The Megyn Kelly Show - Thomas Chatterton Williams on the Authoritarian Left, the Illusion of Racial Identity, and Victimhood in America | Ep. 80

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Thomas Chatterton Williams, contributing editor to Harper's Magazine and the New York Times Magazine, to talk about the illusion of racial identity, the "Authoritarian Left," the fallout from his "Harper's Letter," victimhood in America, the situation at Smith College, nuance of policing in America, anti-racism vs. anti-race, his parents and family, race and schools, 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. Today we've got Thomas Chatterton Williams. This guy is bold. He is bold, man. He tells it like it is. And he takes a lot of slings and arrows, but stands tall. He is he's had such a fun resume. He's an author and he's a cultural critic. He writes for Harper's Magazine. He writes for New York Times Magazine. And he's a fellow at AEI, American Enterprise Institute, which I was saying on our last show when I was teasing this, that, you know, it's a conservative think tank. So think about that, right? He's not blinded by ideology or partisanship. And his views, they cover the board. He's the guy who got that now famous Harper's letter going, where mostly people on the center left were gathered together to speak out to the left

on free speech saying, calm down and remember what America is supposed to be about and stop being so illiberal. Right. So he's a doer and he's a thinker. And his, his most recent book is called self-portrait in black and white, unlearning race. His dad was black, his mom's white, and he has been thinking about race in an interesting way for his entire life. And I think you're going to listen to him and think, why aren't more people going to Thomas Chatterton Williams way as opposed to the Robin DiAngelo way? Why aren't we listening to this man of color as opposed to this white woman who's trying to lecture everybody, including him, on how they need to think about their skin color?

So anyway, he's a great thinker. He's a great guy. And he's coming up in one second. But before we get to him, on how they need to think about their skin color. So anyway, he's a great thinker. He's a great guy. And he's coming up in one second. But before we get to him, there's this. Thomas, how are you? I'm well. How are you? I'm great.

It's such a pleasure to be speaking with you. Likewise. Thanks so much for inviting me. Let's talk about the need to balance the playing field right now when it comes to speech, when it comes to civil rights, when it comes to things that, you know, the left, the liberal left used to traditionally would have been seen as liberals and conservatives to try to take over that role that the ACLU has totally abandoned of just a fighting for free speech, a fighting for actual civil rights. fear of sanction, without fear of reputational destruction. Those are bedrock freedoms that make our civil society work. You know, the ACLU is an organization that had such radical beliefs in freedom of speech that they filed lawsuits on behalf of the right of neo-Nazis to march, you know. And now you have an organization that's changed into something quite different from that, that files lawsuits on behalf of non-white students at Smith College

paying $78,000 a year to go to school, filing lawsuits for them to have the right to live in segregated dormitories. I mean, it's really, it's not the same organization that it once was. The thing at Smith College is so insane. I mean, there's a couple things going on there, Jody Shaw and her resignation after being bullied there to talk about race at every turn and see everything at Smith through the lens of race. But then the other story that the Times reported now, not long ago about the young woman who claimed she was the victim of racists. They're a racist janitor, a racist cafeteria worker who she thought threw out of there just because she was sitting or eating while black. But it turns out she was in the wrong place. She wasn't allowed there. Instead of standing behind the cafeteria worker and the janitor, the school threw them under

the bus. And you had a great tweet about this, about what you would do if your kids sort of ever treated a cafeteria worker or a janitor this way. Can you just sum up what you were trying to say? Well, yeah, I was saying that I would be really mortified if it turned out that my child, whether she or he believed that they had been targeted or not, when the facts came to light and it turned out that my child had gotten someone who is legitimately economically marginalized, and it turns out that the cafeteria worker is dealing with lupus or some chronic autoimmune disorder and hasn't been able to find work since in almost a year, if I found out that that had happened, I wouldn't be able to

sleep until this situation had been rectified. What's really disturbing to me, though, is that I don't think it's just that this student acted maliciously. I think that we're raising generations of people now to see themselves only through hyper-subjective lenses of victimization that really are immune to to factual refutation, if that makes sense. This person's whole worldview has told them that there cannot be a situation in which she interacts with white people, even though she is actually objectively in the position of being in the elite, and they are in the position of what used to be called the proletariat. she cannot perceive herself as being the person with the upper hand in the encounter, even after their lives become destroyed from clashing with her. Right. You were saying that this is a girl paying $78,000 a year at this

school, pulling social rank on a janitor and a chronically sick kitchen worker, right? And these people's lives really have been ruined. The cafeteria worker came out publicly and said she did nothing. All she did was wave at this young woman as the woman walked into the facility. That's it. And the woman just accused, suspected her of calling security. Meanwhile, it was the janitor who called security, as he had been instructed to do by Smith,

if they saw anybody in this dorm over the summer where they weren't supposed to be. So the cafeteria worker winds up furloughed looking for another job and the and the restaurant she applied to says, aren't you that racist? I think, where do you go to get your reputation back? You can't. And this is what, you know, I've been pretty vocally outspoken about what is being called cancel culture since the summer, since some other writers and I published a letter in Harper's Magazine warning of these dangers. And we caught a lot of flack from people saying that it's just a bunch of elites. It's just billionaires like J.K. Rowling complaining that they can't criticize with impunity anymore. Real people don't actually ever get canceled. And this, to me, crystallizes the fact that this is not a conversation just about elites.

This woman is the definition of somebody who's had their life ruined through a cancellation. made the issue spark on Facebook with a post that drew many, many strangers to target this woman and even harass her by snail mail and in her own physical community to the point where she could not go and get another job. She had been tarred as a racist. And there's nothing that you can do in that situation to untar yourself. You're just at the mercy of this kind of stigma attached to you. And it's devastating. The line that really struck me in this article by Michael Powell in the New York Times that you're referring to about Smith College was the fact that this woman and others had said that they're afraid of even enforcing the rules because you don't want to get into a conflict with students, even when you're simply doing your job or what you've been hired to do.

You just try to avoid confrontation because you can't win. I find that very, that's very problematic on a number of levels, including, let's look forward to something like hiring, right? I worry about this with women in the wake of how sort of nutty the Me Too movement got, you know, after it started with, I think, nobility and it crossed over to a place where it felt very witch hunty. But I worry about my fellow women actually making it into the C-suite of these companies because the truth is, while these male executives who still control America are going to say publicly, of course, equal rights, you know, to borrow a term from the White House, you know, women's rights are human rights.

They say trans rights are human rights. Behind closed doors, when they actually have to make the hiring decision between you and a guy who they know cannot ruin their career with one allegation, right, after 30 years of service, they're probably going to choose the guy. And I worry about this for my black friends, too. I don't want to see them not chosen because of women like this girl at Smith College who basically ruined a couple of people's lives just by making what turned out to be a totally baseless allegation. Yeah, I mean, that's a valid concern. In all of these movements, you have an initial kind of response to what is a correct perception that there have been many injustices in the history of elsewhere. But you always have to make sure that you

don't allow the correction to become an overcorrection that's actually worse than the problem, or in some cases is creating new victims out of, you know, collateral damage. You don't want to be in these situations. And so I worry quite a lot that we're in a moment where there is an extraordinary overcorrection and many of us have become blind to real people's lives getting devoured in the process of trying to fight for kind of abstract ideals of what we've been led to believe is amounts to social justice without really knowing, um, who is, who is, um, a victim or an oppressor in these altercations. The, after the Smith thing happened and, um, it, you know, that article published about what had been done to the custodian and the, and the

cafeteria worker, I tweeted out the following, I'm quoting my tweet. It reads, we are brainwashing kids into believing they're being victimized every minute, then punishing people who did nothing wrong because we are so terrified of pushing back on any allegation of racism, no matter how invented. ourselves. You know, we've just become so obsessed with racial identity that now even when one raises a baseless claim that hurts other people, they're not held to account because of it might have been consistent with that person's other quote, lived experience. And so victims can fall left and right without any consequences, right? Because of that other lived experience, which only is going to encourage more, more of this obsession with identity. Don't you think? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that was a good tweet. You can't, lived experience can never be the basis by which we go about deciding all of these matters because

it's by definition irrefutable. That's why memoir is such a powerful genre of writing. You can't argue with someone's experience. You can only try to interpret it. We have to actually have values that are universally accessible through which we can interpret these situations. And we have to be able to, you know,

to depend on reason. I think that we're really entering into dangerous terrain. You know, one of the worst aspects of the Smith College situation was that even after the college president was made aware that a gross misjustice had been carried out, she still wouldn't actually go so far as to fully distance herself from the students' fallacious claims. And even the ACLU lawyer said, well, just because no evidence of any racism had been found, you can't conclude that the kid was wrong because these things are really difficult to actually prove. So in any event, it doesn't matter whether the report finds racism or doesn't find racism. The answer is still racism. And so, you know, it's not that the society has no racism in it. It's that we have to have objective standards that can be met. Otherwise, we're in a terrain where we're just going to be in a

perpetual kind of identity battle, as you've pointed out already. Well, I think about, you know, the law, right? That's my background is as a lawyer. You can't get up on the witness stand and say, well, that's my lived experience. You'd be laughed right out of court. Right, exactly. Not yet. You need to present facts and then the judge or the jury will determine what the lived experience actually was, right? Like no one cares about your subjective feeling. They care about what happened.

You saw somebody as you walked in. Were you aware that you weren't supposed to be there? Did they say anything to you? Did they look at you? Like what are the facts? And then we draw conclusions because the problem with lived experiences, and I had this argument with a friend of mine who was saying his lived experience is that all police are brutal. Now, this is a black man.

