square with fascist political ideology at all. Those are just distractions meant to throw us off the trail, or so the logic of ad hominem inference goes.

It would be one thing if those who promote and amplify insults like that were sincere but mistaken in their beliefs. All too often, though, their actions belie their words. As I point out below, if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris really did believe that Trump was a fascist, then why do they, when push comes to shove, treat him like an ordinary politician? If Joe Biden really believed he was handing power over to a fascist regime, his willingness to sit with him for a White House photo-op would constitute a profound betrayal of his beliefs and the country’s interests.

In other words, we know Biden and other Democrats tried using the f-word as a political tactic. It didn’t work, and they dropped the act. But plenty of ordinary voters, having bought into the smear, now do believe he’s a fascist, and they’ll view everything he does through that lens. An effective smear becomes a doctrine of faith. And one must have a lot of faith to believe that a wishy-washy functionary like Kamala Harris has the degree of political commitment demanded of a hardcore communist or that as unpredictable a figure as Donald Trump could abide any ideological restrictions at all.

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GLENN LOURY: This is [a question from] Peter Bradshaw.

What do the two of you think of the use of labels and slurs? I can think of these recent examples: “fascist,” “Hitler,” and “commie.”

To which I add, parenthetically, “apartheid,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing.”

Here are some historical examples. “Pimp” (applied to President Pierce in 1855), “Drunkard” (regarding President Grant in 1868), and “moral leper” (regarding Grover Cleveland in 1884). What are the effects of labels and slurs? Does the use of labels and slurs suggest anything about the user?

I find that to be an interesting question. Maybe I should defer to the linguist. I'll just observe, I'm not surprised that there are historical examples, because the temptation to call one's opponent a bad name, unacceptable, outside of the realm of legitimate political activity can be very powerful. Communist? A Marxist? Anybody who's in favor of the New Deal in [1936] is a Marxist? Anybody who is left-of-center on national healthcare and wants Medicare for All now is a communist? This kind of idea. Likewise, “fascist” and “Nazi.”

I can see the temptation. These are not descriptive. They are emotive uses of words. It's politics after all. You're trying to get people to get off their couch and go and vote one way or another. You're trying to get their juices flowing.

On the other hand, to the extent that they are clearly false claims about people— “I'm left-of-center, socialist, therefore I'm a Marxist, I'm a communist, I'm someone who wants Russia to prevail in the Cold War?" That discredits the person who uses the slur. It undermines their credibility. And likewise, calling someone a fascist. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris spent a lot of time talking about MAGA as a fascist movement until he won the election. And Biden invited him to sit down at the White House and have a peaceful transition of power.

You don't do that to Hitler. Hitler is not entitled to a decent, peaceful transition of power. He's entitled to be assassinated. How can I take you seriously next time when you go to such vituperation and exaggeration and hyperbole and then revert to norm when the voters don't confirm what you say?

That's a comment.

JOHN MCWHORTER: I didn't know Franklin Pierce was a pimp. I thought he was a drinker.

Those things are not inconsistent with one another.

Okay, anyway. Using slurs in that way is something that human beings do, because it's natural to seek to find some sort of coherence or system or broader explanation for all of the chaos that's buzzing around us. You're trying to make sense of things. And if You call somebody a commie because they like the New Deal or because they think Obamacare was a good thing, obviously that's a vast distortion of what the term originally meant. It's a way of saying, “All of this can be explained if you just realize that ultimately these people are, etc.” They are this thing. All sorts of other things about them are gonna fall out from that thing. It's a way of trying to make an explanation. There's that.

Also, there's the fact that terms’ meanings tend to change over time, and that change often is a matter of generalization. For example, the term fascist. All these articles trying to explain, “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” in terms of what the term meant in 1932? It's beginning to be used in a more general way. And I'm not sure we can get the horse back into the barn. We're talking about a general, vague sense of the authoritarian, as opposed to what Mussolini's regime actually was like. But we're trying to make sense of things. And yes those things are going to happen.

Or Ulysses S. Grant. How did you feel about his politics? How did you feel about the way he was waging war? One way to dismiss him was just to say he's a drunk. So whatever he's doing, he's not doing it as well as he could or he's doing it wrong or he did it by accident. He's a drunk. You're trying to explain. That's what people do. And so that's why slurs get used in that way.

It's a kind of mess that I think we just have to tolerate, because it's part of being a person, and people have emotions and people seek to make sense out of the chaos. Or they should try to make sense out of the chaos instead of just saying things like “apartheid.” That's what I would say.

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Normally, free subscribers to the newsletter and podcast have to wait until Friday receive the new episode. And normally Q&A sessions with John McWhorter, in which we answer questions posed by the audience, are only available to full subscribers. But today is no normal day—I’m releasing our Q&A from last month to everyone.

