Making Sense with Sam Harris - #281 — Western Culture and Its Discontents

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about his new book, “The War on the West.” They discuss the problem of hyper partisanship on the Left and Right, the primacy of culture, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the de-platforming of Trump and Alex Jones, the new religion of anti-racism, the problem of inequality, the 1619 Project, history of slavery, moral panics, the strange case of Michel Foucault, 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.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Okay. Well, a lot happening out there in the world. I think a brief comment on the immense amount of attention and controversy sparked by Elon Musk planning to buy Twitter. controversy sparked by Elon Musk planning to buy Twitter. Seems like that is happening. It could still not happen, but seems like it's more likely than not at this point. I have been fairly astounded by how much of what has been said about this on both sides seems to miss some obvious points. sides seems to miss some obvious points. Again, from both sides. On the left, there's been a fair amount of hysteria around a billionaire and one as outspoken and opinionated as Elon buying Twitter and therefore controlling such an important media property. Well, billionaires control so much of what's important that there's nothing new there. And from the right, there has been a lot of celebratory nonsense about how much is guaranteed to change under Elon's stewardship. If I was going to summarize my opinion here, I think I'm agnostic as to whether

or not Elon can actually do much to improve Twitter. There's some obvious things he could and should do, and I trust will do, like cleaning up a lot of the bots and not doing some of the very stupid things that Twitter has done in the service of its moderation policy in the past. The people on the left that think that Twitter did not have a problem with heavy-handed moderation either weren't paying attention or agreed with that heavy-handed moderation for ideological reasons, right? I mean, literally someone got kicked off for life, I believe, for tweeting, men are not women, right? That was considered hate speech in the context in which she tweeted it. And meanwhile, ISIS and the Chinese Communist Party, I mean, all of these groups have accounts in good standing at that point, right? So that's crazy. And insofar as Elon is

going to insist upon a more transparent and ethical moderation policy, that will be to the good. But in truth, if moderation were easy, someone would have figured it out by now. And, you know, I'm not especially close to this problem technically and what algorithms can do to solve it, but it just seems like there are always going to be apes in the loop, at least to adjudicate someone being kicked off and reinstated. You need people at a certain point to process these claims of who should be kicked off and who shouldn't. And what you have in front of you are an endless series of judgment calls, some of which are trivially easy and some of which are really hard, right? And I don't see how that problem ever goes away. So I don't see how you don't always have

enormous numbers of dissatisfied people in the wake of even the wisest moderation policy. Now, for the so-called free speech absolutists who seem to not want much of a moderation policy and who are claiming that Twitter's or any other platform's attempts at moderation in the past amounted to censorship, first of all, we already know what an unmoderated or effectively unmoderated platform looks like. You go over to 4chan or 8chan and see what

no moderation gets you. Here's where any sane moderation policy parts ways with the First Amendment. Everything happening over at 4chan and 8chan is protected by the First Amendment. I think those platforms should exist. Right now, there are things on there that might be illegal, right? Child pornography and any other video record of a crime that was perpetrated for the purpose of creating the video. There are laws against all of that. People should go to prison for that stuff. Totally understood. But that leaves immense scope for absolutely obnoxious and soul-destroying poison that can be spread on a social network, and which most of us want nothing to do with. And there are legitimately hard calls. Like,

for instance, I think every platform should have a no-doxing policy. And the people who have been kicked off Twitter, people like Alex Jones and even Donald Trump, I think should have been kicked off. And they should have been kicked off largely for their knowingly marshalling their crazy followers to dox and harass and effectively ruin the lives of identifiable people on the platform. That is what was happening. Jones and Trump knew that's what was happening whenever they targeted an individual on social media, and it was absolutely despicable. But there is no bright line between malicious doxing and necessary journalism, right? As users sort of know it when you see it.

Do I think that members of ISIS should be doxxed? Absolutely, right? Show me some terrorist atrocity with people caught on cell phone cameras or security cameras. Do I want those people identified? Do I want them caught by the cops? Of course.

But do I want somebody who has an opinion that is not shared widely by the woke mob, doxed by that mob, and hunted as an apostate out in the real world because of what happened to them on Twitter? Of course not. But again, this is a hard problem to solve, and there will be edge cases. And I just don't see how that problem goes away by taking Twitter private, or by cleaning up all the bots, or by implementing an appropriate algorithm. There's still going to be people at the end of the day trying to figure out where the edge cases are and what to do about them. So I think the right and the left have much of this wrong. I think appeals to the First Amendment are generally misleading. I think we want platforms that have coherent moderation policies

that prevent them from becoming like 4chan and 8chan. And I certainly wish Elon the best of luck in developing such a policy, implementing it, and in making Twitter better than it is. I think Elon's claim that Twitter is the town square and that it's absolutely crucial to make it much more in line with the First Amendment, is an understandable, but I think ultimately dubious, one. Twitter isn't the town square. There are many successful, influential people who are not on Twitter. The problem is that most people in tech, most people in journalism, most academics,

and certainly Elon among them, are addicted to Twitter. And I think it's pretty clear, or it should be, that in almost every case that addiction is counterproductive. It's not to say that Twitter isn't useful. I'm still on it. I still find it a valuable source of news and recommendations. Occasionally, it's a great spot to connect with someone who I wouldn't otherwise connect with. But I have pulled back a lot because I witnessed a fair amount of the dysfunction of over-engaging with the platform in my own life, right? And I certainly see that dysfunction well advertised in the lives of others. So there are many reasons not to be on Twitter, or not to be on it much, and there are many people who are thriving who are not on it.

So it's not the town square. You have not lost your personhood if for some reason you get deplatformed from Twitter. So I think the analogy to the town square is a false one. And I think the notion that any legal speech must be tolerated on the platform is going to lead to a truly awful place to be. And then people will be free to leave and start a new platform. Anyway, this topic comes up, however briefly, in my conversation today. And in the end, there'll be much more to say about it. But I think creating a social media platform that actually works,

that becomes a place where smart, well-intentioned people are wise to spend their time, I think that is a really difficult problem to solve, and I certainly hope someone solves it. Anyway, those are my two cents, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Douglas Murray. Douglas is a friend who's been on the podcast before. He's the author of several books, most recently The War on the West, which we talk about in depth. His previous books were The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds. He's also an associate editor for The Spectator. He writes for several other publications. He's immensely prolific.

