Making Sense with Sam Harris - #172 — Among the Deplorables

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Andrew Marantz about his book “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation." They discuss the effect of social media on politics, the distinction between publishers and platforms, the problem of guilt by association, getting too close to interview subjects, the confusing nature of troll culture, the notion of “dog whistles,” how to respond to the current reality of racism, and other topics. 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 Make It Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, brief housekeeping. Once again, I'm now adding afterwards at the end of these podcasts, so I will save some of my remarks for there. Again, I'd like to urge supporters of the podcast to visit my website and go to the subscriber content page and download the subscriber feed of the podcast. If you are seeing a black Making Sense icon in your podcasting app, you do not have the subscriber feed. You have the public one, and you will be missing some content, and there'll be more of that kind of thing happening

very soon, so you have been warned. And as always, thank you for your support. so you have been warned. And as always, thank you for your support. Also, many of you have asked whether the conversations that I'm now having on the Waking Up app can be made available to podcast subscribers. The answer is yes, although we've decided to put them

on my website only, not pipe them to the subscriber feed. This is because they really are narrowly focused on the topic of living an examined life, meditation, the nature of consciousness, and many of these conversations are just too specific for the podcast generally. So I just don't want to hit the average podcast listener who is supporting the podcast with these episodes in his or her feed. So if you want to hear them, they will be on the website and you can listen in your browser and they will soon be posted in the subscriber content section. And of course, if you really want to get into these topics with me and you want to

hear everything I have to say there, there really is no substitute for subscribing to the Waking Up app. There's a reason why it's a separate app. And as always, if you actually can't afford a subscription, you need only send an email to support at wakingup.com, and you'll be given a free account. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Andrew Marantz. Andrew is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work has also appeared in Harper's, New York Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is a contributor to Radiolab and the New Yorker Radio Hour.

He has spoken at TED, and he's been interviewed in many places, CNN, MSNBC, NPR. And we are talking today about his book Antisocial, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. And it's an interesting book and an interesting discussion. It gets more contentious than I was expecting about an hour in or so. Andrew is more woke than I realized, and we talk about all that. I can't tell if we disagree more than is apparent in this conversation or less. I'm going to guess more. Again, I was a little surprised at the line he took through parts of this conversation. This is becoming an occupational hazard. Anyway, I'll have a few more things to say about that

in my afterward. And now I bring you Andrew Morantz. And now I bring you Andrew Morantz. Andrew, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you've written a fascinating book, which is a really fun read. The book is Antisocial, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Before we jump into your book, give me a potted bio for you. How do you describe your career as a journalist? It's a good question. Well, first, I think some people might have a hard time believing that it's a fun read, but I appreciate you saying it because although it is dark subject matter, I did try to find some of the

dark comedy in it. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Yeah, no, I'm glad that landed because, you know, it can't just be bleakness from start to finish, even though it does get bleak sometimes. I guess I would say I graduated from college in 2006, moved to Brooklyn and became a freelance journalist because that's what all my friends were doing, basically. And, you know, for other reasons, too, I wanted to learn about stuff and pursue truth without sort of boxing myself into one academic discipline exclusively for the rest of my life and wanted to try to write beautiful sentences that also spoke to true things in the world and, you know, all the sort of cliche reasons one becomes a sad young literary man in Brooklyn and ended up freelancing for, you know, Harper's, New York Magazine, Mother Jones, a variety of places, and did a master's program where I met

someone who was leaving an editorial position at The New Yorker and told me that one was opening up. And it was a kind of entry-level, bottom-of-the-food-chain sort of job there. But I just was so impressed with everyone I met there that even though I wasn't sure I wanted an editorial entry-level job, and I was in some ways just happier being a writer, I took that job. And then I sort of was an editor and a writer for six or seven years before going back full-time into writing mostly for The New Yorker and for this book. It's interesting. So your book is fascinating because essentially you embedded yourself among the deplorables. And so this is really a report from the front. When did you actually start reporting for the book? There's kind of different ways of answering that. I mean, in one sense, the idea for the book really gelled once Trump entered the picture, you know, on that escalator that we all remember from June 2015.

