The Ben Shapiro Show – 06/23/24 – deepcast.fm
The episode features a wide-ranging conversation between Ben Shapiro and economist Glenn Loury, covering topics such as race relations in America, the trajectory of Loury’s political views over time, and his relationship with religion. Loury reflects on his decision to identify as a conservative later in life, driven by a belief in personal responsibility and an embrace of free market economics.
They discuss the challenges conservatives face in reaching out to the Black community, with Loury suggesting that conservatives need to demonstrate genuine care and concern for the flourishing of Black Americans in order to be taken seriously. The conversation also touches on the legacy of the Obama presidency, with Loury criticizing Obama for failing to have an honest conversation about race and instead embracing a narrative of white supremacy.
Towards the end, the discussion shifts to the current state of American politics, with both Shapiro and Loury expressing concerns about the polarization and the willingness of both sides to undermine institutions for short-term political gain. They also reflect on the implications of the events of January 6th and the summer of 2020 protests and riots.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Glenn Loury, an economist and public intellectual, experienced a political shift from liberal to conservative later in life, driven by his embrace of personal responsibility and free market economics.
- Loury criticizes the dominant narrative surrounding police violence against Black individuals, arguing that it distracts from more pressing issues like gang violence within Black communities.
- Loury suggests that conservatives need to demonstrate genuine care and concern for the flourishing of Black Americans in order to effectively reach out to that community.
- Both Loury and Shapiro express concerns about the current state of political polarization in America and the willingness of both sides to undermine institutions for short-term political gain.
- Loury reflects on his personal journey with religion, acknowledging the role of faith in providing a foundation for logic and reason.
- The conversation touches on the legacy of the Obama presidency, with Loury criticizing Obama for failing to have an honest conversation about race and instead embracing a narrative of white supremacy.
- The events of January 6th and the summer of 2020 protests and riots are discussed as potential inflection points that have exacerbated political tensions and eroded trust in American institutions.
- Both Shapiro and Loury advocate for a more localized approach to rebuilding community and social fabric, rather than relying on top-down solutions from the federal government.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “You can’t say that the doctor doesn’t care when he’s dealing with a terminal patient and he moves on to the next case.“ by Glenn Lowry
- “I think the idea that you would have to have some such embrace of an unproved first mover kind of primal commitment before you could even have anything that you called logic. And religion is kind of like that.“ by Glenn Lowry
- “If I were a white conservative being told that I had to carry favor with the sentiment of this population in order to get them to take me seriously, I might balk at that.“ by Glenn Lowry
Chapter Details
Chapter 1: The Dangers of Reducing Problems to Wealth and Material Dispossession
- Ben Shapiro strongly criticizes Barack Obama’s view expressed in Dreams from My Father that ties violence, despair and extremism to material dispossession and wealth inequality across different contexts.
- Shapiro argues that reducing such complex issues to merely wealth inequality is an overly simplistic, Marxist and materialist perspective that fails to account for the nuances involved.
Chapter 2: Obama’s Missed Opportunity and the Deterioration of Race Relations
Chapter 3: The Conservative Messaging Challenge and Black Outreach
Chapter 4: Loury’s Political and Religious Journey
Chapter 5: The State of Racial Discourse and Intellectual Diversity
Chapter 6: The Summer of 2020 and Mistrust in American Institutions
Chapter 7: The Trajectory of American Politics and the Threat of Instability
Chapter 8: The Need for Local Empowerment and Rebuilding Social Fabric
🔗
In the face of the concerning trajectory of American politics and the erosion of shared institutions, Ben Shapiro and Glenn Loury discuss the potential path forward. They argue that the only way to rebuild trust and social fabric may be through the delegation of as much power as possible to the most local levels, allowing communities to rebuild from the ground up. Shapiro expresses skepticism about top-down efforts to impose unity, suggesting that genuine community and social cohesion can only be cultivated organically at the grassroots level.
Website URL https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-ben-shapiro-show
Episode Notes
Glenn Loury is an esteemed American economist, public intellectual, and author. In his recent memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, Loury reflects on a lifetime of academic excellence and overcoming personal turmoil. In today’s episode, we discuss the difficulty of political messaging and policy crafting around racial inequality, the trajectory of American race relations since the Obama administration, and Glenn’s relationship with religion. Don’t miss Glenn Loury’s profound insights on racial politics and more, on this episode of the Sunday Special.
Full Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated using speech recognition technology. While we will make minor corrections on request, transcriptions do not currently go through a full human review process. We apologize for any errors in the automated transcript.
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Glenn Lowry
Cops and young black men. Cops killing young black men. I mean, what an absurd narrative when the real violence on the streets of America today is these miscreants and these thugs running around with automatic weapons, firing them aimlessly out of automobiles at their gang rivals and stuff like that. I mean, and you don’t have any engagement with that problem. Instead you convert it into a white domination problem.
So that’s the kind of truth that a black president needed to pull the covers off of, and he failed to do it. Glenn Lowry is an esteemed american economist and public intellectual whose research and commentary delves into the intersection of economics, race and social policy. Born on the south side of Chicago, Lowry’s academic prowess led him to become the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33. Now, as a professor at Brown University, his research has challenged conventional wisdom and sparked critical discourse on issues like affirmative action, criminal justice reform, and racial inequality. Lowry’s salient commentary on the Glenshawn substack and as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute highlight his depth of knowledge and often heterodox views.
Ben Shapiro
In his recent memoir, Late Confessions of a black conservative, Lowry reflects on his experiences in academia, moments of personal turmoil, and his political shifts over the course of his career. In todays episode, we discuss the difficulty of political messaging and policy crafting around racial inequality, the trajectory of american race relations since the Obama administration, and Glenns relationship with religion. We also discussed what Glenn views as the real tragedy of race in America and the lasting damage from the national racial reckoning of the summer of 2020. Stay tuned to hear Glenn Lowrys profound insights on these issues and much more on this episode of the Sunday special.
Glenn, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate, been a big fan for a long time of an extraordinary amount of your work. You have a brand new book out called late Admissions, Confessions of a black conservative. I want to get into all of that first. I kind of want to start.
I mean, it does cover the topic of your book, obviously, with sort of your history politically, because here you call yourself a black conservative for a long time, you consider yourself a moderate or a liberal mug by reality. So now in the title of the book, you’re calling yourself a conservative. What do you think that means? Well, I could approach it in a number of ways. As an economist.
