The Megyn Kelly Show - Activists Capturing Institutions, Censorship and Twitter Toxicity, and Woke Untruths, with Sam Harris

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00:00:30.580 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.520 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:41.980 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.680 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.220 So excited to bring you Sam Harris today.

00:00:49.040 I first talked to Sam way back in December 2020.

00:00:53.040 It was just episode 37 of our burgeoning little show.

00:00:58.280 Like many conversations he has, it was long, it was deep, it affected me greatly for days

00:01:03.440 and days afterward.

00:01:04.880 We talked about political tribalism, race essentialism, cancel culture, the woke left,

00:01:10.500 the rise of victimhood, Trump, Biden, even meditation.

00:01:14.160 In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago, but in other ways, these stories have only gotten

00:01:18.500 more relevant and alarming.

00:01:21.380 After Sam's comments about Hunter Biden back in August, you may remember this.

00:01:26.360 He was on the podcast Trigonometry, which we love, and Sam likes too, and made some comments

00:01:33.460 about how, we'll get to it, but basically he didn't care what was on the Hunter Biden

00:01:37.580 laptop, that Trump was a unique figure who needed to be stopped.

00:01:41.500 And, well, we'll play the soundbite so you can hear it yourself.

00:01:44.720 So much backlash came his way.

00:01:47.580 And Sam stepped away from the spotlight for a bit, but glad to say he's back with me today,

00:01:52.760 and we have so much to discuss.

00:01:55.460 Sam Harris is an author, neuroscientist, and host of the very popular Making Sense podcast.

00:02:01.680 Sam, great to have you back on.

00:02:02.840 Welcome back.

00:02:04.060 Hey, Megan.

00:02:04.640 Great to see you.

00:02:05.360 So you've been busy.

00:02:07.520 You've had an eventful fall and winter season.

00:02:12.240 And let me just start with, how are you?

00:02:14.120 How are you doing?

00:02:15.980 I am great, actually.

00:02:17.300 As you say, I've stepped away from Twitter, and I am actually embarrassed to say what an

00:02:22.700 immense change that has been in my life.

00:02:25.140 I mean, it's really, we can talk about that.

00:02:26.760 But I was genuinely surprised that it was as much of a problem for me as it was.

00:02:34.560 And I really only recognize that in retrospect.

00:02:37.700 So, I mean, obviously I knew something was off and I decided to delete my account.

00:02:43.780 But I'm just amazed at what Twitter has done, not just to me, but to society.

00:02:50.000 I guess it's a problem of social media more generally.

00:02:52.280 But I think Twitter really is the epicenter of it.

00:02:55.540 And I just think it has, you know, we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment

00:03:00.300 to which no one really has consented.

00:03:02.380 And the results are not looking good.

00:03:05.900 And it's, so yeah, we can get into that if you want to.

00:03:09.660 But it's, you know, I'm great.

00:03:11.180 And it's really been a huge improvement not to be segmenting my life in hours and minutes

00:03:20.880 between checking Twitter, which is really what life had become.

00:03:25.160 I mean, it's very strange to say it, but that really is what has happened to so many people.

00:03:30.280 I understand.

00:03:31.020 And I understand in particular for someone like you, who is, I don't know if you call yourself

00:03:37.180 in the center.

00:03:38.040 I think you do.

00:03:38.640 Um, you lean left on some things, you lean right on some things, you surprise both sides

00:03:43.760 with your takes on various issues.

00:03:45.320 You can't be easily pigeonholed.

00:03:47.980 And for somebody like that, um, it's a, it's an even rougher place.

00:03:52.980 I mean, I can kind of relate to this because while mostly I'm leaning right on a lot of issues

00:03:58.360 today, just because I'm big into the culture wars and we've lost our minds.

00:04:03.160 Um, I understand because a lot of the times, uh, the people who follow me from the left

00:04:09.560 because they know I'm not hard right and I'll give their side a fair shake and they just

00:04:13.660 want facts, right?

00:04:14.760 I deal in facts.

00:04:15.900 They'll get very upset over certain things I'm saying, or sometimes the right will, you

00:04:19.480 know, because I'm not afraid to criticize figures on the right, whether it's Trump,

00:04:22.740 DeSantis, et cetera.

00:04:23.540 And so I understand Twitter's one of those places where they just want you to be on their

00:04:27.940 team.

00:04:28.360 And if you're on their team, they'll back you.

00:04:30.320 And if you say something that goes against the team narrative, they get very, very angry

00:04:33.940 and it can be very toxic.

00:04:36.720 Yeah.

00:04:37.320 Yeah.

00:04:37.660 As you say, if you're in the center, you really do get it from both sides.

00:04:41.160 You know, if you're, you know, I say as much against wokeism as I think, you know, virtually

00:04:47.300 anyone on the right.

00:04:48.140 And I say as much against Trumpism as virtually anyone on the left, but if there's any daylight

00:04:54.760 between you and the right and the left on any specific topic, yeah, you, you, you're

00:05:01.120 treated like the near enemy, right?

00:05:02.940 You know, it's just, it's, it precipitates even more of a, a vicious and dishonest sort

00:05:12.280 of attack against you.

00:05:13.580 And so it's, it's, it, I think it is very different being more or less just aligned with

00:05:18.620 one poll and because then you can really just discount what you're getting from the other

00:05:23.500 side, but I really don't have another side, right?

00:05:26.300 I, I, I'm very much in the center, not, not because I think the truth is always at the

00:05:31.900 midpoint between two extremes, but because I'm, I'm genuinely not a partisan, right?

00:05:37.180 And so I'm calling balls and strikes as I see them.

00:05:40.940 And so, so for instance, no matter how much I, uh, despise Trumpism as a, as a movement

00:05:49.240 and, uh, no matter how much I think Trump is, is, uh, precisely the wrong sort of person

00:05:55.680 to have been put in the Oval Office, you know, I'm, I'm not willing to take cheap shots at

00:06:01.880 him.

00:06:02.080 I mean, despite what, what Trump is may think I do.

00:06:04.480 So, so for instance, when, you know, he's, someone takes a clip from a, the, a press

00:06:10.000 conference of his that is genuinely misleading, like the, you know, the fine people clip after

00:06:14.900 Charlottesville, right?

00:06:16.440 That was, you know, that was not, you know, what, what he, what he seemed to say over on

00:06:22.660 the left, right?

00:06:23.780 And, and, and could be made to seem to say, uh, by just endlessly referencing that clip of

00:06:29.620 him saying there are fine people on both sides was not in fact, what he said in context,

00:06:33.920 right?

00:06:34.440 He was not praising Nazis and anti-Semites in the way he was made to seem.

00:06:39.380 And so that's, that's an unfair attack.

00:06:41.920 And it's, you know, so it's the sort of thing that has happened to me as, as you reference.

00:06:46.100 Um, and many of us are just living and dying by clips, but partisans are happy to play that

00:06:51.360 game because they're not, they don't really care what their opponents think.

00:06:56.480 They only care what they can be made to seem to think, right?

00:07:00.200 They, what, what, what a part, a tribalist and a partisan wants to do at each moment politically

00:07:05.680 is tar their opponents with the most extreme and however tenuously plausible version of

00:07:14.940 what they can seem to mean, right?

00:07:17.180 And then they just want to hold them to that, uh, no matter how uncharitable that is, no matter

00:07:21.480 how dishonest that is until the end of time, right?

00:07:24.360 And so I'm just, I'm not willing to play that game as much as it gets played with me.

00:07:28.900 Um, and, uh, yeah.

00:07:30.780 So then when you, when you decline to do that, you get a tremendous amount of hate from both

00:07:37.220 sides.

00:07:38.280 Yeah.

00:07:38.740 Well, that's why we can get into the comments about Trump and Hunter Biden, but that's why

00:07:42.520 I thought it was useful.

00:07:44.280 Like, why are people so averse to hearing someone like you who has defended the cops in the midst

00:07:52.000 of the BLM storm against them, spoken out against wokeism has been an important, really smart,

00:07:58.200 which is a bonus voice on some of these really important issues that, that the right in particular

00:08:04.640 cares about.

00:08:05.100 Why do they care so much that you hate Trump?

00:08:07.280 Like, okay, you hate Trump.

00:08:08.720 A lot of people hate Trump.

00:08:09.620 A lot of people love Trump.

00:08:10.620 Like, okay.

00:08:11.620 I think it's valuable to have somebody like you who's not deranged, who's not just suffering from

00:08:17.580 this sort of leftism that takes over your brain and makes you see everybody on the right is

00:08:21.680 terrible.

00:08:22.200 That's not you.

00:08:23.380 Why is it so upsetting to them to hear you say, I really, really hate him and hear all the reasons

00:08:27.480 I hate him and don't think you should be near them.

00:08:29.040 Great.

00:08:29.400 It's, to me, a window, a window we should open, we should listen to, we should consider,

00:08:34.840 may not be persuasive, may not, may feel offended in the moment, but that's what the

00:08:41.460 right criticizes the left for doing, being little snowflakes who can't hear another view,

00:08:45.640 right?

