Making Sense - Sam Harris - #454 — More From Sam： Minnesota, Greenland, Iran, S＊＊thole Countries, and More

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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00:00:30.200 doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, we're back with another episode of More

00:00:38.920 from Sam. Hi, Sam. Hey, good to see you. Good to see you as well. Once again, I just want to

00:00:43.920 quickly remind everyone that you will be giving talks in a number of cities in North America this

00:00:48.180 year. This week we have LA, which is sold out. Congrats. That'll be fun. And then coming up,

00:00:53.520 we have Dallas, Austin, Portland, Vancouver, Toronto, DC, and ending in New York City again.

00:00:59.060 So if you want to see Sam, now is the time to do it. While touring can be a lot of fun,

00:01:02.400 it's also hard work, not to mention you have to stand up there for nearly two hours straight.

00:01:06.600 Yeah, yeah. The talk keeps getting longer. I keep trying to cut it back, but events happen. So yeah.

00:01:12.160 Yeah, I've learned to stop making any suggestions. I keep asking you to cut 15 minutes and you add 15

00:01:16.620 minutes. So I'm just going to be quiet. But it's a great show and it's a cool experience to see you

00:01:20.640 deliver it live. And anyone wanting to buy tickets can head over to samharris.org now and you can find

00:01:25.060 all the info there. Okay. So many things happening that I don't even know where to begin from Rene

00:01:30.560 Good, ICE in general, Greenland, tariffs on the EU for intervening in Greenland, the potential

00:01:35.860 collapse of NATO. And I haven't even gotten to Iran and Venezuela and Maduro might as well have

00:01:39.980 happened a year ago. And it seems like- That was just like two weeks ago. I mean, it's been

00:01:45.120 incredible two weeks. Yeah. Well, it seems like the Epstein files have successfully fallen out of the

00:01:49.800 news again. And do we even have time to cover the latest round of antisemitism? Plus, I want to get

00:01:53.880 your take on prediction markets and gambling apps, the latest on AI, and discuss Ben Shapiro's

00:01:58.060 appearance on Gavin Newsom's podcast and anything you hope to discuss with Ben when he's on your

00:02:02.620 podcast next month and more. Let's see how much of this we can get to today. So which emergency would

00:02:08.460 you like to start with? How about ICE and Rene Good? Yeah, I guess we could. I did speak about that on

00:02:14.200 Scott Galloway's podcast at some length. So some people have seen that, I think. But yeah,

00:02:18.400 I'm happy to cover that. Yeah, just why don't you give us a little synopsis of what you said

00:02:22.420 over there, and then we can go from there. Well, I mean, there's so many aspects to it that are

00:02:27.780 regrettable. I mean, like, there's nothing about this that is normal. The more general problem is

00:02:34.240 that we're getting lulled into a sense of a new normal that is so aberrant, right? It's so

00:02:40.620 unacceptable, or it should be so unacceptable to everyone. This should be just a completely

00:02:45.840 nonpartisan feeling of revulsion that is coming over the country for what we're seeing here. I

00:02:50.740 mean, just the behavior of ICE, the fact that you have, you know, masked and quite obviously poorly

00:02:57.900 recruited and poorly trained people expressing a totally unprofessional level of belligerence to

00:03:05.600 everyone in sight, right? I mean, this is not normal policing. I mean, it's not even close to even

00:03:10.720 normal bad policing, right? I mean, so just how anyone has felt that this is defensible,

00:03:17.100 you know, right of center, it's, I just, it just boggles the mind. I mean, we're talking about people

00:03:22.060 who were upset over the Twitter files. Just remember that, right? I mean, that was the level

00:03:27.300 of Orwellian federal government overreach that had them fucking vomiting online, right? I mean,

00:03:33.600 just the calls from Joe Biden when he's not in power, right? Just, he's just got a presidential

00:03:38.540 campaign and he's calling Twitter to have naked photos of his son removed and he's just asking,

00:03:45.020 right? And this is the thing that gets the Matt Taibis of the world just around the clock, 24-7.

00:03:50.680 It's their entire career to chase this down. And now we have got thousands upon thousands of maniacs

00:03:58.160 in the street breaking people's windows and hauling them out of their cars and throwing them on the

00:04:03.140 pavement without any probable cause. And these can be immigrants, they can be citizens.

00:04:06.920 They're using flashbang grenades on peaceful protesters. They're using people's kids as

00:04:12.820 bargaining chips in negotiations to get people to surface from homes. And I mean, it's just,

00:04:18.560 the footage is awful. But what is even more awful than the violence, the totally unwarranted violence

00:04:24.220 we're seeing is the government's response to the worst excesses of that violence when people react.

