Glenn Loury: Ousted for Opposing Middle Eastern Wars, MLK Files, & the One Thing Malcolm X Got Right

Summary

Summary of "Glenn Loury: Ousted for Opposing Middle Eastern Wars, MLK Files, & the One Thing Malcolm X Got Right" – The Tucker Carlson Show (May 9, 2025)

In this compelling episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson engages in an in-depth conversation with esteemed economist and scholar Glenn Loury. The discussion navigates through Loury’s academic journey, his perspectives on African American progress, his critical stance on Middle Eastern conflicts, and the ramifications of his outspoken views leading to his departure from the Manhattan Institute.

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1. Introduction: Glenn Loury's Standpoint

The episode opens with Glenn Loury addressing his recent departure from the Manhattan Institute after voicing his opposition to the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF) actions in Gaza. Loury states:

"What has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified." [00:00]

Tucker Carlson probes whether Loury would have faced similar repercussions if he had criticized the United States, to which Loury reflects on the disproportionate reactions based on the subject of critique.

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2. Academic Journey and Transformation of Higher Education

Loury delves into his extensive academic career, highlighting significant changes in higher education over the decades. He shares insights from his time at Northwestern University and MIT, contrasting the intellectual rigor and less politicized environment of the past with the current highly political and "woke" university landscape.

"When I was at college, there was a certain devotion to the life of the mind. I don't know that we've lost that, but I think it's less intense for our students today than it was when I was in college." [02:40]

He reminisces about his early days balancing work at a printing plant with academics, underscoring a time when student activism, though present, was not all-consuming.

Loury further critiques the ideological drift in universities, asserting that institutions like Brown have become "much more political, much more self-consciously radical, much more anti-establishment and as it were, woke faddish."

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3. Perspectives on African American Progress and Civil Rights

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the evolution of African American progress post-Civil Rights Movement. Loury references Jason Riley's work, questioning the commonly held narratives around affirmative action and its actual impact on the African American community.

"The ballyhoo about liberation of African Americans associated with black power and the civil rights movement and advent of affirmative action is overstated." [32:28]

He presents a nuanced view, acknowledging the strides made in dismantling overt segregation and discrimination but expressing concern over the subsequent societal challenges, such as family stability and economic empowerment.

Loury introduces the concepts of the "bias narrative" versus the "development narrative," advocating for the latter as essential for sustained progress:

"The development narrative basically says... 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." [39:34]

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4. Middle Eastern Conflicts and Human Rights

Transitioning to international affairs, Loury articulates his concerns regarding the IDF's actions in Gaza, framing them as collective punishment rather than targeted military operations. He emphasizes the inappropriateness of such measures by civilized nations.

"What has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified." [00:00]

Loury discusses his podcast episode featuring historian Omer Bartoff, criticizing the Manhattan Institute's discomfort with his perspectives on the Gaza conflict. He asserts that his stance is shared by many Israelis and is grounded in a humane and ethical critique of excessive punitive actions.

"I think the authorization of a certain kind of perspective... they think it's unacceptable." [81:45]

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5. Ouster from the Manhattan Institute: Causes and Implications

Loury recounts the circumstances leading to his severance from the Manhattan Institute. After hosting a debate on his podcast that critically examined Israeli military tactics in Gaza, Loury was informed via email that the Institute would discontinue their relationship due to differing priorities.

"I said I have to say no, he said nothing did dissuade me from that point of view. And that got posted and I got notified the next day..." [69:53]

He speculates that his outspoken critique of Gaza operations was incompatible with the Manhattan Institute's established priorities, particularly their unwavering support for Zionist perspectives.

Loury reflects on the broader implications of his ouster, expressing disappointment but maintaining composure:

"I'm not mad at anybody. I mean, I am sobered and it's a cold bucket of water in the face..." [74:15]

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6. Reflections on Free Speech and the Media Landscape

The conversation shifts to the current state of free speech, especially within academic and media institutions. Loury laments the loss of independent discourse, noting that while independent media platforms provide hope, the overarching environment remains hostile to dissenting voices.

"I am deeply disquieted because it means that the reality that I take for granted is orchestrated or manufactured." [52:19]

He touches upon the challenges posed by the “woke incumbency” in higher education and media, suggesting that powerful lobbies, including the Israel lobby, exert significant influence to suppress alternative viewpoints.

Loury advocates for the necessity of individual critical thinking and the exploration of independent media sources to counteract orchestrated narratives.

"You have to exert the effort to look beyond what's right in front of your nose." [54:05]

Carlson echoes concerns about the suppression of free speech, emphasizing the importance of honest public debate without fearmongering or labeling dissenters as extremists.

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7. Concluding Thoughts: The Path Forward

In closing, Loury underscores the importance of maintaining excellence in academia despite ideological battles. He expresses optimism about technological advancements fostering broader communication, while also acknowledging the inherent challenges in preserving intellectual freedom.

"Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint. So I actually wish that I were going to live long enough to see what would come of this." [87:45]

He advocates for universities to continue being bastions of intellectual achievement, free from politicized agendas that threaten to undermine their core missions.

"We want to cultivate these excellent centers of human intellectual achievement and I think that's the position I try to defend." [92:56]

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Collective Punishment in Gaza

  "What has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified." – Glenn Loury [00:00]

• Academic Environment Then vs. Now

  "When I was at college, there was a certain devotion to the life of the mind." – Glenn Loury [02:40]

• Bias vs. Development Narrative

  "The development narrative basically says... the ball is in our court." – Glenn Loury [39:34]

• Impact of Affirmative Action

  "The ballyhoo about liberation of African Americans... is overstated." – Glenn Loury [32:28]

• Departure from Manhattan Institute

  "I have been disrespected, although I imagine that the positions that I took on this issue just were simply not tolerable." – Glenn Loury [74:18]

• Free Speech Concerns

  "You have to exert the effort to look beyond what's right in front of your nose." – Glenn Loury [54:05]

• Optimism for Technological Advancements

  "Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint." – Glenn Loury [87:45]

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Conclusion

This episode provides a profound exploration of Glenn Loury's intellectual journey and his unwavering commitment to truth and ethical discourse. Loury's critique of institutional biases, both in academia and media, coupled with his analysis of African American progress and Middle Eastern conflicts, offers listeners a nuanced perspective that challenges prevailing narratives. Carlson and Loury's dialogue underscores the importance of independent thought and the ongoing struggle to preserve free speech within charged political landscapes.