00:08:45.820 The right is supposed to be able to hear opposing views, walk away fortified by new opinions or

00:08:51.740 insights that they accept or reject and move on with their beautiful lives.

00:08:56.160 Yeah, it's not so much that I hate Trump.

00:09:00.640 It's really, you know, I don't hate him as a person.

00:09:02.940 I think, I hate the fact of him.

00:09:06.060 I hate the, I hate what he has done to our politics and to our society generally.

00:09:12.060 It's not, you know, I mean, for me, the, the, the bright line with Trump has always been

00:09:19.840 his refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power, you know, in, in, in the run-up to

00:09:27.960 the 2020 election.

00:09:29.120 I mean, there were, there were, obviously there are many other reasons, literally a hundred

00:09:32.300 reasons to have deplored his, his candidacy in my view.

00:09:39.040 And I, and I, I was very, you know, uh, outspoken on those reasons, but the, the, the true point

00:09:46.140 of no return for me was his declining to, to, uh, accept a peaceful transfer of power.

00:09:53.940 Uh, and this, uh, I really think this should be uncontroversial, right?

00:09:57.220 This is, you know, Ronald Reagan and his first inaugural celebrated our peaceful transfer of

00:10:02.440 power as a miracle, right?

00:10:04.260 And, and, uh, you know, he, I think he was right to, to, to emphasize that it distinguishes

00:10:10.420 us from so many other societies that are struggling to, to create valid democracies, uh, and stable

00:10:18.320 ones.

00:10:18.960 And Trump did his best to destroy that miracle in 2020.

00:10:24.940 And he effectively did.

00:10:26.400 I mean, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power.

00:10:28.600 So, you know, whatever you think about him as a person, whether you think he's a

00:10:32.420 he's, you know, entertaining and, and, you know, just worth paying attention to, or

00:10:37.320 you, you always wanted him to, to disappear.

00:10:41.280 Um, I, that was the point of no return, I think politically and ethically.

00:10:46.300 And yeah, so that's, so I, the, you know, that was going on for a good eight months before

00:10:53.120 the election was actually run.

00:10:54.440 And it was, it was quite clear.

00:10:56.640 I mean, the, the, the, the painful irony here is that he attempted to do what he claimed

00:11:01.960 was being done to him.

00:11:03.080 And he really did attempt to steal an election.

00:11:06.280 Uh, and the fact that so many people in our society believe that the election was stolen

00:11:11.080 from him, uh, is, you know, it's not something that I necessarily blame millions of people

00:11:17.160 for.

00:11:17.520 I mean, there's so much misinformation and so much confusion now.

00:11:21.520 And there's, and there's so little trust in our institutions.

00:11:24.500 Again, this is largely a problem engineered for us by social media that, um, yeah, I, you

00:11:31.020 know, I can't blame millions of people for, for not quite understanding what happened there.

00:11:36.180 But, uh, you know, I believe I do understand what happened there.

00:11:40.740 And I think it's pretty clear.

00:11:41.900 It was pretty clear in real time what was happening and it was unconscionable and it was

00:11:46.000 beyond that, it was actually dangerous.

00:11:48.600 So, um, yeah, I mean, that's, you know, it's not a matter of personal animus toward Trump.

00:11:54.160 I, I think Trump is, is kind of a goofy entertainer really in the end.

00:11:59.640 He's, I mean, he's a con man and he's, um, I don't think he's a normal person.

00:12:04.560 I don't think he's an ethical person.

00:12:06.000 I don't think, I think he's a malignantly selfish person, but he's not someone who I would

00:12:10.360 need to pay attention to if he hadn't already been president and wasn't seeking the presidency.

00:12:15.960 Well, that's the thing, right?

00:12:17.100 So you say the point of no return and yet he has returned and, and maybe returning in

00:12:22.220 an even more robust way, uh, in over the next weeks and months to come.

00:12:26.140 Um, let me ask you this, Sam, cause I, one thing about your comments to trigger an

00:12:30.280 opportunity, and I'll play part of them, um, has me listening to comments like the ones

00:12:35.720 you just made in saying, but don't you understand what led people to believe that Trump was cheated

00:12:41.960 out of his second term?

00:12:43.220 It was in part comments like the ones you, you made because they rightly believed the

00:12:50.760 Trump hating left would do anything to stop him and saw your comments as an admission to

00:12:59.240 that effect.

00:12:59.740 It was an acknowledgement.

00:13:01.740 The ends justify the means.

00:13:04.140 He must be stopped.

00:13:04.940 He's a unique figure.

00:13:06.260 And that, that's just one of the many things that had people believing they, they will do

00:13:10.720 anything.

00:13:11.200 And in particular, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop, let me let, you can ruminate

00:13:16.140 on that while I get the audience up to speed with a soundbite that we're talking about.

00:13:20.380 Let me just, let me just say as preface to the soundbite that I'm not actually saying what

00:13:26.720 I seem to be saying in this clip, right?

00:13:28.560 This is a clip that was maliciously spread on Twitter by someone who subsequently spread

00:13:36.380 a clip that, you know, tried to have me saying that I wished more children died during COVID,

00:13:42.060 right?

00:13:42.320 I mean, and, and that clip was so inept and it was, uh, it was so clear what I was saying

00:13:48.300 in context that not a lot of people believe that, but it's the same person who circulated

00:13:52.340 the clip.

00:13:52.800 And, and, and this is a larger problem again with social media that people are behaving

00:13:57.500 like psychopaths, right?

00:13:58.760 And people, you know, whether they're psychopaths or not, they're actually just consciously misleading

00:14:04.780 millions of people, uh, just for the, you know, just for the lulls, you know, and just,

00:14:10.760 just to, uh, exact some kind of reputational harm on people they, they don't like.

00:14:16.800 And it's, it's not good, right?

00:14:19.120 So I'm, I'm happy to, you know, feel free to play the clip.

00:14:22.120 I'm happy to talk about it, but I'm actually, it's not, I'm not actually saying what I seem

00:14:27.880 to be saying in this clip.

00:14:28.880 Okay.

00:14:29.320 And that was reasonably clear in context.

00:14:31.540 I mean, the truth is I'm not, I wasn't speaking as well as I might've spoke in that context.

00:14:37.640 It's annoying to the audience to listen to the windup without knowing what we're, we're

00:14:40.840 going to do that on the, on the backend.

00:14:42.580 So let me play what we have and then you can take it on.

00:14:45.360 SOT three.

00:14:46.020 Yep.

00:14:46.180 I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had, had the corpses

00:14:52.300 of children in his basement.

00:14:54.640 I would not have cared.

00:14:56.000 Right.

00:14:56.260 It's like, it's, there's nothing.

00:14:57.980 First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right?

00:14:59.460 It's not, it's like, it's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe, like even whatever scope of

00:15:05.580 Joe Biden's corruption is like, if you, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly

00:15:10.060 and, and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever

00:15:15.280 else, right?

00:15:16.180 Or China.

00:15:17.800 It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.

00:15:25.260 It's like, it's like, it's like a firefly to the sun, right?

00:15:27.780 I mean, like there's just, it doesn't even, it doesn't even stack up against Trump university,

00:15:32.800 right?

00:15:33.760 Trump university as a story is worse than anything that could be in, in Hunter Biden's

00:15:39.120 laptop in my view.

00:15:40.380 Right now that's not, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair

00:15:45.140 to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the, you know, the

00:15:50.940 New York posts, Twitter account.

00:15:52.680 Like that, that's a, just a conspiracy, that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency

00:15:57.840 to Donald Trump.

00:15:59.560 Absolutely.

00:16:00.040 It was absolutely right.

00:16:01.980 But I think it was warranted.

00:16:04.600 Okay, go ahead.

00:16:07.480 Yeah.

00:16:08.020 So, so the, the thing that's genuinely misleading there is that is the final line.

00:16:12.820 I think it was warranted, right?

00:16:14.420 That was not what I was saying in context and what, what I meant to say.

00:16:17.980 I mean, the distinction for me is, I was, so here, here was, here's what I was talking

00:16:23.280 about in context, right?

00:16:24.240 So we have this, this October surprise dropped by Rudy Giuliani, something like 10 days before

00:16:30.020 the election, this, this laptop from hell.

00:16:33.340 And this is, it was a very unpleasant echo of what had happened in the previous election

00:16:37.760 with Jim Comey deciding to revisit Hillary Clinton's emails based on the, you know, the

00:16:43.180 discovery of Anthony Weiner's laptop.

00:16:45.500 And we know what happened there.

00:16:46.840 We know that that was really, you know, obviously I think Hillary's failed candidacy

00:16:52.580 was, it was over-determined.

00:16:53.900 She was a terrible candidate for a variety of reasons and it's understandable she didn't

00:16:58.100 become president, but we, we saw what happened to the polls, you know, hour by hour after

00:17:02.560 that, that press conference and it did seem decisive, right?

00:17:07.500 And so I viewed the emergence of this laptop as many people did as just this, you know, on

00:17:15.080 the one hand, it certainly seemed like it stood a good chance of being fake or at least doctored

00:17:20.820 or, and some species of, of, um, disinformation.

