Making Sense with Sam Harris - #490 — Lies, Bulls**t, and the Rule of Law

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Sam Harris speaks with Preet Bharara about the collapse of good faith debate in American politics. They discuss the fragmentation of media, the treatment of Anthony Fauci, the rush to prosecute political opponents, Trump's self-dealing, why indictments strengthened Trump, lying vs bullshit, tribalism and dogmatism, the failures of the Democratic Party, hypocrisy and sanctimony, restoring norms and institutions, the 2028 election, and other topics. This episode was originally recorded for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast. 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.  

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please consider subscribing today. Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. How are you? I'm good. Great to see you, Prit. It's been a while. It's been a while, and I'm just trying to figure out if things are the same, if they've gotten better, if they've gotten worse. I don't want to talk

about politics just yet. Okay. Something that's been on my mind, I know, is on your mind. And one of the things that you're known for is your commitment to and dedication to and concern about good faith debate and discussion, right? Is that fair statement? Yeah, sure. That's why, you know, one of the reasons you have a podcast, that's one of the reasons I have a podcast. So before we talk about how political debate unfolds, because that's a subspecies of over all conversation and debate. There are discussions on college campuses. There are discussions in people's homes. There are discussions at Thanksgiving, cable television podcast, you name it. Has the quality of discussion, we love to say you hear this all the time, and I heard it 20 years

ago and 30 years ago also, that the quality of dialogue has gone down. Is that true, or do we just reinvent a reason to be concerned and critical and annoyed every few years? years. No, well, I think both things are also true. I mean, those aren't mutually exclusive, but I do think it has gone down for some obvious reasons. I mean, I think the information siloing of born of social media has, you just said that in the fragmentation of culture as a result of that has preceded a pace for the last 20-some-odd years. I think people are reading less and and what they read is shorter and less carefully argued. I think much of what people are consuming is, if not, AI, slop entirely. It's the slopification born of hot takes and, and, you know,

frankly, podcast conversations such as this, although, you know, I think you and I are, hopefully we're going to, we're okay. Yeah, we're not going to be displaying the, the most egregious sins of the format here, but so many podcasts are just a matter of the, host and the guest bloviating without much care to observe anything like academic or journalistic or intellectual norms, right? They're just, I mean, we have so many podcasts that are run by comedians and, you know, entertainers and, and, and also just unserious people. And so the, the appetite for contrarianism and conspiracy thinking has been supercharged, you know, during COVID and beyond.

That's one big cultural change. And so there's very little respect for institutions and institutional narratives and gatekeeping and expertise. And so that unwinding has had an effect. It's not to say that there weren't reasons for it, but I think it has been in the main disastrous. I just take a moment to defend

some comedians I know who are not on serious people. Yeah, yeah, okay. Before you get mail on it. Do you want to name names? Well, I think some of the late night hosts, I don't know that they have podcasts. I think David Letterman is a is not an unsurious person. I certainly wasn't thinking of the old guard.

I think Stephen Colbert is not an unsurious person. And there are some other comedians. I won't name them. Yeah. Well, I'll name one. I mean, he was a friend, but I'm quite worried about his cultural influence. I've named him on many other podcasts. But I think the effect that Joe Rogan's podcast has had has been, I mean, it's been

many things, but it has been politically disastrous. I think. I just think it's not just what's happened on his podcast, but the instruction that every other independent broadcaster on Earth has taken from his example. I think it's been terrible. But sort of the odd thing is you would think people would have a base level of credulousness about things that they hear. And in both regards, with respect to people that folks think they shouldn't agree with, someone from a different party, they don't believe anything that comes out of the mouths of the people who are on the other side of the fence, which I sort of get that. But you couple that with simultaneously taking his gospel everything said by the folks on their own side of the

fence. That's true with Joe Rogan. That I don't really understand. That I don't really understand. Do you have a theory about that? Well, it is a form of tribalism. It's a form of confirmation bias. I mean, there are certain sources that you, you know, prejudge as friendly or, you know, through cruel experience, you realize that, you know, certain sources are kind of weaponized against you, and you just are not disposed to take them seriously. I mean, if, I'm going to take, you know, again, so much of this, you can date to COVID and what it did to our society. I mean, both the fact of the pandemic and the reaction to it and the overreaction to it and the counterreaction to it. I mean, all of that was a great shattering of culture that I still think we're

working out the consequences of and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, living under the shadow of. But yeah, you know, if CNN, you know, colorizes your face to make you look sick and tells the world that you're, you're a racist or you're, you know, and you're eating, you know, horse tranquilizer or, you know, horse dewormer, I mean, you know, Rogan got completely slimed