Transcript

[Glenn Loury]

And I said, what has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified. And I got notified the next day the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow.

[Tucker Carlson]

If you'd said that about the United States, would you have gotten the same reaction?

[Glenn Loury]

Ah, big question.

[Tucker Carlson]

Do you think you've been bamboozled?

[Glenn Loury]

Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast the ballot?

[Tucker Carlson]

In Georgia, I watched a couple Malcolm X speeches and it was like a totally different person from the one I was presented in high school. And I was like, well, why isn't this guy much more famous than he is now? One of the speeches, he goes off after white liberals and he's like, you know, whites are bad, whites are problem, but the real problem is white liberals. I was like, you go, Malcolm X. It almost feels like his message has been suppressed a little bit maybe. Thank you, professor, for coming. So you just, you told me last night, dinner, that you just, after about 50 years, taught your last course at Brown. You just left Brown. Just. Big picture question first. You've taught for so long. How has it changed? You've taught it, you know, the most prestigious universities in the world. How have the schools changed? How the students changed? Do you leave more hopeful or more concerned?

[Glenn Loury]

Big question.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah, that's a big. That's a big question, I'll admit it.

[Glenn Loury]

Well, I graduated high school 60 years ago.

[Tucker Carlson]

Whoa.

[Glenn Loury]

And where? John Marshall Harlan High School, public school in Chicago.

[Tucker Carlson]

How is it now?

[Glenn Loury]

I don't know, to be honest with you. I know that the community that it houses, it has gone into decline and it's become a part of the south side. Problematic.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yes.

[Glenn Loury]

Which is Chicago with the violence and so on. It was a modest, working, upper working, lower middle class community. When I was at that school, it was integrated. There were 30 or 40% of the student body was white. I'm sure it's all black now and has been for some time. But I've lost touch with, with what's going on back there. But I'm just saying I've been around for a long time.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah, it's a long time.

[Glenn Loury]

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 remembered 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. It was the shadow of the Second World War. It was still only 25 years after the end of the conflict. That had, I think, its effect. It was the Vietnam era and that had its effect. But even though it was the Vietnam era, it wasn't in my experience, as political as I see the university has become today.

[Tucker Carlson]

Wait, so right at the. I mean there are probably. You got to campus in 1968.

[Glenn Loury]

I got to campus in 1970 at Northwestern. I started out at the Illinois Institute of technology in 1965. I dropped out. I attended a community college for a couple of years and then I re enrolled at a major university as a scholarship student in 1970, graduated in 1972.

[Tucker Carlson]

So there were Vietnam War protests going on on campuses all over the country.

[Glenn Loury]

They were.

[Tucker Carlson]

And. But it was still, you think, less political than it is now?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, frankly I do. First of all, not everybody was a protester or enmeshed in the ethos of protest. Some of us were just trying to get to class. In my own case, I was a full time employee at a printing plant and a young father with a wife and two children even as I was taking classes at Northwestern. My case is very unusual. I didn't really have time to protest, but it wasn't even for the other students. It wasn't all consuming. There were intense, engaged protest students, but there were also kids just going about their business. What.

[Tucker Carlson]

Not to sidetrack the conversation, but what were you doing at the printing plan? What was your job?

[Glenn Loury]

I was a clerk. They called me a timekeeper and a bonus estimator. We had these decks of IBM punch cards and I would write on each one the employee's name, the number of hours they spent on what task. And sometimes I'd have to estimate whether or not their productivity count entitled them to bonus payment and take at the end of the shift my deck of IBM punch cards to the offices where the young women would keep punch them up and then they would go into the process of the mainframe computer congestion. It was pretty antiquated, but that's how we kept track of the accounting. So I was, I was clerk.

[Tucker Carlson]

What did they print at the plant?

[Glenn Loury]

Everything. This was R.R. donnelly and Sons, a big printing concern. Lakeside Press is what they call the campus. Couple of miles, three miles south of the Loop on the lakefront in Chicago. Maybe a dozen or so factory style buildings, railroad tracks running alongside huge rolls of printing paper. These monstrous machines which were the presses. Craftsmen everywhere, from the people who ran presses to the people who engraved the plates to the people who cultivated the photographs that had to be made into images. They printed Time magazine, Life magazine, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek. They printed telephone books, they printed Sears catalogs. And it was a massive opportunity.

[Tucker Carlson]

So it was like the size of a steel plant. It's like a hole campus.

[Glenn Loury]

It was a dozen buildings or so spread out over a mile along the lakefront. Maybe, maybe three quarters of a mile.

[Tucker Carlson]

Is it still there?

[Glenn Loury]

I think it's condos now.

[Tucker Carlson]

Of course it is.

[Glenn Loury]

And in fact, the guys that you know, the union guys who I worked with, I wasn't in the union, I was a clerk, could see it coming. They could see the jobs going to South Carolina and then going to Southeast Asia. They didn't see the technology revolution coming that made a lot of what they were doing obsolete. But they knew that their days were numbered.

[Tucker Carlson]

And they said that out loud?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

Wow. Were they mad about it?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, and to a certain extent, resigned. But, you know, the fight, the good fight, you know, resist, but the wheel was turning.

[Tucker Carlson]

Amazing. So you get to campus, you're married with two kids, you're working in a printing plant, and you probably don't have time to throw tear gas on the quad.