In this one, John and I answer and debate questions about the election and the incoming Trump administration, America’s role on the global stage, linguistic complexity, the state of campus wokeness after Trump, Gaza and the West Bank, political slurs, and lawfare. Things get heated, as they sometimes do in these episodes.

If you like what you see here, consider becoming a full subscriber. You’ll get a new Q&A session with John McWhorter every month, and you’ll be able to pose questions of your own. That’s in addition to the many other benefits, like early access to weekly episodes, full access to the archives, new post-show bonus episodes, and more. The Glenn Show is supported almost entirely by subscribers—this newsletter and the podcast would simply not exist were it not for your generosity. Thank you!

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2:49 Mike Spooner wants to know how I came around to supporting Trump

8:14 Substack Reader wants to know if Trump’s reelection signals that we’re entering an era where “reason and common sense once again prevail.”

15:34 Michoel Stern senses that I’m becoming more isolationist, and that I don’t want America to be the world’s policeman. So what is the alternative?

22:41 Robert Odear asks if there is “an accepted metric for linguistic complexity,” and if there is one, whether linguistically complex societies also tend to be advanced societies.

28:58 Nancy wants to know if the triumph over “wokeness” represented by Trump’s election is being felt on campus.

32:53 Jonathan E. Burack wants to know why I haven’t responded to this review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message.

45:54 Pete Bradshaw asks what we think of the use of political slurs like “fascist,” “Hitler,” and “commie.”

51:02 Cara C. suggests that, while it was wrong for Democrats to use lawfare against Trump, it is acceptable for Republicans to use it against Democrats, if only to teach them a lesson.

Recorded December 1, 2024

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Tomorrow, in lieu of our regular episode, I’m going to release the November Q&A to both free and full subscribers. Every month, John and I solicit questions from viewers, pick a handful, and respond to them in a bonus episode. Only full subscribers are able to ask questions (though anyone can read them), and only full subscribers have access to the episode. But this is a particularly rich installment of the series, and I wanted to give free subscribers a glimpse of what they’re missing out on.

In this preview clip from tomorrow’s episode, a subscriber asks me to reconcile what might seem like two contradictory positions. In 2021, I averred that Trump’s repeated attempts to overturn the election results constituted conduct unbecoming of the presidency. John had thought as much all along, and I conceded that he was correct. Yet after Trump’s win this year, I revealed myself to be excited about his upcoming presidency.

Is this “I was against it before I was for it”-style flip-flopping? I don’t think so. The American electorate voted Trump into office again this year. If Kamala Harris had won, I wouldn’t have been happy, but I would have dealt with it. And though I didn’t support Trump’s candidacy, he won fair and square. Whatever we’re going to get from him over the next four years, it’s not going to be business as usual. And we simply can’t afford—economically, socially, and geopolitically—another term of business as usual. So yes, while I’m wary of some of his stated goals, I’m also excited about the possibility for change.

John, as you all know, is not excited. We get into it a little in this clip. And we get into it even more in the full Q&A episode, which you’ll receive tomorrow. It’s an intense exchange, at times. So if you like what you see here, and you’re not a full subscriber, consider becoming one. You’ll get regular TGS episodes early every week—on Mondays instead of Fridays—commenting privileges, Q&As, post-show bonus episodes, and a host of other goodies.

This is a preview of an upcoming Q&A episode of The Glenn Show. To get more Q&As and a host of other benefits, click below to become a full subscriber.

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GLENN LOURY: You ready, John?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I'm ready.

All right. This is from Mike Spooner.

Glenn, in your first discussion with John after January 6, 2021, you told John “I was wrong about Trump” and “You, John, were right.” Those are quotes. Do you still stand by this statement? If not, what was it that made you change your mind?

And I can respond, Mike Spooner.

I do still stand by that statement. You have to remember that after January 6, 2021, the riot at the Capitol inspired by Donald Trump in protest against the outcome of the 2020 election, which Joseph Biden had won, the purpose of which was to disrupt the ordinary processes of government that would have certified Joseph Biden's victory.

I thought, and I still think, Donald Trump should have stood down. He had his day in court. It didn't work out for him. I am not now addressing the merits of his various claims. They are what they are. The merits of those claims are what they are. I'm not saying they were without merit. I am not saying that they were entirely meritorious.

I'm simply saying he had his day in court and it didn't work out. We're a republic governed by a constitution, which is law. When it doesn't work out, you stand down. The enterprise of trying to overturn the outcome of that election, which Trump engaged in unsuccessfully, was unbecoming in the extreme, in my opinion, of someone who would lead our country. I didn't see that coming. John, in his assessment of Trump, was not at all surprised that he stooped to that depth. I was wrong and he was right. I don't see any reason to change that assessment.