00:04:30.440 So, I mean, the killing of Renee Goode was, in my view, totally unjustified. I mean, we can dissect

00:04:35.500 that a little more if you want. But the most shocking thing was the lies that came from the

00:04:41.660 president and vice president and Kristi Noem, everyone on down immediately, right? And they were,

00:04:47.160 they were not even normal lies. I mean, they were impossible lies. They were lies being told when

00:04:52.480 everyone could see what happened from three different sides. She's being described as a terrorist who

00:04:57.460 tried to kill ICE agents. There is no way of looking at that footage to justify that claim

00:05:04.440 that was obvious from the beginning. And no one, I mean, these aren't errors. These aren't normal

00:05:09.600 errors. No one corrects an error. No one apologizes. No one says, oh yeah, so we had some initial

00:05:13.540 reports. We got that wrong. Obviously, we've got to investigate this. There's a sense of completely

00:05:18.800 unprofessional contempt being expressed for half of American society. I mean, this is,

00:05:25.220 the framing of everything is that we have an enemy within and we are now going to war against that

00:05:31.060 enemy. And the enemy within is basically everyone who didn't vote for Trump and who isn't going to

00:05:36.040 ratify his excesses at every turn. I mean, this is, if you saw this happening in any other society,

00:05:42.960 you could safely assume that those people were living under a dictatorship. This is not hyperbole.

00:05:49.440 I mean, I'm not saying we live under a dictatorship, you know, fully achieved at this point, but what we're

00:05:54.580 seeing in the streets of Minneapolis and, and what we're seeing communicated from the Oval Office

00:06:00.360 on down is fascist style governance. There's just no question about that.

00:06:06.720 Yeah. And according to Damon Linker's article, the Substack piece, which the main point was that

00:06:11.980 whatever you think you're seeing in the media, it's worse. I mean, it seems like every quote said

00:06:16.720 something to the effect of the media is just not conveying to you just how awful this is. And so

00:06:22.320 whatever you just said and whatever you think we know, it's worse on the ground, apparently.

00:06:26.500 Yeah. And it's hard to know what to do about it. I mean, obviously I think people need to keep

00:06:30.280 protesting. They should try to do that as safely as possible. So let's say the other side of this,

00:06:35.640 let's just bend over backwards to be charitable to ICE and the Trump regime. There's no question that

00:06:42.180 some of what protesters do is, is unwise and illegal and almost certainly unnecessary to express their,

00:06:50.140 their free speech opposition to what's happening. So, I mean, I'm sure there are maneuvers with

00:06:54.200 people's cars, blocking traffic, and it's still uncertain to me what, just what Renee Good was

00:06:59.500 doing that was illegal or not. But let's just price all of that in. Let's just say this is, you know,

00:07:04.280 to some degree, you know, the, the fuck around and find out principle is operative. You shouldn't be

00:07:09.660 doing dangerous, illegal things in order to protest. Okay, great. But what she clearly wasn't doing was

00:07:16.220 trying to run over cops with her car. There was no reason to escalate this situation. This was not

00:07:22.040 a situation that had to be violent, that was running off the rails. This was not, ICE officers

00:07:27.040 weren't being threatened by anyone. They came in so aggressively and were, you know, shouting

00:07:34.380 contradictory commands. Whatever you think about the first shot, you know, I, I still think that was

00:07:40.940 unjustifiable. But even if you're, you're going to bend over backwards and say, all right, this is an

00:07:44.480 officer who perceived, you know, any movement of the car to be imperiling his life. I mean, first of

00:07:50.240 all, moron that he is, he's walking in front of the car. If he actually thought he was in a hostile

00:07:54.900 situation, why would you walk in front of a car like that? You, you simply wouldn't. I mean, this

00:07:58.840 is bad training, bad recruitment. Bad common sense. But, but just leave that aside. And what is he doing

00:08:03.640 with his phone, right? He's, he's, he's making his own home movies of the situation. I mean, what are

00:08:08.700 these ICE guys doing with their, their phones? I've heard that some of them are using facial

00:08:12.880 recognition. Maybe that's the case. That's also a little weird and dystopian. If they're running

00:08:17.140 around doing facial recognition on everybody, we, we, we should have a public conversation about

00:08:21.800 that. But again, leave that aside. Let, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. He found himself in

00:08:25.800 the front, in front of somebody's car. He started moving. He thought, again, idiotically that the best

