Bari Weiss and Glenn Loury: A Neo-Con Match Made in Tikvah Rufo Institute Straussian Charles Murray Heaven!
David Shasha
Bari Weiss and Glenn Loury: A Neo-Con Match Made in Tikvah Rufo Institute Straussian Charles Murray Heaven!
Last June, I posted a Rufo Institute discussion between Weiss and Loury, which provides a very illuminating understanding of their passionate Neo-Con love affair:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/YcYjhF9O_Bs/m/x87K8KFhAwAJ
Later that month I put together a special newsletter in honor of Loury’s special relationship with the arch-racist, and White Supremacist in good standing, Charles Murray:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/_zB81aV-mDM/m/sVSxPzkkAAAJ
In July I posted a deplorable article from the radical Right Wing rag Law and Liberty that proudly reinforced the Murray racist vision:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/IeqIJHS0EUU/m/jLHon3b4AwAJ
Central to the New Black Neo-Con Con are Loury’s friends John McWhorter and Jason Riley, who earlier this year participated in a program at the Rufo Institute:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/55ewNehT8nI/m/mYSTTBSLAQAJ
Riley has just published a fawning biography of Black Neo-Con godfather Thomas Sowell:
https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Biography-Thomas-Jason-Riley/dp/1541619684
I led off SHU 1002 with one of Weiss’ boilerplate articles attacking American Elites and our educational system from her Elite Tikvah perch, as well as a Law and Liberty article on the Riley book by another veteran Black Neo-Con, Thomas Chatterton Williams:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/UG69OpK9MT4/m/9WI899dPAAAJ
We must recall the vile Sowell’s immense impact on arguably the most pernicious Black Neo-Con of them all, Uncle Tom Pornographer Thomas, an eternal blight on American jurisprudence:
https://www.quora.com/How-was-Clarence-Thomas-influenced-by-Thomas-Sowell
In September, Weiss posted the following article by newbie Black Neo-Con Daniel Idfresne showing how profoundly dangerous the Sowell influence has been:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/wqLrUPJ697Y/m/bWkmDoV7CQAJ
Loury has posted a portion of his recent interview with Weiss on her podcast, which adds to her original partial transcript last September.
I provide both the Weiss and Loury Substack postings following this note.
The interview shows us how the White Jewish Supremacists in the Tikvah Tablet orbit have made common cause with the Sowellian Black Neo-Cons, and how they have found a way to sound Trumpian without ever really committing to the Lysol vision with any precision. It is an excellent example of the PILPUL dance of death that now plagues our socio-political system.
It is somewhat similar to what we have been seeing from Neo-Con radicals, like Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens, who have both been providing some demented Trump 2024 campaign propaganda of late:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/A3dO29MNF_U
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/ctJgQjsfkcM
I continue to believe that it is vital for all of us to understand what the Neo-Con movement in the Zombie Orange Pig era means, as we continue to see the erosion of Civil Rights for women and people of color in this country. It is an effort that ultimately supports the Alt-Right Tucker Carlson White Supremacist Vision, in a way that duplicitously deploys academic language.
Weiss and Loury are a central part of the new amen chorus which serves as a poisoned echo-chamber of unreason at a critical moment in American history.
As the Trumpublicans are working overtime to undermine our democratic institutions by chipping away at Voting Rights and Election Integrity, the New Neo-Con Con is all about supplementing the subversion by focusing exclusively on attacking the New Racial Consciousness and avoiding anything that would put Trumpism into question.
All this is a threat to the Sephardic tradition, as it reinforces the toxic detritus of White Jewish Supremacy and its erasing of our intellectual-religious heritage, which remains rooted in the noble values of Jewish Humanism and the culture of Andalusian Convivencia marked by the Maimonidean tradition:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/VXe7iEiJHJ0/m/XlVCD2AyAgAJ
As the Sephardic heritage continues to be killed off, it is the Straussian nihilist Jewish vision of Neo-Cons like Weiss that will serve to replace it.
