Making Sense with Sam Harris - #293 — What I Really Think About Trump and Media Bias

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Sam Harris responds to a controversy over a recent podcast appearance. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I seem to have caught a case of Twitter cancer last week, and it was probably Facebook and Instagram cancer, too, but I don't look at those platforms. Anyway, I was on someone else's podcast and said some things about Trump and Biden, and those statements produced a fair amount of outrage in a very large group of people. So I think there are a few points I should clarify. There's nothing of real substance to walk back, but the truth is I wasn't speaking very clearly or systematically on that podcast.

And in one place, I actually misspoke. And as a result, there seem to be a few significant misunderstandings that have gotten amplified. I tried to clarify a few of these points on Twitter, knowing that I would be doing little more than spit in the wind. But I still think it was probably good to attempt this, and to do it quickly, because several of the articles that got written about the episode noticed those tweets, and so they didn't spread precisely those same misunderstandings. Of course, some people noticed my effort to clarify things

and rejected it. At moments like this, I'm always reminded of Nietzsche's aphorism, that when you force people to change their mind about you, they hold the effort you cost them very much against you. This really does seem to be true, and it's pretty maladaptive. We tend to want to hold people to the worst possible interpretation of what they said, even when it's belied by other things they said in context and continue to say. This happens on both the right and the left, politically. And this is the problem with taking clips of audio or video out of context. Of course,

any clip is, by definition, out of context. That's what a clip is. But many are chosen for the ways they seem to make a point very clearly when the editor knows that the actual point being made is far more complicated, or even contradicted by something else the person says a few seconds or minutes before or after the chosen clip. For instance, many of you will remember that it became well-established on the left that Trump referred to the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville as, quote, very fine people. There were very fine people on both sides. You remember that?

That was something that Trump said in a clip from a press conference where he was attempting to address the aftermath of those terrible events. Everyone from Biden on down insisted that he was talking about the neo-Nazis and other obvious racists as, quote, very fine people. And almost everyone on the left still insists that this was the case. But if you watch the press conference, you will see that he wasn't doing that. How can we know this? Because he says so. He literally says that he's not talking about the neo-Nazis and other racists. However, in my experience, if you tell people who want to think the worst of Trump about how misleading the clips from that press conference were, they are highly disinclined to believe you. And many of them come up with arguments for why they don't have to believe you.

They say things like, well, there was no one else there. They were all neo-Nazis and racists. So Trump saying that he wasn't talking about them doesn't hold water, because those were the only people to talk about. Now, even if that were true, and I highly doubt that it is, it's clear from his remarks that Trump thought there were other people there, just ordinary people who were worried about certain statues being taken down. His remarks make no sense if he thought that every protester was a neo-Nazi. Anyway, as most of you know, there are very few people who are more critical of Trump than I am.

And I'm sure I will amply demonstrate that yet again in the next few minutes. But I think it's important to be honest even when attacking someone you know to be a terrible human being. And relying on clips is a great way to be misled and to mislead others about what people actually think. And many people over in Trumpistan are now doing that to me. Again, I made this much easier than it should have been by speaking sloppily, which I hope it doesn't seem too self-serving to say I don't do very much. Even when I say something that seems quite extreme, I tend to be

fairly precise in how I say it. Consequently, I don't often find myself in the position of having to say that I misspoke. It's true that people sometimes misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent what I actually meant to say, but that's a different problem. Even when dealing with people's misunderstandings, or outright lies about what I've said, I'm rarely in a position of saying, sorry, there was actually a word there that was out of place and misleading. Unfortunately, in the present case, there really is an offending word.

So I feel I need to offer some clarification. Because I genuinely see the grounds for people's confusion based on that clip, and because many people are now accusing me of believing things I don't believe, and of supporting things I don't support, and of generally being a hypocrite. For instance, many people are saying that I used to be committed to truth and honesty. I wrote a whole book about how bad it is to tell lies, but now I'm in favor of lying, apparently, and censorship.