And I said, I understand that. And that's how you grew up. And those are your experiences in interacting with police. And I obviously have a different experience as a white woman. But I do have a different lived experience with police that shows me not all police are brutal. Right. Like I can testify to that firsthand. Now you can qualify it further, like he could have said all police are brutal towards black people that I can't speak to. I don't think it's true, but based on my conversations with people. But you know, everybody has a different lived experience, and it doesn't

amount to evidence of anything. That's right. And also, you know, his lived experience can't be that all police that he's interacted with are brutal because he wouldn't be able to be there sitting, talking with you. Clearly, it's a kind of hyperbole to make a point. And it's rooted in fact. I mean, it is rooted in fact that different identities have different experiences, different stories that they tell themselves and each other about their reality in America. And we do have to understand what belief means, what psychological aspects of one's system of reality, what that makes someone's experience of shared spaces be. But that can't be the basis by which everything is decided now. And so I'm just really, I'm really worried that we're in a space where we don't have any longer a kind of, we're getting into unbridgeable territory where we're essentially going to be segregating ourselves out of interacting with each other. I mean, the saddest part of the story is that

there is a fight for spaces where, you know, my dad grew up in the segregated South. My dad's old enough to be my grandfather. He grew up under real segregation until he was in his late 20s. The idea that in his son's lifetime, we'd be moving back to arguments that people should be physically segregated from each other by choice now. I mean, it's incredibly heartbreaking. It seems like the worst kind of measure of regress possible. Mm hmm. decent, lovely man who's really helped a lot of inner city communities. But in my own experience, you know, as a woman, I can tell you, I've been, I've been bullied by police officers who have been real brutes. I've been sexually harassed by police officers back in my college years, like pretty blatantly in areas in ways in which I easily could have gotten these guys fired, but didn't.

I'm just saying it's not like, like any group of humans. You got some good ones and you got some bad ones. And so in my ever defending police on data and facts, it doesn't mean I think they're all great. It just means I don't think they're all bad either. Of course not, because life is too complicated for anything to be either or. I mean, you can talk about the ways in which black and brown people who tend to be in poorer neighborhoods in certain areas interact with the police in different ways or have more interactions with the police because of certain structural realities. That's certainly possible. own experience and my own lived reality. Uh, you know, I've interacted with, with cops who have been extremely mean and, and, and a few have let me off in, in ways that I couldn't believe. Um, when I probably deserved a ticket or things like that, you know, it's, it's, it's, there's no one single conclusion I can draw from my own personal interactions with police officers.

Um, so I don't, I mean, I don't know. That's pretty generous of you, but that's pretty generous of you. Cause I did, I understand that your brother was beaten up pretty badly by cops. Yeah, he was. And that was in my first book. I wrote about the fact that, you know, my brother and I, and my parents, we lived, we were one of a few families on, on what was essentially the white side of a town that was informally still segregated in New Jersey. And, you know, we were, these were cops that my brother had interacted with before, and he had an outstanding ticket, and he hadn't paid it in time, according to their records records and they were waiting for him to come home with a

warrant for his arrest and he said that he had paperwork to show them inside that would show that he had sent the payment in and as he tried to get to the door they both physically started to restrain him and he tried he got scared and he tried to run into the house and my father tells me that he came down into the garage and you you know, my brother was in the process of being beaten pretty bad. You know, his teeth were knocked out and they, they drew a, uh, one of them drew a firearm on my father. Um, and which is, which is extraordinary because he's a 60 at the time he was a 65 year old man, you know, he's got a PhD, uh, he's standing in his own home. It's an extraordinary situation. And the only thing that stopped it was when my mother, who's white, came downstairs on the phone with the lawyer.

This is something that is very difficult for me to make sense of. I wasn't there. I believe that it was racially inflected. Absolutely. I also believe that, you know, it does not, it doesn't define my brother's life. He doesn't believe it defines his life. He's had other interactions. You know, I've, I've also talked sometimes about the fact that, you know, I've been in the car with my brother when he's been speeding and a white cop pulls us over and, and, and says, it's late at night. I want you to get home safe. If I let you go, will you just get home safe? That's happened too. So experiences are varied and I can't draw a single conclusion about all police from that. But I would also just say, you know, I think that

one of the main problems that we have is that we do live segregated lives and many people don't interact or know well people from other identities. And so I think that there's a kind of feeling that non-white people can have that white life is always easy and perfect. And, you know, when you actually live around white people and know white people, white people don't all treat each other well and nicely, in my experience. I've seen white cops be awful to white neighbors, to other white people I've been in the car with, to white family members. It's not as though outside of their interactions with so with, with, with so-called people of color, everybody gets along all the time. So it's very difficult to make these enormous conclusions from individual interactions. I heard you and Coleman Hughes,

who I love having a really interesting conversation about, you're talking about the SATs and sort of how there's a, there's a separate assessment of one's privilege now. And they look at more than just race. They look at background and, you know, what's our advantages and disadvantages you may have had in your life. And I was thinking, OK, I like that. I think about somebody like J.D. Vance, you know, who grew up in Appalachia and had a

mother who was addicted to drugs and nobody in the family had ever been to college. And, you know, he wound up at Yale Law School and this guy's brilliant. And he's exactly somebody who should get extra consideration, you know, in applying to schools and shouldn't be ignored just because he has white skin. But you were raising interesting points about how what what is privilege. Right. And like, can you assume somebody's got it just because they're rich? Yeah. I think it's very difficult to standardize concepts like privilege, to standardize highly subjective ideas like struggle, adversity. How do you make an index that scores that in a way that, you know, I've had these debates with some of my friends, you know, and you can't argue experience. I have one friend in

particular I'm thinking of who's a beautiful human being, you know, a six foot four inch, you know, college basketball player who went to two Ivy League schools for undergrad and his MBA, worked on Wall Street, made really good money, dated every beautiful girl of any race that you would wish to date, and fundamentally believes that he's a victim and that he's constantly suffering in his life because of his race, his back. And there's nothing that you can kind of do to tell him that on every other measure, he's extremely privileged and extremely fortunate and lucky. And I'm not sure that many white people I know would actually, would not want to trade places with him. So it's how do you measure all of these factors? I think that when you go to

elite schools, you end up meeting quite a lot of non-white people who are there to build diversity, but in fact, they're not bringing an enormous amount of socioeconomic diversity. I worry that we're kind of saying that there needs to be a certain amount of diversity within the billionaire class that reflects the population at large. There needs to be 13% of CEOs should be XYZ, as opposed to actually looking for ways in which we could do something that would even come close to leveling the field between people of any background who are really shut out of understanding how social networks work and how to get ahead and how to get into these spaces in the first place, if that makes sense. I think that being poor is something that is not represented at Columbia,

at Harvard, et cetera. And it's not being represented necessarily by the people who superficially bring a different identity category either. This is one of the biggest things that shocked me when I got to Georgetown, you know, 22 years ago, whenever I started college. Every black and Latino person that I met was well-to-do by my standards. So I had never met this many wealthy. So I didn't understand what the diversity was in some ways, you know? Yeah, being poor is not represented, and neither is being Republican. There are no poor people and there are no conservatives.

Viewpoint diversity is a completely different aspect of making a truly diverse space that's really neglected in these conversations now. I do think there's probably a desire, if you said to the admissions board at Harvard, would you like to get more people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged into the school, they'd say yes. If they were honest and you asked, do you want more Republicans, they'd say, hmm, what kind? Like the Mitt Romney kind? They definitely want the Mitt Romney kind, I would bet. They do want the Mitt Romney kind. Right. But I think your point about segregation is really interesting and distressing. There's a couple of things I want to talk to you about that. So you're right that part of the

problem we have, like I was talking to Glenn Lowry and he was saying one of the ways forward, we had this long, great discussion. It's one of my favorite shows. He and Coleman came on. One of mine too. Yeah. I really liked that show. Oh, thank you. And, and he was, I was like, what's the solution? And it ended with, you know, he didn't have it all summed up, but one of his recommendations was we need more interracial marriages, right? We need, we need more race blending. So we're just not otherizing people all the time. And we kind of, as you say, get past this obsession with race. And I do think part of the problem, and I live in the city,

I live in New York City, so it's very mixed, the race, the ethnicities, all of it. But it isn't that easy to find new friends of other colors unless you make a point of it. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, you would have to say, I want to affirm to go out and increase the number of black friends I have in my circle. I have thought that to myself. And then I think, is that racist? Like, just like, hello, you over there with the brown skin, will you be my friend? So I'm not sure how exactly one handles that. And I'm sure we got a lot of listeners out there. We're living in communities that are predominantly white who would love to make a black friend,

but don't totally understand how to go about doing it. I mean, that's an interesting point. And it's one that really speaks to my own lived experience, if we should come back to that. But, you know, I'm a product of an interracial marriage that began just a few years after that was made legal nationwide after Loving v. Virginia. My parents got together in the early 70s. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. When I was growing up, I really didn't know many people that were from mixed marriages, but, you know, something did really change in the culture. It's an exploding demographic. And now in my own mixed marriage,

which is both racially mixed and, you know, we're of different nationalities, you know, kind of being different is something that's become very normal in my family. And my brother has a, has a daughter with a, with a Russian woman. So there's lots of different normal in my family. My brother has a daughter with a Russian woman. So there's lots of different identities in my family. And I think that's really helped me understand some of these things from a variety of viewpoints. And one of the first things that became clear to me was that when you have people in your family, when you have children in a mixed marriage, this is what my mother knew that I didn't realize until I became a parent. You're not a different race than your children.

I thought I have a black dad and a white mom, but once I had children that looked different than me, the categories fell apart in my own way of understanding myself and then eventually in my way of understanding our entire society. These categories aren't real. I'm not a different race than my daughter. The best thing that we could do is actually live intimately with each other. I mean, in terms of friendship and in terms of, you know, mixing would actually help. It's kind of been dismissed as a naive kind of panacea. You know, Norman Podhoretz wrote about that, you know, decades ago as the only way he saw we get out of the racial dilemma is when we become a beige society. There's lots of reasons why that's not going to happen anytime soon. And there would still probably be a very poor and darker skinned underclass. Many demographers have predicted the way that you have in Latin America or something. But there's no doubt in my mind that if we actually knew each other

and how each other lived and were related to each other, you'd have some of the breakthroughs that you had, for example, with the evolving understanding of gay rights. When people started realizing 10 years ago, oh, Uncle Dave, he's gay, actually. And then the whole issue starts to open up in a different way because you love Uncle Dave and you actually know him. You know he's a good guy.

