The Megyn Kelly Show - Coleman Hughes and Glenn Loury on Race in America, Patriotism, and College Campuses | Ep. 25

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Megyn Kelly is joined by Coleman Hughes, host of "Conversations With Coleman," and Professor Glenn Loury, host of "The Glenn Show," to talk about race in America, patriotism, Trump and Trumpism, "woke" culture, college campuses and schools in America, the 1619 Project and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We've got a great one for you today. I think you're going to find this really smart, really interesting, provocative, and contrarian, as they say. We've got Coleman Hughes and Professor Glenn Lowry, two guys who I really, really deeply admire. And if you don't know who they are, you're going to deeply, deeply admire them very shortly. More on them in just one second. But first, I want to talk to you about Pure Talk. Let's talk about talk. Who's your wireless provider? Is it AT&T? Verizon, T-Mobile? What if I told you you could be saving over $400 a year

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cell phone dial pound 250 and say Megan Kelly, and you'll save another 50% off your first month. Pound 250, say Megan Kelly. Pure Talk. Simply. Smarter. Wireless. And now just a quick word about the two guys we're going to be talking to. Coleman Hughes is 24 years old, Columbia University graduate, and has become, I think, one of the most promising intellectuals of our time. He is like Glenn, a contrarian. He does not accept sort of these race narratives that have been shoved down our throats and has really been pushing back in a smart, forceful, respectful way on some of the narratives that we've been sold about our country and ourselves.

One more on Coleman before I get to Glenn. I met Coleman Hughes shortly after I left NBC when I was still feeling bad and people were calling me names and I was down in the dumps. And I went to the comedy cellar with Doug, my husband. We had a lot of laughs. It was fun. And before I left the comedy cellar, he came over and introduced himself. He was there. He knows a lot of the comedians and he himself is not one, but he was there enjoying everything as well. He introduced himself and we sat and he opened with Megan. I just want to tell you that what was done to you at NBC and the accusations against you are bullshit. And of course, I was in such a dark period and place that I was like, oh my God, right? It was like, he was like an angel who came over to help me. And we talked, I mean, over an hour, maybe two hours that night

about everything. And I left with such a better understanding of what had happened to me, where we were in the country, where we were about to go and felt so grateful to him. And just one other thing on him, he had me on his podcast recently, and we did a really in-depth conversation and he never asked me about the NBC exit or the blackface thing. And I heard him later introduce the interview by saying, I'm not going to ask her about that because one of the downsides of cancel culture is the person who's been the victim of it keeps getting re-victimized by people who keep bringing it up like it's meant to be part of their story. That's what kind of a guy Coleman Hughes is. He truly is a beautiful man in every sense of that word. And so the reason for inviting him on is multifaceted. Glenn, Glenn is somebody I listened to all summer long in the wake of the George Floyd protests. And he is intellectually

fierce and really fair to his critics on the other side. He'll help you understand both arguments. But I think he's an intellectual giant. And when he talks, you're going to want to stand up and cheer. He's just that kind of persuasive thinker. So these two guys are friends. They've done a lot of panels together. They don't agree on everything like Trump. But I think they agree on the big things like the damage that's being done to our country by woke culture crusaders who are more bullies than true activists. Anyway, enjoy. Professor Glenn Lowry and Coleman Hughes, thank you guys both so much for being here. Thank you. My pleasure. Thrilled to have you. Thrilled. I just want to tell the audience that the entire summer as we were going through the

George Floyd protests and all the racial unrest we saw in the country, you were who I read, Coleman, and you were who I watched, Glenn, on The Glenn Show, which I highly recommend to everybody. I watched it on YouTube. You and John McWhorter, who, you know, you come on, he's a little bit more left than you are. But it was these were all great debates where I learned. And it's just so hard to find open debates where people can still teach you as opposed to just preach to you in a way that's not really that informative. So anyway, thank you for that. Let's just start because it's the most recent news of the day with Trump. And I know Coleman, you describe yourself as a liberal and Glenn, you've been a liberal,

but you describe yourself now as a conservative. So do you guys mind sharing how you voted and, and why you voted that way? I'll start with you Coleman. Yeah, I'm not really sure what I am anymore. And I don't, I don't get too hung up on these words, liberal and conservative. Um, but I voted for Biden and it's more accurate to say I voted against Trump. Um, I think a lot of the arguments in, in favor of Trump that I, that I hear are really arguments against left-wing hypocrisy and media bias, all of which I think are real and worrisome phenomena. But when I see the way Trump conducts himself, the undignified way he holds office, his boorish personality. I think all of it is such a turnoff that, and Biden has been fairly good at rejecting woke excesses thus far on the left that Biden seemed like the clear pick for me. So that's why I voted Biden. But I could see why someone would vote Trump simply as a rejection of left-wing identity politics and apologizing for riots and so on and so forth. But ultimately, I think, you know, for Trump to be the face of the fight against woke excesses is not good. It's not good for that face to be someone

so undignified. That's an interesting point, because there has been a debate about whether the fight against wokeness and cancel culture, is it helped by having Trump in the office or is it hurt by having Trump in the office? And that's well articulated, an argument that if you oppose that stuff, as I definitely do, you'll do better without him. And you're right, Biden has not signaled that he's in favor of this stuff, although he does say he's going to bring back the critical race theory mandated sessions for the federal government and contractors dealing with the feds and a couple of other things like he's he's unfortunately today the news broke that he's going to try to bring back these incredibly unfair anti due process standards for accused men on college campuses that Obama had in place and Betsy DeVos under Trump tried to remove. I mean, the long and the short of it is you can't cross-examine your accuser. If you're a college guy accused of

sexual assault, you have no right to an attorney in the room. You have no right to discovery. So you can't see her texts or messages to friends. And once you get found guilty, which you are in virtually all cases, you have very limited rights of appeal. You basically get labeled a sex offender. It's very hard to get into another college. It's just been crazy slanted in one direction. And now he's saying he's going to bring those unfair standards back. Glenn, let me ask you, I've heard you defend Trump on a lot of things. And I don't know if you voted for him. I'm assuming you did. Yeah, Megan, I'm going to defend Trump. I don't want to tell you how I voted. What I say is I voted for Biden, but you shouldn't believe me. And the joke is, if I had voted for Trump, I would never say it. You can't ask me if I voted

for Trump and expect me to say yes to that. Okay. So there's no information in my response to your question as to how I voted. I voted for Biden, but you've learned nothing from me saying so. But I want to make the case for Trump because I think this personification thing is ridiculous. I mean, we're now dancing on the grave of Trump. I mean, the energy of the moment is, oh, hallelujah, our long, dark nightmare is over. Whereas the difference between Trump and Biden is, what is your policy about building pipelines and about fracking and about global warming and about America's positioning in the climate change debate? The difference between Biden and Trump is, what are you going to do at the border? What is exactly the philosophy of your view about the integrity of the American

nation state? The difference between Biden and Trump is, who is Secretary of the Treasury? The difference between Biden and Trump is a lot of things. There's 70 plus million people voting for Trump, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is a fight about America. Huge forces are at play here. That the press, that the coastal elites, that the pointy heads in the university, that the three and five gender people would drive the agenda of American politics is a horrifying prospect. That the deep state, that the phony Russia hoax, I know how it sounds. I know my saying this will mark me because I bothered to invoke the fact that the result of the 2016 election was never accepted. I don't want these people, and you know who I'm talking about. I'm talking about the news anchors.

I'm talking about the people who put out 1619 projects. I'm talking about the people who give national book awards. I don't want these people telling me what this country is about. That's a legitimate position to reduce that argument to the personality of Donald J. Trump. He is merely an avatar standing in for a whole lot of forces in the society. I want regulations down. I like the way the economy was going before the COVID thing came. I want the economy to open up. I don't want another shutdown. Those are legitimate positions.

Glenn just unleashed the heat, Coleman. He did, yeah. I mean, I don't think you disagree with a lot of that, but what points would you take issue with, if any? So I think what I would take issue with is, you know, everything you said about left wing media bias and hypocrisy. I'm on board with including, you know, the Russia story being a hoax and just being filled with confirmation bias since the beginning and the media being out to get Trump and being terrified at the prospect of 1619, you know, being imported into schools and becoming the new story that America tells about ourselves. My question is, what about the past four years

of the Trump administration has shown us that Trump is an effective bulwark against that? There's a first question about how much power the executive has over a cultural war of ideas to begin with. And then there's a secondary question of what Trump's net effect on left-wing craziness is. The logic of Trump derangement syndrome presupposes that Trump deranges people on the left to a degree that a Mitt Romney or, you know, someone I would feel comfortable voting for, like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain wouldn't. And so I think, you know, it's not clear to me. I'm not saying that without Trump, suddenly this stuff is going to go away. What I'm saying is, it's not clear to me what the net effect of Trump, the personality is. Can I respond to that? I want to give a concrete example, the race debate, the race debate,

Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, the NFL, Trump picking a fight about that, the cops, are the cops racist? Going to the bedside of Jacob Blake, talking to the daughter of George Floyd. I mean, mothers of the movement, martyrdom in the black community from cops, okay, versus love your country. You should be fortunate to be playing in NFL and being a millionaire. What do you mean systemic racism? The country's made tremendous strides. The cops, are you kidding me? It's one of the toughest jobs you could ever imagine. Really? You're going to take the side of the quote-unquote thug over and against the cops? The riots? You're going to apologize for that? Now, Trump is an imperfect tribune for a particular

position in that discussion. That position says, by and large, the cops are our friends. After all, the murder rate in New York City went from over 2,000 to under 500 in a decade. After all, most of these incidents involve people who are provoking whatever the altercation is that ultimately ends up in their end. After all, really? You're going to tell me that George Floyd is a hero? That's a legitimate position. Trump embodies it. Let me just finish this. 70 million people.