Glenn Lowry
I could talk about kind of libertarian ideas on the economy, markets, property prices, limited government, free trade, that kind of thing. As a person who is a born again christian at one point in my life, and very fervent believer, less so now, but still with great respect for these traditions of religious search for meaning in life. You know, I tend to be conservative on the cultural side, but from the racial point of view, the, quote, conservatism has mainly to do, I think, with embrace of a kind of autonomy, self determination, personal responsibility, not blaming the white man, more Booker T. Washington kind of, you know, bootstrapping kind of response to the existential challenge that being the descendants of slaves confronts black Americans with. And my reaction to that problem, the problem of, what do you do?
What do you do now? Do you have your hand out? Do you go around talking about racism and reparations, or do you get busy building your own community? That makes me conservative, too. So I would say on all three of those, economics, culture, and black self determination, I have finally, at this late stage in my life, come to embrace a conservative identity.
Ben Shapiro
Obviously, that’s a dangerous political move, because you can be as groundbreaking a thinker as Thomas Sowell and just get completely marginalized from the public debate, treated as though you basically don’t exist if you are openly declared a conservative early enough. I mean, I’ve been saying literally my entire political lifetime, which now goes back about 20 years, that if I could pick one person to be president of the United States, who would be Professor Sowell? But Professor Sowell, in sort of mainstream economic discussions, is never even mentioned, despite so much of his amazing work on things ranging from race and discrimination to just basic economic knowledge and decisions type work. Why do you think it is that black conservatives, particularly in the economic sphere, or people who even are perceived that way, you say, roland Fryer, why does that marginalization happen? That’s such a good question, Ben, and I’m so glad you mentioned Tom Sowell, who’s a great man, epic figure of the 20th century, one of the great intellectuals of our lifetime.
Glenn Lowry
I mean, you know, you can name book after book, and Jason Riley’s written a pretty good biography of him and whatnot, but Thomas Sowell is a towering figure. I keep saying he should get the Nobel Prize just like they gave it to Friedrich von Hayek, and they gave it to Gunnar Merodal. They can give it to a generic thinker. He doesn’t have to be a technical, you know, kind of mathematics kind of fetishizing. And, you know, he’s a big thinker.
And. Yeah, but anyway, I’m not answering your question, and I think there’s a certain expectation that if you’re black, you have a kind of progressive, what they’re going to call progressive or kind of critical, you know, that you have to be in a, in an anti system mode, that there’s some kind of rebellion that’s part of the authenticity. And so when you see somebody comes along who’s, you know, whose worldview is grounded in something other than resistance to struggle or domination, who kind of embraces the reigning cultural paradigms and whatnot, then they want to marginalize them. I don’t know. Did that make any sense?
I’m not sure I understand the problem, since I’m kind of, in a way, a victim of the same set of forces myself. One of the things I wanted to ask you, and I want to get to your critiques of the left, which, of course, have made you very controversial. But one of the things that I think that’s fascinating from what I’ve read about your book and what I’ve listened to you talk about with John McWhorter and other people, is sort of your take on why the right has been historically unable to reach out to the black community or to black voters, so to speak, in some ways that are kind of unique. So when I hear you talk about race very often, or when you write about race, you write about race in a way that you’ve talked about here, as essentially, it should be made less relevant to the question of personal autonomy and responsibility, that people should be taught that the decisions to make their life better are effectively in their own hands because teaching them anything else is counterproductive and useless. And yet one of the things that you’ve talked pretty openly about is that conservatives, when they speak that language, are not speaking that language properly.
Ben Shapiro
And then when they speak to black Americans very often about that sort of stuff, it comes off less as an act of sympathy and pragmatism and more as a sort of alienating language with regard to black Americans. How it’s said is maybe not how it’s heard. I’ve heard you talk about that, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what do you think are the main obstacles to a conservative or libertarian message in speaking to black Americans. I think that’s a hard question. At least it’s a hard one for me.
Glenn Lowry
The thing that came to my mind, I don’t care what you know until I know that you care. This is an old aphorism. You know, you can’t really get my attention and tell me anything that I might otherwise be disinclined to believe that I’ll take credibly and until I’m persuaded that your basic commitments are consistent with my flourishing and not antagonistic to it. So the suspicion that the motive is racist or a lack of concern altogether, that the prescription might be free market bootstrap responsibility, but the motive for it might be indifference or hostility to the person as opposed to desire that they flourish and are thinking that this is the best way to do it. And if I were a white conservative being told that I had to carry favor with the sentiment of this population in order to get them to take me seriously, I might balk at that.
I remember back in the nineties when I started pulling away from conservatism a little bit for a period of time, being at a meeting where the great William F. Buckley said, in effect, the metaphor was, you can’t say that the doctor doesn’t care when he’s dealing with a terminal patient and he moves on to the next case. And I thought at the time, oh, how horrible that was, how horrible. He was merely saying what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a way, was saying to Richard Nixon in that famous benign neglect. He says, I think it’s time for the race quiz question to endure a period of benign neglect, meaning, let’s move on to other stuff.
And people get from that the message that you don’t care. I want to go back to that period in your life because I find that particularly fascinating. I want to get to the before and then the after also. But that period which you do talk about in your new book, that period where you moved away from conservatism, I think is instructive for conservatives in speaking about race. So maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, what were the forces that propelled you away from conservatism and toward a sort of view of yourself as more moderate or even left leaning.
Okay. Some of those forces were not as flattering to me as others. I mean, so the unflattering was like I was feeling alienated from other african american intellectuals, and I wanted to be rehabilitated. In other words, I’d been out in the wilderness with Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams and people, and I kind of wanted to get back into good graces. And I.
And with the likes of the Cornel west and Henry Louis Gates juniors and the Anthony Oppy is the kind of what I call the Negro cognoscenti in my book. I mean, the kind of intellectual elites amongst African Americans. Because, you know, being from the south side of Chicago, being a black guy, I mean, having a certain identity, I wanted to be. And, you know, I was getting pressure all over the place, even from my own family, even from my own children. You know, I was getting pressure about my politics.
So maybe I was succumbing to that a little bit. The mass incarceration issue. There was a while where I was very agitated about the sharp increase in the size of the prison population and the racial disparity in it and all of that. And I leaned left in those years on those issues, but there were also other things that were going on. So the bell curve came out.