David Shasha
Against the Commodification of Blackness
By: Glenn Loury
Recently, Bari Weiss was kind enough to have me as a guest on her podcast, Honestly. We had a wide-ranging conversation that covers my path to academia, my personal struggles, my work as an economist, education, and of course, race in the US.
Bari is a sharp interviewer and a fierce thinker in her own right, so I highly recommend that you subscribe to her newsletter. She’s generously allowed me to post an excerpt of the discussion below. You can find more excerpts and a link to the entire episode here.
BARI WEISS: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and one wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?
GLENN LOURY: I think self-determination and some sense of what we mean by taking responsibility for our lives. That's in the Shelby Steele ballpark that we started this interview talking about. I'd say education. I'm sorry, and this is partisan, but the public school unions are poorly serving—on the whole, in the places where black students congregate—the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. Opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.
And people are going to dismiss me. They are going to say I'm anti-union, and they're going to say I'm a right-wing ideologue. I'm going to say I'm looking at failure. I'm looking at multigenerational failure and the public safety piece of this narrative that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it.
Patriotism, and by that I don't mean blind loyalty to a flag salute. I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don't stand off from it. There is no United Nations where black claims will be negotiated. We must make our peace with our fellow citizens here. That has corollaries. Two national anthems is a terrible idea. Reparations for slavery is a mistake. It wrongly places the nature of the moral problem. It creates these parties as between which a negotiation and a deal is being cut. There are not two parties here. There's only one party.
I have to say, on the last one, I feel very, very torn about the issue of reparations. Because I feel, in lieu of some kind of organized government-run reparations program—and let's put aside the incompetence of the government and the rest—instead, what's happening is a kind of piecemeal hand-to-hand patchwork reparations program that is actually stoking incredible contempt and suspicion and tension among racial groups right now.
Oh, gosh, that's such an interesting point. And I’ve thought about that. You have a point and it actually is not inconsistent with my point. My point is that if you bundle it up in a package and put it on the table and you have an act of Congress and a couple of hundred billion dollars move, then you will have executed the transaction and the Negroes will have been paid, which is another unkind way of putting what you just said. That is, we can have that ceremony, we can do that deal, and then we'll be done with all of this genuflecting and virtue signaling and so forth and so on.
But my point is: No, no, no, no, no, no. This is organic. Everybody has to own this together. And we don't commodify this. We don't make this into an arm's-length deal. This is not what we should be doing. Which, by the way, means that the corporations genuflecting in virtue signaling is also not good because we're all in this together. We got to be solving the problem, not showing ourselves to be on the right side of history.
Well, what Shelby would say if he were in this conversation is that the reason reparations are bad for all the reasons you've said, but also because no amount can ever stand in for the injustice and the root and the brutality and the pain of that original sin of this country.
Yeah, I agree with that. It's not a commodity. It's not like 30 pieces of silver or 300 billion pieces of silver are going to get that done.
Glenn, you mentioned public safety and the fact that during the protests of the last summer, we were not allowed to say things that we were seeing with our own eyes. We weren't allowed to acknowledge the truth of the nature of, not all of these protests, but some of them as being violent. And there's this chyron from CNN that was unbelievably memorable to me, where you have this anchor standing in front of a conflagration, the whole background is fire. And the words at the bottom of the screen are “mostly peaceful protests”. Where do you think that fear of acknowledging the truth, or really just the inability to say it out loud, where is that coming from?
This is like a question you asked me previously about why Ibram X. Kindi was taken as seriously as he is, because it's a really important question. I think it says a lot about our culture. I'm not sure I've got an answer. I mean, at some level, your guess is as good as mine. But I can try.
