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Note: Due to the AWS outage, many online services experienced disruptions throughout Monday. To ensure that everyone receives the episode, I thought it best to hold the episode until Amazon fixed the problem. Apologies for the delay.

In this edition of the livestream, we're talking about the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, creative destruction, nuclear war, Trump's multi-billion-dollar currency swap with Argentina, military strikes on "narcoterrorist" boats, sending the CIA into Venezuela, a combination War on Terror and War on Drugs, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, "This Week in White Crime," and Tucker Carlson's warning about (or attempt to incite) a new civil war waged over immigration and white Christian nationalism.

Recording of the full stream is available to full subscribers right now. An abbreviated episode will be available for free subscribers on Friday. The Glenn Show is almost entirely subscriber-supported. To those of you who are already full subscribers: thank you! If you like what you hear and want more, go to my Substack and become a full subscriber today.

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Video Links

0:00 Happy 60th, John!

2:20 2020 in hindsight

12:05 Ground News ad

14:01 Are Glenn and John helping to shift the Overton window?

18:25 Is Charlie Kirk the George Floyd of the right?

29:53 Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s conversation about Kirk

34:14 Glenn’s new book idea

41:43 Kirk’s comments on Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Joy Reid

48:05 The purging of the woke remnant

51:33 The responsibilities of the black intellectual

58:27 Glenn: There is meaning in blackness

Recorded October 6, 2025

Links and Readings

Glenn and John’s first discussion of George Floyd, from May 2020

Pete Hegseth’s speech before US military leadership

The Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Atlantic essay, “The Other Martyr”

Glenn’s October 3rd livestream, with Nikita Petrov and Robert Patton-Spruill

Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s NYT conversation following the assassination of Charlie Kirk

Coates’s 2015 Atlantic essay, “Letter to My Son”

Glenn’s recent conversation with Jason Riley on the life and work of Thomas Sowell

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This week on The Glenn Show, Robert Patton-Spruill and I get into a detailed analysis of a conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein. The show begins as a debate on their divergent reactions to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, expressed in a New York Times column by Klein and a Vanity Fair piece by Coates. I find Coates’s smug, morally hectoring characterization of Kirk as a hate monger hard to stomach. As much as I admire parts of The Message, his vision of African American history as a struggle against an apparently timeless and all-encompassing white supremacy cannot go unchallenged, and Klein was simply not up to the task. But I am.

This is a long segment from my Friday, October 3rd livestream, and there’s lots more in the full episode. To watch that, you’ll need to become a full subscriber. I’m doing another stream next Friday, October 17—we’ll post an announcement with links next week. And John McWhorter will return on Monday for a regular episode for full subscribers (free subscribers will have to wait until next Friday). John and I really get into it on some of the same topics: Charlie Kirk, the Coates-Klein debate, and what being a “black writer” means in the twenty-first century. It’s one of the best episodes of the year, if I do say so myself. You won’t want to miss it.

And you’ll want it as soon as possible! To get early access to episodes, video from my livestreams, and much more, become a full subscriber by clicking below. The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe

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Last Friday’s livestream was a hot one. Today I’m posting the video for all who missed it (you have to be a paid subscriber to hear the full version now, but everybody else will get it on Friday). But trust me, this is appointment viewing. I’ll be at Stanford later this week for a conference on the work of Thomas Sowell. But the livestream will return the week following.

In the first half of the stream, Nikita Petrov, Robert Patton-Spruill, and I talk about …

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit glennloury.substack.com

Note: Links and info for my next livestream, which is happening this Friday, October 3 at 1:00 PM EDT, can be found at the end of this post.

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Normally, I release TGS episodes to full subscribers on Mondays and then to the general public on Fridays. But this conversation is a repost from my conversations with Bob Wright at his Nonzero podcast, so I figured I’d make this one an early public release. If you like starting your week off with The Glenn Show, and you’re not yet a full subscriber, consider becoming one by going here. We at The Glenn Show are almost entirely subscriber supported. We need your help to keep the show going. So if you’re already a paying subscriber, thank you for making The Glenn Show possible.