I think the implicit question is, why didn't my judgment that Trump behaved despicably in January and preceding of 2021 and the months preceding preclude me from supporting the outcome of the election. I did not support Trump during the campaign. I did not vote for him, if you must know that. No, I'm not telling you who I voted for, but I'm telling you, as I said out loud, I didn't vote for him and I didn't vote for Kamala Harris. But after the election, I said I was excited at the prospect that my country was moving in a new direction and I was happy that the Democrats lost.

I don't see any contradiction between those two things. Between, on the one hand, thinking that Trump behaved despicably in his handling of his defeat in 2020, and thinking that, on the other hand, I had a strong preference not to see Kamala Harris and the Democratic establishment affirmed in the election of 2024.

I stand by the statement that I was wrong and John was right about Trump in 2021. And I also stand by my more recent statements that it's a new day politically in America. It's very exciting to see what's going on and we'll take it a day at a time from here.

Glenn, I think your answer basically covers this, because how I feel is quite clear from our previous discussions. I'll just say briefly, and I really mean briefly, Trump was about to deny that he lost if he had. He was going to do it again. I find that utterly, conclusively reprehensible. He was going to do the same thing.

Wait a minute, what do you find reprehensible? That you think he was going to do it? Or that you know he was going to? Because you don't know what he was going to do in the counterfactual circumstance.

He would never allow that he could be legitimately defeated. Whenever he was asked the question, he would evade it. He was gonna do the same thing. Trump, you could have a calendar ...

But he didn't do the same thing. And in fact, the voters affirmed his candidacy quite to the contrary of the spirit of your remark. I'm hard pressed to see how your speculation about what he was going to do is relevant.

“Daily Bad Trump Thing,” taking the calendar. Something I just learned about him. John Lewis, civil rights icon, passes away. Everybody in the world, basically, prays for him. The whole world celebrates—not celebrates, commemorates John Lewis. Really, the whole country. Everybody, of any stripe. Donald Trump did not attend the funeral. The reason was because Lewis had not attended his inauguration. The president did not commemorate the passing of John Lewis. That can be my answer to the question.

Okay, I see that.

Isn't that disgusting?

I agree that he should have attended Lewis's funeral, to be sure. If he wanted the votes of anybody in the traditions that Lewis represented, he should have attended the funeral. If he simply wanted to represent the country adequately, he should have attended the funeral of this civil rights icon. Yeah, that's small. That was small.

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On this week’s show, John and I spend a long while discussing the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. We had two decades of hard-won, substantive social and political victories for African Americans. But after that, the movement for black equality seemed not to know where to go. When we should have been looking inward to our communities, building our social capital, and making up for time lost to Jim Crow, the leaders of the movement too often turned outward, insisting that “whitey” was still to blame for all our problems. And yesterday’s “whitey” is today’s “systemic racism.” In this clip, John and I discuss what happened when the progress of the Civil Rights Movement gave way to the slogans of Stokely Carmichael and his godchildren, Black Lives Matter.

This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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Perhaps I’m feeling hemmed in.

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John and I stepped away from the leftovers and sat down for a post-Thanksgiving recording session this weekend. As the family “patriarch,” it was on me to offer some words before the meal, a task I found a little daunting. To whom are we giving thanks, anyway? Some of us give thanks to God, some to the people we love, and some simply express general feelings of gratitude for the good things in their lives. I certainly feel thankful for all I have, but I often wonder myself where those feelings are directed.

In this episode, John and I review our respective Thanksgiving weekends. I had a house full of family and a crowded kitchen, while John did a little party hopping. John recently finished reading David Greenberg’s new biography of John Lewis. We discuss his path from SNCC to the House of Representatives, and the radical turn black activism took after the mid-1960s. In John’s view, the Black Panthers accomplished nothing. Even the great James Baldwin succumbed to the era’s excesses. I took my own leftward turn, and I talk about James Q. Wilson’s prediction that I’d come back around (he was right). Finally, we talk about John’s New York Times piece about Yiddish.

One big group of people I’m thankful for is all of you readers, viewers, and listeners. Thank you for making The Glenn Show the success that is has been over these many years. Here’s to next year, and many more after.

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0:45 Thanksgiving with Glenn and John

6:50 Glenn the patriarch

10:35 John Lewis’s legacy

15:48 Ground News ad

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

25:21 To isolate or to integrate?

27:41 What black activism could have been

32:02 John: The Black Panthers accomplished nothing

40:04 ACTA ad

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

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

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

55:11 John’s investigation of contemporary Yiddish speakers

Recorded December 1, 2024

Links and Readings

David Greenberg’s book, John Lewis: A Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I often write about the inadequacy of “disparity” as an analytic category. Too often, “overrepresentation,” “underrepresentation,” or “disparity” are pointed to as concrete proof that systemic racism exists, with no further effort to discover the cause of the disproportionality. Racial disparities are treated as ipso facto evidence of racial discrimination. Medicine is a field in which that fallacy can have major, even deadly consequences. Many African Americans have “poorer health and lower access to care” for a number of historical, legal, and political reasons. But systemic racism does not necessarily explain the underlying causes of the disparities. When researchers see “disparity” and automatically name “systemic racism” as the cause, they prematurely negate other possible causes of those disparities, especially those that ought to be addressed medically rather than politically.