So I think that there is something about... Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this extraordinarily best-selling memoir Between the World and Me that kind of changed the American conversation around race and in many ways led us to where we are now. You know, he became the authority on the black experience. One of the things he says and is quite honest about is that he never knew white people,

never really knew any white people until he started working at The Atlantic. This is nuts. You know, he only knew white people from TV. And I think that a lot of white people only know black people from what they see on TV. And a lot that a lot of white people only know black people from what they see on TV. And a lot of our problems come from that too. Up next with Thomas, the difference between anti-racism and anti-race. He's the latter. He's a proponent of the latter,

as of course his book title tells us, a learning race, and why he thinks that's so important. That's coming up in one minute. I used to laugh because I grew up in upstate New York, Syracuse, and then Albany. And we had one black kid in our class, and both of his parents were doctors. And I was just thinking, like, this might not be totally representative of, you know, the normal black experience in America. I'm not sure how much I should be extrapolating from Aussie to, you know, the general black community. But then, you know, I got out there, right? I went to schools in those same cities. But then after that, I moved to Chicago, moved to New York, moved to DC, and you sort of you expand your horizons. A lot of people don't. And so it's not that they have prejudice in their heart or racism against other, right? It's just, they haven't been exposed there. I think in general, there is a, I don't want to say fear of other, but maybe just like distance from other or reticence to understand. I'm not sure my friend, Ellen, she's married to Stossel, John Stossel. She,

she's a psychiatrist. She's like human beings have a fear of other. And so then to get over the fear, when you don't have any people in your community who are of a different skin color than you, it doesn't work to just watch Cosby. You know, like, I don't know what the answer is, but we got to find it. We do have to find it. You know, in my experience also, you know,

a lot of these problems are solved when people can meet each other as equals. A lot of problems are that, you know, a lot of these problems are solved when people can meet each other as equals. A lot of problems are that, you know, there still is a great amount of economic inequality. I've really come to see that since I wrote my second book, you know, my book is an argument for why we can't just be anti-racist, uh, as is the fashion now by, by kind of digging deeper into our racial identities. Uh, but we actually have to be, um, anti-race and try to, try to transcend these divisions. But I'm aware that, you know, this is not going to happen without, um, without getting people into situations where they meet each other as equals, where people have

opportunities for education, where people are, you know, able to have some sense of reparation for the housing inequality that's happened over the decades. We have to think seriously in terms of material terms and also in terms of, you know, the way we perceive ourselves in each other. And the two have to go together. It's a really, really difficult situation. But one of the way we perceive ourselves in each other and the two have to go together. It's a really, really difficult situation. But one of the reasons we don't meet each other is because of economic inequality. And I don't think that so long as, um, so long as, yeah, as long as class is overwhelmingly raced, um, then these, these problems are going to persist.

So the book that you're referring to, your second book is called Unlearning Race. That's the book you're referring to. Self-Fortune and Black and White, Unlearning Race, yeah. And in that, you do make the point that we need to de-emphasize race to progress as a culture that racism creates race, not the other way around. Have I put it correctly? That's right, yeah.

So explain that. Yeah, I mean, that's a point that's made very powerfully in a book from 2012 called Racecraft, The Soul of Inequality in American Life by two sisters, Barbara and Karen Fields. One's a historian at Columbia and the other is a sociologist, I believe, at Duke. And they argue that race is a construction that comes out of the collision of Europe and Africa

in the new world through the fundamental economic exploitation of the slave trade. And that in a new democracy that's based on the universal rights of man and liberty, you have to have an ideology that justifies why very obviously some men are not free and some men are slaves. And that ideology became a racial ideology. The racism, the exploiting of the otherness became a way of dividing people based on these immutable characteristics. You know, prior to this, it's not that people never looked different before, but if you read, you know, I'm a fan of Terence's famous quote from Roman times, you know, I'm a human being, nothing human is alien to me. You know, people were different from each other in prior times, but they didn't organize the world into four or five distinct color categories.

That comes out of the Enlightenment. That's four or five hundred years old. And I have to believe that anything that's been created could be potentially uncreated or unlearned, no matter how difficult that's going to be. So that's why I argue in the book that these categories are irredeemable. I don't think that, you know, the fashionable anti-racism that gets close to making Blackness a distinct identity from whiteness in the same way that actual racists do, I don't think that that will ever get us where we want to go because the hierarchies and the exploitation is implied in the color categories. That's right. That's what seems so wrong about it to me.

When I read Robin DiAngelo telling me to walk into the room if you and I were in person together, I would have to start by saying, Thomas, I'm sorry. I apologize on behalf of myself, my race, and my country. And I promise to you, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you. Meanwhile, it's like, you are better read than I am. You're better educated than I am. You live a glamorous, awesome life in Paris. It's so pejorative.

It's so condescending. I would hope you'd laugh in my face if I said that to you. Well, I never did take the LSAT. So you might be much better educated than me. I wouldn't bet on it. But I would say that, you know, it would actually be something that I really wouldn't want you to do. Because even though you could be doing it from a well-meaning place, Megan, you would actually be reaffirming that you're superior to me. And it's really not what I want. You know, you would be, there is something so condescending in a white person taking Robin DiAngelo's advice and thinking that

I'm so broken and wounded because of things that are in my ancestry that she has to kind of make herself smaller for me to feel fully myself or, or she can't, you know, you're not supposed to cry in front of me either, Megan, because you know, white women's tears would trigger me and there's a long history of that, but this is so paternalistic and so condescending actually. It's a way of actually reaffirming, reaffirming my inferiority by other means.

And so the thing is to treat each other the way you want to be treated to, to even if that means, you know, um, treating people bluntly or rudely or, or, or, or just being not trying to change the world to make it softer for, for people you perceive as being, um, victims it's i get it that that's how i feel honestly like somebody said to me once i was having some sort of a twitter spat with um well it started off with um um with colin kaepernick he he was ripping on the solomani strike as racist when we took out the iranian general and was like, oh, of course. I'm like, everything, everything has to be seen through a racial prism, right? Like we wouldn't have bombed him if he had white skin and had been killing American soldiers. And then,

oh God, what's her name? The director, the black director, Ava DuVernay. Ava DuVernay. She got on me and I gave it right back to her. You have an A-list pile on. Yeah, yeah. So we were punching each other rhetorically. And somebody on Twitter was like, you know, you might think about not attacking black people on Twitter all the time.

And I was like, so first of all, it's not all the time. But second of all, how I feel like for me to say I'm not going to respond to this attack Ava launched on me or this stupid thing Colin Kaepernick said because they're black. That's racist. They're going to get it just as good as I'd give it to some white person, which I also do. That's really actually treating them as though they're not your equal. I mean, it's funny to me that that's not apparent to people on its face, that if you have to hold yourself back and be quiet around black people, it's because you believe that you're stronger than they are. It's really that obvious. It's also just crazy to think of,

you know, to internationalize. I actually am very concerned with this in my own work these days. I live in Paris. The internationalization of highly specific American ways of thinking about identity. You know, we saw this with the Alison Roman scandal that happened, you know, we saw this with Alison, the Alison Roman scandal that happened,

you know, last summer when she was accused of, you know, of diminishing women of color. Chrissy Teigen. Yes. Right. Wasn't she, she was the critic at the Times, the food critic, and she ripped on Chrissy Teigen and one other person. And I'm sorry, it's the woman who organizes, the Japanese woman who organizes spaces. Oh, yeah. Marie, what's her name?

Marie Kondo. Marie Kondo. Yeah. So she ripped on them in a very mild way, by the way. It wasn't like particularly harsh. And she was called a racist. Because these are considered to be people of color. But, you know, Japanese people don't walk around identifying themselves in Japan as

people of color but you know japanese people don't walk around identifying themselves in japan as people of color iranians don't think of themselves as people of color in in iran the way that we um the way that we make people people of color in america uh through our discourse on white supremacy even though on the census persians and arabs are considered caucasian but no one even you know we don't actually get it we just throw around these labels as though the entire world is organized based on our racial discourse. And it really actually dissolves complexity. And it's a problem. We're importing these debates into Europe at the moment. And I don't see any good coming out of this. In fact, there's a very kind of intense debate going on in France where at the level of the president, Macron is saying that he doesn't, France can't import American style identity politics. It has a

different value system, a different way of making its multicultural society work. And this has been something that American journalists have been ripping into him for having, you know, the gall to say. It's really quite something. I miss that Twitter spat, though. It was a while ago. I think it was January of 20, when he was making, right after Soleimani got bombed.

So on that subject, let me ask you, you're raised in Newark, New Jersey. You move over to Paris. You marry a French woman, right? She's French. Yeah. And what, so what is that like now? Because I've heard you say something to the effect of when you're in, when you're in Paris, when you're in France recurring theme in the literature of Black American expat writers like James Baldwin or Richard Wright, Chester Himes. that race is often tied to localities and that, you know, your racial identity is something that's made in the society in which you grew up. When I came to Paris, it's not that I stopped being

black or anything like that, but it wasn't the most important aspect of who I was. First and foremost, I was an American. I was certainly not a European. You learn very quickly as Baldwin wrote that you have more in common with a white American in Paris, and he has more in common with you than either of you have with the European or the African that you'll meet there. And me, the way that I look, when I was first in France, living in neighborhoods that were highly mixed with North Africans, with Arabs, I was often mistaken for Algerian. My physical characteristics were not necessarily read in this society in the exact same way

that they were read in the society I had left. So all of this was kind of, it was revelatory to me in the sense that I felt like I had freed myself from the kind of American obsession with race as a binary between black and white. And I had, you know, I had started to perceive myself as being simply myself, but also I had started to experience what it means to be an American, which is actually itself quite a privilege in a global context. Wow, that's so interesting. And like that you would have to go overseas to get away with this

from this obsession on race. And you went before this year. I mean, we weren't quite as bad when you went over there as we are now. We're going in the wrong direction. People have thrown your book out in favor of Ibram X. Kendi's, and it's exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. They're coming for you now in France with his ideas. Yeah, they are. Although the French are less, the French are still putting up a different kind of a fight. Not that the French are without flaws and there's no racism in the society, but a lot of people in France of a variety of ethnic backgrounds really do believe in a kind of universalism and still want that. You want to

have a society in which you're first and foremost a citizen and your ethnic or religious identity is something private. They want that in a way that Americans don't seem to want that anymore. So actually my book just came out in France and it's been received entirely differently here than it was in the United States, which has been an eye opening experience, actually. Good. I mean, everyone should read it. It's the it's the solution. And yet, we really are embracing we just not long ago, we played an ad that's playing on some kids channel now, where the little characters are saying we really should see color. It's important to see color. You know, and then a little black child says, like, I think it really is important that my skin's black and your skin's white.