[Glenn Loury]

Now, I talk about this in my memoir that came out last year. Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative. I review the bidding of my life. And yeah, I tell a story. So I'm at the community college before getting to Northwestern. The year is 1970. The spring of 1970. The strike, the incursion into Cambodia and the strike. And I'm taking calculus and I'm loving it. And there's an exam coming.

[Tucker Carlson]

You loved calculus?

[Glenn Loury]

Pardon? I loved calculus. Yeah. I was a math major in, you know, calculus and trigonometry and abstract algebra and, you know, differential equations.

[Tucker Carlson]

How could you love something like that?

[Glenn Loury]

Man? It was just fun solving those problems.

[Tucker Carlson]

I get it.

[Glenn Loury]

Had got a feeling of mastery and, you know, solving the problems and their tricks, you know, in calculation. How do I reduce this expression to a form that I can actually integrate it and apply? You know what? I know I liked it. And I had a great teacher, Mr. Andres was his name. He was an engineer. He had retired. He was a Northwestern alum, which is how I ended up at Northwestern. He referred me to their admissions committee. And I go to his office hours and he'd show me problems and tricks and you know, we were having a good time. But in any case, I'm saying I wanted to study for the exam. And the librarian had barricaded herself in because she was afraid that the rampaging students who were all up in arms about the strike, were gonna somehow come in and deface the library and so on. So she had barricaded herself and I had to persuade her. It took me 15 minutes to persuade her to open the door and let me in so that I could sit down and study. Because I had to get to that 4 o' clock shift, the second shift that day, to my job, and I needed to use what hours I had to study.

[Tucker Carlson]

So you're working second shift. So that's four to midnight?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, I was working on second and sometimes third shift, but mostly second shift. Yeah, four to midnight. Right.

[Tucker Carlson]

How old were your kids?

[Glenn Loury]

Lisa and Tammy were born in 1967 and 1968 respectively. So this was 1970. They were 2 and 3.

[Tucker Carlson]

Did your wife work?

[Glenn Loury]

She did. She worked at the post office.

[Tucker Carlson]

Man, that's a busy family. So you have no time at all then.

[Glenn Loury]

We had our hands full, to be sure. We were, you know, very young parents and we were determined to improve ourselves and we were doing the best we could.

[Tucker Carlson]

What did you think of the protests, given everything else you had to do?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, first of all, I thought the war sucked. Yeah, you know, I was against the war fair, and I thought the protests were justified. I mean, Kent State, you know, these kids got shot and all that. But I thought also that a lot of the participation in the protest 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, you know, Italian or Irish or Jewish or polished or Greek. Second generation immigrants to the United States. And they were pretty conservative. But there was the black power stuff that was going on as well in those years. And I was enmeshed in that on the south side of Chicago and had family members who were pretty radical. So, you know, if you had to give me a label, I would have been left of center. I would have been a liberal, but I was mainly a nerd.

[Tucker Carlson]

What did your radical relatives think of your life path?

[Glenn Loury]

Of my.

[Tucker Carlson]

Of your life path, of go, you know, going to college?

[Glenn Loury]

Oh, they were proud of me, you know. Well, okay. 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 two first two children had dropped out of high school to give birth, and they were worried that I was going to lose my way. So when I and my father, my mother and father broke up when I was quite young, five years old. But my dad was an important part of my life, and I very much wanted his respect and approval. And he, you know, when I told him that Charlene was pregnant, he said, he 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, 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, let's. 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yes. What did your dad do?

[Glenn Loury]

My dad is no longer living. He was a lawyer and accountant. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service. Sorry. Tucker spent his life as a. As a federal employee, as a bureaucrat. He worked his way up to being the director of the Kansas City Service center, which is a huge income tax return processing operation in Kansas City. And it suited him. He was a revenuer. I'm telling you, man, this guy would drive around. He lived in Overland Park, Kansas, which is a tony suburb of Kansas City, and he drive around and he see a boat sitting in somebody's driveway and he ask himself, I wonder how that got paid for that boat. And I'm not going to put him. Put it past him to go and look up the thing and maybe direct an audit in the. In the direction. I mean.

[Tucker Carlson]

So he believed in paying your taxes?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, he believed in it very religiously. Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

What were his politics?

[Glenn Loury]

He was a moderate Democrat.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah.

[Glenn Loury]

But not especially political. He was mainly a bureaucrat. I mean, he loved the internal politics of who's getting promoted, what budget is going on, who's the regional director, and how much power has so and so. God. And what about this or that? You know, he loved calling people on the carpet. He was a Patton. George C. Scott. Yeah, that was his favorite movie. The scene where Patton slaps the recruit. That was his favorite scene.

[Tucker Carlson]

So he was the patent of the Kansas City IRS office?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, something like that.

[Tucker Carlson]

So did you go to MIT?

[Glenn Loury]

I did go to MIT. Did a PhD in economics at MIT in the 70s.

[Tucker Carlson]

What was the atmosphere like there then?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, in economics, MIT was riding high. Then There were people, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, all of whom became Nobel laureates in the fullness of time. Samuelson had been honored in 69 or 70, I think it was a very, very strong department of economics. Was very Jewish, both the faculty and the student body. And that was noticeable to me. They were nose to the grindstone. They were.

[Tucker Carlson]

How many soft left were studying for PhD?

[Glenn Loury]

Black students?

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah.

[Glenn Loury]

I'd say maybe 12 out of 150, something like that. They had a program MIT did, determined to respond to the time. They were liberal Democrats and they had a kind of affirmative action thing. Now I will say I'm quite sure I would have been admitted to MIT based on the record that I had established at Northwestern, the prize winning record A's and everything, taking graduate courses in math and economics when I was still an undergraduate and so on. I think I would have been admitted regardless of their program. But I was among three. A cohort of three African Americans and a class of 25 who were admitted in 1972. And they had been admitting since 1970. And they continued this on through, I think, 75 or 76. Three black students. I was told later that the way that that was done was they had their regular budget for graduate students and then they had additional funds that would allow them to admit three more students who were African American. So they were about 12 of us, 12 to 15.