And as you'll hear, he is always great to talk to. We get deep into his book, The War on the West. Before we do, I go fishing for some areas where we might disagree, and actually this question of moderation on social media platforms is one of those areas. We talk about the problem of hyper-partisanship on the left and the right, and the primacy of culture. We talk about the problem with Trump and use the Hunter Biden laptop controversy as a lens there. We talk about the deplatforming of Trump and Alex Jones specifically, and then we get into the topic of his book, Proper. We talk about the new religion of anti-racism, the problem of inequality, the 1619 Project, the history of slavery,

moral panics, the strange case of Michel Foucault, and other topics. Anyway, it's always great to talk to Douglas. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And I bring you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for joining me again. It's a huge pleasure to be with you, Sam. So, we have a lot to talk about. First, I should apologize to our listeners for canceling the live Zoom event, which had been scheduled for this podcast. But as I told you offline, the house across the street from me was being demolished. And rather than have sounds of the apocalypse intrude upon our recording, I had to forsake my Zoom recording space in order to go just for the pure audio experience. So there we are. I'm in New York, Sam, so it's permanent Armageddon noises in the background here. So we could have cancelled each other out. Yeah. Okay. So you have a new book, which we will definitely talk about. That book is The War on the West. And it is a, in case it's not

obvious from the title, it is a passionate defense of Western culture of a sort that only you could muster. And it's a fantastic read. It's actually a doubly fantastic listen. I read some of it and listened to the rest of it. And as I did with your last book, I can't remember if you, I don't think I heard the audio for The Strange Death of Europe. That wasn't done by me, sadly. Yeah, only this one and Madness of Crowds. Yeah. So both of those, Madness of Crowds and your new one, The War on the West, you read and it's one of the great pleasures of having ears and a brain to which they're connected is to hear you. Reading your own stuff is great, but to hear you reading quotations from people you deem to be either insane or sinister and giving it the top spin of derision is just amazing.

So I recommend that people listen to the that people that's very kind of you just say so i actually i enormously enjoy doing my own audio books partly because i find it incredibly funny and with madness of crowds as with the war in the west i had to apologize repeatedly to the sound engineers and explain to them i wasn't laughing at my own jokes i was i was laughing at the things I quote because so often they're ridiculous on the page, but they're even more ridiculous when you say them out loud. Yeah, and just some of your own writing

also gets the benefit of your reading. There are lines that really are laugh-out-loud funny, which I'm not sure everyone would discover on the page quite as readily as when when you're you're reading them so that's very kind there was one in matters of crowd as i remember that was much better on audible which was i quoted somebody referring to something as being literally like adolf hitler's mein kampf and i say not just any old mein kampf but adolf hitler's mein kampf it's much better in audio than on the page yeah so you you've had a tremendous amount of fun at

the expense of the left and we will get into that but i want i mean one thing i noticed when i announced this conversation when i when i announced the zoom event i got some of your your hate mail on social media and some of my own perhaps and i think many people were expecting that any conversation between the two of us about the derangement of the left would just be an exercise in confirmation bias right we're basically yeah there's something in that yeah and so I think I it would be good for us to remain alert to any areas where we actually might disagree. I think we will fully agree, perhaps with tiny little shadings of gray somewhere when our attention is directed to the left

and to the topic of your book. But I think if we talk about the right at all, that we may find some differences of opinion. I mean, one area of difference for me, and maybe we can just start here, because I do see, again, we totally agree about the central problem in its leftist form, but I do see a similar thing happening on the right, and you don't tend to focus on it. And I guess I do have a general question as to why, but let me just spell

it out for you. I think the generic problem that we both see is that there's now a concern with identity that seems to supersede any honest engagement with ethics or facts or even a concern about whether one's own beliefs are internally consistent, right? So there's just immense double standards and instances of hypocrisy and just shoddy thinking happening under the aegis of identity politics. But I'm finding this both on the right and the left. And there's this obsession with group difference and victimhood. There's the same willingness to destroy institutions without any thought as to what could replace them.

For sure. The right has just grown demented by conspiracy theories and a cult of personality under Trump. People deny that there's anything strange about being told that all white people inherit the original sin of racism or that there's anything strange about a new book titled Anti-Racist Baby. This is where we'll get deep into this when we hit your book. But on the right, we see people denying that there's anything wrong with Trump or the January 6th attack on the Capitol or the big lie about the 2020 election. So I guess my question for you in search of possible disagreement here is why focus exclusively on the left? Well, the first thing is I don't. And I'm always, I'm sure like you, Sam, I've become aware of quite easily of who doesn't read me. And, you know, actually an interviewer said to me the other day, you know,

what do you think about what people think about you? And I said, I just, I don't really know what they think. I don't spend that much time trying to absorb it. But I know when people don't read me, and I know that one of the signs is when people say, you only talk about X, when actually I write about a pretty wide range of subjects. I write three to four national newspaper columns a week. And I wouldn't be employable if I wrote about only one issue. Well, let me just to claim not to be guilty of not reading you, because I do, perhaps only is too strong. So you and I both have several friends and colleagues, and in certain cases, it might be former friends and colleagues who have been fighting from the same trench as the two of us aimed at the left, but they've

focused entirely on the left, right? And some of them appear to have lost their minds, or at least lost certain principles of intellectual honesty. And I won't name names. I know you know who I'm talking about. And I certainly don't put you in that category. But there's no question that this book you've just written is entirely focused on the leftist assault on Western culture. Yes, because I see the left as providing the assault that I'm trying to push back against, identify and I think inoculate us against. But I mean, I'm by no means silent on problems on the right. Obviously, I'm more politically aligned with the right than you are and uh you know i don't particularly mind that albeit the right that i knew from the uk is rather different from some of the american right but that's not to dodge matters um it's simply

