#230 — An Insurrection of Lies
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
142.91742
Summary
Sam Harris explains why the attack on the Capitol was not a coup attempt, but an attempt to overthrow the sitting president. He also points to the hypocrisy of the left, both real and imagined, in its response to the events in D.C. and the lack of action on the part of the White House and the media, and suggests that the real problem is not a lack of support for the president, but rather a failure to address the root cause of the problem, which is Donald Trump and his policies and policies that have destroyed our democracy and our ability to do anything about it. And he points to a new kind of coup: a coup, in which the police are used as shields and shields only to fight back against a crazed mob who have been emboldened by the lies that have spilled ceaselessly from the mouth of this president for years, and who are unhinged by a man who has been encouraging them to act on their worst instincts. Making Sense: What happened in DC this week wasn t a protest that got out of hand. It was an attempt at overthrowing the President, and the police were the only ones who stood in the way of it and the only one who could do anything to stop it. And they don t have a democracy anymore. That had been stolen from them, and they don't have a chance to fight for it anymore that has been taken from them And that they must get back to a country that had literally been stolen a few months ago, and that had been taken away from them by a president who is no longer serves them anymore. What happened on the streets of America is a coup? or is it really a coup ? What does it really matter anymore? What will they do now, and what will they have to do ? What s going to happen what do they really need to do now ? and what s going on how can they fight for democracy How can they get back why they have been robbed of it? and why it s been stolen, and why they can t get it back? And why they need to fight in the streets Why it s not enough, and how can we get back ? what s really going to get back? And why it doesn t matter when it s so stolen anymore What do they have a country anymore And what s the point?
Transcript
00:00:31.000
I can't say I was expecting that exactly, but I can't say I was surprised either.
00:00:38.240
And nothing will surprise you about my view of Trump's responsibility here.
00:00:48.340
But like so much that has happened under Trump, what occurred at the Capitol was in every way unsurprising.
00:01:01.560
Trump has managed to invent a new state of the human brain.
00:01:05.920
Trump has turned our democracy and this period in American history into Pizzagate.
00:01:15.460
We had people visibly and audibly deranged by misinformation.
00:01:22.720
I mean, just listen to what they say when you stick a microphone in front of their faces.
00:01:27.640
These are people who have been unhinged by the lies that have spilled ceaselessly from the mouth of this president for years.
00:01:40.440
It had none of the gravitas of a real coup, but it fully degraded our country.
00:01:47.320
I mean, in some sense, it was more debasing than a real coup attempt.
00:01:50.680
But what we saw in DC was like a YouTube comment thread come to life.
00:01:57.460
Now, we may find out much more about what happened here.
00:02:01.620
And it may even be more sinister than it appeared.
00:02:07.080
But at the time I'm recording this, I'm seeing two truly terrible unforced errors being made at the moment on social media and in the media generally.
00:02:23.300
One's occurring on the right and the other on the left, politically.
00:02:27.600
Once again, those two polls are a little hard to map, but they'll have to do for the moment.
00:02:33.180
And we have a problem on both sides of our politics where people have become single-issue thinkers.
00:02:41.040
Even people who are very smart on other topics.
00:02:44.780
It just seems that now most people can't manage to think about two problems at the same time.
00:02:51.420
You know, it's possible to have cancer and heart disease at the same time, right?
00:03:03.180
They've got different causes, different remedies.
00:03:07.340
It is possible to acknowledge that Donald Trump is the most dangerously unfit person who has ever occupied the office of the presidency.
00:03:16.800
While also acknowledging that leftist social justice hysteria is terrible and needs to be opposed.
00:03:26.280
You don't have to be a genius to keep both of these grotesque objects in view.
00:03:31.860
And yet it appears that only a handful of people, really, can manage it.
00:03:38.020
I just cannot believe what I'm seeing on social media now.
00:03:44.360
Here are the two reactions that I find most troubling.
00:03:48.780
On the right or right of center, many people are minimizing the gravity of what happened at the Capitol by comparing it to the violence that attended the BLM protests last summer and the insane events in Seattle and Portland.
00:04:06.880
And these people are now focused on the hypocrisy of those in the media and in the Democratic Party who overlooked the violence last summer and who are now calling for law and order.
00:04:18.680
The real problem is almost certainly worse than this.