I’m presenting the first chunk of Sally’s essay here for your perusal. You can find the rest (without a paywall) at Sensible Medicine.

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The Health Equity Agenda is a Bad Prescription

by Sally Satel

Methadone has been used for decades as treatment for heroin addiction. The long-acting synthetic opioid is given daily to block withdrawal symptoms and drug craving. Patients attend a methadone clinic every day to get their dose and, as they demonstrate reliability and growing commitment to the treatment program can earn increasing numbers of “take home” doses, up to a full month. The staff balance the earned freedom with the risk that a patient might sell their methadone or combine it with other drugs.

During COVID-19, federal government issued a new guidance for methadone clinics, in an effort to decrease infection risk. Whereas before the pandemic, even patients in good standing had to wait months before they could get a single “take-home” bottle per week, the new rule allowed “stable” patients, as the guidance called them, an entire month of take-home doses within a matter of weeks.

A research team decided to examine the distribution of take-home privileges by race. As they reported recently in JAMA Network Open, Black methadone patients on Medicare were less likely to receive take homes than white and Hispanic patients. The authors speculated upon possible reasons why this might have been the case: not all clinics necessarily adopted the new, more lenient policy, some patients may have preferred to attend daily, perhaps there was racial and ethnic bias on the part of the staff, and, critically, it was unlikely that all patients were deemed stable enough for take-homes.

Yet absent any clues about the relative contribution of these potential variables to the outcome—the racial distribution of take-homes—the authors concluded that, “Our findings highlight the imperative to reduce inequities in [Opioid Use Disorder] treatment.”

This is a problem. It is one thing to generate hypotheses about why disparities in health practices or outcomes exist, but wholly another to infer bad faith—“inequity”—as their cause without adequate information.

This paper is certainly not an isolated example. A 2023 meta-analysis targeting six studies found that Black patients were physically restrained in the emergency room more often than patients of other racial groups. However, the authors could not link use of restraint to agitated psychosis—a common reason for restraint—because the studies included in the analysis reported their data in aggregate form. Despite this formidable limitation, the authors concluded that, “methods to address racism at all levels (individual, institutional, and systemic) should be considered.”

Attributing disparities to racism is routine. The CDC deems racism “a public health threat” because it leads to disparities. The University of Michigan’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity identifies "structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities." The Senior Vice President of the American Medical Association says that “[R]acism — as a system of power and oppression embedded into policies and culture — is at the root of [health] inequities.”

There is no question that the poorer health and lower access to care suffered, in the aggregate, by Black Americans is partly due to the legal, political, and social institutions that have historically discriminated against them. At times, inferior treatment has been explicit and at other times passively inflicted through disregard of the differential brunt of policies.

But systemic racism is neither an actionable diagnosis nor a valid explanation of every disparity. After all, factors that initiate problems are not necessarily the ones sustaining them.

Only when researchers bring causal dynamics into sharp focus can health professionals know which points of entry into the healthcare system can help them minimize inter-group discrepancies in health care and health outcomes.

Readiness to invoke racism as the cause of health disparities is accompanied by a tendency to propose dubious, and potentially unconstitutional, policies to address the disparities.

[…]

Continue Reading at Sensible Medicine

My conversations with the political scientist Carol Swain are some of The Glenn Show’s most controversial episodes. And in this clip, you can see why. She contends that there is a political and media bias against covering crimes committed against whites and Asians and toward covering crimes committed against African Americans. In her view, the emphasis on black victims is a tool of the left used to divide groups against each other. If the conversation around your Thanksgiving table is getting a bit stale, consider firing up this clip for the whole family.

And speaking of the holidays, I’ve got an early Black Friday deal for you. Use the link below, and you can subscribe to this newsletter for 25% off the annual rate. That averages out to $0.72 a week for early access to every new episode of The Glenn Show, access to the entire archive, commenting privileges on every post, exclusive monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter and the option to ask questions, weekly post-show episodes, and a host of other goodies.

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I want to use this space to offer an invitation. These post-show quasi-monologues allow me to reflect on the week’s episode. As I get more comfortable with the format, I’d also like to use it engage topics I don’t normally speak about in public. When I find myself drifting into territory where I’m less knowledgeable, I sometimes say, “I don’t know why you’d listen to me. I’m no expert.” But I realize there are topics that some of you, my highly valued subscribers, do want to hear me talk about, despite my lack of formal expertise. Maybe those are topics that don’t come up on the show very often. Maybe they’re more personal, or maybe they’re wonkier. Whatever they are, I invite you to comment below and let me know—I promise I’ll read all of them.