say as i say that about people not reading me i mean anyone who who reads you know what i write will know that i've consistently critiqued my own side. I mean, for instance, and let me just rattle off a few that come to the top of my mind. Immediately, January the 6th happened. I wrote in the main conservative newspaper in the UK, this sits solely at the feet of Donald Trump. He led his troops to the top of the hill. And what did he expect them to do? I make no apology for that. Got plenty of criticism for it for people, but I still will not regard and do not regard the attack on the US Capitol as being nothing. And have consistently said that, among other things, you know, whatever happens with Donald Trump himself, you cannot claim that what people around him were saying was not essentially

up to and past the point of what we call incitement. That seems perfectly clear, and I've written about that repeatedly. And let me give you two other quick examples. There are on the American right things, and I've been in America for a year now, there are things which do not exist anything like the proximity to the political center on the American right than what exists in Britain. We'll give you a couple of examples. An obvious one is conspiracy theories.

Another one is very unpleasant forms of prejudice, which, again, would totally knock you out of the race in the UK. In fact, I spent New Year's Day this year not taking a break because a, I won't name him, but a very ugly, unpleasant right-winger in the US had spent his New Year tweeting about people. One particular person who he described as having a Rothschild physiognomy. And I spoke to Barry Weiss and said, this is where the right goes wrong. This guy is actually affiliated with some conservative institutions in the US. It seems to me totally intolerable that a flagrant anti-Semitism should be anywhere near the center of the American right, and immediately criticized him for this.

And got, I have to say, I mean, absolutely no reward in return, only a heap of bile from right-wingers who thought that he was either ignorant and didn't know what he was saying, or that there was nothing wrong with talking about people having a Rothschild physiognomy. And thirdly, I'd say, just off the top of my head, at the moment that Russia invaded Ukraine, I saw that a part of the right in America was going very wrong indeed, as was a part of the right in Europe. going very wrong indeed, as was a part of the right in Europe. And I immediately used my column in The Spectator, which is the oldest right of center magazine, the oldest weekly magazine in the English-speaking world. I used my weekly column there to talk about the right that had gone wrong on Russia, how it had been misled, how it was

lying, how it was providing counterfactuals, counter information, how it was pumping out Russian disinformation, how it had fallen for Vladimir Putin and be taken for a ride. Again, I say this, not just because anyone can go and search this stuff, but because I don't think I ever have any problem with saying what I think about people who are identified as being on my own side. And there's a reason for that. It's not tactical. It's because I don't want to be a million miles near these people. I wouldn't want to be near these people. So when people say, and they did with that person I identified who was obviously a nasty little anti-Semite, when they said, oh, you've no idea

how many people are going to turn on you about this. I said, I don't care. Why would I care? Why would I care? Why would I want to be aligned with people who thought that Vladimir Putin was the savior of Christendom and a devout, honest Christian who must sort of provide the bulwark to the madness of left-wing liberalism? Of course not. I don't want to be anywhere near these people. And as for the Trump point, by the way, I mean, sorry, it sounds like only because the nature of the question, I don't sound too self-defensive, but no less a platform than the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida last year. I was on a stage with several people you'd know, and the question of Trump came up, I criticized Trump in front of an audience that was mainly supportive of him. And I said, there is something absolutely unsustainable about the fact that in front of an audience like this, I mean, various people like Ted Cruz had spoken as well. And I said, one of the only dissenting notes of the conference, and I said among other things,

it is totally unsustainable that you have a situation where at a conference like this, somebody asks a question about Donald Trump, and everyone on the panel pretends to know less than they know about him. They pretend not to know that he's got a really horrible character, for instance, and pretend that merely his ability to win is what we like, and therefore we'll park everything else. We'll pretend that January the 6th didn't happen and that it's just the libertards going mad. I said that in front of that audience. Again, I'm not searching for popularity, but I would not want to be on a stage which included people who simply uncritically praised Donald Trump and join in with it. Why would I want to be anywhere near that?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm very glad I gave you an opportunity to get that off your chest, I'm very glad I gave you an opportunity to get that off your chest, because you're often lumped in with the people who do not make those points, which I think are absolutely just necessary concessions to political sanity. And it's a problem. So I just, you know. By the way, sorry, one other whilst I'm at it, which is I said immediately after, I covered the US election for a number of newspapers, and I traveled around about 10 states in the days before the 2020 election, in the weeks before the 2020 election. I went everywhere from, you know, sort of across the country, covered a

Trump rally in Florida. And the minute that the results came out, the right started to lie about them. I said then, and again in The Spectator, I said, this is going to be a real problem for us because these people are going to waste our time for years. They are going to waste our time with this conspiracy about this election. And they don't realize that they're not just wasting our time, they're wasting their own, because they will do the crucial mistake that always happens when people fall into this, as some Democrats did after 2016. They will fall into the mistake of thinking that they won and as a result they will not do the necessary self-searching that you need to do when

you've actually lost an election and work out why you've lost you know it's to their own fault as well it it it both demeans their opponents and it demeans themselves i said that straight away yeah so okay so let's again, before we dive into the left side of the chaos. No, we should focus on the right for sure. Yeah. No, I just want to see if I can find the generic essence of our problem first. I mean, I think we both are worried about what appears to be a derangement of our culture. And culture is not this expendable thing. Culture really is the operating system for humanity at this point. I mean, we have, insofar as we surmount mere nature, red in tooth and claw, we arrive fully in culture. And it's just the basis for every epistemic and emotional and

ethical engagement with our shared social reality. And politics is a strand of that, but there's much more to it than politics. And what we're seeing now is an environment where misinformation and moral panics and social contagion are getting made immensely worse by social media and current trends of loss of trust in institutions and just other forms of fragmentation of society. And again, this is, you know, whatever we're going to say about the left, as crazy as it is, and as easily seen to be in your recent book, you know, on the right, we have QAnon and the other odious exports from Trumpistan. I mean, just the amazing thing on the right, I mean, the moment I can't forget, and really it was the point of no return for us, I thought, politically, was when we had a sitting president repeatedly not commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the Republican Party was okay with that. And I mean, this precedes January 6th, and all the knock-on effects of that. But just in the run-up to the election, when we have a president who won't commit to arguably the most important norm politically in our system, upon which everything else that matters is anchored