I had a real problem with it, the speculation about the intrinsic intellectual inferiority of African Americans. I mean, you know, forgive me. As I told my friends at commentary, when I wanted to write a critical review of the Bell curve, and this is Norman Puthor, it’s a Neil Kazadoi. They said, no, thank you. Cause we’re not piling on, Charles.
And I felt, you know, bad about that because, you know, I felt like I was protecting my people. You know, I mean, you know, there was this kind of thing. Other stuff happened. I, as I said, became a Christian and was moved, in a way, about social justice kind of questions from that point of view. As an african american congregation, ame pretty conservative theologically, but also a sense of responsibility for uplifting the black community kind of thing.
So there were various pressures and stuff that were. There were some books I write about in my book, my reaction to the Bell curve, to Abigail and Stephen Thurston’s book America in black and white, and to Dinesh D’Souza’s book, the End of Racism. I had problems with those books, which I could go into, but we don’t want to waste our time on that kind of thing. Actually, I might want to waste my time for at least five minutes on that sort of thing, because I think that it’s instructive as to the approach that conservatives should take when they discuss these sorts of issues, because obviously you’re not only somebody who’s open to conservatism, you’re somebody who is conservative. And yet you found the messages of those books particularly alienating.
Ben Shapiro
And I think that that is something that’s that’s worth conservatives, people who very, like, very likely listen to my show talking about, like, what exactly is the best way to discuss issues that were being taken on by Charles Murray or the Thundstroms or Dinesh in those books? And how do they differ from your message with regard to race, which is a message of taking ownership of your own life? What is the distinction there? Okay, well, I don’t have to be right about this. This is just my opinion, and this is 25, 30 year old stuff, in a way, going back to the nineties.
Glenn Lowry
But I already said my problem with Marion Herrnstein, which was, in a way, a kind of defense of the race. It was a kind of. The intellectual agenda here is hostile to the essential interests of African Americans, to characterize our subordinate social status as the result of intrinsic or inborn deficiency. Now, Charles Murray, who is a friend of mine, would say, that’s not what I was saying, but certainly that message was in the air, and there was a disquiet that I had with that whole project. Dinesh, he has a long career now to stand on, and you can look at his corpus of work, that book, the end of racism.
And I wrote a review in the Weekly Standard about the book. I thought it was just snide. I thought it was a smirk. I thought it was too clever by half. I thought he was kind of dancing on the graves of people.
I mean, he’s a young immigrant from. Is he from Mumbai? He. Dartmouth. He had this political correctness book, Illiberal Education, which I thought was a good book.
And then he comes along with this, undertakes to sort of summarize from a 20 something, conservative, intellectual activist kind of perspective. And I thought he made light. I mean, I could go into details, and some of it was maybe personal. Some of it was my reaction to him at that stage in his life. But I had a problem with the book.
I wrote that review in the Weekly Standard. And as far as american black and white is concerned, it was sort of this point that I made earlier, which is, you know, are we going to stop caring about whether we get this problem right, the problem being the residual subordinate status of African Americans, given slavery and Jim Crow and all that? Or are we just going to move on? And in a way, I thought they wanted to move on, and I didn’t want to move on. So I took the opportunity of a long review in the Atlantic, which cost me their friendship to say that.
Ben Shapiro
So let’s talk about the residual effects of racism in american history. It seems very often when we have this conversation that two sides almost talk past one another. I have this conversation a lot. I’ve debated this question a lot. And I can be fully sympathetic and agree with the argument that history has consequences, because of course it does.
And of course, things that are baked into the cake for hundreds of years are going to have long tails. There’s nothing new about that. But the task of any policymaker is to determine, number one, what would be the most effective corrective to that, if it can be corrected without violating the rights of others. And two, trying to actually create some sort of metric whereby you can determine how much of a given disparity is a result of past discrimination. And that one is really, really hard.
It seems as though the conversation goes, okay, I fully acknowledge that the terrible history of early redlining, let’s say the thirties, forties, and fifties, that has tail effects in terms of familial wealth. But how does that measure into today’s income disparities? How does that measure in today’s wealth disparities? And even if you acknowledge that it measures in a certain percentage in today’s wealth disparities, how is that wealth disparity corrected for by, say, bad mortgage policy, as opposed to increased income trajectory, which would lead, presumably to future wealth? I mean, the reality is that there are a number of minority groups who had literally no familial wealth when they arrived in the United States and have tremendous wealth because of those income trajectories that actually generate wealth generationally.
It seems like whenever you get down to those brass tacks, very often people want to avoid that second question. They want to go back to the original question and then suggest that you’re just not acknowledging the reality of historic discrimination and its after effects in modern life. And then they conflate that with the idea that there is current discriminatory policy, which, as you talked about, even anatomy of racial inequality, the idea of contract racism, idea like legal racism, that’s been gone for a long time in the United States, there might be contact racism as you talk about just how people interact. That’s not the same thing. I agree up and down the board.
Glenn Lowry
I agree 100% on this overhang of history. Of course it’s there. There’s no disputing it. It’s also very difficult to determine, as you suggest, what proportion of any given disparity that you see today is due to that, as opposed to other things. In economics, we have this concept of stocks and flows.
The stock is the wealth you have at hand. The flow is what you’re incrementing and adding to that on each annual or monthly basis. And the long term disposition of the stocks depends upon the flow. So people are looking at a wealth disparity, and they’re saying, see history as bequeath is this? But they’re not asking, where does wealth come from?
Wealth doesn’t fall from the sky. It has to be created. So there’s a kind of fallacy there. If you don’t get the flows right, the stocks are going to revert back to their disparate condition in the long run anyway. You’re not going to really solve the problem.
Wealth creation, I think, is the issue, not wealth inheritance. I think too much emphasis is placed on inheritance. But I want to say this to African Americans and anybody else who’s listening. We’re in the 21st century. And to live looking backward and to base your argument on what you owe or are owed what?
Repair. Repair for the historical, as opposed to the forward looking, which is the 21st century, where China is coming and is here. Technology is moving. Telecommunications politics is so fluid. I think this backward focus on is both kind of analytically wrong.
The issue is going forward, but it’s also kind of corrupt. I mean, it’s a politics of dependency. Who is the audience when you say wealth disparity? It’s the people who have wealth, whom you’re asking to give you some. You empower them with the ability to determine whether or not you flourish, when it’s really your responsibility, whether or not you flourish.
