John McWhorter & Clifton Duncan – Becoming Thomas Sowell

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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

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