The Tucker Carlson Show
Glenn Loury: Ousted for Opposing Middle Eastern Wars, MLK Files, & the One Thing Malcolm X Got Right
Fri, 09 May 2025
For decades, conservative think tanks celebrated and supported black economist Glenn Loury. Then he expressed an unauthorized opinion on the Middle East and they dropped him in a second. (00:00) Introduction (01:13) Does Critical Thinking Still Exist in American Universities? (16:06) How Has MIT Changed? (21:29) Why Don’t We Debate Economics Anymore? (35:26) Was the Civil Rights Movement Good for Black Americans? (49:26) The One Thing Malcolm X Got Right Paid partnerships with: PreBorn: To donate please dial pound two-fifty and say keyword "BABY" or visit https://preborn.com/TUCKER Cozy Earth: https://CozyEarth.com/Tucker code TUCKER Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why was Glenn Loury ousted from the Manhattan Institute?
And I said, what has been proceeding there in Gaza is a collective punishment that I don't think is justified. And I got notified the next day the Manhattan Institute was discontinuing its relationship with me as a senior fellow.
If you'd said that about the United States, would you have gotten the same reaction? Ah, big question. Do you think you've been bamboozled?
Are we really going to go to war with Iran and turn the world economy upside down? Is it really Jim Crow 2.0 if they want to ask for a driver's license before you cast a ballot in Georgia?
I watched a couple of Malcolm X speeches, and it was like a totally different person from the one I was presented in high school. And I was like, well, why isn't this guy much more famous than he is now? One of the speeches, he goes off after white liberals, and he's like, you know, whites are bad, whites are a problem. But the real problem is white liberals. I was like, you go.
Malcolm X. It almost feels like his message has been suppressed a little bit, maybe. Thank you, Professor, for coming. So you just, you told me last night at dinner that you just, after about 50 years, taught your last course at Brown. You just left Brown. Big picture question first. You've taught for so long. How has it changed?
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Chapter 2: Does critical thinking still exist in American universities?
You've taught at, you know, the most prestigious universities in the world. How have the schools changed? How have the students changed? Do you leave more hopeful or more concerned? Big question. Yeah, that's a big question. I'll admit it.
Well, I graduated high school 60 years ago. Whoa. Where? John Marshall Harlan High School, public school in Chicago. How is it now? I don't know, to be honest with you. I know that the community that houses it has gone into decline and it's become a part of the South Side problematic, which is Chicago with the violence and so on.
It was a modest working upper, working lower middle class community. When I was at that school, it was integrated. There were 30 or 40 percent of the student body was white. I'm sure it's all black now and has been for some time. But I've lost touch with what's going on back there. But I'm just saying I've been around for a long time. Yeah, it's a long time.
So I remember as I did my undergraduate at Northwestern University, graduated in 1972, the intensity of the intellectual experience of coming to the university. Yeah. I remember encountering the German language. I remember studying mathematics and economics and philosophy and politics. And I remember books. And I remember there being a certain devotion to the life of the mind. Yes.
I don't know that we've lost that, but it's, I think, less intense for our students today than it was when I was in college. It was the shadow of the Second World War. It was still only 25 years after the end of the conflict. That had, I think, its effect. It was the Vietnam era, and that had its effect.
Even though it was the Vietnam era, it wasn't, in my experience, as political as I see the university has become today.
Wait, so right at the, I mean, there are probably, you got to campus in 1968?
I got to campus in 1970 at Northwestern. I started out at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1965. I dropped out. I attended a community college for a couple of years, and then I re-enrolled at a major university as a scholarship student in 1970, graduated in 1972.
So there were Vietnam War protests going on on campuses all over the country. They were. But it was still, you think, less political than it is now?
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Chapter 3: How has MIT's academic environment changed over the years?
They were proud of me. Well, I graduated with a very strong academic record from the high school. I got a scholarship to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology. My girlfriend, who became my wife and the mother of my first two children, had dropped out of high school to give birth, and they were worried that I was going to lose my way.
So when I and my father, my mother and father broke up when I was quite young, five years old, but my dad was an important part of my life, and I very much... wanted his respect and approval. And he, you know, when I told him that Charlene was pregnant, he said, he rolled his eyes and, you know, he said, you have to do the right thing and take care of that kid and stuff.
But this is not the way that you, you know, I had imagined you living your life. And when I told him I was dropping out of the Illinois Institute of Technology and going to work, he said, well, let's, you better have a plan.
So when I finally kind of put myself together and did well at the community college and then got the scholarship at Northwestern and then made the dean's list in my first semester, he was like, okay, this is better. Yeah. They were proud of me. And when I graduated with awards and stuff, I was the prize-winning mathematics major in my class of 1972 at Northwestern.
And I got admitted to MIT as a graduate student that very same year. They were over the moon. They loved the idea that I was overcoming the odds.
Yes. What did your dad do?
My dad is no longer living. He was a lawyer and accountant. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service. Sorry, Tuck. Spent his life as a federal employee, as a bureaucrat. He worked his way up to being the director of the Kansas City Service Center, which is a huge company. income tax return processing operation in Kansas City. And it suited him. He was a revenuer.
I'm telling you, man, this guy would drive around. He lived in Overland Park, Kansas, which is a tony suburb of Kansas City. And he'd drive around and he'd see a boat sitting in somebody's driveway. And he'd ask himself, I wonder how that guy paid for that boat. And I'm not going to put it past him to go and look up the thing and maybe direct an audit in that direction.
So he believed in paying your taxes?
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Chapter 4: Why don't we debate economics anymore?
I'm just trying to understand the world. Are we ever going to see all the documents related to that? No, of course not.
