John McWhorter & How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of the Fox News podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. Today, I'm pleased to offer you an interview with acclaimed linguist John McWhorter. He has two books that he's released in the past year. The first, the most recent, is Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

The second, and one that's equally interesting, is Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter, Then, Now, and Forever.

We talked about both of these books. I want to encourage you to subscribe to John McWhorter's newsletter, which is now at The New York Times, and also to tune in to The Glenn Show, hosted by Glenn Lowry, where he is a frequent guest and interlocutor. John McWhorter, coming up next. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.

Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer.

John, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Of course, Ben. So, John, I don't know that you know this. There's no reason that you ought to know this, but...

Over the past several weeks, I have been on a promotional tour for your book. I thank you. I spoke in Nevada. I spoke in Maryland. I spoke in Virginia. I spoke in Washington, D.C. I took your book to the entire Republican steering committee, which is all the members of the Senate, and held it up in front of them and told them that they all needed to buy it and read it.

because it is essential reading from my perspective, regardless of your political opinion, to understand our times. I don't know if you knew you were writing something so important when you set out to explain what we're going through. But did you realize at some point as you were writing this book that, you know what, I'm actually really good at explaining what's going on in the United States of America in 2021? Yeah.

I don't think I'm the kind of person who ever sits and thinks that, but I was thinking as I wrote the book that I got the feeling it was going to get a certain amount of attention just because I'm at a certain place in my career and I knew it was going to come after my book, Nine Nasty Words, where I got the feeling that people were just going to find that book kind of funny. And, you know, I've been around. I think a lot of people very understandably think that I'm

I am a linguist who kind of stumbled into writing on race sometime around 2015. I think some people read some of the articles I wrote for the Daily Beast around then, and they kind of think that's when I started. I don't think a lot of people know that I've been writing about race now for 21 years. And so after you've been around, you learn how to put things, you sort of, you have your foot in most of the doors. So I knew that it was going to get around, but to be honest, I am surprised at how very much, but I think it's because of the moment. I think that we have reached a point where people are,

rubbing their eyes after the pandemic and wondering what in the world is this thing that is perverting practically every institution that I held dear. So I'm just proud of a moment. I think your description of not just that thing that is perverting the, the institutions, but also the people who are participants in this project, it's, it's really so important what you've done here because you,

There is a tendency, I think, toward people to become angry about what's going on in front of them. They become resistant. They become frustrated. And what you have done is in a very clinical way, in a very analytical way, you've broken down everything that has gone into this project and the people who have precipitated it.

And I guess, you know, when you started on this, was this a situation where you just started reading? You had you clearly had to consume reading.

everything that they were doing and everything that they were writing and everything that they were saying to a significant degree in order to understand all the different aspects, all the different parts of the elephant, as it were. Is that was that a tedious experience for you or was it something that you actually enjoyed or found to be interesting on kind of a scientific level?

Well, I can't say that I enjoy it, but what it really comes from is just curiosity. Because if there's one thing that disappoints me about people on the left and the right, it is a tendency to think that people on the other side are crazy or they're opportunists.

Those are not usually the case. And so, for example, Ibram Kendi is not somebody who decided I'm going to become famous and I'm going to have power and I'm going to get rich saying things that, you know, self-flagellating white people like to hear. That's not what it is. He's an ordinary, you know, frankly, rather unremarkable, if you ask me, person. That was me.

what I mean. But he's kind of stumbled into something and he's trying his best. And yes, I've read a couple of his books. I skimmed one because I got tired of reading myself this, but then, you know, how to be an anti-racist, I did actually read it. And the idea is to think this person is not crazy. This person is not mean. So why does the world look this way to them when they're wrong?

And so I'm thinking to myself, hmm, they're not right. I will never agree with this. But then on the other hand, they feel the same way about me. And I do think that in doing that, and sometimes it's kind of like you're playing with a tooth that's coming out with your tongue when you're little and you're kind of enjoying the pain. Doing that helps you to understand what the underpinnings are. And in a way, I think it makes whatever critique you have more valuable because you're not just demonizing them. One of the...

points that I found so wonderfully enlightening in your book is when you are comparing how two sides of an experience can both be used against someone. The idea that based on who you're dating, it can be racist from two different perspectives. In other words, it is a trap of

All of these different things, you're either, you know, you know, using using people in a tokenish way or you're refusing to engage with with different culture than you. And from my perspective, that's something that I hear quite a lot from people.

American white people who do not think of themselves as racist, but feel like in a new paradigm, they are trapped that either way they're going to lose. Either way, they're going to be depicted as being the villain in a scenario, regardless of how they approach it.

Do you believe that that's something that's intentional or is it accidental about what this new regime of the elect is focused on achieving? That's just it. It's not intentional. And I know that a lot of white people feel like

they feel like people are basically sticking their foot out and hoping they'll trip and there's just nothing they can do and that they must enjoy it or something. That's exactly what I mean. It's not that. There's a certain kind of person who is very dedicated to showing that racism exists. And especially if you're a Black person, what you're doing is you're showing racism exists and therefore don't look down on Black people in the inner city who are not behaving too well.

Don't look at the disparities between white and black and think there's something wrong with black people because racism exists. And they feel that that's probably the most important thing that society can hear. It overgenerates, though, because it means that you can look at just about anything and come up with a racist analysis. You can look at a white person who only dates white people and think, well, they must not like black people.

You can look at a white person and a black person together and think, well, in the world that I live in, that white person probably is objectifying that black person in some way, especially because in the world that we live in, that does exist. I have I've seen it. It happens. People aren't perfect. It's not the usual, but you can see it. And so therefore, you end up in this situation where the person says racism basically no matter what they see. And it's because they feel like they're doing their job.