by the mainstream media. So it's natural to think he's going to have a reaction against it. And I, you know, in miniature, I know what that's like, right? So it's, and I, and you know what it's like when you see a story that you're close to, many of us have had the experience of seeing the bias and, you know, frank, idiocy of even the best, you know, organs of journalism, like the New York Times on full display, right? I mean, as recently as today, I'm reading an article in the New York Times, and I see them predisposed to get many things wrong because they're tending to various, you know,

left-leaning shibboleths, you know, on a topic that I know very closely, right? So, you know, all of that stuff is infuriating, frankly. And if you don't have enough of a foothold in the norms of proper critical thought, it's easy to see how someone who builds himself as really just an entertainer. Someone's just having fun on his podcast with friends, mainly, doesn't have a responsibility to keep bending over backwards to give the usual gatekeepers and the usual authorities a fresh hearing, right? And so, yeah, there are many people who just think that You shouldn't believe anything in the New York Times, but you should believe what some, you know, fairly crazed person thinks about vaccines, you know, in the same breath as he tells you that he was denied a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work. I mean, they're listening to crazy people, but some of these crazy people are running parts of our government now.

I mean, again, there's been a great unraveling. Since you mentioned COVID, do you have a view on how Dr. Fauci has been described, how he's been treated, and how he's been received and thought of, and how do you think of him? Well, there are a few layers to this onion. So the first thing I would say is that in defense of all the people who are outraged at how the government handled everything, there are kernels of truth to that outrage. And one kernel is that the immediate branding of any speculation about the origins of this virus being not a wet, wet market, but a lab leak as racist, right? That kind of vilification of people who were just following some obvious chains of thought at the time, that was terrible and terribly counterproductive, right? It had nothing to do with racism. I mean, but just step back for a second and ask yourself, how is a lab leak more politically invidious, i.e. racist, than a wet market outbreak, right? I mean, if anything, I would say the fact that the Chinese can't figure out how to stop eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs, that is more, quote, racist to observe about their culture than their propensity to have a lab leak out of a level two or level three lab, which happens to more or less everyone.

Right. So, I mean, the racism charge was always idiotic. It was always going to produce rage in anyone who it was directed at. And so that's true. And Fauci was part of that. And his leaked journals, though I don't think they should have been leaked. I think that's awful are obviously embarrassing. I mean, the contents there. I mean, his level of star-fuckery. It's consistent with libertarianism, is it not? What is consistent? Rand Paul's libertarianism is consistent with releasing the diary. Yeah, yeah, so there's hypocrisy there. Yeah, no. So, yeah, I don't support the leaking of private journals in this way. And I think many people would be embarrassed by that process. But what is, in fact, on display is also as objectively embarrassing as almost anything in a public health official. And he was just blown around by his fame in a way that it was, it's just hard to defend.

But he's, you know, and as to whether or not he was doing any. to cover, you know, the, for the improprieties of himself or his friends in trying to quash any investigation of a lab, lab leak. I mean, I think that remains to be seen, but I do think he's also the focus of a witch hunt and the attacks on him and the glee with which many people are expecting an 85-year-old man to spend the rest of his days in prison. I mean, like, all of this is just a kind of moral panic and a burning of a witch, which I think is, again, it's a sign of the times we're living in. I mean, I think, so I think the most of it's awful, and yet there are kernels of truth in there that are also, understandably getting people tuned up.

So you raise something else that is sort of part of this whole discussion about good faith debate and the lack of it and where people go directionally with their complaints and what outcomes they want. And this one, this one is near and dear to my heart. It's criminal prosecution. And I don't know if it's the case 50 years ago that people were so quick to say if you disagreed with somebody or you thought someone violated a quote unquote norm and I want to talk about norms in a minute and what they mean. Or someone was on the other side of the fence or someone committed an ethical violation or someone told an untruth in some context other than when they're like it doesn't matter what it is. If they're not in your tribe, lock them up. If they're not in your tribe, lock her up.

And there's lots of things that are morally blameworthy. I dare say that I've committed a number of them. I'm sure you have, you know, there's not a human who hasn't, but if you're in the other tribe, the call to imprison you, I feel it comes much more quickly than it ever did before. And that's even true on the left sometimes, too. What's that? I'm just going to keep asking you questions that are impossible to answer.