And I'm actually open to destroying our democracy, too. This is all bullshit. So apologies in advance if you find this boring. I actually find it an interesting experience to go through. Being engulfed by a tsunami of hatred definitely gets your attention, and you get to see who your friends are, and who is almost your friend, and who your former friends were always in the process of becoming. And you get to see otherwise smart and decent people deranged by rather sickening political and financial incentives. And you get to see the strengths and weaknesses of your own business model,

and of your own place in the world, really. It's not an experience I recommend, exactly. If you can avoid being burned as a digital witch, I suggest you avoid it. But it really does have a silver lining, if you've played your cards right. First, I should probably play the clip that went viral, because this is what everyone is reacting to. The context was a 90-minute podcast, where I said many things that make this clip much easier to understand. However, as I said, I definitely created several problems for myself by bumbling around a bit, and genuinely misspeaking at one point. And the fact that I actually misspoke will be very easy to demonstrate, because the word I used really does contradict everything I said in the setup to the clip, and it's contradicted by what I begin to say in the very next sentence.

But it's certainly my fault for using the wrong term. Before I deal with the clip, I want to emphasize again that I usually speak very precisely even when I seem to be saying something extremely provocative. For instance, I've said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden. Now, the statement is obviously meant to get your attention. I get that it's surprising, but it's not meant to be hyperbolic. I can defend every word of a statement like that. What I can't defend are people's misunderstandings and erroneous extrapolations of a statement like that.

Perhaps I should just clarify that statement again, because it actually goes a long way to explaining my view of Trump, why I think he's such a terrible person, but not nearly as scary as some people think he is. that statement again, because it actually goes a long way to explaining my view of Trump. Why I think he's such a terrible person, but not nearly as scary as some people think he is. And not nearly as scary as many people think I think he is. I think Osama bin Laden was a more or less normal human being, psychologically. He was just living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview. The moral structure he imagined he was living under, and wanted to impose on the rest of the world, given his beliefs,

was despicable. So he created immense harm, and it's very good that we killed him. But within the framework of his odious beliefs, he demonstrated many virtues. He was a man who certainly seemed to be capable of real self-sacrifice, and he was committed to ideals beyond his narrow self-interest. He was, by all accounts, personally quite courageous. I don't claim to know that much

about him, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he was generally a person of real integrity and generosity and compassion in his dealings with his fellow Muslims. None of these things can be said about Donald Trump. Trump is, without question, one of the least honest and most malignantly selfish human beings I have ever come across. And the paradox here, it's not really a paradox, but it's what makes the point I'm making confusing to many people. The seeming paradox is that if Trump were a better person, he would be worse in many ways. If he were brave and self-sacrificing and idealistic. If he were capable of being strongly committed to something beyond his narrow self-interest,

he would be capable of creating much greater harm in the world. But he's not. He is a child in a man's body. He lies as freely as he breathes, and just as compulsively. He can't even put the interests of his children above his own, much less commit himself to any ideal that requires real self-sacrifice. Unlike bin Laden, it is patently obvious that Trump isn't psychologically normal.

He really is missing something that almost every other person on earth has. He is an absolute black hole of self-regard. When I say that wherever you are on earth, you could probably walk a thousand miles in any direction and not meet a less admirable human being than Trump, I mean it in the terms I just described. The man is almost completely lacking in personal virtue. If he weren't funny, and I admit he can be funny, he might actually be the least admirable person on earth. Now, some of this is just my opinion, of course, but much of it isn't. To say that Trump lies incessantly, and with a velocity almost never encountered anywhere else

in human life is a fact. It is demonstrable. It is nearly self-evident and has been for decades. It is as true and uncontroversial as saying that he's around six feet two inches tall. I realize that when I say this sort of thing, it sounds like an expression of personal hatred and of my own political partisanship. But it is neither of those things. I don't hate Trump. I hate the fact of him.

I hate the space he occupies in our world. I hate what he has done to our politics. Yes, I know his ascendance politically is a symptom of many underlying problems, but he has also exacerbated those problems massively. Trump isn't the answer to wokeness and leftist hysteria, because he has done more than anyone to produce that hysteria. If you want to see how crazy the left can get, just elect Trump for a second term in 2024. We have a real problem of populist irrationality and misinformation and tribal lunacy on both the left and the right. Trump has made that problem astronomically worse on both the left and the right.