I mean, I could blame Donald Trump to a certain degree. Right? Contrast the reading, the narrative, the narration of the civil disorder associated with the George Floyd riots, which were many billions of dollars in which dozens of lives, and which shook the foundation of our social cooperation. If I lived in one of these cities, if I were somebody who supported Donald Trump—I'm sorry to say this, but they actually exist in our country, and I would contrast how the mainstream organs of public communication treated the “insurrection” of January 6 with what they had to say about the civil disorder attendant to the George Floyd protests—it would cause me to lose faith and trust in basic institutions. I would think that people are lying to me. There's a lot at stake here.
So this idea of what’s really happening versus the narrative being spun about what's really happening. To me this comes out most starkly in the debate over elite public schools in cities like New York and San Francisco. In both of those cities, and many others, there are these famous specialized high schools like Stuyvesant in New York and Lowell in San Francisco, and they produce some of the most impressive and successful members of our society. They are called gifted schools or high achieving schools, but they’re public schools.
The way that you get into these schools is by taking one test. A test that is free to everyone. The idea is that you don’t need to be connected to get this test, or know anyone, there is no such thing as legacy admissions. It's not for the rich, it’s not for the connected. It’s just whoever does great on the test. Historically, this has been a pathway, especially for children of immigrants in lower income residences of a city like New York, to make their way up in the world.
But there has been a lot of focus and stress about the fact that, for example, in a school like Stuyvesant, the makeup of black students in the school is far below the proportion of the city that’s black. And so despite the fact that these schools are some of the most diverse schools in the country, there is something often like 70% Asian, also incredibly low income. The majority of kids are low-income. They have somehow been labeled as segregated, including in the New York Times. And that test that I described, that’s open and available to everyone, has been painted as a tool of white supremacy.
And to me, this gets back, Glenn, to this idea about the distortion of language. Imagine being an immigrant parent from Pakistan or Korea or China, trying to comprehend that huge swaths of the elite media [are] calling your family a tool of white supremacy, and the school that your child goes to, as segregated.
Yeah, well, this is your wheelhouse. This is not your first time speaking to this issue, I think you have your finger on something that's really very important. Again, I remind everybody of George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1984. The Asians are nonwhites. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, they're not white people. White supremacy, if it means anything, will apply to them just as much as it would apply to anybody else. They're not white adjacent. That's playing with words. They have cultural inheritance and it’s specific. You can look at it.
There's this book that I admire very much called The Asian American Achievement Paradox by Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee, two Asian American women, sociologists who interview these families in Southern California, trying to find out how these kids get into Dartmouth and Cornell and Harvard at such high rates. The filial piety and the extreme emphasis on hard work and the valuation of achievement and et cetera. That is at the root of the achievement of these young people.
This is America. This is the story in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century. Yet again, the vitality of our society. Now, to call their overrepresentation and the concomitant underrepresentation of black people, or they would have said “people of color”—excluding Asians—as segregation is, of course, a bait and switch. It's a trick. It's a rhetorical move. They're trying to appropriate the moral authority of the overcoming of Jim Crow on behalf of a completely different program, which is the anti-meritocratic leveling impulse to compensate for the lack of performance in the African American population by pulling down the standards. That's what's happening, white people are nowhere to be seen in this picture. It's New York City, it's an immigrant town. This is an old story. It was Jews before it was Asians.
From author Substack page, October 10, 2021
Wrongthink on Race with Glenn C. Loury
By: Bari Weiss
Four decades ago, Glenn C. Loury became the first tenured black professor of economics in Harvard’s history. Ever since then, he has made waves for his willingness to buck the elite intellectual establishment; for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality; and for his incisive cultural criticism.
He is a man of many apparent contradictions: he rails against the divisiveness of woke politics from his post as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics Brown University, one of America’s most left wing campuses. He worries about what the death of God means for the country — though he calls his own past religious beliefs a “benevolent self-delusion,” even as he admits they saved his life. In the ‘80s, Glenn challenged his fellow black Americans to combat the “enemy from within,” while he himself battled personal demons like addiction.