That is almost half the electorate. You're going to roll that up until he's a racist and he's an imperfect representation of something? It's not about him. Go ahead. I don't think he's a racist and he's an imperfect representation of something. It's not about him. Go ahead. I don't think he's a racist, I think. And it's not just that he's imperfect. If he's the embodiment

of the I love America vote, and again, everything you say, these are things we, we pretty much see eye to eye on, but if he's the embodiment of the, I love America vote, what, what makes, what makes me angry as an American is when he doesn't respect the norms of democracy, such as conceding an election, right? Like that, that, that seems to me as, as the president, that is the one to defend Thomas Jefferson statues, for example, which I'm completely

on Trump's side of for him to then, you know, disrespect, you know, piss all over the founding father's graves by not respecting the transition of power is something that actually angers me in a patriotic sense. And a blunder like that makes Trump's entire package more easily dismissible. He will always be remembered as the president to break that norm that is so fundamental. And it makes the rest of it just, again, he besmirches everything he touches by association. That's why the personality stuff is not irrelevant. The way he conducts himself is not irrelevant. Let me respond to that. And I really hate having to play this role, but I have to play this role. For the integrity of this conversation, I have to play the role. The election is in dispute.

I actually have no position. I have no position whatsoever about recounts. I'm not a lawyer. I have no position about the legal claims that have been made. You may recall in 2000, there was also a disputed election, and you may recall that lawyers got involved. So there's a disputed election. It does look like Biden won as far as I can see. Okay. I'm not disputing that. But let me finish this. Let me finish this. What I'm trying to say is the judgment about who's president of the United States will be rendered under the constitution when the electoralctoral College cast its votes, okay, the interpretation of the election situation, just like in 2000, is a subjectively constructed in real time thing. We're deciding it right now. When a foreign leader decides to call and congratulate Biden, he's actually casting a ballot, so to speak, in this process by which we're constructing how we interpret the thing.

But the election is not over. There are disputes in play. They're going to play out. OK, but but but and I'm just a genuine question. years old during Al Gore, George Bush, did either of them declare victory before the votes were even on 2 a.m. the day after the election? I don't think so. But you're saying Trump declared... Look, I don't want to get into that, Coleman. No, but that's my point. That's not something to dismiss.

That's banana Republic shit that it's embarrassing to have an American president. Cause we like to think, I like to think of our, our nation as, as better than the nations that are routinely dealing with, uh, coups and, you know, people, you know, but, but that, that that's, it's embarrassing as, as an American to, to, to not be able to take that norm for granted. Look, I agree with you. He shouldn't have said it. Mike Pence cleaned it up when he came up. But the election is in dispute. That's my point. The election is not over. All the votes should be counted. Again, I'm going to echo talking points here because these talking points happen to actually be correct. We should let the process play out. Stacey Abrams never conceded that gubernatorial election. I've been whinging about that for two years, Glenn. I feel like I've been the only one

talking about how fundamentally corrupt that is. So to be consistent, I say the same about Trump. Do you not think that the voter suppression phenomenon, this is Eric Holder and Barack Obama. OK, this this is this creeping argument. It doesn't know any bounds that if a legislature changes a state law in such a way that an accountant calculates it will disadvantage the Black vote, then we presume that the motivation of that legislator was to suppress that vote, and we thereby cast into doubt the electoral consequences of processes that are under the governance of those state legislatures, because we presume that the motives of those Republican state legislatures, many more of which exist after Obama was president than before, was somehow racially unjust.

Do you not think that that undermines the integrity of our electoral process? Absolutely, Glenn. And I've been talking about that for years, about how the moral panic about voter suppression, it hits me in exactly that same, you know, that same patriotic place in my brain where, you know, concerns about, you know, inflated concerns about voter fraud hits me. It's like, you're playing with our democracy. You're playing with the trust in our democracy and you better have a damn good reason to play with it if you're going to. Can I ask a question on that? Can I ask a question on that? Okay. Sorry. No, no, it's fine. I'm loving this. I understand that Trump is abnormal in many ways. And it's of course also why he was elected in large part. But don't you think, Coleman, that he has some reason to distrust systems at this point, given that so many of them are very clearly against him and given how the

apparatus has worked for four years to ruin him, to tear him down, to actually boot him out of the presidency? If I'm Trump, I don't have a lot of reason to trust anyone, especially vote counters in Philadelphia or places that I know are controlled by Democrats who you have, you know, you have more than a decent reason to believe might think the ends justify the means. That's why I've been saying, go ahead and kick the tires, kick the tires all day long. Do, do better than Stacey Abrams did who just ginned up controversy in the press, but never actually pursued a lawsuit. The courts are fair.

I believe the courts are fair and they will have the final say. And then we'll all feel better one way or the other. We'll know a winner or a loser and we can lick our wounds one way or the other. But I feel like don't don't you think he has a reason to have some healthy amount of distrust? Oh, sure. I mean, yeah. And the he has a reason to have some healthy amount of distrust? Oh, sure. I mean, yeah. And the media has been out to get him since day one. I mean, it's it's it's obvious if you if you, you know, care enough to look at it. But listen, I think people kind of implicitly have lowered their bar for for over the past four years. It's like, yes, he from his position,

the media has been out to get him. You know, the Russian investigation, he has to be paranoid and thinking that any criticism of him is unfair. But to begin, he's also, you know, can't we, shouldn't we have a bit of a higher standard of our president, right? Like, even if you get unfairly criticized for four years, does that mean I just have to accept any level of paranoia and mistrust in the system that I shouldn't put the burden on you to try to distinguish a legitimate criticism from, you know, complete bias. I can understand it, but this is the president, right? This is the top job. You just asked him to concede when he doesn't think that he lost the election and he wants to go through due process. I asked him not to declare victory, at least. Well, that was another thing that you said. The quote, declaration of

victory, close quote, was an offhand comment that he made and a thing that he shouldn't have said. And as I said- So that's what I talk about, lowering the bar. He said it twice in the span of like three minutes. You just asked for him to concede. And then when he says, no, I'm actually going to fight because I think I've been wronged, you call him a miscreant who has destroyed the integrity of American government. I mean, he gets to have his day in court. He gets to fight. No, he does get to fight. But listen, my- So let him fight. Yeah. Election night, he said, frankly, we won. And then a minute later, he said, we won.

This is Trump. This is Trump. So that's what I'm saying. We say this is Trump. We excuse it. We excuse it as if it doesn't matter. We've changed the bar because we understand he's like a friend that we're used to showing up drunk at our house. And we just we price it into our judgment of him. No, I'm sorry. I'm not going to get down into the, you know, Trump is crazy. Trump is this or Trump is that. This is not about Trump. Well, that's therein lies the whole part of the election.

If Biden could make it about Trump, he was going to win. And if Trump could make it about policy, he was more likely to win. And to me, when I see when I see Trump doing what he's doing and I I'm not in Trump's head, I can't tell you whether he believes he's, in fact, the victor or whether he's trying to create a soft PR exit for himself. I don't know. But I'm reminded of, do you guys remember this guy, Harry Markopoulos? He was the guy, he showed up over and over at congressional hearings and elsewhere trying to warn about Bernie Madoff. And the guy was, he was some sort of former securities executive and an investigator and like a forensic fraud investigator. And he had like a crappy suit. It was always green. His hair was messed up. He just did not look like somebody we should listen to. And on the other end of his accusations was Bernie Madoff. You know, he'd run the SEC. He was completely respected and lauded by all these

white shoes firms on Wall Street. And everybody's like, all right, Harry, bitter much. That's how he sounded. Just kind of like, no, poor Harry. Well, little Harry was right. He he was the one guy who saw it and was like setting himself on fire trying to say, this guy's a fraud. Don't give him any more money. He should be in jail. And Harry was right. And so I kind of look at Trump, not necessarily in this instance. I don't know. I'll listen to what the courts tell me because I've spent enough time litigating in them that I do trust them. Not implicitly. They get things wrong, but they're going to get this one right one way or the other. There's too many cases and

there's too much data. I think Trump is sort of at this point almost a Harry Markopoulos figure, as we've seen in a couple of these accusations against him. You know, and he's jumped up and down and said, I did not collude with the Russians and all the media and all the Democrats and all polite society was saying you did. Right. And Harry was there like anyone. And Trump was coming in saying the media is the enemy. They're the enemy. And people are like, it's disgusting and it's deplorable. He was. And you

know what? He was proven right. They're certainly his enemy and they are the enemy of his supporters. I mean, you don't have to look far for evidence of that. So I almost see this, whether he wins or loses as his final Harry Markopoulos moment. We'll find out. Can I ask you now what you take away from the black vote? Because the numbers have changed from election night to now. It looks like he got 8% of the black vote overall. That's up from 6% in 2016. He did a little bit better with black men than he did with black women. And that's, that's not a huge surprise, given the gender split overall. But you know, the Republicans are spinning this is like he improved his margins with black voters, despite four years of being called a white supremacist. And the Democrats are

like, 8%. So what, what's your take on those numbers? I'll start with you, Glenn. I wouldn't put so much weight on the numbers. I'm not a numbers person in terms of elections in any case. I was going to say, you're an economist. You know, think about six to eight is also 94 to 92. I mean, we're still above 90, right? So, but the nature of the conversation is definitely shifting. I mean, you had African-American political candidates.