Let me volley this back to you with a similar question, but I'm wondering, I mean, there's some significant asymmetries here, right? So it's like, if you were someone who claimed to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop or about the impropriety of him having a, you know, a sinecure in a Ukrainian oil company for which he was clearly not qualified and what that might say about corruption from the, you know, in the Biden family and the Biden, you know, coming Biden presidency, okay, well, it's fine to care about all of that, I guess. but then how can you not care about a president who has already enriched himself billions of dollars by trading away our, you know, tariff policies and our foreign policy?

Well, he's my guy. Because he's my guy. But it's the scale of the thing that is so different. And, you know, Nancy Pelosi's stock trades are one thing. What Trump and company are doing now is orders of magnitude worse, even if you're going to take the least charitable view of the Pelosi case. So my question to you is, if there are not laws against what Trump and family are doing now, I mean, did you, the cryptocurrency scams or creating an insider trading mechanism, you know,

selling access, early access to his true social posts for $100,000 a month so that you can bet on their implications in the market, I mean, one, aren't there laws against that and why wouldn't somebody be going to prison once the Democrats have enough power to actually investigate things? But so that's question number one. I mean, are there laws and if so, why not? But two, my concern is that once the Democrats are in a position to investigate these sorts of things, it's all going to be spun as just more lawfare, more cynicism, more tribalism, and attention to details of scale and to the egregiousness of some of these offenses will go completely out the window. And we will just be swinging back and forth between these misuses of American justice. wherein one is actually its proper use. If this kind of financial behavior and self-dealing can't be investigated, I don't know what can be. Well, so number one, I think it will be. I think the House will be in the hands of the Democrats.

The Justice Department is not. And you have my erstwhile friend, Todd Blanche, and former colleague saying words to the effect of, you know, neither he will say, nor should any Attorney General say that they're independent from the White House, which is astonishing. But when you ask a question like that, a lot of people do on a going forward basis, there's some history here. And Donald Trump has been investigated multiple times again and again and again, both by state courts, I'm sorry, state jurisdictions, state DAs, by federal prosecutors, a number of them, by a state attorney general, by Congress multiple times. He has been sued. He has lost. So, you know, there is a mechanism for doing this

that doesn't always succeed because there are problems of proof or there are problems of, you know, who's directing the investigation and who's not. And I think the things that you're talking about are ripe for investigation and will be investigated, not by the Justice Department over the next two and a half years, but at some point they will. Now, the other paradox here is, you know, I come from a law enforcement background. And so if someone committed a crime or there's sufficient predicate to investigate a crime, then you do that. And you walk away if there's not enough evidence or it's not in the interest of justice. And otherwise, no matter what the Hew and cry is, you go forward. The problem is when you investigate and or

prosecute or decline to prosecute someone like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or anyone else who has a political following, and in some cases a subset of a political following that is sort of blindly following, I'm not going to say which side I mean that to be. Sometimes politically the best thing that can happen to them is to get investigated or to get indicted. Now, I haven't looked at the charts myself, but multiple people have said,

and I should go look at it myself, that Donald Trump was deader than dead as a political prospect after he lost the election in 2020. And if you look at the people tell me, if you look at the graphs, his popularity began to rise again when he was indicted by the Manhattan DA.

And the other thing that happens is, which I don't know how, you know, this is a sort of a general question for us to discuss, the sort of drowning in information, and not just information, but drowning in conspiracy theories, and drowning in lies, and drowning in controversies. Donald Trump, even though the publicity he was getting was largely negative, right? You had the prosecution in Manhattan, you had the prosecution in Georgia, you had the two special counsel prosecutions. He was taken up all the air,

right? So even if somebody else on his side, on the Republican side, had a message. And even if the information about Donald Trump was bad, it was all about Donald Trump, going to prove, you know, that old saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity. I don't know if that's true or not. And then you combine that with, and I'm curious what you think about this assessment, you combine that with J.D. Vance's recent pronouncement

that if Watergate happened today, it would be a 12-hour story. And can you imagine how ridiculous it is that that little thing called Watergate toppled a presidency, how do you react to all of that stuff? Well, I think it's probably right about that, which is, but it's, you know, I would, draw the opposite lesson, I think, there. I mean, that is a sign of just how deep a hole we are in

politically and culturally. It's not that it should have been a 12-hour story. It's that it would be now a 12-hour story, given how much noise and how little signal there is in our, you know, on our information landscape, given the- But is there always that noise, or does Donald Trump strategically, tactically, instinctively, instinctively create that noise? I mean, Was there that much noise when Biden was president? I don't think so. Well, there was, there, there had been kind of Trump-like reverberations, you know, that crossed, you know, the four years where he wasn't president.

