In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I speak with Graham Wood, a writer for The Atlantic and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, about the current state of the country, including the recent protests in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. We talk about what it means to live in a failing state, how to deal with it, and what it looks like to be a journalist in the 21st century, and why it s so important to have a healthy sense of the past and the future of the United States. We also talk about the impact of the protests in Washington, D.C. and other major cities across the country and the implications for the police response to them, and how they affect the country as a whole. This is a must-listen episode for anyone who wants to understand what's going on in the streets of Seattle, Portland, or any other major U.S. city, and wants to know what's being done to try to make sense of it all. If you can t afford a subscription, there's an option at Samharris.org to request a free account, and we'll grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. You'll need to subscribe to the podcast to get access to full episodes of the podcast. Making Sense wherever you get your podcasts, and access to the full episode. Thanks for listening! Sam Harris and as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the Podcast. I never wants money, but I do not want money, so if you can't afford it, I'll be the Podcast, then I'll never want to miss out on the podcast, right? - I'll make it so you can be a supporter of the Podcast? - Sam Harris: Making Sense: The Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris, the podcast by The Atlantic by Making Sense? by: Graham Wood: . , The Way of the Strangers by: The Way Of The Strangers? , , and The Atlantic by: (The Way of The Stranger? and The Stranger by The Stranger: The Stranger, . . by Graham Wood ( ) by , & The Stranger by The Facts by The Nation Magazine, by Rachel Goodman, The Stranger Podcast by & , Rachel Goodman Thanks to: , Sam Harris ( ) by: Sam Harris
00:13:09.100But it is crazy-making and deeply concerning that the left seems to, the bar is nowhere near where you put it at the Atlantic.
00:13:21.020Not only would they not acknowledge that he gets anything right, but just everything is upside down in how they describe what's happening with police violence and social protests.
00:13:32.640I mean, NPR just published a wonderful interview, which I think you noticed, informing all of humanity that looting was essentially a moral imperative and a great form of social protest because small business owners are really no better than big business owners, and they all deserve to have their stuff stolen.
00:13:51.580And this was presented on the NPR website without any, there wasn't a single critical question, if I recall correctly.
00:13:59.580It was just like, this is practically NPR's position on looting.
00:14:03.580Yeah, it was, that was shocking to read.
00:14:05.280I've actually subjected myself to the book.
00:14:07.640I've read it cover to cover by now and have reviewed it for the Atlantic.
00:14:12.080It is, if anything, it's more radical than the NPR interview would have you believe.
00:14:20.940The NPR interview really took the title of the book as the jumping off point, In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil.
00:14:28.840The book is actually mostly about a defense of violence.
00:14:35.400I think there are whole chapters where looting isn't mentioned explicitly.
00:14:39.420What it's really trying to argue is that America is conceived in sin, racial sin, capitalist sin, you name it, that the system that we've inherited in the present is bad, it's screwed up, and that it must be destroyed.
00:14:55.280So, you know, if it sounds like the kind of thing that would destroy our society to just have people smash open shops, take everything in them and burn them down, then that is very much the point.
00:15:07.000There's a desire on the part of the author to recreate society in what I can only assume is some kind of, she doesn't say explicitly, but a Marxist anarchist revolution that is born out of violence, wiping away the old order.
00:15:23.400And yes, the NPR interview that introduced this book to, I think, most of the people who have heard about it was totally uncritical.
00:15:32.280And I will say this word, I think that NPR did the right thing by interviewing this writer, because there are a lot of people who have, if not explicitly positive things to say about looting, think that looting is a reasonable response to the injustices of American history or the present in the American system.
00:15:54.400And I think that those people need to articulate what they really think that they can't just get away with saying, I don't want to criticize the looters.
00:16:03.400No, I want them to say I'm on the side of Vicky Osterweil or say that they have a different view of looting.
00:16:11.820But being able to be kind of mealy-mouthed about these things has not worked out very well.
00:16:18.720And it's allowed, for example, Donald Trump to conflate the position of, say, Joe Biden with the position of, say, someone who throws a brick through a window and steals an iPad, which is completely unfair.