Of course, you have to be a full subscriber to comment. So if you want to participate in the comment section here and on the rest of the site, receive weekly episodes on Mondays rather than Fridays, get access to the full newsletter archive, and get in on other full subscriber-only goodies, click below to join the community.

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This week we have a spy in our midst. Okay, not exactly a spy, but a former CIA analyst. My guest is Yaya Fanusie, director of anti-money laundering & cyber-risk at the Crypto Council for Innovation and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. He is also, of course, a podcaster. I got to know Yaya while we were both working on the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites project. I had intended to have him on to talk about one of his areas of expertise—crypto currency and financial crime—but was so fascinated by his backstory that we didn’t get to it.

Yaya begins by telling me about his audio spy thriller The Jabbari Lincoln Files, whose titular hero resembles Yaya in the broad strokes but not, Yaya insists, in the details. It’s not every day I have an ex-CIA analyst on the show. He explains how he became one and what it is that analysts actually do. As a black Muslim convert, Yaya might seem an unlikely candidate for the CIA, which has a mixed reputation among American blacks, Muslims, and black Muslims. But, as someone put it to Yaya, “this isn’t your father’s CIA.” As Yaya tells it, the days of COINTELPRO are gone, which is not to say that the CIA is perfect.

I loved this conversation. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to ask a CIA analyst for the inside dope? I’m looking forward to having Yaya back soon, and I promise we’ll talk about crypto.

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

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

10:05 How Yaya joined the CIA

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

20:42 The lessons of the WMDs debacle

23:08 A Muslim convert at the Agency

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

30:28 Terrorist recruitment and the search for self

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

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

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

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

Recorded November 9, 2024

Links and Readings

1776 Unites

The Jabarri Lincoln Files

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

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

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

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

Yaya’s other podcast, Designated

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As you might guess, the second text more or less reflects how I currently think about high crime and incarcerations rates in low-income black communities. At the end of the first piece, I write, “Black Lives Matter, all of them, even the so-called thugs!” I still believe this, as a matter of principle. We cannot write off the value of a human life, even a human who has done something horrific to another. Conditions in our prisons can be despicable—there is no virtue in forcing another to live in squalor, no matter what they’ve done.

But the fact is, placing moral emphasis primarily on the incarcerated does a disservice to those whom they victimize. A very small number of African Americans are responsible for the most damaging crimes in their communities, and the rest simply have to deal with the danger they pose. Those law-abiding members of the community, who are too often victims, “matter,” too, and we ought to prioritize them when deciding where our resources and attention go. Almost all black men in our prisons are there because they committed a crime. That is the first order of business to be dealt with when we consider how black communities can alleviate their problems.

That’s how I see it, anyway. Check out the texts below, and let me know which Glenn you side with (if any).

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Black Incarceration and the Violence of Ideas

These remarks offer one scholar’s reaction to historically unprecedented rates of incarceration that emerged in the United States after 1980. (That rate quadrupled in 20 years!) What, I ask, are an intellectual’s responsibilities in the face of that situation? This is difficult territory, especially for an economist. Treacherous territory. The stakes are high! Because there are limits to our purportedly objective cost-benefit analyses that inform public decision-making about investing in prison (For, just how ought we to value a “thug’s” wellbeing?). And there are incentives to conformity that stifle reflexive and critical thinking for many academics. Their career concerns often lead investigators to frame studies so as to remain viable within the prevailing structures of authority and funding. (After all only “radicals” like Angela Davis dare call for prison abolition!)

Historical narratives are under-determined by empirical research (i.e., the facts don’t pin down the story). Hence, substantive political commitments often masquerade under the cover of supposedly neutral investigation. So, what is someone like me to do? What’s my story? A responsible intellectual must tread carefully—especially if he is black. There are snares, traps and pitfalls. There are two sides to this dilemma, it seems to me. So, mine is a Janus-faced tale.

On the one hand, by the turn of the twenty-first century, America’s prison system had grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history. Anyone professing to love liberty should have been deeply troubled by this. Incarceration on a massive scale has become a central component of social policy in this country. This is a preeminent moral challenge to be faced, not merely a technical problem to be solved. We are not dealing here with mere policy analysis. The very nature of the country is at stake. America—with great armies deployed under a figurative banner that reads FREEDOM—harbors the largest custodial infrastructure for the mass deprivation of liberty on the planet. For poorly educated black men, coercion is now the most salient feature of their encounters with the American state. More than mere law enforcement—more than locking up “bad guys” in the name of public safety—incarceration became a modality of governance. It is social policy writ large. And no other nation on earth does it quite the way we do.