00:17:26.080 Uh, but most important, not knowing what was true there, uh, the, the clock was ticking, right?

00:17:33.360 And it didn't seem, uh, at all prudent to be hostage to Rudy Giuliani's timeline, right?

00:17:41.980 And to have to figure out, had to drill down on this laptop in the 10 days before the election,

00:17:46.720 making it the front page story across the board, uh, trying to figure out what was real there.

00:17:52.720 Uh, so my, my position was never that it was an easy call journalistically.

00:17:58.760 I, in fact, in the, in the context of this interview, I talk about it being a coin toss.

00:18:03.060 I talk about being uncertain, what I think should have happened there, but I sound very certain in

00:18:06.960 that clip and that clip, I seem to be saying that it was just straight, a straightforwardly wise

00:18:12.880 decision to ignore the laptop. What I actually was saying. And what I actually believe is that it

00:18:18.080 was a genuinely hard decision journalistically to decide what to do when that laptop emerged at 10

00:18:24.880 days before the election. Um, and I think, you know, it's, it's a coin toss, whether or not

00:18:30.840 a institution like the New York times should have just ignored it until after the election.

00:18:35.900 I'm not saying they should have ignored it until the end of time. I'm not saying that

00:18:38.720 it's not totally valid now to look at what's in that laptop. Um, although the truth is now that

00:18:44.360 Trump is a candidate for the presidency, again, I still don't care what's in that laptop. Right.

00:18:48.960 And this is the other point I was making. We know so much about Donald Trump and Joe Biden as

00:18:55.100 people, right? These are, these are two men. This is your judgment. This is a difference.

00:18:59.320 This is less controversial. This is where you veer off into Biden's worse than, or Trump's

00:19:03.980 worse than Biden. Nothing's going to convince me differently. I get that. Um, like that's

00:19:08.180 that we've had that debate with people many times and that's what leads people to the polls

00:19:12.300 and they make the choice they do. It's the, it's the, it's the notion that, cause you said

00:19:18.400 in the interview, politically speaking, I, I consider Trump an existential threat, or you

00:19:22.660 said that after the fact he's an existential threat. And so the thought that he's an existential

00:19:26.800 threat and really must be stopped. Right. And that I'm not really interested in information

00:19:31.620 that, but that's not true. So, so I just want to clarify that. I mean, I was not, I was not

00:19:36.600 saying in that interview that the ends justify the means and that we, we are free to do illegal

00:19:45.280 and unethical things in order to stop Trump. And I don't think he's, and I've, and I did not

00:19:50.560 think he's an existential threat of that sort. I don't think Trump is orange Hitler. Right.

00:19:55.380 I think he's a, a deeply selfish and unqualified person to put in the presidency. Um, and therefore,

00:20:04.940 uh, I think he's, you know, he's dangerous, right. But he's not ideological. He's not, he's

00:20:09.940 not nearly as sinister as he could be. And again, I, in the context of that interview, I made

00:20:14.780 that clear. Um, the, the whole bit about him being, I mean, there's a, I think part of the

00:20:20.580 clip you didn't play is I, I, I drew an analogy to an asteroid hurtling toward earth. Again,

00:20:25.120 it was misleading in the clip because what I was talking about is just how irrelevant it

00:20:30.380 was to, uh, whether there was a conspiracy or not, whether people are talking behind

00:20:35.640 closed doors. We didn't pull that clip because I understand that. I agree with you. You're talking

00:20:38.700 about, is it a conspiracy just because you have people in a room talking about a threat coming

00:20:42.520 at them like an asteroid? No doubt people are talking in public and in private about how to

00:20:46.720 stop Trump. And I consider that fine. What I don't consider fine is lying about him, lying about his,

00:20:53.600 what he actually means when he's speaking, lying about what he's done and hasn't done,

00:20:57.520 lying about what he intends and doesn't intend. And so much of the problem of Trump is completely

00:21:03.300 in plain view. I mean, he, he's, he's quite. Oh, wait, are you saying the right doing that or

00:21:07.580 the, like when you said, when you list that off, that's the left. That's, that's who did that.

00:21:10.400 Oh yeah. No, no, that is, that is the left. And I, and I haven't done that with Trump.

00:21:14.040 My, the point I'm making is that, um, it, it was, it was totally valid to avert your eyes from the

00:21:23.660 Hunter Biden laptop story with 10 days to run out before the election, given that this, this, uh,

00:21:31.640 October surprise was clearly engineered for political reasons. Right. So that's, that's,

00:21:36.060 that's all I was saying in that, but the city, the citizenry can avert to anything. It's the

00:21:40.920 question of whether journalists should be in on it, should be, should be making decisions to

00:21:47.920 protect a candidate or journalists have to make editorial decisions all the time, as you know,

00:21:53.700 and, and you, you, you signal boost things you think are important and, and going to make the

00:21:59.340 future better than the past. Uh, and you, so maybe you don't run with it. Maybe the New York

00:22:04.480 Times says we don't have it. We don't think the sourcing's there, but what happened in this case

00:22:07.800 was the New York posts reporting was entirely shut down. They, their Twitter account was frozen.

00:22:13.320 They couldn't, you couldn't, I couldn't retweet the article as somebody who wasn't shut down.

00:22:17.860 There was absolutely no communication of that in our, in our online social square. And it,

00:22:25.120 it definitely suppressed circulation of a very big story. So it wasn't just we, the New York

00:22:30.220 Times don't think the sourcing's there. It was, we big tech and big journalism are going to put our

00:22:37.080 thumb on the New York post and squash its reporting, which was clearly done to advance the Biden

00:22:42.940 candidacy. Well, let me just, again, I would dispute the fact that at the time it was clear

00:22:49.680 whether the New York post story was, was valid. Um, so I, I do think it was an understandable judgment

00:22:55.720 call on, on the part of, uh, the, the people at Twitter. I don't think it was the right call.

00:23:00.900 No, you don't do that. You don't do that. You don't do that. You don't say we little armchair

00:23:05.080 warriors will decide without having done any of the reporting. We haven't seen the laptop. We

00:23:09.940 haven't talked to the FBI. We now know they had an investigation open, which we knew at the time.

00:23:14.220 Um, they haven't done anything. It's little armchair warrior saying that hurts Biden. Done. And I don't

00:23:19.220 think there's anybody who believes if the story had been about Donald Trump that they would have had the

00:23:23.640 same reluctance to publish it. We all know that. Oh, no, that's, that's completely true. Yeah. So

00:23:29.300 that in, in so far as there, you know, I'm, I'm acknowledging a massive bias against Trump on the

00:23:36.260 part of the people at Twitter and then the people in, in, you know, much of the, the established

00:23:40.820 mainstream media, um, that's true. Right. And it was understandable. And yes, if it had that been,

00:23:49.180 you know, Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop, that there's no question there would have been a different

00:23:54.180 response. Um, and I do think it was, it was almost certainly the wrong decision for Twitter to block

00:24:02.420 that story and, and to, and to ban. I think they, you know, I think they took down the New York Post

00:24:07.880 account briefly if I, if memory serves. Um, yeah, no, I think again, that's, that's quite distinct from

00:24:14.260 the New York Times just deciding not to look into it for 11 days. Right. I mean, that, that's, so

00:24:18.860 there, there were, you know, gradations to the, the practice of bias there. And I'm, you know,

00:24:25.560 I'm much more comfortable with, with what the New York Times did and didn't do than what, with what

00:24:30.880 Twitter did or didn't do. Um, so. And I think it, it helped, it helps feed what you hate, which is

00:24:36.420 conspiracy. Um, yeah. Saying what you hate, you'll decide what you, you'll tell us what you hate,

00:24:41.180 but I know you're not a big conspiracy person and I, I pride myself on not getting sucked into those

00:24:47.360 either. I really do. I, I, my listeners know I'm vigilant about taking in information from the left

00:24:53.200 and the right. So no one can corrupt my brain. No one can make me don their team Jersey advertently

00:24:59.140 or inadvertently. I want to deal in fact, it's getting harder and harder with AI and chat GPT and

00:25:05.060 so on and where it's going to be an ongoing battle. However, it's worth the effort. Um, so, but

00:25:09.700 this is how conspiracies are born. Little things like this. It's not, it wasn't a little thing.

00:25:14.720 The suppression of a story by, by big tech, by a respected newspaper. I don't care if you're on

00:25:19.780 the left or the right. The New York post is Alexander Hamilton founded. It's been around

00:25:23.260 for a long, long time. It's done very, very well. They have legit reporters over there and they did

00:25:27.120 have the story as we now know, 100% Washington post New York times. They've all acknowledged it.