In another way, the preoccupations of the book predated that, you know, I was reporting on clickbait factories and the kind of degradation of online media since 2014. And so it was kind of, it was a set of preoccupations I had already had. And then once Trump and Trumpism entered the picture, and then from there, various kinds of trollery and misogyny and white nationalism and stuff, it all kind of congealed into something that I felt really had to be a book. But the underlying concerns, I think, had been with me for a while. They were just kind of inchoate and hard for me to even really put a name to. So before we actually begin to walk through your adventure in the book and touch specific topics like social media and fake news and gatekeeping and Trump and how the press deals with him, and there's a lot to cover here. But what's interesting to me is that many of us have been isolated in a kind of liberal, scare quotes, elitist bubble. And this book is really a kind of breaking of that spell, is what it's like to fully embed in this

culture of reaction, in their own terms, to elitism. And your book offers some considerable testimony to what has been happening. But I do have a concern that as we analyze this, we are very likely to be importing the continued liberal confusion into that context and misunderstanding things. And so what I feel like, this is now a concern that I've expressed on multiple podcasts, I feel like there's the prospect of either exaggerating the problem of things like white nationalism, for instance, and sparking a kind of pendulum swing into moral panic. I mean, I certainly see that on the left. I see that especially clearly because there are people on the left who think I'm a white nationalist, which is completely insane. So as we walk through

this at various points, I'm going to want to question whether or not the way you see the data, you were confronting the data being these conversations with people, is the only interpretation to which it's susceptible. So with that caveat, let's just wade in. Well, just to add on what you're saying before we get going, I think that's all stuff I'd be interested in exploring in the conversation. I guess one thing about being blindsided and being in an elitist bubble and all that stuff, it's sort of fully yes and also no. I mean, on the one hand, I do find it sort of inexplicable that Trump could have any base at all in this country on a kind of like a priori level. On another level, I, you know, was the guy sort

of betting my friends that he would win because I had that read of the political landscape, even though I was sort of, you know, incredulous about it. I still did think it would happen. And there was kind of a lull in, you know, October 2016 when I sort of finally accepted, OK, I guess all the polls can't be wrong. But up until then, I did sort of have a sense that it was not only possible, but at many points probable. So I definitely own the

latte sipping, glasses wearing, Brooklynite label that I very clearly wear. But I also, I think there are bubbles and there are bubbles. And yeah, I think it's possible to see out of them. And in some cases, all you have to do to see out of them is just, you know, do a Google search or a Facebook search. And there it is. So I definitely, everybody has their biases, and I have mine. But I do think that the sort of liberal elites who can't even believe that Trump, you know, misspelled a word on Twitter, kind of, you know, caricatured, you know, we get carried away with that sometimes, I think. Yeah, I actually had forgotten that part of your book where you detail your impressions with respect to Trump. So I was more in the bubble than you were, except I was struck

by the detail you flagged that the New Yorker had not prepared a cover for a Trump victory. They only had a Clinton cover, which was fairly amazing. Yeah, and there is a degree to which, and we can get into this too, but there's another kind of bifurcation here with regard to the New Yorker, because in a sense, the New Yorker is kind of a minor character in the book. in a sense, the New Yorker is kind of a minor character in the book. And there's a way of reading what I do as a kind of, you know, parody of the New Yorkers, you know, insistence on putting accents on, you know, the word elite or, you know, the diarists or whatever. And like that stuff is fun to mock, and I'm happy to mock it lightly. On the other hand, there is this sort of strange, and I'm happy to mock it lightly. On the other hand, there is this sort of strange, almost reversal that I experienced where my natural tendency is to be pretty anti-authoritarian and contrarian and anti-establishment in many ways. That's kind of my natural instinctive

tendency. And yet I find myself kind of coming to this from within the kind of inner sanctum of elite American journalism. And I guess there's a lot to say about it. We can explore many angles of it. But I guess there are just different kinds of elitism. And many of them, most of them are obviously bad. And I think that from my experience of The New Yorker, from being inside it, it actually doesn't subscribe to that bad kind of elitism nearly as much as I would have expected. I mean, I expected a lot of snooty, elbow patch wearing, you know, all the stuff you see on The Family Guy or something. I didn't, that hasn't been my

experience. It has, however, been my experience that there's a lot of, there are a lot of discriminations being made, you know, with regard to which piece is better than another piece or how a piece should be structured or which arguments withstand scrutiny. And so it is hierarchical in that sense. You know, it is a gatekeeping institution in the sense that it takes great care to decide which things to publish and which things, you know, not to. But so, I mean, that's just to sort of mark that as to the extent that that is hierarchical. You know, there are different ways of being hierarchical, some more arbitrary than others. Yeah, well, I once wrote an article titled In Defense of Elitism for Newsweek, and then John Meacham helpfully retitled it When Atheists Attack. I still think yours is more clickable, but maybe more meretricious. Right. Yeah, I was going after Sarah Palin back in the day.

