#421 — “More From Sam”： Political Violence, Iran, Deportations, Protests, & Rapid Fire Questions
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Summary
In this episode of Making Sense, host Sam Harris talks about Father's Day, the recent shooting of a state representative and her husband, and why he thinks we should be worried about political violence in general. Plus, a look ahead to Sam's upcoming tour.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing
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the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
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Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore
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it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're
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It's going well. Did you have a nice Father's Day?
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We don't really do anything. I don't even know how to celebrate.
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We don't observe. I feel like every day is Father's Day in my house.
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I got one card. I've got two daughters, one card. So that was sweet.
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But let me set this series up. All right. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode
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of More From Sam. As a reminder, the goal of this series is to get more from Sam on current events
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more often, and also to share a more fun side of Sam. Sam, you have a fun side. Plenty of heavy
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shit to discuss, but in this series, we're allowed to have fun doing it. The tone is faster paced,
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which includes interruptions because they create more energy. I'm here to surface Sam's ideas,
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so don't get caught up on what you think my actual positions might be. It doesn't matter.
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Sure. Everybody loves a spicy Sam, so I'm going to do what I can to get more of that.
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And lastly, this series is not meant to be. Thank you. It's not meant to be a replacement
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for anything. It's simply in addition to what Sam is already doing. Also, Sam has some tour
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dates coming up this fall that have already been announced. New York and Boston in October
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are nearly sold out. I think there are about a hundred tickets last I checked in each of those
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cities. And Seattle, and nice job, Sam. Well done. Thanks to all those in New York and Boston
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who have quickly bought tickets. And Seattle and San Jose in September are each a little over
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50% sold as well. So if you want tickets to any of those shows, you can head over to samharris.org.
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Also, we're about to announce Chicago. So that's coming this week in order to get, yeah,
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it should be fun. In order to get access to the pre-sale, you must be a paid subscriber to the
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podcast, and then there'll be a general on sale shortly thereafter. Anyway, all this info can be
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found on the website. And if you're on the mailing list, be on the lookout for something coming very
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soon. Sam, are there any quick thoughts on these shows you can share with us? Something the audience
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should... Just that I'm looking forward to them. I'm going to write a talk. And so the first hour will
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not be extemporaneous. I mean, maybe I'll say something. There'll be some marginalia as I work
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from what I've prepared. But no, I'm actually going into this wanting to put my thoughts in order.
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And I love the excuse to be able to do that. So it feels almost like I have to write a short book
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between now and then. But I will do that, and I'll come prepared to tell people what I'm thinking
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about. That'll be fun. And then the second half, we'll do an episode of more from Sam,
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this kind of vibe where we can incorporate some of the current events. I mean, I think what I want to
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do is I want to field the questions in advance that we know are most pressing, especially things
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that I have said or fail to say that the audience finds most galling. So we'll get the hardest
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questions. And one, I'll probably anticipate some of those in my talk, but we'll store them up for
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each event and deal with them in the second hour or two. Well, we'll do that. That's what we do for
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every episode here. So that shouldn't be too hard. All right. So there's no shortage of things to
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cover on this episode. So let's get into it. I want to start with the political violence that
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took place this past weekend in Minneapolis, where a state representative and her husband
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were murdered in their home. And a state senator and his wife were shot multiple times at their house
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and have thankfully survived. You got Trump, Josh Shapiro, two employees at the Israeli embassy,
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and you could throw in the United Healthcare CEO as well. What's going on with the explosion of
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political violence? And is this a new norm we should come to expect? Well, I mean, it's obviously
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awful. It's also mimetic. We know that people find this kind of, the kind of notoriety that shooters
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get somewhat contagious, right? So, you know, we've had episodes like this before in our past. I mean,
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not for a very long time, but obviously the late sixties was a time where we were sort of in free
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fall with respect to assassinations. I mean, it's awful. I think, you know, the thing that is,
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I mean, the only governor we have on and apart from catching people and we're providing great
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security so as to make it effectively impossible is to shun any political rhetoric that directly
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inspires this kind of behavior. And unfortunately, both sides, not both sides equally, but both sides
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have had various points tipped over into, you know, ways of speaking about their political opponents
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that have been totally irresponsible. And I would put Trump at the top of this list of people who
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has been... Who's got the timer? How long did it take to bring Trump up there?