00:25:32.500 Now the laptop was real. Those disinformation experts who put out their statement, those Intel

00:25:37.520 experts have been embarrassed and, um, it, they should have gone with the story and they should

00:25:42.840 have reported on the story. So that's, it's just bit by bit, things like that, that send people down

00:25:47.100 the rabbit hole that send people down into Reddit hell from which they emerge thinking there are

00:25:53.240 lizard people, right? We could go down the list. Right, right. But, but the, the point I made there

00:25:59.100 that was so provocative that people found so astounding and objectionable was that there,

00:26:04.680 there could be nothing on that laptop that I would have cared about. Right now that is,

00:26:09.940 you know, still true, right? Because it's a big, again, because I believe we know so much about Trump

00:26:16.580 and Biden as people. Now I'm not, I'm not a fan of Biden running again for the presidency. Uh, you know,

00:26:23.640 I hope he doesn't, although I don't know who the other candidate, I don't know who we would put in his

00:26:27.280 place. Uh, but, uh, still I know, I believe I know so much about him as a person and that, and there's

00:26:35.200 nothing on that, on his son's laptop that is all likely to offset that. You know, if, if Biden were

00:26:41.580 living like Andrew Tate, right, if he was driving around in a Bugatti, if he had all kinds of homes

00:26:46.280 we didn't know about, well then, okay, then some allegation of corruption might land in a way that

00:26:54.200 would balance the scales against Trump. But again, we know so much about Trump's history that precedes

00:26:59.780 his even running for the presidency in 2016 that makes him, in my view, one of the most corrupt

00:27:06.860 people we've ever seen in public life. And so that, that's why I simply don't care about what

00:27:10.940 Hunter, Hunter Biden has been up to. We know Hunter is, you know, a disaster, right? I mean,

00:27:16.960 he's, he has been a, a crack addict, you know, and, and it's just, but this is about whether Joe

00:27:22.540 was also a disaster. The, the, what was interesting in the corruption front was whether Joe was taken

00:27:26.960 10% from the, as the big guy and that whether it would be persuade, persuasion, whether it would

00:27:32.700 be persuasive to you or not is relevant. It's relevant to a campaign and, and to balancing out the

00:27:38.320 scales. And one of the reasons why you may not think the Biden corruption compares to corruption

00:27:43.380 on the Trump side is because the mainstream media won't report it. They don't care, Sam. They won't

00:27:48.380 go digging on a Biden story the way they would go digging on a Trump story. If Trump's daughter had

00:27:55.280 written a diary that talked about inappropriately long showers between her and her father, you don't

00:28:00.780 think the mainstream media would have covered that for days? No, they blacked out the Ashley Biden diary story.

00:28:08.320 Okay. Well, it's been so successfully blacked out that this is the first I'm hearing of it. So I

00:28:12.720 can't really respond, but your, your point is, is certainly true, right? That yet there is this

00:28:19.520 bias, but again, the bias is understandable because we know so much about these guys. Now it's not that

00:28:25.880 they, you know, there was a sexual harassment charge against Biden that was looked into and it didn't get

00:28:31.740 completely suppressed, but there are literally dozens. I interviewed Tara Reid. I'm one of like two

00:28:37.580 people who did it. I flew to her during the COVID pandemic while I didn't even have a network. I

00:28:42.100 didn't even have a show because everyone was ignoring her and I was mad. And I, I can't show

00:28:49.460 you another there. I don't think there is another journalist in America who interviewed both the

00:28:53.100 Trump accusers and Tara Reid and Biden's accusers because I, I read about the story, I believe in

00:28:59.440 the New York times. So I, I mean, it, it was covered because it got, it got into my brain, but

00:29:03.460 my point is, even if it's true, you know, how it was covered, you know, you know very well how it

00:29:08.280 was covered. If you look at the same way that the stories about the Andrew Cuomo accusers originally

00:29:15.060 were covered, that the instinct of the media is at first to run cover and they demolished Tara

00:29:20.060 Reid. They completely pulled this woman apart. They, they, I read about her bankruptcies in,

00:29:25.180 in the paper. Why the hell is that relevant? She's poor. Tara Reid is poor. The accusers don't come

00:29:30.780 in these perfect little packages. Did they do that to all of Trump's accusers? Absolutely

00:29:34.780 not. They didn't. They weren't interested in tearing them down to this day. They build them

00:29:38.540 up. Yeah. I'm, you know, I'm not going to dispute the bias, right? I'm just going to, I just

00:29:45.160 still feel, uh, that the scale of it is so, um, non-analogous, you know, when you, when

00:29:56.240 you look at my point, which is how do you know that you're working with all the facts

00:30:03.600 when you say that, when I am telling you that my industry stops, it stops you from having

00:30:09.320 the relevant information. They intentionally don't investigate when they smell a rat on

00:30:14.280 the democratic side, especially if Trump's on the other side.

00:30:17.980 Well, I think the whole thing has been a process, right? So, you know, Biden went through a primary,

00:30:22.860 right? Biden went through a primary process where even his current vice president accused

00:30:29.840 him of racism, right? In order to land a blow when she still had presidential aspirations,

00:30:34.940 right? So that there's, there's been a, a, um, the incentives have been such that, that

00:30:41.140 everyone gets banged around by everybody else, you know, over the course of, of, you know,

00:30:46.000 years of being a political candidate. Uh, my point about corruption is just that we know

00:30:51.080 how Biden lives his life day to day. He's again, both of these men have been in the public eye for

00:30:57.880 practically as long as you and I have been alive. So you just can't hide that, that kind of corruption

00:31:04.660 and Trump doesn't hide his corruption and he's, he's never hidden it. And so, um, again, it's just,

00:31:11.420 it's the scale of it. Yes. I I'm sure there are unsavory. I'm not sure, but I'm, I would not be

00:31:16.860 surprised that there, that there, if there were many unsavory things we might find out about

00:31:21.460 Joe Biden on Hunter's laptop or somewhere else, right? Is it, but, um, from what I think we know

00:31:28.700 about him, he's a very different sort of person than Trump is. He is not a once in a generation,

00:31:36.080 uh, narcissist. He is not this. He, I mean, Trump is, is not a normal human being really. I mean,

00:31:44.400 he's really not, he's not the sort of person who can even put his children in front of his own

00:31:49.480 interests. You know, I mean, someone praises his children in his presence and the first thing out

00:31:54.600 of his mouth is to say, Oh, well, they're just, you know, they're just riding my coattails. Right.

00:31:59.900 I mean, it's just, that is what a narcissist does. And it's unbelievable doles out love based on

00:32:04.440 how you feel about them or how you reflect on them. And I think there's a good case to be made

00:32:09.240 that Trump is a narcissist. I mean, I think most presidents have some large touch. If ever,

00:32:13.540 if ever there were a case to be made about anybody, it's, yeah, I don't dispute that,

00:32:17.940 but I don't, I, I think that, you know, sort of the hubris of, then that's the calculation that

00:32:23.380 everyone should go into the, the voting booth with, right? They shouldn't be, they, you don't need

00:32:28.100 to see the Hunter Biden laptop because it's just obvious. One man is a better person than the other

00:32:32.080 is just such a fail. Well, again, it's not, it's not that we don't need to see the laptop.

00:32:38.260 I mean, so it's, even if you say Trump is not a great man, Trump's not a great, whatever,

00:32:43.880 not a great dad, shouldn't really be anywhere near the presidency with that sort of temperament

00:32:47.620 and erratic behavior. Okay. Ideally that wouldn't happen. Then you look across the aisle and you got,

00:32:55.160 you know, sleepy Joe from Scranton. Okay, fine. We haven't seen as anywhere near the number of bad

00:33:00.820 stories about him as we have about Trump. However, this guy now, as you point out, they have records.

00:33:05.700 This guy, what are we seeing? He and his party want to pack the Supreme court. They want to add

00:33:11.520 states so that we can get rid of the legislative filibuster. They opened the border entirely. We

00:33:17.460 have absolutely no rule of law down. So they want to ignore court rulings entirely. They seem fine

00:33:22.740 with Supreme court justices having their lives and their children, their family threatened on a

00:33:26.120 regular basis and the law being violated, but not enforcing it through Merrick Garland, which he's

00:33:30.140 now admitted. Uh, they, they're openly saying that they're going to ignore court rulings, including

00:33:35.220 from the U S Supreme court, which Joe Biden did when it came to the whole rent abatement, uh, process

00:33:41.520 that, that he had during COVID they're eliminating gender. They won't say what a woman is, which I know

00:33:46.340 you don't approve of that's lunacy. Right? So it's like, okay, Trump, I get it. You, I know you,

00:33:53.900 you've mentioned Trump university in the, in the trigonometry thing, like the corruption,

00:33:57.360 guess who asked Trump about that presidential debate? Me. Okay. So I get it. However, the level

00:34:04.420 of lunacy happening on the left right now makes all of that pale in comparison.

00:34:11.040 Well, there's lunacy on both sides, right? I mean, on the other side, you've got people talking

00:34:14.720 about Jewish space lasers setting fires in California, right? You've got Q and I, you've

00:34:19.660 got, that's Q. The democratic party can't say what a woman is. It's, it's in Congress.