For my part, I think Glenn embodies what the philosophers call a man in full. Glenn is a man who, in a time of lies told for the sake of political convenience, strives to tell the truth even when the truth is hard. Or complicated. Or an affront to our feelings. Or contradicts what we wish were true.
On today’s episode of Honestly we discuss: race, racism, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Tony Timpa, school choice, standardized tests, crack, sexual infidelity, Christianity, the Nation of Islam, neoconservatism, and pretty much every other hot-button subject you can imagine.
Plus, Glenn’s own remarkable life story and what it says about America.
Below are some of the highlights from our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.
On being the skunk at the garden party:
BW: Two years after you got to Harvard, in 1984, you published an explosive essay in The New Republic called “A New American Dilemma.” In it, you wrote “the social disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black on black crime, the alarming increase in the early unwed pregnancies among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to progress.”
GL: Yeah.
BW: I want to hear about the decision to publish that piece.
GL: Bari, that almost made chills run down my spine. Remembering those words, those years and the whole thing that led up to it. I made Coretta Scott King weep in a meeting of the urban coalition leaders and civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C. the summer before that essay was published. That essay comes out of my years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when I would go into Detroit a great deal. And I was seeing what was happening to Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s. And it also came out of my work in my dissertation, in which I addressed the post-civil rights dispensation and whether the disparity would narrow in the face of equal opportunity. It was very much influenced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. So there was all this talk in the air. And in that meeting where Coretta, the great widow of the iconic figure, Martin Luther King Jr., wept, I was invited to give a précis of this essay and to hear from civil rights leaders in response before it was published.
BW: Did it feel like you were saying something out loud and in public that many people you knew and probably many people you grew up with believed, but it just wasn't allowed to be said out loud at a place like Harvard?
GL: I don't want to get too partisan about it, but I just want to say I don't think the people around that table who led those organizations were like: “Yeah, I agree with you. That’s the problem. But we can't say it that way.” I think they were more like: “That’s not how we talk. That’s reactionary talk that gives aid and comfort to the enemy. We expected better of you than that.” That’s why I think Mrs. King was weeping. At the end of the day, I was standing right next to her. We're only about 20 people in the room. And I'm standing up extemporaneously giving a 20 or 30 minute exposition. And I looked down and there are tears rolling down her cheek. And I think it was a disappointment. You know, I am this wunderkind, I'm 34 years old and I'm a tenured professor of economics at Harvard. I have all that cache. And there I am. That's my message. That's what I have to say.
On the state of American universities:
BW: You’ve been on campus for several decades now and you're now at Brown, which has a reputation of being, for lack of a better word, one of the most “woke” campuses in the country. What changes have you seen on campus since the time that you began teaching at Harvard to what you're seeing at Brown today?
GL: My, that’s a very large question, which I'm loath to answer off the cuff. I think standards have gone down. You ask me, I'm going to tell you. I think, for example, in math education we're not serious. We in the United States of America are losing our edge. When I speak to one of my classes, if I do anything, that's the least bit demanding of abstract, analytical, logical framing, I'm looking at their faces and I'm made to dumb down, in effect, what I want to say. I'm not doing this subject justice, but I don't think we expect as much of our students. I don't think we demand as much. Grade inflation is a horrible corruption.
BW: To what extent do you connect the decline in standards to the fact that schools are effectively now a political monoculture? Is there something about not being around other people with worldviews that are radically different from your own and being forced to contend with them? Does that make people stupider and perhaps lazier?
GL: I think it sounds correct to me. I don't know if that accounts for the fact that if I write an equation on the blackboard during a lecture to undergraduates at Brown, a third of the class eyes will glaze over. I don't know if I can draw the direct connection there, but groupthink is the enemy of rigor. I think that's a defensible place to take a stand. So one of the things that I think has happened is that our standards have lowered. Now, another thing that has happened is that I think we're in the service of various believed-to-be-certainties about moral issues. We feel that we need to signal solidarity with them through the work of the university, through its research, through its teaching, its pedagogy, through its composition of its incumbent members and how we select and what we define to be excellence and all that. That has become captive to a certain political agenda. I mean, it's left. It's definitely left. We could go into it. And if I get specific, then I'll be written off as a reactionary.
