Making Sense with Sam Harris - #285 — American Division

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with David French about forces that are pulling American society apart. They discuss David’s experience as a JAG officer in Iraq, his experience of harassment for coming out against Trump, the way real grievances drive political derangement, the illiberalism on both the Left and the Right, the role of prophecy in Evangelical support for Trump, honor culture, the response to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the January 6th hearings, the personality cult of Trumpism, federalism, geographic sorting, group polarization, cultural divisions in sports and entertainment, the gun rights movement, the ethics of gun ownership, whether Trump will be prosecuted, the 2024 Presidential campaign, the dangers of online activism, 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with David French. David is a senior editor at the Dispatch and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and he was previously a senior writer for National Review and a columnist for Time magazine. He is a former constitutional litigator and past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education. He's also

a New York Times best-selling author. And his most recent book is Divided We Fall, America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. David is also a former major in the United States Army Reserve and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. And in this conversation, we talk about all of the forces that are pulling American society apart. We discuss David's experience as a JAG officer in Iraq and his experience of being harassed to really an extraordinary degree by the far right for coming out against Trump. We talk about the way that real grievances drive political derangement, the illiberalism on both the left and the right, the role of prophecy in evangelical support for Trump,

Prophecy in Evangelical Support for Trump, Honor Culture, the response to Hunter Biden's laptop, the January 6th hearings, the personality cult of Trumpism, federalism, geographic sorting, group polarization, cultural divisions in sports and entertainment,

the gun rights movement, the ethics of gun ownership, whether Trump will be prosecuted, the looming 2024 presidential campaign, the dangers of online activism, and other topics. Anyway, it was great to finally get David here. I've been an admirer of his work for a long time, even though I know there are many topics on which we disagree. He is, after all, a religious conservative, but that made his perspective on the issues we did discuss all the more valuable. And now I bring you David French.

I am here with David French. David, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. I'm honored. Yeah, me too. I've long been an admirer of your short-form writing. Your last book is the first book of yours I've read in anticipation of this podcast, which we'll talk about. But yeah, it's great to finally speak with you because your political commentary has been more than edifying, lo, these many years where everything seems to have gone toward the brink and in many cases into the abyss. Yeah, I did not have this level of extremism. If you talked to me 20 years ago, I would not have seen this level of extremism, but it started emerging pretty soon after that, and now here we are.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let's catch people up on your background here before we get started. Your most recent book, which came out in 2020, is Divided We Fall, which talks about this problem of American division that we're going to get into. And you focus on the prospect of secession, actual secession, the actual fragmentation of the political union of the United States. And we'll talk about that as well. I mean, on its face, that has always seemed like a highly implausible threat. And yet you make it sound all too plausible when you get into the details in the book. And I can only imagine since the book came out nearly two years ago, it came out right before the 2020 election, I assume things have only gotten worse in the meantime. Is that right? How do you view the last 18 plus

months since you published the book? Yeah, I would say that things have accelerated worse. They've accelerated more than I thought they would. I was pessimistic, but I did not see, for example, January 6th occurring when I wrote the book. I did not see, for example, things like the Texas GOP, one of the largest and most influential wings of the Republican Party in the United States, calling for a secession referendum in Texas. Now, doubtful it will happen anytime soon, but this kind of conversation and this level of polarization is absolutely something that's accelerated. And when I wrote the book, I was nervous about using the word secession. I was nervous about

introducing the concept. But what I saw was that we didn't have, and this is something I say right up front, that there is no single truly important cultural, political, religious, social trend that is pulling us together more than it's pushing us apart. And it's not just politics. It's where we live. It's how we live. It's our pop culture. It's so many different fronts are sort of pushing us apart. Yeah. I mean, so I must admit, I had a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of I have a I had a knee jerk reaction to the concept of secession as just being a bridge or several bridges too far. And it just sounds so implausible. But when I actually look at the assumptions that are that are anchoring that reaction, it's just there's so many assumptions like these that have been destroyed in recent years. I mean, I never would have imagined.