00:04:22.400
The real problem is that nearly 50% of Republicans support the attack on the Capitol.
00:04:35.820
But that aside, virtually everyone right of center is focused on the hypocrisy of the left, both real and imagined.
00:04:44.560
Okay, now this is a dangerous delusion on many levels.
00:04:52.760
It's not true to say that Biden and Kamala Harris didn't condemn the looting and violence last summer.
00:05:08.360
Okay, what happened in D.C. this week was not a protest that got out of hand.
00:05:15.860
This was an insurrection incited by the sitting president of the United States.
00:05:21.920
I mean, granted, terms like insurrection and coup seem grandiose, given Trump's total ineptitude.
00:05:33.020
But consider, the people who attacked the Capitol fought with cops, right?
00:05:42.340
They weren't all just let in and risked their lives to get into that building.
00:05:47.620
Okay, one cop is dead from having been beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher.
00:05:52.020
And one insurrectionist is dead, having been shot in the neck by a police.
00:05:56.760
And there was no telling what that mob would do once it got inside those buildings.
00:06:06.940
They were storming the halls of Congress at the direct encouragement of the President of
00:06:12.580
the United States, who had convinced them over the course of months that their democracy
00:06:29.860
He set them loose on the Capitol that very morning, saying that he would be with them.
00:06:36.620
If you don't see a difference between that and a BLM protest that devolves into looting
00:06:51.680
Now, it is a miracle that more people weren't killed at the Capitol.
00:07:02.240
I'm not saying I wish that many more people had died.
00:07:08.260
But if you run that experiment again, the let's storm the halls of Congress experiment, you
00:07:15.340
I am certain that many more people die in most of those scenarios.
00:07:21.620
And it was only due to a total failure of security that more people didn't die.
00:07:26.280
The people crashing through those doors, who had already overwhelmed cops, the people who
00:07:32.980
were staring down the upraised guns of the cops who were inside, smashing through the
00:07:47.160
To just let the lives of our elected officials depend upon the restraint of a mob?
00:07:55.700
One guy was carrying zip ties of a sort that cops use for handcuffs.
00:08:03.040
There is actually no way of knowing what would have happened had those people gotten their
00:08:11.280
There were people calling for the hanging of Mike Pence.
00:08:14.760
So you're going to rely on the restraint of people who have just risked their lives to
00:08:20.800
break into the Capitol, who believe that there's a global conspiracy of child raping cannibals
00:08:28.000
People who have never received anything other than a wink and a nod from the President of
00:08:35.140
Granted, much of the footage of this attack on the Capitol is perplexing.
00:08:40.960
You've got a cop taking selfies with some of the crowd.
00:08:44.720
You've got cops seeming to let people in after others had broken through their ranks.
00:08:50.420
And then you've got everyone just wandering around taking selfies and vandalizing the place.
00:08:56.540
Some of the footage that makes it look like a busload of people headed to Burning Man just
00:09:03.480
Some of the people are surprisingly old, right?
00:09:06.920
But other footage reveals that this was an absolute emergency.
00:09:14.080
To not acknowledge the gravity of what happened here.
00:09:18.540
To not acknowledge the degree to which it disgraced our country and weakened it in the
00:09:28.380
And yes, the press contortions around them were also a disgrace.
00:09:33.960
To have CNN anchors say, as a dozen cities were being set on fire, well, whoever said protests
00:09:45.460
To have a journalist on camera trumpeting the mostly peaceful protests, even while cars and
00:09:51.680
buildings burned in the background, that was all a disgrace, right?
00:09:59.220
And yes, it was insane, patently insane, to see calls to defund the police as social order
00:10:10.020
But what happened this week was altogether different.
00:10:14.360
Nothing like this has ever happened in our country before.
00:10:17.820
I mean, this was a desecration of our government, of our whole system of government, engineered
00:10:28.980
A mob was set upon the Capitol by the president himself for the purpose of disrupting the certification
00:10:35.940
of an election that he lost, absolutely lost, but claims to have won.
00:10:42.200
Just take a moment to view this travesty through the eyes of Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or
00:10:51.660
any other dictator on earth who has a real interest in proving that democracy just doesn't work,
00:11:01.720
They have captive populations who they are messaging to.