00:08:31.360 way to stop a moving car, to keep yourself safe from it, is to shoot the driver at close range. I can't

00:08:37.460 imagine any training suggests that's the case. But in any case, within a second, he was to the side of

00:08:43.500 the car, not at all in harm's way, and then delivered two more shots to Renee Good and, you

00:08:50.260 know, kind of ensuring that she was dead. The purpose of those shots were not self-defense. This

00:08:54.720 is not a fleeing fugitive who has, you know, several murders on her record and you know she's a threat to

00:09:00.900 the public, right? So it's just, there's nothing about this that makes sense from a law enforcement

00:09:04.640 point of view. And yet you have people defend, I mean, forget about all the liars and maniacs who

00:09:09.540 are calling her a terrorist and, and, and, you know, Trump said the guy was in the hospital and

00:09:13.720 lucky to be alive, right? That's the level of communication. But forget about all that. There's

00:09:17.620 still people right of center defending this as somehow a kind of normative policing that we want,

00:09:23.600 we want our law enforcement to come in this hot. And if you simply don't obey them, you have

00:09:30.300 fucked around sufficiently so as to lose your life, right? I mean, that's basically the center

00:09:35.860 of narrative gravity over there. It's insane. And again, it's coming from people who, it's coming

00:09:40.380 from the right, these people who get radicalized by every, or at least, you know, heretofore got

00:09:45.040 radicalized by every overreach of federal power, right? I mean, think of, you know, Ruby Ridge that

00:09:52.120 radicalized the entire, you know, far right for a generation or Waco, right? I mean, this is what got

00:09:59.420 Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building, right? It's like any intrusion of the feds, you know,

00:10:05.740 coming into our lives. And what the feds are doing now is stopping traffic randomly and hauling

00:10:12.500 people out of cars who are just driving home from work and throwing them on the pavement, restraining

00:10:18.200 them and beating them up after they've been restrained. It's awful. Do you think these videos,

00:10:23.660 these horrifying videos bode well for midterm elections for the Dems? Well, I think, you know,

00:10:28.080 technically everything Trump is doing now bodes well because it's, it's all quite unpopular,

00:10:32.960 at least from the polls I've seen, you know, the ICE operations are unpopular. The Greenland

00:10:38.220 stuff is unpopular. So yeah, I mean, he's- BCA subsidies. Yeah. Yeah. The tariffs are unpopular.

00:10:43.160 I mean, it's, it's hard to know what he thinks he's accomplishing from a political point of view

00:10:47.540 with any of this. Yeah. And, um, you know, I, I know you had touched on the takeaway of what you

00:10:53.180 think we should do when it's protesting. I wanted to get a sense of what you thought we could do,

00:10:57.620 but before you answered that, I just want to show you a video clip of what I think you should not do.

00:11:06.060 Renee good. Renee good. Renee good. All these comfortable white people who are living lavish,

00:11:14.040 comfortable lives while children are dragged into concentration camps. You're living real life,

00:11:18.620 nice lives with your lattes, doing absolutely nothing for your Latino and Somali brothers and

00:11:23.160 sisters. Listen, I think you want to model the civility you want to see in your society, right?

00:11:29.500 So I just think whenever these things become oppressive to the rest of the citizenry, I just

00:11:37.940 think you're, you're, it's counterproductive. I mean, that's what was so ridiculous about so many

00:11:42.720 Black Lives Matter protests where they would get in people's faces in cafes and, you know, aggressively

00:11:47.260 force them to, you know, in some kind of struggle session to comply with, with, you know, to grant

00:11:53.300 assent to the legitimacy of the protests, right? You've got, you know, bend the knee right now,

00:11:58.360 or we're going to, you know, ruin your life. That's just not a way to win hearts and minds in,

00:12:03.500 in any way. So. Also, these are not leaders of the party. There's a difference. This is not the

00:12:08.360 behavior of those that are leading that party. Again, this is asymmetric political warfare. The,

00:12:13.040 the right and, you know, the Trumpists have very few rules. You know, they'll dox people,

00:12:18.560 they'll shatter all the norms that I think we're right to live by, you know, when we oppose our

00:12:24.420 political opponents. So I, it's hard to know. I don't think Michelle Obama's aphorism, uh, has,

00:12:30.600 um, weathered the test of time. You know, when they go low, we go high. I just don't, I think, uh,

00:12:35.560 that probably admits of some exceptions, but I just don't think you want to be an unethical asshole