But I can imagine how being a white person, that must be frustrating for me as a black person. Watching that dialogue was always frustrating because I was thinking, why are we supposed to make it so that the white person can barely get out of bed? What's the point? Do we show how good we are by being that annoying? But that's not how a lot of black people see it, because they're dedicated to this this quest to show that racism exists to save how people see us. It's all very sad in a way.

My wife, May McCain, went to Columbia University. She was a graduate of there. And we have an ongoing argument about the Ivy Leagues and

It relates to our daughter, who is now only a year old. So, of course, we're discussing which college she ought to go to. And the argument that I have is essentially that the Ivy Leagues have corrupted themselves, that they are no longer of any use to us.

here in america and where they were you know once a gold standard of education uh that that history is lost to us and i don't see how they could possibly recover she still has some underlying affection for them do you have hope for higher education in america and does that hope focus on

a perhaps reformed Ivy League, or is it finding new entities? Is it setting up new universities to compete with them? Is it going into state universities and trying to improve their programs? You know, higher education in America has obviously brought so many people here over the decades. Do you have hope for the Ivies or do you think that they're essentially lost due in part to these questions?

Well, to tell you the truth, if I lose hope over any realm, it is going to be academia. And what I'm more worried about is academic inquiry, the kind of work that one's allowed to do, what happens at conferences, what gets you tenure, how that affects what undergraduates are taught and whether or not they drink it in. I genuinely don't know at this point

how dire that is, because most students are much more skeptical than we like to think. It's not that they're drinking this stuff in and walking out as little radicals. Most students can see there's a bias to what I'm hearing from a certain kind of student. There's a bias to what this teacher is teaching. They can see it.

And they teach themselves other things, especially these days, just by engaging with the media that's in their phones. I worry about them less than the people who practice academia, where it does seem to me that we're getting close to a point where all the people in power in academia are going to be the kinds of people I call in the book, the elect. They determine the hirings and that will be self-perpetuating. I don't know what would change it. It might be that academia becomes this religious realm that is one where certain priests work

And if you want to be a priest, then you join that. But if you want to actually be a thinker, you're going to have to be some kind of independent or write books. And maybe society will develop groups that can engage in a more wide ranging kind of intellectual than academia does. I do fear that that might be what's happening with and about the next generation.

Tell me about the different aspects of the elect and how people can identify them moving within the circles that they inhabit. I certainly know many people who I put I would put that category. But from your perspective, what are what are sort of the the signal and inclinations or indications that you are dealing with one of the elect?

Oh, it's just one thing. I mean, we're making it sound like they have some sort of disease and it's not. It's one thing. You know it when you see it. It is the kind of person where you notice that to them, battling power differentials or at least striking battle poses against power differentials and usually whites over blacks.

is not just one of many things you think about. That's, you know, probably anybody you or I have known, you know, in our mature lives, but it's the very center. It's what everything is supposed to be filtered through. It's how they watch TV. It's how they process art. It's how they think of history. It's what kind of books they read. It's their ethics. It's everything they do. Once you sense that you're dealing with somebody who thinks of that as the center of

and fount of everything, and also that if you question anything that they think, they're about to hurt your feelings. They're about to consider you somebody who doesn't belong. They're about to talk about you when you're gone. That threat that you get from some of them, even if they don't explicitly level it, that's an elect, as opposed to somebody who realizes that power differentials need to be thought about, but can also look at things

without that lens and genuinely mean it, and doesn't seem to have a commitment to defenestrating people who aren't with the program. So yeah, for me, as soon as I detect that in a person, unless I absolutely have to break bread for some reason, I just shut down very politely. I just figured we're not going to talk about anything interesting with that person because you cannot get through to them. Let's just change the subject. Yeah, that's what the elect is.

Since publishing the book, have you gotten any hate mail from the elect? Of course. Yeah, I get occasional email. Nowadays, it's less the email and less. It used to be written mail and then it became email, but less the email. Those people want to hang you in public. That's part of being an elect. So nowadays they put it on Twitter. And so it's so it's a it is a it is a passive aggressive email.

sub-tweets or something like that as opposed to or just an open tweet you know john mcgorder is a jackass you know they'll put it on there it's better to like put it on a on a fence for everybody to see instead of just writing it to me yeah that's that's there but to tell you the truth i am gratified that um i see a lot more praise

And contrary to some of my detractors, it is not only from white people by a large margin, and it is not only from the right wing by a large margin. I think that I'm just saying what most people these days of all stripes are thinking. I completely agree with you there. I think that you've tapped into something that is not just a, you know, it isn't even on the spectrum. It is a of politics. It is something that most people

believe and know and you have

done this amazing service by vocalizing it, giving it a description in such a way that they can now express what they felt was already going on all around them. Exactly. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping this is for. But yeah, there are the haters, but I don't get as many of them as I used to. I get the feeling that in some ways consensus is coming around to this supposedly crazy way that I think. Mm-hmm.

There is a dynamic, a bizarre dynamic with so much of what the elect want to achieve or however you want to describe them when it when it comes to kind of going backward.

reversing the racial progress, eliminating the colorblindness narrative and the like when it comes to dating relationships, you know, the pop culture that we consume.