[Tucker Carlson]

Did you keep in touch with the other two guys in your class?

[Glenn Loury]

I did. One didn't finish. He was from Kansas City by coincidence and he left after a couple of years and never finished his degree. The other is. Teaches at Harvard now and is a dear friend whom I've known for 50 years.

[Tucker Carlson]

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[C]

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[Glenn Loury]

Merchants Payments Coalition, not authorized by any.

[Tucker Carlson]

Candidate or Candidates Committee. Www.merrestancespaymentscoalition.com How serious was the academic environment when you started at mit?

[Glenn Loury]

It was absolutely top notch. I mean it was. This is technical stuff. And you know, you were challenged and the people that you were studying with and competing against, they had come from Israel and India and Japan and the UK and Russia and they were the best in the world. 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 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, I remember. But I was in the midst of that.

[Tucker Carlson]

That was back when people talked in public about economics.

[Glenn Loury]

They don't anymore.

[Tucker Carlson]

No, there's not a lot of public comment. It's all about race or sexuality or whatever. But I don't think that I have heard in like at dinner a debate about economics in 25 years.

[Glenn Loury]

Well, there was a lot of debate about economics then, about monetarism and Keynesianism and whatnot, about regulation and laissez faire and whatnot.

[Tucker Carlson]

Have you noticed that though, that the, the incidents of public debate about economic. Just people talking about like what's the right system? You don't hear that?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, I've kind of fallen away from economics, to be honest with you. These last 10, 15 years, I've become a guy that talks more about the culture issues myself. And now with the new administration, Trump, and with the tariffs and the changes in economic policy, there's more talk. It's very arch, it's very partisan, but there's more talk. But yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

So how would you compare the environment at MIT to the one that you're now leaving at Brown on an academic level?

[Glenn Loury]

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 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 are experimental. Economics, for example, has become a big thing. Nobel prizes are given in development economics and stuff like that, where people are trying to figure out how to make the best use of resources to raise living standards in poor countries and stuff. And economics was more self consciously theoretical and abstract when I was a student. You could make a living without ever carrying one of those boxes of computer cards over to the computer processing center. You could just, with a pencil and a yellow pad, sit and off the top of one's head, as it were, invent models of interesting economic phenomena and get yourself published in the journal and make, you know, tenure and all of that. And I think it'd be much, much harder to do that.

[Tucker Carlson]

Now that sounds like a good thing.

[Glenn Loury]

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 wider range of questions. But if I were comparing college in the period when I was a young student to now, I think, you know, 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 you may, humanist, I'm a social scientist. But I can see looking, you know, across the aisle, as it were, at what my colleagues are, are doing. 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 the 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 was really very cogent or incisive. And you didn't read it as a Bible. You, you read it as a, okay, there is a problem here about how to understand the implications of the transformation, which is industrialization and so on. There are real issues about how the fruits of economic cooperation get divided amongst the participants in the process 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, but, and I think in the center of the economics establishment, that would be the judgment. But I think I can't stop the sociologists from reading Marx. I can't stop the anthropologists from reading Marx. I can't stop the literary critics from reading Marx, 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. And we're seeing a backlash against that.

[Tucker Carlson]

You said you've seen various waves of sexual liberation movements and over the last 50 years there have been a number of them. Was anyone liberated, do you think?

[Glenn Loury]

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 it's 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. But 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 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 move forward. Were blacks liberated? Well, I just read an interesting book by Jason Riley, the conservative African American Wall Street Journal editorialist. He calls it the myth of Affirmative action. And it 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 big. The ballyhoo about liberation of African Americans associated with black power and the civil rights movement and advent of affirmative action is overstated. That there were downsides, significant downsides to those developments, both in terms of the 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 a partisan and divisive. And this is Riley's argument, and I have some sympathy for it.

[Tucker Carlson]

So what I mean it's a very complex subject and you've obviously lived at the middle of it for a long time. But like what is the verdict? Was, was all of that good for African Americans or not? Or probably a mix of both. But like how would you describe what we know now?

[Glenn Loury]

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 way that 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, the change in the ethos of the country with the rise of the civil rights movement and so on, that having changed, the question becomes we get to 1970, let's say, and the question becomes what next? And there I think the story is less clear and I think that there are developments that are very distressing. I think when you. There's a wonderful book that I want to plug here called the World of Patience Groms, G R O M E S by a man called Scott Davis. Patience Groans 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yes.

[Glenn Loury]

In their orientation. And she marries and migrates to Richmond, Virginia and starts a family in the 1920s. And Scott Davis, the author of this great book traces her family life through the early 1960s. And what you see for Patience Groan's is her kids struggle the neighborhood which is not wealthy but stable. Her husband works for the railroad. He's got a very good job. Neighborhoods declines, model cities and various kinds of federal programs come through that end up remaking the community in ways that actually work in an adverse effect. Public housing, which is initiated with the idea that the poor were going to be sheltered, ends up creating ghetto type phenomenon. The kids who used to be interested in Earning the respect of their peers by keeping their nose clean, keeping 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 wet light births and all of that. Of course there was crime. Du Bois in 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 can speculate, and people do, about the sources of this dissolution, and I think they are many. I think they are the incentives of welfare transfer programs which encourage people to live in ways that were ultimately not socially productive. I think the change in the larger culture in which these liberatory sexual revolutions gave the back of their hand to a set of conventions, expectations and restraints that were, yes, freedom impulse, freedom limiting. I mean, you can just do anything you want to do and maintain the respect of your peers. But we're also order inducing, freedom limiting, but order inducing and provided a framework within which people 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. As your arguing point, I don't think those are healthy things. These are things I've written about in my own work.

