TGS Live: Self-Censorship Today
The Glenn Show
Glenn Loury
4.8 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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My latest book, Self-Censorship, is coming out in a couple weeks, and I’m excited to share it with you. As a kind of apéritif, Mark Sussman and I livestreamed our wide-ranging discussion of all things self-censorious. We talk about the book, of course, but also the economics of addiction, the trouble with streaming music, the best and worst of airplane socializing, and many other topics. It’s a good introduction to the book, which you can preorder now on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books.
In this stream, Mark and I discuss the incoherence of racial and ethnic nomenclature, the utility of self-censorship in political coalition-building, uncovering consensus within the spiral of silence, objectivity in public discourse, the joy and pain of in-flight chit-chat, the truth-seeking value of debate, de gustibus non disputandum est, the paradox of choice, what we’re self-censoring about today, anti-antisemitism, Václav Havel and the power of the powerless, minor and major self-censorship, speaking your mind without tenure, Israel and self-censorship, risking deportation for self-expression, the return of Old Glenn / New Glenn, and the line between cowardice and strategic silence.
Anybody can tune into our livestreams as they happen, but if you’d like to watch the video later, you’ll need 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 less than the cost of an IPA at your local dive bar, 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.
Become a full subscriber at https://glennloury.substack.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so I read back through chunks of it. |
| 0:03.3 | I've read the contents of this book many times, |
| 0:06.2 | so I didn't give it a full rereading this time through. |
| 0:12.7 | But one of the things that I thought was interesting |
| 0:18.3 | is that there's this kind of, you could broadly divide this argument into kind of two different aspects. |
| 0:27.6 | And one of them you could think of as broadly social, |
| 0:30.2 | and one of them you could think of as highly personal or individuated. |
| 0:35.3 | Because the issue of self-censorship, as you discuss it, |
| 0:39.8 | is something that has an intersubjective quality |
| 0:42.9 | where it's not just a person thinking alone in isolation, |
| 0:47.8 | and it's not just about this model of a society |
| 0:51.5 | that through some kind of like abstract notion of |
| 0:56.5 | deliberation somehow spontaneously comes to sort out its opinions and points of view, |
| 1:04.9 | it's about the interaction between those two different registers of discourse. |
| 1:14.2 | And so I want to kind of, at least to start, |
| 1:21.5 | just kind of think about provoking you a little bit. |
| 1:27.7 | Oh, why would you want to do that? |
| 1:29.3 | I know, I know, I know. |
| 1:30.8 | It was terrible, terrible. |
| 1:34.8 | Let me try understand what your setup is. |
| 1:37.7 | Two registers. |
| 1:38.4 | What are the registers now? |
... |
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