00:11:06.940
Now they get to tell them that democracy is bullshit, right?
00:11:11.840
That having a free press is just dangerous bullshit, right?
00:11:17.860
What does the United States stand for in the world today?
00:11:23.000
If you don't think it matters for our country to become the laughingstock of the world,
00:11:28.280
to fail and fail and fail again, right, to fail to deal with COVID and to fail in a way that
00:11:36.220
still seems impossible to understand, to fail to distribute vaccines we already have in hand
00:11:42.700
when there are more deaths from COVID than at any point during the pandemic, right?
00:11:47.060
We're at the absolute peak and this desecration of the very seat of our democracy is happening
00:11:55.020
before the eyes of the world, to fail to prevent the Russians from accomplishing the greatest
00:12:00.500
hack in the history of cyber war, and to fail so hard at containing the absolute madness of
00:12:08.500
our president that we can't even talk about these other failures.
00:12:12.020
We can't even talk about COVID or the Pearl Harbor level hack of our government because we
00:12:18.160
have a shirtless fucking Viking stalking the halls of Congress.
00:12:22.140
We've got people in Camp Auschwitz t-shirts hunting down Nancy Pelosi at the behest of
00:12:35.340
Trump has been assaulting the foundations of our democracy since before he took office.
00:12:41.060
And if you couldn't see it earlier, as many of us did, it should have been absolutely clear
00:12:47.380
to you the moment he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power during the 2020
00:12:58.140
But throughout 2020, he repeatedly refused to offer an assurance that he would cooperate
00:13:07.960
Half a dozen times, at least, he shattered the most important democratic norm we have right
00:13:17.900
I think that moment was the most shocking development in our politics in a hundred years.
00:13:24.400
The real Trump derangement syndrome is not to have seen every day of this obscene presidency
00:13:32.100
what a terrifying risk Trump has posed to the safety and integrity of our country.
00:13:37.860
And of course, the ultimate Trump derangement syndrome sent a delusional mob attacking the
00:13:45.020
Capitol, imagining that this was a path to securing Trump another four years as president.
00:13:50.900
As I hear myself getting tuned up here, I want to respond to one species of criticism I keep
00:14:00.040
I think I should have cleared this up a long time ago, because there is some conceptual confusion
00:14:05.540
I keep hearing from people who are apparently contented users of the Waking Up app, who say
00:14:13.440
things like, your app has changed my life, I'm getting incredible value from it, but I
00:14:18.980
find your comments on politics really off-putting.
00:14:22.560
These are not the sort of things that a teacher of mindfulness should be saying.
00:14:29.120
People tweet me and they say, you should use your own app.
00:14:31.740
You know, it sounds like you need some mindfulness.
00:14:35.800
If you think there is something about meditation, successful meditation, right?
00:14:41.540
If you think there's something about cutting through the illusion of the self or recognizing
00:14:46.360
the nature of mind prior to concepts, if you think there's some necessary contradiction between
00:14:51.860
that project and caring about the kinds of problems I'm talking about now, you're confused.
00:14:59.640
There is nothing incompatible between mindfulness and not wanting to lose a cyber war, say.
00:15:08.180
There is no contradiction between what I'm saying now and how I'm saying it and the practices
00:15:18.640
You may disagree with some points I'm making here.
00:15:21.660
There are probably several things worth debating.
00:15:23.980
But if you think that meditative insight should cause one not to care about the implosion of
00:15:31.980
our democracy or about our ongoing failure to deal with civilizational challenges, if you
00:15:37.800
think we get to not care about the world we're building or wrecking the world that our children
00:15:44.380
will be condemned to live in, it's time to take your head out of your ass.
00:15:49.120
And if you think I can't say that mindfully or mean that mindfully, in this very tone
00:15:56.180
of voice, if you think it's impossible for me to be mindful right now, non-dualistically
00:16:02.440
mindful, free of self mindful, even as I tell you to take your head out of your ass, then
00:16:09.860
you are confused about what mindfulness is and about what meditation is and about what the
00:16:19.520
You have mistaken a style of communication, an anodyne, religious or new agey communication,
00:16:26.980
and a pseudo-ethic around being as inoffensive as possible for the goal of spiritual life.
00:16:34.180
Yes, there are some apparent paradoxes here, but there should be no confusion.