00:34:24.580 The democratic party can't say what a woman is. They cannot say what a woman is that you

00:34:28.300 can't vote for that. Listen, I mean, I'm happy to, to pivot to wokeism. If you want, if you

00:34:33.060 want me to talk about that, I'd be, you know, we will agree about the problem. We're just talking

00:34:36.220 about levels of threat to the country and to ourselves and to our culture and to what's important

00:34:40.580 in America. That's what we're talking about. I mean, the problem for me is that, that

00:34:44.720 they're the extreme left and the extreme right, or, you know, I mean, Trumpism is not quite

00:34:51.080 conservatism, but, uh, you know, let's, let's do two extremes just to keep it simple. Uh,

00:34:57.520 both extremes are, uh, completely pathological and dishonest and, and I would agree dangerous.

00:35:05.880 I think you're excusing the democratic party's enormous shift to the left over the past 10 years.

00:35:11.520 I am not. I've spent much more time. I certainly had my podcast talking about and worrying about

00:35:18.560 wokeism. I know. And, you know, I, identitarian moral panics on the left than I have spent time

00:35:25.640 worrying about Trump and Trumpism, right? Because before. I know, but in this argument, you're

00:35:29.980 equating Q and the far left as, you know, and what I'm saying is the demo, I get Q and on, I get,

00:35:36.760 but trust me, I've, I've had people call up wanting me to sign onto those theories or they're

00:35:41.060 not going to listen. Bye. I'm not the podcast for you. That's not my thing. And it's never going to

00:35:45.660 be. However, it's the democratic party putting out these, it's this democratic party that won't

00:35:50.540 protect the border. It's the democratic party that wants to pack the court. It's it's Joe Biden who

00:35:55.460 wouldn't say no to that. It's his AG who wouldn't protect the Supreme court. It's his AG who wanted to

00:36:00.800 go label and the white house that wanted to label parents objecting to the COVID restrictions and to the

00:36:05.820 overreach, um, as a domestic terrorist like that. That's not the left. That's not the Marjorie

00:36:12.100 Taylor Greene of the left. That's Biden. Yeah. Well, I don't think Biden has been fully captured by,

00:36:19.980 by the far left, but there's no question he's had to pander to the far left to be the, to be the

00:36:26.240 democratic nominee in the first place. And, and he'll have to do it again, presumably to seek

00:36:31.500 the presidency in 2024. Um, although I do hold out some hope that we've seen the, the peak wokeism.

00:36:41.560 And I think the pendulum might be swinging back. I mean, I certainly, uh, I have to think it is

00:36:47.380 because it looks so ridiculous. Uh, but, uh, yeah, there's a, there are asymmetries here that are just

00:36:54.260 worth pointing out. I mean, one asymmetry, and this is something I've pointed out many times is that,

00:36:58.740 you know, the extreme right, when you're talking about, you know, white nationalist racists in

00:37:04.440 our society, say the kinds of people who marched in Charlottesville, um, or, you know, QAnon, you

00:37:10.060 know, the, the, the crazy end of, of Trumpism is extreme, right? It has not captured major

00:37:17.560 institutions apart from, you know, the, you know, to some degree, the brain of, of, of Trump and a few

00:37:24.660 people in Congress, right. Who, you know, again, someone like Marjorie Taylor green. Um, but it

00:37:30.680 hasn't, it hasn't completely vitiated our institutions the way far left identitarian

00:37:37.920 politics have. Right. So we, with, with wokeism, you have, uh, you know, the genuine corruption of

00:37:44.880 journalism and science and Hollywood and, you know, all of our tools for making sense at scale

00:37:53.040 in, in, in popular culture. Uh, so, uh, but, you know, the, the reason why that's so shocking

00:38:01.440 is because, uh, we expect the New York times and a scientific journal like nature or science,

00:38:09.300 uh, or, um, an institution like a Stanford university to be above rank political partisanship and,

00:38:20.980 uh, you know, not to be deranged by its own tribalism. Right. And, and we, we, we don't

00:38:27.780 expect that of some of a, of a, of a, an institution like Fox news or Breitbart. Right. And so it's,

00:38:34.480 it, to some degree, the, the, the, the shock is testament to how different various institutions

00:38:42.000 have been up until now. But yeah, I'm, I spent a lot more time worrying about what's happening at

00:38:47.120 Stanford university and the New York times. And in, uh, you know, in our scientific journals,

00:38:51.560 like, like science or Lancet or JAMA, uh, in the aftermath of, you know, the last, you know,

00:38:59.200 four or five years, uh, then I spend worrying about QAnon. Right. And because QAnon is just,

00:39:05.120 you know, at a glance crazy, but it's, it's not that it's not scary, but it's, it is the fringe of

00:39:11.040 the fringe for a reason. Yeah. It doesn't. Right. What I think the word you use is capture. That's

00:39:15.940 exactly right. They don't have the capture of those major institutions. Um, so where does that

00:39:20.480 leave us? Uh, we got to turn the page to woke ism what to do. Very happy to hear you say, you think

00:39:26.040 we may have reached peak. Um, and we're going to get into the latest on you and I believe you audience

00:39:31.960 members, how now the head of the student group at San Francisco state university is responding to

00:39:37.500 Riley gains. Here's a tip. Uh, she's not sorry. Not at all. Sam Harris stays with us for the whole

00:39:44.360 show. Very interesting conversation. Hope you're enjoying it. So Sam, uh, before we get into Riley

00:39:53.160 gains and all that's happening on that front, I don't, did you see this now viral exchange between

00:39:58.340 this BBC journalist and Elon Musk? Uh, no, you probably didn't cause you're not on Twitter.

00:40:04.520 I'm on Twitter. So, all right, well, I'm going to show enlighten me. I'm going to show it to you. So

00:40:09.500 Elon sat down with the BBC and, uh, they were talking. I, I believe he was trying to press him

00:40:17.600 really. The journalist was talking about his own experience on Twitter and how he thought it was

00:40:21.760 more negative after Elon took over. Uh, and so Elon pushed back and it went on for about two or three

00:40:28.560 minutes in the clip that's online. We shorten it down to the, to a one minute highlight.

00:40:32.300 Watch what happened. Can you name one example? I honestly don't. Honestly, I can't name a single

00:40:39.140 example. I'll tell you why. Cause I don't actually use that for you feed anymore because I just don't

00:40:43.340 particularly like it. A lot of people, a lot of people are quite similar. I, I only, I only look

00:40:47.460 on a second. You said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example,

00:40:51.560 not even one. I'm not sure I've used that feed for the last three or four weeks. And then how did you

00:40:57.120 see the hateful content? Because I've been, I've been using, I've been using Twitter since you've

00:41:01.100 taken it over for the last six months. Okay. So then you must've at some point seen that you,

00:41:04.500 for you hateful content. I'm asking you for one example, right? And you can't give a single one.

00:41:08.380 And I, and I'm saying, I, I, then I say, so that you don't know what you're talking about.

00:41:12.340 Really? Yes. Because you can't be a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet.

00:41:17.640 Look, it's people will say all sorts of nonsense. I'm literally asking for a single example and you

00:41:21.720 can't name one. Right. And as, as I've already said, I don't use that feed, but then how would you know

00:41:25.960 that? I don't think this is getting anywhere. You literally said you experienced more hateful content

00:41:29.720 and then couldn't name a single example. Right. And as I said, I haven't, I haven't actually

00:41:34.940 looked at that feed. Then how would you know that there's hateful content? Because I'm saying

00:41:38.260 that's what I saw a few weeks ago. I can't give you an exact example. Let's move on.

00:41:43.700 This is so embarrassing, Sam. This is so embarrassing. You're, you have a degree in

00:41:49.100 philosophy. You understand it. Like we have to, you have to have your reasoning, right? You have to have

00:41:53.020 your reasoning behind any idea that you're going to debate if you're going to debate it. Well,

00:41:55.860 this guy went in there totally unprepared. And for once the interviewee caught the interviewer

00:42:02.560 completely flat footed and really kept pressing for me as a journalist, it was, it was a delight

00:42:08.320 because I never go into an interview without my facts, without my backup, without my evidence. You

00:42:12.840 don't just say like, it's gotten more hateful. And if you see what preceded that, he says it's gotten

00:42:17.420 more racist and more sexist since you took over. And that's where Elon said, what, give me an example.

00:42:22.400 What did you make of it? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just kind of a comedy of errors there really on

00:42:27.960 both sides, because, you know, had he given a single example, there's no reason to think that

00:42:32.380 would be a valid representation of, of a trend. Right. But, you know, I'm sure there are people

00:42:36.200 who quantify these things and yeah, I, I can, uh, I'm certainly prepared to believe that it's gotten

00:42:44.000 more hateful, uh, and, you know, that the guardrails have, have come off to some degree

00:42:48.600 since Elon took over. Um, but, you know, any one person's experience is not going to be a valid way

00:42:55.680 of quantifying that, but yeah, I mean, that was ridiculous exchange and, you know, work to Elon's

00:43:00.660 advantage. Um, I, I mean, the, the, the larger point with, you know, Elon and Twitter is that

00:43:06.840 Elon is the, is the poster boy for what is wrong with Twitter. Right. And it's not, it's not because

00:43:14.280 he's, he's running it badly. I mean, I, I, I really am agnostic as to whether or not he can improve it

00:43:20.500 as a platform. Um, I think he's done some, some, um, you know, ill-considered things that, you know,

00:43:27.380 in his tenure as, as its owner, but, um, it's, it's his actual personal use of the platform that

00:43:34.600 is so, uh, worthy of criticism. Right. And Elon, you know, Elon was a friend, right? So it's not,

00:43:41.920 I'm not, I don't like to be in a position to say this, but, um, I think Twitter has been obviously

00:43:49.120 bad for him as a person, right? He's obviously addicted to it. He's, he's, um, he's behaving in

00:43:56.160 ways that are, you know, starkly unethical. Uh, he's singled out, you know, individual citizens

00:44:01.820 in front of what now, something like 130 million people, uh, you know, you know, bullying them and

00:44:08.380 abusing them with, you know, to great consequence in their lives. Um, and it's, it's just not good.