Video Links

0:00 A message from Glenn

1:34 How this conversation came to be

2:59 What surprised Glenn most about the Kirk killing

8:56 Who (or what) is driving our polarization?

17:36 Cognitive empathy for MAGA

25:24 Reacting to Charlie Kirk on affirmative action

45:04 Are we re-running the 1960s?

51:50 Glenn’s latest book, Self-Censorship

54:11 Why the Manhattan Institute dropped Glenn

1:04:02 Glenn on Gaza: “I can’t bear it.”

1:17:27 “Genocide” and other Israel speech code flashpoints

1:26:58 Has Trump’s anti-antisemitism push chilled campus speech?

1:36:58 A few kind and less kind words for Bari Weiss

1:46:44 Are Israel’s defenders hurting their cause?

1:52:14 Glenn’s next big project

Recorded September 15, 2025

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe

The Glenn Show is almost entirely listener supported. We need your help in order to keep bringing you the conversations you can't hear anywhere else. To get early episodes and much, much more, become a full subscriber at my Substack.

You can keep tabs on Clifton’s progress and support his work at his Substack, Becoming Thomas Sowell.

Video Links

0:00 A Hard Day’s McWhorter

3:51 Jimmy Kimmel and the collapse of the“bluegeois” paradigm

9:47 Ground News ad

11:30 Ideological gatekeeping in the arts

17:02 The Gamergate-ification of everything

25:50 John: Wokeness isn’t dead, it’s changed shape

33:11 Clifton’s one-man show in-progress, Becoming Thomas Sowell

35:21 Sowell at Cornell

40:10 The challenge to Sowell’s conception of “the civil rights vision”

43:36 The pressures of bringing Sowell to the stage

45:58 Clifton: I think of Sowell as “the people’s intellectual”

Recorded September 20, 2025

Links and Readings

John and Clifton’s previous conversation on The Glenn Show

Clifton’s Substack, Becoming Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

Sowell’s book, Knowledge and Decisions

Thurgood on Amazon Prime

Sowell’s book, Black Education: Myths and Tragedies

Donald Downs’s book, Cornell ‘69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University

Sowell’s book, On Classical Economics

Mark Whitaker’s book, Saying It Loud: 1966—the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

Sowell’s book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

Jason Riley’s latest appearance on TGS

Jason’s book, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s memoir, A Personal Odyssey

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit glennloury.substack.com

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In our latest Q&A, John McWhorter and I take questions on troubled black communities, the N-word, issues on which we've changed our minds, ratcheting down political tensions in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, and how we handle personal security.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer supported. If you like what you hear, head over to my Substack and become a full subscriber. You'll get monthly Q&As with John McWhorter, and a whole lot more.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit glennloury.substack.com

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com

Last Friday, I hosted a livestream featuring Nikita Petrov, Robert Patton-Spruill, and call-ins from viewers. Once again, our topic is the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

We talk about my own cancelation by the Manhattan Institute, warding off the tyranny of the majority, the worrisome comments of truly powerful people like Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Pam Bondi, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s intervention in the Kirk debates, and what I dream the leader of our nation would say (and still can say) as the post-assassination temperature continues to rise. I talk with callers about the dynamics of backlash, plausible deniability, and the spiritual impetus to ease political tensions.

Listen, I need your help.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely viewer supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a measly $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get weekly episodes of The Glenn Show earlier than their public release, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

Subscribe at https://glennloury.substack.com

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Video Links

0:00 Why Marc thinks nothing works

6:45 Who decides the winners and losers in public trade-offs?

12:50 Penn Station and public interest logjams

20:29 Marc: We have Trump because people feel that government doesn’t work

28:17 Two progressive conceptions of power

33:03 Finding the balance between centralized and dispersed power

39:05 Ok, nothing works. So how do we get things working?

51:28 Marc: We need a return to Hamiltonian governing

55:03 The new class of moderate Democrats trying to get things done

Recorded September 6, 2025

Links and Readings

Marc’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

Marc’s book, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Robert Caro’s book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance

Jennifer Pahlka’s book, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Yoni Applebaum’s book, Stuck: How the Privileged and Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe