The Megyn Kelly Show - Activists Capturing Institutions, Censorship and Twitter Toxicity, and Woke Untruths, with Sam Harris | Ep. 527

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Sam Harris, host of the "Making Sense" podcast, to talk about leaving the toxicity of Twitter, how the middle gets attacked by both sides, partisans treating their opponents unfairly, his comments that went viral about Trump and Biden that caused Sam to step away from the spotlight, former President Trump's narcissism and the importance of the peaceful transfer of power, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop by tech platforms and the media in October 2020, moral panics today and from the past, Elon Musk skewering a BBC journalist, SFSU continuing to attack Riley Gaines, activists elevating Dylan Mulvaney, how the extremes of the transgender movement are influencing how people identify, woke untruths spreading and whether the pendulum is swinging back toward sanity, the Dalai Lama's disturbing and bizarre interaction with a child, which Republicans Harris could support, and more.More from Sam: https://www.samharris.org/Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. So excited to bring you Sam Harris today. I first talked to Sam way back in December 2020. It was just episode 37 of our burgeoning little show. Like many conversations he has, it was long, it was deep, it affected me greatly for days and days afterward. We talked about political tribalism, race essentialism, cancel culture, the woke left, the rise of victimhood, Trump, Biden, even meditation. In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago, but in other ways, these stories have only gotten more relevant and alarming. After Sam's comments about Hunter Biden back in August, you may remember this. He was on the podcast Trigonometry,

which we love, and Sam likes too, and made some comments about how how we'll get to it. But basically, he didn't care what was on the Hunter Biden laptop, that Trump was a unique figure who needed to be stopped. And, well, we'll play the soundbite so you can hear it yourself. So much backlash came his way. And Sam stepped away from the spotlight for a bit, but glad to say he's back with me today. And we have so much to discuss. Sam Harris is an author, neuroscientist, and host of the very popular Making Sense podcast. Sam, great to have you back on. Welcome back. Hey, Megan. Great to see you. So you've been busy. You've had an eventful fall and winter season. And let me just start with, how are you? How are you doing? I am great, actually. As you say, I've stepped away from Twitter, and I am actually embarrassed to say what an immense change that has been in my life. I mean, it's really, we can talk about that.

But I was genuinely surprised that it was as much of a problem for me as it was. And I really only recognize that in retrospect. So, I mean, obviously I knew something was off and I decided to delete my account, but I'm just amazed at what Twitter has done, not just to me, but to society. I guess it's a problem of social media more generally, but I think Twitter really is the epicenter of it. And, uh, I just think it has, you know, we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment to which no one really has consented and the results are, are not looking good. And it's, um, so yeah, we can, we can get into that if you want to, but it's, you know, I'm, I'm great. And it's really been a huge improvement not to be segmenting my life in hours and minutes between checking Twitter, which is really what life had become.

I mean, it's very strange to say it, but that really is what has happened to so many people. I understand. And I understand in particular for someone like you who is, I don't know if you call yourself in the center. I think you do. You lean left on some things, you lean right on some things, you surprise both sides with your takes on various issues. You can't be easily pigeonholed. And for somebody like that, it's an even rougher place. I mean, I can kind of relate to this because while mostly I'm leaning right on a lot of issues today, just cause I'm big into the culture wars and we've lost our minds. Um, I understand because a lot of the times, uh, the people who follow me from the left, because they know I'm not hard, right. And I'll give their side a fair shake and they just want facts, right? I deal in facts. They'll get very upset over certain things I'm saying, or sometimes the right will, because I'm not afraid to criticize figures on the right, whether it's Trump, DeSantis, et cetera. And so I understand, Twitter's one of those places where they just want you to be on their team. And if you're on their team, they'll back you. And if you say something that goes against the team narrative, they get very, very angry and it can be very toxic. Yeah.

Yeah. As you say, if you're in the center, you really do get it from both sides. You know, if you're, you know, I say as much against wokeism as I think, you know, virtually anyone on the right. And I say as much against Trumpism as virtually anyone on the left. But if there's any daylight between you and the right and the left on any specific topic, yeah, you're treated like the near enemy, right? It precipitates even more of a vicious and dishonest sort of attack against you. And so I think it is very different being more or less just aligned with one pole. Because then you can really just discount what you're getting from the other side.

But I really don't have another side, right? I'm very much in the center, not because I think the truth is always at the midpoint between two extremes, but because I'm genuinely not a partisan, right? And so I'm calling balls and strikes as I see them. And so, for instance, no matter how much I despise Trumpism as a movement and no matter how much I think Trump is precisely the wrong sort of person to have been put in the Oval Office, I'm not willing to take cheap shots at him, despite what Trumpists may think I do. So, for instance, when someone takes a clip from a press conference of his that is genuinely misleading, like the fine people clip after Charlottesville,

right? That was not what he seemed to say over on the left, right? And could be made to seem to say by just endlessly referencing that clip of him saying there are fine people on both sides was not in fact what he said in context, right? He was not praising Nazis and anti-Semites in the way he was made to seem. And so that's an unfair attack. And it's the sort of thing that has happened to me as you referenced. And many of us are just living and dying by clips, but partisans are happy to play that game because they don't really care what their opponents think. They only care what they can be made to seem to think, right? What a tribalist and a partisan wants to do at each moment politically is tar their opponents

with the most extreme and however tenuously plausible version of what they can seem to mean. Right. And then they just want to hold them to that no matter how uncharitable that is, no matter how dishonest that is until the end of time. Right. And so I'm just I'm not willing to play that game as much as it gets played with me. And yeah. So then when you when you decline to do that, you get a tremendous amount of hate from both sides. Yeah. So then when you when you decline to do that, you get a tremendous amount of hate from both sides. defended the cops in the midst of the BLM storm against them, spoken out against wokeism,

has been an important, really smart, which is a bonus, voice on some of these really important issues that the right in particular cares about. Why do they care so much that you hate Trump? Like, okay, you hate Trump. A lot of people hate Trump. A lot of people love Trump. Like, okay, I think it's valuable to have somebody like you who's not deranged, who's not just suffering from this sort of leftism that takes over your brain and makes you see everybody on the right is terrible. That's not you. Why is it so upsetting to them to hear you say, I really, really hate him and hear all the reasons I hate him and don't think he should be near them? Great. It's to me, a window, a window we should open, we should listen to, we should consider, may not be persuasive, may feel offended in the moment, but that's what the right

criticizes the left for doing, being little snowflakes who can't hear another view, right? The right is supposed to be able to hear opposing views, walk away fortified by new opinions or insights that they accept or reject reject and move on with their beautiful lives. Yeah, it's not so much that I hate Trump. It's really, you know, I don't hate him as a person. I think I hate the fact of him. I hate what he has done to our politics and to our society generally. It's not, you know, I mean, for me, the bright line with Trump has always been his refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power in the run up to the 2020 election. Obviously, there are many other reasons, literally a hundred reasons to have deplored his candidacy, in my view.

And I was very outspoken on those reasons. But the true point of no return for me was his declining to accept a peaceful transfer of power. And I really think this should be uncontroversial. Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, celebrated our peaceful transfer of power as a miracle. And I think he was right to emphasize that it distinguishes us from so many other societies that are struggling to create valid democracies and stable ones.