So many aspects of this. It just feels like there are people who want to roll everything back and to become more segregated, more separate, more tribal in a lot of different ways. To me, this just seems antithetical to what I thought we were pursuing as the American project, as the Western project, the post-enlightenment narrative about the value of people as individuals and

Why do you think that they want to reverse course in so many different aspects of the way that we live? Well, you know, humans are joiners. And that dream that Americans were going to be people who just viewed one another as individuals and everybody was going to just sort of hang out. That was always fragile because the next question was going to be, what kind of clumps do we get into? Because they were going to be, you know, some kind.

And instead, it's been the sorts of things that are a little easier and as with many easy things, less savory, which is that instead of it being that everybody is viewed by the content of their character and getting passphrased, it can be very comfortable to cherish it. Here we are. We are Black people.

We define ourselves as those who white people don't like, although we know we're okay. And so we're going to engage in asserting that we're okay, which makes us feel more okay. And we have certain black traits. These are things we do that other people don't do, or if they try to do it, they don't do it right. All of this is very, very human. You could have predicted that there would be some of this kind of thing. And there would have been a lot of this kind of thing, even if there were black

even less interpersonal racism than there is now. And so it's just it's human nature to have groups like that. There are many black people who don't go for that. They don't write about it, because if you try to write about not having that tribal feeling, you have a ton of bricks thrown on your head. But not all black people are that way. But there is a very strong tendency. And it's because people group. And I think this is me flying by the seat of my pants. But I think the dialogue among educated people is such that

It teaches you that you're supposed to be wary of white people if you're a black person that I think you really need to be. And so there's a whole narrative that white people are going to commit microaggressions against you, that white people don't see you as whole. So you can only really be yourself when it's only black people in the room. That's something that gets around that I think is overplayed. But again, it gives you a sense of comfort. You're not really cowering in fear of something white people are going to do, but you're enjoying that you have a tribe.

I think that's that's natural to people. The influencers, power brokers within corporate America and media seem to be very much people who are either cowed by this reality or willing to go along with it because the people in their H.R. departments say that they need to and the like. The first time that I ever met you was at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

And honestly, it's one of the few reasons that I even enjoyed going there was to be able to interact with you. But the thing that really sticks out to me is that this is the whole class of people

who feel sort of they're wealthy, they feel guilty, they're white, and they want to make amends in some sense for just the automatic assumption that they're a bad actor. And to me, I want to just sort of say to them,

Don't assume that don't go along with this. You know, let's have conversations and debates about the way that the nation ought to work. But it does really seem to me that the power brokers in corporate America and in Hollywood and media and the like have really bought into what the elect is pitching, whether they believe it or whether they feel like they need to pretend to believe it in order to continue in their careers.

Can that be changed?

Do you disagree with my analysis? What do you think about that? No, I don't disagree. And I know exactly what you mean. And I think, to be honest, I think a lot of people are less guilty than just afraid. You don't want to get mauled. Most people aren't up for that. And I completely understand why. You can even, even at Aspen. Aspen is one of my favorite events in life. I adore running around on that campus for a few days, you know, watching brilliant people, being brilliant with the perfect weather. But you and I both know that at Aspen,

there is a kind of black thinker who's invited. It's usually maybe two people at the whole thing who are up on stage at an event and saying things that make white people sound really bad. There will be, I remember the first one I went to, I'm not going to say who it was, but there was someone who kind of cut through the jolly atmosphere of the whole thing with some extremely sour things said,

about white persons, not ones there. But there's this idea that, yay, we're all eating shrimp and we're talking about the future and how we're going to fight climate change. Then there's this person who's saying, all of you, basically, by extension, are racists. I think that scares people to their socks. And so they pretend to believe things. Can that be fixed? You know what? My book is, I'm trying to be one brick in the wall saying that

It's time to stop pretending to believe the worst of this stuff, especially if it makes you do something you wouldn't otherwise do. If you're going to allow your institution to be turned upside down because you're afraid that somebody is going to call you a dirty name in a venue like Aspen or on MSNBC or on Twitter, that's not good enough because we need to all be grownups. There comes a time when we have to realize

Black people have been through a lot. We have a really messy history. That doesn't mean we're always right. That doesn't mean that you're supposed to just bend over to anything that we say, any way that we interpret things, because unfortunately, we, like everybody else, are human beings and no human beings get it right every time. It's time to be more honest about those things. I hope it can happen, but it's too early for me to prognosticate as to whether it will.

So let's close out on this. You have a lovely little essay in The Atlantic about the let's go, Brandon phenomenon, which I'm so glad that you decided to weigh into and talk about because as a linguistic phenomenon, it's very interesting to me because it seems so, I don't know, unlike the way that the right has approached this type of thing historically, but perhaps historically

uh you have more insight on the it's it is a it's an interesting phenomenon and i've had more than one conservative uh compare it to me to samastat or something like that where they say uh oh this is a way to communicate that exists outside um the the normal structure of things

But I'm not sure that's an I'm not exactly sure that's an accurate comparison. What do you think about that phenomenon and and how much it has kind of taken on a life of its own?

