Making Sense with Sam Harris - #454 — More From Sam: Minnesota, Greenland, Iran, S**thole Countries, and More

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron dive into the chaotic start to 2026. They discuss the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration's response and rhetoric, the "evil Chauncey Gardiner" approach to acquiring Greenland, the potential fracture of NATO, the humanitarian crisis in Iran, Sam's upcoming conversation with Ben Shapiro, the radicalization of Scott Adams, and the unrecoverable error Democrats are making regarding trans activism. 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. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll 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. 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, we're back with another episode of more from Sam. Hi, Sam. Hey, good to see you. Good to see you as well. Once again, I just want to quickly remind everyone that you will be giving talks in a number of cities in North America this year. This week, we have L.A., which is sold out. Congrats. That'll be fun.

And then coming up, we have Dallas, Austin, Portland, Vancouver, Toronto, D.C., and Indiana in New York City again. So if you want to see Sam, now is the time to do it. While touring can be a lot of fun, it's also hard work, not to mention you have to stand up there for nearly two hours straight. Yeah, yeah. The talk keeps getting longer. I keep trying to cut it back, events happen. So yeah. Yeah, I've learned to stop making any suggestions. I keep asking you to cut 15 minutes in that you add 15 minutes. So I'm just going to be quiet. But it's a great show and it's a cool experience to see you deliver it live and anyone wanting to buy tickets can head over to samharis.org now and you can find all the info there. Okay, so many things happening that I don't even know

where to begin from Renee Good, ICE in general, Greenland, tariffs on the EU for intervening in Greenland, the potential collapse of NATO. And I haven't even gotten to Iran and Venezuela and Maduro might as well have happened a year ago. And it seems like... That was just like two weeks ago. I mean, it's been incredible two weeks. Yeah, well, it seems like the Epstein files have successfully fallen out of the news again. And do we even have time to cover the latest round of anti-Semitism?

Plus, I want to get your take on prediction markets and gambling apps, the latest on AI and discuss Ben Shapiro's appearance on Gavin Newsom's podcast and anything you hope to discuss with Ben when he's on your podcast next month and more. Let's see how much of this we can get to today. So, which emergency would you like to start with? How about ICE and Renee Good? Yeah, I guess we could. I did speak about that on Scott Callow's podcast at some length, so some people have seen that,

I think. But yeah, I'm happy to cover that. Yeah, just, why don't you give us a little synopsis of what you said over there and then we can go from there? Well, I mean, there's so many aspects to it that are regrettable. I mean, like, there's nothing about this that is normal. The more general problem is that we're getting lulled into a sense of a new normal that is so aberrant, right? It's so unacceptable, or it should be so unacceptable to everyone. This is just

should be just a completely nonpartisan feeling of revulsion that is coming over the country for what we're seeing here. I mean, just the behavior of ICE, the fact that you have, you know, masked and quite obviously poorly recruited and poorly trained people expressing a totally unprofessional level of belligerence to everyone in sight, right? I mean, this is not normal policing. I mean, it's not even close to even normal bad policing, right? I mean, so it's just how anyone has felt that this is defensible, you know, right of center. It's, I just, it just boggles the mind. I mean, we're talking about people who were upset over the Twitter files. Just remember that, right? I mean, that was the level of Orwellian federal government overreach that had them

fucking vomiting online, right? I mean, just the calls from Joe Biden, when he's not in power, right? He's just got a presidential campaign, and he's calling Twitter to have naked photos of his son removed. And he's just asking, right? And this is the thing that gets the Matt Taibis of the world, just around the clock, 24-7, is their entire career to chase this down. And now we have got thousands upon thousands of maniacs in the street breaking people's windows and hauling them out of their cars and throwing them on the pavement without any probable cause. And these can be immigrants, they can be citizens. They're using flashbang grenades on peaceful protesters. They're using people's kids as bargaining chips in negotiations to get people to surface from homes. And, I mean,

it's just, the footage is awful. But what is even more awful than the violence, the totally unwarranted violence we're seeing is the government's response to the worst excesses of that violence when people react. So, and the killing of Renee Good was, in my view, totally unjustified. I mean, we can dissect that a little more if you want. But the most shocking thing was the lies that came from the president and vice president and Christy Nome, everyone on down immediately. Right. And they were not even normal lies. I mean, they were impossible lies. There were lies being told when everyone could see what happened from three different sides. She's being described as a terrorist who tried to kill ICE agents. There is no way of looking at that footage to justify that claim

that was obvious from the beginning, and no one, I mean, these aren't errors, these aren't normal errors, no one corrects an error, no one apologizes, no one says, oh yeah, so we had some initial reports, we got that wrong, obviously we've got to investigate this, there's a sense of completely unprofessional contempt being expressed for half of American society. I mean, this is, the framing of everything is that we have an enemy within, and we are now going to war against that enemy, I mean, the enemy within is basically everyone who didn't vote for Trump and who isn't going to ratify his excesses at every turn. I mean, this is, if you saw this happening in any other other society, you could safely assume that those people were living under a dictatorship. This is not hyperbole.