As a “second line of defense,” if you will, American punishment policy deals with individuals whose human development has not been adequately fostered by other societal institutions. It interacts powerfully with social welfare, education, employment and job training, mental health and other social initiatives. It is a site for the (re)production of social stratification, for the (re)enforcement of various social stigmas, and for the (re)enactment of powerful and uniquely American social dramas.

And yet, the ubiquity of imprisonment in poor urban neighborhoods has left families in these places less effective at inculcating in their children the delinquency-resistant self-control and pro-social attitudes that insulate youths against law-breaking. Ironically, mass incarceration is criminogenic! As criminologist Todd Clear concludes from a review of evidence in his book, Imprisoning Communities: “[D]eficits in informal social controls that result from high levels of incarceration are, in fact, crime-promoting. The high incarceration rates in poor communities destabilize the social relationships in these places and help cause crime rather than prevent it.” Put differently, the relationship between prison and public safety is complicated since “what happens in San Quentin does not stay in San Quentin.”

What are the responsibilities of honest policy intellectuals in such a situation? This is a difficult question, because punishing criminals is not just instrumental state action. It is also expressive. Americans have wanted to “send a message,” and have done so with a vengeance. Along the way we have constructed a national narrative to assuage our fears. We have answered the question: Who is to blame for the maladies which beset our troubled civilization? We intellectuals played a key role in this process. As mentioned, any cost-benefit analysis of our historic prison build-up needs to specify, at least implicitly, how one reckons the pain imposed on imprisoned people and those with whom they share social affiliation. Failure to consider such “collateral damage” in the development of policy implicitly discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists and, yes, of those whom we would unceremoniously put to death. It is clear that choosing the weight—if any—to place on a “thug's” wellbeing, or on that of his wife or his children, is not a scientific question. Neither does the data tell us how to weigh any additional cost borne by the offending classes against the purported benefit of increased security and peace of mind for the rest of us. That is, data analysis can only take us so far in our quest to identify ideal institutions. Ignoring costs imposed on offenders by institutions of punishment is a political not a scientific decision. We intellectuals—too many of us, wittingly or not—allowed ourselves to become the handmaidens to a massive internal mobilization that our work helped to justify and to implement.

Punishment is rooted in violence. Prison institutionalizes the necessary though problematic violence routinely undertaken by the state on behalf of its citizenry in the interest of order maintenance. Social control and the management of the unruly are the primary function served by such institutions. But, social affirmation—the construction of the virtuous “we”—is a less celebrated though no less central function. And this violence is not only physical. There is also a violence of thought and conception—a “violence of ideas,” if you will. Key to this violence of ideas is the mystifying process by means of which the exercise of might on this scale and with this degree of inequality comes to seem natural, inevitable, necessary, and just. Rather than becoming cheerleaders in this process, my view is that responsible policy intellectuals must strive to de-mystify—that is, to lay bare the underlying ideological terrain.

The social formation of “race” plays a central part in all of this. Although slavery is a distant memory, the racial subordination accompanying African slavery cast a very long shadow. Urban districts like North Philadelphia, the West Side of Chicago, the East Side of Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles are man-made structures that were created over the generations, and have persisted due to a complex of forces and interests ranging far beyond those communities’ borders. Antisocial behavior by people embedded in such social structures may reflect personal moral deviance, but it also reflects shortcomings of the society as a whole. As a result, the rise of the mass imprisonment state has opened-up a new front in the historic struggle for racial justice. That struggle most decidedly is not over. I’m afraid I must insist on this point: racial disparity in punishment reflects explicit and tacit racism. These policies have garnered support at times because of and at other times despite their having a disproportionate impact on blacks.

In The Condemnation of Blackness, a study of entanglement of race with crime in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American political culture, the historian Khalil Muhammad contrasts reactions of American political and intellectual elites to two related, though differently experienced, phenomena: crime perpetrated by new European immigrants and crime by recently emancipated black Americans. Citing emergent statistical social science literatures of that time, Muhammad shows how the prevailing ideological climate influenced analysts to construe the problems of urbanizing and industrializing America in such a way that, while the poor, white city-dwelling migrants were seen to be committing crimes, the poor African Americans migrating to those same cities were seen to be inherently criminal. As a matter of historical causation, the structure of our cities, with their massive racial ghettos, is implicated in the production of deviancy among their residents. As a matter of ethical evaluation, the decency of our institutions depends on the extent to which they comport with a narrative of national purpose that acknowledges and seeks to limit and to reverse the consequences of history’s wrongs.

It is not implausible to suggest that managing social dysfunction via imprisonment is a primary means by which racial stigma is reproduced in the United States. But, racial disparity in the realm of punishment is not merely an accretion of neutral state action applied to a diverse social flux, the chips having fallen as they may, so to speak.

