Making Sense with Sam Harris - #167 — A Few Thoughts on White Supremacy

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Sam Harris addresses listener concerns that he uses a "double standard" to evaluate the relative threats of white supremacy and jihadism. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well it seems like I got into trouble in a housekeeping I did for the Judea Pearl podcast. I recorded that in the immediate aftermath of the mass shootings in the U.S. in El Paso and Dayton. Many people sent me emails and tweets suggesting that I look at my subreddit, which apparently has been going haywire for quite some time. I think half the people in my subreddit despise me, so it's a perpetual state of war there. But my comments on the mass shootings and white supremacy, white nationalism, racism, etc. Seemed to have caused people to go fairly berserk there. So I looked into this. I don't usually look at Reddit.

I couldn't get very far. I mean, honestly, it was like looking at one's own colonoscopy, if done by a madman. It was not a pretty sight. Some people were defending me, so thank you for that, but the subreddit really is bizarre. In any case, it seems like I could clarify a few things, which I will do now. One thing that people seem to have taken issue with and widely misunderstood was my claim that Trump's go-back-to-your-own-country tweets were not clear signs of his racism. Now, I've long said that I have no doubt that Trump is racist,

but I've often said that we have to be precise in making these allegations, right? My problem with the left is that it's finding evidence of racism everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And here was a case in Trump's recent tweets against the so-called squad where it was susceptible to other readings, right? And I thought it was counterproductive to seize upon these tweets as clear signs of his racism and indeed his white supremacy. And to remind you of how overheated this context is, when Nancy Pelosi criticized the squad, she was attacked as dog whistling to white supremacists, which is patently insane. So that's the context. And again, I'm giving Trump the benefit of the doubt here, which I think I should always do because I despise the man. People often accuse me of claiming that I have no biases. That's simply untrue. I have biases, and I try to correct for

them. Here's my bias. I find Trump to be one of the most repellent human beings I can think of. That is a significant bias. I should be bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt when there is a doubt. And the left should do likewise, especially if they don't want four more years of Trump in office. So let's go to the tweets. This is what Trump tweeted. So interesting to see, quote, progressive Democrat Congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt, and inept anywhere in the world, if they even have functioning government at all, now loudly and viciously telling the people of

the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run? Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came, then come back and show us how? Okay, well, the president is clearly expressing contempt for these four congresswomen and contempt for the countries he imagines they came from. Now, his error here, his main error, is that only one of them is an immigrant, Ilhan Omar from Somalia. And Somalia is precisely one of those countries that fits Trump's description here. But the fact that Trump was wrong about the other three congresswomen, they're all natural-born U.S. citizens, that is being interpreted as a symptom of his racism, right? Go back to your own countries when, in fact, this is their country.

I ascribe this to Trump's ignorance. He couldn't be bothered to figure out who these people were. He might not be able to name all four of them. I bet he knows Ilhan Omar. He couldn't be bothered to figure out who these people were. He might not be able to name all four of them. I bet he knows Ilhan Omar. He knows AOC. Does he know Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley? I wouldn't bet on it. It is easy to imagine that he just assumed they were all immigrants or was just speaking about Ilhan Omar. Once again, this falls into the evil Chauncey Gardner framing. He is not playing four-dimensional chess. He's not a genius. He is a buffoon.

And I'm sure he's also a racist. But again, this isn't clear evidence, in my view, of racism. Had these women come from Ireland, right, at the height of the potato famine, Trump could easily have said, go back to your own starving country and fix that before telling us how to run the greatest nation on earth. And there would have been no implication of racism. And the problem is the left is as fixated on race as the far right is. And that is not a recipe for good politics. Anyway, that's the basis for my demurral about Trump's tweets. He's an ignoramus and a blowhard and a bully. And sometimes that's the most parsimonious explanation for the chaos he causes.

explanation for the chaos he causes. But there was much more on the topic of white supremacy, and it appears to be widely believed that I use a double standard when thinking about white supremacy and jihadism. Okay, well, first, intellectual honesty is really my master variable here. And this might sound fairly preening of me to say, but read my book, Lying, if you want to understand my view on honesty in general. And this dictates a somewhat unusual way of speaking. And people seem to read into it something sinister when nothing sinister is there. So I'll give you two examples of how this happens routinely. If some terrible person makes a valid point, I'm not going to pretend that he's wrong just because he's a terrible person. A logically or factually or even ethically true statement is no less true if a serial killer or a neo-Nazi or some other repellent person has observed it to be so.