So, let's start with social media. I mean, you make this, so I think many of us feel that social media is somewhere close to the root of the problem, you know, that coupled to the advertising model for digital media and the primacy of clicks. You point out in a recent New Yorker article, I don't think you make this point in your book, but that, you know, the Gutenberg revolution you make this point in your book, but that, you know, the Gutenberg revolution unleashed similar problems, right? I mean, you know, the printing press had liabilities in that it allowed for the amplification of misinformation, and Martin Luther is often celebrated as a sign that, you know, the printing press enabled the Reformation, but as you point out, it also allowed him to spread his murderous anti-Semitism and ushered in something like a century of religious conflict. But it seems that there is something special about the time in which we're living, and this notion upon which

Facebook and these other companies are founded, that linking people digitally is just an intrinsic good, that hasn't really survived contact with reality these few years. Yeah, it unfortunately survived, I think, a few years beyond where it was plausible. And that extension of a few years was enough to, in part, give us Trump and Brexit and Bolsonaro and Modi and, you know, Duterte. I mean, I could go on. But yeah, I think you're right. The worm has kind of turned on that one. I think, you know, in the space of, you know, just the few years between when I started embarking on this project and when I'm putting it out into the world, I've been shocked at how much public opinion has swung from, in my view,

one sort of extreme to the other. And I think that's helpful. I don't think that it's, I don't think we're all the way there yet in terms of nuance and understanding. Obviously, there's a lot of helpful stuff bundled together with a lot of really dangerous stuff. And I don't think on a large scale, we've really teased it all out yet. I guess to your point about whether it's different, I think, yes, it's different in the sense that, well, two things. oversimplified idea of what liberatory technologies do because a lot of the young men who started these social media companies were just sort of assuming that their technologies would be like the printing press and that the printing press essentially did nothing but help us move toward progress and democracy and all the rest of it. They had an opportunity, if they had had a more nuanced view of it, to build in protections right from the beginning, and they

didn't do that. And so they set themselves up for more pain than was necessary. I also think that even though the early publishers and printers in Renaissance Europe were ambivalent about their status as gatekeepers, they did come to accept pretty quickly that they had that role and responsibility. And the social media founders worked really hard to deny that they were gatekeepers, to deny that they had any curatorial responsibility, to deny that they could be held accountable for what happened on their platforms. In some cases, they're still trying to deny it, again, without any plausibility in my view. So yeah, I think it's the combination of these massively powerful tools with all kinds of denials of the idea that the tools could have

any negative impact and that if they do have any negative impact, well, we're just not responsible for it. I think that is unique. Plus, now we have nukes and climate crisis and just things that they didn't have to deal with back then. Do you think the gatekeeping problem is soluble? I think it can be improved. I don't have a perfect solution in mind, but I think one key thing is for the engine of virality to be moved away from what it currently is, which is what I call activating emotion. Or I don't call it that. The scientists that I cite call it that. that I cite call it that. I think that's one big thing you could do where instead of the current system, which measures engagement and engagement is measured by proxies for essentially things that increase your galvanic skin response, anger, lust, laughter, there's just these very animalistic behavioral responses. If you moved away from that as the coin of the realm and moved into a more, you know, balanced system where those emotional

reactions were mixed with other kinds of reactions, you know, more slow brain kinds of reactions, more pro-social reactions, to use the mirror image of the book's title, that would solve a lot. The problem is it's really hard, and it might make the companies a little bit less money. Yeah, well, I mean, there is just this problem, which you cite in the book, that fake news consistently spreads faster than the truth. And it is because we've optimized for these activating emotions. We've created essentially a quasi-Darwinian system that selects for outrage and misinformation.