It's not about hating the man. I hate the phenomenon. I didn't hate Trump when he was just a charlatan on The Apprentice. I ignored him. And my criticism of Trump isn't remotely partisan. It isn't even political. Because what I have to say about Trump, I wouldn't say about any other Republican. And many Republicans with whom I disagree about politics share my view of him. I probably agree with most of Trump's politics, in fact. Do I think we should have a secure border? Absolutely. Do I think we should be harder on China? Yes. Do I think that much of the left is in the grip of an insane moral panic? I do. Do I think the phrase, defund the police, is one of the stupidest ever uttered? Of course. Do I recognize that globalization has produced many casualties

in our society? Yes. Am I in favor of onshoring much of our supply chain and energy infrastructure? Yes, I am. Am I appropriately humbled by our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now skeptical of our ability to do anything like nation-building? Absolutely. All of this significantly overlaps with Trump's policies and with the political concerns of his supporters. I may be an elitist, globalist, Jew asshole, as many of Trump's supporters now allege, but not only don't I denigrate many of their political concerns, I share them. My real opposition to Trump, beyond all the flaws of his character, which again I consider to be so far beyond the norm, that I just cannot believe we even have to think about this man.

But the thing that makes him truly irredeemable, and should have made him politically radioactive for Republicans for the rest of his life, is that as a sitting president of the United States, he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He declined to do this repeatedly, many months in advance of the election. I believe this is the most shocking thing to have happened politically in my lifetime. And of course, Trump's lack of commitment to the most basic principle of our democracy laid the groundwork for his big lie about having really won the 2020 election, and for the violence on January 6th. This single fact,

among the thousands of other facts that should have disqualified Trump for the presidency, this fact alone should make Trump impossible to defend, much less support, at this point. And the fact that the Republican Party has found a way to ignore this truth as though it were some tiny detail is proof that it has become a cult of personality. This is the real Trump derangement syndrome, to be defending the indefensible. What we are witnessing now among Republicans is not normal politics. So when I describe Trump as an existential threat to our democracy, I'm thinking about things like the willingness to abide by the results of an election and the peaceful transfer of power,

the very norms that safeguard our democracy. One thing that Trump taught us is that we rely on norms in so many ways, and in some ways even more than laws. It's quite possible that all of what Trump did to corrupt and destabilize our institutions was legal. It remains to be seen whether he's committed any crimes at all. It's legal to just ask the Russians on television to hack the emails of your political opponent.

And there's no price to pay when they actually do that very thing. It's apparently legal to campaign on the promise that you'll lock up your political opponent when you win. And it seems legal to openly lie about having won an election that you actually lost. And to encourage a mob to gather in Washington to, quote, stop the steal. And when they begin storming the Capitol and calling for the murder of your vice president in order to stop the steal, it may be legal to just sit on your hands when you're the only person on earth

who can do anything to stop the violence, just to see if things somehow play out in your favor. There don't appear to be laws to defend our democracy against this sort of thing. It's just that we've tended to expect that our politicians won't behave in these ways. And normal politicians, or even just decent human beings, won't. For better or worse, the integrity of our democracy depends on hundreds of norms like these not being violated on a daily basis. But when I say that Trump is an existential threat to our

democracy, I don't mean that he is Orange Hitler. Again, Trump is a narrowly selfish conman. He doesn't appear to think big at all. If he wants anything, it appears to be only fame and money. He seems content to do things like rack up millions of dollars in fees at his hotels and golf courses and apartment buildings by doing things like oblige the Secret Service to stay there. We all use the word grifter now with alarming frequency. Trump is the ultimate grifter, but he is not ideological. He seems to believe in nothing beyond the next opportunity to do something venal and selfish. So he is not ideological. He seems to believe in nothing beyond the next opportunity to do something venal and selfish. So he is not Hitler.

