Making Sense - Sam Harris - #230 — An Insurrection of Lies

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?

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:22.840 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:25.720 Okay.

00:00:27.560 The siege of the Capitol.

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.

00:00:45.100 I think I need hardly express it.

00:00:48.340 But like so much that has happened under Trump, what occurred at the Capitol was in every way unsurprising.

00:00:57.660 But it was also in every way astonishing.

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.

00:01:12.920 That was a Pizzagate insurrection.

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.

00:01:36.900 In a way, it was absolutely perfect.

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.

00:02:06.540 I don't know.

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.

00:02:19.420 And they're causing a lot of further harm.

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?

00:02:56.420 That's a possible state of the human body.

00:02:58.980 And they're both problems.

00:03:00.620 And they have to be thought about differently.

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.

00:04:29.100 That is a horrific polling number.

00:04:32.960 That is the abyss politically.

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.

00:04:50.220 First, in many cases, it's not true.

00:04:52.760 It's not true to say that Biden and Kamala Harris didn't condemn the looting and violence last summer.

00:04:59.160 They did.

00:05:00.060 They just didn't do it enough.

00:05:01.920 Not nearly enough.

00:05:03.380 And I criticized them at the time.

00:05:05.900 But there's a much deeper disanalogy here.

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.

00:05:30.400 He can't actually accomplish his aims.

00:05:33.020 But consider, the people who attacked the Capitol fought with cops, right?

00:05:40.500 They really fought with cops.

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.

00:06:03.740 They were not looting a shopping mall.

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

00:06:18.680 had literally been stolen from them.

00:06:21.820 That they don't have a democracy anymore.

00:06:24.040 That they don't have a country anymore.

00:06:26.760 And that they must fight to get it back.

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

00:06:42.640 and arson, take a moment and try.

00:06:46.760 There is no analogy to be drawn here.

00:06:51.680 Now, it is a miracle that more people weren't killed at the Capitol.

00:06:56.760 In fact, many more should have been killed.

00:07:00.860 Don't misunderstand me. 0.94

00:07:02.240 I'm not saying I wish that many more people had died.

00:07:05.740 I'm very thankful that so few did.

00:07:08.260 But if you run that experiment again, the let's storm the halls of Congress experiment, you

00:07:14.220 run it a hundred times.

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 0.97

00:07:39.080 glass, those people should have been shot. 0.55

00:07:43.940 Because what is the alternative? 0.97

00:07:47.160 To just let the lives of our elected officials depend upon the restraint of a mob?

00:07:53.660 Some of the people were armed.

00:07:55.700 One guy was carrying zip ties of a sort that cops use for handcuffs.

00:08:00.660 What was he planning to do with those?

00:08:02.400 Take hostages?

00:08:03.040 There is actually no way of knowing what would have happened had those people gotten their

00:08:08.560 hands on Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. 0.94

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 0.94

00:08:20.800 break into the Capitol, who believe that there's a global conspiracy of child raping cannibals 0.94

00:08:26.500 running the world.

00:08:28.000 People who have never received anything other than a wink and a nod from the President of

00:08:32.140 the United States on those very points.

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

00:09:00.540 decided to use the restrooms at the Capitol. 0.84

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

00:09:23.700 eyes of the world.

00:09:24.380 Yes, the BLM riots were also a disgrace. 0.83

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

00:09:42.200 need to be peaceful.

00:09:43.680 That was a disgrace.

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?

00:09:55.940 And just amazing, dark comedy.

00:09:59.220 And yes, it was insane, patently insane, to see calls to defund the police as social order

00:10:07.400 was unraveling across our country.

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

00:10:26.240 by the president himself.

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,

00:10:59.280 right?

00:10:59.440 That there's nothing to aspire to.

00:11:01.720 They have captive populations who they are messaging to. 1.00

00:11:06.940 Now they get to tell them that democracy is bullshit, right? 1.00

00:11:11.840 That having a free press is just dangerous bullshit, right? 1.00

00:11:15.280 Because it drives people insane. 0.99

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 0.99

00:12:18.160 have a shirtless fucking Viking stalking the halls of Congress. 0.99

00:12:22.140 We've got people in Camp Auschwitz t-shirts hunting down Nancy Pelosi at the behest of 1.00

00:12:30.620 the fucking president of the United States. 1.00

00:12:35.340 Trump has been assaulting the foundations of our democracy since before he took office. 1.00

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

00:12:51.840 campaign.

00:12:52.960 He actually did that during the 2016 campaign.

00:12:55.860 That should have been disqualifying.

00:12:58.140 But throughout 2020, he repeatedly refused to offer an assurance that he would cooperate

00:13:05.760 with a peaceful transfer of power.

00:13:07.960 Half a dozen times, at least, he shattered the most important democratic norm we have right

00:13:14.680 before our eyes.