It's a machine for generating controversy, and you could see how you might tinker with the settings there, but it may just be a fact of human nature that the lurid, incredible, terrifying, and divisive is stickier than something that tells us that people are mostly good most of the time and that order is progressing. Yeah, I would agree that the lurid and those things are stickier inherently. I guess my hope would be that you could build a system that doesn't just privilege those things. I mean, we tend to assume that what we see on social media

is just kind of a flat reflection of the popular will or that, you know, because we're seeing a lot of something that means that, you know, a lot of people want that thing to be out there and that it's just sort of a flat reflection of democratic urges and desires. I guess on one kind of immediate level, that's true because there are people or bots in many cases clicking on the things. But in another sense, there's a system that is conditioning people to behave a certain way. So, you know, it may have always been the case that lurid and false and, you know, sensationalist things got more attention. But, you know, if you were a producer of a newspaper, let's say, yeah, there was plenty of yellow journalism. There were plenty of penny papers and partisan

presses and all the rest of it. But they also had a sense of shame. They also were, you know, members of a society that could be made to feel that they should stop, you know, goading society into war because their buddies would look down on them if they did it, or that, you know, they would do it for the beginning of part of their career and then try to look much more high minded for the latter part of their career, like Joseph Pulitzer did. So I guess I do think that human urges can be pushed back against when you have people in charge of the systems who are willing to try. Yeah, I guess I'm sympathetic with this distinction that every social media overlord wants to draw between a publisher and a platform. And they consider themselves the latter and therefore have more or less happily abrogated any curatorial responsibility that you or I would want to assign to them. And I do understand that just because of the sheer scale of the problem, but for the fact that we might invent some AI that is truly competent and doesn't make egregious errors, just censoring normal Republican senators as neo-Nazis or whatever the failure would be. There's a difference between

the New Yorker making a decision about who to publish and what sort of views to amplify, or me making a decision about who to speak with on this podcast, I think those kinds of decisions have to be made responsibly. And I take it seriously, the concern about whether it makes sense to give someone a platform or not. There are people you spoke with in your book who've asked to be on the podcast and who I've decided essentially never to speak with because I think they are at least beyond my Overton window. And even there, I'm somewhat conflicted because part of me, I'm somewhat idealistic about the prospects of just shining sunlight on bad ideas. And insofar as I think I'm the prospects of just shining sunlight on bad ideas. And insofar as I think I'm capable of doing that, it's tempting to do it with any bad ideas of consequence. But I don't know,

when you talk to someone like, you know, Jack Dorsey, or anyone who's running a platform of this kind, it's hard to see how they can ever curate this correctly, you know, in a way that doesn't cause more problems than it's solving. I mean, because there's just so many casualties of their inept efforts to curate. I mean, there are people who have received lifetime bans from Twitter for saying things like men are not women. In that case, that was considered hate speech against the trans community. I mean, say more about your sense of optimism that we should even move in that direction. But what if the technology on some level just doesn't allow for this to be done in a way that is going to solve this particular problem? So I'm rarely accused of being an optimist. So I appreciate that.

I don't think I'm very optimistic about their ability to do it. Certainly not their ability to do it flawlessly. You know, we can get into specific cases. I think, you know, my instincts on the trans stuff might be different than yours. But just, you know, we can take any number of examples. But I do take the larger point that there's problems of scale. It's never going to be perfect. And that in some cases, the medicine could be worse than the disease when it comes to banning people or kicking them off.

I mean, I get that in principle. And I am definitely sympathetic to how hard it is for someone who's in charge of one of these platforms to make these very tough decisions. I don't think I have all the answers or that if I were in charge, I would know exactly what to do. I guess we kind of have a different starting point, though, where it seems like you might be starting from the system as it exists and then saying, well, how can we expect them to know exactly who to ban when? And I guess I would start a few steps back in the causal chain and question how the system was built in the first place. I think by the time you get to the point of deciding who to

ban or who not to ban, it's in a sense too late and you're dealing with symptoms instead of root causes. I mean, just because you brought up the example of Jack Dorsey, he's been going around for the last six months or so saying, well, I think it might help if we got rid of follower accounts. I think it might help if we didn't incentivize likes and follows and shares as much as we incentivized other things. He hasn't done any of that. I'm not sure why he hasn't done it if he thinks it would help. But I mean, I think I do know why because it would make the company less profitable and its profitability is a big question mark right now. But that's just one example of how there

are structural changes that can be made that are way above the level of, do we ban this account or not? And I think what that gets to is the notion that these things were not built with this stuff in mind. Facebook is right now working on abdicating some of this responsibility, but they're doing it by building a so-called Supreme Court of Facebook. That is not a body, that is not an idea they would have entertained even three years ago. So there are different ways of getting around this problem. It's not just to curate or not to curate. Yeah, it's interesting to consider what would happen if we could curate perfectly. Let's say it's an error-free, you know, Nazi detector, but then you still have the question of when these platforms become more or less identical to internet infrastructure,