Right. has become a reality. But it will always seem implausible to me, even though it's already happened. And the idea that we would have a Republican Party that is not only accepting, but enthusiastically embracing a president, a former president who not only failed to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, but engineered a violent one. Right. You know, it's just beyond shocking. So it's, you know, the idea that we could live in a world where Texas or California could ultimately secede, I mean, that just, you know, not that many more dominoes have to fall to make those events seem plausible. Right. Well, think about what we've learned about January 6th since January 6th. There are two things, both before the 6th and after the 6th, that are particularly sobering to me. So before the 6th, what's incredibly sobering is that there was,

as we've now learned, this incredibly comprehensive effort to overturn the results of the election that depended a great deal on if Mike Pence had just said yes, where would we have been? We would have been through the looking glass on a constitutional crisis. And all of this pressure focused on Mike Pence saying yes to this comprehensive scheme to either flip the results right there on January 6th or send them back to the states and then creating an enormous amount of chaos. And then after Mike Pence says no, this is one thing that's incredibly sobering to me, is if you look at the approval ratings of Donald Trump and Mike Pence after January 6th, only one of the two, their approval rating plunges in its Mike Pence, not Donald Trump. moment of his presidency, who then appeals to his faith as an evangelical, who is sort of the representative of the evangelical base in the Trump administration, appeals to his faith to do the

right thing, and he's rejected by his own movement in favor of Donald Trump. And to me, in some ways, that was as sobering as all of the events that happened before, that not even the shock of the moment of January 6th could shake people from this hyper-partisanship and animosity and distrust that led them down the road of the Stop the Steal effort. Well, I want to get to January 6th and Trump and all the attendant horrors there, but I promised to properly introduce you, which I will have done in the intro. But I think you should say something about your orientation here, because lest you be mistaken for the usual libtard who's just

nodding along with my libtard blasphemy here. What is your political background? Yes. So I grew up a Republican. I was a Reagan Republican from way back, conservative lawyer, pro-life, religious liberty attorney, ran for a while the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is a civil liberties nonprofit defending free speech and due process and religious freedom and higher education, and then was a part of Christian conservative legal organizations, was a delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention. So I was definitely a Republican, a Romney delegate. And then in 2016, I broke with their GOP over Trump. So going all the way back to the early phase of the primary season, I could not continue to support a party that would put that person as its leader.

So did you break the moment he became the candidate? Before, well, I broke with the Republican Party the moment he became the candidate. I became never Trump, to use that phrase, much earlier when he was a frontrunner. Once I began realized that I could not look at myself in the mirror, much less my fellow citizens who I'm, you know, in the 1990s, I'm somebody who's standing and yelling character matters, character matters, character matters about Bill Clinton. I couldn't do that in 1998 and then turn around in 2016 and say, oh, well, you know, forget all that. Yeah. And also you're a veteran, right? You were in the Army?

Yes, I was in the Army Reserve, and I was active duty serving in the Iraq War during the surge in 2007, 2008. I was a JAG officer, Army lawyer. I served with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Diyala, Diyala Province during the surge. And what's the experience of a lawyer in combat? I mean, do you actually, are you just cowering in the green zone looking at legal briefs? Are you out

there risking your life in various operations that require the presence of a lawyer? What's going on there? So it's a mix. So I was with a combat arms unit. So I was not in the green zone. So I was out in Diyala province, far, far away from the green zone in Baghdad. And my commander, my squadron commander, I was with an armored cavalry squadron, was very clear. He said, you cannot make decisions that impact the lives of soldiers until you experience, and my cav troopers, until you experience what they experienced. So I was in the base a lot and I was outside of it a lot. So I was doing detainee operations. I was doing law of armed conflict, assisting the command and making decisions, you know, shoot, don't shoot, bomb, don't bomb. I was out doing tribal relations work. But, you know, one of the things, if I'm going to be in an armored cavalry squadron, I have to understand what the area of operations is like. And so I was outside the wire quite a bit doing various aspects of my job. but I get the sense that your experience in Iraq has primed you for various epiphanies and concerns

about the fragmentation you're witnessing in our own society. How do you see what's happening in the U.S.? I mean, it's not just the U.S., but we're focused at home here through the lens of the failed state of Iraq. Yeah, there was one specific aspect of the Iraqi civil war that really stood out to me as an alarm bell for us. And it was essentially, if you talk to Sunni or if you talk to Shia at the height of the war, the underlying divisions between them at some level seemed quite solvable. In other words, you could have a degree of religious tolerance where both Sunni and Shia could practice their faiths, which are somewhat different, but theyences in governance of each region, certainly manageable. But the thing that was truly difficult to deal with was the grievances. And when I say grievances, I mean real grievances. In other words, if you talk to a Shia militiaman and you start to explain, explore why they've taken up arms,