Ben Shapiro
Now, that last point that you’re making there obviously has been made by people like Shelby Steele, which is that when it comes to the sort of white guilt community, so much of this politics is not being aimed at black americans. A huge percentage of this politics is being aimed at upper crust white liberals who seem to regain moral superiority by declaring that only they can correct this problem. If you just give them enough power, then they will correct all the wealth disparities. And so they’re very happy to use the revolutionary fuel of this sort of argument in order to generate power for themselves, because then only they can fix. They gain both moral superiority in the sense that they have beaten their chests and talked about the historic.
The historic discrimination of the country. But not me. I’m dissociated from that. And also, if you give me the power, I alone can fix. I agree.
Glenn Lowry
I agree 100%. I like that characterization of Shelby. But I’d ask the question, if you were on the victim side of that, why would you give them that kind of power over why would you want them to have that kind of power over you? You willingly accept the position of a helpless client. Why would you do that?
That’s undignified. That’s not manly is what my friend Harvey Mansfield would say. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. I mean, come on. We have some more on this in just 1 second.
Ben Shapiro
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And you can see this in the polling data that about 2008, there starts to be a slight decrease in sort of how Americans are feeling about race. And then it just dives off the table in 2014. In 2013, 2014, it just falls completely off the table. You opposed Barack Obama for president in 2008. I did.
Also, when I read dreams from my father on an ideological level, it seemed to me that he was arguing for a pretty marxist, materialist view of the world, that the reason that people do bad things is because of wealth inequality that he has a section in the introduction to dreams from my father that I still cite as I think, one of the most damaging things that he ever said that nobody ever noticed, where he says that when I see the despair in whether it’s in Jakarta, Indonesia, or whether I see it in young dispossessed terrorists, basically in the Middle east, or whether I see it in the south side of Chicago, it’s always coming from the same sort of feeling of material dispossession. I thought that’s a bizarre argument, the notion that black Americans in the south side of Chicago are committing terror acts in the same way as, say, a radical young Muslim who’s 18, living in the Gaza Strip or something. First of all, lumping all that together in sort of this marxist materialist way is bizarre, but it then led to him creating in 2012, in that campaign a sort of coalition of the dispossessed. And we’re still seeing that politics played forward today. I’ve made the argument that basically 2012 broke the country and we’re all living in the after effects of 2012.
That Barack Obama was elected by a large margin in 2008 on the promise that he would be a post racial president, that he and his very person, by uniting black and white, was going to move America beyond the key issue of division in the United States, that of race. And now we are going to be one America, not white America and black America, just America, not red America and blue America, that whole schtick. And then it turns out in 2012, when he was a pretty unpopular president, he decided to start saying things like, Trayvon could have been my son and Henry Louis Gates, the officer acted stupidly, and he started pretty obviously pandering to particular racial constituencies, not just black Americans. He also started making overtures to Latino Americans with policies on illegal immigration. And it was basically, I’m going to cobble together this coalition of non white Americans and college educated white liberal women, and that will be the winning coalition from here on in.
And when he actually lost votes between zero, eight and twelve, and then he won the presidency over the most milquetoast human being ever to run for president, Mitt Romney, characterizing him as a vicious racist in the process that actually set up this bizarre nether region we’ve been inheriting politically since 2012, in which Democrats believe that they can just get out the racial base by pandering over and over. And Republicans in response have said, okay, fine, well, if you’re going to turn white people into a racial constituency, then I guess they’re a racial constituency now. And so you have this really bad racial dynamic that was set up, in fact, by a politician who was afraid of losing reelection. Okay, that was a mouthful. Yeah, it was.
Glenn Lowry
Let me see what I think about that. 2012 is the hinge year. Well, it was Trayvon Martin. And you’re right, he did say, if I had a son, he looked like Trayvon. And Eric Holder was there whispering in his ear, and so was Michelle and all these other things.
He wasn’t what looked like. It could have been a more challenging reelection campaign than it turned out to be. But I agree about milk toast, Mitt Romney. So a strategy that the Democrats have doubled down on. I don’t know if Biden’s craven, obscene kind of pandering to the black vote with this very insulting and infuriating patronization and this dwelling on, you can’t make it in America ten times better.
You have to be ten. You know, the Ku Klux Klan is coming to get you, and I’m the only thing that’ll save you from. I mean, you know, and maybe it does have its origins in 2012. I never really thought about that. So my take on Obama was, what’s the point of having a black president if he doesn’t tell the country the truth about race?
You have an opportunity, I mean, to really move the needle on race. And actually race relations get worse, not better, after he serves. And my account for that was I never thought about the 2012 effect that you’re talking about talking about. My account for that was more forward looking. It was like he’s only 60 or 60 58 or whatever he is, when he leaves the presidency, he’s going to be ex president a lot longer than he was president.
And he’s got a kind of reputational management problem. You know, he can’t be that guy who pulled the COVID off of the fraud, which is the racial narrative of white supremacy and structural racism, when the real story is a failure to seize opportunity opened up historically at the end of the 20th century, and to take advantage of the possibilities of developing, acquiring, accumulating, building and achieving on the part of African Americans. I mean, yeah, look at this. Cops. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to digress, but look at this.
Cops and young black men. Cops killing young black men. I mean, what an absurd narrative when the real violence on the streets of America today is these miscreants and these thugs running around with automatic weapons, firing them aimlessly out of automobiles at their gang rivals and stuff like that. I mean, and you don’t have any engagement with that problem instead, you convert it into a white domination problem.
So that’s the kind of truth that a black president needed to pull the covers off of. And Obama was as far away from doing that as you could possibly be. Al Sharpton. He brings Al Sharpton into his White House as an ambassador to black America. He has contempt for the historic responsibility which was bequeathed to him when he was elected president to change the conversation on race in this country.
He could have done it, and he failed to do it. Yeah, I think that there are also some political after effects from 2012. To give my hinge theory some more meat on the bones, the. The theory that Obama trotted out politically, which was that there would be an emerging minority majority coalition that would be undefeatable for the rest of time. When he beat Romney, I think the Democratic Party swallowed that line wholesale.