BW: I'd like for you to get specific.
GL: The diversity thing is going to be one of the things that I'm going to say. The hostility to American interest in the world is another thing that I could point to. The impatience with the fact that when you transform moral judgments about things like gender identity overnight in a country of 330 million people, where everybody is not going to be on the same page at the same time, and the way you decide to talk about that from some lofty, supercilious, self-righteous, sanctimonious moral posture and to condemn the people who are holding their bibles or holding on to their traditions as if they were know-nothings. That smugness infects the university. But I think the diversity thing is related to the standards thing.
So I'm just going to say this: You can't do affirmative action, maintain black dignity, and maintain the standards at the same time. That's a trilemma, you can't do all of those things at the same time, if you lower the standards for black people to admit them to elite venues of intellectual performance and the standards are correlated with performance, you assure as a statistical necessity, on average, lower performance of the blacks whom you've admitted. If you insist on their dignity, you can't be Sandra Sellers. This is the adjunct lecturer at Georgetown Law Center who was caught on an open mic lamenting the fact that most of the kids in her class who were at the bottom were black.
BW: And she was fired and the person listening to it left.
GL: And the whole brouhaha, the whole navel-gazing conflagration that happened at the institution of Georgetown Law with a black faculty demand of the white faculty that they acknowledge their white supremacist, blah, blah, blah. It's all a cover for black mediocrity. Yes. There, I said it. You lowered the standards. Now the black kids are at the bottom, but they have to have dignity. Therefore, you immolate yourself morally. That is a disease in the university. I'm going to say it one more time: Black equality cannot be had in this way.
BW: What do you mean when you say “ immolate yourself morally”?
GL: What I mean is they’re now going to search under every bed for racist white people. Do you know that the grades of Sandra Sellers’ previous classes were audited by the law school to see whether she exhibited unfairness to black students?
BW: So let me say back to you what I’m hearing: there needs to be some explanation for disparity beyond the academic proclivities or talents of the students. And so in order to explain that disparity, racism needs to be found.
GL: Yeah, that is what I'm saying. Reporting the existence of the disparity is ipso facto racist in the minds of these people.
On what a movement for black lives should look like:
BW: The word racism has been redefined, particularly by Ibram X. Kendi. First of all, it's no longer about personal bigotry. It's about any system that results in disparity. So if you have any kind of disparity between racial groups in any given institution, school culture system, it is evidence in and of itself that racism is present.
GL: That is exactly what Kendi is saying. He's not mincing words about it. What it brings to mind is George Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he talks about how words and the meaning of words fall in the service of political programs. And people think they can make reality by playing with words. I don't know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. That's a silly book, “How To Be an Anti-Racist.” Kendi’s formulations are sophomoric. They don't bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He's not standing on any literature. He's not citing any intellectual development that has any deep roots in anything. It's pablum. It's froth on the intellectual surface of our life. And it behooves us all to think pretty hard about why it is that we're content with that kind of analysis. When civil disorder in American cities is consuming the lives of black people like a machine, our political leaders and intellectual class and journalistic representatives haven't got a word to say about it. Black Lives Matter is almost completely irrelevant to what matters in black lives.
BW: And yet corporations and the entire elite establishment has taken up the cause of Black Lives Matter. And the cynic in me would say it’s just about the cheapest and easiest thing that they could possibly do.
GL: Nothing that Black Lives Matter is about has any intersection with the things that actually matter in black lives. What about education? The gap in the cognitive development of the human potential of African-American youngsters relative to others in this country widens. It's a yawning chasm.
BW: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?
GL: I think self-determination and taking responsibility for our lives. I'd say education. I'm sorry this is partisan, but the public-school unions are poorly serving, on the whole, the places where black students congregate and the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. But opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.