which you could argue that some of them already are, you know, so that you could draw an analogy to something like the phone company, right? So let's say that the phone company could perfectly detect when people were spreading, you know, Nazi ideas in their private phone conversations. Should the phone company just shut down those accounts? That's sort of the territory we're in, if we actually could do this well. Just to address the point you just made, I mean, I guess the analogy I would use is that the phone company would be more analogous to CrowdStrike or not CrowdStrike, that's the thing in the Ukraine complaint. What's it called? Cloudflare. Cloudflare. Yeah, exactly. That there would be deeper layers of internet architecture. To analogize the phone company to Twitter would be to imagine that the phone gives you extra points every time you say something really exciting or something that

really riles people up. When you're on a conference call, if you call someone a douchebag or something, you get 15 extra points like you're in a video game. If the phone were tilting the playing field in that way, then the phone, yeah, I think would have more of a gatekeeper analogous responsibility because the phone would be affecting our behavior in a proactive way. Okay, well, let's jump into the book properly. So you really go behind the scenes with a fairly motley cast of characters, none of whom I've met in person, I think, but some of whom I've had various skirmishes with online.

But there is this larger issue, which we should touch on, which is just this guilt by association algorithm that is running on the left. I mean, this really is a problem of the left, where if you talk to someone, you know, who's ever spoken to someone who has spoken to someone who's a Nazi, you're a Nazi, right? No one can survive that scheme. You have spoken to someone who's spoken to someone who's spoken to

someone who's a Nazi. Well, I've spoken to all of them, so. Yeah, but you, I mean, you have spoken with them, you could argue, to however amicably you're actually unhorsing them and their worldview or to some degree doing that. No one is going to argue reading your book that you gave these people platforms, or at least I wouldn't expect that would be a common charge. I would hope not. Yeah, I think that's right. I set out to see them through a critical lens from the beginning. And there is a confusion that I think a lot of journalists have and a lot of the public has about journalism. And it's a good faith confusion. It's not easily resolved between being unbiased or objective or any of those words and being someone who, you know, takes in the evidence of your senses. And more and more of those things seem to be at odds. So there's a way of that I could have approached this project where I could have said, well, I'm just going to quote what they say and I'm just going to kind of, you know, transcribe it and be a stenographer to power. And that's that. Or I could have done what

I did do, which was be really critical, and in some cases, really acerbic and mocking, which I think was deserved, and in some cases necessary. But you can't really do both. I mean, you can't always be both even handed and tell the full truth. There's a difference there between me using the material I've gathered to tell the story I want to tell and handing the microphone to someone to tell the story they want to tell. I think that's a meaningful distinction. Does having hung out with these people in person noticeably corrupt your objectivity with respect to how you portray their ideas? Or do you think you're less combative in your treatment of them and their ideas for having broken bread with them and shared long car rides and all the rest? Yeah, it's a good question. I can't know for sure.

I've only run that experiment once. I don't have a control group. But I think you probably do have a control group in that there are other people you cover who you presumably don't meet face-to-face even, and you know what that's like, right? That's a good point, yeah. I mean, one thing I do try to do, it's not just a sort of straight-ahead taxonomy

of shitty people on the internet. You know, I do try, it's sort of using them as fodder to tell a larger story. But I do try to take care to taxonomize to the extent that I don't want to run together differences and conflate differences. Some of them are Nazis. Some of them are not. Some of them are white nationalists. Some of them are not. Some of them are just kind of diehard Trumpists who I find absurd because they hold that opinion, but I actually am fine's hard to say. I mean, the kind of journalism I do mostly requires just really being a fly on the wall for long periods of time. And there are some people who do that kind of longitudinal immersive style journalism who just don't do it about people they don't think they're

going to like. I mean, I have colleagues and friends who say, I don't want to write a profile of someone unless I am reasonably sure that I'm going to enjoy their company because I don't want to spend my time in a combative environment. And I also just don't want to take on the responsibility of writing a really sharp, critical piece in the end. And I just would rather write an admiring piece. Now, obviously, I'm not one of those journalists, but I was always on guard against the possibility that they were playing me or that they were using their time with me to try to subtly lobby me toward a more flattering picture of them. In some cases, I think there was no danger of that, such as the cases of me, a Jewish journalist, talking to a professional antisemite. There was very little chance that I was going to see eye to eye with that person.