00:12:40.280 at any point. All right. Somewhat related to ICE, the state department is halting visa processing for

00:12:46.580 migrants from 75 countries in its latest immigration crackdown. They're basically

00:12:51.400 pausing entry for any applicants they fear would become reliant on taxpayer money if allowed into

00:12:56.780 the U S what's wrong with that? Well, I'm sure everything's wrong with it. Given the people who

00:13:01.040 are in charge, right. And given that we've got, we're living in Stephen Miller's world, at least on

00:13:06.080 this front. I mean, it's gotta be unethical. It's gotta be callous. It's gotta be too blunt force

00:13:12.420 in every applications. I mean, so it's just, I'm sure there's nothing good about it, but in the

00:13:16.840 abstract, I think we could admit that we one want to know who's coming into the country. So, which is

00:13:22.780 to say we want to secure a border and two, we want to admit the people into the country who we want in

00:13:27.680 the country, right. Who we think are going to add value on, on whatever level, whether they're high

00:13:31.760 skilled or low skilled or refugees who, who we just, um, you know, have a compassionate policy

00:13:37.540 around. We don't, we obviously don't want jihadists and Islamists and lunatics of any other ideological

00:13:44.720 flavor. We don't want, I would say we don't want communists. We don't want Nazis. We don't, there's a

00:13:48.740 lot, lots of people we don't want in this country or we don't want more of, uh, and we shouldn't be

00:13:52.000 eager to import them intentionally or haphazardly. So that requires that we figure out who people are

00:13:59.340 and have some orderly process of letting them in. And that's all fine. But again, we have,

00:14:05.060 you know, the kinds of people who will separate families and put kids in cages running our

00:14:10.620 immigration policy. Wait, what happened to the $5 million visa where you could just,

00:14:16.040 I mean, I still exist. The golden visa. Is that, is that happening? I think that happened. Yeah.

00:14:20.560 I don't know how many people bought it, but I think that was, is a thing. Yeah. That's like a hundred

00:14:24.100 scandals ago. I don't even remember that. So people are buying and, and, and I believe that I,

00:14:28.520 you know, we'd have to fact check that, but I believe that happened. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well,

00:14:33.220 well, clearly we know we want people in this country that have $5 million to spend on a visa.

00:14:37.960 Yeah. All right. Uh, help me understand what's happening with Greenland.

00:14:41.920 Uh, well, if I understood that I would be, uh, I think the one person on earth, uh, who does,

00:14:47.700 it makes no sense because we have full access to Greenland. I mean, Denmark is one of our,

00:14:52.380 has been one of our best allies for I think 200 years. I think they lost more per capita,

00:14:58.280 more soldiers per capita than any other ally in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, right? I mean,

00:15:04.000 these are people, it's a country that has joined us even in our unpopular wars. I mean, wars that

00:15:09.080 were unpopular in their own society for better or worse. There's no reason we should be at odds

00:15:14.480 with them, much less be mistreating them, much less be threatening to kill their soldiers. Right.

00:15:19.300 And which is effectively what we have done by saying we might, you can do this easy way. You can do this

00:15:23.680 the hard way and we might invade. Obviously we risk shattering NATO if we, if it isn't,

00:15:28.800 you know, tacitly shattered already. Uh, I think it probably is. I don't think anyone thinks we

00:15:32.740 would defend a country like Poland if Russia rolled in there now. So our article five obligations I

00:15:38.700 think are, are void. It makes no sense because we have, we already have bases on there. We have

00:15:44.120 older bases on there. I think at one point we had something like 17 military bases on Greenland.

00:15:48.400 And I think we have one now, but we have a full access rights. We can do anything we want there

00:15:52.900 with respect to defending Arctic sea lanes or, you know, mining for minerals. I mean,

00:15:58.900 this is just, this is just not, it's not a thing, this problem of Greenland not being, uh, available

00:16:03.700 to us strategically. Why Trump thinks we need it for the, the, I mean, he said something like,

00:16:10.340 you know, America needs it like psychologically or something. I mean, that just is.

00:16:14.040 Well, I thought he said it because he was worried that, uh, China or Russia wanted to take it.

00:16:18.180 Well, no, but if, if China or Russia attempted to take it, they would be attacking a NATO country,

00:16:22.460 right? Which we're sworn to defend. It would be the same situation. This is something that has,

00:16:29.860 um, emerged from Trump's degree. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

00:16:35.600 you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length

00:16:41.200 episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 21, 2026

#454 — More From Sam： Minnesota, Greenland, Iran, S＊＊thole Countries, and More

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