00:16:38.760
Yes, it is possible to be free and happy in almost any circumstance, right?
00:16:46.460
If you put me in solitary confinement, I know that I could be happy.
00:16:51.380
Given what I know about my own mind, that is true.
00:16:55.140
And that is an immense strength born entirely of meditation, and it's available to everyone.
00:17:01.580
But that doesn't mean that we should acquiesce to the ruination of everything, to the breakdown
00:17:11.040
If we find ourselves living in some hellscape out of the Road Warrior movies, yes, it will
00:17:17.320
still be possible to meditate and to feel compassion for oneself and others, and to find
00:17:23.660
That is the capacity of the human mind that will not go away.
00:17:27.380
But we are right not to want to see things totally fall apart in our society.
00:17:34.220
And if your practice of meditation is making you unable to take problems of civilizational
00:17:40.260
importance seriously, well, then you may be managing your own stress well, but you're
00:17:47.720
What we need now are people who understand their own minds and who also understand the world.
00:17:54.060
I mean, I studied with some of the greatest meditation masters who were alive at the end
00:18:03.520
But they didn't know a damn thing about most of what I talk about on this podcast.
00:18:08.040
And if they were alive today, they still wouldn't.
00:18:11.240
And it is a very good thing that people like that aren't in charge of our cyber war capabilities.
00:18:22.560
So, it's great that many of you are getting value out of waking up.
00:18:27.860
But if you don't like me in this mode, when I'm actually doing my best to respond to a
00:18:34.620
real emergency in our culture, if you don't understand that we need to mount a competent
00:18:41.240
response to the challenges we face on a hundred fronts, you're not really getting what I'm teaching
00:18:48.880
You can't let meditation turn you into a new age goofball who just burns incense and thinks
00:18:55.220
that the universe is one big mystery and that everything happens for a reason.
00:19:00.080
Sometimes things happen for bad fucking reasons.
00:19:03.840
And a whole generation or generations lose the most basic capacity for order and forgetting
00:19:16.200
You know, sometimes the barbarians really do come through the gates.
00:19:20.160
Yes, we can always have conversations about the fundamental nature of reality.
00:19:24.680
We can have them here, in this circumstance, of relative order and prosperity, where we can
00:19:30.540
take important things for granted, where I can have a podcast and you can have a smartphone
00:19:35.020
on which to hear it, or we can contemplate reality after we've bombed and hacked and surveilled and
00:19:44.960
The nature of consciousness is available everywhere, even in a cave.
00:19:50.100
And many great contemplatives have found it in a cave.
00:19:53.440
I've met great Tibetan yogis who have spent years in caves.
00:19:56.280
But I would prefer not to have to live in one, because the world has become a Cormac McCarthy
00:20:03.880
And you would prefer it too, no matter how much you meditate.
00:20:08.440
There is simply no contradiction between deep insight into the nature of mind and getting
00:20:18.920
That tirade was brought to you by Waking Up, a meditation app.
00:20:22.220
All right, this brings me to the second bad take I've been seeing on social media and everywhere
00:20:31.700
Many people on the left are interpreting the utter failure of law enforcement to protect the
00:20:37.740
Capitol this week as a symptom of white supremacy.
00:20:52.220
No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday,
00:20:57.720
that they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol.
00:21:01.520
We all know that's true, and it's unacceptable.
00:21:05.780
And every anchor on the news has made this point, and Kamala Harris has made it, Michelle
00:21:11.380
Obama, Barack Obama, everyone has tried to stick this woke landing.
00:21:19.300
And in some cases, it was the only point they made in response to this desecration of American
00:21:37.080
Even if it were obviously true, it's not the point to make now.
00:21:42.120
But there are so many ways to see that it is probably not true.
00:21:48.080
At best, it's a half-truth and a slightly paradoxical one when you look at the details.
00:21:55.080
When something is this easy to see and it isn't being seen, you really have to worry about what's
00:22:04.460
First, consider the events of January 6th at the Capitol through the eyes of all the black
00:22:11.180
cops who were struggling to defend that building and the people in it.
00:22:16.820
I mean, some of the most shocking footage of how unprepared and unequipped the cops were
00:22:23.180
was of this lone black officer being forced up the stairs by the mob, endlessly retreating.