Ben Shapiro
And so Hillary tried to campaign on that same coalition. The problem for Hillary is that there was no way she was going to generate the kind of turnout numbers that Barack Obama did in the black community. And so when she lost, instead of them saying Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and Obama was a uniquely good candidate in many ways, instead, the Democratic Party said, well, this must be racial revenge. This must be America rejecting the legacy of Barack Obama and swinging over to this racialist, racist, terrible white supremacist, Donald Trump. And meanwhile, on the republican side of the aisle, because there was this buy in to the idea that Democrats would now win every election from here on out because of the demographic changes in the country.
When Trump won, it became, he’s a miracle worker, because only a miracle worker could defeat that machine. And so that meant, when you fast forward to 2020, that Democrats kept doubling down on the same Barack Obama strategy from 2012. But all the rules had changed because of all the early voting and all of this. And meanwhile, when Trump said, I didn’t lose, a lot of Republicans went, well, of course he didn’t lose. He’s a wizard.
I mean, wizards don’t lose. He’s a miracle worker. So there’s no way that he lost. Right? He had to have been cheated.
And so now you fast forward to 2024. Biden’s running the same campaign, except he’s been president for three and a half years and been terrible at it. And he is experiencing the Hillary 2016 effect, which is people don’t want to vote for him. People aren’t going to show up for him. And meanwhile, Trump has the right believing that he’s a miracle worker.
So we’re now set up for a situation in which either way the election goes, there’s a high probability, I would say, of significant chaos. I wish I could argue with that, but I can’t. I wanted to say something about something you said earlier, which was that they make, with the affirmative action and the structured racism narrative and the white supremacy, shibboleth, they make whiteness into this bugaboo. Then when white people start actually trying to defend themselves, they call it racism. Those were not your words.
Glenn Lowry
But that was something I took from what you said. If you keep labeling people a constituency group, they start to actually see themselves as a constituency group. You can be forced into a room with other people. Everybody outside the room is clamoring for you that they’re coming after you. You’re gonna start to see some solidarity emerge inside that room.
You’re the interviewer. But I almost wanna ask you whether you think Trump is gonna win the election here in 2024. So, I do think that he’s going to win. I mean, listen, I wouldn’t put money on this election, you know, not for hell or high water, although I have. I went from a person who did not vote in the 2016 election because I was so dissatisfied with the candidates, to a person who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, knowing all of his flaws, to a person who literally fundraised for Trump this time around, largely because of Joe Biden.
Right. Number one, I know what Trump looks like as president, and I do believe that the system has done a pretty good job of keeping Trump in check. This is why when people talk about Trump’s the threat to the democracy, the only person who’s been institutionally checked in my lifetime is Donald Trump. Actually for good and for ill. As it turns out in this latest criminal conviction case, where the institutions are being militarized against him for ridiculous reasons.
Ben Shapiro
Joe Biden, because he actually knows how the system works. He’s an actual dangerous potential tyrant. I mean, I think the amount of tyranny that he’s been able to, to actually pursue as president of the United States is so far beyond anything that Trump pursued. Whether you’re talking about using the occupational Safety and Health Administration to try to cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans, or whether you’re talking about the militarization of the DOJ to go after Donald Trump while simultaneously the DOJ is exonerating him for the same kind of stuff Trump did on classified documents by claiming that he’s senile. But then he goes out and rips his own ZOJ for saying he’s senile, or the DOJ trying to let us like Joe Biden to me, because he knows how the government operates and because there are so many people sympathetic to him inside the executive branch, I think a lot of poison slips through the crack.
The way I tend to think of it, in metaphorical terms, is that if american government and american institutions act as sort of a sifter, right. They are designed to sift out the worst elements and let the sand that’s okay kind of drop through. Well, Trump is like a case in point of a person for whom the sifter works beautifully, because everything that he does that’s incredibly dumb is a giant rock. Everything that he does that’s incredibly dumb is like, the election was stolen, I’m not leaving. And then it turns out the institutions are built for that, and so the rock just remains in the sifter.
And so what you end up in the after effects of Trump’s presidency are pretty good economic policy, really good foreign policy, too much spending, but nothing that is really kind of earth shattering. Whereas for Biden, because all of his sins are ground down to find dust, it just goes right through the sifter into whatever the politics are. And so he’s able to get away with an enormous amount because he’s doing kind of smart people corruption as opposed to stupid people extremism. Well, okay. I have a hard time forgiving Trump not stepping aside after the 2020 election, notwithstanding the fact that I agree that there were irregularities and there were dynamics at work in that election, that he had every right to feel he was unfairly dealt with by.
Glenn Lowry
I mean, the suppression of that laptop story, the massive mail in voting and stuff, the delay in announcing the outcome of. I mean, anyway, he had his day in court. It didn’t work out. He should have stepped aside. That’s my opinion.
That’s my humble opinion. I agree with that, by the way. Holding that against them in 2024, people are going to have different opinions about that. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to do. I’m not voting for Joe Biden, though, I can tell you.
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, well, I mean, by the way, I think that’s an enormous number of people, and that’s why I think RFK Junior is polling in the double digits. I think that there’s a huge number of Americans who are just going to stay home this time. This is why I think that Trump does have some systemic advantages. People who really like Trump, especially people who are now militarized by what just happened in New York in this criminal trial, I think that those people are going to walk over broken glass to vote for him. That.
That includes me. I mean, I’m going to, again, I went from somebody who did not vote for either candidate in 2016 to somebody who literally donated money to Trump’s campaign in 2024 and co hosted a fundraiser for him specifically because Joe Biden is a terrible, awful, no good, very bad president, and he cannot be president. This is why I say, like, the institutions of the country, when people say that it was a coup. Well, typically a coup requires you to actually have control over the military to the extent that you’re gonna, like, walk into Congress and just declare that Donald Trump is remaining president. Nobody was doing that.
Nobody was doing that. I mean, what you had was a riot that got out of control. Many of the people who went in actually were just kind of foolish and wandering around. I mean, I know some of the people who went in, and literally, not everybody who went into the building, even, like, treating all those people as though they were committing the same criminal offense is ridiculous. But, you know, the idea that that was on par with, like, the civil war, for example, that to me is such a deep misread, and it’s now being used to justify such exorbitant use of the institutions to stop Trump, that this is the kind of political dynamic that looking historically really does scare me, is that when you have a political dynamic where the other side is so, quote unquote, dangerous, that literally any and all means at your disposal are useful and necessary and, okay, morally justifiable in order to stop that side, nothing good comes from that.