politically. And that the Republican Party just swallowed that without comment, it seemed to me to be, it was a sign that we actually could lose our democracy in the hands of this buffoon. And I know you objected to that at the time as well, but it's so many people who will delight in the contents of your book and who want to hear everything we have to say about the craziness on the left just didn't care about that. Well, yeah. I'd say several things. One is, several years ago, our mutual friend Jordan Peterson and I did a discussion on video about where the left goes wrong, which was a discussion which I thought was really very interesting, very generative. And because of this idea that Jordan kicked off, which was, you know, we sort of have a clear idea of where the right goes wrong politically

and playing games of racial superiority, for instance, authoritarianism and much more. We don't have an absolutely clear blueprint by contrast of where the left goes wrong. And I think that's a totally accurate statement. And I think that it is a big problem. Where is it in collectivism? Where is it within the social justice movement that the left starts? How do you end up with the gulag? And we had a very interesting discussion about this. And one of the things looking back on it,

and I've said this since, including to Jordan, I said this to him, indeed, when we did a discussion on his podcast a couple of days after January the 6th, I said, when we did that discussion several years ago, we did it in the belief that it was clear where the right went wrong and that the right was therefore unlikely to go wrong. And we can no longer make that assumption. We're having to revisit those statements, those basic underpinnings that we thought everybody had. We do actually have to revisit them. And we did, by the way. And again, I don't say this by any means to search for praise but neither jordan nor i got any particular love from followers for this but i said to him this is a very important thing that two figures who are more identified as being on the right than the left certainly make it plain that that this

is where the right goes wrong and the discussion we had, I thought, rather helpfully helping each other to the following realization. I think the best way I could sum it up is I said, if you went back five years from where we were then to say like 2015, and you said there was going to be a time in 2020 in American politics where a significant amount of the right is going to believe the following, politics, where a significant amount of the right is going to believe the following, that no media is telling the truth, that no politicians tell the truth, that the law courts are all totally corrupted, that every one of the intelligence agencies is totally corrupted, that the ballot is totally corrupted, to the extent that an election is going to be stolen. But you have one great virtue on your side. There is one virtuous man in the Republic.

And you know who that man is? It's the dude off The Apprentice. Yes, Donald J. Trump. Now, if you just said that to anyone in 2015, they just said, oh, sorry. And also the vice president, Mike Pence, he's also completely corrupted and not a conservative. If you just said that to somebody in 2015, they just said, you're a maniac.

How is that going to happen? How am I going to end up in a position where the only man who I'm going to trust and possibly turn up for the Capitol and risk my life for and risk other people's lives for is Donald J. Trump, of all the people. Yes. That's a point I've almost made before in the following forum. Back in 2015, I would have said that there was literally not a single Fortune 500 company in America that would have ever had the thought, the situation is really grim for us. What we need is a complete rebooting of our organization. We need to bring in a new CEO. We need to find them. And we have found the most competent, most inspiring person for the job. And

that man is Donald Trump. That would have been- We've done a headhunting exercise guys and we've come back with a song a man of high integrity that's what we need yes never knowingly told an untruth yeah yes but so this is this is definitely a problem and it's a problem of i would say particularly of the american right and the the problem is obviously that there is something that trump taps into which they fear that nobody else can and i don into, which they fear that nobody else can. And I don't know whether they're right or not. I have no electoral crystal ball. What I do know also is that there's one other instinct, which is worth highlighting, which is that for some years, I think, in the cultural realm and others, there was a perception on the conservative side that conservatives had played too nice.

That basically what happened was the left advanced incrementally and sometimes actually in bounds. That it enjoyed rubbing the right's noses in its defeats. That conservatives were too gentlemanly to ever do anything other than slightly slow down that progress of the left or to fight the next battle they were going to lose. And that this was the sort of trajectory of politics. Now, again, I'm not saying that I agree with it or disagree with it or whether it's true or not. That was a perception on the right. And the point that Donald Trump came along, as far as it seems to me, and I, by the way, I tried for most of his presidency not to write about him because I thought that since everyone on the planet had a thought, it wasn't particularly worth my while adding to the melee. And I thought the same with Brexit, incidentally, after the Brexit vote happened, not that they're connected.

But I just, I tend not to, if everybody on the planet is writing about the same thing, I tend not to want to join in the cacophony. And also because it seemed to me there was relatively little to add. But just to return to this point, there was this perception on the right, particularly in America, and they did something which I think is both understandable and reprehensible, which was to essentially choose as a tool of fight, a weapon of fighting, the weapon that they believed would most upset their opponents. It effectively goes to that instinct to hurt your enemy, not to just win, to kick them in the balls. And Donald Trump was that dirty fighter. And the right suddenly, or a section of the right suddenly

got excited about that they got excited about the fact there was somebody who took the fight to the enemy who you know literally calling them the enemy that who would derange the other side you know all that sort of liberal tears sort of thing yeah it was it was rejoicing in it saying basically we're so fed up because we've spent years being bullied, and so we're going to have some fun being the bully. And that is, as far as I can see, the dynamic that led to Donald Trump. And because the Republicans don't know whether they can tap into that feeling of resentment without his aid, they're sort of sticking around him. That's why you have this ludicrous dance that's going on at the moment where no one will declare. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one, again, in the

service of looking for some place where that we might discern some daylight between us. I think there's going to be very little, but there's one instance that I am genuinely undecided about, I mean, in the rubble of our information space, one thing stands out to me recently. I don't know if you've written about it, or I think I've heard you comment about it briefly on a podcast, but the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, right? Mm-hmm. That is a... I genuinely don't know what I think should have happened there, because let's just summarize the state of our knowledge currently is that it was treated like pornography journalistically and suppressed by social media.

