The Daily Signal - Top 5 of 2021 Day 3: New Look at Thomas Sowell, 'Great Black Intellectual' Ignored by Left (Repeat)

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Top 5 of 2021 Day 3: During this Christmas season, we're sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year to allow our team to take time off for the holidays. Thomas Sowell is considered by many to be one of the most influential and brilliant minds of the past half-century. He is most famous for his work as an economist, but is also a bestselling author, syndicated columnist, historian, and academic. Yet he hasn’t received much recognition. “When people talk about the great black intellectuals today, you hear names like Henry Louis Gates at Harvard or Cornel West … or today you hear Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi,” says Jason Riley, a journalist, scholar, and member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. “But in my view, Tom has written circles around those guys and is much broader in subjects that he’s covered as well as much deeper and his analysis is much more rigorous than those guys’,” Riley says. A new documentary, “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World,” tells the story of Sowell’s life and how his logic and intellect have impacted society.  Riley, who narrates the film, joins the show to discuss the documentary and the personal impact Sowell has had on his own life. You can watch the full-length documentary here or by visiting SowellFilm.com. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, December 29th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. Thomas Soul is considered by many to be one of the most brilliant minds of the past half century, both as a scholar and an economist. The recent documentary Thomas Soul, Common Sense in a Senseless World, dives deep into the life and influence of Thomas Soul. Today, I'm excited to share my conversation with Jason Riley,

a journalist, scholar, and member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Riley narrated Seoul's documentary and has spent quite some time having conversations with Soul. Riley joins the show today to share stories of Soul and discuss his influence on America. Today we continue our best of 2021 podcast series, so we hope you enjoy this conversation with Jason Riley. Many consider Thomas Soul to be one of the greatest minds of our day. Soul is most well known for his groundbreaking work as an economist, but is also a best-selling author, a photographer, syndicated columnist, historian, and academic. He is a man in pursuit of truth, and when he finds it, he stands by it, even when that truth may not be popular. Free to Choose Media has just produced a one-hour documentary on the life and work of Thomas Soul.

The film is called Thomas Soul, Common Sense in a Senseless Work. Let's take a listen to a portion of the film's trailer. The main thing that he's done, in my opinion, is to cause people to rethink their assumptions about all sorts of things, not just economics, but about race, about politics, about how we get along. Thomas Souls' essays and weekly columns have appeared in more than 300 newspapers and periodicals, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune magazines. Oftentimes, they created a backlash. The television and the print media, they've wised up. They're just ignoring what he's written because there's no way that they can argue with Tom Soul.

Most of the foolish things that are said on these programs was said 20 and 30 and 40 years ago and refuted 20 and 30 and 40 years ago. By you quite often. Anywhere Tom and Soul is, he's the smartest person in the room. Does he care about how he feels about things? fuels about things, how he wants the world to be, or how is the world as it is. You are a Marxist at one time in your life.

What was your wake up to what was wrong with that line of thinking? A facts. You're about to meet one of the greatest minds of the past half century. Thomas Soul, one of the greatest minds of the past half century, says Jason Riley. And Mr. Riley, who narrated the film is here with us today to discuss the documentary. Mr. Riley, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. You narrated this one-hour documentary on Thomas Soul.

I watched it last week and was just completely captivated by the film. I've known a little bit about Thomas Soul, but I learned so much watching this documentary. What you've really done here in this film is essentially take viewers through the life of Thomas Soul and really show the impact that he has had on people and across so many. many areas of our world. So I want to begin by asking you just to share a little bit of your own personal story of how Thomas Sol, his writings, his rhetoric, his logic, and his honesty has really impacted you personally. Well, I discovered Tom Sol in college in the early 1990s. I was working on the school paper and having a conversation with my fellow students about affirmative

action one day. And someone piped in and said, Jason, you sound like Tom Sol. And I said, Tom Who? And the person wrote down the name of a book on a piece of paper. And I went to the school library that evening and checked it out and read it in one sitting that evening and went back to school the next morning and checked out everything else they had by Tom Sol and was pretty much hooked, hooked on him by then. And while I was working at the Wall Street Journal on the editorial board in the mid-90s is when I first got to meet Tom Sol. He was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University then, still is. And he would travel through New York on book tours and meet with various editorial boards. So that's when I first got to meet him. And I later went out to Stanford to write

a profile of him for the newspaper. That would have been in the mid-2000s. And that's when we sort of struck up a friendship that has sort of endured since then. So when you learned, okay, there's this film project, I mean, yourself being a journalist, a scholar, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, what made you say this is a film project that is something that I have to be a part of? Well, they came to me. The free to choose of folks came to me. I had been working on a biography of Soul that'll be out in May. And when they found out that I was working on this biography, they approached me and said, we want to do a film, a documentary about Tom's life. Would you care