Well, all it is, it's the same tribalism, except among different people. It's a password. I mean, it's at the point where, especially because of the internet, everybody knows what it means. But the idea is that you say those three words and it means something else. And then you can kind of chuckle that this is something we say. Something that didn't make it into the final draft of the Atlantic piece, because I guess it's too dated, but I think enough people will get it, is that it's like on the old Honeymooners show when Ralph and Norton, they had their lodge.

and the lodge is the raccoons and they wore these hats. And whenever members of the raccoon lodge would greet each other, they'd reach behind and kind of flip the tail of the raccoon up in the air. That was the raccoon greeting. Let's go, Brandon. Is that among people who feel that way about Joe Biden? And I just think it's ridiculous

quite witty. I think it's funny. And then for the left to start calling him Brandon and using different phrases is just creative. I enjoy watching it. But yeah, I think it's tribalism. It's how people come together as subgroups. Everybody wants to do it. It is very much kind of a signal thing now. It reminds me of the little ichthos fish or something like that. And I feel like

you know, that's interesting just as a, as a, as a political phenomenon, because we don't have many of those in America. We usually are blunter with our, with our bumper sticker slogans and the like. We're not British. Yeah. That's the, it's very different. And so it's a, it's a fun little development. John, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me again. As I said before, I think your book is fantastic.

the most important book that I've read this year and that everyone should buy it and everyone should read it. And I wish you good fortune and promise to be there for you when you are inevitably canceled by the overarching crushing machine run by the elect. I appreciate that, Ben. Thank you very much.

Now we turn to John's second book, Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter, Then, Now, and Forever. More with him right after this.

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I am eager to discuss your book, Nine Nasty Words, and I'm particularly eager to do so in the context of the current pushback against what I view as a number of different aspects of free speech that are critical and useful and important within the world of comedy and entertainment and the like. But first, I have to ask you,

As a linguist, was this something that you had always intended to do, to write a book of this nature and focused on this topic?

No, actually, I don't study profanity in my academic work on language. I wanted to write a book about language that taught some basic lessons about how language and linguistics work without explicitly saying that's what I was teaching. And I thought that one of the funnest ways of doing it would be to take a trip through the story of profanity. And then I realized that also there were some interesting cultural factors that I could get into and I could sort of revisit.

George Carlin and the famous seven words that he proposed as ones that you can't use on television. So, no, this was not a big plan. And the book does not reflect any academic work that I have done in the past. It's just me trying to share my toys with the public in a way that I thought they would enjoy.

I love all the little anecdotes that you pile up within these chapters. I had no idea that Louisa May Alcox was a an author who we avoided reading just because the nature of the of the name. But it is it is something that I feel like takes on new importance in an era in which people seem so willing and interested in policing language of all types.

And so I have to ask you, was that on your mind when you began writing this or was it something that came as you were doing the work? Because it seems to be a more recent phenomenon.

Huh. I get it. Very often people try to make me out to be a coherent thinker. And in some ways, I'm not. No, I wasn't thinking about profanity because of issues with free speech and what you can and cannot say and the people being defenestrated, especially after June 2020. Really, I wrote that book.

I can see in the future, people are going to think that I wrote that book because I'm black and I wanted to write about the N-word and then I kind of padded it out with some other stuff. Actually, I wanted to write about F-U-C-K. I found that word really fascinating. And I thought, you know, you could get a whole book out of that. But then I thought, nobody wants to read a whole book about just that one word. And I realized that if we're going to do profanity, then these days, profanity isn't only words like that, but it's also slurs.

And it means that to really do profanity, I have to do the N-word and some other unfortunate words that are used as slurs against groups in order to tell the whole story. So actually, you know, I'm happy to talk about free speech issues, but no, this book was a language nerd book, not a cultural commentator book. I almost dreaded writing the N-word chapter because I thought here I have to dip into that sort of stuff I write editorials about and I'm just trying to have fun.

We'll get to the N-word chapter eventually, but I was particularly surprised at some of the first uses of the F-U-C-K word and its prevalence much earlier than I thought that it had been commonly used.

I'm sure that you're probably someone who was already familiar with this, but were there aspects of that that as you did your research for this that surprised you in terms of the commonality of its usage and also how so many people made such great efforts to pretend that it was not commonly used in terms of their writing at the time?

Yeah, I knew about some of the early uses of the word by itself. I did not know about the names. I didn't know that the first actual evidence of F.

F-U-C-K is in people with names like Roger Fuck by the Naval. That was literally a name. And so that was a joy to me. And realizing that the word used to be used that openly and in writing, you know, formal context. And then after a while, you...

You have to work very hard to find it in print. And when you do, it's kind of in quotation marks or it's things that are wrapped in brown paper and doesn't pop up in dictionaries until the early 1960s. It's a fascinating history that says so much about being a person, being a Westerner, about religion, about the body.

And so, yeah, the F-U-C-K chapter was the one that I wrote first, actually. And it's the one that set the tone for me of the whole rest of the book. Just speaking for myself, I would read an entire book about the F word. So I've been part of that audience. But one thing that stuck out to me and that I was curious about in your own experience growing up

I grew up in the American South. I was born in Mississippi and I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and then moved to rural Virginia when I was a kid. And

I was surrounded by a mostly Christian community of people in terms of friend groups and the like. We lived in a working class, majority minority neighborhood in North Charleston, which certainly included a lot of people who would use coarse language. But I always felt like that really was mostly something that I heard

on television or in media, as opposed to in my day-to-day life, that there was more restraint in the way that people talked to each other, certainly around kids. When you were growing up, what was your experience with profanity? Did it surround you in some sense when you were younger, or was it something that you only became aware of as you got older? Dr.

What an interesting question. It was something that I was surrounded by to an extent, and I was very aware of there being this collection of special words that the grownups use, but that I would get in trouble if I use. However, cursing was different because these things change. And so in the book, I say that damn and hell, which I have no problem saying even here, are the first anglophone curses and used to carry a whole lot more punch than they do now.