00:44:14.180 And so it's, yeah, I mean, I just think it's, I mean, Twitter is an awful place for many, many people

00:44:21.720 is, and, and, but certainly not everybody. I mean, if you're just sharing happy cat memes

00:44:25.900 on Twitter, I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about. You just, you're just getting

00:44:29.900 lots of love back. I doubt that. No one is immune. They'll find something nasty to say about your cat

00:44:36.220 at some point. That's just Twitter. I have to say though, not for nothing. If I spend 10 minutes

00:44:41.500 on Twitter and then I spend 10 minutes on Instagram, I feel worse after Instagram. I feel worse.

00:44:47.920 Yeah. I, I like probably for different reasons, but yeah, I know. Right. I know what I'm getting

00:44:52.300 in news. I know news is kind of dark and a cynical place and there's going to be fights. I, I go into

00:44:58.580 it with open eyes. That's my business. I go over to Instagram and suddenly you do, even if you're a

00:45:05.440 secure person, like I am start feeling like, I guess my life kind of sucks. I, my meals don't look

00:45:12.660 like that. My ass doesn't look like that. I'm not running through wheat fields, holding

00:45:17.660 hands with my husband every day. You know, there, you just kind of emerge feeling down,

00:45:22.700 even though the content on its face is supposed to lift you up. Um, and I will just say this in

00:45:29.400 Elon and Twitter's defense, um, I found Twitter a more hateful place before he took it over.

00:45:35.580 I was subjected to tons of hate on Twitter, um, before he took it over from, I guess you would call

00:45:44.220 them not you, but one might call them well-meaning leftists who were trying to correct me on all my

00:45:48.400 wrong think. Uh, and in doing so hurling terrible invective at me, calling me terrible names. Now,

00:45:54.860 at least I have more people on my side who can fight them, who can hurl the invectives back.

00:46:01.860 Now I can say Dylan Mulvaney is not a woman period. And I don't get banned. I find it a more open

00:46:07.680 place. And maybe that leads to more opinions. Some might find hateful. I mean, for me, it's like,

00:46:12.960 well, that's America, right? We get, let's, let's hash it out. Let's see. And if it's not healthy

00:46:17.340 for you, you don't like it, you can leave like you did, but it's not fair to suppress just the

00:46:22.560 one side as was happening under the old management. Yeah. My, my concern is that it's, it's not America,

00:46:31.500 right? Or at least it shouldn't be America. I mean, the reason why I left Twitter was not so much that I

00:46:38.000 was getting so much abuse, right? Because, uh, in fact, I, I sort of solved that problem. I installed

00:46:44.080 a, uh, you know, an app, which allowed me to delete, you know, massive numbers of Twitter,

00:46:51.340 Twitter accounts by the batch, um, you know, or, you know, or mute them, block them. Uh, so I wasn't

00:46:57.740 seeing a lot of hate at a certain point, but then I asked myself, well, why the hell am I the sort of

00:47:01.680 person who's, who's blocking, you know, 10,000 people at, at a pass? Um, I mean, how did I become

00:47:08.700 this person? Right. Um, but no, that the, my real concern was that I was getting a, a distorted

00:47:16.200 picture of other human beings that I was seeing people not only at their worst, but, um, I was

00:47:24.160 seeing them in ways that, that, that where they would, they would never be this way in real life.

00:47:27.960 Right. Like I had dinner with these people, they would not behave like psychopaths. And yet they

00:47:33.240 were presenting like psychopaths in my feed, you know, every minute of the day. And that,

00:47:39.760 so that, that, that, that distortion is what, what most worried me.

00:47:45.020 I, I get it. I will say there are some people on there with whom I would never be friends with whom

00:47:50.200 I would never have dinner. And when they post the picture of them with their cat or they post some,

00:47:55.140 something nice about their kids, it's healthy. It reminds me, this is a human too. This is somebody

00:48:00.620 who, you know, where we in the bunker together, we'd have each other's backs. We'd let everything

00:48:04.880 slide that those are good moments, you know, on that platform too, though it is indeed flawed.

00:48:08.880 All right, standby. Uh, we're going to turn to Riley Gaines and wokeism and the confrontation Sam had

00:48:14.380 with a transgender person who was giving it to him and he was giving it pretty good right back.

00:48:19.340 That's next. Don't forget. You can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM triumph channel

00:48:23.840 one 11 every weekday at noon East. I don't know if you've been following what happened with

00:48:31.360 Riley Gaines, the swimmer. Have you been tuning into that at all? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean,

00:48:38.020 not, I don't know. I'm sure that this is your wheelhouse and not mine, but yes, I've, I know

00:48:41.840 the story a little bit. Okay. Well, I'll just, I'll get the audience and you up to speed on the latest.

00:48:45.740 So she went, she was a competitive swimmer at the college level. She swam against Leah Thomas,

00:48:50.460 who's a trans woman. Uh, she tied against Leah Thomas. They refuse to let Riley hold the trophy.

00:48:56.480 They wanted Leah Thomas to have it for the photo op. Leah Thomas shouldn't even have been in that

00:49:00.660 pool. Riley Gaines should not have had to tie or share a trophy with a man, a biological man,

00:49:06.120 especially since it appears to me that Leah Thomas is really, I don't even know if Leah Thomas is

00:49:10.600 actually trans. Uh, the in-depth report by the daily wire suggests this is a man who has autogynephilia,

00:49:16.060 which is a fetish where you get off on dressing like a woman. It's sexually arousing to you to

00:49:21.220 dress like a woman, which is not really a trans thing. It's a different thing. It's like a kink.

00:49:25.460 It's a fetish. In any event, this poor girl, Riley Gaines had to, had to swim against Leah.

00:49:30.580 So Leah, uh, sorry, Riley now has become somebody who goes on the college circuit tours and talks

00:49:35.980 about this. And her remarks, as I understand it, are limited to the field of athletics. She's not

00:49:41.740 against trans people, trans rights. She's making the point that look, there are some serious

00:49:46.500 downsides to letting somebody like Leah Thomas swim against me. Well, all hell broke loose on

00:49:51.000 the, on the San Francisco state university campus. When Riley went there, here's just a little flavor

00:49:56.160 and we're going to set up the response now from the student group, um, by showing you what actually

00:50:01.140 happened the day Riley was there and was shouted down. It was forced into a room, essentially kidnapped

00:50:05.980 by the mob.

00:50:15.240 It's just me. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.

00:50:27.700 I'm coming. I'm good. I'm good.

00:50:28.880 Oh my goodness. So she was hit twice, right? It is reminiscent of what happened to Brett Weinstein

00:50:53.900 at Evergreen, right? It's just a little, like there's a school mob taking somebody down,

00:50:58.520 trying to threaten them physically. She was punched twice. She says by trans woman. So now

00:51:03.960 we, the head, the president of the university, I think it's the president herself has blocked

00:51:09.480 Riley gains on Twitter. No, she's blocked while Riley gains on Twitter. And now we have the president

00:51:15.640 of the student group. She's the student association, associated, associated students,

00:51:21.540 president. Her name is Karina Zamora issuing her response in writing. And it's, I'm not going to

00:51:28.180 read the whole thing, but you must hear a fair amount of this to believe the mindset. This is

00:51:33.220 what we're dealing with. Uh, on the evening of Thursday, April 6th, the San Francisco state

00:51:39.280 chapter of turning point USA hosted saving women's sports with Riley gains on our campus,

00:51:43.760 an event that promoted discriminatory rhetoric towards trans women athletes, dot, dot, dot.