Ever. Ever. I mean, the instruments of tyranny typically pre exist the tyrant. And this is what I’m seeing, is that the instruments of tyranny are being created in real time. The militarization of law enforcement, the expansion of executive orders, the willingness to end around the Supreme Court, like, all these things are being created in real time, and we’re watching it happen, and both sides are now just figuring out, okay, who can I elect to use that against the other guy?
That’s incredibly dangerous. Well, this might be a biased opinion, but I think the left are much more centers with respect to the trashing of institutions for short term political gain than the right. I think the effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court because of this abortion issue is just horrible.
Glenn Lowry
They want to pack the court.
I think the law, fair thing. We’re going to disqualify Trump. How did my partner, whom I disagree with strongly, John McWhorter, at the Glenn show, I disagree with him. He said tie his shoelaces together, just encumber him. And I say, you’re messing around with the rule of law.
You’re going to mess around with the rule of law in order to handicap a candidate. I mean, think about the trade off there. That’s horrible, man. But they’re doing it. I don’t trust anything I read in the New York Times, not because I’m a conspiracy theorist, but because the New York Times sold its soul to the devil to keep Trump from being able to be president or to run the country once he became president.
So they’ve created a bonfire of their own credibility, and they’re sacking the institutions along the way and largely to keep the populist sentiment that Trump embodies from finding its expression at the top of american government. Get some more on this in a moment. First, are you still struggling with back taxes or unfiled returns? Well, this year, the IR’s is coming after you. They’ve been escalating collections.
Ben Shapiro
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Call 18 24 56,000 or visit tnusa.com. shapiro that’s 1802, four, five 6000 or visit tnusa.com shapiro today. I mean, I totally agree with that. And one of the things that I find hilarious is there’s all this attempt to intellectualize Trump or Trumpism. Like, what is Trump or Trump ism?
And what it is is an impulse against these people. That’s what it is. It’s just an impulse, right? Donald Trump is a giant, pulsating, throbbing, orange middle finger. That’s what he is.
To all of these people who believe that it’s totally okay for them to rip the guts out of the institutions and wear their faces around like Hannibal Lecter. And you mentioned it earlier, that vaccine mandate thing. I mean, I remember that speech. I remember feeling chills run down my spine when I heard him give that speech. I said, this is a demagogic.
Glenn Lowry
You know, it really, really unsettled me. It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Yeah. I mean, and to have history prove them absolutely wrong on the medical facts. Right.
Ben Shapiro
I mean, between, between that speech and the worst speech I’ve ever seen a president give Biden in front of independence hall declaring his political enemies basically traitors to the country. This kind of language is never good in any country, ever. I mean, truly, when you have both sides declaring that this is the final election, like, this is a change from, from when I was growing up. Even, I don’t remember republicans saying about 1992 or 1996 or even 2000 or 2004. If, if John Kerry wins in 2004, there will never be another election for president in the country.
I don’t remember that in 2008 either. It was maybe, maybe a tinge of it in 2012, but it was really in 2016. I think when Trump was running, you started to get the, this is literally the end of the, there will never be another election. Now. Nobody, here’s the thing.
Nobody in America actually believes that. No one, America believes that if you actually believe that you would have a physical duty to go out and do something to the candidate of the other party, if you truly thought that that person was Hitler, you would actually have a moral duty to go out and do something about it if what you thought you were prohibiting and stopping was tyranny. But I’m afraid that that’s actually where we’re going, is that if you, if you keep saying it over and over and over, then an era of political violence that looks more like the late sixties and early seventies, I don’t think that we’re that far away from, from all of that. The only thing I think that’s preventing that is weakness and laziness, frankly, on the part of the radicals. Well, let’s be responsible in our position as public spokespeople to know that even when we talk about it hypothetically, we kind of feed into something that’s not at all healthy for our body politic.
Glenn Lowry
I mean, I’m not criticizing you. I’m just saying I hear you loud and clear and I just assume not talk about it. Yeah. What this raises is if we’re looking at the issues that face the country right now, given the polarization, given the fact that now so many institutions have been thoroughly corrupted in the minds of whichever party is sort of out of power. That if you’re a Republican, you think that the media are completely corrupt, and so you just don’t believe anything they say.
Ben Shapiro
Not just some of what they say, anything they say. You look at the university system and you say, not only do I hate the universities, I’m not sending my kids there anymore. I might not hire from those universities anymore. And if you’re on the left and right now the Supreme Court is controlled by people who are originalists. You look at the Supreme Court and you say, I’m not going to pay any attention to those institutions.
So if we don’t have our institutions in common and we don’t have the federal government in common, and we don’t have religion in common, because religion has largely fallen away in american public life, then where do we go from here? Because, you know, I don’t know if you’re by nature an optimist or a pessimist. To me, it seems the only way that anything can be rebuilt here is delegation of as much power as humanly possible to the most local level possible. Because it seems to me that community and social fabric can only be built ground up, and we just keep fighting over who gets to try to wield the baton to build it top down. Yeah, I’m going to be a little bit more conservative in the small c sense about the institution.
Glenn Lowry
I mean, here I am at Brown University, so I’m embedded within the Ivy League and this whole machine that is, I think, sometimes rightly characterized as over the top and beyond the pale and unredeemable and so on, because there are a lot of problems here. On the other hand, I have some amazing students here at Brown, and they’re not just whip smart, but they’re really hungry to be liberated from the party line. They long for engagement that’s, you know, challenging and whatnot. They may come in with a certain set of predictable views, but they love to be challenged about them. I do have those kind of students, so I’d hate to see it that we, in a revulsion at the elites, threw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, because there’s a lot of potential good here, but I don’t have a solution to the problem, so maybe I should just shut up.
Ben Shapiro
I know. I mean, I think that nobody really has. I mean, there have been a few solutions. Positive, frankly. I’m glad to see some of the donors putting pressure on the schools to actually start trying to live up their supposed original principles.
As opposed to simply playing an inside outside game with radicals on campuses we’ve been seeing over the past few months. I mean, the insanity to me of you have people who are violating the law, who are sitting on campus. We know that if their cause were a right wing or racist cause, for example, that those people would be cleared out forthwith. There certainly wouldn’t be full scale negotiations with the boards of the colleges. And so when you see people like that, I’m very glad that donors are starting to wake up to that.