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Well, I mean, it's just, yeah, but it's just the fact that here's somebody who has normalized
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political violence in several respects. I mean, his response to January 6th was a great act of
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normalization. You get, you have people who are literally stabbing cops in the face with flagpoles
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and they've been exonerated as American heroes. Yeah. All of that is part of what has pushed us
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to this moment, I think. So. Well, I mean, I don't, do you think we have to doge our, the way that we
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treat these people instead of letting them become celebrities so quickly? Can't we just find these
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people that commit these heinous acts and disappear them very quickly? We try to do that. I mean,
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sometimes better than others, but we did that effectively with, at least to my eye, we did
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that with the shooter for, who tried to kill Trump. I mean, as evidenced by the fact that I can't even
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remember his name. Yeah. Well, I think he was just killed right there on the spot. I think that's
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what happened. Yeah. But like, we haven't talked about him. He's not a, he's not a martyr to any
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cause. In fact, we don't even, you know, I don't happen to know much about what his cause was. I mean,
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how much was mental illness and how much was an actual ideological motivation. We've been,
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we've been better in recent years about doing that, whether it's political violence or just
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violence. I mean, the Vegas shooter who still killed more people than any shooter in American
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history. Again, I've forgotten his name. I once knew it, but he, that was memory holes within like
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72 hours of the occurrence. So I think we're, we're getting better at it, but the way we are talking
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about our politics, I think is just, it's not reminiscent of any recent period in American
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history. I mean, we just, we're so uncivil. I mean, this is of a piece with a U.S. Senator being,
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you know, wrestled to the ground and handcuffed at a press conference for Kristi Noem, right? And the
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fact that his Republican colleagues in the Senate didn't immediately, or Congress didn't immediately
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condemn that. In fact, some of them lined up on the other side and castigated him for some
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impropriety that they thought warranted his manhandling there. The thing that we're not
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recognizing is that civility is, is the last stop before violence, right? I mean, the civility is not
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just a nice to have, it's really a must have when you're talking about discussing politically
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polarizing issues. Yeah. Well, I want to get to Alex Padilla and a little bit of that later,
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because I do think what he did, you know, perhaps had some impact on changing the course of events
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there. It seems that that's been, that's been walked back, but we'll, we'll get back to that in
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a bit where the, the ice, uh, rates have been, have been, uh, walked back because of the idea that
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apparently it's impacting the farming industry and the hotel industries, the hospitality industry.
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I wonder what those phone calls were like. Well, no shit. I mean, what a dummy, like how obvious was
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that for him to say, um, yeah, but how, but also how dysfunctional is it that really what, what
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accomplished this change in policy undoubtedly were a bunch of rich friends of the president
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calling and saying, listen, you're fucking up my hotel business. This, uh, it said nothing to do
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with the humanity of it. Yeah. It said nothing to do with the, with wisdom or pragmatism or ethics or
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anything. It's just pure patronage. I mean, this is, this is what is turning us into a banana
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Republic. What Trump has done is he's put himself at the bottleneck of everything and he's using both
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domestic and foreign policy to dole out favors and to friends and punish enemies. I mean, the thing
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that is so despicable about the Republicans now is that no one objects to this. That's what was
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amazing to see in the falling out with Elon. Well, you know, you have all these people who,
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many of whom are welcoming Elon back into the fold. I mean, just a desperate to, to patch up
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this marriage and yet they're not acknowledging how corrosive it is to have a president who
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immediately goes to, if Elon supports any Democrats, there'll be extraordinary consequences,
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right? He's threatening him with, with what a judicial investigation or loss of contracts. He's,
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he's using the levers of government power to say that his former friend shouldn't fund political
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opposition in this country. And everyone on the Republican side accepts that as somehow normal.
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This is, you know, authoritarian is, is the generic term for it. I mean, this is not
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remotely normal in American politics. No, no, no. Well, you know, you talked about,
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while we're talking about Musk in your recent Substack piece, you torched him. And this is something you
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and I were talking about earlier, that Musk has admitted that he went overboard with something
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that resembled, I guess, an apology on Twitter. But what he's saying here really matters. I mean,
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we shouldn't be quick to forget what he's basically saying. He's saying that he's either
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someone who has no morals, who just was happy to work with Trump, who was a rapist, a child rapist,
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and he was just fine because, well, he had shared interests. Or he completely made up an insane lie
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about his friend, you know, someone who he loved as much as any man could love another.
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So either way, and the reason why I think it matters is because, according to your latest
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podcast, I think, was it Daniel or I think it was the last name, you just spoke to about AI.
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One of these guys could very soon become the leader of the most powerful AI army in the world.
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And, you know, we should care about the character of these individuals.
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Yeah. I don't know how we got here, but we seem to have, at least half of our society
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seems to think that we, the personal integrity of the most powerful people in our society doesn't
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matter, right? It's just like, it doesn't matter. Like, you can have the most self-interested,
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unethical people you can find, give them basically all the power human beings can have,
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and you can just expect everything to work fine. Now, it would be great to have systems,
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to have laws and institutions that were totally impervious to bad actors. I mean, that would be
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the dream. It's an unrealistic one. Clearly, we don't have anything like that currently in the U.S.
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government. So it matters whether psychologically normal, at a minimum, psychologically normal people
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are in charge, right? And we just don't have that. We have narcissists and liars and confabulators
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and, and in certain cases, I think mentally unstable people.