00:13:15.940 He should have been impeached for that.

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

00:13:57.940 getting on social media.

00:14:00.040 I think I should have cleared this up a long time ago, because there is some conceptual confusion

00:14:05.080 here.

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.

00:14:27.500 You know, there are many versions of this.

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.

00:14:32.980 Let me clear this up.

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

00:15:15.580 or worldview I present in Waking Up.

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 1.00

00:15:44.380 will be condemned to live in, it's time to take your head out of your ass. 1.00

00:15:49.120 And if you think I can't say that mindfully or mean that mindfully, in this very tone 1.00

00:15:56.180 of voice, if you think it's impossible for me to be mindful right now, non-dualistically 1.00

00:16:02.440 mindful, free of self mindful, even as I tell you to take your head out of your ass, then 0.99

00:16:09.860 you are confused about what mindfulness is and about what meditation is and about what the 0.99

00:16:15.780 whole project of living an examined life is.

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?

00:16:44.980 I believe that is true.

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

00:17:09.360 of society.

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

00:17:22.860 equanimity.

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

00:17:46.000 no good to us.

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

00:17:59.680 of the 20th century.

00:18:01.160 These were extraordinary teachers.

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.

00:18:17.940 Because then we wouldn't have any.

00:18:20.040 We have to play this game on multiple levels.

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

00:18:47.360 over there at waking up. 0.71

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. 0.99

00:19:00.080 Sometimes things happen for bad fucking reasons. 0.98

00:19:03.840 And a whole generation or generations lose the most basic capacity for order and forgetting 0.99

00:19:10.660 what they want in life.

00:19:11.780 And lose good things they didn't need to lose.

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

00:19:41.500 abused ourselves back into the dark ages.

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

00:20:02.640 novel.

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 0.53

00:20:15.440 our shit together out in the world. 0.59

00:20:18.920 That tirade was brought to you by Waking Up, a meditation app. 0.99

00:20:22.220 All right, this brings me to the second bad take I've been seeing on social media and everywhere

00:20:29.760 else.

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.

00:20:43.280 They're racializing this travesty.

00:20:47.840 And everyone is doing this.

00:20:50.000 Here's what Joe Biden tweeted.

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 0.63

00:21:27.140 democracy.

00:21:28.520 And it's the wrong point to make.

00:21:31.020 And it's wrong in almost every way.

00:21:34.120 It would be wrong even if it were right.

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

00:22:01.800 happening in our culture.

00:22:04.460 First, consider the events of January 6th at the Capitol through the eyes of all the black 0.99

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.

00:22:30.980 Perhaps you've seen this, right?

00:22:32.540 It's crazy footage.

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?

00:22:49.860 And the cop keeps backing up and backing up.

00:22:53.180 What is being claimed here? 0.95

00:22:54.700 Are you telling me that this black cop didn't shoot white boy in the face because of his 1.00

00:23:01.520 own internalized white supremacy? 0.98

00:23:04.800 You know, this double standard was operative there. 0.99

00:23:07.700 He would have shot a black rioter and not a white one. 0.97

00:23:10.700 Is that really the claim you want to make? 0.99

00:23:14.100 And the truth is obvious.

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. 0.69

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 0.55

00:23:33.380 he started killing people. 0.98

00:23:36.140 But if he went down that path, he didn't have enough ammunition to kill all the people he 0.99

00:23:41.940 would have to kill to have saved himself. 0.93

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. 0.55

00:24:01.760 And there would have been people in that mob bloodied and beaten by cops.

00:24:06.960 As there should have been.

00:24:08.140 It was an insane situation.

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.

00:24:19.400 And one died.

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.

00:24:32.020 A white woman was shot and killed.

00:24:35.020 How many BLM protesters were shot and killed by cops over months of rioting in dozens of

00:24:43.580 cities?

00:24:44.480 To my knowledge, none.

00:24:47.140 Imagine if one were. 0.99

00:24:48.220 Imagine if a black woman were executed at point-blank range. 0.99

00:24:55.440 Surely that's the way it would have been described had it happened. 0.97

00:24:58.480 Black woman executed at point-blank range for merely trying to breach a door at an otherwise

00:25:04.020 peaceful BLM protest.

00:25:06.280 What would have been said had that happened?

00:25:09.160 That's all we'd be talking about now.

00:25:11.880 But here, a white woman was shot in the neck and killed.

00:25:17.720 It's completely understandable she was shot.