Hopefully that will have some sort of impact on the running of these institutions. But it really is sad. I mean, again, if you are sort of, I would say in your soul conservative, you don’t like the idea that all the institutions are to be trashed, and you are seeing the right react with a sort of unbridled willingness to rip down the institutions and say that they are unsalvageable. And some of them, I agree, are unsalvageable. But I think we got to be really careful before we declare everything unsalvageable.
And that, I think, is a real danger. I’ve been pleased to call myself now mostly pleased because they had to use the word non ironically, an anti disestablishmentarianist. All these people are disestablishmentarians. They just want to get rid of the establishment. And I’m anti that.
I think that it has to be good. There has to be a good reason to get rid of the thing and a plausible alternative to substitute for the thing before you can just get rid of the thing. Now that’s from the UK, right? Isn’t that the religious wars, Protestantism also. The longest word in the english language other than pneumols for microscopic silicon volcano coneosis.
Right. So I’m pleased to use it, yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about. So a lot of your book in late admissions is about sort of the combination of the personal and the political. And that’s really a fascinating thing that nobody else has done.
It’s an audacious book in the sense that you really sort of bury your soul in the book. And so, you know, can you talk a little bit about what you think that relationship is? Because those of us who are in the realm of ideas and do it professionally, we like to think that the thing that’s driving us is the ideas. It’s the thoughts, it’s the philosophy. But in your book, you make very clear that that’s not always the case.
How should we think about politics and philosophy in sort of a more realistic sense in terms of how does that cross streams with just life and how we actually live? Gosh, I don’t know if I have anything general importance to say about that. I mean, I could only be anecdotal. I could only kind of talk about my own experience. And, you know, I was on the right, then I moved left and I moved right again.
Glenn Lowry
And I’ve talked about that a little bit already here with you. I mean, I used to be a technical theoretical economist, an academic in the pure sense of the word, who wrote abstract, mathematical modeling type economic theory papers for the academic journals and talked to 500 people around the world about those papers. And that was my life and my graduate students. And I got a job at Harvard, a young, talented black economist. I was the first black to have tenure in the economics department at Harvard in 1982, and had the anticipation that I was going to go on in that vein as an academic theorists.
But I had a crisis of confidence. The ideas weren’t coming. I wondered if I was good enough. Maybe I had a little imposter syndrome. Maybe there was this affirmative action kind of boomerang thing that happens when, you know, you move somebody along so fast and whatever.
But the bottom line is I kind of lost confidence in my ability to succeed in that kind of work at Harvard. And I moved over to the Kennedy School of government and became a more applied, policy oriented political economist. And the race issue was rife. It was something that I had worked on in my thesis, something that I had an interest in as an African American. And so I became what fully developed as a black conservative social critic of the neoconservative stripe in the 1980s.
So how does that relate politics and personal? In a way, I became more political because of a personal professional crisis that I was having, which relates to politics in a way, because it’s linked to affirmative action. And the fact that I was brought in self consciously as an African American to take that position at Harvard, and that influenced the way that I handled those responsibilities, or failed to handle them, as the case may be. And we’ve already talked about how I broke with some of my friends on the right, like Dinesh D’Souza and Abigail and Stephen Thornstrom and Charles Mary, about what was going on in the nineties and about how that had also personal connections for me because my identity, you know, longing to be. To come home again and to be embraced caused me to, I think, be more antagonistic to some of my conservative compatriots than I otherwise might have been.
You know, when I get asked a question about how my personal life should affect my politics. I want to. I want to try to advocate for staying true to the sense of the intellectual framework that you’re committed to and not being pulled by the tug of war that goes on with popularity, audience capture, appealing to other people, going along to get along, even if you’re cutting against the grain, stay true to what you think is the actual. I mean, that’s kind of the lesson that I draw from my various vacillations. I’ve ended up back on the right, and I think I was right all along to be on the right.
I mean, I think the institution or the family is the foundation of modern civilization. I think we know who men and women are based on their chromosomal inheritance. And I think the idea that you would try to undermine that subtle understanding in human culture is pernicious in the extreme. And I think the idea that that project of undermining that subtle understanding within human culture, the fact that it could go without being criticized within the academy in a systematic way, without seeing it for what it is in the long term historical context, that terrifies me. That’s a kind of corruption of our intellectual life, stuff like that.
Anyway, I know I digress a little bit, but I mean, I was right in my conservative instincts all along, and I regret that I strayed from them in order to carry favor with my co racialists. So you mentioned a little bit earlier your kind of journey religiously to Christianity, and then you say that you’re to some extent a believer now, but how does religion play into all of this? I’ve made the case. I had a book now a few years ago called the right side of history that was really about sort of the history of western civilization and how predicated western civilization was on certain fundamental religious precepts, things like made in the image of God, equal before God, free will. The idea that you have a mind capable of grasping actual objective truth, which is a point that Alvin Platinga made, this sort of idea that there is no such thing as abstract truth, that is graspable from an evolutionary standpoint, that if you believe in abstract or objective truth, that’s actually a religiously held jump that you have to make that there is a truth, and that your mind is like a piece of meat, is capable of grasping that truth, that these are all religious principles.
Ben Shapiro
How much do you believe that your religious belief plays into your belief system, and where do you hold religiously? You know, you’re making me think about this wonderful book called a certain ambiguity. A certain ambiguity. It basically posits a confrontation between a hindu and indian immigrant to the United States who is a mathematician and an american jurist, who is a christian believer, but is an open minded man who ends up in a dialogue with the Indian. And the point of view, the sort of punchline of the book is they all have to have assumptions, axioms.
Glenn Lowry
They have to have starting points of unquestioned commitment from which they then can deduce whatever they think of as true. And religion is kind of like that. And the idea that you would have to have some such embrace of an unproved first mover kind of primal commitment before you could even have anything that you called logic. I mean, you know, I think that’s a nice and interesting idea. In my own case, I was at a point in my life of crisis.
I was trying to stopped using cocaine. I had a real serious drug problem. I was in recovery and whatnot. I was vulnerable. I crawled into the church on my hands and knees.
My marriage was on the rocks. I had scandalized my wife with an extramarital affair that became public. It was awful. Read the book if you want to know all the bloody details. I needed respite from the noise of the world and from myself.