And this brings me to another confusing thing about the clip you're about to hear. I use the analogy of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. This was not meant to indicate how bad I think Trump is. It was meant to indicate that the significance that the podcast hosts were attaching to the term conspiracy was misplaced. Anyway, you'll hear how potentially misleading this is. Okay, so now for the clip. Here's the necessary context. As I said on Twitter, I was talking about the ethics of ignoring the story about Hunter Biden's laptop until after the election. I won't play other clips from the interview,

but suffice it to say that I made it absolutely clear that I found the decision to ignore this story a very hard call, ethically and journalistically. I stated quite clearly that I could argue both sides of the issue, and that my mind wasn't made up. It still isn't made up, and I admitted that it was corrosive for journalistic institutions like the New York Times to appear to show obvious political bias in this way, when everyone knows they would never have ignored a Donald Trump Jr. laptop story. And I said that for me, it really was close to a coin toss. I could go either way on this. In the clip you're about to hear, I said that ignoring the laptop story, and even suppressing the New York Post's Twitter account when they ran it, was,

quote, totally warranted. What I clearly meant to say was totally justifiable. It's the difference between justified and justifiable. In the very next sentence, I begin to say, for the second time in the interview, that it really is a coin toss for me, which makes no sense when said against the word warranted. This is where I truly misspoke, this single word. However, as you'll hear, I say several inflammatory things in this clip, so there's a little more to clarify. But I can defend everything I say here, because I believe everything I say here except one word. Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared.

Right. It's like there's nothing. First of all, it's Hunter Biden. Right. It's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe, like even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right? Or China. It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It's like a firefly to the

sun, right? I mean, it doesn't even stack up against Trump University, right? Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view, right? Now, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account. That's just a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely. Right? But I think it was warranted, right? And again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not that particular piece is— Sam, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.

I was the one that said we should move on, but you've just said something I really struggled with there, which is— The kids in the basement? No, no, the kids in the basement. I'm interested in democracy. You're saying you are content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president. Well, no, I'm content. But the thing is, it's just not left-wing. So Liz Cheney is not left-wing.

Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power. You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected. No, but there's nothing conspiracy. It was a conspiracy out in the open. But it doesn't matter what part's conspiracy it was a conspiracy out in the open. It does, but it doesn't matter if it was, it doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open. I mean, I think it's like, if people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon,

you know, it's like, if there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right? Is that a conspiracy? Okay, so as I said, you can hear me say, again, it was a coin toss for me, right after I utter the word warranted. But then I get cut off by the host's next question. So I genuinely misspoke when I said totally warranted. I can truly argue both for and against ignoring and even suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. And I said that clearly elsewhere in the interview. But of course, you wouldn't know that from that clip. And my asteroid

analogy is also misleading as presented in the clip, because I was starting to go down a rabbit hole about this loaded term conspiracy and why it was irrelevant. In any case, the net result is what comes through in the clip was emphatic approval, not just for ignoring the story until after the election, but for kicking the New York Post off of Twitter. And if I think Trump is as bad as an asteroid that might destroy all life on Earth, how could there be any limit to what I'd be willing to do to stop him? I'll come back to that point, because it's important. As far as the laptop story is concerned, the other point I should have made is that viewing the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, or some other sort of disinformation, was quite

reasonable when the story first broke. So I'm not at all convinced that Twitter knew it was shutting down a real story, or even that the New York Times knew it was ignoring a real one. So I don't think any early claims of Russian disinformation were necessarily lies. And I actually have no opinion about whether the 50 intelligence professionals who signed that letter alleging that it was probably Russian disinformation were lying. They might not have been. This was a totally crazy story.

A laptop from hell just gets abandoned in a computer store and then winds up with who? Rudy Giuliani? My claim is that given what happened in 2016 with Anthony Weiner's laptop, ten days before the election, it is totally understandable that smart, well-intentioned people were inclined to avert their eyes from the Hunter Biden story until after the election, as I was. From my point of view, it was totally rational at that point not to care what was on Hunter Biden's laptop. And the truth is, I still don't care, given that Trump is looming

over the 2024 election. Given the choice we had in 2020, given how much we know about both Trump and Biden, stretching back decades, there is absolutely nothing that could be on that laptop that is relevant to me. And I'll explain why in a moment. And this will also be true in 2024, if Trump runs again. Now, as I said, I was not speaking especially systematically or well in that podcast. And many things got condensed and entangled in my remarks about the Hunter Biden laptop story. For instance, there's obviously a distinction between the New York Times deciding to ignore the story

and Twitter deciding to suppress the New York Post story about it. I think I'm more comfortable with the former than the latter. And there's a distinction between these two things and having 50 ex-intelligence professionals sign a letter declaring that it was Russian disinformation. I didn't differentiate any of those things in my remarks. And the truth is I feel somewhat differently about them. There are several other things that are misleading about that clip.