00:51:49.840 Students orchestrating to students, protesting were coerced and given unwarranted warning cards,

00:51:57.360 threatening arrest. If they violated the turning point USA policy, though TP, uh, USA was followed

00:52:05.780 by protesters. So they acknowledge Riley was followed by protesters. I believe the enforcement

00:52:11.620 of these policies was weaponized to silence and threaten protesters. And the presence of police

00:52:18.820 was both excessive and uncalled for. Okay. Tell it to Riley gains, uh, the heavy police presence in

00:52:25.280 response to peaceful protest and the threat of arrest aimed towards students, upholding the principles of

00:52:31.320 social justice and positive change, uh, leads her to believe that the administration has failed to

00:52:37.960 uphold the principles. Our campus prides itself on. I, as president of associated students condemn and

00:52:44.520 stand against the hateful rhetoric and promotion of violence spread by talking, but by turning point

00:52:50.320 USA and Riley gains, as well as the confrontational behavior of the university police. She goes on to

00:52:58.140 say, I call on the president of the university and her administration to hold themselves accountable

00:53:02.020 and host a community forum to hear how damaging these tactics have been to our student body demanding

00:53:09.120 to know how the university plans to move forward with a plausible action plan finishing with to our

00:53:14.380 trans identifying students. We see you, we hear you, and we are here to uplift your voices as president

00:53:22.220 Karina Zamora in solidarity, by the way. So I mean, not a word of apology to Riley, to the students who

00:53:30.400 showed up there in support of Riley are wanting to hear Riley. It's all about them. They're not a bit

00:53:34.780 sorry. They're prepared. I'm sure to do it again. And they want to know why they were threatened for

00:53:39.540 their behavior. So where does that leave us? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously there's, there's a tension

00:53:46.840 between the free speech rights of speakers and the free speech rights of those who would protest

00:53:54.920 those speakers. Uh, I mean, I think we should, I think all these institutions have a responsibility

00:54:03.320 to err on the side of protecting speakers, right. And allowing events to continue in a civil way.

00:54:11.380 Right. So I, you know, I mean, that, that was not a peaceful protest whenever you're not letting

00:54:16.640 someone leave a room, you know, you were, this, that's a, that's a hostage situation. That's not a,

00:54:20.600 it's not a, an exercise of free speech. Um, so yeah, I think there should be very little tolerance

00:54:27.760 for that particular line getting crossed among, by, by protesters on college campuses or anywhere

00:54:35.000 else, right. You're, you're physically coercing somebody when you're mobbing them in that way and

00:54:40.240 not letting them leave a room or, uh, and, and certain speech, you know, is, is threatening,

00:54:48.020 right. Where you're putting people in fear for their life right now. The, uh, the speech that,

00:54:54.360 um, questions the, the wisdom of letting trans women, uh, compete against, you know, biological

00:55:07.760 women in a sport like swimming, um, that is not violence, right. And to call it violence is just a

00:55:15.640 symptom of a, of, you know, what has become a crazy ideology, right. I mean, it's the, again,

00:55:22.380 this is a, it's a problem with the, with the extremes politically that they, they, they view

00:55:26.520 everything in terms of power. And this is true, true, both on the left and the right, but it's

00:55:31.340 especially clear on the left at the moment. They're not interested in what's true. They're

00:55:36.780 not interested in the actual motives of the people they're attacking. They view everything as a,

00:55:43.700 um, as an exercise of power, right. Even, you know, scientific knowledge, a concept of objectivity,

00:55:49.920 uh, you're just asking questions about, uh, biology. All of this is power. None of it has

00:55:55.680 anything to do with truth, right. And, and that's so crazy making and it's so at odds with what is

00:56:03.120 actually going on in the minds of people who are, who are simply worried for obvious reasons about

00:56:10.140 specific outcomes. I mean, they're, they're worried that, you know, to take a specific case,

00:56:16.580 you know, a 13 year old isn't in a position to really consent to a, an irreversible, an irreversible

00:56:22.880 medical procedure, right. So, um, that's a, you know, they're genuinely hard problems to solve here

00:56:29.360 at the policy level and at the individual level. Uh, and it requires wisdom and compassion from all

00:56:36.560 of us to, to interact with those problems and try to, try to, uh, find our way to some, some decent

00:56:44.120 outcome, right. But the problems are, are, are different. And even the, this trans issue is not

00:56:51.160 the same when you're talking about trans men and trans women, right. We don't, we don't have the

00:56:55.940 analogous problem of trans men, uh, fighting to dominate their divisions in sport, say, right.

00:57:05.500 You don't, I'm not having, having biological women transitioning to, uh, become men, uh, posing a

00:57:13.120 problem in, in, uh, in sport. So this is just, or their locker rooms or their prison spaces, or even

00:57:20.760 their sponsorships and scholarships. I mean, look how many sponsorships Dylan Mulvaney is getting

00:57:25.920 now. We talked about it yesterday on the show, even for bras and women's facial cream, aging facial

00:57:33.120 cream, like oil of olay. Like why did we run out of biological women to sell bras? We now have to go

00:57:38.900 to biological men to sell bras. I mean, and not to mention tampons, Tampax is working with Dylan

00:57:46.280 Mulvaney. Dylan Mulvaney does not even have a vagina. I mean, it's like, am I drawing the line too close to

00:57:52.160 actual womanhood here? Like this is insane. Yeah. But again, it's a continuum problem,

00:57:59.680 right? So that on the far end of, of, you know, one side of this continuum, you have absolutely

00:58:06.660 clear cases of gender dysphoria in children at the earliest possible time where there really is no

00:58:15.220 real realistic threat of social contagion or ideology, you know, browbeating them into,

00:58:23.760 you know, having a problem that they don't have. Right. So, and I, you know, I've, I know cases like

00:58:29.420 this. I know, you know, I know, um, a trans girl who, uh, as a four-year-old felt that, you know,

00:58:39.260 he is a four-year-old boy was born into the wrong body. Right. And there were no incentives to convince

00:58:44.640 this kid that, you know, that he was trans and then, and should eventually transition. Um, but the,

00:58:51.560 on the far extreme of the other side of this continuum, you have obviously deranged gaslighting

00:58:59.540 advocacy, uh, of just completely crazy propositions. Right. Uh, you know, and, and, um, uh, the problem

00:59:10.200 for the rest of us is to try to figure out how to interact with this whole space in a way that is

00:59:15.180 compassionate and pragmatic. And it's, um, you know, so to take the case of, you know, the specific case

00:59:21.360 of trans girls, um, sorry, biological girls, you know, deciding that they're trans or, or non-binary

00:59:30.380 there, there, there is legitimate concern that social contagion is at least part of the story,

00:59:35.820 right? You have lots of young girls, you know, teenage girls and, and tween girls who decide they,

00:59:42.540 you know, are, are no longer gender conforming. Right. And it's a kind of fad. And it's not to say

00:59:49.540 that every one of those cases is a matter of social contagion, but certainly some seem to be.

00:59:54.680 And in those cases, it is totally legitimate and it is not at all an expression of violence or,

01:00:00.660 you know, you know, malicious uses of power to be concerned that social contagion is, is leading,

01:00:08.060 uh, some young people who, uh, aren't really in a position to think so clearly about the far future

01:00:14.600 in their lives to make irrevocable choices, you know, to, to, to go on, uh, hormones or,

01:00:20.680 you know, puberty blockers or, um, uh, or to have surgeries. I mean, to have teenagers having double

01:00:26.320 mastectomies, right. This is, it is easy to see that, that well-intentioned people will get very

01:00:34.000 worried about all of this. And it's not an expression of hatred, right. And this is a completely

01:00:38.580 distinct problem from the kinds of problems, you know, you just raised of, you know, competition

01:00:44.720 in sport, right. And denying, uh, female athletes, uh, the experience they would have, uh, of, uh,

01:00:52.160 you know, succeeding because you have biologically male athletes, uh, out-competing them, right. It's a,

01:00:58.640 it's a totally different issue. And all of these issues are getting conflated and we're finding it

01:01:03.160 very difficult to, to talk about these things, but it's, this process is not at all helped by

01:01:10.120 dishonest and hysterical, uh, uh, moral panics, uh, happening on the left. And that's, you know,

01:01:16.940 that's what is happening in many cases. How do you, those people are not persuadable. You know,

01:01:22.120 the, the, the people running after Riley, shouting at her, punching her, mocking her tears after she'd

01:01:29.280 been punched in the face. Okay. This is not a person with whom we can reason. And there are many

01:01:35.400 more just like them. It's not just because it's San Francisco state university. The trans activists

01:01:40.880 as a rule are fairly rabid. They're just the worst spokespeople, the absolute worst. And they lead to

01:01:49.680 the elimination of, of compassion. You know, I was talking to Glenn Beck on his show the other day

01:01:55.140 saying, I started this whole journey, very compassionate towards the trans community.

01:01:58.960 I had a trans person in my family. I wound up marrying Doug who has a trans person in his family.

01:02:04.640 Um, and I saw the bullying and I saw how tough it was. And this person went through it in my family

01:02:09.080 before it was a thing before it was okay. You know, when it was still very stigmatized,

01:02:14.000 had nothing but compassion. I feel differently now. I feel like it's gone too far. It's eroding

01:02:22.060 reality. Biology. They're getting rid of male or female on birth certificates. Doctors in the

01:02:30.320 hospital are not allowed to ask whether you're a man or a woman or tell their, their residents,

01:02:36.380 42 year old male. You're not allowed to say that it's considered offensive. We can't say breastfeed.

01:02:42.000 That's a, that's offensive. I have to say chest feed people with vaginas, as opposed to women,

01:02:47.240 not to mention the parodies of us by people like Dylan and others. These people who are all over

01:02:53.440 tick tock more and more saying what's normal is trans sis sis, which means biological man or woman.