they're going to have a terrible story of what the Sunni have done to their family or done to their tribe and vice versa, vice versa with the Sunni telling about Shia atrocities. And what really strikes me about our divisions here is if you really, if you boil down a lot of the political disputes are subject to compromise. I mean, they're not unsolvable. I mean, even if you look at an issue like abortion, which the pro-choice and pro-life seem miles apart, but the large majority of Americans are in a more middle position. The political issues seem pretty darn solvable, but the level of animosity is what's really driving our polarization and this story of grievance and anger. And that's what struck me in Iraq was this constant feeling

of grievance and anger that was rooted in very real things that happened. We're starting to see replicate itself here, you know, to a lesser degree, thankfully, it's not, you know, we're not in a situation like Sunni and Shia were in Iraq. But if you talk to a Republican, they can tell you chapter and verse of terrible things that the left has done. If you talk to a progressive, they can tell you chapter and verse of terrible things that the right has done. And they're real things, you know, so they're actual real outrages that are driving a lot of our division. Yeah. Yeah. I think I noticed that in, again, a somewhat more abstract way in the careers of several people I know who have an experience I share to some degree. I mean, I know many people

on the left or who are formerly on the left who, with the eruption of wokeness, you know, pre and post Trump, experienced something like an attempted reputational murder from their fellow liberals, right? And, you know, you send the wrong tweet or you have the wrong position on Black Lives Matter, say, and what you meet among your former co-tribalists is nothing but contempt grading into a fully weaponized sociopathic attempt to destroy your life, right? And Twitter is the medium upon which most of this happens. And then I've noticed these people, many of whom have podcasts or they're out there spreading their views to one degree or another, I've noticed them migrate toward Trumpistan and some of them have been fully absorbed by it. And it's clearly a psychosocial phenomenon for

them. I mean, it's not like, I mean, these are people who were real liberals and it's not that the foundation of their political views has shifted. It's that they have been enrolled in a kind of psychological experiment, which from my point of view, they failed, right? I mean, they became intellectually dishonest to a degree that should seem impossible in order to kind of do the emotional arithmetic on what has happened to them. They got love-bombed by the right for everything they said against wokeness. And they got nothing but hate from the left. And so they just decided to just flip everything upside down in their politics and ignore all of the obvious problems with what's happening on the right, including the problems of Trump

himself. But it does capture the dynamics you just described, which is, you know, when you ask these people what the hell's going on, they have a long list of grievances, right? I mean, they have been attacked endlessly by the left in the most dishonest ways possible. And it's, you know, it just, that is what, you know, explains their pilgrim's progress to the dark lord. Yeah, well, you know, and we are, just as human beings, we long for relationship and community. And if you have been rejected by one community, if you've been purged, if you've been subject to a storm of hatred, you're going to look for another community. It's the most natural thing in the world in a way. But at the same time, if you're longing for community and then you're going to ignore

some of the real problems within that new community, you become in a sad way part of the problem that you're just switching from one flawed partisan tribe to another flawed partisan tribe because one of them rejected you, contributes to our crisis in some important ways. Because what it does is it causes your new tribe to feel validated by your presence. See, they're so bad. They're so bad. And look, we're much more

welcoming. But if you drill down into what's happened in this country, there is not a phenomenon. If you're going to talk about cancel culture, which a lot of people think of as mainly a left wing phenomenon, it's all over the place on the right, all over the place. And one of the things when I was researching the book that was very helpful for me, I was talking to some experts in conflict in the developing world who were beginning to refocus a lot of their efforts here in the United States because they were seeing some of the same things that cause civil strife overseas. They're seeing some of these same phenomenon here in the United States. And one of the most enlightening conversations I had was with a scholar who said, when there is a revolutionary or an extremist

moment, the first target of the extremists often isn't the other side. It's the quote, in-group moderate of their own side. Yeah, the near enemy. Yes, the near enemy. Yes, the near enemy. You have to purge the near enemy or the in-group moderate to create the solidarity necessary to fight that next battle. And when you see that phenomenon, you just see it everywhere. Some of the most vicious cancel culture or canceling you'll see is left on left, is blue on blue or red on red.

