Making Sense with Sam Harris - #383 — Where Are the Grown-Ups?

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Sam Harris talks about the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the cesspool of X, Tucker Carlson’s conversation with Darryl Cooper, freedom of speech, 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. 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. Okay, well, there appears to have been another attempt on Trump's life, although this one seems to have not been a close call, happily. Also seems to have been another lunatic who, I mean, he was ideological, but he was first and foremost a lunatic who, I mean, he was ideological, but he was first and foremost a lunatic, at least at the time I'm recording this. That seems to be the case. What to say about this? Well, the first thing to say is that it's a tragedy for our society that we have to worry about political violence of this kind. I think it does say something about our politics,

about political violence of this kind. I think it does say something about our politics, but that would require some fine print to spell out. It certainly says something about unregulated mental illness and the prevalence of guns in our society, and what to do about either of those things remains an open question. I think it's totally irresponsible to politicize the event itself, and the allegation that it was provoked by the rhetoric of our politics, so as to put many of our institutions and even our democracy in jeopardy, is not a dishonest provocation hoping to incite violent lunatics. It is, in fact, a sober judgment made by serious journalists and scholars of both parties about the consequences of promoting a malignant narcissist of this sort riding atop a personality cult to the presidency. None of those facts change because a madman or two make attempts on his life. We can't suddenly pretend that Trump is a

different person or that Trumpism is a healthier political movement than it is because of these incidents. The way to talk about Trump and Trumpism responsibly is to say what's true, and one truth is that the rhetoric coming from Trump's supporters is far more demagogic and irresponsible than anything that has been said by Democrats before or after these recent attempts on Trump's life. Apparently, Elon Musk, genius that he is, tweeted, and no one's even trying to assassinate President Biden or Vice President Harris, followed by a thinking face emoji.

He sent that out to 200 million people before deleting it after there was a backlash. And honestly, that's not even close to the worst thing he's done on X. The worst thing he's done is to repeatedly engage with and promote some of the most odious liars and conspiracists that exist on the platform, and thereby poison our public conversation about more or less any topic that is politically polarizing. All in the name of free speech, of course. Anyway, I certainly hope that this is the end of this season of political violence in America, and I hope we can have an election which is run in such a way so as to convince virtually everyone that it was run fairly, whatever the outcome. Well, there was a recent episode that many of

you might have paid some attention to, if only out of the corner of your eye, which exposed many of the problems we're having in our media and our politics. And that was the appearance of the podcaster and amateur historian Daryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson's internet show. As I've said before, I think Tucker himself is a symptom of much of what currently ails us. He's an example of a person who has been driven out of the mainstream media, I think for good reason, and has grown increasingly radicalized by that experience. And he's worth paying attention to because he has tremendous influence in right-wing populist circles. That is, within Trumpistan and amid the wreckage of the Republican Party.

He had a primetime slot at the Republican National Convention, you might recall. I've heard many people suggest that he might one day run for the presidency himself, given his popularity. And he's also taken seriously in alternative media. Many prominent podcasters who don't exactly share his views or don't even know what his views are have spoken with him recently and celebrated his success out on the frontiers of alternative media. People like Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman and the guys over at the All In podcast,

which I think is now the biggest business podcast. Some of these people I consider friends, but they all have spoken to Tucker and declined to ask him difficult questions, and that effectively laundered his reputation in front of their own audiences, if it needed any laundering. Here I'm talking about audiences that are already fairly red-pilled, as far as I can tell, and conspiratorial, at the very least, anti-establishment to a degree that they're inclined to view any success outside of our institutions to be more or less a sign of virtue. These are audiences that can't figure out what's wrong with RFK Jr., for instance. And they think that Twitter Files was the biggest story of the decade. One might even say they have Twitter Files derangement syndrome.

And of course, they think that Elon Musk is fighting the good fight in defense of free speech without showing any obvious signs of hypocrisy. So this is a flavor of confusion that grows wide-eyed with admiration in the presence of Tucker Carlson. I would say that appearing on these podcasts has been very good for Tucker, and more or less whatever is good for Tucker is almost certainly bad for the world. There's an act that many charlatans and grifters and bumptious little weasels perform, and no one does this better than Tucker Carlson. If you've watched him, you have seen him do this many, many times. To begin by emphasizing his own Christian humility,

he starts with an almost confessional self-awareness of his own imperfections. It's the, there's no greater sinner than I am routine. I've made huge mistakes myself. I'm ashamed of how wrong I was about X or Y or Z. And then with that throat clearing out of the way, you go on to pronounce your absolute certainty on some controversial topic that's the political equivalent of plutonium. This is what Tucker does, whether he's shilling for Putin, or the Great Replacement Theory, or Kanye, or Andrew Tate, or simply delivering the next fresh

bolus of insanity that has surfaced somewhere right of center. Now, Tucker might have once been a real journalist. I'm not sure, actually. I think he was almost certainly a talented writer. But he's now a fraud. Of course, that doesn't mean he's wrong about everything. He can't be wrong about everything. That would take too much work. He's probably right about many things, if only by accident.