And I actually thought of you. You've been trying to say exactly the opposite. Your dad, who is a black man raised in America and the segregation of South, raised you to not obsess over this. Like, I love the story of when your daughter was born who looks white. And he was like, none of this matters. And he's been saying that to your whole life. This stuff doesn't matter. And he also said, you know, and it's also not new.

He said, you know, in the segregated part of Texas where I grew up, there was a child who was colored like your daughter was, and she was on the black side of town. You know, he said, we have never been as unmixed as people would like you to believe. And that really did put me at ease. that you brought up, which is the idea that kids are now being taught to see and focus on color and to see and focus on what's called racial difference. You know, that's where you actually have, you know, the French have a saying, extremes meet. That's where you have the anti-racist left coming full circle and actually using the same way of seeing the world and the same way of the same prism of race to filter all of reality through as actual racists do. Racists see color too, and they want their kids to grow up seeing differences that they call racial

differences and believing that those are the things that cannot be transcended or overcome. I mean, it reinforces the very thing that these people claim to want to counteract. I can't understand why it's so difficult to get people who claim to be anti-racist to see this. But I have to also admit that, you know, you've mentioned Kendi and there are many others, D'Angelo, but there are many others. There's quite a lot to get out of exploiting racial divides. It's not that they're doing this in futility. You mean they're making money?

Money, power, influence. It's a way of ending debates, silencing dissent. you know, people are using racial difference in a way that works for them. So telling anybody to stop doing something that works for them is going to fall on deaf ears nine times out of 10. So that's when I started to feel a bit pessimistic. You know, you're in New York City. I believe you've been focused on stuff with schools because your kids were in schools there. You know, I'm alarmed by what I read about what's going on stuff with schools because your kids were in schools there. You know, I'm alarmed by what I read about what's going on there. If you look at Fieldston or something, you know, they're sorting kids as young as the third grade into racial affinity groups. And every group talks about what they're proud about in their racial identity, except that the white group was supposed to just meditate on on you know on their privilege and and to listen and be silent and you know the reporting on this was extraordinary there

were several articles in the times in new york magazine within a few weeks the third grade white racial affinity group that's supposed to think about how guilty it is becomes a white pride group of course it does because the more identity, the sort of identity can be picked up and used by anybody. The more that one group focuses on its racial identity, the more that that incentivizes every other group to focus on its racial identity. This doesn't lead anywhere good. It's so maddening, because I will tell you here in New York, my son, his two best friends, one was black, one was brown. My daughter's best friend has been a brown, a mixed race girl from the time she was two. They do not, like they see color.

They have eyes. They see it the way they see hair color. But they have zero idea that there's something that should be dividing them or making one of them feel like they belong to the oppressor race and one to the oppressed race. And I resent the schools making them see it in a way that creates a wedge between them. I resent, I know they need to learn about history. I want that. I know they need to learn about anti-bullying and the fact that there are racists in this country. I want that too. I just don't want such a, such a divisive message being wedged between them to where you take beautiful, perfectly healthy friendships, and change them in a way I think is unhealthy.

Absolutely. And you actually you actually damage, you know, real friendships that were evidence of the actual world already that people say they want to get to. Real interracial friendships that were working, you know, that are then, that problems are introduced into those friendships and made to not work, when the whole point is to transcend these differences and get to the space they were already at. I've even seen accounts of people, you know, since unfortunately George Floyd died in May and the kind of racial reckoning the country has been going through ever since. I've seen unbelievable accounts of people happily married for years and decades, suddenly realizing that they were uncomfortable being married to a white person

because of systemic racism and reassessing their own wife. There have been reports of this. It's been unbelievable. People reevaluating friendships. There have been op-eds. I'm not sure I can allow my kids to be friends across race anymore. It's too traumatizing. But they were already friends across race. One of the things that my wife pointed out to me when I was finishing my book, there's a scene at the end of my book where, you know, we're at her grandmother's house in Normandy. Her grandmother is a lovely woman who's always treated, you know, me really well and really, you know, likes my dad. And, you know, she's a woman of her time. She's 90 years old and she has, you know, there's a porcelain head that she has in her place in Normandy that is like a black woman's head. And it just, it's a crazy looking thing to me.

My wife and her cousins are like mortified. They try to hide it. Her grandmother's not even, she's not aware that it's something that she would never understand if I tried to explain to her, you know, why it's racist. But I write about, you know, my own like wrestling with staring at this thing sometimes when we visited. And the thing my wife told me was, you know, like, we are already living in a mixed multiracial family that loves each other. It's already working, you know? And I could sit her 90-year-old grandmother down and try to get her woke and try to explain to her how that was a microaggression.

But as I think it through, it didn't actually hurt me. I'm already living the way that I want to live. And, you know, I'm strong enough to get through it. And when my daughter is old enough to understand it, I'm going to teach her exactly what I think is wrong about it. And we're going to continue to be in this family that loves each other and works. And to me, that seems like the win-win situation, you know, as opposed to fetishizing the wound and, and, and wallowing it and never getting past it. And then, you know, and then trying to re-educate, um, all of the world to see things the way that we see things now, you know, it just seems to me

like, uh, not only a Sisyphean task, but it seems to me that it would miss the fact that this woman actually is not intending to harm me. And that's something that's getting lost in the conversation now. Exactly right. I mean, like my 100 year old Nana, she said something like I was dating a Jewish guy and she said, is he Jewish? I said, yeah. She goes, they're very good to their women.

I'm not even going to try, right? There's no reason to, some are good, some are bad, like everybody else, man. But you know, you're dealing with somebody who's a hundred years old. I mean, really, what's the point? But I see your point. And I like what you said, fetishizing the wound. That's what we've become about, whether it's race, you know, your gender, sexism, being trans, whatever it is, if there's any perceived transgression, and often there's none, it's imagined, you fetishize your wound because that's so in vogue. Because your wound is who you are. I think that's the real danger is that your identity becomes whatever kind of oppression is associated with the category that you belong to.

You said something really good about this on Bill Maher. You said that you have had things happen to you, but you are not a victim. And that really resonated with me. There's a difference between going through experiences and overcoming them and dealing with them and allowing those experiences to become yourself, to somebody who hurt me. Target, yeah. I was targeted. That's fine. But it removes this cloud from it of poor me, you know, poor me. Even when you could say poor me, that's the point I keep trying to make. Because I understand so many people when we talk about race and the history of race in America, they make great points.

And I know you've been the victim of racism. I was reading about some of the words you were called when you were little, really upsetting, disgusting things. And you could make a choice to obsess over it, to wallow over it, and then to see the rest of society through that lens, same as I could have on certain issues. But that only hurts you. And you can be an activist for change.

You can find ways of being realistic about our foibles without condemning the entire society in which we live, yourself to a life of pessimism and wound fetishization. And that's what brings happiness. I can't imagine these people who are so focused on how victimized they are and how violent the speech is are happy people. I mean, yeah, outside of the kind of sense of community that you might get by, you know, by finding other people to wage battles with you. But, you know, Zadie Smith wrote something that I find very insightful, which was that

bitter struggles deform people, even the people who are on the right side of them. You can't allow yourself to be deformed by even a righteous struggle. I think you have to actually see it the way that you said. You have to say that you have been targeted, you have experienced certain things, but you're not allowing that to devour you. And I think that right now we have a situation that really is something like a kind of a moral panic, where we're whipped up in a frenzy.

And I think you can't probably, maybe we have to be a bit optimistic and patient and see this as something that's inextricably linked to the fact that we're going through a pandemic and everybody's just sitting around and too online and losing their minds. And maybe some of this is going to resolve itself when we actually get back into the world and are around each other in real and meaningful ways physically, as opposed to just, you know, hate scrolling Twitter. Up next, we're talking about someone I really don't like. I mean, I hate to be bringing all these people I don't like onto the show by soundbite or otherwise, but we need to fight back against these judgmental leftists who are trying to lecture everybody on how to be a perfect person when clearly they are not and they don't have their facts.

And one of those people for a long time has been Kirsten Powers. Well, she picked a fight with the wrong person on Twitter, and that was Thomas. And he won. So good. Okay, that's that's coming up next. But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we call real talk here at the Megyn Kelly show. And today's is kind of weird, but important. I was saying to Abby, my assistant, I really want to talk about this. And she was like, you should do it. It's important. Weirdly, that the topic is dry eye. I know, right? It's medical. But I want to tell you about an experience I've people who had dry eye. I thought I was too young. I didn't think it was going to be a thing for me. But then, you know, you go every year to your ophthalmologist, they do that tear test. And I was making like no tears, like none. And my eyes, they felt fine. Actually, they just felt a little tired. I was thinking,

why am I so tired all the time? But it wasn't fatigue. It was, it was tired eyes, which is confusing sometimes. So I went two more years to my ophthalmologist who was saying, okay, start on this medication. It's just eye drops at night and in the morning, and we'll see if it gets any better. And I did that for two years religiously, and it wasn't getting any better. And then I asked my primary care physician, like, what should I be doing? And he said, why don't I send you to a dry eye specialist? And there's such a thing here in New York and maybe where you live. Well, she took a hard look at the insides of my eyes and in particular, the glands that are like if you pull your lower eyelid down and look kind of on the top of your lower

eyelid and just inside your lower eyelid, you'll see they look like little fingers, like little glands. They are that line the lid and you have them on your upper lids too. And these are, I guess they're called sebaceous glands and they funnel like the liquid, the oil into your eye and keep your eye wet. And they have a machine that can photograph these on you and you can see what kind of condition yours are in. And it's supposed to be like nice, long, spidery fingers like my actual hands have. But if you're missing a couple fingers or if you've got fingers that are like, you know, they look like a mobster's fingers where they're missing the top couple of knuckles, that's bad. And once they're