or canceling, you'll see, is left on left. It's blue on blue or red on red. In fact, it's actually pretty hard for blue to cancel red or red to cancel blue because you have that community that will rally to your side. Yeah. So what was your experience? Remind me, where were you working as a journalist when you announced that you were a never-Trumper, journalist when you announced that you were a never Trumper and what was that experience like? So I was at National Review and this is in 2015 when I first became very strongly critical of Trump. And then early 2016 was when I said I was going to be a never Trump. And we faced a hell storm from the beginning. I mean, in August 2015, I'll never forget is when the first round of death threats came in the first round of really horrific, uh, social media harassment, including, you know, taking pictures of my then seven-year-old youngest daughter who's adopted, and she's adopted

from Ethiopia, and Photoshopping her face into gas chambers and to slave pictures. Threats aimed at my wife, threats aimed at me, at my family, online harassment. All of this started happening in 2015, 2016, and it's never fully stopped. It just comes and goes. And remind me, so the National Review, was it the editorial position of the magazine to go against Trump, or were you just an outlier within the organization? So the magazine had a cover story called Against Trump that was against him in the primaries. So a cover story called Against Trump that was against him in the primaries. So the magazine formally came out against Trump in the primaries, but then did not endorse anyone in the general election. So the editorial position of the magazine in the election was neutral. And so I had a number

of colleagues who voted for Trump and a number of colleagues who did not. And National Review, because it's sort of historically been the flagship intellectual journal of the right, became the center of just an enormous amount of contention and pressure. Now, the magazine itself did a great job in sort of granting academic freedom to each one of its writers that we were, you know, no one told me to change my mind in leadership that I needed to support Trump if I was going to stay at National Review. But the pressures being put on National Review were incredibly strong. And look, a lot of the guys who are my friends, you know, my friends to this day, I'm not at National Review currently anymore,

but who are my friends to this day, they were pretty darn courageous in resisting the pressure to make National Review sort of a house organ of the Trump administration, which it never was. So let's see, I was thinking we would save Trump until the end, but the tractor beam pull of his awfulness is being felt with every sentence here. Let's, well, we may bounce around. I mean, this is a generic problem of hyperpolarization and what you refer to in the book as negative polarization, which we should describe, and just, you know, the loss of trust in our institutions, the fragmentation of media, the breakdown of civility, the upregulation of tribalism, conspiracy thinking. So there's the generic problem that visits the left and the right. I think it does so with some important

differences, which we might discuss, but I think we'll probably spend more time on the problem of the right. I think you and I will fully agree about the problem on the left and the right, frankly, and it's interesting to consider that because on paper, you and I are not in the same tribe. You and I are not in the same tribe, right? I mean, you're an evangelical Christian. I'm a famous atheist. I've said some very nasty things about your faith, which I got to think has not warmed you up for this conversation. And yet you and I are going to have an entirely civil conversation about all of these things. So what tribe are we in is the rhetorical question I would ask all of these things. So what tribe are we in, you know, is the

rhetorical question I would ask all of the people who accuse me. I don't know about you, but I'm often accused of tribalism, even though I attack the left, I attack the right, and I have positions that are not entirely predictable. For instance, you and I, I'm pretty sure, will disagree about abortion, and yet we're going to agree about guns. Tribalism does not capture the animus you and I are going to express on the various topics that will provoke our animus. in my view, is one of our greatest problems at this point. The idea that people feel this social pressure to conform to the sway of ascendant bad ideas, and in many cases, ideas which are obviously bad and claims which are obviously false. I guess before we lurch into Trumpistan, is there something general you can say about the different expression of this problem on the left and the right politically? Yeah. Well, you know, and one thing, just going back to what you were saying a moment ago about our differences, I think that while we certainly

have differences on a number of fronts, we're both small L liberals and both committed to American pluralism. So in other words, we both see a role in a place, and there should be a role in a place for each of us in the American system. And the American system is supposed to exist, is supposed to provide a place where atheist and Christian can live side by side and both communities can flourish. That's sort of a hallmark of the American classical liberal system when it's functioning well. And so I've always perceived you as being quite committed to American pluralism. And this is, I think, where a lot of the new... There's an old culture war, which is over things like gun control or abortion or religious liberty.