Most people appear to be conflating what I'm recommending there with something illegal, like actual election fraud, or some other way of subverting democracy. In fact, even the podcast hosts appear to have misunderstood me on that point. I say a few things to emphasize the difference, but it doesn't really clear the air. Ignoring the Hunter Biden story, or even suppressing it, again, I'm still not entirely sure what I think about that. But neither of those actions entail breaking the law. They don't even entail lying. This is just pure editorial judgment, especially if you think the story stands a chance of being Russian disinformation. This is not breaking the First Amendment. It's not destroying democracy in order to save it.

It isn't any of the things that hysterical defenders of Trump are now alleging. And I should say, it's simply amazing to hear people who are carrying water for the biggest liar probably in history shrieking about the primacy of truth and journalistic integrity in a right-wing echo chamber that has ignored and suppressed real facts and real stories for decades. You're telling me that you think Fox News and Breitbart and AM Talk Radio and the One America News Network don't ignore stories they find politically inconvenient? This is where you get your news and you're pretending to be worried about media bias? And as for engaging in so-called

censorship, what do you think is happening when Wikipedia locks down a page for a time or erases the edits made by some QAnon lunatic? Is that censorship? Is it a breach of the First Amendment? Is it the end of democracy? Should everyone get to say whatever they want on every platform? No. Every legitimate platform requires some form of moderation. Otherwise, every platform would become like 4chan, an absolute cesspool.

Every platform has an ethical obligation, in my view, to exercise some editorial control with the public good in mind. The problem is this might be impossible to do well. And Twitter isn't doing it well. And I agree, it certainly appears to show a left-leaning bias. And that's annoying. I think kicking people off the platform for saying benign and obviously true things like men and women are different is insane. But as I said at some length in that podcast,

I'm not sure what the remedy is. One remedy is to start competing social media platforms, which is what conservatives have done. You've got Truth Social and Gab and Getter and I don't know what else. My point is that it's hard to figure out what to do here, beyond letting the market recognize that there's a growing opportunity to build new and better things. Or in this case, new and much worse things. You really think you're going to get the truth on truth social? But what really is the alternative? I highly doubt we want the

police or some other government agency kicking down doors trying to enforce a balanced application of Twitter's terms of service. As I said on that podcast, I think Twitter should be free to destroy itself. It should be free to become a platform purely for trans rights activists. And if you don't think Twitter should be free to do that, you are advocating for a world in which the employees and board members at Twitter who want to bend it in that direction, are eventually put in prison. We probably fine them first, of course. But what do we do when they don't pay the fines? We start putting people with purple hair in prison, I guess. I don't think that's a road

we want to go down. Joe Rogan's podcast is enormous at this point. Could it become so influential that we would want the government to force him to talk to guests that he doesn't want to talk to? I don't think so. Anyway, as I said, getting vilified at scale reveals a few things. One thing it's revealed is that I don't really have a tribe. But I knew that. I don't really have a tribe, but I knew that. As you've heard in previous podcasts,

I've always been fairly aghast at accusations of tribalism and political partisanship. Because I go as hard as anyone against Trump and the far right. And I go as hard as anyone against the woke and the far left. Not many people do that. I think I can count on one hand the number of people I know who do that. Andrew Sullivan does it. Bill Maher does it. I can't think of anyone else at the moment, though I'm sure there are others. One of the consequences of pissing off both the right and the left is that when you become the object of a Twitter mobbing, there are very few people inclined to defend you. They're certainly not

going to defend you reflexively and tribally, because you spend half your time pissing them off. I really have an unusual audience, and it's a direct consequence of how I think. At some point I've made almost everyone uncomfortable. I've made religious people uncomfortable by attacking religion and being an atheist. I've made atheists uncomfortable by going on and on about how meditation and psychedelics can produce real spiritual insight. I've made spiritual people uncomfortable by saying that many of their beliefs are bogus. I've made many left of center uncomfortable by talking honestly about racial disparities in crime and the connection between Islam and terrorism.