So this gets me into trouble occasionally. And there's a related principle here, which is whatever the topic, it could be race, it could be violence, guns, terrorism, immigration, whatever it is, an honest walk through it will flirt with points that support the side you don't like. And in fact, these may be points raised by terrible people to support a position you don't like, and may be right not to like. So, for example, this is the kind of thing that came up in my recent conversation with Jared Diamond. Japan. And there was a point I'd heard white supremacists make in defense of their own immigration stance, right? Which is to say they want no immigration, they want to live in a white ethno-state. And then when right-thinking people attack this as a symptom of pure evil, the white supremacist might say, well, what about Japan, right? Japan has the same policy. The

Japanese want to keep Japan for the Japanese. They don't want any pink-skinned barbarians living among them, right? Why isn't that a racist policy? Now, that's actually an interesting point. So this is something I brought up with Jared just to talk about Japan, because it's interesting, right? What about Japan? Why aren't we viewing this policy as shocking evidence of a racist worldview or something, if not racism, something? You know, I'm happy to take that point from Hitler himself, if it's interesting. The source simply doesn't matter. Anyway, this seems to be the kind of thing that can make people think that the mask is slipping, right? Or that I'm dog whistling in some way to extremists, or that I have a secret affinity for white supremacists or racists or whoever. So let's talk about white supremacy and jihadism and how I have spoken about each in the past. Just so there's no confusion here, I'll make a few declarative statements. White supremacy is a real phenomenon. It is an ideology, and it is a source of violence. No question about that.

The question is, how big a problem is it? How well subscribed is it? What exactly do white supremacists believe? Why do they believe it? What do they want to do? What are they likely to be able to do? And compare that to the same set of questions for jihadists. If there's an apparent double standard in how I relate to these two phenomena, it's the result of my giving different answers to those questions. So to make it even more precise, what percent of white people, however we define that group, are white supremacists or are fond of white supremacist organizations, if they're not members themselves, or would support them, and who either publicly or privately celebrate their violence. So you hear that

some white supremacist went into a mosque or a synagogue or a school and killed 20 people and left some manifesto online, what percent of white people in the U.S., say, recognize that to be a valid expression of an ideology that they support? To pick a concentric circle further out than that, what percent of white people are just not quite sure how they feel about it? Are they kind of open-minded? You know, maybe that school did have to be shot up, right? Maybe those Jews in that synagogue said something that warranted their murder. How many people fall into that category? And conversely, we should ask all these questions about jihadism, jihadist terrorism, and the full set of the world's Muslims, right? Now, I don't know the precise answers to these questions, but we have enough data to suggest that they're different. And I'll talk about why I think that is.

But if you detect in me a different attitude toward these two phenomena, this is one reason why. I think that support for jihadism is far more common. There's a far greater percentage of the world's Muslims who acknowledge jihadism as legitimate, the killing of apostates and blasphemers, committing murder in defense of the faith as legitimate. And that's not an accident. Now, what that percentage is, again, I can't give you an exact number, but it's not one percent. It's not two percent. It's a far more disconcerting number than that. But if it were only 10% of the world's Muslims that had a soft spot for jihadism, that would be an enormous problem worth thinking

about. That's a civilizational problem. That's a problem that probably exists in half the world's countries, if not more. What percentage of white people, again, I don't know how you define that, but anyone who could conceivably be a white supremacist, what percentage of white people have a soft spot for white supremacy? To be clear, this is not the same thing as asking what percentage of white people are a little racist, right? That's different, right? There are people who recognize in themselves racial bias who are absolutely appalled by ideological racism, just as there are Muslims who take Islam seriously who are appalled

by jihadism, right, and appalled by a group like ISIS. Certainly that's got to be a majority of Muslims, otherwise the game would be over. So what percentage of white people in the U.S. do you think, sort of like the neo-Nazis, the KKK, or other white supremacist groups, who are poised to join them. Again, I don't know the data on this. I don't know that we can trust the data on this. It's unfortunate that some of the groups whose job it is to give us data of this sort have now proven themselves to be totally unreliable. The Southern Poverty Law Center has just immolated itself by more or less calling everyone in sight a neo-Nazi. As you might remember, they called my friend Majid Nawaz

an anti-Muslim extremist. He's in fact a Muslim reformer. They had to pay him over three million dollars for that defamation. They've gone nuts over there, and yet they're still assumed to be reliable brokers of information on white nationalism and Christian identitarian extremism in the U.S. Unfortunately, they're not, and that's a loss for all of us. In any case, what do you think the number is? Whatever you think it is will dictate how big a problem you consider white supremacy to be in the U.S. Now, I will grant you, we are just one large incident away from being convinced that white supremacy is a major problem. If we had another bombing the size of Oklahoma City now in the current environment,

there's no question white supremacy would be our foremost concern, at least for a while. And that's regardless of how many people we think are actually involved in it. But it's an empirical question to determine how many people are sympathetic with this ideology. So let me first admit that I could be wrong about this, right? My intuitions could be wrong. My reading of the news could be biased. But I believe that while it's scary, white supremacy is still the fringe of the fringe in the United States. And this is not to deny how Trump has given comfort to racists everywhere. This is not to deny how this could become suddenly a much bigger problem in the future. Let's just get our bearings here for a second. I'm accused of being

a white supremacist, right? Or of dog whistling to white supremacists. That's the level of the criticism here. Or not being worried about white supremacy because I'm a racist who sort of agrees with their whole program.