gone, you can't get them back. There's no regenerating them. So you need to stay ahead of this problem. And because they can't fix it, they can't get you back. They can only prevent further erosion. So I may have gotten to them a little late, but not too late. But I wish I had gone three years earlier, you know, before the very first sign of any of this. So now I had all this stuff. Like I'm now my eye doctor's like, I have you on 40,000 medications for one month just to see if we can make a big burst in improvement in month one, and then we'll calm down. And there really are things that you can do. But I think most people don't know about this. And I asked her like, why do you think my eyes have gotten so bad in this department so quickly? It doesn't affect your vision or anything. It's just your eyes are tired and they're dry a

lot. And you know what she thought? She said, it's a comment. It happens to everybody. Like she says, so many people have this. So it happens for a number of reasons. But one thing I did when I was younger that may have contributed was I took Accutane. I was young. I was getting into television. I was 32. And I still, you know, my adult acne, I had it and I didn't want to have it on television. So I went on Accutane. It was actually a low dose and a short course. But you know what Accutane dries up? Your sebaceous glands in your face that produce acne. But maybe this is related, right? So look, Accutane has done a lot of good for a lot of people. I know it's a controversial drug, but it was legal and it helped me and it did really help me cure, not totally, but a large amount of my acne. And now I'm dealing with this

other issue. Listen, I still would have taken the Accutane. I just want to say that. And, um, now I'm dealing with this other issue. Listen, I, I still would have taken the Accutane. I just want to say that having bad skin, especially when you're on national television is very hard. It's emotionally tough. I don't, I feel like Kendall Jenner right now, Google it. Um, but anyway, the point is stay on top of your eyes, go to your ophthalmologist once a year. And if you hear the term dry eye, make sure you're being as aggressive as you can right from the get go. Because with all the screen time we have now, which is another contributing factor, looking down, staring without blinking for long periods of time, it can really mess up your eyes. And there's no getting around the screen time given the way we all live in 2021. All right, this has been a public service announcement brought to you by Restasis. No,

but I am on that now, among 40 other things. So there you go. Dr. Kelly is in and now out and back to Thomas in one second. You're a force for good on Twitter. You and Chloe, I've noticed the same thing. When you talk about race in a way that can be uplifting, but sound, it's one of the reasons I fell in love with your Twitter feed. It was like, who is this brilliant man who has – it's not like you're constantly defending racists.

It's not like at all. That's not your messaging. You're just so sound in your analysis of these issues. And I want to give the listeners one example because I'm going to make a confession to you, Thomas. I can't stand Kirsten Powers. I do not like this woman one bit. And I saw you get into a Twitter battle with her, although sadly I saw it too late.

So I would have been retweeting. But anyway, so this happened on February 23rd. So she was tweeting about some guy at Slate. As I understand the story, he's a some guy at Slate, Pesca, he's discussing Donald McNeil, and Pesca's basically saying internally, I think there could be some circumstances where a white person could actually utter the word that wouldn't be hideous, that could be okay. Yada, yada, yada. He came under it. I think he got suspended and indefinitely. Yeah, his employment is very much in jeopardy. So Kirsten Powers, everyone's moralizer. I mean, another news story quoting white men saying they can say the N-word because

context and that nothing should be beyond debate. What is so hard about this? She writes, what is so hard about listening to black people and respecting their view? And then you respond saying, I mean, Joel Anderson has used that term in reference to me on this website. And she responds, what's your point? Does that mean white people should be saying it? And you responded, I think a white person mentioning it not derogatorily is not as bad

as a black person using it derogatorily. And she responds, OK, not sure why you were trying to change the subject. Feels like whataboutism, which I don't entertain. My tweet was about white people who argue with black people about when it's OK to use the N-word. And here was the hammer drop. You. I hate to break this to you, but right at this very moment, a white person, you, is arguing with a black person, me, about when it's okay to use that term. You know, this is one of those things where, you know, how can this possibly happen? You know,

she's so into her kind of script of being on the right side of this issue that she can't stand complexity of any sort. She can't understand that there is not one black view. She can't believe that this guy, Joel Anderson, that she's holding up as the definitive black view has called me that word in a way that I hate. And I'm a descendant of slaves and I don't know why I'm calling me that. And it bothered me a lot more

than using the term descriptively, even if someone doesn't happen to be black. And then she explained to me what was wrong about me thinking differently than her. It gets into this thing that I've really become hyper aware of, which is listen to POC, listen to black voices, except when they disagree with me, then disregard them. And that's where we are. She wrote me privately actually to apologize, but I don't have the impression that she ever fully understood why she was apologizing to me because she realized that I was black and because she got piled on, but I don't believe she ever fully understood why,

um, uh, my point of view might be something that she should take into account. She believes. She knew you were black when she argued with, with you because she knew she knew you were black when she argued with with you because she she you were saying someone's called me that word right like yeah she was well aware she apologized because she didn't want a black man attacking her and be to be there on the wrong side of a black man who could potentially say she did something racist she has to have a perfect record on her alleged anti-racism. And there was some follow-up on Twitter after this where somebody, another person tweeted, according to neo-racism, which is really, you know, this sort of quote anti-racism, which is,

it's not anti-racism at all. So he's, according to neo-racism, she is now a bigot regardless of intent, right? That's what the New York Times said when they fired Donna Deel. And then you said, actually, you said, I believe according to new rules she would subscribe to she's not a bigot because my views de-racinate is that how you say absolutely okay deracinate me multicultural whiteness and she is quote an ally she's more black than you are yeah that's the thing that's really been kind of the most frustrating aspect of all this for me is that we can't disagree. We can't have different perspectives. It's that certain perspectives actually make you, in the neo-racism, anti-racism, you know, mainstream, make you no longer Black. This

is what Ayanna Pressley means when she says, we're no longer interested in Black voices, in Black faces that won't speak with Black voices. That means that your race is dictated by your views. This is what people say when they say, let's no longer talk about Latinos. The way that Latinos voted, I'm not sure Latinos can be POC anymore. This is really something, it's catching on. And, you know, there was an op-ed recently about multicultural whiteness, because the cognitive dissonance of dealing with the fact that the leader of the Proud Boys is a very brown-skinned Afro-Latino, physically Black-presenting man, it clashes with what we're all supposed to be told about how this all works. So instead of applying Occam's razor, we have to actually just come up with new terms that make sense of the fact that Donald Trump doubled his

support among every single demographic except for white males after we were told for four years that he's a white supremacist, we can't make sense of how people don't think in the way that they're supposed to think based on their identity grouping. It reminds me of, we had on Daniel Cameron, the AG in Kentucky who pursued the Breonna Taylor case, but didn't think charges should follow against the officers. And there was a former LAPD sergeant who said he's skinfolk, but not kinfolk. Yeah, I get that too. You know, this is a way of enforcing consensus. You know, it's a way of controlling, you know, we talk about diversity and viewpoint diversity and being sensitive to minorities, but there's no lonelier position than being the minority within the minority.

Totally. The Muslim who is actually concerned about Islamist extremism, the woman in media who is concerned about, you know, innocent people losing their jobs in the exorcism of Me Too. You know, the Black scholar who's very worried about an anti-racism that reinforces the very same stereotypes and assumptions that racism is based on, you know, that Black kids can't be expected to learn math,

you know, that minority that pushes back on this stuff, that's the loneliest place you can be arguing from. Yes. I see you there. Hi. I'm there, too. But there's also there's something empowering about it. I mean, there's like I like being a person who has, you know, in a way, you know, had had a pretty significant role in the Me Too movement, who is at the top of the mountain screaming for due process for men who get accused. You can attack me on a lot of things, but my credentials and standing up for women is not on the list. But that doesn't mean I'm anti-man, right?

We don't have to go so far that we hate the other or want to disempower the other. And I think on some women's issues, I've heard it said, and I don't totally disagree that the solution to our problem may be parents of boys and girls, right? Like you have an equal concern for both or like, you know, a dad who has daughters, like whatever, you can sort of see it from both perspectives. And I think on race issues is probably pretty helpful to have someone like you who has a white mom and a black dad. You look like a black man. You look like a man, a person of color.

And yet you have daughters, you have kids who appear white. I think it's helpful to be able to see it from multiple perspectives that you love and are dear to you? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the greatest gifts that I've had is that I was always loved by and loved both black and white people. I was loved by my mother, by her sister, by my grandmother, and I loved them. And I was loved by my black father and I love him and I loved the black friends that I had growing up. And so I never felt that, you know, one of these groups, that the evils that's attributed to either one of these groups, that I was always skeptical about that. I knew my mother wasn't a racist, so I knew that all white people couldn't be racist. And if she wasn't racist, I knew there must be some others that weren't too. So the totalizing kind of way of, you know, all white people have racism in them. It just allowed me to see through that crap or the, the idea that, um, the, the terribly racist ideas that people, you know, put on black people. It never made sense to me because

I was living with my father. I have a question about your dad. I saw an interview and, and your, your first book was, you know, about what's the, what's the title? I love the title about the hip hop. Losing My Cool. Yeah. And it's a testament to my father's pretty extraordinary library. He accumulated about 15,000 books that filled every spare inch of our kind of small house in New Jersey growing up. So how did your dad, I saw an interview with the two of you, which was pretty adorable,