00:22:34.680
At one point, he picks up a baton and then thinks better of it, right?
00:22:39.260
His gun is apparently meaningless to the horde of zombies who are pursuing him.
00:22:44.520
And there's one especially aggressive white guy who keeps chasing him up the stairs, right?
00:22:54.700
Are you telling me that this black cop didn't shoot white boy in the face because of his
00:23:04.800
You know, this double standard was operative there.
00:23:07.700
He would have shot a black rioter and not a white one.
00:23:16.140
This black cop was undoubtedly in fear for his life.
00:23:21.060
And he recognized he was in a totally untenable situation.
00:23:26.080
He was struggling to do his job and keep a mob back that wasn't going to be kept back unless
00:23:36.140
But if he went down that path, he didn't have enough ammunition to kill all the people he
00:23:44.400
One cop with a handgun can't hold back a hundred people who aren't afraid to die.
00:23:52.680
Had there been an appropriate police presence, had that cop been joined by 50 others at that
00:23:58.560
point, there would have been a fight on those stairs.
00:24:01.760
And there would have been people in that mob bloodied and beaten by cops.
00:24:11.540
And in other places in the Capitol, that's what was happening.
00:24:14.300
There were cops fighting what had become an insurgent mob.
00:24:21.020
And yes, one Trump supporter was shot in the neck and killed as she tried to breach a door.
00:24:27.140
There's another place to put the lie to this racialized framing.
00:24:35.020
How many BLM protesters were shot and killed by cops over months of rioting in dozens of
00:24:48.220
Imagine if a black woman were executed at point-blank range.
00:24:55.440
Surely that's the way it would have been described had it happened.
00:24:58.480
Black woman executed at point-blank range for merely trying to breach a door at an otherwise
00:25:11.880
But here, a white woman was shot in the neck and killed.
00:25:20.840
What's not understandable is that more weren't shot.
00:25:23.340
But to interpret this as yet another symptom of white privilege is frankly crazy.
00:25:29.400
And there is endless footage of BLM protests gone wrong where the cops are just standing
00:25:40.800
They are not using extreme force on crowds of looters who are disproportionately black.
00:25:47.820
We all saw that footage and asked ourselves, what the hell are the cops there for if they're
00:25:53.360
not going to stop people from burning down buildings?
00:25:56.140
Yes, absurd force was directed at peaceful protesters in many places rather than looters and arsonists.
00:26:06.480
And many of those peaceful protesters were white.
00:26:09.660
Using this abomination that occurred at the Capitol as yet another opportunity to score a social
00:26:17.640
justice point is frankly idiotic and it's incredibly divisive.
00:26:24.380
It convinces everyone right of center that their cynicism and blind partisanship is totally justified.
00:26:33.980
What we're witnessing now is just how high a price we are paying for the hypocrisy and moral
00:26:44.300
We would be in a much better place had they not bent over backwards to obfuscate what a sickening
00:26:52.180
eruption of criminality we were witnessing, how destabilizing it was, how dysfunctional it was,
00:26:59.680
how appropriate the anger was of business owners who were left to their own devices to defend their
00:27:09.240
And there are whole neighborhoods that will take a generation to recover because they were burned
00:27:20.820
We're being told that the Capitol Police would have behaved like jackbooted thugs had the Capitol
00:27:28.860
Anyone remember the endless imagery of cops bending the knee at those BLM protests?
00:27:34.640
It's literally getting down on their knees in solidarity as something approaching a Maoist
00:27:45.260
Yes, there was some peculiar behavior of cops on the Capitol, but I didn't see any bending the knee
00:27:53.980
Honestly, at the time I'm recording this, it is still a mystery why the Capitol was so
00:27:58.620
And there might be some real conspiracy behind that.
00:28:04.020
It could be something that reaches all the way to Trump, or it could be due to the fact that the mayor
00:28:08.540
of D.C. didn't like the heavy-handed federal response to the BLM demonstrations that happened
00:28:13.820
in D.C. in particular when Trump orchestrated his photo op in front of the church.
00:28:19.020
So ironically, it could be a fairly woke mayor's resistance to heavy-handed policing that left the Capitol
00:28:27.960
That would be amazing to have that be the underlying cause of what is now being alleged
00:28:34.060
to be proof positive of the truth of white supremacy and white privilege governing law enforcement
00:28:51.680
You know, we could find out that some of the cops are die-hard Trump supporters who totally
00:29:00.900
And some obviously did their best to resist it.