There was a challenger to Maxine Waters' seat out in Los Angeles. There was somebody in Texas who was running. You had the Jones, this guy in, I'm sorry, I forget his name, in Michigan who ran for the Senate and did a very- Yeah, John James. John James, yeah. You have Tim Scott has played a role in the senatorial campaign committee and stuff like that. You have these rappers. I mean, you know, it's froth on the top of the public culture, but it's still, I think if he had been more of an effective populist, he might have been able to pry this kind of lock that Democrats have on African-American political sensibility a little bit away. Certainly, I think he had opened up a conversation about the political tenor of African-American leadership and such that I think in the years ahead will be interesting to see what develops. Do you see any sort of a trend happening here, Coleman? Well, there is a trend. Apparently, I was speaking with David Shore, who is Obama's in-house Nate Silver type. And he pointed out that ever since either 2000 or 2004, every four years, the percentage of the black vote that goes red has increased. And so this 2% increase could just be, it could have nothing to do with Trump per se, and just be a continuation of that trend. And it's, of course,

the trend is starting out with such small numbers that it's easy to ignore. But, and frankly, I don't know exactly what is causing the trend, but there certainly is a trend line in one direction. And it's possible that 30 or 40 years from now that that might be a really significant chunk of the vote. I don't plan on waiting that long, Colton. I said I don't plan on waiting that long. I don't have 30 years. Well, one thing I will say about it, one thing I will say about it, and this might I'm shooting from the hip completely here. I have no idea whether this is true, but I have to imagine. The other point to realize is that this trend, insofar as it exists, could be is that younger Black Americans are growing up

in a country that is less racist than it's ever been, in a condition where racism will never be completely gone. But where I just talked to my father, I talked to my grandfather, they had more experiences of frank, straight up racism than I have. And most black people I know have that same dynamic with their parents and grandparents. And so if you're met with a narrative that is a new narrative, that's telling you racism is absolutely everywhere, it's pervasive, and you combine that with a generation that is on a day-to-day basis experiencing less of it than every Black generation prior, it's possible that you will just get a slow backlash of Black people feeling this narrative doesn't really address the concerns that they actually

have in their life. And it's increasingly fantastical. And you may just get a backlash against that. You get the black lash. Remember Van Jones said there was a white lash, black lash. More with the Dream Team in one second. But first, have you ever been sitting in a room and you're enjoying yourself and then you realize there's something wrong and it's that you feel like you're on the sun because you haven't bothered to put blinds up on your window, call Blinds Galore. Go to Blinds Galore. That's what you need to do,.com,

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off your order. Visit BlindsGalore.com today and let them know that I sent you by choosing the Megyn Kelly Show at checkout. Beautiful custom window treatments are waiting for you at BlindsGalore.com. That at BlindsGalore.com. That's BlindsGalore.com. In the wake of the George Floyd killing and the riots and just incendiary talk about race in the country that took a direction I found downright alarming, alarming. And having been in the media, I had seen the media take random cases involving white police officers and black suspects and blow them into a huge thing time and time again. And it coincidentally always seems to happen in an election year. And so many cases get just get totally ignored when they're not in an election year. And I do think they have an agenda.

But if you look at the actual statistics of police shootings of black men, they do not. This is data. They do not support the narrative that police are hunting black men in the streets. And yet that was said. That was said this summer by LeBron James and others and accepted. And it's become a narrative that I think large factions of the Black Lives Matter supporters believe. What LeBron said, tweeted was, we are literally hunted every day, every time we step foot outside the comfort of our homes.

And Coleman, I thought you had a very brave article. You're at the Manhattan Institute now and writing for City Journal, among other places, but you just said it flat out. It's not true. It isn't true. And I wonder if you can put some meat on that and help us understand why people refuse to believe that it's not true. Well, first thing I want to point out is I walk out of my home in Virginia, say, you would think to yourself, well, this person has imbibed a narrative so crazy that they seem like they might be crazy. And you would feel no compunction at all pushing back against them and saying, well, actually, only 30 people died from Islamist terror last year. And obviously, one is too many. But let's not blow this out of proportion. You would understand,

at least people on the left would understand instinctively why it's important to pour cold on crazy exaggerations of a problem. So when I say that around 50 unarmed Americans get shot dead by the cops every year, to me, it feels like I'm pouring cold water on a narrative just in the same way that you might want to do about jihadist terror. But it's received completely differently on the left. I would say probably most protesters don't know that the number is that low to begin with. They don't know that the race that takes up the majority of that number is going to be white people in most years.

And the other thing that people really don't know if they're not paying attention closely is that every time you see a video of a black person unarmed getting shot by a cop, there is almost an identical video or situation that has happened to a white person probably in the same year that you don't know about because they don't get elevated into your Instagram feed, into your Facebook feed, into the areas that, into the medium that media that people consume nowadays. So in my piece, I took a random year, I took 2015 and just listed 10 or 12 different white, unarmed white people that were shot and killed by cops. In most cases, the police did not receive any kind of punishment. One of them was a six-year-old kid. Each of these is different

and should be analyzed on its own terms. Some of them are straight up murders. Others are completely defensible. And it happens to Americans of every race, every year. To your point, community requests tend to determine police deployment. Someone inside an urban community calls the police, they show up, and then there's an interaction with a suspect. And if you survey most Black women inside of these communities where there are high crime rates, they want more police, not less now and black men to more police, not less. They're worried about their kids getting shot. They want they say they talk about feeling relieved when they see a cop in the vestibule of their building and getting a little worried when he's not there. And that just to add to the statistics, there are about 7500 black homicides a year, black homicide victims a year. And in 2019,

there were, according to the Washington Post, 14 of those were black unarmed suspects dealing with police. So that is 0.2, 0.2% of the total of black homicide victims, 0.2%. This in a country where we have an average of 27 deadly weapons attacks on cops a day, a day, 27 deadly weapons attacks on cops a day. And, and, you know, when cops make between 10 and 11 million arrests a year. So, you know, Glenn, people don't like to talk about that. And even I, when I talk to people about the stats, they'll look at you like, I don't want to hear your stats. Your stats are contrary to my lived experience. And that's racist.

That's a racist's defense to what our own lion eyes are telling us, right? We can see, and a lot of Black men will say, I have had a lifetime of negative interactions with the police. So don't tell me there isn't systemic racism in the police department. Megan, what we're dealing with here is a kind of delusion on a grand scale and a kind of denial of brutal and very disturbing facts. And those facts have to do with Black crime. Now, I have to apologize in advance for even saying this, okay, because I don't take any pleasure in saying this.

I'm not some ideologue who's on some crusade. I'm not a racist. The reality of life in the communities where these encounters between police and Black citizens take place, these problematic encounters, is basically driven by the violent behavior of people. I mean, look at the homicide rate, look at the robbery and burglary rates, look at what's actually going on on the ground. The reason that you have a disparity in the number of African Americans who are killed by cops relative to population is because you have a disparity in the encounters between African

Americans and cops, which is based upon the behavior of African Americans, not the behavior of cops. The reason that you have a prison disparity, a monumentally humongous disparity in the incidence of incarceration, is because you have a huge disparity in the incidence of criminal offending, not because the system is so configured as to hunt down and lock up Black men. This is humiliating and shameful. If you're an African American, if you're a lifelong liberal, if you're somebody who believes in civil rights and racial justice, the failures reflected in this disparity of uncivil behavior by race in the country are unbearable to accept. And therefore, fantasies get invented.

Michael Brown had his hands up, don't shoot. Mass incarceration is the result of white supremacy. Who could believe it? White supremacy? Certainly, if you're one of these police officers or he's your uncle or your brother or your cousin and you live in, I don't know, Staten Island somewhere, one of these enclaves of working class white people around here, Providence, Rhode Island, Johnston, Rhode Island or something like that. You don't believe that for a minute. And you're worried about the future of your country. That's what's at stake in this debate. The stats that I've seen say that 60% of the violent crime in our major cities are committed by Black defendants. And so necessarily their interactions with police will go up. But you know, the response to that Glenn is,

well, why is that? Why are more black people offending in a criminal way? Why that's, that's where racism comes in, that their system has kept them in poor communities, uh, where they don't have any economic advantages, where their education system is awful, leading to bad choices that the rest of society doesn't seem to give a damn about. Okay. We can have that conversation. I don't think I need to know the answer to the question why, as I don't think anybody actually does know the answer to that question, to be able to decide about order, law, and civility. I mean, I think I get to ask of citizens, don't hurt the other person. I get to ask that of them, regardless of their socioeconomic experience. That's a bedrock of civilization.

I get to expect that people are going to actually conform in such a way that they don't take the lives of six-year-olds sitting on their auntie's lap on the front porch. That's barbarity. So, yes, people are going to say the system should be so configured, but I think it's time to take responsibility for what's actually happening in African reason what that's that's where the discussion goes with what is the reason that the black crime the question. The assumptions that are embedded in the question is that criminal behavior is completely unnatural. If someone has violent impulses, that couldn't possibly be how some people are. It has to be something society injected into them. I'm not sure that we know that. I mean, the history of our species is the history of a lot of beautiful things, but a lot of ugly things. And a lot of ugly things that are done for no reason other than pure, selfish nature, red in tooth and claw. And in many ways, you could make the argument as Steven Pinker has that really the thing to explain is how populations have come to commit less crime,

at least in the parts of the West and the East that have incredibly low crime rates, that that's the phenomenon to be explained. Beyond that, I would say I have never heard a compelling explanation from the people that have a theory about what the quote unquote root causes of crime are. I've never heard really a compelling explanation of why crime spiked in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s, and then suddenly came down in the 90s. the unified theory of what makes a person choose a criminal lifestyle over a non-criminal lifestyle in order to get the ethical question right, which is that you have no right to hurt your fellow citizens. And as a matter of keeping civilization in order, we have to prevent you from doing that or punish you when you do it. So people have this unthinking and naive, I think, belief that poverty causes crime. And therefore, if we eliminate poverty, which is a bar, how exactly does one do that fully, then the crime

problem will just sort itself out. And I think that's incredibly naive. It doesn't accord with the picture, certainly with my picture of human nature. And that's how I would sum it, but in the number of homes that don't have a father the unraveling of the Black family, these are very controversial things. People would go ballistic in the seminar rooms that I'm familiar with if you were to say these things out loud. And I'm not going to take a stand of causality, but common sense tells me that if you've got 70% of the kids born to a Black woman, born to a woman without a husband, that this is a reflection of something not healthy in the social fiber of the community for reasons that, you know, you could spend a lot of time talking about welfare state or bad economy or whatever. But I wanted to underscore the consequence of this racial disparity in crime and criminal offending, which is that it makes it hard for us to stand against crime and criminal offending because the society, this is really Shelby Steele's argument, but I

think he's right. I mean, the society as a whole is guilty about the fact of past racism. And we know we have, collectively speaking, with regard to the treatment of Black people, blood on our hands, America does. And so when you have this huge racial disparity in crime and criminal offending, incarceration and whatnot, it makes it hard to stand up for law and order. The very idea that you would invoke law and order would be thought to be racist. I mean, think about that. There's something bizarre about that. It's racist to insist on law and order only because the insistence on law and order would have you confronting, oh, I don't know, mobs of people looting high-end boutiques on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. And who are those people? And so you find yourself with a rhetoric about the causality of, you know, their sense of dissatisfaction with society. And you even

find yourself blaming the president of the United States, who might take the position against them as inciting them to something. Uh, when in fact, you know, they, they are, uh, you know, uh, an embarrassing reflection of, uh, of structural failures that we don't exactly know how to, how to deal with. Well, is there, is there something else at play here? You know, the, was it Condi Rice who said the soft bigotry of low expectations? As we look at it first, George W. Bush used to say it. Yeah, I think you got it from Condi. It's you look at some of the black crime rates and you look at how black kids are struggling in our education system and how some schools are dealing with it.