I have to say. He's obviously intellectually huge. I mean, it was very clear. He's read everything. And I was like, oh, this explains a lot. This explains a lot about Thomas. But having grown up as he did in Texas, right, during segregation, I couldn't help but ask myself, I heard you tell a story about something like he found something like Pluto's writings and went into a closet and started reading them. I think that's how it went,

but Pluto's Dialogues. How did your dad first get that spark of like, I want more and I'm going to see race differently, that's extraordinary, to the place where he could deliver us Thomas Chatterton Williams, this guy who's so evolved on these issues? Man, I mean, my dad is a really remarkable guy. And that's somebody, you know, I don't, some people that criticize me, you know, I just want to say I don't discount racism in this country's history, because my father is somebody who has been harmed in his 83 years by being designated black in a society that was racist. It's hard to put this in context for my children, but my father is 83. His grandmother was married to a much older man

who was born during slavery. My dad is, in his own family, two generations removed from, from, uh, from a grandfather that was born in 1865, the last year of slavery there. Um, so it's not that far away from him. Was your dad born in what? 38? 37. Yeah. So that's just so people understand when he grew up. Yeah. And he grew up in the, in the house without plumbing. I mean, he came from an environment where he learned somehow very early on that the only way he was going to transcend his circumstances was going to be with his mind. And it was going to be through the books that he saw contained

glimpses of a world beyond where he was. His family was terrified by him reading books because, you know, not without reason, they said that you're going to get up above yourself and that's how you can get into trouble. You can get, you know, out of your station and you can get beat up or whatever. So he hid in the closet and he read Plato's Dialogues, which he happened to stumble upon in a neighbor, at a neighbor's garage sale, and the man gave him the book. You know, it's something that he didn't understand when he was a kid, but he understood that it linked him to something larger than himself. And he had this profound desire to get out. And, you know, when he was 18,

he left town for college and he moved west eventually, and he never went back to the south. He has a kind of, you know, like many people do, he has a childhood and he never went back to the south um he has a kind of you know like many people do he has a childhood that he doesn't like to talk about um and he raised his kids very deliberately um with the sense that they wouldn't go through what he went through they wouldn't what they would have to do would be to to read and to study but they wouldn't have to fight for the for the chance to do it The only thing that really appalled him was laziness or was not engaging with the books that he killed himself to put around us. Um, and so, you know, the, the, in some ways, the best thing I could ever do to show my dad that, um, that all of that work that he put in, uh, wasn't in vain was to,

was to go into writing, to reading and writing for a living. And, you know, people say lots of stuff about me that I would never want my dad to read or to see. Thankfully, he's not on Twitter. But I know that I'm doing the right thing because I know that I have his approval. And, you know, and I don't mean I have his approval as a father likes his son. I mean that I am honoring the kind of the struggle that he went through. And that's the struggle to think for yourself and to define your own life and your own values and not to be not to have your life dictated by by others. You know, first and foremost, my dad believes in freedom. And and so I try to fight for the things that he raised me to believe in. And I don't know.

It's just so disappointing to think that we're in so many ways we're moving away from the kind of world that he thought he was working towards. I know. We were making real progress. Just the sight of, as I said earlier, my, my son and my daughter, you know, in their class. And it's, these are beautiful friendships that are going to last the test of time. It's like, stay out of it. Stop ruining it, you know?

And then of course you say that as a white woman, you're like, that's your privilege speaking. Okay, whatever. So your dad, cause I want to spend a little bit more time on him if you don't mind, cause I'm kind of in love with him. So he exposes you to James Baldwin, to W.B. DuBois, but also Aesop's fables and chess. And this was a man determined to round out your intellectual knowledge, but the way your brain works, too. Yeah. My dad, the primary way that we interacted with each other for many years, once I was old enough to play competitively with him around 12 years old or something, was chess. We spent so much time together. You know, my dad is he's a pretty serious guy. He doesn't just do chit chat all the time, but we could spend hours really being together across the chessboard.

And he didn't believe it was a game. He believed it was a way of it was a strategy for a living. It was a way of assessing risk. It was a way of understanding opportunities. You know, it was it was it was a way of seeing space. So he he he tried to teach us to see um chess as a metaphor for life you know you can mess up everything with one bad move after doing a lot of things right this was all what he was teaching us through the chessboard um he also did sports with us too but he was an older father so by the time i was in high school we we fundamentally spent time together over the chessboard and yeah what he was trying to do was he was trying to give his children a chance

to have full lives. I think in many ways, my father felt, you know, that he had to do so much just to get to where he was able to give his kids an opportunity that he didn't feel that he had an entirely full life in many ways. And, you know, it's just one of those stories. My dad was kind of like, the way he raised us was similar to the way that I've since understood friends of mine whose parents were immigrants raised them. You know, he raised his children as people who were going to go on and have life experiences that he knew were not going to be his own. Right. And to get any give you the tools needed. Yeah. And one of the things he did was tell me that France, I mean,

I can't separate my living in France now from his kind of always telling me that France was, you know, this wonderful place to be that, you know, James Baldwin had lived there and he just painted these pictures, you know, where, where, where books mattered. And, you know, it was, of course, it was a glorified situation that doesn't really capture my experience on a rainy Sunday in the crappy supermarket. Just, you know, wondering why I live in Paris. But, you know, he painted this picture for me that the world was bigger than the town I grew up in. We grew up in, you know, in suburban New Jersey. Whereabouts?

I grew up in a town called Fanwood. Fanwood's got planes off of Route 22, Union County. And, you know, it's the type of place where when I go back to see my parents, you know, I can go into TGI Fridays and I can see people from my neighborhood or people I went to high school with who have never left the neighborhood. It's one of those places. And I'm not saying that you can't be happy living that life, but my parents always raised us to believe that we could go where we wanted to and we didn't have to limit ourselves. And I think that was an enormous, it was just an enormous gift. Oh, there's something very romantic about the way you've chosen to live your life. And that's how it feels from over here. Just you went over to Paris and you married a French woman.

And whenever I read your tweets, I'm like, when can we travel? When can we travel? We got to get out of here, you know? But I do think it is like I don't want to skip over because you did have an interesting and your first book was about this. Your home life and your social life diverged. So your dad's raising this sort of bookish kid, this young intellectual. And, you know, you described being like his captive in-home student.

Yeah. And yet you got attached to, quote, the secular religion of hip hop, of which you've become very critical. But what did that look like? Probably like a lot of teenagers, but in my own specific way. I was leading a kind of double existence. There was no debating with my father that at nighttime after school, on the weekends, and all through the summers, my brother and I, we studied with him. It was like a second school. And in fact, it was the school that got me into a decent college. I wasn't going to the type of high school that would just do that for me. We studied for the SATs

starting very early, like second grade. We did tons of vocabulary building exercises. We did spatial reasoning. He had us reading Aesop's fables all the time, but also literature, philosophy. It was just really something that I had to do. And I accepted that that was my own home life. But outside of the home, you know, I was performing a kind of, I guess, stereotypical Black masculinity that certainly contradicted my father's masculinity, but that I felt was necessary to make it in my social milieu. So I was pretending to be a thug, pretending to be not interested in the pursuits of the mind that were very important to my father. And mostly I was defining myself as a kind of athlete, as a basketball player, and hiding this more studious side of

myself. It's kind of tragic in retrospect. And I wonder how many of my friends were also kind of playing down their natural curiosity and intelligence and trying to attain a kind of glorification of street culture that was sold to us. It's impossible to separate this from the fact that, you know, these images were sold to us as a kind of racial authenticity. And, you know, it becomes very clear to you once you're 20, 25, 30, that you were hoodwinked. But when you're 15, it's not so apparent.

And I'm very clear on this. It was my father who pushed me through that and got me out of that and into a good school. And I'm not sure I would have ended up there on my own. It ended very badly for the girl that I was dating at the time, who my father also tried to teach, but she rejected it. It actually, my father, the book centers on my friendship with another boy who was half black and half Puerto Rican and came from a family where no

one had been to college really. And my father found that our friendship was strong, that my buddy was smart and was able to intuit that there was something in my father's house and all the books that he wanted to be around, but he didn't know how to ask. So my father essentially adopted him after school and he began to be, you know, my study buddy. And I ended up going to, um, to Georgetown after graduation and my buddy went to Syracuse and then he ended up, yeah yeah and then he studied abroad at oxford went to harvard law and ended up i went to albany law that's where we diverge i guess but it was just you know we were the only two it was just in retrospect i look back at it we were the only two uh the two who were studying with my dad everybody else in in, in our group, they didn't, they didn't

leave. They didn't. And some of them ended up in jail. But can you explain why? Like, I know in Jason Riley's book, he talks about how he grew up in Buffalo, where by the way, right now, there's a push in the public education schools and the public schools to start indoctrinating they're open about it. Children as young as four into critical race theory and BLM, you know, beliefs about life. And then at six years old in the public schools in Buffalo, they are showing children videotape of young black children who have supposedly in this tale died. They've been killed by racist police officers coming back from the dead to talk about their murders now can you imagine can you imagine how fast you'd pull your kids from a school that was

doing that to your six-year-old fictional fictional tale used to teach kids about structural racism yeah they're showing them videos where these little children acting as as that's actually traumatizing oh my god i know it's. It's insane. So Jason grew up in Buffalo. And as a black man, he talks about how he was very smart and he was academically inclined, but he never wanted to show it because it was considered, quote, acting white. You know, there's been a lot of debate about this and a lot of research. And Roland Fryer, who was at Harvard, I believe he's no longer there, published, I think, pretty definitive study that showed that if you're one of a handful of black kids at Dalton or somewhere like that, at a mostly white school, there's no penalty for being studious. And if

you're a studious black kid at a predominantly black school, there's not a penalty for acting white. But if you're at a place like I was, and maybe Jason was at a place like this too, that's pretty mixed, that has a sizable white population, but also a sizable enough black and Latino population, then there becomes a kind of oppositional culture where being too studious can exact a social penalty. And I found myself very much navigating this. You know, Barack Obama has spoken on this. This is something that people like to dismiss as a fantasy, but I can tell you from my own lived experience that you did not want to be seen as being in AP classes and things like that where I was going to school. You did not want to be seen as being in AP classes and things like that where I was going to school.