[Tucker Carlson]

So I. I experienced all this from like sort of the other side. I didn't grow up around a lot of black people, only kind of rich black people. But I grew up around a lot of white liberals who were very invested in talking about the civil rights movement. And from that they derived like moral authority, great moral authority. Like I'm on the side of black people, therefore I'm a good person.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

And it does feel like maybe they were the great beneficiaries of the whole thing. Like there was sort of no downside for them.

[Glenn Loury]

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.

[Tucker Carlson]

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.

[Glenn Loury]

Here's what I think, Tucker. I think, and I've written about this in essays and so on. I think that there are basically two dispositions that you can have in thinking about the persistence of racial inequality. What I call the bias narrative. And the 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. Yes, 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. They're more Hispanics by far than there are blacks in the United States right now. The Asians, if you can speak in those generic terms, are here to stay. The world is getting small. So not confronting the development challenge, continuing to take the victim stance, continuing to rely on the largesse and the beneficence of supposedly supportive white liberals is a disaster for black people. It's not a disaster for the, what I call Negro 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yes.

[Glenn Loury]

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 gang banger who's running around firing his pistol aimlessly out the window at a gang rival and killing a three year old sitting on her auntie's lap. It's a disaster for those people. There's no escaping the imperative to develop. There's no substitute for being effective, for having a mastery over skill, for having solved the basic problem of life, which again I say, is how do I comport myself in a way that is both dignified and consistent with my own and my children's prosperity. That problem has to be faced. It still has to be faced.

[Tucker Carlson]

So I always blame, again, not my world, but. 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, that's my current thinking on this. I don't know if you've thought about this or notice 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, 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.

[Glenn Loury]

I don't disagree with that.

[Tucker Carlson]

And they never get any attention. You're like, so if you're NBC and you're hiring Sharpton, again, I personally, as I told you last night, probably horrified you. I kind of like Sharpton because I think he's smart, he's amusing, but he's, I think, been probably pretty bad for the country. I don't think he's helped black people at all. But like, if you're NBC, why are you, you're driving an advantage from the system that is not helping the people Sharpton says he supports. Like, why they're never blamed for that, I guess, is what I'm saying.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, well, who would blame them? Conservatives. Yeah, Republicans would blame them and they're racist, you know.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah, but they both conservatives mostly don't actually they blame Sharpton or. I'll speak for myself as a conservative lifelong. I would always be like, sharpen's the problem. And it's like, no, I think the whole, I'm just really struck, I don't know too much about it, but I'm really struck by the difference. Like I grew up thinking, you know, Martin Luther King was like a great man there. I still think great things about him and Malcolm X was a really sort of evil figure. But if you listen to Malcolm X, he's a lot closer with some big differences. But in general to what you're describing as positive.

[Glenn Loury]

Correct. He got murdered and so did King. No, I have enormous respect for the straight backed, manly, autonomous, independent responsibility embracing amen 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?

[Tucker Carlson]

Exactly.

[Glenn Loury]

Will you start a business? You don't have wealth. You're waiting for you with your hand out for somebody to give you wealth. Why don't you start a business? Why don't you take care of your own community? You know, get busy.

[Tucker Carlson]

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[Glenn Loury]

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[Tucker Carlson]

So why. Okay, so like all high school students, I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which I, I don't even know if it was written by. Malcolm X 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, white's are a problem, but the real problem is white liberals. I was like, you call Malcolm X white? Why isn't. It almost feels like his message has been suppressed a little bit maybe.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a historian, but I see what you say and I do think there are aspects of his message that are extremely threatening to established order. Hence it's, you know, he was a Muslim. He was succeeded in his leadership of that movement ultimately by Louis Farrakhan, who's a notorious anti Semite, quote unquote. So there's that. But Malcolm X was uncompromising about. Well, you know, remember his comment after the Kennedy assassination, Chickens come home to roost and whatnot.

[Tucker Carlson]

What do you think he meant by that? I've never understood what that meant.

[Glenn Loury]

I think he meant US Entailment and global affairs has created enemies. The US has undertaken various operations that are in effect responsible for the blowback that we're seeing. That's what I think he meant.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah, probably some, probably some truth in that.

[Glenn Loury]

Well, you're the conspiracy theory.

[Tucker Carlson]

Hardly. I'm just trying to understand the world.

[Glenn Loury]

Are we ever going to see all the documents related to that?

[Tucker Carlson]

Of course not. And you know, to the three. So the president issued an executive order on January 23rd, one of the first things he did after the inauguration. Commanding. Commanding with the force of law, the federal agencies, the executive branch, to 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? Like, what is that? And I don't think it's because the truth is easy to deal with. I mean, I still think the truth 60 years later is really threatening to somebody, clearly, because on some level, like, why would you care if you found out there was a, you know, complex conspiracy to assassinate Garfield? You'd be like, okay, you know, it's long over. Like, I think we can.

[Glenn Loury]

Everybody's dead.

[Tucker Carlson]

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 the pushback against declassifying this stuff within the government has been very intense. Very intense. So that tells you that there's something worth hiding. I certainly hope, because I believe in disclosure and honesty, that it all comes out. But. But you do get the feeling, not as a conspiracy nut, but as an honest person trying to make sense of history in the present, that a lot of our assumptions are based on things that aren't true or fully true. Do you sense that?

[Glenn Loury]

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? Yes, it's a charade or a fantasy.

[Tucker Carlson]

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. Yeah, but you're also working within, like, the very heart of the system. Harvard, Brown, mit. Like, you're, you know, you have every possible credential. So at what point did it occur to you that maybe some of this was fake? When did you start to think that?

[Glenn Loury]

Oh, I don't really know the answer to that question. I'm going to make a personal reference. I married my wife, Lawan, whom you've met.

[Tucker Carlson]

It had the best.

[Glenn Loury]

Just about eight years ago.

[Tucker Carlson]

Last night. Yes. She's awesome.