And the public safety piece of this narrative, that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it. Patriotism. And by that I don't mean blind loyalty to a flag salute, I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don't stand off from it. There is no United Nations where black claims will be negotiated. We must make our peace with our fellow citizens. That has corollaries: two national anthems is a terrible idea, reparations for slavery is a mistake. It wrongly places the nature of the moral problem. It creates these parties as between which a negotiation and a deal is being cut. There are not two parties here. There's only one party.
On partisan race-baiting:
BW: There was an incident recently surrounding Larry Elder’s campaign during the recall. And the first was when the L.A. Times called Larry Elder the “black face of white supremacy.”
GL: I saw it.
BW: He was campaigning in Los Angeles right before the vote. And a white woman wearing a gorilla mask came up to him and was screaming, throwing eggs at him, trying to hit him I think. And this went almost ignored by the mainstream press. Whereas in the notorious Central Park Karen case, there were almost two dozen stories about that incident in The New York Times. And yet here a black politician is being harassed by a woman in a gorilla mask . . .
GL: Why is it not an unacceptably racist political act to caricature Larry Elder in that way and to assault him? I'm sorry, I think many of us black people are not fools. I mean, this is not a plantation. You can’t tell me what I'm supposed to think. Larry Elder is a conservative. I'm not advocating for him here. I'm just saying to use his race in that way, as the Los Angeles Times did, that's unspeakable. That’s despicable.
BW: Is that because he's just not the right kind of black man or the right kind of black politician?
GL: OK, now you're asking a partisan. I’m critical of the Democratic Party’s use of race in its larger political strategy, which relies on keeping black people afraid of racism. The idea that black people need to be afraid of the police. I think that's absurd. I think it’s madness that with 330 million people in the country, with 40 million black people in the country, we've got dozens of cities with 500,000 people in them with large urban areas. There are tens of thousands of encounters between the police and citizens on a daily basis. You've got a handful of incidents of the George Floyd variety, and even many of those are ambiguous. So you construe that as open season on black people when, in fact, homicide is through the roof.
BW: And yet when I watched the video of George Floyd, and when I watched the passion and rage of that summer, I was shaken by it. I watched that video and thought: How the hell could this be happening in America right now? Maybe I was taken by what Shelby Steele said. That is, the poetic truth of it. And maybe that’s one explanation for why something like that goes so viral. That it represents, maybe in our collective consciousness, the truth about the fundamentally racist history of America. What do you think of that?
GL: Well, I think Shelby does make that point in reference to Michael Brown. Poetic truth. I think that's a very brilliant way of putting it. He has a point that reading these events in a particular way resonates with a larger narrative about American society that feels true to many people. I would point out that for every George Floyd type situation, there’s a Tony Timpa type situation. This is a white guy who got similarly abused by police officers under similar circumstances. The numbers say that it happens to white people, too. So we have to choose to read what happened to George Floyd as a racial matter. We're choosing to interpret it that way. To say that that's a reenactment of Emmett Till, that's a choice we're making.
I could go down the litany of evidence to the effect that the race-relations situation in America in the 21st century is completely and radically different and improved relative to what it was in the mid 20th century. And I think we have to begin to entertain a possibility, which is that the actual success of American history, the fact that we overcame the warts, is the problem. Because the fact of that success in the face of the continuing failure of a large chunk of black society to get on the escalator of opportunity, which defines this country, is just too much cognitive dissonance for a lot of people to grapple with. It’s the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. It’s the fact that black women are the mayors of a half dozen big cities that I could name. It's the fact that there are black billionaires. That Oprah Winfrey is Oprah Winfrey and that LeBron James is LeBron James. It's the fact that every corporate office has an Ibram X. Kendi-loving executive running it. These are the realities of America. Now, in the face of that, you still got jails overflowing with black people. You’ve still got massive poverty and disparity. People do not know the goal in the 21st century with those facts. So they end up, like infants, throwing tantrums in the corner.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, September 29, 2021