I mean, I needed to surrender to something, and I think that made me more credulous than I otherwise might have been, you know, being a high flown academic who doesn’t believe in magic. You know, you tell me a man was dead, and now he is raised from the dead, and he lives on, and, you know, that’s the vehicle to connect me to the creator of the universe. That’s asking a lot from, you know, a guy with a PhD from MIT who thinks of himself as a modern man. But I did come to believe, and it did really revolutionize my life. And it’s a long story, perhaps longer than I can tell here, as to how it is that I came to have doubts.
The doubts became creeping, and the crevice got bigger and bigger, and suddenly I couldn’t find my faith. And I try to talk about that in the book, but I say even here, I’m in my 8th decade of life. I’m 75 years old. I’m not going to live forever. Mortality and all of that.
I think it’s kind of an open question. I think I don’t want to be so arrogant to presume that I know the answer to the question about the existence of God and so on. So, anyway, call me an agnostic at this stage in my life, but I have great respect for the fact that people are grappling with this enormous issue of what is the meaning of life? What’s the foundational belief that grounds all of our strivings? I think there’s nobility in the quest for an answer to that question.
Ben Shapiro
So when it comes to go back to the racial issue, briefly, when it comes to the racial debate, it seems like the racial debate has gotten markedly stupider over the course of my lifetime. When I was at Harvard Law, one of my professors, there’s Randall Kennedy. Randall’s a really interesting guy, right? He has some very heterodox. Yeah, Randy’s a great guy.
Yeah. I mean, there. And there is this kind of fascinating conversation among racial academics that has completely been sidelined in favor of Ibram x Kendi and Kimberly Crenshaw and Ta Nehisi Coates, the most overrated writer I have ever read in my entire life, bar none. The idea that ta nehisi Coates is some sort of phenomenal author. He is so purple.
His metaphors are mixed. I just. I can’t stand it. But it’s not just that I hate his writing. I think that his thinking is incredibly messy and deliberately attempting to obfuscate issues.
And I feel like to that end, I actually would prefer Abramax Kendi, who just says the dumb thing out loud. Ta nehisi seems to sort of paste over the dumb thing with layers of colorful adjectival use, and Abram Kennedy is just like, nope, I’m gonna say the thing right here in front of you. But it does feel like our racial debate now is incredibly, incredibly dumb. And I don’t know whether that’s a good thing, because maybe that means that it’s clarifying in a certain sense, and we’ve reached sort of apex woke and now we’re receding, or there, we kind of keep sliding down that shoot. Well, I have an interested position in this debate.
Glenn Lowry
I am also a contributor on the questions that people like ta Nehisi Coates and Ibrahim X. Kendi address. And I have issued my very negative assessments of both of those authors and on many occasions in the past. I won’t try to recount it here. I like your formulation, though.
At least Ibrahim Xkindi is straightforwardly done. Ta Nehisi Coates has to give me a long set of paragraphs and metaphors in order to make the same dumb point. I think there’s merit in that assessment. Is it getting dumber? Yeah, it’s definitely getting that, man.
I’m doing my best, man. You know, I’m hoping that the memoir will raise my profile a little bit. That’s late admissions, confessions of a black conservative, everybody just out from Norton and we’ll see. God’s not finished with me yet, but it’s definitely an uphill. It’s definitely an uphill struggle.
We said what we said about Obama. I think all of this Michael, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd stuff, I mean, riots in the cities, I mean, people have no idea what that’s costing politically to the country. They talk about January 6, but the summer of 2020, I think, towers over January 6 in terms of the damage to the fiber of the country, that the serial disorder defund the police. Anyway, I could go on for a long time about that. Yeah.
Ben Shapiro
I think that the summer of 2020, which is the great ignored period in american history because it is clearly the most, between the COVID lockdowns and the giant riots in the middle of the summer, it is clearly the most. It is an inflection point in american history, the summer of 2020, and the willingness to sort of gloss over it as though it never happened and to pretend that none of it ever happened, the lockdowns never happened, that you didn’t have Kamala Harris talking about bailing people out of jail, the fact that the Democratic Party was kind of complicit in those riots and trying to use that, as I’ve said before, the revolutionary jet fuel in the engine of the Biden election. You want to talk about breaking trust with the american people that I don’t think has really ever been repaired or even attempted to be repaired. That’s it. I mean, like, it led to serious life changes for people.
Summer of 2020 is the reason I live in Florida. Right. I grew up in Los Angeles. I lived my entire life in Los Angeles. They locked us in our houses starting in March, and then they would not let us come out unless we were rioting on behalf of George Floyd.
And so at about the time that my wife was being double locked down because we weren’t allowed to leave our house cause there was curfew because of the riots that were happening blocks away. And she was hearing the helicopters swirling over our house in a fairly nice area of Los Angeles, and we were also locked down because of the lockdowns. It was about that time she turned to me and said, maybe we ought to take a look at Florida. And I don’t feel like I’m alone in that. I mean, that sort of.
And again, the willingness to just pretend that none of this ever happened or that it was normal is the part that’s astonishing to me. Yeah. And I think you have to blame the journalist establishment and the academy because these are really fundamental things in american history. I mean, here’s an anecdote. So Jacob Blake, Jacob Blake was a guy who got shot in the back by cops in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and caused riots.
Glenn Lowry
The circumstances that he getting shot by cops was, long story short, he was kidnapping his girlfriend’s children, who may have been his own kids, in her car. Without her permission. She called the cops. He had a knife. He was resisting arrest and not responsive to commands.
To cease and desist, he turned with the knife in his hand and the cop shot. Now, to make a long story short, Kamala Harris and Joseph Biden called his bedside in the hospital to inquire of his well being. That’s despicable. And it goes without commentary. It’s forgotten.
If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t even know about it. Audience so that’s just to say I agree with you. Ben. Well, Glenn, you’re out there doing God’s work. The good news is you’re 75, which means that if you run for president, you’re young, you’re a spring chicken.
Ben Shapiro
So maybe that’s still in your future. I’d vote for your nomination more than pretty much anybody else out there. Glenn, really appreciate your work. Really appreciate the new book, folks. Go check out late confessions right now.
Glenn, thank you so much. You’re welcome, Ben, good to be with you.
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Thank you for this great article on Glenn Loury. I’ve followed his work for years but wasn’t particularly aware of his life journey. A remarkable man. I will pray for him to come all the way home to Christ.
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Thanks for reading. May I suggest you subscribe to both the Daily Wire and Claremont Review of Books. LB
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