Of course not. And, you know, to the three, so the president issued an executive order on January 23rd, one of the first things that he did after the inauguration, commanding, commanding with the force of law, the federal government, agencies, executive branch should declassify all documents pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy in 1968.
And that hasn't happened. But you have to ask yourself, well, you know, why 60 years later, are they still classified in the first place? Like, what is that? And I don't think it's because the truth is easy to deal with. I mean, I still think the truth 60 years later is really threatening to somebody, clearly. Because on some level, like, why would you care?
If you found out there was a, you know, complex conspiracy to assassinate Garfield, you'd be like, okay, you know, it's long over. Like, I think we can tell the truth. Everyone's dead. Exactly. So it does make you wonder, like, well, what is this, actually?
And I know for a fact, a verifiable fact, that the pushback against declassifying this stuff within the government has been very intense, very intense. So that tells you that there's something worth hiding. I certainly hope, because I believe in disclosure and honesty, that it all comes out.
But you do get the feeling, not as a conspiracy nut, but as an honest person trying to make sense of history in the present, that a lot of our assumptions are based on things that aren't true or fully true. Do you sense that?
I do, and it's deeply disquieting to me, actually, because it means that the reality that I take for granted is orchestrated or manufactured, and there are forces, I would have to presume dark forces, at work that I don't fully understand. And then if this is not what it appears to be, what else that I take for granted is a charade or a fantasy.
I mean, in some ways, I mean, obviously you've been an African-American conservative for a long time, moved around, but basically you've been against the conventional view of things for a long time, I would say. Yeah. But you're also working within like the very heart of the system. Harvard, Brown, MIT, like you're, you know, you have every possible credential.
So at what point did it occur to you that maybe some of this was fake? When did you start to think that?
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Chapter 5: Was the Civil Rights Movement beneficial for Black Americans?
And I ran afoul of the sensibility of my friend, Raihan Salam, who's president of the Manhattan Institute, wrote me saying that we review our scholarly relationships from time to time. This is practically a quote for productivity, and there's no question about my productivity. I've put a dozen articles in their city journal over the last five years. and shared priorities.
And so I assume it's that we don't share priorities. And the priorities that I assume we don't share have to do with me inviting an historian colleague of mine on the show, The Glenn Show, to talk about the post-October 7th, 2023 incursion of the IDF into Gaza, which he characterized in the same kind of language that
international human rights organizations have used as being, if not genocide, then in the same ballpark and something that one needs to be concerned about from a human rights perspective. He thinks the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice are right to take initiatives that are holding Israeli officials to account for the prosecution of that conflict.
And I had him on the show. Now, who is he? His name is Omer Bartov.
Omer Bartov.
He's a student of the Holocaust, of the Nazi extermination campaign in Eastern Europe, and has written books about that. And he's been my colleague for 20 years at Brown. I've gotten to know him, and I knew that he was engaging these questions in a controversial manner, and I wanted to hear from him, so I had him on the show.
I am completely obsessed with Alp, and we're totally focused on getting it into the hands of everyone who wants a tin of it. We're working very hard to do that. We're very proud to announce our newest retail partnership, Niko Kick and Northerner. This is a huge step forward to making Alp more accessible. So he's a professor at Brown. Yeah, a very distinguished historian.
And I think it's fair to say he's not an anti-Semite. He's Israeli. Oh, okay. I just wanted this to be clear to everyone listening. So it's not like you didn't have Louis Farrakhan on the show to, like, call Judaism and God a religion or something. You had an Israeli historian of the Holocaust on.
No, and there were objections coming from the staff at MI, and they asked that we not, in promoting the show, make mention of the Institute of the Manhattan Institute in connection with this particular episode. And there were other incidents. The Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates came out with a book called The Message, in which he describes writing about politics.
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Chapter 6: What did Malcolm X get right according to Glenn Loury?
It's all good. I am at the end of a long career. I have, you know, a pretty good reputation as a scholar and as a public critic. My podcast is flourishing. I'm okay.
Are you worried about speech? I mean, because obviously the ability to think freely is at the heart of education. And I mean, that is education. So are you worried about it? The state of it? Speech in the United States?
I am, although independent media gives me hope. Everybody has got the opportunity to be heard now, and pockets of influence can develop, emerge, and flourish. And you can't stifle the conversation in the same way that you used to be able to. because you could control a few of the portals of dissemination of information. Now that's not any longer possible.
How long do you think that'll last?
I think it's going to just get more capacious. I think we're, I don't know, it's not my field, you know, about media, but I think we're on the verge of something, you know, revolutionary. Everybody's got an encyclopedia and a global translator in their pocket. Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint.
So I actually wish that I were going to live long enough to see what would come of this. But I'm 76, soon to be 77. What happens to the universities? Well, there's a confrontation now. And I just read an interesting piece by Peter Berkowitz. I don't know if you know who he is. He's at the Hoover Institution. He's a political theorist.
And he's talking about the Harvard Trump administration confrontation. And he's saying on the one hand, yeah, Harvard had gotten a little lax in its enforcement of restraint on the anti-Israel demonstrators and had gotten very woke in its kind of... latter-day modernist relativism of the humanities and the social sciences. And those are things that can be critiqued, he says.
On the other hand, he says the Trump administration's cancellation midstream of commitments to funding and wholesale assault and demanding to be able to dictate curriculum and hiring decisions of Harvard was over the top, and some of it he doubted was going to survive in the courts.
He says, in effect, this is almost a quote, both sides stand to get bloodied if they end up in court with one another for different reasons. So what about a compromise? And the compromise would involve, according to Berkowitz's thinking, basically Harvard conceding that, yeah, its curriculum had gotten too far left and anti-Western.
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