And yeah, in the end, even in cases where there wasn't that direct of a conflict, I don't think that I was hoodwinked by any of them. And at the same time, I don't think I overreacted to that or overcompensated by trying to go harder on them than was merited. But I mean, it's really not for me to decide. Yeah, there is an interesting effect of, you know, compassion creeping in for better or worse, where, I mean, just as the reader, I mean, you know, the one of the more odious characters you talk about is this guy, Mike Enoch, who I knew nothing about. That's his pseudonym. What's his real name again? Pinovich.

Pinovich, Mike Pinovich. But when you get the details of his childhood and his life, it's pretty easy to see that there's a psychological explanation for at least some of his obsession with these ideas and the misuse of his own mind. I mean, he's a smart guy who's spending all his time being an anti-Semite, yet married to a Jewish woman, or I guess no longer married to a Jewish woman once she discovered the nature of his podcast. I guess no longer married to a Jewish woman once she discovered the nature of his podcast. But, I mean, the whole thing is so depressing, you know, that it's hard not to just see him as a casualty of something. I mean, it's like his own agency kind of erodes and you just see, you know, but for the fact that he wasn't, you know, fed an endless supply of prednisone because he had such horrible eczema as a child, things might have been different. And it's those kind of details, which if you're just dealing with the ideas, I just find if I'm just reacting to someone

because they're putting out terrible memes, that's one level where I can just deal with the ideas and I can be as uncompromising as I can be. But then if you hung out with someone and gotten a sense of their humanity and all of the exculpatory or potentially exculpatory influences on them, you come away sort of not knowing how harshly to judge them as a person. I felt the same thing with Cernovich, frankly. I've never met Cernovich. He's attacked me a bunch online, and I, you know, responded in kind a little bit. But then I just sort of got more of a sense of, you know, how complicated it was to be Mike Cernovich. And I just couldn't keep it up anymore. You know, it just seemed like, all right, this is just,

it's not worth interacting in a hostile way with this person at all. And yeah, so I just don't know if you felt that in your reporting or not. Because as a reader, I felt it, you know, meeting some of these guys, it just felt like it's, you know, I wouldn't want to trade places with any of these people. So how harshly am I going to judge them? I think you're right that spending a lot of time with these people, both as a reporter and for you as a reader, it does change and deepen the way you see them. And that was part of my goal. I think it's tricky because you don't want to let people off the hook for their terrible behavior. And there's a really fine line between

empathy and excuse, or, you know, you use the word compassion. I don't know how many layers deep we want to go. It's kind of deep in my ethos that I try to have radical compassion for everyone. I try to have compassion for Donald Trump, who's obviously suffering from one or more personality disorders and who. It would be easier to have compassion for him if you felt that he was actually suffering. Right. You're using suffering in a different sense because, I mean, we're suffering from his his neurological disorders, but he doesn't appear to be suffering from them. You know, I think in the first few minutes before he can actually get the TV to turn on in the morning, I think he probably experiences immense suffering. But I, you know, obviously don't know. And in a sense, it doesn't matter, right? Because

what I really try to do, and I'm not, I'm not saying that I'm, you know, able to do this always, I'm not some Christ-like saint or anything. But I do think on some deep level, the goal is to try to have empathy for everyone, even the worst people. Now, that obviously doesn't mean that you excuse what they're doing. And every fiber of my being thinks Donald Trump is a bad dude. It's just like, what do we really mean by bad? We mean that he behaves badly. He's bad for the world. He's bad at his job. You know, you can go down the list. But does it mean that he is condemned on every level, that he, you know, is a soulless creature who's not a human being? You know, I mean, if you really, really want to get down to the core of it, a part of it has to do with, you know,

you mentioned the concept of things might have been different in these people's lives. And one of the deep sort of concepts that I'm wrestling with in the book is this concept of contingency, and how history might have been different and people's lives might have been different. And yeah, there is this kind of deep existentialist effect of a kind of, you know, giant pachinko machine that we're all in. existentialist effect of a kind of, you know, giant pachinko machine that we're all in. But I think the key, and I didn't expect to be talking about this kind of stuff, but I think it does get to that deep level pretty quickly, because I think the key is to try to hold at once the sort of existentialist, absurdist notion that nothing is predetermined and that we're not on a

automatic track toward progress and redemption, while also not becoming nihilistic and feeling that life has no meaning. And so part of how that, for me, applies in this case is to think that on some level, of course, people need to be held accountable for their actions. And of course, there's a massive moral difference between being a professional antisemite and being a professional nurse or bus driver. There are differences in how we act in the world, and they're immensely meaningful. But I really struggle with saying that the deepest and most complete explanation we can give for someone who does bad things is that they're a human dumpster fire and that's the only thing we have to say about them.