And in too many schools, it's just to lower the standards or just assume they can't do it or pass them anyway, even though they're reading and their math is entirely too low for their grade level. And I think this is done by a lot of people who are trying to be allies, right? They're trying to sort of excuse the crime rate in the one instance as, you know, they're victims of circumstance and excuse poor performance in school, you know, for different, but maybe related reasons, but both have the same net effect, which is to not really help anyone. And I think, you know, if we can focus on schools for a minute and Glenn, you're of academia and Coleman, you just graduated from Columbia, so you're not too far out of it yourself. I would love to talk about the achievement gap

because we've had huge, huge federal spending on trying to fix it, but it keeps going up. And the government, you know, they've tried to prioritize poor children to try to equalize spending between poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods. But still, the test scores in math and science of reading, they've remained flat for 40 years. And the question is why, right? Why? Just to give you a couple stats so the audience is up to speed. There was a, I think there was a study in 2012 by the Department of Education, 79% of eighth graders in Chicago could not read. And that was it was split basically down the middle, black and Hispanic. In Detroit, only 7% of eighth graders were proficient in reading. Only 4% were proficient in math.

And it was something like in five out of seven categories, a majority of blacks were scoring at the lowest level possible. So it's just the stats are alarming and bad. And what we're hearing right now is that's because of systemic racism. I'll give that one to you first, Coleman. Yeah. So it strikes me that when you talk about the bigotry of low expectations, the measure of how much you respect a person is what you would blame them for if they mess up. If I'm looking at the best chess player in the world and he makes a blunder, I blame him. I say I'm disappointed in him. If on the other hand, I'm looking at someone

for whom it's true to say that nothing they could do would be so bad that I would blame them and them only, what I'm saying about them is that I do not view them as a full human being with agency and autonomy. You're saying about them the opposite of what you would say about the best chess player in the world, right? You're saying you view them in precisely the opposite way, as someone so low that nothing is beneath them. They cannot be blamed for anything. They're like a child. the choice between quote unquote victim blaming and, um, and this kind of soft bigotry, they would prefer the soft bigotry because the victim blaming to them, it, it, it seems like hard bigotry.

And I think, um, a lot of, a lot of people look at these stats and they feel dejected. They feel, I have no idea. I don't really know how we could make them much better. Because it's a very tough thing, raising test scores. As you say, we've been trying to do it for 50 years, and it's not so easy. At the same time, the charter schools that occasionally have some success with it, for some reason, those are opposed by the left. Isn't it teachers unions? Isn't that the reason they're opposed?

I find the contrast between the reception on the left of teachers unions and police unions to be very, very interesting. Teachers unions are unions and they're in the business of protecting the interests of their members and the interests of their members are not perfectly aligned with the interests of the kids. It's obvious, given the statistics that you were talking about, that these institutions are not succeeding. Now, there are home life issues and peer group issues and such that have to be also taken into account. But the schools that are serving the kids in Baltimore or in St. Louis or on the south side of Chicago or in south central Los Angeles or Oakland, California, they're not succeeding. That system needs to be blown up. I mean, I know I'm saying a very radical thing

experimentation there should be welcome let a hundred thousand flowers bloom charter schools yeshiva schools and the equivalent of that in the afrocentric world whatever let a thousand flowers bloom it's time for uh breaking up that system and getting these kids better educational services it wouldn't be a panacea. I wouldn't mind spending a little bit more money if I thought it could be well spent. I'm not just going to shovel it into this bureaucracy that is politically protecting itself and that's not serving these kids very well. It's like the teachers unions, all of us love our teachers. That's not the same as loving your teachers union, which is really, they care about one thing, which is the union. I mean, they didn't put teachers first, that the union itself is what's

most important in supporting democratic causes. Maybe teachers come up someplace after that, but students aren't even on the list. Students are not their concern. Right. The other thing, I mean, so the teacher's union explains why left-wing politicians uh are against charter schools the argument i counter from normal people are you know people who listen to podcasts and liberals say what are you trying to say colman uh is that uh it takes money away from government and it's anti-public school and it occurs to me this is kind of like, there's this phrase market fundamentalism. If you're a libertarian, you think the market is always better than the government. In every case, you will be accused, I think justly,

of market fundamentalism and blind faith in markets. But there's the opposite problem as well, blind faith in government. Why should I have more of an allegiance to the public education system in itself? That's not an end. The end is to educate kids by whatever means necessary. What about, can I ask you, I read among the other works I was into this summer was Jason Riley's Please Stop Helping Us, which is a great book. And he's writer for the Wall Street Journal. And he cites in there another another problem, which is culture, culture. And this is, I be honest with you, I feel uncomfortable even saying this as a white woman. But he talks about some study by a guy named John Ogbu of UC Berkeley, an anthropology professor who went to Shaker

Heights, Ohio in the late 90s. And this is an area that had black students. It was like one third of the residents were black. The school district was pretty equally divided, but same, blacks trailed significantly by GPA, by college placement, by dropout rate. And a lot of these were affluent families. And they were trying to figure out why. Why is that? And what Agbu apparently concluded was that there is a culture, at least at that school, and he extrapolated it, where it wasn't cool. It was considered, quote, white to get good grades, to take AP classes, to achieve honors, to talk properly. That's the term used in the book. And that there was peer pressure within the black student community not to work too hard. It wasn't prized or considered cool.

Now, if that's a factor, it's a problem. That's a big problem. But I don't know. As I say, it's an uncomfortable thing to even raise. What are your thoughts, Glenn? Megan, I would say it's actually an opportunity. Maybe it's both of those things, because if that's the case, it can be changed. I mean, for example, if you make a genetic argument and you say the blacks are just the IQ they've inherited and they don't have it, well, there's not a lot that can be done about that. But if indeed, to the extent that it is the case, that peer group norms and social patterns and behavior valorization and what's thought hip and cool is implicated, well, you can have a campaign against that. You can raise the

consciousnesses of people. You can, you know, redefine. I mean, I think this is an underestimated thing. African-Americans became black from being Negro sometime between, I don't know, 1950 and 1970, because people started thinking it was OK for their hair to be natural and not have to be straightened and that the light color of the skin was not necessarily a thing to affirm and things like that. That's not nothing. That's something. So I would say that. I think there's a lot of evidence, not just Agbu. Agbu is dated, the late great anthropologist, that there, you know, Fryer even has some evidence on this. I could go into it, but it would take too much time, that there is something to it. It's also fair bulletin to say so in the enlightened racial advocacy circles. It's like blaming Black people. But yeah, I think it's okay. By the way, there's a flip side to this. Why are the Asian students suing Harvard

and Princeton or Yale, wherever they're suing, insisting that they're being discriminated against because these institutions should probably be 50% Asian student body if they were admitting just based on academic merit instead of 20% or 25%. Does it have anything to do with culture, with how those communities are organized, with what those peer groups value, with how those families carry out their duties, with what expectations those communities have for their people, with the institutions that they develop, the patterns and practices and habits that they cultivate. I mean, so obviously culture, it seems to me obvious that culture is a legitimate part of the account that you would give for disparity in academic performance between groups.

Yeah, I want to. Yeah, go ahead. I just want to underscore something, a couple things Glenn said. One is, one reason people don't like the culture argument is because, as Glenn said, they think it's not easily changed. They think it makes them helpless. Oh, well, if it's culture, then I can't do anything about it. And, you know, a thought occurred to me, which is that implicitly what that argument says is that if it's systemic racism, then it's much easier to solve. And I'm not sure that that's true. So for example, if you think about, let's say that prosecutors or real estate agents are racially biased, right? Like that documentary

where they send otherwise identical white and black people to go apply for a mortgage and the real estate agents treat them differently, right? That's very hard to root out too. I'm not sure that it's easier. You would have to have some kind of panopticon watching every real estate agent in their private moments. And even then, you would have to see into their mind. And then once you know they're racist, how do you then change their behavior if it's not in their self-interest to do so? My point is just that it's not so clear to me which one of these is easier and which one is harder. As for the acting white thing, it's something Obama has talked about. It's something Jay-Z has talked about.

It's something Jay-Z has talked about. It's something I've experienced. There's a great book by Stuart Buck called Acting White, which is just a treasure trove or data dump of examples of people complaining about this since roughly the 60s. And apparently there were not so many examples before that time. So it's something that is relatively new in American history. And I will say one time I remember mentioning this at a charter school in the South Bronx run by our mutual friend, Ian Rowe. And that was one of the few times I've gotten an ovation from a crowd of entirely Black and Hispanic parents is when I mentioned this notion of acting white being pernicious. So clearly it resonated in some way with people. And I think it's more present in some places than other places.