00:25:20.840 What's not understandable is that more weren't shot. 0.97

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

00:25:37.900 and watching and doing nothing, right? 0.97

00:25:40.800 They are not using extreme force on crowds of looters who are disproportionately black. 0.96

00:25:47.820 We all saw that footage and asked ourselves, what the hell are the cops there for if they're 0.96

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 1.00

00:26:17.640 justice point is frankly idiotic and it's incredibly divisive. 1.00

00:26:24.380 It convinces everyone right of center that their cynicism and blind partisanship is totally justified. 1.00

00:26:33.980 What we're witnessing now is just how high a price we are paying for the hypocrisy and moral

00:26:41.140 blindness of the media during the BLM riots. 0.96

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

00:27:06.920 businesses and many lost them.

00:27:09.240 And there are whole neighborhoods that will take a generation to recover because they were burned 0.51

00:27:15.020 out by mobs of cultic lunatics.

00:27:18.440 Here's another disanalogy. 0.95

00:27:20.820 We're being told that the Capitol Police would have behaved like jackbooted thugs had the Capitol

00:27:25.540 been attacked by a BLM protest.

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

00:27:41.900 struggle session surrounded them.

00:27:45.260 Yes, there was some peculiar behavior of cops on the Capitol, but I didn't see any bending the knee

00:27:51.580 in solidarity.

00:27:53.980 Honestly, at the time I'm recording this, it is still a mystery why the Capitol was so

00:27:57.960 unprotected.

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

00:28:27.120 undefended.

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

00:28:41.740 in this country.

00:28:43.920 Anyway, I don't know what happened there.

00:28:45.840 I'm sure we will learn a lot.

00:28:48.320 And it could point in both directions, right?

00:28:50.520 It could be over-determined.

00:28:51.680 You know, we could find out that some of the cops are die-hard Trump supporters who totally

00:28:57.320 sympathized with the attack on the Capitol.

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.

00:29:17.420 I mean, it was kind of mystifying.

00:29:20.200 You had people who looked the part, right? 0.98

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

00:29:44.780 of people by taking a selfie.

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

00:30:02.420 that was totally under-resourced.

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. 0.93

00:30:15.700 Those cops got completely screwed. 0.99

00:30:18.860 And to summarize their failure as a symptom of racism, again, even as you see black cops 1.00

00:30:26.080 among them struggling to protect the place, it's so sloppy and disingenuous. 0.84

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 0.90

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 1.00

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?

00:31:11.280 They are missing something crucial. 1.00

00:31:14.000 The analogy between what happened last week and the BLM riots is idiotic. 0.99

00:31:20.800 But it is easy to see how the media and Democratic politicians have totally discredited themselves 0.99

00:31:28.980 in their eyes.

00:31:30.860 That has to be corrected.

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

00:31:44.040 mistake politically, pragmatically.

00:31:47.360 We have to figure out how to heal the divide in our country.

00:31:51.400 Our country is shattered.

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

00:32:27.540 than they were over the attack on the Capitol.

00:32:30.840 This is a very interesting topic.

00:32:33.760 And I think there are many issues to debate.

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.

00:32:47.500 He's threatened nuclear war on Twitter.

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.

00:33:14.940 That should get you kicked off Twitter.

00:33:16.620 He should have been kicked off years ago.

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.

00:33:28.140 And then he incited an attack on the Capitol.

00:33:31.360 Twitter isn't obligated to give him a platform to do those things.

00:33:36.020 This is not a free speech issue.

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

00:33:48.100 division in society issue?

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

00:34:02.640 Trump has caused on the platform.

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.

00:34:23.940 Well, they should be kicked off too, right?

00:34:26.140 It's not an argument for not kicking Trump off.

00:34:29.020 It's an argument for being consistent.

00:34:31.640 Yes, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Twitter as a platform to spread its propaganda.

00:34:37.320 That seems like a pretty easy call.

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

00:35:09.580 Twitter.

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

00:35:23.460 the hell they want to do.

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. 1.00

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 0.98

00:35:54.020 like what they talk about?

00:35:55.940 These are interesting questions.

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

00:36:44.220 as I can tell, it was the right one.

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

00:37:03.020 the right at some point.

00:37:04.580 And of course, part of the responsibility for this will fall on Trump and his enablers, even

00:37:12.860 if it happens months from now.

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

00:38:03.140 of recent events.

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

00:38:23.740 on those issues.

00:38:24.820 I now think that everything in that cesspool, whatever you want to call it, is suddenly of

00:38:31.320 much greater concern and growing concern now.

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.

00:38:54.060 I hope that number's wrong.

00:38:56.160 Maybe it was 70%.

00:38:57.260 I don't honestly know.

00:38:59.460 I can't believe these numbers.

00:39:01.580 But to have anything like half our society believe that the government has been stolen, that is

00:39:10.840 a shattering of society.

00:39:12.940 We have to figure out how to remedy that.

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.

00:40:55.360 Can we start 2021 again? Is that okay?

00:40:58.300 It's January 9th. I'm starting the new year all over again.

00:41:03.860 Happy New Year, everybody.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 11, 2021

#230 — An Insurrection of Lies

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