And it's being supplanted, I think, by a new culture war that is really, quite frankly, over liberalism and pluralism itself. And this is where I feel like the far right and the far left actually have a lot more in common than one might think. Woke and anti-woke have a lot in common. And the thing that they have in common is they are deeply questioning that American small L liberalism. They're deeply questioning pluralism.

And, you know, for example, the critical race theory argument. Now, there are elements of critical race theory that I've learned from, and I've read CRT stuff for 30 plus years since my first day of law school. But there are elements that I find to be quite troubling, including the way in which it directly confronts American small L liberalism, American classical liberalism. And you see a lot of that arising on the right as well. So while on one hand you might say, well, the left is quite different from the right because it's going to be very, very aggressive on trans rights and the right is going to be very aggressive in combating that move. scratch below the surface of both efforts is you'll see a lot of illiberalism, a lot of willingness to use the power of the state to force sort of compliance or to force by main force to sort of defeat your opponents, not just in the marketplace of ideas, convincing other people that they're wrong, but actually using the power of the state to punish your political opponents. And that's something that I think you're actually seeing a commonality between right and left that's disguised by the different issues that they advance. for me, and I know you've commented on this in other forums, is that when you're talking about the derangement of the left, you are talking about something that has spread like a proper

social contagion and moral panic in our most elite institutions, right? So if the true decision makers don't quite believe this stuff, they are swayed sufficiently by the people who do, that you see the capitulation of the New York Times and scientific journals like Science and Nature and The Lancet. see the ACLU become the antithesis of what it used to be, to say nothing of the Southern Poverty Law Center. You see this just a breakdown in elite institutions in Hollywood, et cetera, along these lines or on these issues. And what you see on the right is not, apart from the fact that we had a sitting president of the United States who was effectively the psychological and social equivalent of Alex Jones. I mean, that's its own unique danger and

derangement. But when you talk about the extreme of the right, you know, you talk about white supremacy, say, that is not, I mean, it is politically odious, and no doubt it's a reservoir of potential violence that we should worry about. But it doesn't drive culture in the same way that what's happening on the left drives culture. And I guess that's a distinction that may ultimately not matter all that much, but it's mattered to me because what's wrong with white supremacy, you know, what's wrong with the KKK, what's wrong with someone like David Duke is so obvious, right? It takes absolutely no intellectual fuel to point out what's wrong with that and to disparage it and to consider it, you know, disqualifying. But when you ask, you know, what's wrong with, you know, all of the intersectional confusion that is, you ask, what's wrong with all of the intersectional confusion that is causing people to call for the firings of people who simply balk at any claim that there are no difference between men and women, say. Right. Right. Like that is that's so confusing to so many people. And it's having such a outside influence on our conversation that it's much closer to home for me. I mean, when the New York Times is reliably wrong about, you know, trans issues or jihad important newspaper in the world visibly destroying itself.

And that's different than some lunatics with AR-15s claiming they're going to take over the United States with their militia. And that's its own problem, but it's not the same kind of cultural problem. I would agree with that with the caveat. I would agree that when you're talking about significant problems in a place like the New York Times or, say, Harvard or Yale, these are institutions that have enormous influence, not just in the United States, but globally. And so if you have deep, deep dysfunction in these institutions, the effect of that radiates far beyond the walls of the New York Times building or far beyond Harvard Yard. But the caveat that I would say is that there is a deep dysfunction in many very, very important

conservative institutions. They don't have as much purchase. The sort of dysfunction in evangelical Christianity doesn't have as much purchase, like the sort of dysfunction in evangelical Christianity doesn't have as much purchase, say, in Los Angeles or in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But it has immense amount of impact in Middle Tennessee, where I live. Or dysfunctions within the broader gun culture. That doesn't have as much of an impact in, again, in LA or Boston, where there's not just, not that,

not so many people who own weapons. I mean, of course the crime problems are, are deeply troublesome, but you know, when there's problems with gun culture, that's, that's quite influential where I am. And, and so, and a lot of people on the right then downplay their own cultural influence by sort of saying, well, we don't really have to worry about our cultural maladies because the New York Times is so much more powerful or Harvard is so much more powerful. But where I am, where I live, the Southern Baptist Convention is much more potent culturally than Harvard or the New York Times. And so I agree with you. I think sort of as from an objective standpoint, I would say objectively dysfunction at the New York Times or Harvard has an enormous radiating influence throughout the culture. But I would also say that a lot of people on the right just, I don't know what the right term is, they minimize or rationalize their own cultural dysfunction as somehow less important than it really is. their own cultural dysfunction is somehow less important than it really is.