A lot of Black people I've mentioned really don't, didn't grow up with it, but it's pervasive enough that it ought to be talked about and opposed. Coming up in one second, we're going to talk more with Glennon Coleman about the 1619 Project, academia, and also patriotism and what's being sold in our schools today instead of patriotism. How do you raise a patriot? They've got some thoughts I think you're going to want to hear. But first, I got a crash course in home title theft, and you better pray this crime never happens to you because it can ruin you. It can ruin you financially. Here's how easy it is. The legal titles to our homes are digitized and they're kept on government and business servers and in the cloud up above where they can

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second. But first, we're going to bring you a feature we call Asked and Answered. And this is where we bring in our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, to do the asked part of this feature. Steve? Hey, Megan. Yeah, lots of great questions continue coming in. Send those to questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. This one comes from Jennifer Bell. Sort of a general question that I thought is a good little look behind the scenes. She says she's been enjoying the show, enjoys the middle of the road approach, and wants to know how do you select guests that come on your show? Well, it depends. I mean, some people I just love and I want to talk to and I gave my team a list. And like the interview you're listening to right now, I would fall in that category. Like I, there was zero chance of me doing the show without

talking to those two guys. And I want to have them back on over and over and over. And I hope you feel the same way. I could have picked any one of those subjects and we could have done an hour with those guys on, you know, racial preferences on police, on black lives matter. They're just brilliant. And it's just not enough time in the day. Uh, but then, you know, there's also just the work of my team where we sit down and we ask ourselves, what are the issues in the news and who would be the best guest for it? What are the books coming out and which ones have our interest? I don't know who's sort of a provocateur out there who might be fun to talk to. When I saw Kim Klasick on The View take on Joy and Sunny, I was like, I want to know her. So some of it is

just fulfilling my personal wish list based on what the team finds interesting too. I will tell you without revealing the guests, all right, I'm not going to tell you who it is, but I said to my team, there is one set of guests that if you could get them, it would be my dream come true. Like I could retire. I don't, I don't have to interview anybody ever again after I speak with this set. And they were like, okay. And we got them. And there, and, and my team, Steve, I'm talking about you. You just, you sent me an email update about the guests. You were like, okay, so on the 10th, we have this person. And on the 12th, we have this person. And on the 12th, we have that person. And on the 14th, and you just threw them in there.

Like it was a nothing. I was like, ah, I was on the couch with my family. And my kids were like, what, what, what happened? Like, oh my God. So, I mean, this is a great tease for the interview. Everybody at home is wondering who the hell it could be, who could generate this most excitement. They're almost sure to be disappointed now. Anything I say is going to be a disappointment.

It's a collective effort is the bottom line. And sometimes it's really, it brings a lot of delight into my life and hopefully into yours. Do I think I did I sum it up? Okay. What do you think? Yeah, I don't think anyone will have any idea what it is, but they will they will find out next month. That's a good tease. Yeah. I don't think we're going to air it until right December. So I haven't done the interview yet. I don't know why I'm not telling you, but it's fun to keep the mystery alive a little bit, just a little bit, to keep you guessing. I'm taking your submissions. People who know me well might know who that would be for me. It's not judge Judy. I do love her, but I've interviewed

her many times. These are people I've never ever spoken to, but have long, long, long loved from afar. Okay. Going to leave it at that. But, uh, Hey, if you guys have guest suggestions, I'll take them. I actually do look, we, we have, we monitor our Instagram page and Twitter and the reviews that people post at Apple. And I've actually gotten a lot of great ideas from there. Somebody was like, have on Sam Harris. We're having on Sam Harris. So I appreciate that and keep them coming. And now back to Glennon Coleman. As you guys know, now we're at a place where things like self-reliance, determination, belief in the American dream, according to the Smithsonian, at least, those are all white terms that are racist if you encourage

them in black people or students. You know, it's gotten to the point now where ideals that we used to attach to academic achievement or striving to be a professional success are now being dismissed as racist and not laudable. You know, and you've got that example. You've got the example at Rutgers, Glenn, where they decided to change the grammar standards because they thought they were racist against black students as, you know, as if they're not capable of of something higher or better, you know, that that it's racist to expect that. And I do wonder where all of this goes or better, you know, that it's racist to expect that. And I do wonder where all of this goes.

Like, where does this wind up? Well, it's very troubling. And I think the character of the country in some ways is being tested. I'd like to think about it in terms of, you know, the history of discrimination cannot have but had the consequence of hindering the full development of African American potential. So when we come

through the era of the Civil Rights Movement, where we are now, where pretty much we have reckoned with, you know, that legacy, I mean, we have equal rights laws all across the board, there will still be disparity because there's a disparity of development. And that's going to manifest itself in a lot of in a lot of ways, including in the performance of kids in these educational institutions. Maintaining the standard and addressing the developmental deficit so as to raise kids to the standard is the way to respond to that situation. But the temptation is to avoid the hard work of actually addressing the residue of the historical oppression and to lower the standard in the interest of quote-unquote equality. And the thing that I find most troubling about it, not only the loss of human potential, but the loss of integrity and dignity in the society, because everybody actually knows the difference between fit,

healthy, you know, performance and unfit and deficient performance. And you can't read, you can't read. There's no way to hide that. So the inequality of history, which led to the underdevelopment of the black population or some segments of it, when that development is underdevelopment is papered over and not addressed, continues in a kind of unexpressed way. It continues with people pretending that it doesn't exist. And I think that's a very bad place for us to be at. how racist America is, how sorry they are. And then it wasn't enough to say you're a racist. You had to say you're an anti-black racist, anti, you know, like it lists the things that you've done and said that are bad. We got, our kids are in a, we have a daughter. She's at an all-girls school. We have two boys in an all-boys school. So both of the schools sent almost identical letters. Just, we're terrible. The U.S. is terrible. So sorry. We're going to do everything within our power to make it up to everybody. And I think a lot of us were looking at this like, what specifically did you do? What did you do?

There really wasn't anything specific. It was just an attempt to appease some of these student groups that were popping up, you know, black at this school, black at that school, recounting alleged incidents of racism that had happened 30 years ago, some deeply disturbing, some milquetoast, you know, like I, I sat alone at the lunch table for a year. I mean, I was like, well, that that's called middle school, white or black. But I know that you spoke up at Brown when, cause you were ticked off because it, it had sort of the air of, let me speak on behalf of the university to tell you how awful we are and what we're going to do about it. And you people will not be surprised now that they've gotten to know you on this spoke up.

It's referred to as the Paxton letter, Paxton, because it was written by Christina Paxton, Brown's president. And it asserted that oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour, committing the university to programming courses, research opportunities to promote equity and justice, and went on and on from there to do some of the self-flagellating that I just discussed. Why did you have such a problem with it? This was in the wake of the George Floyd killing. I had a problem with it because it was signed by every top administrator in the university, the person who runs the university's portfolio, the general counsel of the university, the provost of the university, dean of the faculty, dean of the School of Public Health, and so forth. It was a manifesto. You read some of the language. I mean, think about that language.

I can imagine the professor at African American Studies who sent the memo that ended up getting adapted into the letter that had a sentence in it that every hour of every day and so forth and so on. It was preachy. It declared as if there were no argument that the killing of George Floyd was a manifestation of white supremacy run amok among us, and that all decent people must stand on the right side. And I thought that Christina Paxson could have had that opinion as her personal opinion, but to have that sent to every student, every member of the faculty and staff, and every alumnus, we're talking about many, many tens of thousands of people with the imprimatur of the entire university leadership, that it was

precluding the very intellectual deliberation about these sensitive and complex matters that the university exists to carry out in the first place. I thought it was a most horrific abuse of the responsibilities of management of this precious institution, which is a university, to put it on a bandwagon, to have it join a parade of people marching down the street with a banner. It's as if the university had taken a position in the presidential election or if it had declared a position in the conflict in the Middle East or something like that. The cops, the riots, the civil disturbances, Black Lives Matter, these are not straightforward, unambiguous, monodimensional issues. These are very profound

things. We're there to think it through. The university exists to think matters through. This politicization is horrible. It is poisoning the well. We be careful that we don't be able to get George Floyd, if indeed he did do so, was a reflection of every hour of every day Black people live under the whatever? That is clearly a propagandistic, ideological pose. It was horrible that the president of a university took that position. Horrible. So can I tell you, this resonated with me for personal reasons. At our, I should say that we're, we've decided to move. New York City is, it's out of control on so many levels. And after years of resisting it, we're going to leave the city.

And we pulled our boys from their school and our daughter's going to leave her soon, too. But the schools have already they've always been far left, which doesn't align with my own ideology. But I didn't really care. You know, it's like most my friends are liberals. It's fine. I come from Democrats as a family. I don't I'm not offended at all by the ideology, and I lean center left on some things. But they've gone around the bend. I mean, they have gone off the deep end. And I wanted to get your reaction to a letter that was circulated at the school we've now left, my son's school, former school. This summer in the wake of George Floyd, they circulated amongst the

diversity group, which includes white parents like us, you know, just people who are, want to be allies and stay attuned to what we can do, an article. And afterward, they recirculated it and wanted every member of the faculty to read it. It was written by a woman named Nalia Weber, who says she's the executive director of the Orleans Public Education Network. She works in education advocacy. And just give me one minute to tell you some highlights of what she writes that my school wanted circulated to all the faculty. She says, as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against Black bodies to keep those spaces white. As Black bodies drop like flies around us from violence at white hands, how can we in any of our minds conclude that whites are all right? White children are left unchecked and unbothered in their schools, homes, and communities to join, advance, and protect systems that take away Black life. I am tired of white people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity,

snuffing out Black life with no consequences. Where is the urgency for school reform for white kids being indoctrinated in Black death and protected from the consequences? Where are the government-sponsored reports looking into how white mothers are raising culturally deprived children who think Black death is okay? Where are the national conferences, white papers, and policy positions on the pathology of whiteness in schools? And here's the last part. This time, if you really want to make a difference in black lives and not have to protest this shit again, go reform white kids. Because that's where the problem is with white children being raised from infancy to violate black bodies with no remorse or accountability. Gosh.