Instead, I see it as a salient feature of contemporary American social life best understood as the residual effect of a history of enslavement, violent domination, disenfranchisement and racial discrimination. (I realize that talking in this way may imperil my viability within the system, but I am old enough now not to care.) For massive inequality by race in the incidence of punishment in this country is one of two things: either a necessary evil given the need to maintain order, or an abhorrent expression of who we Americans have become as a people at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Nothing in the data—nothing within empirical social science—can tell us which of these alternative narratives is the “correct” one. So, I am free to take the latter view. On the whole, we have concluded that those languishing at the margins of society are simply reaping what they have sown. Their deviance is seen to have nothing to do with us—it is not a systemic failure, entailing social responsibilities, correctable via public action.

But this is wrong-headed. When the socially marginal are not seen as being part of the public body along with the rest of us, it becomes possible to do just about anything with them. What does this state of affairs say about our purportedly open and democratic society? What manner of people do our punishment policies, with their racially disparate incidence, reveal us Americans to be? As I see it, we are acting as though some of us are different from the rest and because of their culture, their bad values, their self-destructive behavior, their malfeasance, their criminality, their lack of responsibility—they deserve their fate. I wish to suggest that this posture is inconsistent with the attainment of any distribution of benefits and burdens in our society that could rightly be called “just.” Because Black Lives Matter, all of them, even the so-called thugs!

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That’s one side of the story I want to tell here, the progressive’s account. Now, here’s the other side.

“Systemic Racism” Is a “Just So” Story

Consider this report from my hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, that ran some years ago [May 31, 2016]. Things have only gotten worse since. I ask you to bear with me here because these details matter. Those of us who insist that “black lives matter” must face them squarely.

Six people were killed including a 15-year-old girl and at least 63 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. 

That’s one city.  That’s one weekend.

The total number of people shot during the weekend this year surpassed (last year’s) holiday when 55 people were shot, 12 fatally.

The most recent homicide happened late Monday in the Washington Park neighborhood on the south side. 

Officers responding to a call of shots fired at 11:00 pm found James Taylor …

He had a name. Can we say his name?

James Taylor lying on the ground near his vehicle on the 5100 block of South Calumet Avenue, according to the Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Taylor lived about a mile and a half away at the 6500 block of South Ellis. He had been shot in the chest and was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said. 

Witnesses at the scene were not cooperating with detectives.

About the same time a man was shot to death In the West Rogers Park neighborhood on the North Side.

Officers responding to a call of shots fired at about 11:00 pm found 39-year-old Johan Jean lying in a gangway in the 6400 block of North Rockwell, authorities said. 

Jean, who lived in the 100 block of North Ashland in Evanston, was shot in the neck and taken to the Presence St. Francis Hospital in Evanston where he was later pronounced dead, authorities said.  Police said he was 25 years old. 

A source said the shooting stemmed from a dispute between two women. One of them has a child with the man and the other was his girlfriend. The women were armed and the man was eventually shot during the argument. No weapons were recovered from the scene. 

And finally:

About 5:20 pm on Saturday, a man was shot to death in the Fuller Park neighborhood on the south side. 

Gavin Whitmore, 27, was sitting in the driver’s seat of a vehicle with a passenger, 26-year-old Ashley Harrison, in the 200 block of West Root Street when someone walked up to the vehicle and shot him in the head, according to the police and the medical examiner’s office. 

Whitmore, of the 5800 block of West 63^rd Place, was pronounced dead at the scene at 5:29 pm, authorities said.

All the victims were blacks. Sixty-three shot, 6 dead, one weekend, one city. Here’s the thing: reports such as this could be multiplied dozens of times, effortlessly. If a black intellectual truly believes that “Black Lives Matter,” then what is he supposed to say in response to such nauseating reports? That “there is nothing to see here?” But how can he effectively respond without demonizing the “thugs”?

Violence on such a scale involving blacks as both perpetrators and victims poses a dilemma to someone like me.  On the one hand, as the Harvard legal scholar Randall Kennedy has observed in his book, Race, Crime, and the Law, we elites need to represent the decent law-abiding majority of African Americans cowering fearfully inside their homes in the face of such violence. We must do so not just to enhance our group’s reputation, as in the “politics of respectability,” but mainly as precondition for our own dignity and self-respect.

On the other hand, we elites must also counter the demonization of young black men which the larger American culture has for some time now been feverishly engaged in.  Even as we condemn murderers, we cannot help but view with sympathy the plight of many youngsters who, though not incorrigible, have nonetheless committed crimes.  We must wrestle with complex historical and contemporary causes internal and external to the black experience that help to account for this pathology. 

(There’s no way around it. This is pathology. The behavior in question here is not okay. It is a sign of profound social dysfunction in these communities. That one can adduce social-psychological-economic-political explanations does not resolve all moral questions.)