And Trump did his best to destroy that miracle in 2020. And he effectively did. I mean, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power. So, you know, whatever you think about him as a person, whether you think he's, you know, entertaining and, you know, just worth paying attention to, whether you think he's entertaining and just worth paying attention to, or you always wanted him to disappear, that was the point of no return, I think, politically and ethically. And yeah, so that was going on for a good eight months before the election was actually

run. And it was quite clear. The painful irony here is that he attempted to do what he claimed was being done to him, and he really did attempt to steal an election. And the fact that so many people in our society believe that the election was stolen from him is not something you know, it's not something that I necessarily blame millions of people for. I mean, there's so much misinformation and so much confusion now, and there's so little trust in our institutions. Again, this is largely a problem engineered for us by social media that, yeah, you know, I can't blame millions of people for not quite understanding what happened there, but I believe I do understand what happened there. I think it was pretty clear in real time what was happening, and it was unconscionable. Beyond that, it's not a matter of personal animus toward Trump. I think Trump is kind of a goofy entertainer, really, in the end. He's a con man. I don't think he's a normal person. I don't think he's an ethical person. I think he's a malignantly selfish person. But he's not someone who I would need to pay attention to if he hadn't already been president and wasn't seeking the presidency

again. Well, that's the thing. You say the point of no return, and yet he has returned, and maybe returning in an even more robust way over the next weeks and months to come. Let me ask you this, Sam, because one thing about your comments to Trigonometry, and I'll play part of them, has me listening to comments like the ones you just made and saying, but don't you understand what led people to believe that Trump was cheated out of his second term? It was in part comments like the ones you made because they rightly believed the Trump hating left would do anything to stop him and saw your comments as an admission to that effect. It was an acknowledgement. The ends justify the means. He must be stopped. He's a unique

figure. And that's just one of the many things that had people believing they will do anything. And in particular, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop. You can ruminate on that while I get the audience up to speed with a soundbite that we're talking about. Let me just say as preface to the soundbite that I'm not actually saying what I seem to be saying in this clip. This is a clip that was maliciously spread on Twitter by someone who subsequently spread a clip that tried to have me saying that I wished more children died during COVID, right? I mean, and that clip was so inept and it was so clear what I was saying in context

that not a lot of people believe that, but it's the same person who circulated the clip. And this is a larger problem, again, with social media that people are behaving like psychopaths, right? And people, you know, whether they're psychopaths or not, they're actually just consciously misleading millions of people just for the, you know, just for the lulls, you know, and just to exact some kind of reputational harm on people they don't like. And it's not good, right? So I'm happy to, you know, feel free to play the clip. I'm happy to talk about it.

But I'm actually, it's not, I'm not actually saying what I seem to be saying in this clip. Okay, I got it. That was reasonably clear in context. I mean, the truth is I'm not, I wasn't speaking as well as I might have spoke in that context. It's annoying to the audience to listen to the wind up without knowing what we're, we're, you can do that on the, on the back end. So let me play what we have and then you can take it on. Sot three. Yep. I mean, 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, like, there's just, 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. Like, 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 okay go ahead yeah so so the the thing that's genuinely misleading there is that is the final line i think it it was warranted, right? That was not what I was saying in context and what I meant to say. I mean, the distinction for me is,

so here's what I was talking about in context, right? So we have this October surprise dropped by Rudy Giuliani, something like 10 days before the election, this laptop from hell. And this was a very unpleasant echo of what had happened in the previous election with Jim Comey deciding to revisit Hillary Clinton's emails based on the discovery of Anthony Weiner's laptop. And we know what happened there. We know that that was really, obviously, I think Hillary's failed candidacy was overdetermined. She was a terrible candidate for a variety of reasons. And it's understandable she didn't become president. But we saw what happened to the polls hour by hour after that press conference. And it did seem decisive. of this laptop, as many people did, as just this, you know, on the one hand, it certainly seemed like it stood a good chance of being fake or at least doctored and some species of disinformation.

But most important, not knowing what was true there, the clock was ticking, right? And it didn't seem at all prudent to be hostage to Rudy Giuliani's timeline, right? And to have to figure out, have to drill down on this laptop in the 10 days before the election, making it the front page story across the board, trying to figure out what was real there. So my position was never that it was an easy call journalistically. In fact, in the context of this interview, I talk about it being a coin toss. I talk about being uncertain what I think should have happened there. But I sound very certain in that clip. In that clip, I seem to be saying that it was just a straightforwardly wise decision to ignore the laptop.

What I actually was saying and what I actually believe is that it was a genuinely hard decision journalistically to decide what to do when that laptop emerged 10 days before the election. And I think it's a coin toss whether or not an institution like the New York Times should have just ignored it until after the election. I'm not saying they should have ignored it until the end of time. I'm not saying that it's not totally valid now to look at what's in that laptop. Although the truth is now that Trump is a candidate for the presidency again, I still don't care what's in that laptop, right? And this is the other point I was making. We know so much about donald trump and joe biden as people right these are these are two men this is your judgment this is a difference like this is less controversial this is where

you veer off into biden's worse than or trump's worse than biden nothing's going to convince me differently i get that like that's that we've had that debate with people many times and that's what leads people to the polls and they make the choice they do. It's the notion that, because you said in the interview, politically speaking, I consider Trump an existential threat, or you said that after the fact, he's an existential threat. And so the thought that he's an existential threat and really must be stopped, right? And that I'm not really interested in information that- Yeah, but that's not true. So I just want to clarify that. I mean, I was not saying in that interview that the ends justify the means and that we are free to do

illegal and unethical things in order to stop Trump. And I don't think he's... And I did not think he's an existential threat of that sort. I don't think Trump is orange Hitler, right? I think he's a deeply selfish and unqualified person to put in the presidency. And therefore, I think he's, you know, he's dangerous, right? But he's not ideological. He's not nearly as sinister as he could be. And again, in the context of that interview, I made that clear. The whole bit about him being, I mean, I think part of the clip you didn't play is I drew an analogy to an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.

Again, it was misleading in the clip because what I was talking about is just how irrelevant it was whether there was a conspiracy or not, whether people are talking behind closed doors. I understand that. I agree with you. You're talking about, is it a conspiracy just because you have people in a room talking about a threat coming at them like an asteroid? No doubt people are talking in public and in private about how to stop Trump. And I consider

that fine. What I don't consider fine is lying about him, lying about his, what he actually means when he's speaking, lying about what he's done and hasn't done, lying about what he actually means when he's speaking, lying about what he's done and hasn't done, lying about what he intends and doesn't intend. And so much of the problem of Trump is completely in plain view. I mean, he's- But wait, are you saying the right doing that? Or when you list that off, that's the left. That's who did that.

Oh, yeah. No, that is the left. And I haven't done that with trump my the point i'm making is that um it it was it was totally valid to avert your eyes from the hunter biden laptop story with 10 days to run out before the election given that this this october surprise was clearly engineered for political reasons, right? So that's all I was saying in that. But the citizenry can avert to anything. It's the question of whether journalists should be in on it, should be making decisions to protect a candidate.

Journalists have to make editorial decisions all the time, as you know, and you signal boost things you think are important and going to make the future better than the past. So maybe you don't run with it. Maybe the New York Times says, we don't have it. We don't think the sourcing's there. But what happened in this case was the New York Post's reporting was entirely shut down. Their Twitter account was frozen. You couldn't, I couldn't retweet the article as somebody who wasn't shut down. Their Twitter account was frozen. They couldn't, you couldn't, I couldn't retweet the article as somebody who wasn't shut down. There was absolutely no communication of that in our online social square. And it definitely suppressed circulation of a very big story. So it wasn't just we, the New York Times, don't think the sourcing's there. It was we, big tech and big journalism, are going to put our thumb on the New York Post and squash its reporting, which was clearly done to advance the Biden candidacy. Well, let me just, again, I would dispute the fact that at the time it was clear whether the New York Post story was valid. So I do think it was an understandable judgment call

on the part of the people at Twitter. I don't think it was the right call. No, you don't do that. You don't do that. You don't do that. You don't say, we little armchair warriors will decide without having done any of the reporting.