I've made many people right-of-center uncomfortable by talking about the problem of wealth inequality. And I've alienated more or less everyone by insisting that free will is an illusion. The truth is I've pissed off a lot of people by goring one sacred cow or another. There is no tribe for this. So at moments like this, I'm more or less on my own.

But it's a very fair trade for the quality of the audience I've built. I have an audience that wants to know what I think, and more important, how I think. And if you're a true member of my audience, and you're not just listening to this because you hate me, you are here because you enjoy the ride, whether you agree with everything I think or not. As I said, one also finds out who one's friends are at a time like this. And you find out who is a real professional and who isn't. Megyn Kelly, for instance, who I don't know, I was just on her podcast once, was incredibly gracious, even while probably taking that clip at face value. She clearly was walking the line in front of a largely

right-wing audience, with co-hosts who thought the worst of me, but she managed to do it without screwing me over. I'm sure she and I disagree about many, many things, but I truly admire how she handles herself there. I can't say the same for many other people. The strangest response is from people who think that my efforts to clarify my points on Twitter, and they will probably take the same view of what I'm doing here, amount to my walking things back and apologizing in response to a backlash. Many of these people seem to believe that I destroyed my career by inadvertently blurting out what I really think, and now I'm just trying to do damage control. None of these people understand me, or my audience, or my business, frankly.

Here's the only thing I wrote on Twitter in response to the clip. There's a podcast clip circulating that seems to be confusing many people about my views on Trump, which is understandable because I wasn't speaking very clearly. So for what it's worth, here's what I was trying to say. I was essentially arguing for a principle of self-defense, where there's a continuum of proportionate force that is appropriate and necessary to use. I've always viewed Trump as a very dangerous person to elect as president of a fake university, let alone the U.S., and when he became a sitting president,

who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, I viewed him as more dangerous still. However, I've never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler. On the podcast, I was speaking narrowly about the wisdom and propriety of ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election. I've always thought that this was a very hard call, ethically and journalistically. But given what happened to the Anthony Weiner laptop in the previous election, I think it was probably the right call. Nothing I said on the podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud,

or take any other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency, nor do I think they did that. Okay, so after reading these tweets, many people have argued that this really couldn't be an honest articulation of my views, because it just seems like a slippery slope. If I'm willing to ignore information, then I'm willing to suppress information. And if I'm willing to do that, I must be willing to lie. And if I'm willing to lie, I must be willing to commit outright election fraud by stuffing ballot boxes and rigging voting machines. There's no natural stopping point if I think Trump is an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. Right? Wouldn't you do anything to stop an asteroid? If I thought Trump was literally the next Hitler, I should want him

assassinated. Is that even controversial to say? Is there anyone who doesn't wish that one of the plots against Hitler had succeeded? Unless you're a Nazi or just crazy, you too wish that Hitler had been assassinated. And as I said, I think our killing of Osama bin Laden was totally justified. But I don't think Trump is Hitler or anything like him. I think he's a person like Alex Jones, and I said that on that podcast. It's like we elected Alex Jones president. I think he's a person like L. Ron Hubbard, without Hubbard's astounding typing ability. Making Trump president was a disaster for our country. But it was not the same sort of disaster that started World War II

and sent millions of people to death camps. What would I expect if Trump got elected again in 2024? The further unraveling of America's stature in the world, a further descent into the chaos of conspiracy thinking and lies here at home, our further derangement politically on more or less every topic, irrational fury and demagoguery and blasphemy tests on both the right and the left, more grifting and humiliating norm violations from Trump and his family, massive opportunity costs on more or less every front, because while all that's going on, we're going to be very distracted from every other important thing.

I think all of this will be terrible for America and for the world. Above all, I think setting the precedent that you can lie about everything and shatter the most basic norms of our democracy and still get re-elected to the presidency could lead us further down the path of democratic decline. And yes, if re-elected, I would also expect Trump to enact some rational and pragmatic policies that I also just happen to agree with. So this is not at all the same as electing a highly competent evil person with a grand plan to remake the world.