You did not want to be seen as caring too much about the SAT. My high school girlfriend, she didn't even take the SAT. It was insane to her that I was spending my weekends stressing over this test. The test wasn't even real to her. These are serious conversations that we can have, but only if we're able to be honest. But now I found that the conversation has changed so much from where it used to be, even in the past 10, 15 years, even in the past 10 years since my book came out, that you can no longer really, this is something that's considered blaming the victim. And you're not going to get a fair hearing if you even try to say that this was a real aspect of your own childhood growing up. But it absolutely

was for me. I mean, my father raised us with concepts that, you know, you're not allowed to say anymore. He said, he said, look, life's not fair. You're going to have to work twice as hard. That's something now that you're told by Ta-Nehisi Coates and all these people that that's a form of racism. And, you know, it's just what bothers me so much about it is not that I think that all black people should have to work twice as hard or believe that they have to work twice as hard. But it's just that how do you want to succeed? I think going into any situation and believing that you're going to have to work as hard as possible is a net benefit, no matter who you are. It's just, why is that such a bad thing to teach a kid as opposed to teaching a kid that the world is structurally against you based on your identity and you're a powerless victim? And you have to then, as Glenn Lowry

always points out, you have to then go and appeal to the people that you say are inherently racist and oppressive and hope that they'll then you'll appeal to their goodwill and they'll help you out. But you're powerless and you have no agency in the matter. I'd much rather go with my father's way of saying just work twice as hard. Hard work is the golden keys. You know, that's that's what gets you out. I felt it as somebody I was middle class, but I was never that academically inclined and I never really thought of myself as all that smart. But I knew that I was a hard worker and that that could make up for what I felt were some of my intellectual deficiencies.

I didn't think I had the super brain that some of the people around me had, but I knew if I just busted my tail, I could do it. And, and working hard slowly, but surely started to prove me right. You know, then you get good results and you're like, oh my God, it's working. Exactly. What better, what better advice could you give a kid than, than you have control over yourself and, and your effort will pay off. I mean, we're, we're, we're creating an extraordinary world right now. I don't know if you've seen the scandal at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History when they briefly had Robin DiAngelo's points about white supremacy culture. And, you know, there were things like punctuality is white supremacy culture, literacy, you know, objectivity. Linear thinking. Linear thinking linear thinking these are the this this is like a a a real racist dream come true

that you tell that you tell young black kids and latino kids and other non-white kids that that white people own punctuality you know it's just it's how that's a fantasy come true for a racist and they never say okay so so what do black people own when the implication is it's all bad things pain i don't you know so yeah well so so let's go back to to you in the hip-hop culture because i i saw another panel you did and this was i can't remember where it was but it was um it was a mostly black panel it was was a black interviewer. And she was kind of giving you some jazz for saying that you think hip hop these days has, quote, sunk to new lows. And you were saying, I think it glorifies damaging things. And that if you tried to live your life kind of like, what? You know, like hip hop is a sort of a form of urban street poetry. And this is people's experience. And what's your take on it now? Because it's in the news sometimes.

You know, you see sort of some of these lyrics. And of course, the N-word is everywhere. And I think I know exactly the talk you're describing. It was at the Harlem Book Festival in 2010. Yeah, it was 2010. It was a mostly black crowd um and in fact the crowd was very much on it's on youtube the crowd was very much on my side when i um responded to her because this is something that coleman hughes uh cites pretty regularly too the majority

of black people if you actually talk to black people, not extremely online activists on Twitter, but the majority of real black people who live real lives outside of the discourse, uh, will say that they will have critical views of hip hop culture and its effect on, uh, on black identity. The crowd was, um, was really receptive to the message. And I would also say that, you know, 10 years ago, I think the culture was in a worse place than it is now. Um, and there was an enormous amount of like, um, what was called like cocaine rack and drug cocaine rap and drug dealing rap. Uh, and I was specifically saying that if you follow, um, the kind of route that Jay-Z laid out of being a drug dealer, glorifying that as a way to becoming a business mogul, as he did, then you'd better be one of the most talented people in music in your generation, because that's

how he got where he is. And he also got it through being extremely smart and working hard, but it's not going to work out for you. The crowd erupted in applause. And after that, Fab Five Freddy, who was this iconic host of UMTV Raps in the 90s, and a friend of Andy Warhol, and just an icon of hip hop culture, came up to me afterwards and said, your point about Jay-Z, I agree with you. If you just listen to his raps and think that your life's going to end up that way, it's not going to. You'd be better off working and trying to go to Yale. The thing that I try to say to people is that the stuff that John McWhorter is saying, the stuff that Coleman is saying,

a lot of the stuff that Glenn Lowry is saying, and I happen to know a lot of the stuff that I'm saying is not as controversial. If you step into any number of barbershops or other places where you actually talk to people candidly, you'll hear those things all the time. I just did a talk with Glenn Lowry and even Ian Rowe to the African American Alumni Association of Harvard Business School. And on the topic of reparation, you know, I said something that I said earlier to you that I just don't see how we get to a full reckoning if there's not some form of material reparation for things like, you know, being excluded from redline neighborhoods, you know, in the 60s. These are things that can be measured and can be repaired. Glenn Lowry disagreed. I'm not sure what Ian thought, but my parents were watching via Zoom. And after I was texting with

my mom and she was like, it's always great to see you talking. And your father was really interested. And I said, what did he think? And she said, well, he disagreed with you about reparations. There's no uniform black point of view. And thank God there's not. We don't think as a monolith as no other group does. You know, there's diversity of viewpoints. My dad's own life experience and beyond his life experience, his own research and reading and his scholarly conclusions are that he reached a different conclusion than I did on the issue of reparation. And we're going to talk today after I get up with you,

and he's going to explain today after I get up with you, and he's going to explain to me what he thinks. But the idea that all black people think the same way about reparations or anything like that is nonsense. Yeah, that well, that's right. But as you know, the only views that wind up getting criticized usually by the press or sort of the mainstream, other so called heterodox views, many of which you hold when it comes to race, certainly Glenn. I mean, he's just, he's so hard to argue against. He's so powerful. I pity you for having been in that position. I'm sure it went fine, but he's tough because he's so smart. He's got, he's willing to give you your side of the argument. He's a clever arguer because,

right, he'll give you all the points that are really yours and then he'll up it to a level where you're like, oh, shit. Yeah. I mean, I always tease him about this. Glenn is actually able to make the other side's position better than they are. I've gone to Brown University to record a podcast with Glenn at the Watson Institute. And I know that he agrees with me. And then he ends up saying, like, let me just play Ta-Nehisi Coates'

point of view or Ibram Kendi's. And he's just killing me with their point of view in a way that I wasn't expecting because it's better than they've published their own views. I know, and those two guys, they should be so lucky, right, as to have him doing that since they refuse to debate anybody.

Coleman's all over Twitter like, hey, Ibram X. Kendi, come debate me. I'd love to talk about your book. It's really sad. It would really be beneficial if there could be some debates that would be, you know, moderated fairly and in good faith and in neutral, you know, settings. I think we could all learn quite a lot because it's not as though one side possesses all of the truth. I'm sure that we could learn quite a lot by opposing these views in good faith ways. But, you know, there is a disincentive to have yourself challenged, especially when it's working the way it's working. These are writers who essentially come down with the Moses tablets and they tell you how it is, but they're not interested in feedback. The one time I've interacted with Ibram Kendi, I was a fellow at Bard in 2019, and he came to speak and he was talking about how all discrepancies between groups, there's only two reasons for discrepancies between groups. It has to be that there is a fundamental inferiority in one of the groups, or it has to be that it's a policy difference that unfairly targets one of the groups. But that's the only way that you can explain real differences. Asians in New York, why did they so dominate whites in New York on entrance exams to Stuyvesant

and all these, you know, elite public high schools? He just refused to answer the question. It was one of the most disappointing, you know, he just, he wouldn't step out of his framework and really engage with what I was trying to understand. How do we explain what is the policy that would be favoring Asians? Many of them are, you know, English as second language students who are absolutely dominating standardized testing. And Many of them are, you know, English as second language students who are absolutely dominating standardized testing. And he said something about, you know, it's too small a group to really get into, or, you know, all immigrants start out

with a different level of desire, but he wouldn't get into why immigrant cultures inculcate these desires or these beliefs or these- That's very telling. You know? This is reminding me of something. Tulsi Gabbard was on the program and she was saying the reason there's such a knee jerked instinct right now to shut down speech that you don't like is not just you dislike the other side. It's fear that the message will resonate. why Kendi doesn't want to debate and D'Angelo doesn't want to debate and Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn't want to debate because there is fear that you'll get the better of them or Coleman will or

Glenn. And I mean, I, this brings me to the Harper's letter because you have been, you tried to lead the way this summer on just pushing back on some of this cancel culture and saying like, we got to, we got to be able to talk to each other. You know, there's a quote from the letter, the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted. And you say, censoriousness is spreading more widely in our culture, an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, that's hard to say, ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. Exactly right. There's a tendency to dissolve complex policy issues into a blinding moral certainty. Of course, right? I mean,

my audience knows I'm constantly quoting my therapist who always says like, I can boil down his entire therapy. I don't know why I'm paying $700. It would tip to the following, people are complicated. They're complicated. We've lost all sight of that. So you decided to put together a group of luminaries, mostly, I would say, center left to say, please stop. And do you think it did any good? Well, that's a complicated question itself. It certainly got the issue quite a lot of attention, and it's been debated now steadily since July. So, you know, there's sustained debates. I'm constantly talking about it in France. You know, I did 60 Minutes in Australia. There's been a sustained debate in the UK and

Spain. So, and in the United States, certainly. So it resonated. It got an extraordinary amount of pushback. And I think that Tulsi Gabbard is correct to tell you that a good amount of that pushback would have been because people don't want our critique to resonate. They want to preclude people from thinking in the way that the letter is asking them to. And so they want to nip it in the bud. difficult to refute, that we should tolerate opposing views that, you know, that the solution to bad speech is more and better speech, that, you know, minorities do best in environments that are maximally free, you know, as opposed to debating those points, they say the people that wrote that because they allowed this person to sign, that means they're transphobic, because they allowed this person to sign, that means that they're racist, x, Y, Z. Just the argument is to the man. It's

ad hominem as opposed to dealing with what we're actually saying. But I think that the interest in the letter, the extraordinary amount of debate that it sparked is a testament to the fact that it's talking about something very real. It's resonating with people. I still get mail as Barry Weiss and a lot of people will say John McWhorter. Anyone associated with that letter still gets tons of mail every day from people, many of whom are not public figures, who say thank you for saying that because I've never expressed once what I actually think in my workplace because I'm terrified of doing that but it makes me feel a little bit safer if you know Malcolm Gladwell is saying that this is a problem maybe that will make it a little bit safer for me you know you can't get that much of a conversation going if you're talking about something that's completely made up as our critics like to say it is well and here's they sort of your critics who, I mean, there were some names on there

I laughed out loud at, like the worst person at this small little media site that we in the media read called Mediaite, this guy, Tommy Christopher, who's an insane leftist. He's a lunatic, this guy. He signed it. I'm like, okay, this isn't exactly Thomas Chatterton Williams, but okay.