We haven't seen the laptop. We haven't talked to the FBI. We now know they had an investigation open, which we knew at the time. They haven't done anything. It's little armchair warrior saying, that hurts Biden, done. And I don't think there's anybody who believes if the story had been about Donald Trump, that they would have had the same reluctance to publish it. We all know that. Oh, no, that's completely true. Yeah. So that insofar as I'm acknowledging a massive bias against Trump on the part of the people at Twitter and

the people in much of the established mainstream media, that's true, right? And it was understandable. And yes, had that been Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop, there's no question there would have been a different response. And I do think it was almost certainly the wrong decision for Twitter to block that story and to ban. I think they took down the New York Post account briefly, if memory serves. Yeah. No, I think, again, that's quite distinct from the New York Times just deciding not to look into it for 11 days, right? I mean, that's, so there were, you know, gradations to the practice of bias there. And I'm, you know, I'm much more comfortable with what the New York Times did and didn't do than with what Twitter did or didn't do. And I think it helps feed what you hate,

which is conspiracy. I keep saying what you hate. You'll decide. You'll tell us what you hate. But I know you're not a big conspiracy person. And I pride myself on not getting sucked into those either. I really do.

My listeners know I'm vigilant about taking in information from the left and the right so no one can corrupt my brain. No one can make me don their team jersey advertently or inadvertently. I want to deal in fact. It's getting harder and harder with AI and chat GPT and so on. It's going to be an ongoing battle.

However, it's worth the effort. But this is how conspiracies are born. Little things like this. It wasn't a little thing. The suppression of a story by big tech, by a respected newspaper. I don't care if you're on the left or the right. New York Post's Alexander Hamilton founded it. It's been around for a long, long time. It's done very, very well. They have legit reporters over there. And they did have the story, as we now know, 100%. Washington Post, New York Times, they've all acknowledged it. Now the laptop was real. Those disinformation experts who put out their statement, those Intel experts have been embarrassed and they should have gone with the story and they should have reported on the story. So that's, it's just bit by bit, things like that, that send people down the rabbit hole, that send people down into Reddit hell from which they emerge thinking there are lizard people, right? We could go down the list.

Right, right. But the point I made there that was so provocative that people found so astounding and objectionable was that there could be nothing on that laptop that I would have cared about, right? Now that is still true, right? Because it's's again, because I believe we know so much about Trump and Biden as people. Now I'm not, I'm not a fan of Biden running again for the presidency. You know, I hope he doesn't, although I don't know who the other candidate, I don't know who we would put in his place. But still, I know, I believe I know so much about him as a person and that and there's nothing on that on his son's laptop that is all likely to offset that. You know, if Biden were living like Andrew Tate, right, if he was driving around in a Bugatti, if he had all kinds of homes, we'd like to be out. Well, then, OK, then some allegation of corruption might land in a way that would balance the scales against Trump.

But again, we know so much about Trump's history that precedes his even running for the presidency in 2016 that makes him, in my view, one of the most corrupt people we've ever seen in public life. And so that's why I simply don't care about what Hunter Biden has been up to. We know Hunter is a disaster, right? I mean, he has been a crack addict, and it's just- But this is about whether Joe was also a disaster. What was interesting in the corruption front was whether Joe was taken 10% as the big guy. And that, whether it would be persuasive to you or not, is relevant. It's relevant to a campaign and to balancing out the scales. And one of the reasons why you may not think the Biden corruption compares to corruption

on the Trump side is because the mainstream media won't report it. They don't care, Sam. They won't go digging on a Biden story the way they would go digging on a Trump story. If Trump's daughter had written a diary that talked about inappropriately long showers between her and her father, you don't think the mainstream media would have covered that for days? No, they blacked out the Ashley Biden diary story. Okay. Well, it's been so successfully blacked out that this is the first I'm hearing of it. So I can't really respond. But your point is

certainly true, right? That there is this bias. But again, the bias is understandable because we know so much about these guys. Now, it's not that there was a sexual harassment charge against Biden that was looked into and it didn't get completely suppressed. But there are literally dozens. I interviewed Tara Reid. I'm one of like two people who did it. I flew to her during the COVID pandemic while I didn't even have a network. I didn't even have a show because everyone was ignoring her and I was mad.

And I can't show you another. I don't think there is another journalist in America who interviewed both the Trump accusers and Tara Reid and Biden's accusers because I read about the story. I believe in The New York Times. So, I mean, it was covered because it got it got into my brain. But my point is, even if it's true, you know how it was covered, you know, you know very well how it was covered. If you look at the same way that the stories about the Andrew Cuomo accusers originally were covered. The instinct of the media is at first to run cover. And they demolished Tara Reid.

They completely pulled this woman apart. I read about her bankruptcies in the paper. Why the hell is that relevant? She's poor. Tara Reid is poor. The accusers don't come in these perfect little packages. Did they do that to all of Trump's accusers? Absolutely not. They didn't. They weren't interested in tearing them down packages. Did they do that to all of Trump's accusers? Absolutely not.

They didn't. They weren't interested in tearing them down. To this day, they build them up. Yeah, I'm you know, I'm not going to dispute the bias. Right. I'm just going to I just still feel that. The scale of it is so non-analogous. You know, when you when you look at my point, which is how do you know that you're working with all the facts when you say that?

When I am telling you that my industry stops you, it stops you from having the relevant information. They intentionally don't investigate when they smell a rat on the Democratic side, especially if Trump's on the other side. Well, I think the whole thing's been a process, right? So Biden went through a primary, right? Biden went through a primary process where even his current vice president accused him of racism, right, in order to land a blow when she still had presidential aspirations, right? So there's been a, the incentives have been such that everyone gets banged around by everybody else, you know, over the course of, you know, years of being a political candidate. My point about corruption is just that we know how Biden lives his life day to day. He's, again, both of these men have been in the public eye

for practically as long as you and I have been alive. So you just can't hide that kind of corruption. And Trump doesn't hide his corruption, and he's never hidden it. And so, again, it's the scale of it. Yes, I'm sure there are unsaved, I'm not sure, but I would not be surprised if there were many unsavory things we might find out about Joe Biden on Hunter's laptop or somewhere else. a very different sort of person than Trump is. He is not a once in a generation narcissist. He is not this. I mean, Trump is is not a normal human being, really. I mean, he's really not. He's not the sort of person who can even put his children in front of his own interests. You know, I mean,

someone praises his children in his presence. And the first thing out of his mouth is to say, oh, well, they're just, you know, they're just riding my coattails. Right. I mean, it's just what a some large touch. If ever if ever there were a case to be made about anybody, it's yeah, I don't dispute that. But I don't I think that, you know, sort of the hubris of then that's the calculation that everyone should go into the voting booth with. Right. They shouldn't be. You don't need to see the Hunter Biden laptop because it's just obvious one man is a better person than the other. It's just such a fail. Well, again, it's not it's not that we don't need to see the laptop. So it's even if you say Trump is not a great man, Trump's not a great whatever, not OK, fine. We haven't seen anywhere near the number of bad stories about him as we have about Trump. However, this guy now, as you point out, they have records. This guy, what are we seeing? He and his party want to pack the Supreme Court. They want to add states so that we can get rid of the legislative filibuster. They opened the border entirely. We have absolutely no rule of law down. So they want to ignore court rulings entirely. They seem fine with Supreme Court justices having their lives and

their children, their family threatened on a regular basis and the law being violated, but not enforcing it through Merrick Garland, which he's now admitted. They're openly saying that they're going to ignore court rulings, including from the U.S. Supreme Court, which Joe Biden did when it came to the whole rent abatement process that that he had during covid. They're eliminating gender. They won't say what a woman is, which I know you don't approve of. That's lunacy. Right. So it's like, OK, Trump, I get it. You I know you you've mentioned Trump University in the in the trigonometry thing, like the corruption. Guess who asked Trump about that at a presidential debate?