Twitter, I think, delinked New York Post's account. I think you couldn't forward the story any longer. That's right. And all of this was done immediately before the election. This was some kind of October surprise. And at the time, I didn't know what to think about it. I didn't know any more than anyone else knew who was being denied access to the information. if Hunter Biden had severed heads in his basement, right? I mean, there was literally nothing you could have told me about Hunter Biden that would have been relevant to me when the goal was to keep Trump out of office at that point, right?

Because it was just, I did view Trump given, you know, the aforesaid non-commitment to the most important principle of the survival of our democracy, I viewed him as an existential threat. And given what had happened in 2016 with Comey reopening the email, the case into Hillary Clinton's emails, we know that though her failure to win the presidency was certainly overdetermined, we know that in the last 11 days of the campaign, that was the coup de grace, right? And this could have proved the same for

the election of Biden, because it was going to be this bright, shiny object that was going to captivate everyone and suck up all the oxygen. So I honestly don't know what I think should have happened there because I think you and I will agree that there really is a problem when you have our preeminent sources of journalism pretending that a significant story is in fact a non-story. I guess I should close the loop on this. It's recently been admitted by the New York Times in an article to which they gave very little oxygen that, oh, sorry, guys, this really was a story and it was legitimate. And there are all kinds of heinous things on that laptop. And who knows to what degree it suggests the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family in their engagement overseas.

So I don't know how you feel about that, but I don't know what the counterfactual is, what might have been done differently that would have been within bounds ethically, journalistically, but I don't know what I would change about the past with respect to that story, given the outcome. I should declare an interest. I do write a weekly column for the New York Post,

which is the paper that broke the story, of course. I wasn't actually writing for the Post at the time, apart from occasionally, and now I'm a regular, so I just add that as it were, just in case anyone thinks there's a conflict of interest. But I had no involvement in the Hunter by Laptop story, but I know the people who were involved in it. I think that it was a catastrophic mistake to silence the Post, America's oldest newspaper, at that moment. I thought it was a decision by

a few big tech companies who were basically helping Biden out to win the election. The contents of the laptop, there's a good book by a colleague of mine at the New York Post, Miranda Devine, who did a lot of the work on the story, one of the people who had access to everything on the laptop. There's a very good book about it now called Laptop from Hell, which if you read or even you read excerpts from, you'll see that the problem is, I should stress, I'm not that prurient person. And I actually have no, I mean, nobody's not prurient,

but I genuinely have no interest in the rather sad private life of Hunter Biden. And I would have thought that a lot of the story would have got caught up with that, was people looking at dick pics and falling asleep with smack beside him and this sort of thing. I have no interest in that. And I don't think it would have made any serious change to the election. That wasn't the real story. The story was, as you mentioned, the fact that Hunter Biden had been making money,

among other places, in Ukraine to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to sit on a board of an energy company in a discipline he doesn't have, in a country he doesn't know, in a job he wasn't doing. Now, does that matter? You might say no. What matters is comes across in some of the emails, which now not only the New York Times, but the Washington Post has said, okay, the emails are true. And by the way, they could have done all of this back then. It wasn't hard to, you could have called up anyone who was on

the receiving end of any of the emails, of the many emails that are on the laptop, and say, is this actually an email from Hunter Biden to you? And they could have confirmed or denied. It would not have been a hard story to have chased up and followed up as the Post did then. But none of the rest of the media came in behind. And the things that are on about the business thing should concern people. I mean, I think the top of American politics is more corrupt than almost any other civilized nation, it has to be said.

There is something outrageous about the amount of money that could be accrued at the top of American politics, both during and after office. And that is not exclusive to any one party. I think that it is, I mean, whenever there's a financial scandal in the UK, by comparison, it is laughable, you know. $15 change stands. Yeah, exactly. Somebody was, there was a backbench Labour MP at the time who got into incredible trouble because she expensed a whirlpool bath that cost £800. I was in America,

this would be absolutely nothing compared to Nancy Pelosi's share deals. But the point is that the interesting thing in the laptop was Hunter saying to his daughter, for instance, whatever I do to you in your life, know that I will never do what my father did to me and demand half of all the money I earn. Now, that is a very interesting story, if true. If it's true that Hunter Biden makes money and the father hives part of it off, and we know that the uncle takes part. Look, the problem is that nobody on the left, as far as I can see, particularly wants to engage in this. Why? Because they'll say, but Trump. They don't like it, they wish it away, and they'll say, but Trump. Well, that is exactly what the right does with some of the Trump stuff. They say, but Biden, but Democrats, but Hillary. And so they should have published. I don't think the private prurient stuff would have made any difference. But I think that a realization that the top level of American politics is wildly corrupt, that family members of people, again, in both parties, become rich when their relatives enter the White House, Congress, or what's more. I think that is

something that's worth confronting. Would it have changed the results of the election? I don't know. Nobody does know. But the New York Post was completely right to run because this was a hell of a story. And the rest of the media were woefully gave themselves away by not reporting. And the media companies revealed what was revealed after the election, which was, anyone could tell, which was a lot of the tech bosses and others were so desperate to make sure that Trump didn't win the election, that they were willing to suppress news that was negative about Biden. I think that's a scandal. I think it is part of the thing that leads to this ever-increasing distrust in every single entity of power and information. Yeah, no, I agree. I just think that Trump,

given his, I would argue, treasonous non-commitment to the most basic principles of our democracy. He's a singular problem that had to be solved at that moment. Well, I would have said that American democracy, let's take the idea of Trump being a kind of stress test of the American Republic. The American Republic survived him. Now, you might think it was closer. By the skin of our teeth. By the skin of our teeth, but it survived. Court survived.