00:29:05.200
From the footage I've seen, it's easy to see how, in certain places at least, the cops could
00:29:12.960
have been somewhat mystified by what they were up against.
00:29:22.820
Who looked like straight-up insurrectionists, which is what they were.
00:29:27.460
And then you had old ladies and old men who were kind of shuffling in there.
00:29:33.720
And then all the cosplay and costumed weirdness.
00:29:37.800
And I don't put a lot of onus on a cop in that circumstance who's trying to humor a bunch
00:29:46.840
I don't know what the mood in that particular room was like at that moment.
00:29:50.720
But there are many social cues that are hard to interpret.
00:29:56.260
But the general picture we should draw from what we know at this point is of a police force
00:30:05.200
The cops were put in a totally untenable position for reasons we should understand.
00:30:12.420
And something like this can never happen again.
00:30:18.860
And to summarize their failure as a symptom of racism, again, even as you see black cops
00:30:26.080
among them struggling to protect the place, it's so sloppy and disingenuous.
00:30:32.220
And this pseudo-insight is now raining down from on high from every liberal voice in the media.
00:30:39.780
I am genuinely concerned that we have tens of millions of people in Trumpistan now who
00:30:47.000
are, for all intents and purposes, totally unreachable.
00:30:50.140
But between them and the rest of us, we have millions of conservatives who are not QAnon
00:30:58.560
lunatics, but they are absolutely outraged over the selective application of outrage.
00:31:07.180
And as I said at the beginning here, they are not following the plot, right?
00:31:14.000
The analogy between what happened last week and the BLM riots is idiotic.
00:31:20.800
But it is easy to see how the media and Democratic politicians have totally discredited themselves
00:31:32.620
There are so many things here that have to be corrected.
00:31:36.800
And to just dunk on the right now, as the orange goblin is driven out of office, is a colossal
00:31:47.360
We have to figure out how to heal the divide in our country.
00:31:55.080
And Trump is largely responsible, but not entirely responsible.
00:31:59.960
Finally, I just want to touch upon the fact that Trump was finally banned from Twitter.
00:32:07.840
And while I admitted that there was a lot to debate here of interest, I signaled my approval
00:32:14.120
of this in very clear terms on Twitter, for which I got fairly furious pushback.
00:32:22.520
There are people who seem way more agitated over the fact that Trump was kicked off Twitter
00:32:36.480
But it seems to me that in the case of Trump, it's not even a close call.
00:32:41.240
Trump has been violating any sane terms of service policy on Twitter for years.
00:32:49.640
More importantly, he has ruined people's lives intentionally on Twitter.
00:32:56.300
As president of the United States, with tens of millions of rabid followers, many of whom
00:33:03.720
he knows to be quite deranged, he's attacked private citizens repeatedly, knowing that they
00:33:11.440
would be doxed and inundated with death threats.
00:33:20.260
In recent months, he's relentlessly spread misinformation about the election.
00:33:24.800
And he has destabilized our society in the process.
00:33:31.360
Twitter isn't obligated to give him a platform to do those things.
00:33:38.140
This isn't a why can't we just debate all ideas issue.
00:33:41.260
This is, why should we let the most dangerous cult leader on earth use our platform to sow
00:33:50.640
Why should we give him the tools to produce mob violence?
00:33:55.240
Honestly, I would expect to get kicked off Twitter for causing one one millionth the harm
00:34:04.540
Many people have pointed out an apparent irony here that the President of the United States
00:34:10.800
has been kicked off Twitter, but, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei or the Chinese Communist Party
00:34:16.800
still have their profiles up and they're spreading odious misinformation.
00:34:26.140
It's not an argument for not kicking Trump off.
00:34:31.640
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Twitter as a platform to spread its propaganda.
00:34:39.400
But there are many other things to say here, and I share people's concern about the power
00:34:44.160
of big tech and especially the harm that these social media platforms have done to our society.
00:34:52.640
This needs to be the focus of government regulation, right?
00:34:57.820
I think Facebook should probably be broken up as a monopoly.
00:35:01.100
I think there's a lot that has to be done here.