And my parents, you know, I had a very middle class upbringing. I think it's very often assumed that, you know, most black people had working class upbringings and their parents busted their their butts to send their kids to college. I didn't have that. I had a very book lined home, middle class upbringing.

weirdo experience and my parents used damn and hell a lot that was that that to them was not something to hide from the kids but then when you get into the scatological words the sort of classic four-letter words such as f-u-c-k they did not use them as much as i do i use f-u-c-k constantly and i think most people think of me as kind of a very buttoned up bourgeois kind of person and i don't think i'm alone

But thinking about my parents talking 50 years ago, for them, the word was S-H-I-T. They would use that if they were really upset. That was the word that came out after they'd had a drink or two. Whereas in the same situations, I use F-U-C-K because that word has lost a lot of its power since the middle of the 20th century. But yeah, I grew up around profanity. Also, as soon as you're anything close to a teenager, you start hearing the way teenage boys talk. So yeah, I did not grow up in especially...

straighten circumstances that way, nor did I grow up in an especially Christian environment. So no, I was bathed in it early on. Maybe that's part of why I ended up writing a book about it. I still remember the first time I heard my mother call someone a prick and it was such a shocking event. And see, my mother never used that one. So the thing that I think is interesting about that is

is you come into the cultural experience, especially coming into a big city like New York or something along those lines. And if you come from the American suburbs or the rural experience, regardless of your upbringing, I just feel like you are less likely to have that experience

that melange of either scatological or other forms of profanity that are just around you and that are used with much less of a justification for using them. It doesn't take a lot for you to use them in a city environment.

And I find that on the one hand, I mean, a mildly entertaining you have a lot of fish out of water experiences. If you if you bring your friends and relatives who aren't used to that to the big city, I've gone through that myself. But then there's also an aspect of it that sort of says, is this is this actually language that describes certain things in a in a useful way? Or does it become does it lose its power by so much use?

And that's one of the questions that I have about the F word in the sense that it used to be something that seemed significant that you were going to, you know, in the in the PG 13 movies, you know, you get one use of this word, you know, and that that so that had to be significant.

Now it seems like it's just everywhere on across, you know, media and it takes it takes away from the power or the audacity of using MF or something like that in in in that context.

Is that something that you've seen going on in recent years, just as TV has become especially so much more willing to have this stuff go on on all manner of networks and shows? Well, I think that you have to pull the camera back and

see that without a doubt, say the F word has lost that sting that it had even, you know, say 30 years ago. If you think about pop culture, it's used quite a bit by a much wider range of people. It used to be that you would use that word in order to exclaim,

and, you know, really set a little explosion going. Now it's lost that power, but on the other hand, it has become a little piece of grammar, as I try to show in the book, in sentences where you'd be challenged to figure out exactly what function the word is actually serving, and what it's doing is giving a certain kind of piquancy, a kind of punch to the sentence. And so if you say, what the F is that, except you say it the real way,

Well, that doesn't have the power that it had if you said it in 1920, when that was something that you said if you were absolutely appalled. But then on the other hand, it's not the same as saying, what's that? It's conveying one shade of how a human being feels about things at a certain time. And in the meantime, the thing is, nowadays, to really get a room going, no, you can't use the F word, but you use our slurs and they are treated differently.

in exactly the same way. And then you get the kind of reinforcements. And so, for example, damn is

is very weak and really more likely if you're going to exclaim you'll say goddamn that reinforces it and you used to and I can't say it but F imagine calling somebody an f-er and so that notice that that's not that's barely a word in terms of something you would call you might talk about those efforts but more likely it's those mother efforts it strengthens it and so also these words go through cycles like that where we strengthen them the original word is weaker

but we have a way of using it in a strong way by adding material. Have you seen the discussion between Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis CK about the F word?

I believe not. So this is from a small documentary from a little more than a decade ago where Louis says that the first time that he, you know, Louis used to open for Seinfeld and Louis was blue and Seinfeld was clean. And so they're having a discussion about it. And he says, you know, at one point, Jerry said to me, you know, that the F word's like a Corvette. Right.

And I, Louis, thought to myself, oh, well, of course. It's flashy. It's colorful. It's red. It attracts attention.

And he says, it's only after I got to know him a little bit better that I realized this is a man who collects European cars, who has, you know, you know, garages full of Porsches and Italian, you know, sort of designs. He thinks the Corvette is a piece of trash. He thinks it's crap. And so because of that, it made him rethink the way that he, you know, thought about that word and the way that he uses it to me, you know, especially in comedy.

you know, the use of these words is critical because a lot of people will use it as a crutch to essentially, you know, stand in for the joke that they are incapable of writing or constructing. In our own speech, do we use these words as crutches too much in terms of trying to describe things that we are incapable of describing or that we don't want to do the work of describing?

Yeah, I can't say that I see it that way because a linguist has a bias, which is to see the complexity and the nuance in the way a person puts almost anything. And that's not political. I think, for example, most people know that politically I frustrate a great many people on the left and even liberals as well. It's just the science of it. And so if somebody says, get the F out of here.

Now, that might sound inarticulate, like why didn't they have a more articulate, a more refined way of indicating that they wanted someone to leave the premises and they felt strongly about it. But the truth is, get the F out of here has all sorts of resonances. It's not just leave the premises. It means that

When you were here on the premises, you were unwelcome. You shouldn't have stepped into this space in any case. It also implies that your performance within the space and whatever you were trying to do was inadequate. Get the F out of here. You don't think about that. You don't say it. But that's what it means. Get out of here is one thing. Get the F out of here is another sentence.

And so it may be that you classify F as vulgar, but there is great articulateness in vulgarity, as we know from many of the best modern standup comedians.