[Glenn Loury]

And I would say that that relationship has been a wake up call for me in that she brings a perspective that's very different from my conventional. I read the New York Times and I pretty much believe what I'm reading. I read the Washington Post, I read the Wall Street Journal, I read the chronicles of Higher Education 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 whatnot. And she's like, man, that is all manufactured consent. She could gonna pull out Noam Chomsky on me. So I say all that to say while I am not necessarily gonna parrot her perspective on things, they have caused me encountering her perspective has caused me to revisit some of my own assumptions.

[Tucker Carlson]

And it's been uncomfortable, you said?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, I think so, sure.

[Tucker Carlson]

Why?

[Glenn Loury]

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, 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. And that there, if you don't do your quote unquote, 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 led around by the nose. You're, you're being. How did Malcolm X. You've been bamboozled. You're being hoodwinked. You're, you're not exercising your full critical capacities. You have to exert the effort to look beyond what's right in front of your nose.

[Tucker Carlson]

Do you think you've been bamboozled?

[Glenn Loury]

A little bit, yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

How?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, for example, I pretty much take what my government says to be until proven otherwise true and, and reliable. And you know, I, I have reason now to be more skeptical about that.

[Tucker Carlson]

You are the master of understatement, I must say. I have reason now to be skeptical of that. You do? I think we, I can confirm that.

[Glenn Loury]

Well, man, I mean, we've been at war since forever.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yes.

[Glenn Loury]

Do we really need to be at war since forever? There were no weapons of mass destruction, were there?

[Tucker Carlson]

No.

[Glenn Loury]

In Iraq. Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? Is that what we're about to do? These are important questions. Must we risk nuclear war with a nuclear armed Russia over the conflict in Ukraine as an imperative to prevent the re emergence of a dominant force coming from the east to occupy civilization? I'm being told. Or let me get more prosaic. Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast the 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah, I'm younger than you, but I've had a similar. I'm not even sure it's awakening. I don't know the answers to most of the questions that you just asked, but I know that they're valid questions and it's important to push back a little bit. Right. Because. But how weird is it to. Especially for you because again, you have pushed back against the status quo for a long time. It's why you're famous. So you've been, to be blunt, much more of a free thinker than most people, certainly at university level. So it's not like you were just like following orders anyway. It must be particularly weird for you to realize that some of your assumptions may not be true.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, I got used to being the contrarian and thinking of myself as the guy who thought outside the box and who was not bound by convention. I came to realize though that I wasn't quite as independent a thinker as I imagined myself to be and that there were traps, you know. So. Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

So if you don't mind, if you just describe the process of realizing that. What made you come to that conclusion?

[Glenn Loury]

So I'm going to talk about my relationship with the Manhattan Institute and can.

[Tucker Carlson]

You, for those who aren't in right wing world like me and you, can you just describe what the Manhattan Institute.

[Glenn Loury]

The Manhattan Institute is a think tank based in New York City. Publishes a magazine called City Journal, puts out reports and houses scholars who are investigating different aspects of social policy, largely urban related issues. And they've been around for a while.

[Tucker Carlson]

I used to write for them.

[Glenn Loury]

Did you?

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah. Myron Magnet was the editor. It was a wonderful man. Ran City Journal. Yeah, they were.

[Glenn Loury]

I and, and they are a.

[Tucker Carlson]

They were great.

[Glenn Loury]

They are a high brow, serious, intellectually robust, critical from the right observer about all manner issues about housing, about crime, about welfare and other things, mostly American domestic politics. And I signed on there a few years ago as a senior fellow and my podcast, the Glenn show, which I put out content every week was being sponsored by the Manhattan Institute and just.

[Tucker Carlson]

Give me some such a point that I think is worth underlining. The Manhattan Institute and particularly City Journal, its flagship publication, are concerned have been for 30 years with domestic issues. This is not the Hudson Institute. This is not AI. This is like a overwhelmingly domestic focused organization is that fair?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, yeah, that's correct. They worry about race issues. They worry about crime and punishment type issues. They worry about, you know, housing, about city politics and, you know, things like that. And they have, you know, estimable scholars who are a part of the shop that produces these studies and commentaries and so on. And I signed on there as a senior fellow, John Paulson, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and we part 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 Reihan Salaam, who's president of the Manhattan Institute, wrote me, saying that we review our scholarly relationships from time to time. This is practically a quote for productivity. And there's no question about my productivity. I've put a dozen articles in their City Journal over the last five years and shared priorities. And so I assume it's that we don't share priorities. And the priorities that I assume we don't share have to do with me inviting an 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. And I had him on the show.

[Tucker Carlson]

Now. Who is he?

[Glenn Loury]

His name is Omer Bartoff. He's a student of the Holocaust, of the Nazi extermination campaign in Eastern Europe, and has written books about that. And he's been my colleague for 20 years at Brown. I've gotten to know him and I knew that he was engaging these questions in a controversial manner, and I wanted to hear from him, so I had him on the show.

[Tucker Carlson]

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[Glenn Loury]

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[Tucker Carlson]

So he's a professor at Brown?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, very distinguished historian.

[Tucker Carlson]

And I I think it's fair to say he's not an anti Semite.

[Glenn Loury]

He's Israeli.

[Tucker Carlson]

Oh, okay. I, I, I just wanted this to be clear to everyone listening. So it's not like you didn't have Louis Farrakhan on the show to like call Judaism a gutter religion or something. You had an Israeli historian of the Holocaust on no.

[Glenn Loury]

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. Yes, 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's 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

Oh, I remember very well.

[Glenn Loury]

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. But it was a interesting, provocative, insightful, humane engagement with a difficult, very difficult set of issues. Well, the party line on the book, including at the Manhattan Institute, is this is unspeakable. This is a black guy who doesn't know what the f he's talking about wandering around on the west bank in the company of some anti Zionist Jews 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 it is. But his basic point is, look, I'm telling you what I'm seeing there is not healthy, it's not humane and it's not right. And I had some appreciation for his courage to say so and for the artful way in which he said so. And I said so on the show.