Me. Okay, so I get it. However, the level of lunacy happening on the left right now makes all of that pale in comparison. Well, there's lunacy on both sides, right? I mean, on the other side, you've got people talking about Jewish space lasers setting fires in california that's cute you've got q and i've got that's cute the democratic party can't say what a woman is it's it's the democratic party can't say what a woman is they cannot say what a woman is that you can't go for listen i mean i'm happy to to pivot to wokeism if you want if you want me to talk about that. We will agree about the problem.

We're just talking about levels of threat to the country and to ourselves and to our culture and to what's important in America. That's what we're talking about. I mean, the problem for me is that the extreme left and the extreme right, or Trumpism is not quite conservatism, but let's do two extremes just to keep it simple. Both extremes are completely pathological and dishonest and I would agree dangerous. I think you're excusing the Democratic Party's enormous shift to the left over the past 10 years. I am not. I've spent much more time, certainly on my podcast, talking about and worrying about wokeism and, you know, identitarian moral panics on the left

than I have spent time worrying about Trump and Trumpism, right? Because- I know, but in this argument, you're equating Q and the far left as, you know, and what I'm saying is the Democrat, I get Q and on I get trust me, I've I've had people call up wanting me to sign on to those theories, or they're not going to listen by I'm not the podcast for you. That's not my thing. And it's never going to be. However, it's the Democratic Party putting out these it's a Democratic Party that won't protect the border. It's the Democratic Party that wants to pack the court. It's Joe Biden who wouldn't say no to that. It's his AG who wouldn't protect the Supreme Court.

It's his AG who wanted to go label, and the White House that wanted to label parents objecting to the COVID restrictions and to the overreach as domestic terrorists. Like that, that's not the left. That's not the Marjorie Taylor Greene of the left. That's Biden. Yeah, well, I don't think Biden has been fully captured by by the far left, but there's no question he's had to pander to the far left to be the to be the presidency in 2024.

Although I do hold out some hope that we've seen the peak wokeism, and I think the pendulum might be swinging back. I mean, I certainly have to think it is because it looks so ridiculous. But yeah, there are asymmetries here that are just worth pointing out. One asymmetry, and this is something I've pointed out many times, is that the extreme right, when you're talking about white nationalist racists in our society, say, the kinds of people who marched in Charlottesville, or QAnon, the crazy end of Trumpism is extreme, right? It has not captured major institutions apart from, to some degree, the brain of Trump and a few people in Congress, right? Again, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it hasn't completely vitiated our institutions the way far left identitarian politics have.

So with wokeism, you have the genuine corruption of journalism and science and Hollywood and all of our tools for making sense at scale in popular culture. But the reason why that's so shocking is because we expect the New York Times and a scientific journal like Nature or Science or an institution like Stanford University, to be above rank political partisanship and not to be deranged by its own tribalism, right? And we don't expect that of an institution like Fox News or Breitbart, right? And so to some degree, the shock is testament to how different various institutions have been up until now. But yeah, I spent a lot more time worrying about what's happening at Stanford University and the New York Times and in our scientific journals like Science or Lancet or JAMA, uh, in the aftermath of, you know, the last, you know, four or five years, uh, then I spend worrying about QAnon, right. And because QAnon is just, you know, at a glance crazy, but it's, it's not that it's not

scary, but it's, it is the fringe of the fringe for a reason. Yeah. It doesn't, right. I think the word you use is capture. That's exactly right. They don't have the fringe of the fringe for a reason. Yeah, it doesn't. Right. I think the word you use is capture. That's exactly right. They don't have the capture of those major institutions. So where does that leave us? We got to turn the page to wokeism. What to do? Very happy to hear you say you think we may have reached peak.

And we're going to get into the latest on you and I believe you audience members. How now the head of the student group at San Francisco State University is responding to Riley Gaines. Here's a tip. She's not sorry. Not at all. Sam Harris stays with us for the whole show. Very interesting conversation. Hope you're enjoying it.

So, Sam, before we get into Riley Gaines and all that's happening on that front, did you see this now viral exchange between this BBC journalist and Elon Musk? No, you probably didn't because you're not on Twitter. I'm not on Twitter. All right. Please enlighten me. I'm going to show it to you. So Elon sat down with the BBC and they were talking. I believe he was trying to press him. Really,

the journalist was talking about his own experience on Twitter and how he thought it was more negative after Elon took over. And so Elon pushed back and it went on for about two or three minutes in the clip that's online. We shorten it down to a one minute highlight. Watch what happened. Can you name one example? I honestly don't. You can't name a single example? I'll tell you why, because I don't actually use that for you feed anymore, because I just don't particularly like it. A lot of people are quite similar.

I only look at my followers. Well, hang on a second. You said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example, not even one. I'm not sure I've used that feed for the last three or four weeks. Well, then how did you see the hateful content? Because I've been using Twitter since you've taken it over for the last six months. Okay, so then you must have at some point seen for you hateful content.

I'm asking for one example. Right. You can't give a single one. And I'm saying... Then I say so that you don't know what you're talking about. Really? Yes, because you can't give a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. Look, people will say all sorts of nonsense.

I'm literally asking for a single example, and you can't name one. Right, and as I already said, I don't use that feed. But then how would you know? I don't think this is getting anywhere. You literally said you experienced more hateful content and then couldn't name a single example. Right, and as I said, I haven't actually looked at that feed. But how would you know this content? Because I'm saying that's what I saw a few weeks ago.

I can't give you an exact example. Let's move on. This is so embarrassing. Sam, this is so embarrassing. You're you have a degree in philosophy. You understand it like we have to you have to have your reasoning. You have to have your reasoning behind any idea that you're going to debate if you're going to debate it well this guy went in there totally unprepared and for once the interviewee caught the interviewer completely flat-footed and really

kept pressing for me as a journalist it was it was a delight because i never go into an interview without my facts without my backup without my evidence you you don't just say like it's gotten more hateful and if you see what preceded say like, it's gotten more hateful. And if you see what preceded that, he says, it's gotten more racist and more sexist since you took over. And that's where Elon said, give me an example. What did you make of it? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just kind of a comedy of errors there, really on both sides, because had he given a single example, there's no reason to think that would be a valid representation of a trend, right? But,

you know, I'm sure there are people who quantify these things. And, you know, I can, I'm certainly prepared to believe that it's gotten more hateful and, you know, that the guardrails have come off to some degree since Elon took over. But, you know, any one person's experience is not going to be a valid way of quantifying that. But yeah, that was a ridiculous exchange and worked to Elon's advantage. I mean, the larger point with Elon and Twitter is that Elon is the poster boy for what is wrong with Twitter, right? And it's not because he's running it badly. I mean, I really am agnostic

as to whether or not he can improve it as a platform. I think he's done some ill-considered things in his tenure as its owner, but it's his actual personal use of the platform that is so worthy of criticism, right? His tweets. And Elon was a friend, right? So I don't like to be in a position to say this, but I think Twitter has been obviously bad for him as a person, right? He's obviously addicted to it. He's behaving in ways that are starkly unethical.