I mean, we continue to unravel. And there's a left-wing version of the kind of the Trumpist noise machine. But, I mean, for Trump specifically, I mean, this is, I think a kind of unpopular opinion of him, but this is the framing I have always had of him. And I think I still have it. I think a lot of his success and his ascendancy and his invulnerability to scandal has less to do with him being some kind of political genius and more to do with the situation in which he has found himself, right?

So I view him as a, the analogy that has worked for me is that he's kind of an evil version of the Chauncey Gardner character from the Jersey Kosinski book and the being there and the film by that name. If people remember, Peter Sellers played this character who is just kind of alone in the house and he's all he is the gardener and he gets a thrust into a situation where he can be, everything he says can be mistaken for political wisdom, but he's really an imbecile, right? And he never ceases to be an imbecile, but he's in a context in which everything he does begins to look profound and has a profound effect on the people around him. there's something like that going on with Trump, right? So ask yourself, now, is it, is Trump being a genius when he contradicts himself 15 times over the course of 30 minutes on topics of enormous importance like what's going on in our current war with Iran, right? He'll, he'll claim that the Iranians are, you know, just peace-loving people just like ourselves who want the best for their country. And then he'll turn around and say they're scum. He'll say he's going to annihilate. them, but then he'll say that the war's already been won and the straits of Hormuz are wide open.

And he lurches back and forth. It is just a word salad, right? Now, that is not, I would say, calculated to confound the audience. And no, it's just he has found himself in the presence of an electorate where tens of millions of people simply do not care about what is real, right? They don't, it's not like, so an ordinary con man has to lie so as to be believed, right? He had, he has to be aware of the logical expectations of his audience. And the con is to shade the truth or to lie outright in such a way.

But the puzzle piece has to fit, right, or seem to fit so that everyone doesn't call bullshit on, on the whole enterprise where the situation Trump is in is he's got enough people, you know, something like 30% of Americans, maybe 40% of Americans, who simply don't care if the puzzle piece fits, right? They're just, they're not tracking the truth. They're signaling to themselves in this some kind of, you know, extended loyalty test that they will eat everything that comes out of his mouth, you know, lie, insult, you know, hallucination. And, and they'll give him money. I mean, then he'll print another, you know, fake gold coin. and it doesn't matter what that gold coin says. I mean, he could mint a coinage that says, you're all a bunch of dumb cucks, come and get it, and he would sell millions of dollars of those coins.

Right, so that's the situation he's in, and given that he's got tens of millions of people who will never be dislodged from that cult, he looks like of some kind of political genius. Would you describe it as a demagogue? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And so demagogues never have a majority.

I don't think. It's unlikely that they have majorities because there are thinking intelligent, rational people in any given population, particularly one that's a democracy, that may be under a threat of becoming something less than or different from a democracy. And, you know, most people, as politicians, whether it's a Republican like John McCain or it's a Democrat like Barack Obama, try to strike themes of unity and stitching together coalitions and big tents. And there's always talk about tents. It's a tent big enough. It's a tent too big. big. And Donald Trump seems to have figured out, again, instinctively, because I don't think he gives deep thought to anything. He doesn't have a manifesto at home. He has instinct in his head that you don't

need to have 51% of the people. Yeah. You don't need to have 60% of the people. And if you, if your particular appeal is to that subset of any population who is, who is more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and is, and is more likely to not be attached to democracy, I mean, And Alabama has this statistic that I think about all the time. And I was looking back at one of her books over the weekend that I think there are social scientists who believe that even in Western liberal democracies, there is like a latent subset of, I don't know, they claim 20, 25, 30 percent. We're like, yeah, look, if we have to have some autocracy, but we get the outcomes we want,

then we're okay. And he figured that out. I mean, look, even now, with his very low poll rating, he's basically alienated all the people who have some skepticism about him, even if they voted for him. And the only people that are left are the ones who don't. And if that's of a sufficient number to win the electoral college, then that's all you need. Does that mean the system is messed up? And then I guess my question is, on the pie chart of blameworthiness about our being in this predicament, how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump, and how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump supporters?

Well, I would point to the other part of the pie, which I think is, I would say at least half of it, which is the miscalculation and frank idiocy and confusion of the left, right? I blame the left, in large measure for the fact that there's a President Trump in the first place. Let's go through that. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player. Literally, the President of the United States Commander Chief, who also calls himself, the Chief Federal Law Enforcement Officer of the country,

is saying that certain people are guilty and should go to prison and, in the case of some, should get the death penalty. In the old days, if a sitting president of the United States openly called for the death penalty of a duly elected member of the Senate from the largest state in the country, from the other party, that would be close to presidency ending that day. Thank you.