There are enormous examples of shows that have leaned into their ability to now use profanity to great effect. Always study in Philadelphia, the league, obviously. Yes. And they turn it in many cases into kind of an art form. The insults on the show Veep.

for instance, are, are incredibly constructed and especially a couple of those characters. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, a tall stack of pancakes shaped like a rapist is still one of the funniest things I've ever heard. And so the, the thing that I, the thing that I find in these is there's, there's a comedic beauty to, to these well-constructed insults and back and forth. And yet,

I still don't feel like most of the people I know in real life are capable of using profanity in that way. Do we need to, as a culture, get better about using profanity? Is it possible to improve the way that we use it so we are perhaps more...

selective but more damning when we actually use it? I think that it's at the point where that's happening in that profanity is used openly to such an extent and you can share it on social media and you can play with it. And I, for me, profanity also means the N word, the F word that has six letters that refers to gay men, etc. Those words are not being used

poetically in the way that we're talking about. But is there room for real people to talk more like Veep? I think if you listen closely, you can hear some people who are almost like that. And it's our job to learn to not hear them as vulgar. It's one thing to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus or one of those operatives in particular on Veep talking that way and thinking, well, this is funny.

But suppose there's a person in real life who uses an awful lot of profanity. I think we tend to listen to them and think, oh, how vulgar, as opposed to thinking about how articulately they use it. Like, for example, here, the the utter

bluntness, the utter crudeness of this F Joe Biden chant that's getting around. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah, there's a certain articulateness in just how terse and blunt that is. There are other things that people might have wanted to say about him, but that one is just boom, boom, boom. It's almost Beowulfian in its way. And it's easy to think those people in the soccer stands are just vulgar. But there's also that

And this is this has nothing to do with how I feel about Joe Biden, but it's just that is an interesting example of profanity used in what you could consider artfully. And so in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck has a sentence, the dirt crust broke.

And that sounds like the dirt crust on the groundbreaking. And that's taught as art. Well, this F Joe Biden and that masquerading as a political opinion. There's a certain art even there. It's a vulgar and it's a vulgarian art, but there's an art there. I want to get to your N word chapter, and I'm going to ask you a question that might be uncomfortable and you may not want to answer it. That's OK.

You are obviously joining an institution in the New York Times where you're going to be writing, as you said on the Glenn Show, a 1500 word essay or something along those lines with regularity. And you've made clear to them you are not going to back off any of those opinions that you that that might ruffle feathers here and there. Exactly. You are joining an institution that.

that quite recently, you know, within the last year and a half, dismissed one of its most prominent and respected reporters, Donald McNeil, over his use on a previous school trip, collegiate students or what have you, in 2019 of the N-word in a conversation about someone else's use of the N-word, something that he obviously didn't

got into hot water over resigned over, you know, spawned a lot of different think pieces and reactions. I just wanted to get your perspective on that.

because from my perspective, I have no, you know, I don't know Don McNeil. I have no other than reading his byline over the years. I have no affiliation with him, but it seems profoundly unjust what treatment he went through. And I'm curious as to your reaction to that and, and understanding that you're, you know, now part of the New York times, you know, superstructure. Do you think that what happened to him was fair? Yeah.

I have read the New York Times every day of my life for about 35 years. I am honored to be part of the institution. However, I have said before, and there's no reason for me not to say now, and I've also written it. I think that what happened to Donald McNeil was unfair. I think that it was egregious that he lost his job because of what he did.

And I stand by that, that you are not going to agree with everything that an organization that you work for does. And this would have to be certainly a case of that. I felt really sorry for him. I know him a little bit.

And I thought it was a sign of an era that began in about June 2020, with which I have many bones to pick and have written a new book called Woke Racism in order to make that clear. And the New York Times knows that very well. So that is my opinion about that. Of course, I wasn't there when that happened. Of course. Yeah. But one question I would have to follow on that is for those who are not Donald McNeil, if they are put in that position now, I'll say this. I

I truly believe I have never uttered the full N-word in my entire life.

I've just never done it. And I wouldn't say that out of some kind of virtue signaling. I've just never said it. I find it to be a word that is inappropriate to say. And I have avoided it. I have been around people who have said it, who have made me feel uncomfortable by their saying it, even in the context of conversations like the one that Don McNeil was purportedly having regarding a news story and the like.

My question is basically what should people perceive in these new rules regarding, you know, in this case, he is not using it as an insult. He's not calling someone the word. He is asking a question about whether basically, at least in my understanding of the reporting, whether it was ending in an A or a hard ER, you know, in, in, in terms of his in terms of what he actually said.

How should non-black Americans feel about that kind of use of the word? In other words,

I think they understand at this point, if they use it as an insult, if they call a coworker that there's going to be consequences. But if, if we're talking about a news story in which the word is the center of the story, how should they feel about that? And should, should there just be this kind of avoidance of, I can't say that term. I can't say that because it might risk all my livelihood. Well, you know, I, I,

I show my age on this because part of what happened with McNeil is that he's an older man and he's used to an era when you could say the word in reference, where people made a difference between the use and the reference. And I'm 56, and I guess that's becoming older. And I have full adult memories of

of it being allowed you know with taste with restraint to say the word in order to indicate that you were talking about and almost invariably you were condemning it but you could say it under those conditions and then keep going i remember conversations with people of all colors where with taste you could you know let the word slip out if you were going to say something about it and i don't think there was anything wrong with that i don't i personally don't see it as

a further and useful development for us to never be able to say the word at all. But the way I would handle it is that the world is not about me and the world is not going to be run by me's. And many black people disagree with me about this. I think that

We can wrap our heads around the new way of treating it by realizing that it has become profanity. We now treat that word the way an indigenous society might treat a taboo word. And that means that it's no longer about F-U-C-K and damn and hell. Now we have other profanity. We have other magic words. And the N-word has become one of those. I personally wish it hadn't because

To me, I see a certain delicacy in it. I don't need people to not say it, but apparently that's just me and you have to choose what hill you're going to die on. And I think the larger lesson is the N word is profanity. The F word today, by comparison, is just salty.