The democracy survived. But it was down to a handful of people who would just not exceed to his demands. Had Mike Pence done as instructed, had a few Republican election officials done as instructed, we would have had an absolute constitutional crisis, the resolution to which was just non-obvious. Absolutely. But they did stand up. Lindsey Graham did say on the floor of the House on the 6th of January, I have asked repeatedly for evidence of this fraud in the election, and he doesn't

provide it to me. So I agree that too many people went along with it. There were mad theories going around. Almost none of it has stood up since. But let me just return to this issue of the laptop, because it's important in terms of this issue of trust in American politics, which disturbs the hell out of me. The problem with the Post story was not just the suppression of the story, but what you described, Sam, the joint letter by intelligence chiefs saying this is classic Russian disinformation. Here's the problem. In my view, every single person who signed that letter should lose their pension, should be cashiered, should be disgraced. Why? Because these were people involved in the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, who

became political actors in order to support the suppression of a newspaper, breaking a story that enabled Joe Biden to be elected president. It was a wildly political intervention. And it has... Except, though, Douglas, we know that there was massive Russian meddling into every aspect of the conversation. I mean, on social media, with the hacking of the DNC, there was a continuous assault upon our democracy with a kind of information warfare campaign from Russia. upon our democracy with a kind of information warfare campaign from Russia. So it was certainly plausible to think that this might have been Russian compromise of some kind. It's not a crazy allegation. On the contrary, I think it is. I think that both sides have wound themselves up in American politics in recent years, and politicized institutions that should never have been politicized, and have overemphasized this allegation that the democracy has been

hacked. The Democrats did it immediately after the 2016 election. Again, it's not a popular point to make to some Democrat listeners, but what Donald Trump did in 2020 was unforgivable. But part of his ability to get away with it, I believe, came from the fact that there were so many Democrats who were not willing to believe that he had been legitimately elected in 2016 either. In other words, what I'm saying is, you might say it's a 1% injection of falsehood or a 5% injection. But the point is, is that it was already up for grabs in America, that the ballot was not secure, is that it was already up for grabs in America, that the ballot was not secure,

that the vote was not secure, that you could be hacked by Russia and actually it didn't matter. Now, here's the thing. You're now at this stage, and I wrote this some time ago, if you translate this into the British context. In Britain, if you had a situation where conservatives, never mind, we can put the left side for the second, I can do the same exercise on the left. Conservatives didn't believe that any of the following institutions were on their sides. The court, the ballot, MI5, MI6, the police, the GCHQ. If they believed that all of these institutions and more were against them, these people would no longer be conservatives. They would be something else, but they would not be conservatives. You cannot be a conservative

if you believe that there are no institutions in the state that are trustworthy. Hence what's so strange about the Republican Party at the moment. You could argue it's not at all conservative. I think there's a lot of truth in that. And again, the problem with it is that there is an element in everything that they believe on this that is true. It is true that the intelligence services, for instance, in the US have massively politicized themselves. Unnecessarily, they have therefore ended up losing the trust of even the political side that would be most likely to be nascently supportive of them as an institution of state.

Again, to give one other example, when in our lifetimes before could you have imagined a situation, not when the left derided and dismissed the heads of the armed forces, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but where the right did? That's the extraordinary terrain that we're now in. Yeah. And we were in there quite early on, just during the campaign, when Trump derided John McCain and his service as a war hero and prisoner of war and suffered absolutely no political penalty for it.

Oh, I remember very clearly sitting in a friend's house in America the day that that story broke on the front of the Post, and I remember this friend who'd been in politics all her life saying, that's him done, you know. And of course it wasn't. I mean, it happened that on the right there wasn't that much love for John McCain. It turned out there was a certain amount of respect, not much love for him. But still, for somebody who had skipped the draft, to be deriding somebody who'd spent years

in a prison of war camp and who had refused to leave until his men had left was a very, I agree, a very strange and sinister turn of things. So where do you sit? This is an adjacent, lurid topic. Where do you sit on the subject of deplatforming people like, well, Trump is one case from Twitter, but maybe a clearer case is someone like Alex Jones. Are you a free speech absolutist of the sort that you think that, forgive me for leading the witness quite this hard, think that private companies should be forced to give a megaphone to someone like Alex Jones, who with every tweet is ruining the lives of identifiable people?

In general, I am, yes. I certainly think Trump should be on Twitter. In general, I am, yes. I certainly think Trump should be on Twitter. But why wouldn't you take the company's eye view of that? If I start a social media platform tomorrow, why should I be forced to put any particular person who I want to exclude? Well, effectively, it's the thing that Elon Musk pointed out the other week when he started his bid for Twitter, which is whether we like it or not, Twitter is the public square. And this dance between private company and that is a tricky one. It is a private company. They can make their own decisions. However, it is true that if the tech platforms decide to downregulate you, dampen you, or let alone chuck you off, you are left essentially voiceless.

Yeah, but clearly, all of these companies have terms of service, which if you violate them by declaring a change, but in any plausible terms of service, you would think that ramping up the risk of nuclear war or singling out private individuals who you know, based on the insane multitude following you, will be doxxed immediately and have their lives ruined. And then, in fact, that's why you target them, right? But people do that all the time. A Washington Post reporter just did that to someone. You know, a Washington Post reporter,lor taylor lorenz just docs this woman who the private individual who runs this account called libs of tiktok that's pretty

revealing quite funny and has a big following and um and she uh she had only a couple weeks beforehand being complaining about what it's like when a twitter mob comes for you and indeed cried on air talking about this i mean this goes in all, she doxed him and he runs his account. I mean, this goes in all directions. I'm not saying it makes Alex Jones right. And by the way, in the Alex Jones case, I think it's less clear with him because, I mean, it's just so obvious. But, I mean, the courts are taking care of him. The families of the Sandy Hook victims who he defamed and lied about,

he's being looked after in the courts. I mean, it's a really, it's, I mean, and just one other thing, it's an obvious point to make, it doesn't quite solve the deeper point you're trying to get to, but of who gets the right to the dart gun, which is, of course, what Twitter is. But it's nevertheless crucial to say that if a platform like Twitter actually cared about, you know, threatening entities on the site. They wouldn't have kept the accounts of the Russian government open all this time. They wouldn't have the supreme leader of Iran.