00:35:02.960
But people have been getting kicked off Twitter for far less every single day you've been on
00:35:10.300
And it is somewhat ironic to see all of these erstwhile libertarians not be able to find
00:35:16.380
their libertarian principles and recognize that private companies should be able to do whatever
00:35:24.660
Twitter can kick anyone off its platform it wants to.
00:35:29.820
It can kick all the men off tomorrow and all the women off.
00:35:33.940
It can have only trans people on the platform if it wants to tomorrow.
00:35:39.080
Granted, there is an interesting discussion to have about the power of these platforms.
00:35:44.940
Maybe social media needs to be looked at more like telecom.
00:35:48.920
Should the phone company be able to kick all the Nazis off its platform because it doesn't
00:35:58.820
But we have much bigger problems that in large part have been caused by social media.
00:36:05.140
And the malicious spread of misinformation by some of the most powerful figures in our society
00:36:12.920
on these platforms is one of the biggest problems we have.
00:36:17.060
And with less than two weeks left in his doomed presidency, letting an increasingly destabilized
00:36:25.620
Trump just tweet whatever the hell he wants to millions of proper lunatics, which is what
00:36:33.000
everyone who believes his lies has become, that was an untenable situation.
00:36:38.120
So it might have been a hard call for Jack and the other people at Twitter, but as far
00:36:46.840
Needless to say, there's a lot we need to figure out going forward.
00:36:50.420
I do not have a crystal ball here, but I can tell you what I'm concerned about.
00:36:55.040
I am certainly worried that we will see some Timothy McVeigh-style terrorism coming from
00:37:04.580
And of course, part of the responsibility for this will fall on Trump and his enablers, even
00:37:15.760
I mean, honestly, the lies that he has told will long outlive him.
00:37:21.640
Our society has been poisoned, verifiably poisoned by lies.
00:37:28.780
And Trump harbors an enormous responsibility for this.
00:37:33.300
But the antidote to the lies of Trump and his enablers can't be the lies of the left.
00:37:43.300
We need an intellectually honest discussion about what's going on in the world.
00:37:48.980
So I am certainly worried about what the far right and the Trump cult is capable of.
00:37:55.640
And to just, for 10 seconds, revisit a position I took long ago, which has now changed in light
00:38:04.280
Whenever the topic of white supremacy and Christian militia risk has come up, I have claimed to
00:38:12.220
be agnostic about how big a problem these things are in our society.
00:38:17.260
Whether they were diminishing, whether they were being exaggerated by the people who focus
00:38:24.820
I now think that everything in that cesspool, whatever you want to call it, is suddenly of
00:38:35.200
Again, given how Trump has behaved in recent months.
00:38:39.800
To have nearly half our society believe, I think the last poll showed that 90% of Republicans
00:38:47.740
believe that the election of Joe Biden was fraudulent.
00:39:01.580
But to have anything like half our society believe that the government has been stolen, that is
00:39:16.100
So Biden's presidency, with all the challenges he's going to face, COVID and its economic consequences,
00:39:24.880
the bellicosity of China, the major challenges that Biden should focus on.
00:39:31.580
But honestly, one of the most important things we can do, and begin doing immediately, is
00:39:38.700
figure out how to hold elections in this country that are secure in a way that everyone can
00:39:45.460
recognize, transparent, unhackable, where the right people get to vote and they know their
00:39:52.240
vote has counted, so that when you lose, you can admit you've lost.
00:39:56.680
We simply have to figure out how to put such a system in place.
00:40:01.580
And I also think Biden should work very hard to diminish the power of the presidency.
00:40:10.700
I think the Oval Office has to be made psychopath-proof.
00:40:15.640
Of course, it would be great if we could figure out how not to elect a psychopath to the presidency.
00:40:19.920
But once having done that, we need a system that will check the misuse of that office, right?
00:40:29.800
We need laws where we only had norms that Trump was more than happy to violate.
00:40:35.960
I don't know how that can be done, and I'll look to have people on the podcast who know much more
00:40:41.440
about that. But Trump has been a stress test of our democracy that we nearly failed, and we should
00:40:48.900
do our best to learn from it. I've just been a barrel of laughs these last two podcasts.
00:40:58.300
It's January 9th. I'm starting the new year all over again.