I'm sure you've seen the John Mulaney bit about, you know, being confronted over a sketch that he had involving a group of midgets where he was told that he couldn't use the word midget because it was like the N word to them. And his response was, well, I can tell I could tell that that's not true because we're saying one of these words. Exactly. And I think that, you know, that's something that a lot of people are certainly aware of, you know, in writing your book.

Every author, you have to have in mind the person who is going to buy the book and going to read the book.

Who was the person that you were writing this book for? Who was the person who you thought would take up this and read through it laughing frequently, as I have to admit I did, at many of the stories that you have to tell? Were you just sort of thinking of the foul-mouthed person at the corner of your local bar? Who did you have in mind for this?

I think I had in mind not that person at the end of the bar, but people who consider themselves persons of normal profanity usage who had just been intrigued by why some words are bad when there's nothing about the shape or the sound of the word that would lead you to know that unless somebody told you. I wanted to write something that would make people laugh and give them a linguistics lesson in the bargain. And especially as you know what happened, I thought by the time the book comes out,

will be on the tail end of the pandemic and it'll be kind of a tonic. So, yeah, I really wrote it with very light intentions. The N-word part to me was a necessary thing, especially because I'm black and because I do believe that it's the new profanity. But I wasn't crazy about having to put that in there because I thought this is glum. This is serious. You can't crack jokes about the N-word. And I was very anxious to get on to the next ones. But yeah, I wrote it to be just a funny but

relatively learned book that would show people that a linguist can, can have some fun. I hope it got somewhere near that. Do you have favorite words that are not in typical usage? Um, you mean just words in general words, words in general that you like that you appreciate and that you feel should be used more often. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Eldritch.

Eldritch means weird and kind of in a gory-esque way, Eldritch. I wish more people used that word because there's nothing quite like it. I've used it occasionally only because I run a D&D game. There you go. Exactly. I can't imagine that there's a single instance where I've used Eldritch. I like it. That's interesting. Is there a word that is used that is poorly defined or defined incorrectly in the mind of the user? Yeah.

that you just recoil at the fact that you have to hear it so often being misused. To be honest, I can't think of one where I think people are using it in the wrong meaning, because if a lot of people are using it in the wrong meaning, what's happening is that the word's meaning is changing. And that's something that you can't stop. But there I have my peeves and they're kind of arbitrary. I cannot stand, etc.,

et cetera, instead of et cetera. I don't like that. And yeah, I understand that et cetera is easier to say. It feels more like English et cetera. You know, you have to, you have to know some Latin to really think about it. But to me, et cetera is always one of the very few things where even as a linguist and we're so permissive, I listened to the person and I think, well, you,

please say it right and i always feel guilty about that but i don't like etc i i don't like it and also um espresso yes that's what i was going to say that that one that one just under my skin yeah you're an intelligent person this is not that is not yeah it's hard to avoid it i feel so bad about that but yeah yeah um the this book is a very fascinating book i'm curious

Whether you've had early reactions to it from from people and what those reactions are. And are you going to go and tour at all? I know that touring is different in these times, but to talk about this book to multiple audiences across the country.

Well, Nine Nasty came out in May, and so it came, and I am very happy that it was very nicely received. I am proud to say that it spent one week on the New York Times bestseller list, which is the best that any of my books has ever done and may ever do. I was always hoping I could pull that off just once. So now I guess I can die. Check the box. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, it was received exactly as I expected, although...

because I conceived of the book and sold the book before the pandemic. I had no way of knowing how central the N-word was gonna be to its reception. And so my new relationship with the Times, I think began when they published an N-word excerpt from it.

in their paper. But yeah, I thought of it as the F-U-C-K book padded out with information about all the other words. I think it was more received as John McWhorter writes about the N-word and then there's all the other stuff. But I'll take it where I can get it. And yeah, it made a nice statement. I think it underscored out there that I am not this

glum bow tie wearing person who only sits around complaining about black people. That is not my only guys. I also try to smile. I never confused you with that last question is, is Glen Rao is Glen Lowry really as crazy as he seems?

You know, I mean, if you mean crazy in a good way. Oh, very positive. Yes. What you see in our conversation is very rarely staged. Every now and then we have a conversation beforehand where we say we need to do a routine or we need to talk about something. But almost all of it is spontaneous. And I have known him in real settings. And that's that's him. That is not a character that he's playing. That is him. You know, morning, noon or night. Yes, he is. He is crazy. I

I hope, I hope you will start at some point doing, doing live events or live showings of, of we wanted to. Yeah, it would be really, really wonderful to see. And, and I'm an addict to the show and it's always great to hear you both. I've read with interest, a number of pieces this year covering what's happened in all the places that dabbled with the prospect of

defunding the police. This is something that obviously got a lot of attention from the national news media, but they didn't pay as much attention to the ramifications for people who experienced the fallout from these defundings and the rise in crime that inevitably followed. A piece from Michael Schellenberger that ran in the New York Post last week

entitled How Seattle's Anti-Police Policies Led to an Innocent Father's Death, as his son looked on. It reads as follows.

At 1:24 p.m. on November 2nd, 13-year-old Drew Urich called 911 to report an emergency. His father, Will, didn't feel well and needed help. Medics arrived six minutes later, but were told by dispatch to wait for the police before entering. There was a cautionary note that flagged the occupant of the address as being hostile to first responders, but the note was outdated, referring to a previous tenant.