I mean, I'm not saying we live under a dictatorship, you know, fully achieved at this point. But what we're seeing in the streets of Minneapolis and what we're seeing communicated from the Oval Office on down is fascist-style governance. There's just no question about that. Yeah. And according to Damon Linker's article, the substack piece, which the main point was that whatever you think you're seeing in the media, it's worse. I mean, it seems like every quote said something to the effect of the media is just not conveying to you just how awful this is. And so whatever you just said and whatever you think we know, it's worse on the ground, apparently. Yeah. It's hard to know what to do about it. I mean, obviously, I think people need to keep protesting.

They should try to do that as safely as possible. So let's say the other side of this. Let's just bend over backwards to be charitable to ICE and the Trump regime. There's no question that some of what protesters do is unwise and illegal and almost certainly unnecessary to express their free speech opposition to what's happening. So, I mean, I'm sure there maneuvers with people's cars blocking traffic. And it's still uncertain to me just what Renee Good was doing that was illegal or not. But let's just price all of that in. Let's just say this is, you know, to some degree, you know, the fuck around and find out principle is operative. You shouldn't be doing dangerous, illegal things in order to protest. Okay, great. But what she clearly wasn't doing

was trying to run over cops with her car. There was no reason to escalate this situation. This was not a situation that had to be violent, that was running off the rails. It was not, ICE officers weren't being threatened by anyone. They came in so aggressively and were shouting contradictory commands. Whatever you think about the first shot,

I still think that was unjustifiable. But even if you're going to bend over backwards and say, all right, this is an officer who perceived, any movement of the car to be imperiling his life. I mean, first of all, moron that he is, he's walking in front of the car. He actually thought he was in a hostile situation. Why would you walk in front of a car like that? You simply wouldn't. This is bad training, bad recruitment. Bad common sense. But just leave that aside. And what is he doing with his phone, right? He's making his own home movies of the situation. I mean, what are these ice guys doing with their phones?

I've heard that some of them are using facial recognition. Maybe that's the case. That's also a little weird and dystopian if they're running around doing facial recognition on everybody. We should have a public conversation about that. But again, leave that aside. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. He found himself in front of somebody's car. It started moving. He thought, again, idiotically, that the best way to stop a moving car to keep yourself safe from it is to shoot the driver at close range. I can't imagine any training suggests that's the case. But in any case, within a second, he was to the side of the car, not at all in harm's way, and then delivered two more shots to Renee Good and, you know, kind of ensuring that she was dead. The purpose of those shots were not

self-defense. This is not a fleeing fugitive who has, you know, several murders on her record, and you know she's a threat to the public, right? So it's just, there's nothing about this that makes sense from a law enforcement point of view. And yet you have people defend me, forget about all the liars and maniacs who are calling her a terrorist and, you know, trust. Trump said the guy was in the hospital and lucky to be alive, right? That's the level of communication. But forget about all that. There's still people right of center defending this as somehow a kind of normative policing that we want our law enforcement to come in this hot. And if you simply don't obey them, you have fucked around sufficiently so as to lose your life. Right. And that's basically the center

of narrative gravity over there. It's insane. And again, it's coming from people who, it's from the right, these people who get radicalized by every, or at least, you know, here tofore got radicalized by every overreach of federal power, right? I mean, think of, you know, Ruby Ridge that radicalize the entire, you know, far right for a generation, or Waco, right? I mean, this is what got Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building, right? It's like any intrusion of the feds coming into our lives. And what the feds are doing now is stopping traffic, and hauling people out of cars who are just driving home from work and throwing them on the pavement, restraining them and beating them up after they've been restrained. It's awful. Do you think these

videos, these horrifying videos, bode well for midterm elections for the Dems? Well, I think, you know, technically everything Trump is doing now bodes well, because it's all quite unpopular, at least from the polls I've seen, you know, the ice operations are unpopular, the Greenland stuff is unpopular. So yeah, I mean, he's... ECA subsidies, yeah. Yeah, the tariffs are on pop. I mean, it's hard to know what he thinks he's accomplishing from a political point of view with any of this. Yeah.