I actually think it's more incumbent on us, again, not to excuse, not to look away, but to actually understand the complexity of it. And in no way to say, oh, if you grew up poor or if you had eczema, therefore you can do whatever you want. Absolutely not. Or that we have to agree with, you know, we have to go from 100% condemnation of their behavior to 90%. It's not that at all. It's just that on some deeper level, you know, my wife has been a public defender in the past and their sort of ethos is you're not the worst mistake you ever made. And it's really, really hard to apply that to Nazis. Trust me, it's not instinctive. It's not intuitive. And again, I don't claim to be

some Gandhian figure who just naturally, intuitively does that. I mean, Nazis make me upset. They make me angry. I get why people want to yell at them. I get why people even want to punch them. And I don't claim to be above that. I just think it's not the only place to land. And I also think it doesn't help us understand anything. I mean, there are different projects, right? There's one project that is about fighting the ideas, which is valuable. And there's another project that's about diagnosing and understanding where they come from. I think they're both necessary. Well, there really is a problem of understanding what's going on, because in addition to having Nazis out there and extremists of various types, we have this other problem, this layer that is built around it, on it, somehow interacting with it, of what we might call troll culture. And there's just this new style of insincerity or apparent insincerity or, you know, irony usurping every other value, which creates a problem of assessing

what people actually believe and intend. Or, you know, even if you do grant that people should be taken literally, even in these contexts, it's hard to know just how committed they are to these specific ideas. There's a culture of just deliberate obfuscation around this, where, as you report, some of these people are, I think this was, I forget which website this was, but it was explicit that they wanted it to be hard for the normies to tell whether or not they're joking, right? Right. And contained in that is the implication that most of the time we're not really joking, right?

Or we're not joking about some of the worst stuff. How do you think about troll culture and what should be the appropriate response to it. Because the response I'm seeing more and more in the mainstream media and on the left is just taking the worst possible construal of everything as the literal truth of everything. Yeah. And I get where that impulse comes from. And, you know, look, it's really, really complicated. I mean, I say a couple times in the book that trolls set this ingenious trap, right? Because if you're a good troll, and, you know, I think the president is good at very few things, but I think trolling is definitely one of them. If you're good at it, you don't leave people any good choice, right? If you pay any kind of attention to a troll, you're letting them win because what they want is attention. If you let their views or putative views or offensive jokes or ironic whatever go unchallenged, then they also win.

So it's a kind of trap. And I don't think we've figured out a good way out. I think, you know, I have a little part of the book where I'm at the White House briefing room, and I'm there with this kind of, you know, just, just, he's, he's essentially an insurgent in a, He's essentially an insurgent in a dirty culture war who is acting as a White House correspondent for a gateway pundit. So I'm there kind of shadowing him and sort of seeing how far he can go in the... He's essentially just performing. He doesn't actually ask questions or intend to ask questions. He's just there to kind of act out the degradation of the norm of the press briefing room being meaningful at all. And while he's there. But nonetheless, he and others in this vein were just adorably excited to have been granted press

credentials in the first place. Absolutely. You know, so they're subverting it as the norm of this institution is like, this is just a worthless goof. And yet, this is the biggest day in my life that I get access to the White House. Totally. I mean, yeah, you see that all over the place. You see that with all kinds of reactionaries and proto reactionaries and wannabe authoritarians that, you know, our whole system is meaningless and, you know, should be consigned to the waste bin of history. And yet, as soon as I have any power within it, I'm going to flaunt that power to the maximum. Not that these guys were really reactionaries in the sense that they had a consistent ideology, but just that their impulses run in both directions. But while I was there with him,

a few of the real reporters who were there called him out and sort of confronted him on camera or, you know, everything is on camera these days because someone just holds up a phone and they wanted to nail him to the wall. They wanted to nail him on having a view that was inarguably beyond the pale so that they could prove that he didn't belong there. they could prove that he didn't belong there. And they couldn't really do it because they didn't, well, because they just didn't know exactly who he was. And so they kept saying, well, you are a white nationalist. And he said, well, my boyfriend is Colombian. So I guess I'm not a good white nationalist, you know, and he was able to kind of win that round. Now, even though they weren't wrong in their intuition that he didn't belong there, he absolutely didn't belong there because he wasn't even pretending to be good at being a journalist. I mean, he and some level was pretending, but just in the barest, most superficial way, he really was to the extent