He's singled out individual citizens in front of what now is something like 130 million people, you know, bullying them and abusing them to great consequence in their lives. And it's just not good. And so it's, yeah, I mean, I just think it's, I mean, Twitter is an awful place for many, many people. And, but certainly not everybody. I mean, if you're just sharing happy cat memes on Twitter, I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about. You just, you're just getting lots of love back. And it seems like a great place. No one is immune. They'll find something nasty to say about your cat at some point. That's just Twitter. I have to say though, not for nothing. If I spend 10

minutes on Twitter and then I spend 10 minutes on Instagram, I feel worse after Instagram. I feel worse. I like news. Probably for different reasons, but yeah. I know, right. I know what I'm getting in news. I know news is kind of dark and a cynical place and there's going to be fights. I go into it with open eyes. That's my business. I go over to Instagram and suddenly you do, even if you're a secure person like I am, start feeling like, I guess my life kind of sucks. My meals don't look like that. My ass doesn't look like that. I'm not running through wheat fields holding hands with my husband every day. You just kind of emerge feeling down, even though the content on its face is supposed to lift you up. And I will just say this in Elon and Twitter's defense. I found Twitter a more hateful place before he took it over. I was subjected to tons of hate on Twitter before he took it over from, I guess you would call them, not you, but one might call them well-meaning leftists who were trying to correct me on all my wrong think. And in doing so,

hurling terrible invective at me, calling me terrible names. Now, at least, I have more people on my side who can fight them, who can hurl the invectives back. Now I can say, Dylan Mulvaney's not a woman, period. And I don't get banned. I find it a more open place. And maybe that leads to more opinions some might find hateful. I mean, for me, it's like, well, that's America, right? Let's hash it out. Let's see. And if it's not healthy for you, you don't like it, you can leave like you did. But it's not fair to suppress just the one side as was happening under the old management. Yeah. My concern is that it's not America, right? Or at least it shouldn't be America. I mean, the reason why I left Twitter

was not so much that I was getting so much abuse, right? Because in fact, I sort of solved that problem. I installed a, you know, an app which allowed me to delete, you know, massive numbers of Twitter accounts by the batch, you know, or, you know, or mute them, block them. So I wasn't seeing a lot of hate at a certain point. But then I asked myself, why the hell am I the sort of person who's blocking, you know, 10,000 people at a pass? I mean, how did I become this person, right? But no, my real concern was that I was getting a, a distorted picture of other human beings that I was seeing people not only at their worst, but, um, I was seeing them in ways that, that, that where they would, they would never be this way in real life.

Right. Like I had dinner with these people, they would not behave like psychopaths and yet they were presenting like psychopaths in my feed you know every minute of the day and that so that that that distortion is what what most worried me i i get it i will say there are some people on there with whom i would never be friends with whom i would never have dinner and when they post the picture of them with their cat or they post some, something nice about their kids,

it's healthy. It reminds me, this is a human too. This is somebody who, you know, were we in the bunker together, we'd have each other's backs. We'd let everything slide that those are good moments,

you know, on that platform too, though it is indeed flawed. All right, standby. We're going to turn to Riley Gaines and wokeism and the confrontation Sam had with a transgender person who was giving it to him and he was giving it pretty good right back. That's next.

Don't forget, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel, 1-11 every weekday at noon east. I don't know if you've been following what happened with Riley Gaines, the swimmer. Have you been tuning in to that at all? A little bit, the swimmer. Have you been tuning into that at all? A little bit, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm sure this is your wheelhouse and not mine, but yes, I know the story a little bit.

Okay, well, I'll get the audience and you up to speed on the latest. So she went, she was a competitive swimmer at the college level. She swam against Leah Thomas, who's a trans woman. She tied against Leah Thomas. They refused to let riley hold the trophy they wanted leah thomas to have it for the photo op leah thomas shouldn't even have been in that pool riley gaines should not have had to tie or share a trophy with a man a biological man especially since it appears to me that leah thomas is really i don't even know if leah thomas is

actually trans the in-depth report by the daily wire suggests this is a man who has autogynephilia which is a fetish where you get off on dressing like a woman it's sexually arousing to you to dress like a woman which is not really a trans thing it's a different thing it's like a kink it's a fetish in any event this poor girl riley gaines had to had to swim against leah so leah uh sorry riley now has become somebody who goes on the college circuit tours and talks about this and her remarks as i understand it are limited to the field of athletics she's not against trans people trans rights she's making the point that look there are some serious downsides to letting somebody like leah thomas swim against me well all hell broke loose on the san francisco

state university campus when riley went. Here's just a little flavor. And we're going to set up the response now from the student group by showing you what actually happened the day Riley was there and was shouted down and was forced into a room, essentially kidnapped by the mob. It's just me. I'm good. I'm coming. You got me. I'm good. I'm good. Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women!

I'm coming. I'm good. I'm good. You crying? You fucking crying bitch? Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women! Trans women are women!

Trans women are women! Oh my goodness. So she was hit twice, right? It is reminiscent of what happened to Brett Weinstein at Evergreen, right? It's just a little like there's a school mob taking somebody down, trying to threaten them physically. She was punched twice, she says, by a trans woman. So now we the head, the president of the university, I think it's the president herself, has blocked Riley Gaines on Twitter. No, she's blocked Riley Gaines on Twitter. And now we have the president of the student group. She's the students association, associated, associated students president. Her name is Karina Zamora issuing her response in writing. And it's, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but you must hear a fair amount of this to believe the mindset. This is what we're

dealing with. Uh, On the evening of Thursday, April 6th, the San Francisco State chapter of Turning Point USA hosted Saving Women's Sports with Riley Gaines on our campus, an event that promoted discriminatory rhetoric towards trans women athletes. Students orchestrating to students protesting were coerced and given unwarranted warning cards threatening arrest if they violated the Turning Point USA policy. Though TPUSA was followed by protesters, they acknowledge Riley was followed by protesters. I believe the enforcement of these policies was weaponized to silence and threaten protesters, and the presence of police was both excessive and uncalled for. Okay, tell it to believe that the administration has failed to uphold the principles our campus prides itself on. I, as president of Associated Students, condemn and stand against the hateful rhetoric and promotion of violence

spread by Turning Point USA and Riley Gaines, as well as the confrontational behavior of the university police. She goes on to say, I call on the president of the university and her administration to hold themselves accountable and host a community forum to hear how damaging these tactics have been to our student body, demanding to know how the university plans to move forward with a plausible action plan, finishing with, to our trans-identifying students, we see you, we hear you, and we are here to uplift your voices. A.S. President Karina Zamora.

In solidarity, by the way. I mean, not a word of apology to Riley, to the students who showed up there in support of Riley or wanting to hear Riley. It's all about them. They're not a bit sorry. They're prepared, I'm sure, to do it again. And they want to know why they were threatened for their behavior. So where does that leave us? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously there's a tension between the free speech rights of speakers and the free speech rights of those who would protest those speakers.