Yeah. Well, the asymmetry that cuts the other way on the right is that on the right, you have the capitulation of the Republican Party to a full-on personality cult and crazy conspiracy, right? I mean, it's just basically the Republican Party is halfway to QAnon now in terms of the kinds of things that will claim to be true about what happened in the 2020 election, what happened on January 6th, the forward-looking dangers of democracy, that it will work to amplify, apparently. I mean, it's virtually anything you want to say against the Democratic Party, I would probably agree with at this point, but it hasn't become anti-democratic to the degree that the Republican Party has. To the degree where the Republican Party, many people in the Republican Party will actually scorn the idea that they should be Democratic.

So they fall back on the idea that the United States is. So they'll, you know, they fall back on the idea that the United States is a republic and they'll say, no, we're not a democracy, we're a republic. Well, we're a democratic republic. You know, our foundational governmental institutions are either elected or appointed by elected officials. I mean, even the counter-majoritarian constitution can be amended by strong majorities. So the idea that this sort of notion that Republicans are splitting hairs when they reject this idea that we're a democracy, yeah, we are a republic. Yes, our republic is a constitutional republic and has counter-majoritarian elements to it, but it's still a democracy.

So one question about Trump and the fact that he succeeded in becoming president that has just never been satisfactorily answered for me, and you seem well-placed to consider it, is just how is it that evangelicals finally and so fully embraced him? I mean, like this guy was practically the Antichrist with respect to the degree to which he violated the values or the professed values of evangelical Christianity. How is it that of evangelical Christianity. How is it that he succeeded in getting their support to that degree? And that, I mean, I have to think that in the aftermath of January 6th

that you just described, where you have Mike Pence suffering a kind of, you know, reputational defenestration for his, you know, maintaining his oath to protect the Constitution and Trump's reputation only rising. I got to think that was true among evangelicals as well. And Mike Pence is, you know, in my world, practically an evangelical theocrat, right? I mean, it's just he is as every single box you need to check to be in good standing with

the evangelical church, I think he has checked. So explain what has happened there. Okay. Well, there's one thing that I think people have really pegged, and then another thing, an underappreciated factor that people don't talk about enough. So the one that I think that people have pegged is that if you spend 20, 25, 30 years telling a community of people that it's six minutes to midnight on their religious liberty, that America is about to fall, that the Democrats represent an existential threat to their faith, not just to the country, but to their faith, then that's going to have a distorting effect on a community. It's going to cause them to have a constant sense of emergency, and it's going to cause

them to feel as if they have to take desperate times, call for desperate measures. So if you have the Flight 93 election essay where this guy named Michael Anton said, you know, look, we have to charge the cockpit or this plane is going down. That was a message that a lot of evangelicals were ready to hear. Now, the shame of that is that it's utterly contradicted by Scripture. So, you know, let me put on my Bible quoting hat for a minute. And the Apostle Paul wrote that God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power. And he's not talking about political power there, but confidence in the power of God.

Power, love, and of sound mind. And yet, how much did that spirit of fear drive so many evangelicals towards an unsound mind? I mean, this was the conspiracy theories and everything that you saw. So that's the thing that I think people have accurately pegged. And that's the conventional wisdom that has a lot of truth to it. Now, here's the part that I don't think people fully understand. And this is, to me, even more troubling and more dangerous. The role of prophecy. There are quite a few self-proclaimed prophets who not only declared that God was going to decree that Trump was going to be president,

they not only prophesied that Trump would be president, but their prophecy included this really dangerous element that was Donald Trump has a special anointing or a special divine purpose to save this country. So Donald Trump is God's man, and he's God's man for a very particular purpose. Who are these prophets? Are these some megachurch pastors? So these would be Pentecostal, large Pentecostal megachurches and movements. A lot of people who are completely not household names. If you're on Twitter, you don't know this movement exists. You would have more consciousness of it maybe if

you're on Facebook, but it's totally outside of sort of the American elite. You know, the Pentecostal world is something that the New York Times world just by and large doesn't comprehend. And so these are people who have huge platforms in religious media, and they would say, you know, Trump is God's man to save this country. Now, what does that do? One, it creates an unfalsifiable kind of argument. what does that do? One, it creates an unfalsifiable kind of argument. I've debated people about Trump. As a Christian, I've debated, for example, a guy named Eric Metaxas, who was a reasonably well-known Christian intellectual. And it was very clear to me that he was under the influence of prophecy.