Where is the self-respecting black intellectual to take his stand? Must he simply act as a mouthpiece for movement propaganda aiming to counteract “white supremacy”? Has he nothing to say to his own people about how some of us are living? Is there no space within American public discourses for nuanced, subtle and sophisticated moral engagement with these questions? Or are they mere fodder for what amount to tendentious, cynical and overtly politically partisan arguments on behalf of something called “racial equity”? Must we limit ourselves to the incantation of anti-racist slogans and expressions of “solidarity” with activists?

I don’t know all of the answers here, but I know that those victims had names. I know they had families. I know they did not deserve their fate. I know that black intellectuals must bear witness to what actually is taking place in our midst; must wrestle with complex historical and contemporary causes both within and outside the black community that bear on these tragedies; must tell truths about what is happening and must not hide from the truth with platitudes, euphemisms, and lies.

I know, despite whatever causal factors may be at play, that black intellectuals must insist each youngster is capable of choosing a moral way of life. I know that, for the sake of the dignity and self-respect of my people and for the future of my country, we American intellectuals of all colors must never lose sight of what a moral way of life consists in. And yet, I fear that we are in imminent danger of doing precisely that.

Here’s one big reason why: Progressives are not honest in the ways they talk about this problem.

Socially mediated behavioral issues lie at the root of today’s racial inequality problem. They are real and must be faced squarely if we are to grasp why racial disparities persist. Activists on the left of American politics claim that “white supremacy,” “implicit bias,” and old-fashioned “anti-black racism” are sufficient to account for black disadvantage. But this is a bluff that relies on “cancel culture” to be sustained. Those making such arguments are, in effect, daring you to disagree with them. They are threatening to “cancel” you if you do not accept their account: You must be a “racist”; you must believe something is intrinsically wrong with black people if you do not attribute pathological behavior among them to systemic injustice. You must think blacks are inferior, for how else could one explain the disparities?  “Blaming the victim” is the offense they will convict you of, if you’re lucky.

I claim this is a dare; a debater’s trick. Because, at the end of the day, what are those folks saying when they declare that “mass incarceration” is “racism”—that the high number of blacks in jails is, self-evidently, a sign of racial antipathy? To respond, “No. It’s mainly a sign of anti-social behavior by criminals who happen to be black,” one risks being dismissed as a moral reprobate.

But we should all want to stay in touch with reality! Common sense, and much evidence, suggest that on the whole people are not arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race. Those in prison are, in the main, those who have hurt other people or stolen something. They have violated the behavioral norms which make civil society possible. Seeing prisons as a racist conspiracy to confine black people is an absurd proposition. No serious person could believe it. Not really. It is self-evident that those taking lives on the street of St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to a man, are behaving despicably. Those bearing the cost of such pathology, almost exclusively, are other blacks. An ideology ascribing this violent behavior to racism is not serious.

The invocation in political argument about incarceration of the “structural racism” trope is unconvincing—at least to this observer. It offers an “explanation” that is not an explanation at all and, in effect, dares the listener to come back. 

So, for example, if someone says, “There are too many blacks in prison in the U.S., due to structural racism,” you’re being dared to respond, “No. Blacks are so many among criminals and that’s why so many are in prison.” (This retort has the inconvenient virtue of being true!) More than this I think “structural racism” talk is mainly a rhetorical device. Its users do not even pretend to offer evidence-based arguments beyond citing the fact of the racial disparity itself. The “structural racism” argument does not go into cause and effect. Rather, it asserts shadowy causes which are never fully specified, let alone demonstrated. We are all just supposed to know that racial disparities are the fault of something called “structural racism,” abetted by an environment of “white privilege,” furthered by an ideology of “white supremacy” that characterizes our society.  Any account that explains everything, at the end of the day, really explains nothing at all!

History, I would argue, is rather more complicated than such “just so” stories would suggest. These racial disparities have multiple, interwoven and interacting causes— from culture to politics to economics to historical accident to environmental influence and, yes, also to the nefarious doings of particular actors who may or may not be “racists,” as well as systems of law and policy that disadvantage to some groups without having so been intended. I want to know what they are talking about when they say “structural racism.”  In effect, use of the term expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity. It asks for my fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief.

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The cat’s out of the bag: I’m glad Trump won. I identify with the populist spirit that elevated him to the presidency the first time, the spirit that’s made him the most influential politician in the country, and that put him into office once again. If things go well, he could make some badly needed changes to our country. If things don’t go well, I’ll have plenty to say about it. But the Democrats had their shot—more than one, in fact. They’ve done very little to improve economic pain at home and war abroad, but they seem to think we ought to be happy with whatever they give us.

John, of course, is appalled. He doesn’t understand where my enthusiasm is coming from. In this clip from our most recent conversation, I do my best to explain it to him.

This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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