Actually, the insurrection on January 6th is perfectly Trump. This is exactly the kind of coup you would expect to be associated with the man. Not really a coup at all. There's no question he was trying to disrupt the certification of the election. He was trying to bully Pence and Congress by sending that mob to the Capitol. But when they breach the Capitol, what happens? But, when they breach the Capitol, what happens? They just wander around in their costumes, smearing shit on the walls and taking selfies, and stealing mementos from Nancy Pelosi's office. This is Trump.

Actually, the real essence of Trump was that he figured out how to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters amid all this chaos. He monetized the absolute degradation of our institutions. That's Trump. So there's no problem with a slippery slope. Everything we do or don't do can be proportionate to the moment. And I certainly think it was rational to hope in 2020 that merely trying to force good information to win over bad information would be sufficient to keep Trump from the presidency. And I maintain that hope for 2024. Nothing in that space is illegal, and nothing entails lying. And I can say honestly that I can see how people could easily justify ignoring a story that emerged

as an October surprise because they know there's not enough time to get to the bottom of it. It is rational to ignore the story until after the election. And I can support the right of tech companies to be biased, because I can't see how we can force them to not be biased without damaging more important things in our society. And I can honestly say that this was a hard call, really in the territory of a coin toss. But if pressed, I would probably side with those who ignored the story. Because that's what I, in fact, did, right? I didn't talk about the story on this podcast. There's another point that many people on the right reacted negatively to in that clip. That's

when I said that there's no possible scandal involving kickbacks from China or Ukraine to Biden that could outweigh Trump's corruption. How can I say such a thing? Okay, well, obviously, I'm not saying that it would be a good thing if Biden were corrupt in this way. I'm saying it wouldn't matter in a forced choice between him and a president who had repeatedly said that he might not accept the results of an election or support a peaceful transfer of power. But there's this underlying question. Why do I know that Biden couldn't be nearly as corrupt as Trump without examining the contents of his son's laptop? Because both of these guys have been living in public for nearly as long as I've been alive.

have been living in public for nearly as long as I've been alive. We know a tremendous amount about both of them, going back over 40 years. It's like, what if a story broke suggesting that Biden had cheated on his tax returns? Would I care about that? Not 10 days before the 2020 election, I wouldn't. Because I know at a glance that whatever Biden could get up to in tax avoidance, it would be absolutely obliterated by comparison with what Trump has done. because I know at a glance that whatever Biden could get up to in tax avoidance,

it would be absolutely obliterated by comparison with what Trump has done. We know so much about the day-to-day lives of these two men. The same could be said about sexual scandals. And there was a Me Too allegation against Biden. Should it have mattered? Not for the 2020 election, it shouldn't have. Because Trump had him beat, something like 29 to 1, and with far more credible and disturbing allegations.

The 2020 election was a forced choice, and the clock was ticking. I'm not a fan of Joe Biden, and I wasn't a fan of Hillary Clinton. I'm a fan of a normal range of political and ethical chaos. Trump lives far outside that range, and he's dragged us all out there with him. It is just appalling that this man has taken up so much of everyone's time and attention. Now, I've taken great pains to build an audience that values my honest attempts to figure things out, to figure out what's true and what's possible and what we should do in light of what's true and possible.

Above all, my audience expects me to be honest, and on the rare occasions where I misspeak, there is nothing dishonest about acknowledging that and clarifying things. The truth is, given the nature of my audience, this thing that appears to be a 20 megaton problem to my detractors on the right is a total non-issue for me. And it will be a non-issue if something similar happens on the left, because I've deliberately built my platforms

to be immune from backlash from the right or the left. And those of you who subscribe to the podcast make that possible. There are no sponsors to drop me. There are no executives having a meeting now wondering what to do about all the controversy on Twitter. There will be no forthcoming hostage video of me apologizing to all the people I may have offended. video of me apologizing to all the people I may have offended. It is a wonderful thing to simply be free to think out loud, and to be free to correct the record when something gets garbled. And I truly know how lucky I am. I wish everyone was in this position. Thanks for listening.