I mean, I think we should, I think all these institutions have a responsibility to err on the side of protecting speakers, right? And allowing events to continue in a civil way, right? So I, you know, that was not a peaceful protest. Whenever you're not letting someone leave a room, you know, you know, that was not a peaceful protest. Whenever you're not letting someone leave a room, you know, that's a hostage situation. That's not an exercise of free speech. So, yeah, I think there should be very little tolerance for that particular line getting crossed by protesters on college campuses or anywhere else, right? You're physically

coercing somebody when you're mobbing them in that way and not letting them leave a room. And certain speech is threatening, right? Where you're putting people in fear for their life, right? Now, the speech that questions the wisdom of letting trans women compete against biological women in a sport like swimming, that is not violence, right? And to call it violence is just a symptom of what has become a crazy ideology, right? I mean, again, this is a problem with the extremes politically. They view everything in terms of power. And this is true both on the left and the right, but it's especially clear on the left at the moment.

They're not interested in what's true. They're not interested in the actual motives of the people they're attacking. They view everything as an exercise of power, right? Even scientific knowledge, a concept of objectivity, just asking questions about biology. All of this is power. None of it has anything to do with truth. And that's so crazy making. And it's so at odds with what is actually going on in the minds of people who are simply worried for obvious reasons about specific outcomes. I mean, they're worried that, you know, to take a specific case, a 13-year-old isn't in a position to really consent to an irreversible medical procedure, right? So, you know, there are genuinely hard problems to solve here at the policy level and at the individual level, and it requires wisdom and compassion from all of us to interact with those problems and try to find our way to some decent outcome, right? But the problems

are different. And even this trans issue is not the same when you're talking about trans men and trans women, right? We don't have the analogous problem of trans men fighting to dominate their divisions in sport, say, right? You're not having biological women transitioning to become men posing a problem in in uh in sport so this is just or their locker rooms or their prison spaces or even their sponsorships and scholarships i mean look how many sponsorships dylan mulvaney is getting now we talked about it yesterday on the show even for bras and women's facial cream aging facial cream oil of ola like why did we run out of biological women to sell bras we now have to go to biological men to sell bras i mean and not to mention tampons

tampax is working with dylan mulvaney dylan mulvaney does not even have a vagina i mean it's like am i drawing the line too close to actual womanhood here? This is insane. children at the earliest possible time where there really is no real realistic threat of social contagion or ideology you know browbeating them into you know having a problem that they don't have right so and i you know i've i know cases like this i know you know i know I know a trans girl who, as a four-year-old, felt that he, as a four-year-old boy, was born into the wrong body. And there were no incentives to convince this kid that he was trans and should eventually transition. But on the far extreme of the other side of this continuum, you have obviously deranged gaslighting advocacy of just completely crazy propositions. And the problem for the rest of us is to try to figure out how to interact with this whole space in a way that is compassionate and pragmatic. So to take the specific case of trans girls, sorry, biological girls deciding that they're trans or non-binary, there is legitimate concern that social contagion is at least part of the story, right?

You have lots of young girls, you know, teenage girls and tween girls who decide they, you know, are no longer gender conforming, right? And it's a kind of fad. And it's not to say that every one of those cases is a matter of social contagion, but certainly some seem to be. people who aren't really in a position to think so clearly about the far future in their lives to make irrevocable choices, to go on hormones or puberty blockers or to have surgeries, to have teenagers having double mastectomies. It is easy to see that well-intentioned people will get very worried about all of this. And it's not an expression of hatred, right? And this is a completely distinct problem from the kinds of problems you just raised of competition in sport, right? And denying female athletes the experience they would have of succeeding because you have biologically male athletes out competing them.

It's a totally different issue. All of these issues are getting conflated, and we're finding it very difficult to talk about these things. But this process is not at all helped by dishonest and hysterical moral panics happening on the left. And that's what is happening in many cases. Those people are not persuadable. The people running after Riley, shouting at her, punching her, mocking her tears after she'd been punched in the face. Okay. This is not a person with whom we can reason. And there are many more just like them. It's not just because it's San Francisco State University. The trans activists, as a rule, are fairly rabid. They're just the worst spokespeople, the absolute worst. And they lead to

the elimination of compassion. You know, I was talking to Glenn Beck on his show the other day saying, I started this whole journey very compassionate towards the trans community. I had a trans person in my family. I wound up marrying Doug, who has a trans person in his family. And I saw the bullying and I saw how tough it was. And this person went through it in my family before it was a thing, before it was okay, when it was still very stigmatized, had nothing but compassion. I feel differently now. I feel like it's gone too far. It's eroding reality, biology. They're getting rid of male or female on birth certificates. Doctors in the hospital are not allowed to ask whether you're a man or a woman or tell their pay their residents 42 year old male that you're not allowed to say that it's considered offensive we can't say breastfeed that's that's offensive right you have to say chest feed people with vaginas as opposed

to women not to mention the parodies of us by people like dylan and others these people who are all over tikt, more and more saying, what's normal is trans, cis, cis, which means biological man or woman. That's what's abnormal. Your parents slapping some label on you that may or may not have. What's normal is the freedom of being a trans person and choosing. No, wrong. I've got thousands of years of biology on my side. So I am less and less compassionate by the day. And it seems like that, that make me even more so. Am I wrong? Do I need to readjust? Well, yeah. I mean, it's an understandable reaction that many people have. And this is a reaction that many people who have migrated rightward politically have had, where the attacks on them from the left

have been so dishonest and incessant and gaslighting, and they've been commensurately love-bombed by people on the right, that they have just, as again, almost an experiment in social psychology, their politics have changed because it's an understandable reaction to hostility from one side and love and understanding from the other. But I do think that our reasoning about what is real and what we should do in light of what is real needs to, to, um, escape the, again, understandable psychological reaction to just being confronted by assholes, uh, again and again and again. Uh, that's like, again, another reason why I got off Twitter. I felt Twitter was distorting my sense of what was even important to respond to because the noise is turned up so loud on on many of these issues um but this is a really this is not just a twitter issue i mean

this came to my it's not at all it's not at all in his third grade classroom you know this was nothing happened to me on this front to alienate me. I wasn't attacked by trans activists, though I'm sure it's a matter of time. But this does come into your world now. I mean, I've told the story publicly, but in my son's third grade classroom at our New York City private school, they were asked on a weekly basis whether they were still sure that they were boys. They had to hold up their fists and do a one through five rating of how confused they were. They were showing them video after video of trans kids suggesting, oh, do you like the color purple? Well, you might have something to consider.

It went, I could go on. So that's the kind of, it's, it's not, this is well beyond, you know, I mean, Riley Gaines, what was she doing? She was swimming. She was swimming. She was swimming. And suddenly there's a man next door in the pool. Like, it's everywhere now. It's unavoidable. Yeah.

Although I would say that I do think it is spilling out into the real world largely because of what is happening on social media. I mean, the activism is dominating institutions because of institutional concern about what happens on social media. So let me just take a specific case. The New York Times has become as woke as it has become largely based on its concern over blowback on Twitter, right? I mean, Twitter effectively became the editorial board of the New York Times there for a while. Twitter is the chief cancel culture officer, right? I mean, Twitter effectively became the editorial board of the New York Times there for a while. Twitter is the chief cancel culture officer, right? It's like their CEO of

cancel culture. Yeah. So when we're talking about institutional capture and we're talking about the gaslighting of a whole society where you can't even use the word woman, right? Without self-consciousness, without scare quotes, without worrying that you're going to be attacked as a bigot for having just spoken the English language. That is largely a phenomenon born of social media, right? It is what the activist class on social media has successfully done by hectoring everyone else in institutions that you would think would be impervious to this kind of bullying. What's the solution to that?