that what happens in that room is meaningful at all, which we can, you know, call into question, but to the extent that that kind of journalism is meaningful, he shouldn't have been there. But they couldn't really nail down why. in my head about these theoretical concerns and reading into the history of questions of journalistic ethics and reading public opinion by Walter Lippmann and thinking through how democratic institutions do or don't survive, and all of which was an interesting thought exercise. But then, you know, to just see a scene like that playing out in front of your eyes and seeing how even when something is obviously going awry, it's not always easy to name it accurately or to decisively prove it. And so to me, to get back to the substance of your question, that kind of seems like it suggests two different things to me that may or may not be at odds with each other. On one hand, it seems to me like you want to be really minimalist and limit yourself to only lodging accusations that you absolutely know to be true, because otherwise, you know, you could set yourself up for humiliation.

On the other hand, when you're dealing with a really slippery, gifted troll, they're not always going to give you the ammunition you need. troll, they're not always going to give you the ammunition you need. So if you limit yourself to only the barest assertions of fact, you're just letting them win because you are allowing a liar to dictate the terms of the debate. So of course, I don't advocate for making up accusations or for misinterpreting jokes as reality or vice versa. Obviously, in a vacuum, you want to get things right as often as you can. But the problem is, they don't say what they mean. They don't give you the courtesy of telling you who they are. And so I get why people try to, you know, why sometimes people overplay their hand, because you have to get outside of their setting of the terms.

Well, many of them tell you who they are or they tell themselves who they are when only their friends are listening. I mean, so if you listen long enough to many of these people, I think the mask, if they're ever wearing one, does come off. Sometimes. Yeah. So let's go to one of the kind of the harder cases, which are more, by definition, more mainstream. And here, I think our intuitions might divide a little bit. And again, I mean, my intuitions here are now sort of newly anchored to the experience of being on the other side of this. I mean, being targeted by people's poorly calibrated

racist detectors. So like, take the cases of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram, right? So these are both people who I've been interviewed by. I've never met either of them in person, I don't think, but, you know, I've been interviewed by each of them a few times, you know, not recently, but you single them out essentially as racist dog whistlers for things they've said recently. And I think Laura Ingram said, Democrats mostly want to replace those old white Yahoo conservatives with a new group who might be a bit more amenable to big government. And that you read as a dog whistle. I believe I can read that more charitably just as a fairly factual statement. I mean, there's so many people on the far left who are banging on and on about white

privilege and using whiteness and age and gender, you know, so old white men being the filter against which they would make almost any political decision. I mean, they're advertising this about themselves, and it seems to be charitable to Laura, and that's an impulse I don't often feel. She could have just been remarking on that and not dog whistling to actual racists, much less expressing her own racism. to actual racist, much less expressing her own racism. Yeah. So I believe you that you can parse that in a way that you see it as not a dog whistle. I guess I don't see it that way. And I don't really see why you I mean, I look, I get that it's always possible to read a quote literally as not racist in the sense that the person is not literally saying in the quote, I, a racist, believe that the white race is superior to read it as not racist. I haven't listened to every episode of your show, but I've heard some former episodes where I've heard you do this a few times with

Trump, you know, saying, you know, yes, he told, you know, these women of color to go back to their countries, but I'm not sure I see that as a racist dog whistle. And I guess I don't see why we should ignore what's right in front of us and not take the obvious inference from it. There is a very well-known poisonous theory called the Great Replacement Theory that we all know now because they were chanting about it in Charlottesville. And so to the extent that people didn't know about it before that, which I would argue it's probable that Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson did know about it before that, but I can't prove it. But we all know about it after that. So then traffic in those words, replacement, and give it an explicitly race-related valence,

and then to turn around and deny that you're trafficking and race baiting, it just beggars belief. Plus, you can put it together with a decades long history of doing similar things and of supporting policies that have those effects. So I guess I just don't, I don't see why we would try to contort ourselves into, you know, trying to, I get the point of being charitable to people, but this doesn't seem charitable. This seems implausible. I mean, I can give you an answer to that question. I mean, why bend over backwards to be charitable, even in the case when you're dealing with someone who you have other reasons to believe might be racist? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.