I have long wanted to meet John McWhorter. He’s an extremely well-known public intellectual and opinion leader who, in my opinion, always talks sense. I have this rather eccentric idea that before becoming a public intellectual, you need to earn your credentials by having something important and interesting to be intellectual about, and John McWhorter qualifies in a big way. He is a world authority on linguistics, the study of the extraordinary phenomenon of human language, which I think is one of the most important and interesting subjects out there.
We both spoke at the Dissident Dialogues conference in New York this year, and I seized the opportunity to invite him onto The Poetry of Reality. I was delighted and honored when he accepted. I began by asking him about linguistics, including the vexed question of the origin of language.
Only later did we move on to his more controversial book, a book that I strongly recommend, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.