Al-Akhshari Taiba, who carried out the Mumbai massacre, remained on Twitter until a couple of years ago, when I actually alerted one of the heads of the company to the fact that I thought this was a bit too close to home for most Indian citizens, and much more. They're not fit for purpose. Companies like Twitter grew, they're a small thing that grew far too fast, have ended up having to understand free speech and seem apparently not to have thought about the subject until yesterday. And they're incredibly inept, and they get inept people to ineptly police these platforms. Yeah, well, I agree there. And it may actually be an impossible task, right, to actually moderate billions upon billions of posts effectively.

But it seems to me that if you, for instance, had a no-doxing policy, you know, doxing is an unrecoverable error on this platform. Well, then the question is, you should be free to have, I mean, in my view, you should be free to have that policy and then do your best to enforce it. And if you see irregularities in its enforcement, well, then those are worthy of criticism. So Washington Post writer is probably up for defenestration also if she doxes people. But it just seemed clear that the most prominent examples of people... I mean, the case of Alex Jones, you have parents whose six-year-olds were murdered, and he was monetizing their agony by claiming that they weren't murdered and that they were just crisis actors.

And there's some of these families that have had to move, literally change homes 10 times since their kids were murdered because of his insane cult that is following them. It's wicked. It's wicked. But I mean, we come back to this thing of how on earth you run this. And clearly nobody exactly knows. I mean, if you and I were on the board of Twitter, I think we would struggle with it as well. I don't think there's any obvious solution. I know there are some things that are also, I think, incumbent upon people not to do themselves to make the situation worse. Can I give a quick example? Sure. Which is not even in the realm of laws, but in the realm of manners.

I'm consistently horrified by the number of people, particularly young people, who are willing to put out on social media things I simply think they should not put out. My rule on this is never ever say anything that you don't want to be used back at you because you can just bet your life it will be you know send out a photo of yourself and someone will say you don't look great fine send out a photo of yourself with your wife somebody will say something about your wife that's the name of the game send out a photograph your children not everyone's going to love your children and so on and so on uh somebody i know a little bit recently divorced announced news on twitter and a load of people get into it and celebrate it and are laughing at him and so

on and i just look at this i think why on earth would you announce stuff about your private life on this bloody platform so i do think part of it and this is obviously isn't the case with the sandy hook parents or anyone who who just were thrown into this situation but a lot of what people complain about on social media of what they get back is a result of them feeding the beast themselves in the first place and there are things that if you put out there you're just not going to get 100% positive likes back it's an ugly medium it It's an ugly platform. And I have infinite compassion for the people who suffer from it and what's happened with the victims of Alex Jones, but not when it comes to the, I said this thing, and now I've been criticized, and I'm upset,

and now I've got PTSD sort of thing. And I'm afraid that is so commonplace now, the cry bully thing, where people behave one way on social media and can't take it in response and complain then. You know, there are plenty of cry bullies on these platforms, and I don't have much sympathy for that. We're new to this situation that evolution, neither evolution nor previous culture has prepared us, which is you can join a mob, a virtual mob, and perform a reputational murder on someone, and you can be the object of a mob like that, and you never quite know what it's like until you're on the receiving end. Yes, but also, I mean, people do have to try to find a way to live their lives without this having maximal impact. I mean, you know, I do think there's sort of, as I say, the realm of manners in this, the realms of customs,

that we should also try to come towards a better type of custom with these platforms. In the same way that we did with email early on do you remember sort of the beginning of email you know people would sort of pass around crazy stories about how if you eat tomatoes you know you could you will never get cancer that sort of thing and just quite early on those sorts of people who would send those things around learned that people didn't want to get them and stopped or at least that was my experience you know please don't send me this shit. Thank you. And they stopped.

I mean, we're just not quite there yet or not remotely there yet with a platform as furious and as fast as Twitter. So, I mean, you know, we have to assist our own behavior as well as hoping that Twitter can solve its side of the problem. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, I'm not sure how much we disagreed in there. I think if we were on the Twitter board, we might disagree about who to de-platform. But would you acknowledge that,

I mean, do you just think Twitter should be declared essentially effectively no longer a private company able to function by its own policies, but more like the town square that just has to function in deference to the First Amendment? Yeah, I think it's basically the Wild West, and there's not much you can do about it. And you have to decide whether you want to go into the saloon. Right. It just seems strange that... Because, again, I take the company's eye view of this. You start a company. For instance, I think,

you know, actually I recommended that Jack Dorsey pull the plug on Twitter at some point, and he would have been given the Nobel Prize for peace. Yes, I suggested Elon Musk send it into outer space. Yeah, no, so Elon's buying Twitter as of the hour we're recording this, it seems that's happening, and taking it private. If he's doing that all with his own money, I'm not sure he is, but let's say he were to do that, couldn't he just destroy the entire thing and say, I'm doing you all a favor? He could do. The interesting thing about it, as you know, is that the people who try to set up rivals to it, it doesn't actually work. Somebody said to me the other day, assume that Elon's a rather smart guy. There must be a reason why he hasn't tried to

start his own Twitter. It's just hard to get to... Once you get the kind of traction people have on Twitter, he's got 80 million plus people following him. It's hard to imagine starting that on a new platform. just pull the plug on it, effectively cancelling or deplatforming everyone, why can't you deplatform Alex Jones for his misbehaviour? Well, as I say, I would regard him as being a borderline case. I don't know. I think basically once you get into the realms of harassment, which is where he was, that's a viable case for taking somebody off. I haven't

really thought enough about his particular case because I don't follow him very closely. But I know that it's basically unsustainable that an American company deplatforms the US president and doesn't deplatform the Ayatollah of Iran. It's wild. Yeah, but I just hear that as an argument for deplatforming both of them given who they are well that that could be the case although i wouldn't agree with the moral equivalency but yeah it could be the case i mean as i say all of these things set themselves up and end up having to run the town square and they're just clearly not suitable for the task i don't i don't know what all the answers are to it. But as I say, most people don't like the unfairness thing. I mean, personally,