[Tucker Carlson]

And in the same restrained, non radical way you're describing it now to me.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, yeah. I just basically said this is something that has to be reckoned with. I said to John, my partner in conversation, who's also an African American, he teaches at Columbia University and writes a regular piece, a newsletter for the New York Times. And he took exception. And he and I, John and I went back and forth about this and it came to like me saying what I actually thought about what was happening in Gaza and what I thought was 10-7-2023 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

So. But that's it. You didn't say you didn't like, espouse violence or.

[Glenn Loury]

No, no, I. 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.

[Tucker Carlson]

That doesn't seem. I mean, people could disagree with you for sure, but it doesn't seem like radical or crazy.

[Glenn Loury]

No, you know, and a lot of Israelis agree with me for sure.

[Tucker Carlson]

Well, including the one you interviewed, I guess. Your colleague at Brown.

[Glenn Loury]

Oh, yeah. I mean, Omari, of course, but many.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah. Oh, I know. So what. What happened next?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, next, the outfit called Air Wars A I R W A R S Air wars, which is a 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, PhD student at the London School of Economics. I had him on with Eli Lake, who's a journalist, writes about Middle east and other international affairs.

[Tucker Carlson]

But it was a debate. So you had both?

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, I had both.

[Tucker Carlson]

I've never heard of Cockrell. I don't know anything.

[Glenn Loury]

He's prominent.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah, but. But Lake is prominent and. But. But both sides were represented. I guess that's what I just want to establish for a little bit.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah, both sides were represented, and they had their back and forth about the. How do you interpret the data on civilian casualties and the bombardment. Aerial bombardment of this campaign. And then I did a, a kind of me directly to the camera, 10 minute or 15 minute reflection on the interview as a bonus feature of the podcast which we make available to paying subscribers and where I interact with my, 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 was being proceeding, what has been proceeding there in Gaza as a collective punishment that I don't think is justified. And I said as my, I said no. He said nothing did dissuade me from that point of view. And that got posted and I got notified the next day that the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior Fellow.

[Tucker Carlson]

How did they tell you?

[Glenn Loury]

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.

[Tucker Carlson]

You the next day.

[Glenn Loury]

Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

Did he call you?

[Glenn Loury]

No, no, it was a two paragraph email.

[Tucker Carlson]

And that's it? That's the only contact you had?

[Glenn Loury]

I haven't talked to him since.

[Tucker Carlson]

I, I know Reihan is one of the, as it sounds like he was a friend of yours too, one of the world's nicest people.

[Glenn Loury]

I mean, yeah, I like Rahon a.

[Tucker Carlson]

Lot actually, and very.

[Glenn Loury]

A little bit disappointed about this. Now let me just say this, but.

[Tucker Carlson]

What do you think that was?

[Glenn Loury]

I assume it was somebody saying this guy's gotta go. And I don't know who the somebody is. I assume that that's somebody sitting on the board of the Manhattan Institute. Or it may be that the internal deliberations had been. The warning signs had been flashing for some months and finally this was over the top and more than people could tolerate. It may be the John Paulson Senior fellow that John Paulson or someone like him that is a heavy hitter who puts up funds for the Institute's operations, said this is unacceptable, you gotta do something about this. But I'm speculating and saying that. And I want to say something else, Tucker, which is that I'm not mad at anybody. I mean, I am sobered and it's a cold bucket of water in the face and it's a reminder to me about the environment that we all operate in. The Manhattan Institute had been good to me. They helped me get my memoir written. They have supported my work. I've made friends there so it's not as if I'm feeling that I've been disrespected, although I imagine that the positions that I took on this issue just were simply not tolerable. And this has been the consequence of that.

[Tucker Carlson]

If you. It's. First of all, it's so sad. And I would agree. I think the Manhattan Institute's been a force for good. And they've been kind to me. You know, 30 years ago, 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. 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?

[Glenn Loury]

No, in my opinion, not at all. You know, the issue of Israel and the nature of the October 7th attack and the political climate that's been created since and the advent of vigorous protests on American campuses and the need to marshal, you know, 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, requires people to get in line. And I think that's what's going on here.

[Tucker Carlson]

I just think it feels to me counterproductive. I love the United States. I'm never leaving. Tons of things about American history I would not defend. Why would I? Slavery. You know, I like the American Indians, don't think they were treated very well. That's our part of our founding, and it's depressing. And I'm happy to say that I think the Vietnam War was a disaster, Iraq was a disaster. US Government did all that stuff. And I say that as someone who really loves America. And I'm not attacking America, but, like, it's okay to say that it doesn't mean I hate America. Right. Don't you think that's a better way to approach public debate rather than just like any. You must read these lines. And anyone who disagrees is like a Nazi. That's not. That doesn't help the people pushing it.

[Glenn Loury]

I think my detractors, and I now speculate, wanted me to be a neutral arbiter and not to be a partisan, not to take a Side, I think they wanted me to hear from Barry Wise or Douglas Murray 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 a not a wild eyed leftist but a person of centrist to right of center sensibility who however, speaks out on behalf of the Palestinian position. They want to call me a Hamas sympathizer. I'm not a Hamas sympathizer. I'm, like I said, appalled by what I've seen proceed in Gaza and don't want to be associated with it. I don't want my country associated with it. I think it's wrong, I think it's excessive, I think it's punitive in the extreme, I think it's inhumane. I don't think it's necessary. Well, defend that position, will you? People will say, I think as a black intellectual of somewhat conservative sensibility, it's way out of line for me to be taking that kind of a position. And I think that's why a point had to be made.

[Tucker Carlson]

Because it's a threat to have someone like you say something like that.

[Glenn Loury]

Not to exaggerate my own importance. Yes.

[Tucker Carlson]

Well, I mean I just have lived in this, in the, in that world for so long, 35 years that, you know, for in conservative world, very famous, you were a very famous guy. And so I think you have real importance in that world.