And the response was, and I quote, their words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism that still pervades the media industry and unwillingness to dismantle systems, that code word, that keep people like them in and the rest of us out. Right? It's like, even what you're saying is, can we talk about it? Can we not cancel people who make mistakes as a knee jerk reaction? Can we encourage debate and the open exchange of ideas rather than your words are violence? Right. And of course, the response is that's your elitism talking as you try to keep me out and yourself in power. And the argument that's one of the most disingenuous criticisms that it was

150 elites signing a letter, because what they're implying is that it would have been better if we had a bunch of people sign who you've never heard of, then that would have gotten no attention. Then the people who are actually vulnerable that these elites are speaking up on behalf of wouldn't have advocates because no one would care. So you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. No one's going to read a letter. The other thing they say is, oh, all these people have platforms. What are they complaining about? So it's possible they're arguing on behalf of others beyond themselves. Exactly. Exactly. Malcolm Gladwell stepping up and signing that letter, it's not for himself. He already wrote Blink. He's doing that for the kid who's got a tenuous work situation, who's afraid to say what he actually thinks worker who's about to get piled on. Margaret Atwood isn't doing that for herself. I mean, the idea that Margaret Atwood is worried about herself

getting canceled is ludicrous. It's self-evident that these are people with enormous platforms using their platform for good. But there are also people on there, and I count myself in the latter category, there are people on there who could get canceled tomorrow and would actually, it would be a problem. I have not written blank yet. I have not earned my life's salary already. You know, I'm taking a risk by saying this, but I'm doing that because I actually believe that to stay silent on issues that I think are really important would be a kind of, it would be another kind of death. And that's not what I got into writing to do. So I think that people like Chloe, people like me, people like Coleman who signed it, that's different.

That's a good point. I have 40 more years, hopefully, to be working. God willing. Yeah. So there are people that did risk something to sign that. And so the idea that we're all like J.K. Rowling is really disingenuous. And it doesn't engage with what the letter is actually saying. I liked it because I thought, you know, having grown up at Fox and I'm more center right.

My side agrees with those points, you know what I mean? Like people who are my fans and people who watch Fox News, they agreed with all that stuff there. I don't think except for like the hardcore, you know, hardcore sort of Trump people who do want to cancel anybody who rips on him. Right. There's a There's a faction there on the right that has a little too pro cancellation. I think for the most part, they're with you. But it's the left. It's like this weird, I'm stopping myself from saying far left because I do think like Crystal Ball is kind of far left, but she's not a lunatic. She's not one of these wokesters. Well, also like Noam Chomsky is very far left

and he signed it because he's very pro-freedom, you know? Exactly. So I don't even know how to describe them, but we're up against this sort of woke cabal that is dangerous to our country and what we stand for. And they need to hear from people like you. Yeah, these are people who are illiberal. They don't get to claim the term liberal.

They're actually anti-liberal in many ways. They're restrictive and punitive. Yeah. I don't know. What's the term for them though? Is that fascism? What is that? I think the term that I try to settle on is illiberal. I would also say there's an authoritarian tendency there too. I'm going to go with that. I would also say there's an authoritarian tendency there too. So I'm going to go with that. I feel like I always, I was thinking about my imaginary listener, you know? Yes. My imaginary listener, imagine Iowa does not know what illiberal means. She doesn't get it. I don't, I barely understand. So if I don't get it, she doesn't get it either because she's with me. So authoritarian, I think that works that, that you get, they're just like,

they're over you and they want to put their thumb on you and they don't want you to behave or speak or think any way other than they approve. we're in this kind of endless cycle of, of people displaying authoritarian behaviors, but denying that they have any ability to inflict harm and saying that they're the only people that are in actual danger. And so what we tried to do with the letter, you know, it was signed by most of the people signing were left of center, but you know, Francis Fukuyama signed it,

David Frum signed it, David French signed it, you know, real principle. I stand by, I stand by my original statement. In any event, you know, we criticize, you know, on the one hand, you know, you've got Donald Trump is doing some real authoritarian things that we object to. On the other hand,

the institutions that are supposed to defend liberal values and oppose authoritarianism are flirting to this other kind of authoritarianism and censoriousness and engaging in public humiliation and shaming to crush dissent. And this is also really a problem, and it might be even more of a problem because they tend to control the spaces that form opinion that matters, you know? Yep. So we end as we began, which is now what? Like, what do we do to fight back against that? Yeah. So I'm very serious about this. One of the things that I've been doing, I'm someone who defines himself as a liberal. I won't let people take that from me. You know, I feel like I've been doing. I'm someone who defines himself as a liberal. I won't let people take that from me. I feel like I've stayed basically in the same place my whole adult life and the left has moved

away from me. But I'm a liberal and I'm interested in bridging the divide and making common cause with other liberals, people in the center left and center right, basically. I think that we need new alliances, we need new institutions, and we need new dialogue partners who will oppose authoritarianism wherever it crops up, whether it's on the right or the left. And so, you know, I just started, I'm a non-resident fellow at AEI now. I'm working with Yuval Levin, who's someone I really respect. He's to the right of me, but I see that we have opportunities to find common cause and I think hopefully to improve our society together because it doesn't really matter who's destroying the

society. We're on the left or the right. We need to build something that can oppose it wherever the threat is coming from. Well, that's one great thing about the letter is you have a group of people whose names I recognize, but with whom it's not like I have dinner all the time. And I know more of the people on the right who feel that way. And so it's sort of good to just publicly identify allies in this way. Because I do feel our army of reason is growing and getting bolder and getting more organized. And this is the beginning of the solution. I hope so.

I hope so. And your podcast is a good place to start. You've been having wonderful conversations. Oh, thank you. Well, listen, it appears that I have more work to do at home because my children are not reading any of the books that your father had you read. They're reading Captain Underpants, Thomas. My kids are reading Peppa Pig, don't worry.

Okay, good. All right, good. So when I'll let you go, before you hang up, can you do me a favor where I'm unofficially starting my little Kelly College where we ask very smart people to give us a book to recommend for our viewers to read to get smarter, you know, something that they might not have read,

you know, like something by James Baldwin or whatever it is. So give that some thought. It doesn't actually have to be on this podcast, but if you have a thought, I'm going to put you into Kelly College. And in the meantime, can I ask you one last question just to close it out, which is. Absolutely. Yeah.

I sometimes I'd like to ask people this just to close it out. And that is in this age in which we hear so many negative things about our country and ourselves and our history. What do you love about America? Oh, yeah. I mean, plenty of things. I'm not, you know, I'm not Panglossian. I'm not deluded about America. But, you know, I've lived in different parts of the world now. I'm almost 40 years old. I've spent a quarter of my life in France. America is a place where you can really transcend the circumstances you start in. That is extraordinary. I don't think you know, educated, you know, urban, bourgeois, bohemian types. And if you go to these people's homes, you realize that they're basically reproducing the same social class over and over and over again, as far back as the 1700s sometimes. You know, people are not transcending their station. They're not first generation to go to

a good school. They're not first generation to buy a new apartment. They're inheriting apartments. What I mean by this is that my dad transcended his situation. He made it possible for me to transcend my situation. I see the Black struggle in America as one that has transcended immense adversity and it's one to be proud of. It's not something to think about in a way that's negative. It's one to think of, these are stories that make me optimistic about the future. I think that our country corrects itself when it goes wrong. I was very, very, very dismayed. I'll be honest, I was extremely dismayed that we went from a country that elected Barack Obama to a country that put Donald Trump in office directly after him.

That was something that made me think quite a lot about the society. And one of the things that I realized is that we can't get complacent, but that the best of America always ends up coming through. And so I think that this is a moment that we're stuck in where we're caught up in a kind of moral panic, where America is somehow now the singular source of evil in the world and behind everything wrong. I have to be optimistic. I think that coming from the African-American experience, you don't have the choice to be pessimistic. I'm fundamentally an optimist about the future of America. I'm sorry, that was a kind of long and meandering answer. If it's edited down, maybe there'll be something in it. I loved it. It was perfectly well said. Listen, thank you for all the thoughtful commentary and

the time. It's been an absolute pleasure. Hey, it was really nice to talk to you, Megan. Thank you for reaching out and getting in touch. And I wish you success. I'm really inspired by you and Barry and the people who are in the forefront of trying new forms and making new platforms for yourself and not being dependent on, um, on the institutions you've left. You're, you're kind of pioneering ways to, to do this. And I think it's really important. Uh, are you enjoying the podcast as much as you were enjoying being on TV? A hundred percent more because you're going to have more thoughtful conversations. And I was never somebody who needed to see herself on television. I just was looking

to do like a meaningful job. And so this has just taken it next level, even on Bill Maher, you know, I had 13 minutes and it was just he and I, but if I was saying to Doug, it was so much less fulfilling than the conversations that I can have on this show where you can really get into nuance and back and forth and you can tell a story with a, you know, a climax and like you can build it up. It's just, it's such a more meaningful conversation. And I, I feel like I was born to be here. Yeah. You're really good at it. Coming up on Friday, we're going to have a guest unlike any other here on the Megan Kelly show, any other so far, and that's a Hollywood star. Justine Bateman is here. Now, you may know her from her child star

years or teenage star years as Mallory on Family Ties, but she just wrote, directed, and produced a film called Violet that's about to come out starring Olivia Munn and Justin Theroux. And she's here because she's written two really thoughtful books. I had her on my NBC show, and I really loved her. And I'm like, I'd love to have her back. She just wrote a second book. The first one was about fame and losing it. And the second one is about your face and losing it in a different kind of way.

And the pressures on women in particular, nevermind Hollywood woman, in aging. And if you Google Justine Bateman, you will see she is aging naturally. She's not doing any of the needles or the fillers or the knives and people have been so cruel to her just because she chose not to do any of that nonsense. And now she's written a really thoughtful book and I think you're going to enjoy this. So tune in next episode. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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