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But I think a lot of times when you talk like that, people think you exaggerate, but right here,
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right here, we saw Elon Musk and we, we know...
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Well, even on the president's account, he's gone, he went crazy, right? So he's unstable. I mean,
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I think most people will admit that at a minimum, he's unstable.
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But yes, those two interpretations of Elon's character. One, he was happy to collaborate
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with a person he knew to be a child rapist or an enabler of child rape. Or two, he was willing
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to claim that a person who is his favorite person on earth 10 minutes ago was a child rapist the
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moment their interests were no longer aligned. You pick your favorite interpretation of his
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character there because that exhausts the possibilities.
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Because again, right of center, nobody cares about a person's character. They, they'll care
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about, they care about Hunter Biden's character, apparently, right? They care about whether Joe
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Biden's inner circle knew that he wasn't compos mentis and were letting, letting the country,
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you know, have a somewhat vacant presidency or presidency by committee, right? That strikes them
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as just adjacent to evil. But nothing on their own side matters, including, I mean, they were
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completely unfaceted. The people who thought Elon was this absolutely impeccable omnibus genius,
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when he alleged that, you know, mark my words, Trump is a, is a child rapist. In so many words,
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he alleged that he doubled down on that tweet, said, you know, just flag this tweet, flag this post,
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come back to this post, mark this post, however he put it, you know, the truth will come out,
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right? He's claiming to have certain knowledge of Trump's criminal culpability, right? All these
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people who were, who were up to that moment thought Elon could do no wrong. What did they think? Did
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they, did any of them care? And these are also people, the irony is that these are also people
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who are disproportionately fixated on the problem of pedophilia. You know, half of them think there's a
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pedophile cult running the world. They certainly don't think Epstein killed himself. They think
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lots of powerful people were, are culpable for an immense coverup there. And to hear that Elon knows
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and promises you that you will know soon, if you just watch this space, you soon will know
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that Trump is one of these sinister rapists or enablers of rapists. How many of them cared?
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Where were the, the Jack Posobiec and the Charlie Kirks and the other grifters and confabulists,
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the Pizzagate dummies, the Mike Cernovich, where were they? Like, how did, how did they not jump
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into that space one way or the other? Either, either Elon is lying and he's pure evil. He's
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smearing the president with the worst aspersion that can be summoned to a human mind, or you trust Elon
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because God damn, he knows everything. And he's been on the inside and he's has all the data.
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And you, you sort of know anyway, that Trump is like this, you know, he was friends with Epstein
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for many, many years. You know, he celebrated Epstein's sexual conquests and even named the
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fact that he likes his ladies young. He said that some people say that he likes beautiful women even
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more than I do. And he likes, he sure likes them young, right? That's, that's practically verbatim,
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right? You know that the, that, that in his sixties, probably he was storming the dressing
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rooms of teenage girls at the Miss America pageant. You know that he's just right on the
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edge of doing this anyway, all by himself, right? And yet who cared, right? This is, I mean,
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it's not even hypocrisy. It's just a complete vacancy of a moral sensibility right of center now.
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Well, they, and they rightly care about lawlessness too. Except for when it's January 6th.
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But I mean, but that, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, one can imagine it's going to
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normalize at some point. I think part of it is the characters we have in play. You know,
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I just, I don't, I don't know that you can get a delusional cult under somebody like J.D. Vance,
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but I'm sure the Republicans will give it a good hard try.
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All right. Switching gears. Let's talk about Israel and Iran. Any early thoughts on that?
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Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think that they are fighting our war in some respect. I
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mean, they're fighting their own war too, because a nuclear armed Iran is definitely an existential
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concern for them. And if you doubt that, you just haven't been paying attention to what Iran has said
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for the last 20 plus years. I mean, the Iranian regime is explicitly a theocratic death cult. I mean,
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this is a jihadist regime of the Shiite variety that has had as its special focus for years and
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years, the eradication of Israel. And so this is not a metaphor for anything. This is, once we get
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a bomb, we're going to turn Israel into glass, right? And I think the Israelis are, have to take
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that threat at face value. I mean, Phil, I think the lesson that the world should learn is that if you
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are going to be explicit in your genocidal aspirations, your neighbors, whoever you're
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targeting with your, with this, with these malicious hopes, your neighbors are justified in
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coming across your border and killing the principal bad actors. I mean, words matter, right? And so if
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you're bluffing, you know, it's on you to, to not do that again, right? It's just, so I think it's
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completely warranted. I think, I mean, this is a commercial for what we should have done years
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ago, we being the United States. And you think the Iranians would use a nuke, no doubt about it,
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if they got it? Yeah. I mean, one, if they didn't use a nuke, if they just had them, I think they would
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do all the awful things they've been doing anyway. I mean, what's amazing is how deterred we,
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the Americans. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
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