The Glenn Show

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comVideo Links0:00 Charles’s new book, Taking Religious Seriously 8:31 Why Charles finds the idea of divine creation plausible13:54 Charles’s “road to Damascus” moment19:25 The appeal of Christianity24:51 The evidence for life after death31:38 Charles: “The relative positions of science and religion have flipped”36:42 The trouble with scientism 40:17 Glenn’s steps toward and away from religion51:04 Was The Bell Curve putting making a deterministic argument?Recorded November 4, 2025Links and ReadingsCharles’s new book, Taking Religious SeriouslyCharles’s book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980Richard Herrnstein and Charles’s book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American LifeCharles’s book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and ClassCharles’s book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010Martin Rees’s book, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the UniverseJames Q. Wilson’s book, The Moral SenseC.S. Lewis’s book, Mere ChristianityRaymond Moody’s book, Life after Life: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Near-Death Experiences and the Transformative Insights into the Afterlife, Backed by Scientific Study and Personal TestimoniesSteven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature 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.comSupport The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comThe first half of the show consists of a pre-recorded interview with political scientist Charles Murray. He’s best known for books like Losing Ground and The Bell Curve—controversial though they may have been, they were grounded in the empirical methods that characterize modern social science. His new book, Taking Religion Seriously, is a somewhat surprising departure from social science into the realm of religion and religious experience. Murray has had, if not a conversion experience, then a kind of awakening regarding the claims of religion: the existence of a divine creator, miracles, and life after death. In this conversation, I ask him how a staunch materialist who, by his own account, doesn’t have a natural capacity for religious feeling has come to value metaphysics. After that I bring on Robert Patton-Spruill to talk a little more about religion, the death of Dick Cheney, Zohran Mamdani's win in the NYC mayoral race, the government shutdown, and Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the conservative schism over U.S.-Israel policy.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.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comWatch and listen to the full, 2-hour episode: https://glennloury.substack.com/p/tgs-live-democrats-leadership-crisisVideo Links0:00 John’s misgivings about Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Zionism7:22 Is anti-Zionism reducible to “good black people vs. bad white people”?11:53 Ground News ad13:40 Democrats try to pull out of a death spiral20:05 John: If Trump can end some wars, I’ll take it22:49 What do Kamala Harris fans see in her?30:09 Here’s what Obama should be doing in his post-presidency40:11 Mourning the end of race50:15 Glenn: Eliminating racial disparities requires developing communitiesRecorded October 31, 2025Links and ReadingsTressie McMillan Cottom’s NYT column, “A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness”Michelle Goldberg’s NYT column, “I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind.”Kamala Harris’s book, 107 DaysDavid Brooks’s NYT column, “Hey Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game.” 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.comSupport The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comLast Friday, John McWhorter and I took our ongoing conversation into new territory: we streamed it live. Eighteen years into our partnership, and we’re still finding ways to keep it fresh! In the first half of the show, we talk about New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s position on Israel, which John believes is merely woke moralism. While I’m no fan of Mamdani’s plans for free grocery stores and rent freezes, I press John on whether Mamdani’s views on Israel are as simplistic as he makes them out to be. Perhaps Mamdani’s shocking success in New York is a sign that Democratic voters are sick of the party’s lack of direction and looking for an infusion of new blood. John and I agree that substance-free leaders like Kamala Harris aren’t going to cut it. Trump is running the table at home and abroad, and Democratic leadership seems overwhelmed or, in the case of Barack Obama, strangely passive.Obama was at one time a community organizer, wasn’t he? What happened to that commitment to local communities? I recently witnessed the power of effective grassroots organizing—I tell John about my trip to San Antonio in honor of my friend Ernesto Cortés’s 50th anniversary at Communities Organized for Public Service, an extremely impressive organizing operation. Black communities need leadership like that, and it is in short supply.In the Q&A segment, we answer questions submitted by full subscribers and talk to a couple of them on camera. We take questions on black conservatism in American institutions, AI, race reductionism, test scores in college admissions, the Civil Rights Act, and the government shutdown.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.Click here to subscribe!

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comLast week’s conference in honor of Thomas Sowell was the culmination of a long year of anticipation, planning, reading, and thinking. In this long excerpt from my most recent livestream, I talk with my editor Mark Sussman about the conference events and my own contributions. I explain the importance of Friedrich Von Hayek to Sowell’s thought and work, and how Sowell extended Hayek’s work. The actor-writer Clifton Duncan drops in to talk about his experiences at the conference. And I recount a conversation that I sat in on between the former secretary of state and the Supreme Court justice that would leave their critics speechless. Legacies are about the resources—intellectual, material, and spiritual—the past leaves to the future. If what I saw over those two days is any indication, those of us who inherit Sowell’s legacy will be very rich indeed.Today’s episode is just one segment from last week’s livestream. If you missed it and want to watch the full recording, click below to become a full subscriber. 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 full recordings of our livestreams, 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit glennloury.substack.comSupport The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comIn this edition of TGS Live, I talk about the events of the conference, my contribution, and one of the ideas informing my new book project. The conference honored the past accomplishments of Thomas Sowell, but it also pointed to the future. I heard the effects of Sowell’s writing and thinking coursing through vital new work, I met the two young winners of an essay contest about Sowell’s ideas, and I sat in on a conversation between Rice and Thomas that would stun their progressive critics.And speaking of the future, the actor-writer Clifton Duncan, who is working on a one-man show about Sowell’s life and work, came to the conference as well. He dropped into the stream to talk about what he saw and to let us know how his work in progress is shaping up.From there, it's on to politics. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to American cities may anger his detractors, but crime disproportionately affects black Americans, and some of them are saying they like what they’re seeing from Trump’s actions. Given the broad perception that illegal immigration is bad for black workers, it makes perfect sense that some of them are throwing their support behind Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.We look over some pro-Trump clips from black content creators, and I note that market demand will incentivize the creation of supply. As long as Black MAGA remains a source of fascination for supporters, detractors, and the agnostic, creators will supply the market in search of clicks. It’s hard to say whether those creators are truly as dedicated to the cause as they seem, but they’re going to be here as long as people keep watching.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, click here to become 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.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comTucker Carlson has been suggesting that a new civil war may be coming to the US. Is he trying to warn us? Or is he purposefully stoking the fire? Glenn takes Tucker to task.Today’s episode is just one segment from last week’s livestream. If you missed it and want to watch the full recording, click below to become a full subscriber. 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 full recordings of our livestreams, 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit glennloury.substack.comSupport The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comNote: 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.

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.comVideo Links0:00 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 blacknessRecorded October 6, 2025Links and ReadingsGlenn and John’s first discussion of George Floyd, from May 2020Pete Hegseth’s speech before US military leadershipThe 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-SpruillEzra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s NYT conversation following the assassination of Charlie KirkCoates’s 2015 Atlantic essay, “Letter to My Son”Glenn’s recent conversation with Jason Riley on the life and work of Thomas Sowell 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

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