Because of a shortage of police officers first reported by Seattle journalist Jason Rance, the medics were left to wait outside the house until cops could arrive. At 1.37 p.m., Drew called 911 again, desperate. He needed help. Medics waited two more minutes before deciding to ignore the order and enter the building.

They found Will and started to perform CPR and apply a defibrillator. But by then, it was too late. Despite their best efforts, Will, 45 and a father of four, died of a heart attack as Drew looked on. The police did not arrive until 1.45 p.m. Now, Drew's mother, Megan Peterson, is planning to sue the city of Seattle. People need to know how the city let this happen, said Megan, who is divorced from Will and lives in Utah. They could have saved Will if the system was working like it should.

Firefighters and police officers I spoke to said that they believed they could have saved the man's life had there not been a shortage of cops. By the end of 2020, 200 police officers had left the Seattle Police Force.

What happened to Will Europe and what his son had to suffer is a tragic but cautionary tale of what happens when activism and moral cowardice at the top of government destroys public safety and common sense in society. It has happened in Seattle, but many other parts of the country have also fallen victim, with many more in peril too.

Before a vaccine mandate took 100 police officers off the street in mid-October, the Seattle Police Department was short at least 400 police officers to be at the minimum considered necessary to protect public safety. Why is that?

The overwhelming and unavoidable reason is anti-police protests by Black Lives Matter activists. This happened nationwide, but was worse in Seattle, where Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and progressive members of the Seattle City Council allowed anarchists to briefly take over the downtown Capitol Hill neighborhood in the summer of 2020. Durkan did so to show solidarity with anti-police protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.

The anti-police protests in Seattle were surprising because in 2018, the city council had hired a black woman, Carmen Best, for the first time to serve as the city's police chief. Best opened up for the first time about what happened last summer in an interview with me for my book San Francisco earlier this year. Best is also one of the candidates New York City's mayor-elect Eric Adams is considering for NYPD commissioner.

The community really wanted more cops, she told me. At least three city council members campaigned on more cops. They wanted better response times. They also wanted more racial and gender diversity. And so, said Best, she created a plan to have a lot more diversity with our hiring for women and people of color both. We got to almost 40% of either minority or women representation as new hires. But after the Floyd killing, Seattle anarchists started attacking the police.

Within that large group of people who were there peacefully protesting, said Best, there were groups there to create mayhem, throw rocks, bottles, and incendiary stuff, and point lasers at the officers. In June, somebody removed a police barricade that had prevented demonstrators from protesting in front of the East Precinct downtown. It was decided, said Best, to remove the barricade and to allow the demonstrators to fill in the street in front of the precinct. We didn't want to give up the precinct. I have to tell you, it was not my decision.

Progressive members of the Seattle City Council had pressured Mayor Durkin to order the police to abandon their precinct building. The next morning, said Best, there were these folks out there armed with long rifles telling the officers who responded that it was their sovereign land. What sovereign property are they talking about? Best asked her colleagues. Well, they're talking about 12th Avenue. She laughed. We had never experienced anything like that. And therein began CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

Later, the organizers would rename the area CHOP for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. The anarchist leaders invited hundreds of Seattle's homeless residents to move into the occupied zone, and many did. When asked, Seattle's mayor insisted that everything would work out fine. How long do you think Seattle and those few blocks will look like this? CNN's Chris Cuomo asked Seattle's mayor. I don't know, she replied. We could have a summer of love.

Soon after, said Best, we were getting reports of rape, robbery, assault. I don't know what the Wild West was like, but it couldn't have been any worse than that. Armed residents had shot two teenage boys just before it was shut down. At least one of them could have been saved, but shop's unelected leaders didn't allow first responders in until hours later. The homicides led Chief Best to demand permission from the city attorney to retake the neighborhood, which she did a few days later.

But then in August 2020, a few weeks after it, the Seattle City Council voted to cut the budget of the Seattle Police Department. That means that all these new people that we hired who are black, people of color and women will be the first ones to go. Best told the city council because it's first in first out. The council said they wanted best to go through and pick the people to fire. Let me get this straight. She said she told the council, you want me to pick the white people to go? Are you crazy? They were highly dismissive. It was the most bizarre thing that I had ever dealt with.

Best criticized the city council, saying, I said that they were being reckless and dangerous and that people were going to suffer for it. She said the next day one of the city councilors said we need to cut her salary by 40%. It wasn't even on the agenda for them to talk about. It was highly punitive and retaliatory. And so Best resigned.

This is the type of story that is playing out in cities across America. It's an incredible development, and it's also one that hurts minority communities the most. Those who are on the edge of these types of homeless encampments and occupied zones, things of that nature. And of course, the small businesses that they own within those communities that help sustain them, allow them to grow and foster the kind of wealth that can lead to familial growth and a better community.

Of course, this is the exact type of thing that the left is seeking in its stupidity or perhaps its devious intent to destroy. We need to pay more attention to the developments that are actually happening because of these idiotic slogans. Long past time that the right stopped...

paying the kind of humorous aspect up of the idiocy of these slogans and start taking them seriously. These are serious people who believe serious things. They're just very, very wrong. And they are having an impact on the communities that are leading directly to people's lives being ruined and people ending up dead.

I'm Ben Dominich. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Dominich podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. Hey, it's Clay Travis. Join me for Outkick the show as we dive deep into a mix of topics. New episodes available Monday to Friday on your favorite podcast platform and watch directly on Outkick.com forward slash watch.