00:16:32.460Making sure that these differences are as sharp as possible, I think, is one of the things that journalists should do.
00:16:41.500Unfortunately, they weren't as critical as they could have been of the author when they had her in their clutches.
00:16:49.360Yeah, so Biden, as of yesterday, I think we'll release this a few days hence, but we're recording the day after he gave his speech in Pittsburgh.
00:16:58.360And the purpose of which was to put some daylight between him and the caricature of him that Donald Trump tried to paint, aligning him with the left and the pro-chaos, pro-looting, anti-capitalist, far left, which exists and is clearly worth disavowing.
00:17:20.380I assume you saw that speech. I was pleasantly surprised that he took the line that he did, and I thought it was pretty effective.
00:17:28.900But he does still get enough wrong as part of his talking points that, given enough time, he doesn't do himself too many favors here.
00:17:40.040So, like, when he talks about police violence, virtually everything he says seems to me to be pandering to Black Lives Matter in a way that's just inaccurate.
00:17:49.240I should, you know, explain why I think that.
00:17:52.560But, you know, I think he also said that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist at one point, not in his speech, but I think on Twitter.
00:18:00.700I think that, you know, his campaign released something about white supremacists in a way that was clearly referencing the Rittenhouse shooting.
00:18:07.840I don't think there's any evidence that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, is there?
00:18:11.460I mean, obviously, things can change by the day, but at the time we're having this conversation, do you know of any evidence that suggests that?
00:18:17.040No, unless you think that a white supremacist is someone who believes that there is such thing as private property and it should be defended by the state.
00:18:26.000And, you know, there are such people who are so radical that they would say that that alone will make you a white supremacist.
00:18:31.340But as far as I know, all the reporting about Kyle Rittenhouse's social media suggests that he was a big cop enthusiast, a big gun enthusiast.
00:18:42.160And if that makes you a white supremacist, then I guess he's a white supremacist.
00:18:45.000But I tend to be more restrictive in my definition.
00:18:47.560Yeah, well, I think our sanity depends on our being that way.
00:18:52.260So let's just wind this all the way back to the Jacob Blake shooting, which was the proximate cause of all of this chaos.
00:18:59.160What happened there, to my eye, again, we're talking at one point in time and, you know, who knows what facts will come out in subsequent days or weeks.
00:19:09.700We might learn a lot about the cops there.
00:19:11.680We might learn that they're all members of the local chapter of the KKK and therefore racism could have been a conscious motive on their parts.
00:19:19.520But when I see a shooting like that, within the frame of that video, the color of everyone's skin is totally irrelevant.
00:19:29.340I've seen videos like that where white people are getting shot.
00:19:32.340I've seen videos like that where black people are getting shot by black cops.
00:19:36.680And, you know, I've talked at sufficient length about the statistics of all of these encounters with cops and applications of violence, lethal and not, and justified and not,
00:19:48.280to say that the story is not, is certainly not a clean Black Lives Matter story of us having an epidemic of racist police violence against young black men.
00:20:02.280That is just, the statistics don't bear that out.
00:20:04.720You know, I would just say to our listeners, you have to listen to my two-hour walkthrough this morass titled,
00:20:12.660Can We Step Back from the Brink? Or Can We Pull Back from the Brink? One of those.
00:20:16.360But, so when I look at a video like this, and I'd be interested to know if you see this differently,
00:20:22.560we clearly see a person who has been resisting arrest.
00:20:28.300I don't know to what degree he fought with the cops before the video starts.
00:20:34.360And we see him just essentially moving away from the cops, you know, and their guns are already drawn at this point.
00:20:40.000But I think it's, from other video, I think it's pretty clear that there was a kind of a wrestling match happening,
00:20:43.760and then he broke away, and then you have fully three cops, if memory serves,
00:20:49.500pursuing him around his car, and he's, you know, now opening his door to either get into his car to drive away,
00:20:55.920or reaching into the driver's side of the car for something.