Gosh, that's shocking. I mean, it's racist. That's straightforwardly racist. You can't be racist against white people, Glenn. You know that. Come on, but we know that's false. I want to point out one thing. I think I hold out a little bit of hope because the problem right now is that woke is cool. Being a woke anti-racist, you know, if you're at the age where you very much care about being seen as cool by your friends, obviously not if you live in a red part of the country, but if you're at the age where you very much care about being seen as cool by your friends. Obviously, not if you live in a red part of the country, but if you live in a city, if you live in a liberal suburb, it's cool to be woke. It feels anti-establishment in some ways, even though I think I could make a case that it's not, given that Walmart and Target are saying Black Lives Matter at this

point. Nevertheless, for many people, it feels like they didn't necessarily get woke from their kindergarten and sixth grade teachers. So they still feel you can tap into that sense of edgy identity-seeking adolescence by being woke. That can't go on forever and for much longer. As this stuff pervades the school systems and as people start hearing woke ideas from their kindergarten teachers, there's nothing that will make it less cool more quickly. And I hold out hope that that will happen as a result. Maybe that's optimistic. You mentioned the term, they're poisoning the well. And that's how I felt when I read that letter.

Which boy in my kid's school is the future killer cop? Is it my boy? Which boy is it? Because I don't happen to believe they're in there. It's based on your whiteness? I mean, do you really, if you're a person interested in the well-being of Black people, want to invite a close scrutiny of the race of people who hurt other people in this country? Because if you do, you'll find that Blacks' attacks on Whites are outnumbered. I'm sorry, Whites' attacks on Blacks are outnumbered probably by an order of magnitude by Blacks' attacks on whites. I don't have statistics in front of me, but I'm fairly confident that that's true. So why are we racializing this thing? Why is it

the essentialization of race? A person in that situation should be asked, at the letter that you read, to defend the position that the race of the person is the thing that's relevant. I don't see that killer cops or white kids are at risk. Think of flipping the script on that. Suppose you imputed anything of that sort to black people based upon our race. That would be horrific. It is indeed racist. I feel like pieces like that, and listen, she was sort of a floating academic before our school

circulated within the parent body and the faculty. That's a different level. But I feel like they're trying to create racism where none existed. I mean, I mean, honestly, think of how the most of the white parents felt in response to that. Some, because they're far left liberals here in New York, are like, yes, yes, self-flagellation, more of it. Right. That's what we need. But I will tell you, I was like, listen, lady, my my sons are not future killer cops. Neither are his little classmates. And you're out of line. You're out of line. And it makes you upset. Right. It's like, I think all of these messages from people like Robin DiAngelo that, you know, my main goal in life is to work on being less white is not doing much good for for our race relations. They're injecting so much tension where it didn't exist before. And I understand the argument

from some of these sort of activists will be, that's your white privilege talking. That's your white privilege. It's been an active matter for every black person. You're just too privileged to understand. And now we're just bringing you into our world so you can understand how hard it's been. And I don't really give a damn

if it's making you feel uncomfortable or pissed off. So what do we do with that? It's not just Robin DiAngelo. It's Ibram Kendi. It's not just Ibram Kendi. It's Ta-Nehisi Coates. It's not just Ta-Nehisi Coates. It's Nicole Hannah-Jones.

It's not just Nicole Hannah-Jones. It's Ava DuVernay. The the drift of this white supremacist domination, black bodies rhetoric is what is what accounts for this. I cannot tell you, Megan, you're going to have to tell me why it is that white people are so susceptible to allowing themselves to be flagellated with this stuff, because it's, you know, it's not exactly compelling. Because we're scared. We're scared. We don't want to be called racist. You know, I mean, the only reason I feel capable of discussing these issues as openly as I do is because I've been called that word so many times it's lost all its meaning. And I figured out at this point in my career, it's a tactic. They don't actually think I'm a racist, or maybe they do. But the reason they're calling me that is to shut me up. You know, that that's why they're saying it. And, but I think

for most people to be called a racist is probably the worst thing they could be called. And they just rather not say a word. They'd rather not touch it. Yeah. I mean, think of Kamala and Joe Biden, you know, I'm not the first person to point this out, but, you know, the whole subtext of her attack on him over busing and, uh, you know, making deals with segregationist senators back in the day was you're a racist. And then all of a sudden, when it's in her self-interest, that's forgotten. And frankly, most people seem not to care. Most people who liked the Biden Kamala ticket didn't, you know, they many liked the attack of the activists. At least they liked the attack on Joe Biden for racism. But suddenly when she paired up with him, it's totally fine to be in bed with a racist.

Not to mention Anita Hill, not to mention Tara Reid. Yeah. I think part of the, I think Shelby Steele has a very good line about this in his recent documentary and in his writing, which is that white guilt is misnamed. It's not really guilt. It is a terror at the thought of being accused of racism or the terror at the thought that one might actually be a racist. And I think there are many white people that haven't felt that and so can't understand why white people who have felt that terror act so insane and self-flagellating and

masochistic. But for those that do feel that guilt or that terror, it's incredibly attractive to have this ideology that, you know, Robin DiAngelo, for example, what she says is, yes, white people, you're all racist, but it's not your fault. Society created you racist. So in the same way that one can walk into a church and feel forgiven by Jesus, Jesus sees all my sins. He sees my ugliness and still forgives me nonetheless. That feeling of release is what white people are looking for and what attracts them to this absolutely otherwise unintelligible ideology. Well, you know what I've realized in my travails is most of the people who are loudest in their insults toward me, at least when it comes to that charge are white liberals. I honestly, and if somebody,

if I ever meet a black person who has an issue like that, they tend to be very progressive. I have yet to meet a conservative black person who has any problem with me whatsoever. And so over time you realize this isn't a skin color issue. This is a politics issue. And once you realize that it helps you reframe the whole thing. It helps you regain your willingness to talk openly and honestly, but it's hard, man. It's hard. And I don't know a lot of white people who have, even if they understand that, who would talk about it publicly, well, you know, I'll have a dinner where somebody will say, you know, tell me what you've learned. What do you think about this? But they would never have that conversation in the public square, at their office place, especially now. Of all that's happened over the summer between what it is you can say publicly and what it is that you might think and how people negotiate with each other. I wonder what these dinner parties are like where, quote unquote, white people are sitting around, all of them are getting the same stimulus of the same news feed, the same public conversation about what's going on and they know their correct positions, how do they reveal to each other the fact that they might have doubts, the fact that they might not really,

really buy into the narrative that they're all racist? How do they, you know, work around that? I mean, that's got to be some very interesting material for a novelist to, you know, if we had a Tom Wolfe, a kind of, you know, satirist who could take us behind the scenes of, you know, white people letting their hair down. I mean, that could be a comic routine or something like that. Well, I've been open about this stuff for years, right? And it's like, I've been trying to discuss race issues. I think you need more white people who are willing to take risks. Otherwise, even I said this to Coleman when I went on his podcast, even if you falter, even if you don't do it perfectly, I can speak to that. So what? You got to try. How are we going to get past this if it's like white liberals in a silo self-flagellating and then

guys like you who are willing to have really open, honest discussions about it, but ne'er the twain shall meet. There's not going to be any debate. Even Coleman's been trying to get Ibram X. Kendi to debate him forever. And Ibram's like, who? Huh? What? No, he won't do it. He won't defend the premise of his book to someone like Coleman Hughes. I think as he knows he's going to be outmatched. Anyway, so I'll be at a party where I'll say, hey, did you see this? You see this Coleman Hughes piece or whatever.

I'll try to erase something. And I'm telling you, it's like, and these are with people from all parts of the ideological spectrum. Because as I say, I was at Fox News for 13 years, but I live on the Upper West Side. So it's all liberals. All my friends are liberals. And it's like crickets. No one will say anything in response.

They just don't want to touch race because it's become now a third rail. And if you're white, the only proper response is, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's annoying too. I find I would much prefer, personally, I would prefer to be friends with a white person that is unfiltered and sometimes goes too far and says something that even rubs me the wrong way than someone who is just made themselves more boring by giving in to white guilt. What do you guys think people should do? I've been thinking about this. We've been talking about it openly. Now we're in an age where your company says you got to go to anti-racist training and it really is you you have to this is being done at our schools not our new school but it's you have to

sit there and for like three days at some of these seminars you have to you wind up having to put a placard around your neck with your degree of racism one through 10. So you get to wear your scarlet letter. And then the black participants get to tell you about their experiences and racism and so on, how it's affected their lives. The white people are not supposed to speak at all. And then on the last day of the seminar, they're allowed to say like a couple of things, but they need to be supportive. And most of the time you are told to quote, sit in the quiet of your own white racism. I, so many people want to know, how do I not do that? I, I have no wish to do it. I have no wish to put my kid through it. Again, at one of the schools we're leaving, it's now there's a push to make it mandatory for, for, for students to have to sit through that.

Again, dividing boys who were loving and friends a couple months ago, now being told one of you is the oppressor and one of you is the oppressed. So what do you guys think? What is the answer to that? Megan, have you heard about Jodi Shaw, the case of Jodi Shaw? I love her. Smith. Oh, you know her? Okay, yes, indeed. I don't know her, but I love her, and I watched her video.