And he's clearly catering, and even pandering, to a widely held perception that is real, that is veridical. And it's this, there is something that went seriously wrong with many of our institutions in the last decade or two. Much of the mainstream media, for instance, really was captured by left-wing activism. And many journalists decided that it was no longer their job to merely tell the truth. Rather, their job now was to seek to engineer certain political outcomes. As most of you know, this is a problem that I've worried about on this podcast. And I've also acknowledged that there are corner conditions here where I simply don't know what responsible journalists should do. I mean, if you think, well, they should just report the truth, you're not seeing how thorny this problem is.

There are an infinite number of facts one could choose to focus on as a journalist or an academic or any purveyor of knowledge. And the act of focusing changes how certain of those facts appear, and it changes whether or how they will affect our politics. If the New York Times decided to focus on a single case of vaccine injury, or on a person who got poisoned by something that found its way into the food supply, or they decided to interview a parent whose child had just drowned in a swimming pool, or they found someone who had just had a violent encounter with a recent immigrant. There are enough of these people that an article could be written above the fold every day of the year for the rest of our lives. These articles could be perfectly factual,

right, undistorted, and yet they would give a profoundly distorted sense of the size of these problems. So the admonition to just print what's true doesn't solve all of our editorial problems. And building a social media platform that preferentially boosts the most lurid and divisive and misleading content, which is Elon's approach, isn't an answer either, right? None of this has anything whatsoever to do with freedom of speech. Okay, you can have all the free speech in the world. You still have to choose what to focus on, and you need to determine what your intellectual and journalistic standards will be. You have to decide what to amplify. You have to decide what to amplify. You have to decide who to invite to speak at your conference.

Do you invite Candace Owens to give her edgy take on how the Jews control everything? If you think that would be a dumb idea, that doesn't mean you don't support free speech. It means you don't support Candace Owens. And if you've built an algorithm that preferentially boosts Candace and boosts her more the dumber she gets, that's a choice, and it's a harmful one for our society. One doesn't have to be against free speech

to think that any billionaire who would do that is a total asshole. I spend very little time on social media at this point. I only tend to see it when a friend sends me a link to Instagram or X, and sometimes I'll look at X when there's a breaking news story. I look at it from an account that isn't following anybody, and I almost never click on anything, so I think I have about as naive an account as can exist on the platform. Maybe there's some information in my IP address that

I'm not aware of. Who knows? But when I look at my feed on X, I'm more or less guaranteed to see many posts from Elon, along with posts from the conspiracists and lunatics and trolls who he tends to interact with. I will see an endless number of AI-generated memes, many of which support anti-government idiocy. Needless to say, I see a ton of Trump support. And I see a lot of people getting killed, right? Lots of murders and accidents caught on cell phones and CCTV. It's like that terrible film from the 70s, Faces of Death. I think it purported to be real and a lot of it was fictional. But anyway, it was just a horrible montage of people being killed or seeming to be killed. It's like that film has somehow been

seeded into the DNA of the internet, and it's just now endlessly exfoliated for us. You're scrolling on X, you see a video of three kids sitting on a subway track, and before you even have time to think, oh, that doesn't look so good, one of them touches the third rail and gets electrocuted. Then her friend tries to pull her off the track, and he gets electrocuted too. There are endless videos like this on X now. Is this somehow an important victory for free speech? Who the hell is advertising on this platform? Of course, in the aftermath of Trump's remarks about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, X is now filled with memes about this, some of which are very funny. As a sidebar, it seems to me that the Democrats are

far too confident that laughing at all this is a winning strategy. What's happened in Springfield is actually pretty crazy, at least on the surface, right? A town of 59,000 people has absorbed 15,000 Haitian immigrants in three years. I mean, just think of that in practical terms. Suddenly, 20% of the population is Haitian. I'm sure that most of these immigrants are great people who are just seeking economic opportunity and, frankly, fleeing the chaos of Haiti.

But they are coming from one of the poorest and most violent places on earth. At a minimum, this is a picture of thousands of fairly desperate, traumatized people pouring into a very little city. 15,000 Haitians being dropped into a city like Los Angeles is one thing. Into a town of 59,000 people in the middle of America? That has to pose some problems, whether they're being reported on or not. Now, who knows if anything bad is happening to anyone's pets. I did actually see a video of what purported to be a dog

roasting on an open spit in someone's backyard on X. Whether that was in Springfield or not is probably beside the point. It does appear that there was a tragic accident involving a school bus and a recent Haitian immigrant driving the wrong way that brought many people in Springfield to the end of their patience. But it does seem that most Democrats assume that every community in America should be enthusiastic about suddenly being inundated by immigrants and refugees from some faraway country. People who, however in need of living somewhere they might be, and however entitled to basic human rights they surely are, and however unlucky they were to have been born where they were born, nevertheless don't share the culture of the place where they have landed.