Again, by a fringe. What do we do about that? I mean, what's the answer, right? If you think peak wokeism may be behind us why is that because social media is still as popular as ever unfortunately and um you know you still get all the points for for you know saying the right things and the dei scores and the dei officers has now become a cottage industry to churn out these degrees and pay people two hundred thousand000 a year to enforce DEI principles,

et cetera? Well, I think everyone has to grow a spine, right? And I think institutions in particular and those running them have to grow spines and lay down bright lines around what is acceptable and not acceptable. So to take a similar case, what happened at Stanford Law School recently, right? The capitulations to completely irrational student outbursts have to stop, right? And I think they have to stop in real time rather than just in retrospect, right? So it's fine to have apologized to the judge after the fact and to have written a letter that is somewhat sanity restoring with

respect to the values of the institution, but it'd be much better to be able to do that in real time in the room, right? And I think one of these schools is just going to have to start expelling students who behave this way. Right. And the way, you know, this could have happened at Yale, you know, five years ago or whenever that was when, you know, Nicholas Christakis was surrounded by a mob in the quad and, you know, to some degree taken hostage there. I mean, it was reminiscent of what happened to Brett at Evergreen.

It was, these are uncivil and indefensible eruptions of unreason and social disorder, right? I mean, and they're happening among the most privileged people on planet Earth, right? I mean, that's another painful irony here, which is so crazy making. You know, you're talking about people for whom the world really is their oyster, right? I mean, like you're talking about students at Yale or law students at Stanford. And they're acting like they, you know, they're inmates in some kind of oppressive institution,

finally trying to break free of their chains, right? So yeah, I think institutional patience for this kind of thing needs to run out. And yeah, I'm sure there's a layer within all of these institutions of DEI bureaucrats that shouldn't exist. That's not to say that we don't have problems with racism and other forms of bigotry in our society. And anti-trans bigotry, I'm sure, is a real thing. And we should deplore it, and we should resist it, and we should criticize it. But the examples of bigotry that are now being cited by the activist class are not examples of bigotry at all. And that's what is so destabilizing. It's the dishonesty. It's just as much on the race issue. It amounts to so much of our social conversation being gummed up with lies and half-truths.

So yeah, it would be clarifying to have institutions that will simply not give in to the mob. That would be the first bright line I would draw. You just can't be bullied by what's happening on Twitter if you're the New York Times or Stanford or any other real place. We've had a couple of green shoots on that front. The New York Times and some of its trans reporting, they haven't exactly gone full fair and balanced on it, but they've done some good reporting on, for example, what's happening when we, you know, engage in these surgeries with minors. And there's been a ton of pushback. And so far, they have not bent the knee. The best example of a company handling this, as far as I've seen, has been the Wall Street Journal, when they had some 240 journalists complain about the journal publishing people like Heather MacDonald, who's absolutely brilliant.

I'm sure you've read her stuff. And the journal said, we get it. You're upset. Your upset is really not our concern. Take care. If you would like to quit, you're more than able. Bye. Truly, it was short. It was sweet.

No one quit. They moved on. They never had another uprising. It was very well handled. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I mean, that's an example. I didn't know about that example, but that's the kind of thing that has to happen en masse. And again, I do hold out some hope that we've seen the peak of this thing because, thing, because it is somewhat analogous to what happened in the 80s around the satanic cult panic, right? And the fixation on preschools as being points of access to kids, right? And there was so much crazy fear about a phenomenon that really doesn't even seem to have existed, right? And there was so much crazy fear about a phenomenon that really doesn't even seem to have existed, right? I mean, I'm sure there was a satanic culture too, but, you know, there was not an epidemic of human sacrifice or, you know, any human sacrifice at all, I think. And yet,

you know, we had people believing that in an any given year you know 10 000 infants or or more were killed by you know uh satanic cults it's just um really i missed that one yeah oh the the uh well actually the the journalist lawrence wright tells a great story about how he was he was just turning his attention to this topic, the New Yorker writer. And he was at a seminar run by a member of law enforcement. I think this was probably in Texas. And the cop at that point said that 50,000 people that year had been murdered by satanic cults, many of them children. And Wright realized at that moment

that he was in the presence of something very strange because he knew that there was no year in American history where 50,000 people had been murdered ever for anything, much less by satanic cults. So it's hard to diagnose a moral panic when it's happening, especially when it's conflated with real concerns about social inequality and bigotry and racism and transphobia and homophobia and all the rest and Me Too. aren't problems that sort of answer to these names. But what the activist class has done with all of these problems has been truly dishonest and divisive. And we have to pull back from the brink here. Do you feel like, you know, a lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals, do you feel like that side is starting to come around? I do. I felt this for some time, again, because it's so extreme.

What you encounter in private with virtually everyone is a very different set of opinions than they're comfortable airing in public. And that's been true for a long time. There are many, many people in private who will say things that are entirely reasonable and yet they're part of the silent majority when this conversation spills out into public. And even among kids, when I talk to my daughter and take her temperature on many of these topics and hear what her friends think, it's not quite what woke activists would hope on these topics. So yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm rarely accused of being an optimist, but I do think that it can't last that much longer because the untruths are so obvious here. And it's. And, you know, it will give us each each extreme is amplifying of the other politically. I mean, we if we get Trump again as president, it will be because of the excesses of the far left. Right. I mean, that will be the thing that will drive even reasonable people to overlook the fact that, you know, he's, he's painfully unqualified for the office. They look at him as the, as the 800 pound gorilla who can stop it, who will fight it.

Yeah. Um, and somebody on the show recently was making the point that I can't remember who it was, but it, it was not a Trump hater, but they were saying probably it would get worse under Trump because he so animates this group of people that we're talking about, you know, that maybe wokeism is actually not as bad right now as it otherwise would have been under Joe Biden, even though he's pushing it. He doesn't actively, you know, bring it out in people. He doesn't motivate those who want to march for that cause. So that's also an interesting theory. I'll tell you one quick story.

So I was at a big event not long ago, and there was a very well-known black liberal Hollywood name, household Hollywood name, who came up to me and said, Megan, I'm a huge fan. And he said, I send all of your videos to all of my liberal friends. And I said, well, why do you send them? And he said, because all of them are friends. And I said, well, why do you send them? And he said, because all of them are too afraid to follow you. They don't want to be seen as a follower on, you know, if anybody checks your followers, but they make me send them all of your videos. So I do. And we

all say, yeah, right on. So we're cheering you from the sidelines. I got such a kick out of that. I think that's growing. I do think that there's a growing contingent of people who just need to hear truth spoken and repeatedly and not just from, you know, diehard conservatives on the hard right, you know, that just normal people need to say what's real. And it's so liberating when you do hear it. And I think the more people like you say it and I say it, the more other people feel comfortable saying it. And weirdly, that leads me to the Dalai Lama. We talked about this yesterday. And the only reason I'm asking you about it, Sam, because I remember from our last time, you worked as like an unofficial bodyguard for him at some point in your life, right? Yeah, yeah. For months. Yeah. Like 30 years ago. Yeah.