Yeah, I've watched her videos as well. She's a member of the staff of Smith College, and she's complaining in this series of videos about how she's been treated inside of these diversity training sessions. I won't try to recapitulate what she says, but it seems to me she's got to be the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. What I love about Jodi Shaw is she's kind of meek, I would say. She doesn't project very strong, and yet she's doing it, man. I mean, she's brave. She's like, this is baloney. I don't want to be shamed for the color of my skin. And we should be able to have discussions without getting shamed by the university. Oh, and by the way, everything I'm

saying is protected by the law. So don't fire me. But I do think unless people, unless we get more Jody's, um, or people just willing to say, I'm just, as Douglas Murray keeps saying, you have to say, I refuse to let you re racializeialize my company, my country, and myself. But man, easier said than done. And it occurs to me, I would like someone who defends this kind of diversity workshop where white people are told to remain silent. To come up with a single example from human history where you have improved the relationship between two groups of people that see themselves to some extent as groups having some kind of group consciousness by ritual dominance, right? What is a more direct signal of social dominance than you cannot speak, you must listen and not reply? That's what a parent does to punish their child. example in which that improved rather than created resentment in the population that has to submit to the ritual dominance. I would never, as a Black person, submit to such humiliation. And I would

never ask anyone else to. It's so ironic because it's really based upon white power. I mean, the reason that they get away with saying you can't speak is the presumption that in your whiteness, you're this dominant force that has oppressed. And so you have now to cede the ground to the weak and whatnot. And that's their power. Their power is pointing to white power in a way. I mean, it proceeds at the sufferance of the oppressor. You declare the white to be the oppressor and you impose upon him or her in this way. And you expect them to forbear and to allow you to impose because they accept the fact that they are the oppressor. You give them all the power. Right. I mean, I was saying after Robin D'Angelo's book, if I behaved the way this woman wants me to behave,

my black friends would laugh in my face. If I walked, can you imagine? Let's see, I see you next time at the Comedy Cellar Coleman and I walk in and I say, I just want to begin with, I apologize on behalf of myself, on behalf of my race, and I promise to spend the rest of my life

trying to make amends. I mean, it's absurd. You'd be insufferable. You can't actually develop intimacy, whether as a friend or more with somebody, if you presuppose that they trump you on whole domains of reality, like race relations, right? Like your thoughts don't matter.

You have to remain silent. You have to remain silent, you have to submit to them. It's just, it's not, you know, it's not a relationship that I would want with any of my white friends. Like I said, I would rather have someone who's unfiltered and wrong sometimes than someone who is so filtered that I have no idea who they actually are, what they actually think, or if they even know what they actually think, you know, because you can get to a point where you don't allow yourself to think because you're so afraid of what you might actually think if you, if indeed you really thought. That's exactly right.

That is perfect. I, you know, I have to say as growing up as a Democrat, you know, Democrat House and going through academia, which tends to make you lean left anyway. I never really spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of these issues. And one of them was affirmative action. But I was like, I'm, I guess I'm pro affirmative action, because I'm, I'm pro equality. And that seems to be something that my side when I was growing up was for. So that sounds good. And the more I've read about that, the more I've really had reason to second guess myself. And, you know, I read Heather McDonald's book and I've been reading a lot of Shelby, Thomas Sowell, you guys. And I know there really are questions about how well that works out, right? Like when it comes to student education, that's what I'm talking about in particular, like racial preferences in university admissions, which, you know, they just tried to re-legalize in California.

They had outlawed them and they tried to re-legalize them and the voters rejected that. But it does seem like that may be part of the Jason Reilly, please stop helping us, right? Because it doesn't help at all in the long run because what the studies seem to show is that it creates a division for the black student who gets into a university that he might not have otherwise have been admitted to because, you know, people may hold it against him. They may assume he's there for reasons other than he deserves to be. And that he may, in fact, not be able to handle the work or she may. And, you know, if I were admitted to Harvard because somebody wanted to do affirmative action or, you know, preferences for people who are Irish, it would have been a miserable experience for me. I can tell you right

now, I could not have handled that course load. And Glenn used to work there. So you know this. But I went to Syracuse and you know what? I was a star. It was great. Worked out great for me. So it doesn't always work out to lift somebody up to a place that their raw academic merits couldn't have justified. What do you think, Glenn? Yeah, well, I think we've been at this forever. Affirmative action is going all the way back to the 1970s. This is a part of a dynamic, developmentally focused program that has as its end state a institution of equal standards of performance. Instead, it's become a crutch. It's not a hand up. It's a hand out. It's not dealing with the fact that there were no Blacks at places like Harvard or Princeton or Yale in 1950, and that's not acceptable for our democracy to dealing with the fact that what you said is true about primary and secondary education in so many communities in this country that are not serving well these African-American students. I mean, I think there's huge controversy about the empirical effects of affirmative action. I think you can probably justify as Bowen and Bach, presidents of Princeton and Harvard in the 1990s, William Bowen and Derek Bach in their book, The Shape of the River.

They try to justify what they're doing. They said, no, we're not using the same standards. But by and large, our kids do OK. They get through. They get their degrees. They become important people in their communities and their professions, and they contribute to American society. And we need to integrate the elites of American society. You can't have lily-white elites. They're saying that. But that should be a transitional thing. The institutionalization of it is horrible. It's so corrupt. It tarnishes the achievements. It creates doubt. It creates mediocrity. People are in over their heads in so many venues and so many situations. recognizing that, and by the way, it's a statistical necessity. If you're the lead institution and you're selecting from the very right tail of the performance of the kids and you have different standards by race, you're going to get different performance by race after the fact. The standards are correlated with how kids do after they get in. If you're using different

standards, you're going to get on average different performance. And that creates a situation where in order to avoid acknowledging the different performance, And that creates a situation where in order to avoid acknowledging the different performance, you end up watering down. You end up with great inflation. You end up with African-American studies. I'm sorry, people get very angry with me for saying this, but you end up with mediocrity. No, all African-American studies is not mediocre, but people switch out of the STEM disciplines and they go into the soft disciplines in order to avoid the rigorous quantitative work. Things get watered down. And this is not equality. So in other words, if you're at Harvard and you wouldn't have otherwise gotten in, maybe if you had gone to Syracuse, you could have been an engineer. You could have handled

the workflow there to become an engineer. This is the so-called mismatch hypothesis. This is the idea that the kids can match with the wrong schools. And there's a fair amount of evidence to support that as well. I knew I was right not to even try to go to Harvard. I knew it. I feel totally validated. I'm sure I probably could have gotten in. You would have gotten by at Harvard.

Au contraire, sir. But it was fine. It worked out fine in the end. I always tell people who are so obsessed about colleges, and I know you guys have these esteemed, beautiful academic pedigrees, but it can be fine if you don't go to Harvard. It's the Harvard of Syracuse. And then I went to Albany Law School, which is at best, you know, I'll be charitable and say second tier. But it's fine. If you do well, you work hard, you're a gunner, you figure out what you're good at, you can achieve great success in your life, no matter the academic pedigree. I would say that the number one thing, in my view, you get these good schools, and my husband went to Duke and then Georgetown, is connections. You don't necessarily get connections to future powerful people

at these other schools. Well, I'm sticking with Brown, so there. Good man. And I don't know, Coleman, do you think you'll go back into academia at all? I don't plan to at this moment.

Good. I mean, we need you, but good, because we also need you. It's a hard environment. I mean, I admire you, Glenn. But even as an undergrad, it takes a toll to be the only person in the class, kind of coming into every class with a chip on my shoulder.

If at all these issues are going to be discussed, feeling that I can't lie, but perhaps being the only one willing to speak up and developing a reputation where, you know, people, your reputation precedes you and in many ways it's negative. It's not, like, given the choice, I'm not sure it makes sense for me, you know, psychologically to go back unless there was some something that was, you know, was such a benefit that I felt I I needed to.

What do you make of that, Glenn? I say that we institutions of higher education will have failed in our mission if qualities of mind such as Coleman Hughes manifests feel they have no place in our ranks. I say I'm almost motivated to start a program at Brown University with the intention of having a dozen Coleman Hughes types decide that they're going to write a dissertation in something really important that's been two or three years. Just think of it as investing in this book that's going to make you a gazillion dollars when it finally comes out and you're going to have a PhD after your name afterwards. Exploring in depth some of the most important questions of our time. I think the academy is a place to go to reflect. It's to go to be challenged by the very best

that's been thought and written about the most difficult matters of human existence and to be challenged and to be questioned and to learn from and to stimulate and be stimulated by, I would say it doesn't have to be your whole life. But I think there's still something that we have to offer to a Coleman Hughes. And it's shame on us if we are so configured that he doesn't feel comfortable in our midst. That's a never-ending cycle. People like Coleman don't want to go there and teach because he feels unwelcome. And then more conservative students either hide the fact that they're conservative or don't want to go there because they don't feel represented at all in the faculty body or

student body. And they go underground, they say nothing. And so they arrive at school and they get the tour from, you know, a person who aligns with some gender defined by the astrological spectrum. And who's, you know, going to walk them through all of the prere until I get out of here. Or, or they genuinely get turned and they emerge ready to push the progressive agenda to call out their parents as racist and transphobes. And that's, I think, how we wind up with a media, a media that's, I think, 71 million people are racist and sexist and transphobic and xenophobic and awful and, you know, need to be condemned at every turn. I want to mention Carol Swain because she's somebody who I think has gone through it, right? She's like, she's somebody who was in the academic system and a professor who got more conservative in her viewpoint and started writing books that were more conservative and she got more faithful. And she was basically pushed out.'s it's and she's she's a woman of color she's a black woman so you

think if if you can't keep carol like you think you'd be dying to have somebody like carol stay but nope carol's an old friend and she's a brilliant woman and she is a woman of faith and yeah she's a contrarian and she was at what Vanderbilt and there was a lot of brouhaha down there about some comments that she made and so forth people called her names and she was blackballed

but she certainly didn't deserve it do you get called names do you get called like the Uncle Tom kind of thing Glenn I mean you're more conservative. I hope not, but do you? Maybe I'm just unaware. Maybe I'm oblivious to the corner of Twitter where they're calling me all sorts of names. I'm past that. I used to get called names when I was a Reagan Republican back in the 80s. Pathetic black mascot of the right is what one of my colleagues at Harvard dubbed me. But, you know, I'm past that by now.

You don't care. Can we just talk about the 1619 Project before I let you guys go? The 1619 Project has been debated a lot over the past couple of years. And I'm stunned by what this whole thing has said about where we are as a country and where the media is. The New York Times love them or hate them. And their subscribers are, I think the latest stats were something like almost 90% liberal. It used to at least be someplace that while biased, did care about facts and fact checking. So there'd be a slant, but there wouldn't necessarily be egregious errors that went uncorrected all the time. Wow. Not so with respect to this piece. So Nicole Hannah Jones

wrote originally that, you know, the country was founded in order to preserve slavery. There were all sorts of challenges to that. Now we know before it was published, the New York Times rejected them, ignored them. It comes out, she gets the Pulitzer Prize. All these historians come out and say, this is totally factually wrong. Black scholars too. It's not just a bunch of white scholars saying this is completely erroneous. It's just not true. The country was not founded to preserve slavery. And the Times was pretty silent about it. And then what happened recently was they quietly and without calling any attention to it, started erasing those passages from the sort of preamble, the introduction to her piece and not not being open about it. And now you, Glenn, and some other very esteemed professors have issued a call to have that Pulitzer Prize revoked. First of all, has anyone responded to that? And second of all, why do you think that's important? No one has responded so far as I know.