Well, how do you debate that? How do you reason with somebody who's under the influence of prophecy in that way? And then the other thing is, when the prophecy is so clear that Trump is on a divine mission, then that means that resistance to Trump comes from where? Satan. Resistance from Trump is rooted in evil. And so it really created this extreme level of religious commitment to Trump and hostility towards his opponents. And I remember when there was this ridiculous Jericho march that was several days before, a couple of weeks before January 6th in December. And I wrote in December, watch out because the logic of this movement is going to lead towards violence.

And, and sure enough, I mean, January 6th was the most predictable thing in the world. Once you saw the religious intensity of the support for Trump and that religious intensity went way beyond the, Hey, I'm afraid that America is going, you know, that the Democrats are going to hurt America and went much more towards, if you are against Trump, you are thwarting God's divine plan. And that's where you saw that level of fanaticism that you saw on January 6th. Yeah. So I'm just going to get my head around that for a second. It's a lot. It just seems like it could, if you rewind to 2015, and I mean, this is something I legitimately didn't track, which is, you know, before Trump won the candidacy and when you had a field of, you know, 15 or so candidates, what was evangelical and Pentecostal opinion at that point? Did the

prophecies only get articulated once he was the only choice in the face of the utter sacrilege of a Hillary Clinton presidency? Well, some were early. So, you know, Trump gained a lot of support pretty quickly. Now, the interesting thing was the data indicates that Trump's initial support was a lot of it was located in non-churchgoing evangelicals, but sort of the more disconnected you were, the more the disconnected you were from civic institutions, including a congregation, the more likely you were to support Trump early on. But then once Trump gained the nomination and it was him and Hillary, then of course, the dynamic changed. And so I think you began to have a snowball effect. So there were some who were early in on Trump, but then the snowball effect locked in and then the other thing that was really important to sort of this faith and prophecy based mindset was the shocking victory yeah so the fact that nobody predicted or very few people predicted that he'd win and he did win yeah sent a message

to millions of christians that this was divine intervention and he did win, sent a message to millions of Christians that this was divine intervention. And I think that was the moment where a lot of this loyalty locked in in a way that a lot of people don't truly appreciate it. And I saw it happen in my community, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. Yeah, that is actually something that I've never thought about, but it resonates with me based on my own experience. I mean, it was so anomalous. Right. To have been so sure that he wasn't going to win and then to have him win was such a discombobulating experience. The purely secular version of it was still something that almost seemed to cry out for some non-ordinary cause.

Yeah, it just seemed like we woke up in an alternate universe, right? Like the laws of physics had been suspended to our horror. And so, yeah, I could easily imagine that if you put on the lens of prophecy, it seems like, okay, this is the part of the movie where God makes his presence known. Right, exactly. Exactly. And that's, again, something, you know, so I live, my neighborhood is, there's this New York Times calculator where you can put in your address and it'll tell you sort of how thick is your bubble. My neighborhood is 85% Republican. The neighborhood I lived in in 2016, we moved in 2018, was about 80 to 90%, between 80 and 90% Republican. And I watched all this happen.

I watched this sort of sense of despair on election day when everyone thought that Hillary was going to win turn into a sense of, really, it's not just joy. It was sort of beyond joy. It's almost like a sense of ecstasy that Hillary didn't win. And it created this bond with Trump that is difficult to really fully explain. And I woke up the morning after or the day after Trump's victory, and the bond between him and his base after that victory was extraordinary. And it was directly rooted in the surprise. And the surprise for a

lot of people was directly rooted in divine intervention. And once that happened, you couldn't wedge some of these people away from Trump if you tried. Well, one of the things that many of us have speculated that explains Trump's appeal to people who you would think wouldn't view him as an ally. 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 ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.