[Glenn Loury]

Of course.

[Tucker Carlson]

And. But why would it be more of a threat for you to say that than for one of your white colleagues with the same views to say that, well, let's.

[Glenn Loury]

Ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide, World Court, International Court of Justice. I think the authorization of a certain kind of perspective that of course remember the huge debate about Zionism being racism. I'M not making that claim.

[Tucker Carlson]

I'm not either. I don't, I don't want to get involved in any of this stuff is my personal view.

[Glenn Loury]

I was in Durban, South Africa in 2001 for the World Conference Against Racism and I remember Colin Powell decided as Secretary of State deciding not to attend the World Conference Against Racism because of the controversy that had emerged about anti Zionist elements wanting to make a point out of Zionism being racism at that conference and Powell wouldn't attend it. I didn't endorse that position then and I'm not endorsing it now. I think that's too facile and ahistorical of an equation to draw. But I think that's the thing that the defenders of the Zionist project fear, getting a camel's nose under the tent. The idea that there could be some South Africa like indictment of the political project that could emerge and could gain credence and that's not, 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. And I think these things are all somehow connected with one another.

[Tucker Carlson]

Clearly, clearly they are. I'm just, 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.

[Glenn Loury]

They are.

[Tucker Carlson]

Well, having been to Israel a number of times, I know a lot of Israelis, I know that that's true, that there is a robust debate about these kinds of things there, but not here. What is that?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, I could ask you. I mean, I can only speculate about why that is. I think though the influence of the Israel lobby, as it's called in some quarters is not insubstantial. I think 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 representations.

[Tucker Carlson]

Well, it's not working. It's making, you know, moderate people radical in a way that's not helpful to anybody. I just want to say I'm against it. I'm against radicalism in general. And that's not the way to win people over. I don't think it's hasn't won. Why didn't someone just call you and say, hey, Glenn, this is like, not your area. We're old friends. Why don't we have lunch and I'll kind of give you my perspective and like, just talk it through?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, some people have done it. Nobody at the Manhattan Institute.

[Tucker Carlson]

I'm saying, like, it doesn't. It doesn't help whatever cause they think they're advancing.

[Glenn Loury]

We're in the land of speculation. I don't really know what happened. I don't know what conversations were had and I don't know what was said. I would have appreciated a call from Raiha.

[Tucker Carlson]

Do you know how many lazy people are at think tanks? Like 99% of them. You're probably, like, the most productive person. I mean, I'm not to be mean, but there are a lot of senior fellows at think tanks who don't do anything.

[Glenn Loury]

I do seem to have noticed that. Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah. Well, I have lived it. I've worked in think tank, and I'm not attacking anybody. It's like, it's an employment program. I got it. But I would think from the perspective of think tank, like, well, that's why I guess they hired you in the first place. It's like, good to have someone who's well known, can explain himself well and, like, likes to work.

[Glenn Loury]

It's all good. I am at the end of a long career. I have, you know, a pretty good reputation as a scholar and as a public critic. My podcast is flourishing. I'm okay.

[Tucker Carlson]

Are you worried about speech? I mean, because obviously the ability to think freely is at the heart of education. And I mean, that is education. So are you worried about it, the state of it speech in the United States?

[Glenn Loury]

I am. Although independent media gives me hope.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah.

[Glenn Loury]

You know, that everybody has got the opportunity to be heard now and pockets of influence can develop, emerge and flourish, and you can't stifle the conversation in the same way that you used to be able to because you could control a few of the portals of dissemination of information. Now that's not any longer possible.

[Tucker Carlson]

How long do you think that'll last?

[Glenn Loury]

I think it's going to just get more capacious, I think. Where, I don't know, it's not my field about media, but I think we're on the verge of something, you know, revolutionary. Everybody's got a encyclopedia and a global translator in their pocket. Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint. So I actually wish that I were going to live long enough to see what would come of this. But I'm 76, soon to be 77.

[Tucker Carlson]

So you know, what happens to the universities?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, there's a confrontation now and I just read an interesting piece by Peter Berkowitz. I don't know if you know who he is out at the Hoover Institution. He's a political theorist and he's talking about the hard 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 wholesale assault and demanding to be able to dictate curriculum and hiring decisions of Harvard was over the top. And some of it he doubted. What's going to survive in the courts, he says, in effect, this is almost a quote, both sides stand to get bloodied if they end up in court with one another for different reasons. So what about a compromise? And the compromise would involve, according to Berkowitz's thinking, basically, Harvard conceding that, yeah, its curriculum had gotten too far left and anti Western. And there should be an effort to stand up a school within the University of General Education whose purposes would be more affirming of the Western cultural inheritance. And that while the school would be an independent entity, that is have 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 I think that's worth thinking about. What happens to the university? Well, I've said recently in a public statement that I think if you ask what's going on in the university outside of the politicized discourses, what's going on in the sciences and. And so on, what's going on in the social sciences at the very best places in terms of the, you know, state of economics as a discipline, for example, psychology as a discipline, for example, what's going on in the humanities, where people are writing important books, where they're discovering new things about history, where they are examining in a critical way culture. Not all of it is from the left. The US 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 and I, I think that's the position I try to defend.

[Tucker Carlson]

Why is a College better than YouTube?

[Glenn Loury]

Well, I'm a teacher who taught his last class at Brown University after nearly 50 years of college teaching. In that last class I engaged my students in open ended conversation. We talked about ideas and I reminisced about what we had done over the course of the semester. The course was on race and inequality and we'd read widely. I got a letter from one of my students recently appreciating me and hoping that my post teaching endeavors would flourish and saying that I had changed his life, that I had shown him something that he didn't realize before, which was the fact that even though he recoiled against the conservative tone of some of my, 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?

[Tucker Carlson]

Professor, thank you.

[Glenn Loury]

My pleasure.

[Tucker Carlson]

Terry Munch. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it. Good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit, follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news things that actually matter. Telling the truth, always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.