I think it was wrong to throw Trump off Twitter. But I mean, there are obviously upsides. I mean, not least that every day's news is now not about Donald Trump and what he tweeted today. I mean, that's quite a relief. Yeah. No, it definitely had the desired effect, right? I mean, he's not gone, but he is in a kind of oblivion with respect to the rest of culture and the news cycle. And I think that was a good thing. I mean, I do view, you know, again, it's only, it is a historical fact that he was president of the United States, but I actually think it's more accurate to describe him now as the most dangerous cult leader on earth. I just think there's just no telling what harm he's capable of creating if he manages to continue to hold half of American society or a third of American society in his

thrall. And it's the most deranging thing to happen in our lifetime, including a global pandemic. I think it's one of them. I don't think it's the most deranging. I think it's one of the most deranging. But we've lived in several very, very long years where every day has enough information to derange some people. And whereas I've often said that the range of the things that have come across us and afflicted us from Trump to pandemic to Afghanistan to Ukraine to all of this stuff, the range of things, means that almost nobody is ending up in exactly the same place as their erstwhile bedfellows.

Except the derangement of all of those other things, so much of the onus of that falls on Trump. I mean, so explain to me why you have Republicans, you know, otherwise sane, you have Republicans, you know, otherwise sane, well-intentioned human beings, one must presume, lionizing Vladimir Putin at this point in history. I mean, that would have been unthinkable, I think, but for Trump, right? I mean, is there some other mechanism that got that meme into their heads? Yes, I think so. I think that there is, as I say, I've written repeatedly against these people, but I think that there is a section of the right that was misled by Vladimir Putin. And whether it's stupidity or ignorance or generational loss of memory, I don't know. I think it's a combination of all of these things. But there was certainly an element of the right that in recent years has said that American liberalism has gone so wrong, that we need a bulwark against it. And the bulwark is, and they looked around for people, but one of them that some of them landed on was

Vladimir Putin. And I always said this is so monumentally stupid, among other things, because you had to take Vladimir Putin at his own word. I mean, you had to actually pretend that he was this devout, pious ex-KGB man who said his prayers and was going to lead Christendom to revival. You know, you had to actually believe he was sincere in that. And if you believe that, you're a damn fool. You know, you had to believe that somebody who's used jihadi mercenaries from Chechnya to go and slaughter Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, not that one should need to talk in these terms, but let's talk in those terms for a moment, that that person is somehow the defender of the Christian faith. I mean, it's so unbelievably stupid.

But there is, yes, there was an element of the right in recent years that fell for that, plus some that just had no history and memory of the Cold War, no memory of what the KGB or the Kremlin, let's just say, does. And then there were the people who were so fed up with false claims of overstatements of what Russia had done in recent years, that they believed that the Kremlin was a sort of quiescent, pacifist-like institution that never did anything. You know, I mean, it's maddening in itself, but there were so many people who fell for this, and I thought that it was an unbelievable error. And what has happened in Ukraine is one of the fastest demonstrations of a moral error that I've ever seen.

Okay, well, let's take the turn toward the left and its assault on Western civilization, where you and I will be singing from the same hymn book, because you wrote the hymn book, and I just read it. So I think we, just as you thought it was unseemly to have to spell out the problem with recruiting jihadi mercenaries to attack Orthodox Christians as though the identities would be especially relevant to the moral calculus there. I'm going to lead us in a brief exercise of masochism to just inoculate some people in our audience against the rest of our conversation, I think we need to start with the obligatory acknowledgement that we are two white guys about to express our opinions on many combustible topics. I guess, half tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely. First, let me just spell out, I consider it morally and intellectually obscene to have to take note of our skin color as a preface to this

conversation. But the truth is that there are only so many hills I'm willing to die on. And I do think it's prudent for us to acknowledge what any sane and compassionate person knows to be true, which is that racism and other forms of bigotry are odious, and that Western culture has been replete with bigotry of all types, as has every culture. And there is certainly some residual racism and bigotry left to expunge, and there is nothing that you and I will say that should suggest an unawareness, much less a denial of these facts. Yeah. So I don't know if that's, I'm sure you can more or less sign on to that. I mean, it seems to me that one of the great disappointments of what I describe as the re-racialization of the public square, one of the great disappointments about it is that you even have to talk about yourself in terms of skin color. And that it seems so obvious to me and has done for as long as I can remember that you would in any way identify yourself because of it.

that you would in any way identify yourself because of it. It's like somebody asked me recently what I was proud about, about being a man. And I said to her, this is the second stupidest question I can imagine after being asked what I was proud about, about being white. You know, I'm not proud of things I haven't done.

I don't see why you would be like being proud of being five, 10. What the hell is that? So yes, I think it's just already deplorable at the start that we are being urged to think of ourselves in these terms, because they are precisely the terms that I had been brought up to regard as being so unimportant that we didn't talk about that. Well, I think you and I agree that the appropriate goal here with respect to political and moral progress is to arrive in some happy future where race simply does not matter. It has no moral or political valence to it, right? No cares to me you said to me once i think

maybe in a previous discussion that it would end up having as much importance as your hair color yeah yeah and just and if you just roll that back in the other direction imagine how insane and counterproductive it would seem if if we could look ahead and predict that at some point in the future, people were going to care about hair color to the degree that they currently care about race. We'll want to know how many blondes got into Harvard this year. And if it doesn't exactly match the population level, we've got a real problem on our hands. Yes, I'd go into a bookshop and say, I'd like to see the section written by ginger-haired authors. I'd go into a bookshop and say, I'd like to see the section written by ginger-haired authors.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, just as that would be a problem, the ethical daylight ahead of us is in arriving at some colorblind future. And yet, not only is, and that was the goal of someone like, you know, the leading lights of the civil rights movement, people like Martin Luther King Jr., but it's not only not the goal of the current religion of anti-racism, it's explicitly not the goal. That goal is disavowed by many people. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, this is the great moral error that's going on. And I think there's a little bit of a link to my previous book,

because in the Madness of Crowds, I described what I said and what I described as the temptation. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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 Thank you.