Right. But they were like shoving you to the front. The real bodygu they were like shoving you to the front the real bodyguards were like shoving you to the front because they wanted you to take the arrows um so he's rightfully in my view come under fire for this bizarre troubling exchange with this little boy that happened in india where he was on a receiving line of sorts people were coming up to him and forgive me we're going to show this video again i find it really disturbing but you it has to be seen to be believed um and the boy comes up to him just to tell the audience what they're going to see and um they i'll just read it so i don't get it wrong the child um asks if he can hug him and the dalai lama says first here and as for a kiss on his um i guess i don't know where the first kiss is and then he says right here also now the first one's on his cheek then he points to his lips and says now here and he puckers up the boy leans in people are kind of laughing there's some small applause

and then you see the dalai lama staring at the boy and then he says to the boy then suck my tongue and he sticks his tongue out and the boy kind of goes backwards there's a bit of laughter and the boy and the Dalai Lama leave it lean into one another the Dalai Lama's tongue is out and they come close and the boy kind of gets out of out of the way so this is what we're gonna see I'll show it to you and then we'll talk about it yeah yeah then I think finally she also and suck my tongue what do you make of it yeah um well yeah you know honestly i'm not quite sure what to make of it. I agree it's completely bizarre and unacceptable on its face. I have a hard time seeing it as a frank expression of sexual interest in a child, largely because he's doing this in front of thousands of people,

right? The idea that you're going to be, you know, practice your pedophilia, uh, in front of thousands of people, you know, on camera and get away with it seems, you know, patently insane. So, you know, I, I don't know what to make, like had this happened in private, that would be more disturbing on some level because it's like, okay, then it's really inappropriate overture toward a child. But for this, I honestly don't know what to say about it. I mean, it's some combination of a weird Tibetan joke or a symptom of brain damage on the part of the Dalai Lama. He's an 87-year-old man. I don't know what's happening there. I haven't seen him for 30 years. I can tell you 30 years ago, he was an extraordinary

and extraordinarily inspiring person. And so I have no idea what's going on there. And I completely understand the reaction to it. And it's truly unfortunate that a moment like that can become indelible and really damage the legacy of someone who I consider to have been just an extraordinarily wise and compassionate person insofar as I am fit to judge what kind of person he's been like all these years from the outside. So it's awful and strange. Right. Because we never know. We never know. We've seen a lot of heroes fall when the truth about them comes out. Jerry Sandusky and the whole thing at Penn State. I, you know, a lot of people looked up to him, believed he loved, you know, kids. And then, then we were told a very different story. Think about the Dalai Lama though. I'm, I understand your point. It would, it would in

some ways be worse if he did it behind closed doors, because then you'd really have to say, where's this going? And you knew that that exchange in that moment, at least was going nowhere. However, I think the, it's the, I attribute his willingness to do it in the open to his age. I don't think a normal person who doesn't have pedophilic instincts would ever ask for that or do that in any setting. I think perhaps the screen got dropped because he's getting old and forgot how grossly inappropriate people would see that. That's not something any normal aged person does. Not one. I've known tons of them. Nobody does that. You don't do that unless you have that instinct. And that's why I really think this is a before and after moment for him. I actually would be vigilant about keeping him

away from children from this point forward. I understand once you're the Dalai Lama, you're the Dalai Lama to death. But this guy shouldn't be anywhere near children. He certainly shouldn't be parading him in front of them because I believe that boy was essentially abused right there. I think that experience has the real threat of staying with that child forevermore as an abuse moment. And we all witnessed it. The whole world has seen it now. It troubles me, Sam, and it troubles me when you didn't, but it troubles me when people defend it, as we saw a guy from Rolling Stone do on CNN yesterday, because there really needs to be a hard stop on anything like that from everyone in polite society when it comes to anything that might even open the door a little bit to the exploitation of kids. Yeah, I agree. I mean, again, I don't know how to interpret what was happening there. Again, and I don't know if there's anything in Tibetan culture that I'm unaware of that would have made some sense of it. I mean, I know- We looked into that. We looked into it. They said sticking out

your tongue is frequent, but not sucking on it. That's the thing, yeah. It's such a total miscalibration of the effect it was going to have on his audience and the rest of the world that I don't know what to attribute it to on his side. Again, he's an 87-year-old man. Your interpretation could be correct, but there's no way to know. There's no way either to investigate. That's what I would love to see. Let's do an investigation, see if there's anybody where there's smoke, there's fire, and there's other little boys out there who have a story to tell or now grown boys. That's what should happen, but I don't think there's going to be an appetite for that because he's so revered. You know, he's so revered and has for so many years been held up as this holy leader and

this wise man. It's like, well, sometimes our heroes fall. Sometimes behind closed doors, they do absolutely reprehensible things. And you have to be open minded to it when it's staring you in the face. So I hope they do that. And at a minimum, I hope they keep him away from any child in any private setting. Okay. So last but not least, what does this mean for everything we've discussed, uh, for presidential politics and

the next presidential vote in your view? Let's say, I know you're not going to vote for Trump. I got that. Um, but could a Sam Harris get behind anybody in the GOP field? Could you get behind a Glenn Youngkin? A Nikki Haley was just announced yesterday. Tim Scott is forming an exploratory committee, which is going to host the GOP 2024 convention. So things are starting to happen. And it looks like the Dems are going to go with Biden. We don't know for sure, but he seemed to tell the Easter Bunny and Al Roker the other day he's going to run. He just hasn't announced it yet. So what does it look like for you? Well, again, my criticism of Trump is truly nonpartisan. I mean, it's not, and insofar as it would extend to a disinclination to vote for any other Republican, it's really only to the degree that the 2020 election was stolen and that, you know, that January 6th was a, was a nothing burger and, you know, nothing was ever at stake. And I mean, that's, that's, you know,

that's the larger crater that Trump has left in the GOP and in our politics. I saw some of that in the midterms. But a normal Republican candidate is, is somebody who, you know, I would, you know, I'm not quite sure who would, could conceivably rise to the, to the top of the field there and actually get the nomination. But, um, it, that's the sort of person who I really have, you know, nothing negative to, to say about him. It's just, I don't know, the candidates you mentioned, I don't know what each of them have said specifically on the topic of the big lie and election denialism and how they reacted to Trump's not supporting a peaceful transfer of power.

I think those three have been careful to stay away from it. Those three are not Kerry Lakes, if you will. So yeah, I think, I don't know, I feel like you could get behind them. Could you get behind a Kamala Harris? No. Why? No. Well, one, I just don't think she is electable, right? But, I mean, the degree to which she has pandered to the far left and will continue to pander

to the far left, I just think is unconscionable. I don't imagine that she necessarily agrees with all of the dogmas she has paid lip service to over there. So there's a kind of a cynicism and an opportunism that I believe I detect there. But insofar as she does believe those things, insofar as she does think that we have an epidemic of racist cops performing lynchings on our city streets, and that's, again, it's completely dysfunctional to be lying about real problems, right? And then manufacturing fake problems. So, yeah, no, I couldn't support her, but I don't think that's likely to happen. I don't think she's likely to be the candidate. Unless something happens to him. Yeah. Honestly, I have no inside knowledge or even any intuitions about what the Democrats

are going to do if Biden, for some reason, wasn't going to be the candidate. I don't know if it's Gavin Newsom. I don't know who could rise to the top of the field, but I can't imagine that it would be Kamala Harris. Going to be a tough, tough lady to move off to the side, given what they say they stand for. All right. Well, when we get closer to the election, we'll come back and we'll talk politics again. We'll see whether the gorilla made it happen or whether somebody else is in the GOP slot. Things are about to get pretty fun as we go into debate season. Sam, thanks for being here.

Thanks for speaking so openly and honestly about everything. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.