And, you know, I know you had touched on the takeaway of what you think we should do, and it's protesting. I wanted to get a sense of what you thought we could do. But before you answered that, I just want to show you a video clip of what I think you should not do. Renee Good! Renee Good! Renee good All these comfortable white people

who are living lavish comfortable lives while children are dragged into concentration camps you're living real life nice lives with your lattes doing absolutely nothing for your Latino and Somali brothers and sisters Listen I think you want to model the civility you want to see in your society right so I just think

whenever these things become oppressive to the rest of the citizenry I just think it's counterproductive. I mean, that's what was so ridiculous about so many Black Lives Matter protests, where they would get in people's faces and cafes and, you know, aggressively force them to, you know, in some kind of struggle session to comply with, you know,

to grant assent to the legitimacy of the protest, right? You've got, you know, bend the knee right now or we're going to, you know, ruin your life. That's just not a way to win hearts and minds in any way. Also, these are not leaders of the party. There's a difference. This is not the behavior of those that are leading that party. Again, this is asymmetric political warfare.

The right and the Trumpists have very few rules. You know, they'll docks people. They'll shatter all the norms that I think we're right to live by when we oppose our political opponents. So it's hard to know. I don't think Michelle Obama's aphorism has weathered the test of time. You know, when they go low, we go high. I just don't, I think that probably admits of some exceptions. But I just don't think you want to be an unethical asshole at any point.

All right. Some are it related to ICE. The State Department is halting visa processing for migrants from 75 countries in its latest immigration crackdown. They're basically pausing entry for any applicants they fear would become reliant on taxpayer money if allowed them to the U.S. What's wrong with that? Well, I'm sure everything's wrong with it given the people who are in charge, right?

I mean, given that we've got, we're living in Stephen Miller's world, at least on this front. I mean, it's got to be unethical, it's got to be callous, it's got to be too blunt force in every applications. I mean, so it's just, I'm sure there's nothing good about it, but in the abstract, I think we could admit that we, one, want to know who's coming into the country, which is to say we want to secure a border. And two, we want to admit the people into the country who we want in the country, right, who we think are going to add value on whatever level, whether they're high-skilled or low-skilled or refugees who we just have a, you know, have a country. compassionate policy around. We obviously don't want jihadists and Islamists and lunatics of any other

ideological flavor. We don't want, I would say we don't want communists, we don't want Nazis. There's a lot of people we don't want in this country, or we don't want more of, and we shouldn't be eager to import them intentionally or haphazardly. So that requires that we figure out who people are and have some orderly process of letting them in. And that's all fine. But again, we have, the kinds of people who will separate families and put kids in cages running our immigration policy. Wait, what happened to the $5 million visa where you could just... I think that's silly case. The golden visa, yeah.

Is that happening? I think that happened, yeah. I don't know how many people bought it, but I think that is a thing, yeah. That's like a hundred scandals ago. I don't even remember that. So people are buying and... I believe that we'd have to fact check that, but I believe that happened, yeah. Wow.

Okay. Well, clearly we know we want people in that. this country that have $5 million to spend on a visa. All right, help me understand what's happening with Greenland. Well, if I understood that, I would be, I think, the one person on Earth who does. It makes no sense because we have full access to Greenland. Denmark has been one of our best allies for, I think, 200 years. I think they lost more per capita, more soldiers per capita than any other ally in our wars

in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, this is a country that has joined us, even in our unpopular wars, I mean, wars that were unpopular in their own society, for better or worse, there's no reason we should be at odds with them, much less be mistreating them, much less be threatening to kill their soldiers, right, which is effectively what we have done by saying we might, you can do this the easy way, you can do this the hard way, and we might invade. Obviously, we risk shattering NATO if it isn't, you know, tacitly shattered already. I think it probably is. I don't think anyone thinks we would defend

a country like Poland, if Russia rolled in there now. So our Article 5 obligations, I think, are void. It makes no sense because we have, we already have bases on there. We have older bases on there. I think at one point we had something like 17 military bases on Greenland. I think we have one now, but we have full access rights. We can do anything we want there with respect to defending Arctic sea lanes or mining for minerals. This is just not, it's not a thing, this problem of Greenland not being available to us strategically, why Trump thinks we need it for the, I mean, he said something like, you know, America needs it like psychologically or something. I mean, that just is.

Well, I thought he said it because he was worried that China or Russia wanted to take it. Well, no, but if China or Russia attempted to take it, they would be attacking a NATO country, right, which we're sworn to defend. It would be the same situation. This is something that has emerged from Trump's brain. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast.

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