to narrate it? And I did not hesitate. Share a little bit about your book that's coming out. And what did give you kind of that passion and drive to say, you know what? I appreciate his work so much that I am going to take on this challenge and be a part of not only be a part of this film but also write this book sure well i uh the book is titled maverick a biography of thomas soul it's uh it's available for pre-order on amazon now that it will be out on may 25th and um it is the first ever uh biography of of tom he has no other biographer he's written a memoir himself and um and he's written about his his personal life in as many columns over the years. But this is the first biography of Tom. And it's primarily an intellectual biography. I don't focus much on his personal life, although there is a bit of that

in there. But I do focus on his ideas, the scholarship, how he's distinguished himself as an intellectual over the past half century and sort of what his legacy will be, how he'll be remembered. And I was sort of trying to get him to cooperate with the biography. He's a very private person for a while for for for more than a decade actually and I think I've he's 90 years old now so maybe I just warm down but he did cooperate he's had for a bunch of long interviews for the for the book and I also interviewed a bunch of um colleagues of his acquaintances and and people who are familiar with his work over the years uh so it was a lot of fun it was a lot of fun to write he's he's meant a lot to me in terms of my own uh intellectual development uh over the decades and

And so I wanted to introduce him and his work to a new generation. And I don't think that Tom has gotten the exposure that he sort of deserves. You know, when people talk about the great black intellectuals today, you hear names like Henry Lewis Gates at Harvard or Cornell West and people like that. Or today you hear Toneheese-Cote's and Ibramax-Kendi. But in my view, Tom has written circles around those guys and is, you know, much broader in his subjects that he's covered as well as much deeper. And his analysis is much more rigorous than those guys. And I don't think that Tom has sort of gotten the attention and the exposure he deserves. So I'm hoping the film will whet people's appetite and get them to pick up some books by Tom as well as the biography.

I hope does the same thing. It gets more people interested in Tom and the scholarship. You mentioned Thomas Sol's legacy, and I think that the film does a great job of really explaining what that legacy is, and I'm sure your book does the same. But could you just give us a little bit of a teaser, of in your opinion, what is the legacy that Thomas Soul has already left and will leave? I think in a number of areas, he's really made his mark. Very broadly speaking, though, he's made his mark as a sort of honest. intellectual, someone who is as much more interested in being right than in being popular, and following the facts where they lead and reporting his findings, even if they happen to be

politically incorrect. And he feels that is the real duty of a scholar to follow the facts and not fall for trendy thinking or fashionable thinking or isn't a popularity contest. That's not what true scholarship calls for. So I think that is one of his one of his legacies. Another is something thing that I think he modeled himself after Milton Friedman, one of his mentors at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in the early 1960s. And Friedman was someone who felt that intellectuals shouldn't spend all their time simply talking to one another, that they should seek a wider audience and speak to non-experts, explain themselves in their work to the general public. And after Friedman left teaching in the 1970s, that's what he did. In fact, one of

of the things he did was a television program that was produced by the same company that produced this one, the Free to Choose network. And that was Friedman's way of speaking to the general public about economics. And so when Seoul left teaching in the 1970s, I think he said about a type of public intellectualism that was very similar to Friedman. He wrote his popular column for general interest readers, most of Tom's books are written for non-academics, and he takes great pride in explaining economics and these ideas to non-experts. He's most known for his writings on race, but his best-selling book is basic economics, which is essentially an economics textbook without any graphs or equations in it. And I think Tom, he sort of left teaching,

although he left the campus teaching, he still sort of continued to teach through these books and columns over the decades. One of the things that I was most fascinated to learn about in the film is that Thomas Sol, he actually used to be a Marxist. But what really cured him, he says, of that, was working for the government

when he realized these Marxist ideas they would never actually work. Could you just share a little bit about Thomas Sol, journey out of Marxism, because I really find that so fascinating. Yes, well, it's not that uncommon. If you look at a lot of leading conservatives in the 20th century, many of them started on the left. Milton Friedman started on the left.

George Stigler started on the left. Walter Williams, the late Walter Williams, who passed away last year and was a friend of Tom's for more than 50 years, started out on the left. Thomas started out on the left. So it's not that that uncommon. But yes, Tom was a Marxist through his 20s. And then it was working in the government and seeing how some of these ideas he had about how the capitalist system works, seeing that in practice and seeing the incentives in place. And the intentions of some of these policies versus the actual results, that all had an effect on Tom changing, changing his mind about free markets.

and their power and shaping people's lives for the better. And so that's what it was. It was real-life experience and just less reliance on theories and what's supposed to happen and paying more attention to what actually comes to pass. You did interview Walter Williams for the documentary, which, as you mentioned, Mr. Williams did pass away this past December. So it really is a treasure to have these recorded conversations of him sharing about the work of Thomas Soul, his relationship with Thomas Soul.