I did sign on to this letter that Peter Wood, the National Association of Scholars, circulated and a number of other people did as well, in virtue of the egregious behavior that you just described in terms of running with and putting so much of institutional support behind a narrative that had problems. I mean, yes, she did assert that because a few of the founding generation of Americans feared the British potentiality of interfering with the slave traffic and for that reason were motivated to fight in the revolution, that therefore that was the basic driving force behind the entire movement, which was false. She'd also claimed that 1619 and not 1776 was a better metaphor for understanding the large-scale narrative of the country,

and then backed away from that, saying, no, she didn't mean to replace 1776 with 1669. She just meant to somehow recenter the narrative and elevate the role that African-American exclusion and then aspiration for inclusion should play in the American narrative. The Pulitzer Prize, I think they made a mistake, but they're not going to take it back. I think that's pretty clear. And so what does that say to you about where we are as a country? I'm into talking about narratives these days. I talk about the development narrative and the bias narrative when we're talking about race. And the narrative about the American story,

the American project is fundamentally important. Is this a good country or is this a country that's founded on genocide and slavery? The impact of Western settlement in the Western hemisphere, the European settlement in the Western hemisphere on the native population was devastating. There's not any doubt about that. And the commerce in chattel, which was transatlantic slavery, was of a huge scale, mostly going to Caribbean and South America, but of a huge scale. It was monumental in world history. It was monumental in the foundation of the events that led to the American nation state. There's not any doubt about that. But the founding of the country, 1776, 1787, the creation of the United States of America was a world historic event in which the Enlightenment ideals got instantiated in government institutions.

And as a matter of fact, within a century, slavery was gone. And you know what? The people who had been African chattel became citizens of the United States of America, not equal citizens, not at first. It took another century. But they became, in the fullness of time, equal in Europe and saved the world. American democracy became a beacon to, quote unquote, the free world. We stood down under threat of nuclear annihilation, the horror which was the union of Soviet socialist republics. We have had the greatest transformation in the social status of a serfdom people, which was what the emancipation affected in the creation of the Negro, of the African American, probably that you could find anywhere in world history. 40 million strong, the richest people of African descent on the planet by far. This is a question of narrative. Are you going to look through the lens of the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force?

Are you going to see it for what it is? Which in the last 300 years is the greatest force for human liberty on the planet. That's worth fighting about. That these people at the New York Times lay down to a latter-day woke ideology and debase their country is despicable. on my Instagram, on my Twitter, on my Facebook, and send it in to every school that tells me and my children, America is systemically racist. It's always been racist. We need to apologize for our racism at every turn and is fundamentally an awful place. I love everything you just said, Coleman. Why aren't the kids talking like that? Why isn't patriotism taught anymore? Why, by the way, our new school makes the boys say the pledge, which I like, you know, like when I was a kid, it was okay to celebrate Columbus Day. It was okay to celebrate

the 4th of July. It was okay to say you loved America and its military and its foundational ideals. And now I think thanks to guys like Colin Kaepernick, just saluting the flag or standing for the anthem. Now you've got people explaining why they're standing. Not people explaining why they knelt, but explaining why they're standing to respect our flag and everything that's been sacrificed for it. Well, I don't think you have to teach patriotism.

I think all you have to teach is balanced world history. And a rational person will come to the conclusion that there is something special about America. America is not your average country. There is a reason why it's the number one destination for black and brown migrants, migrants in general, black and brown migrants in particular, across the world. There's a reason why I could win money betting all day that the average migrant from West Africa or East Africa or India, if they have one destination in mind, it's here. That is not a coincidence. It's because there is something about America that is especially open, liberal in the classical sense,

and that those values have had good consequences for the ability of diverse peoples from all across the world to ascend from third world poverty to first world poverty to president of the United States. It's why there's nothing... When you hear rags to riches stories in America, you don't even bat an eye. You take it for granted because it happens so often.

When we talk about history, you don't necessarily have to teach patriotic history per se. What you have to teach is global history, balanced history. A lot of people have no idea about the worldwide institution of slavery, slavery in the Middle East, in China, going back thousands of years, the Aztecs. So people conceive of it as somehow uniquely American sin, and they have no concept of how commonplace cruelty and human bondage has been across every corner of the earth since antiquity. And so the fundamental question is whether you compare America to the ideal nation you can have in your mind based on your 2020 morality or whether you compare it to other nations at this moment i mean right now china is lecturing us about systemic racism while committing something bordering on ethnic cleansing with with the uighur muslims it's it's

absolutely laughable um and you know just there's a contradiction at the center of it too. What other country, can you picture China or India or Turkey or Russia having a 1619 project, even reflecting on their own history in any negative way whatsoever. Can you picture them having a book like the Howard Zinn book, People's History of the United States, which was a bestseller in like the 80s or something? Can you picture a Chinese version of that, a Turkish version of that? No. It's because, and that in a sense speaks to our commitment to self-criticism to freedom of speech which is a novel idea uh in the in the in the long view of history um and so and so i think ultimately it is an ignorance of the uh the rest of the world that leads people to be unreflectively anti-America.

And I think I have a much easier time talking to immigrants about this kind of thing than I do people who've been raised here for so long that they don't know that other places exist. I love that. You don't have to teach patriotism. You just have to teach history, world history, and people will get it. I've got to ask you one last thing that I've been struggling to answer myself. And I'm really curious to hear what your answers are going to be on this. This is like one of the main things I wanted to ask you. So I think it's pretty clear that I'm not a wokester and that I don't buy into all this, you know, racial division BS. But I, like most Americans also see that there is still racism in the United States and take it on a case by case basis to make up my own mind. Overall, in general, as a human in this country, and certainly as a white human here,

what can I do? And what can the listeners do if, if they want to, without buying into all that other stuff, be an ally? How, how can we be good brothers and sisters to people of color and be helpful and be open-minded and, and take into consideration that there is a history that we all are dealing with in a way that's helpful and helps bring us together and forward. Oh gosh, I don't know what to say, Megan. I would, I, the first thought in my mind was be honest, please don't hold back, tell people what you really think. You want to be an ally. And that means have the courage to criticize, have the make it a decent society for everybody. And then a lot of these racial disparity questions would take care of themselves. And we don't have to get disparities down to zero in order to avoid the, you know, food insecurity, people who don't have a decent place to live, schools that don't work, unsafe neighborhoods and things like that. Let's make it a better society for everybody. But that's not really what you asked. You want advice about how to have your integrity intact, and not succumb to this nonsense, and yet at the same time feel that you're on the right side of history with respect to the racial questions. I'm very interested to know what Coleman is going to have to say about that. No pressure. Well, thank you, Glenn. Commit yourself to reason. Always be skeptical of yourself

and your own tendency to confirm pre-existing beliefs. That's always good advice for everybody. Try to remain open-minded. And that doesn't just... Some people interpret that as be open-minded to liberal activist ideas sometimes. Seriously, be open-minded to liberal activist ideas sometimes. Seriously, be open-minded to everything, but have standards for what you believe.

Listen, it's a very tough thing to negotiate. And, you know, everyone has to negotiate it in a different way depending on their individual circumstances. So I don't really have the one-size-fits-all platitude that is good advice for a human being pursuing a happy life and a pro-social existence on this planet is also good advice with respect to the issue of race and race relations. This is not personal advice, but this may be advice for the society. Perhaps we should be working toward unlearning race. And by that, I do mean, you know, intermarriage. By that, I mean adoption. By that, I mean mixing and getting out of this constructed, socially reproduced fiction that were really different. We're not.

So I think that's really the only answer in the long run, that we have to lower the amount of importance that we give to the superficial features of our physical presentation. We should have friends. We should have neighborhoods. We should have schools. We should have families that are integrated across racial lines to the point that in the fullness of time, we would give no significance whatsoever. Now, people will go ballistic in me talking. They'll call me an assimilationist. But I think, I'm not saying this from the point of view of being a black person. I'm saying this from the point of view of being a human being. You two are a national treasure. I'm so, so glad we had this conversation

and I really hope we can continue it. And I just, I do want to say everyone should really check out Conversations with Coleman. Coleman, I subscribed and i paid more than was necessary because i support and love you and it's an option on there and and glenn show the glenn show you can get i you can get it on podcast or youtube but i usually watch them on youtube well we got patreon.com forward slash glenn show we now have a crowd sourcing site if people want to go and give me so i will give you more than you want to well sign up because there's going to be extra. I'm following in Coleman's footsteps. It's about time.

Well, that is a nice way of just telling someone you love them. You love what they're doing and you're behind them. You can't, you know, too often we hear what Twitter has to say about us. And maybe looking at the Patreon revenues is a better way of gauging it. You guys, thank you again. So much love to you both. Thank you, Megan. Likewise, Megan. That was amazing. Wasn't that amazing? Aren't you going to run right down that Glenn Lowry answer and just think about it? That's how I felt when Dennis Prager said the other day, and I said, you know, the left has got the media and they control the big tech and they control Hollywood and they control sports.

What do conservatives control? And he said, ourselves. So good. That's how I felt when Glenn spoke and Coleman with the patriotism. Right. You don't teach it. You just teach history. Yes. Hello.

Love that I'm learning and being inspired. I hope you feel the same. Before we go, I want to tell you that today's episode was brought to you in part by Pure Talk USA. Get unlimited talks, text, plus two gigs of data for just 20 bucks a month. Dial pound 250 and say Megan Kelly for an additional 50% off your first month. That is good. Thank you for listening to the program.

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