And in certain cases, especially when we're talking about people who are coming from conservative Muslim societies, and you see a lot of this in Western Europe at the moment, they might have no interest at all in adopting the norms of this new culture. One doesn't have to be a bigot to worry about the failures of assimilation that can follow from this. One doesn't have to be a racist to regret that the character of a city, or even a whole country, is being irrevocably changed by an influx of basic strangeness from elsewhere. And if you insist upon treating anyone who expresses concerns of this kind

as a xenophobic asshole, then two things will happen. The first is that only true racists and bigots will be thick-skinned enough to address the issue politically. And two, they will win. And then you will have actual racists and bigots in power in your society. So anyway, X is filled with the memification of all this today, as well as all kinds of, frankly, racist crime porn. I mean, honestly, if I had to summarize the intent of X's algorithm at this point, it would be twofold. The first is to make Elon even more famous than he is, and the second is to make every white user of the platform more racist. If you could pipe the X algorithm into your brain through Neuralink, I think you'd probably jump off the table and go out and buy a cyber truck and then join a white supremacist militia. That's the vibe I get when

I spend a few minutes scrolling the homepage. Again, many imagine that this cesspoolification of culture represents progress. Unless my trending news is punctuated by videos of kids getting killed or of black people committing violent crimes, the censors have won. Where is free speech? But of course, all of this is quite obviously a sign of cultural decay, and the signs of this decay are everywhere. I mean, the fact that a person like Trump is taken seriously as a candidate for the presidency, much less became president and may yet do so again, that is not cultural progress. Even those who support Trump seem to be aware of this. He is the break glass in case of emergency candidate.

They also think there's some kind of cultural emergency here. Someone sent me a clip of George W. Bush from 25 years ago, talking about some policy. It's been some years since I've seen him speak. And of course, I remember thinking that the man was not very smart. Well, he sounded like fucking Winston Churchill compared to Trump. Honestly, fluid sentence after fluid sentence full of actual semantic content. Anyway, there's simply no question that we need institutions that maintain good professional standards,

need institutions that maintain good professional standards, whether those are academic or journalistic or medical or scientific, right? There's no substitute for these things. And there's no substitute for integrity and competence. Silicon Valley might have competence in hand, but not integrity. When you have someone like Elon openly celebrated for retweeting Pizzagate lunatics, integrity is no longer on the menu. Somewhere there need to be actual grown-ups in the room. And not everyone who is rich or famous or beloved by anti-establishment cultists is a grown-up. And Tucker, for all his cultural influence, is definitely not one of the grown-ups. He's very smart. He's a great performer, right? That's really what he is.

He's an entertainer and a very talented one. But he's a fraud. How do we know this? We have his private texts from the lawsuit that Dominion brought against Tucker's former employer, Fox News, and they revealed that while Tucker was shilling for Donald Trump for years, he actually despised him and considered him a, quote, demonic force in our politics. And he said he couldn't wait to be rid of him after he lost the 2020 election. And this was how he felt all the while endlessly defending Trump and attacking his critics. But of course,

Tucker has found an enormous audience that simply doesn't care about his lack of integrity. It's the same as Trump's audience. So many people go on Tucker's show either not knowing or not caring that he's so ethically compromised. They go because he has this enormous audience. So many people go on Tucker's show either not knowing or not caring that he's so ethically compromised. They go because he has this enormous audience and because he has the apparent courage to talk about anything. Given the nature of his audience, no conspiracy is too far-fetched or politically combustible. You can play the just-asking-questions game with Tucker about anything. Are the Jews pressuring our government to conceal evidence of UFOs?

Tucker would love to talk to you about that. So onto Tucker's pirate ship out there in the fever swamp of reactionary American politics stepped the podcaster Daryl Cooper to talk about many things, immigration in Europe and other topics, but the lessons of World War II above all. Now, there's obviously a difference between condemning some species of evil and trying to understand it, and there's a difference between understanding it and exonerating it, to say nothing of advocating for it. And knowing where the lines are here can be difficult. And you might not know where they are until you've seen someone cross them. And Daryl Cooper certainly appeared to cross a few of these lines in conversation

with Tucker Carlson last week. I won't rehash or rebut what he said in any detail. I'll just say that if you're going to make the claim that Winston Churchill was the true villain of World War II, and that Hitler's intentions have been widely misunderstood, and that he actually wanted peace with England, and if you can argue that England should have let Hitler conquer Europe, and you do this without even mentioning the Holocaust. But you do linger over your suspicion that Churchill was motivated by his private debts to Zionist financiers. Whatever your actual views about Jews, the world can be forgiven for thinking that there's something wrong with you. And many serious and semi-serious people

have now blasted Cooper for what he said in that interview with Tucker, and for what he subsequently wrote in his own defense on X. In the free press alone, you had Neil Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson and Sohrab Amari just take his head off. And Churchill scholars have detailed many of his errors. And of course, it's one thing to be simply wrong about World War II or Churchill or even Hitler. It's another to be wrong because you harbor the same kinds of hatreds and delusions that produced a Hitler in the first place. And that is what many people came away with. The sense that Tucker, shithead that he undoubtedly is, had platformed a Nazi sympathizer, if not an actual Nazi, and dubbed him the most important popular historian in America.

But here's where my perception of this episode shifted. As I said, Saurabh Amari wrote one of these articles in the free press, savaging Cooper. I've never met Amari. From what I can tell, he's a former Trump supporter. 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. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.