But one of the things that Walter Williams said is that the media really, they stopped covering Thomas Soul a long time ago because they knew that they couldn't debate him. And this is just a sad commentary in my mind on really the state of our media. Why do you think the media has chosen to so often ignore Soul's work? Well, I think they've taken the side of the black left, broadly speaking, and the black left has ignored Tom for a long time, and the media continues to run to black intellectuals, academics, civil rights organizations, and so forth to speak on behalf of black people. And they tell the media, don't pay attention to Tom, anyone who thinks like that or says those things is a sellout or an Uncle Tom or someone who should not be. taken seriously. They're simply doing the bidding of white people. So they've responded with these sort of ad hominem attacks on Tom, and the media has largely bought that argument. And the types of

people that give out economics awards and those types of things are controlled by the left generally. And so that has worked against Tom and his exposure over the decades. And one of the things I'm hoping that the book and the film will help correct. Well, and one of the things that I was, also really fascinated in the film, was just how far-reaching Thomas Sol's work really is, that you know, despite the media not giving him the attention that he so deserves, he has impacted so many individuals in so many different areas of our world. You all interviewed a rap musician for the film who says that Thomas Soul has inspired many of his lyrics. What did you learn in those conversations with individuals who have been seen?

so impacted by Thomas Soul's work? Well, a lot of them speak about the clarity of his writing. He breaks things down in a way that's very understandable and digestible and witty, and people admire that. Tom, you know, in the early part of his career, did write more academic books that speaking to his peers in the academy, but he could also write for a wider audience. And editors at newspapers love this because they had this. serious, rigorous thinker who could write 800-word pieces on the topics of the day for their

general interest readers to understand. So they were getting this depth of knowledge and sort of more easily digestible bites. And then they really appreciated that. And fans of soul all seem to come back to the clarity of his writing and his thinking, how he puts things. He's a wonderful storyteller. And also, one of the things he's known for us is international perspectives. And so he likes to talk about trends not only within the United States, but in other countries and what's going on over there. And I think there's sometime in America, you have people who live in a bit of a bubble, an American bubble, a U.S. bubble. And Tom says, you know, a lot of these policies that are being pushed here have been tried in other places at other times. And here's what's happened over there.

And we should keep that in mind when we think about how those policies might affect life here in this country. So those international perspectives, which is something he specialized in in many of his books, is something people also appreciate. Making a documentary is no small undertaking. It's a complicated process, a lot of time, a lot of work. What for you was the greatest challenge of working so closely with the team of individuals who were producing this film? I just wanted to make sure we were doing justice to Seoul. I really see him as this towering intellectual figure. I'm a journalist by training. I'm not an intellectual, I'm not an academic. I spent life as a print journalist, basically. And I really wanted to make sure, both in the book and in the documentary, that we were just doing him justice. I said before that no one else has

written a biography of Tom, but I hope someone else does come along. A real scholar comes along, someone who can really grapple with Tom's ideas at his level and lay them out for people. I just, I just, I hope someone comes and does that. I hope my book can be a little placeholder until that comes along and do what I intended it to do, which is to, again, let people's appetite about Tom. But that's my, my biggest concern. I just want to do him justice because he has, I think he is one of the great social theorists of the 20th century of any country. And his writings on political philosophy, his writings on social theory, his writings on education

and law and history and culture, they are quite broad. And I think that Thomas, someone, people will be reading for generations to come. Well, and I know that you said that Thomas Sol is quite a private man, but you did have the privilege of speaking with him a little bit throughout the course of making. the film. Do you know if he has seen the documentary yet and what his thoughts are on it? I don't know. I haven't had any contact with Tom since it's been out. So I don't know if he's seen it yet. He is at Hoover, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and I know that Hoover's aware of the film, so perhaps they've reached out to him. But no, I can't say for certain

whether he's seen it. Well, I have no doubt that he'll feel incredibly honored by it. It really is a beautiful documentary and so informative. Would you just tell our listeners both where they can find and watch the documentary and then also again share with us when and where your book will be out? Sure. So the documentary information can be found at soulfilm.com. That's s-o-w-e-l-l-film.com. It was made for public television, so there you can find where it will appear on your local public television station. In addition to that, it's being streamed on Vimeo and Amazon and YouTube, and you can find links to stream it as well at soulthrum.com. In terms of my book, again, it'll be out in May 25th to be exact, and it can be preordered on Amazon right now. Great.

We will be sure to leave links for both the documentary and to pre-order your book in the show notes today. Mr. Riley, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. The Biden administration has been in power for almost a year. And the radical left has been imposing its dangerous ideology on America. Not only do they want to expand government control and promote cancel culture, but they also want to rewrite our nation's history. indoctrinate American students in our public school system, attack our traditional values of honor, liberty, and justice for all, and implement a Marxist agenda that unleashes socialism throughout

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