01:03:00.640 That's what's abnormal. Your parents slapping some label on you that may or may not. What's normal is

01:03:05.720 the freedom of being a trans person and choosing no wrong. I've got thousands of years of biology on

01:03:12.620 myself. So I am less and less compassionate by the day. And it seems like that.

01:03:17.240 That make me even more so. Am I wrong? Do I need to readjust?

01:03:22.720 Well, yeah, I mean, it's an understandable reaction that many people have. And this is

01:03:28.100 a reaction that, that many people who have migrated rightward politically have had where they've,

01:03:34.440 they've, the attacks on them from the left have been so dishonest and incessant and gaslighting

01:03:41.020 that, um, and they've been, they've been, you know, commensurately love bombed by people on the

01:03:47.020 right that they have just, you know, as is again, almost an experiment in social psychology,

01:03:51.600 their politics have changed because it's, um, it's an understandable reaction to, to hostility on,

01:03:59.920 from one side and, and, uh, uh, you know, love and understanding from the other. Um, but I, I do think

01:04:08.140 that our, our reasoning about what is real and what we should do in light of what is real needs to,

01:04:16.240 to, um, escape the, again, understandable psychological reaction to just being confronted

01:04:23.780 by assholes, uh, again and again and again. Uh, that's like, again, another reason why I got off

01:04:29.060 Twitter. I felt Twitter was distorting my sense of what was even important to respond to because

01:04:36.280 the noise is turned up so loud on, on many of these issues. Um, but this is a real issue. This

01:04:43.100 is not just a Twitter issue. I mean, this came to my son in his third grade classroom. You know,

01:04:49.100 this was nothing happened to me on this front to, to alienate me. I wasn't attacked by trans activists,

01:04:55.180 though. I'm sure it's a matter of time. Um, but this does come into your world now. I mean,

01:05:01.120 I've told the story publicly, but in my son's third grade classroom at our New York city private school,

01:05:05.660 they were asked on a weekly basis, whether they were still sure that they were boys.

01:05:10.100 They had to hold up their fists and do a one through five rating of how confused they were.

01:05:16.220 They were showing them video after video of trans kids suggesting, Oh, do you like the color purple?

01:05:23.580 Well, you might have something to consider it when I could go on. So that's the kind of it's,

01:05:29.660 it's not, this is well beyond, you know, I mean, Riley Gaines, what was she doing? She was swimming,

01:05:34.840 just swimming. And suddenly there's a man next door in the pool. Like it's everywhere now. It's

01:05:39.140 unavoidable. Yeah. Although I would say that I do think it is spilling out into the

01:05:46.060 real world largely because of what is happening on social media. I mean, the activism is dominating

01:05:51.820 institutions because of, uh, institutional concern about what happens on social media.

01:05:59.580 You know, so you need to take a specific case. The New York times has become as woke as it has become

01:06:06.040 largely based on its concern over blowback on Twitter, right? I mean, Twitter effectively became

01:06:12.840 the editorial board of the New York times there for a while. Twitter is the, is the chief cancel

01:06:17.120 culture off officer, right? It's like they're CEO of cancel culture. Yeah. So when we're talking

01:06:24.020 about institutional capture and we're talking about the, the gaslighting of a whole society where you

01:06:29.920 can't even use the word woman, right? Without self-consciousness, without scare quotes, without

01:06:36.340 worrying that you're going to be attacked as a bigot for having just spoken the English language.

01:06:42.300 Um, that is largely a, a, a phenomenon born of social media, right? It is what it is. What's so

01:06:51.920 what the activist class on social media has successfully done by hectoring everyone else,

01:06:59.140 um, uh, in, in institutions that you would think would be impervious to this kind of bullying,

01:07:07.360 right? Again, by a fringe, you know, what do we do about that? I mean, what's the, what's the answer,

01:07:14.980 right? If you think peak wokeism may be behind us, why is that? Because social media is still as

01:07:19.520 popular as ever, unfortunately. And, um, you know, you still get all the points for, for, you know,

01:07:26.220 saying the right things and the DEI scores and the DEI officers has now become a cottage industry to

01:07:30.600 churn out these degrees and pay people $200,000 a year to enforce DEI principles, et cetera.

01:07:37.460 Well, I think everyone has to grow a spine, right? And I think institutions in particular,

01:07:42.020 and those running them have to grow spines and, uh, and lay down bright lines around what is

01:07:50.160 acceptable and not acceptable. So if you take a similar case, um, what happened at Stanford law

01:07:57.040 school recently, right? It's like the, the capitulations to, uh, completely irrational

01:08:05.540 student outbursts have to stop, right? And they have to stop. I think they have to stop in real time

01:08:11.480 rather than just in, in retrospect, right? So it's, it's, it's, you know, it's fine to

01:08:16.260 have apologized to the judge after the fact and, and to have written a letter that is, is somewhat,

01:08:23.060 you know, sanity restoring with respect to the values of the institution, but it'd be much better

01:08:29.440 to be able to do that in real time in the room. Right. And, you know, I think one of these schools

01:08:36.120 is just going to have to start expelling students who behave this way, right? And the way, you know,

01:08:40.940 this could have happened at, at Yale, you know, five years ago or whenever that was when, you know,

01:08:46.640 Nicholas Christakis was surrounded by a mob in the quad and, um, uh, you know, to some degree

01:08:55.500 taken hostage there. I mean, it was, it was reminiscent of what happened to Brett at, at

01:08:59.460 Evergreen. Um, it was, um, these are uncivil and, and indefensible, uh, eruptions of, uh,

01:09:12.720 unreason and social disorder. Right. I mean, and they're, and they're happening in the, among

01:09:18.360 the most privileged people, uh, on planet earth. Right. I mean, that's another painful irony here,

01:09:26.700 which is so crazy making, you know, you're talking about people who, uh, for whom the, the world really

01:09:33.000 is their oyster. Right. I mean, like you're talking about students at Yale or law students at Stanford.

01:09:38.260 Um, and they're acting like they, uh, you know, they're, they're inmates in some kind of, um,

01:09:47.920 oppressive institution finally, you know, trying to break free of their chains. Right. Uh, so yeah,

01:09:54.960 I think institutional patience for this kind of thing needs to run out and, um, yeah, I'm sure there's a,

01:10:02.480 a layer within all of these institutions of DEI bureaucrats, uh, that shouldn't exist. Um,

01:10:12.800 that's not to say that we don't have problems with racism and other forms of bigotry in our society.

01:10:17.960 And, you know, anti-trans bigotry, I'm sure is a real thing, uh, and we should deplore it and we

01:10:23.780 should resist it and we should criticize it. But the, the, the examples of bigotry that are now

01:10:32.340 being cited by the activist class are not examples of bigotry at all. Right. And so, and that's what

01:10:37.760 is so destabilizing. It's the dishonesty. It's the, it's the, you know, hallucinatory, hallucinatory

01:10:45.420 quality of all of this, right. Where, um, again, it's not just happening on the trans issue. It happens

01:10:52.140 just as much on the race issue. Uh, it's just, it, it amounts to, uh, so much of our social

01:11:01.480 conversation, conversation being gummed up with, with lies, right. And, uh, half truths and it's,

01:11:10.500 um, so yeah, it would be clarifying to have institutions that will simply not give into the

01:11:16.220 mob, right. That's, that would be the first bright line I would draw. You just can't be bullied

01:11:20.780 by what's happening on Twitter. If you're the New York times or Stanford or any other,

01:11:24.980 you know, real place. We've had a couple of green shoots on that front, you know, the New York times

01:11:32.160 and some of its trans reporting, they haven't exactly gone full, fair and balanced on it, but

01:11:38.060 they've done some good reporting on, for example, what's happening when we, you know, engage in these

01:11:43.940 surgeries with minors and there's been a ton of pushback. And so far they have not bent the knee.

01:11:49.300 The best example of a company handling this, as far as I've seen, has been the wall street journal

01:11:55.280 when they had some 240 journalists complain about the journal publishing people like Heather

01:12:00.520 McDonald, who's absolutely brilliant. I'm sure you've read her stuff. Uh, and the journal said,

01:12:05.920 we get it. You're upset. You're upset is really not our concern. Take care. If you would like to quit,

01:12:12.360 you're more than able. Bye. Truly. It was short. It was sweet. No one quit. They moved on.

01:12:18.280 They never had another uprising. It was very well handled. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I mean, that's an

01:12:24.300 example. I didn't know about that example, but that's the kind of thing that has to happen

01:12:27.520 on mass. And, uh, again, I do hold out some hope that we've seen the peak of this thing because,

01:12:35.020 um, you know, it is somewhat analogous to what happened in the eighties around the, you know,

01:12:41.160 satanic cult panic. Right. And, you know, the, the fixation on preschools as being, you know, points

01:12:48.600 of, um, access to kids. Right. And, and there was so much, um, crazy fear about a phenomenon that

01:12:56.520 really doesn't even seem to have existed. Right. I mean, I'm sure there was a satanic culture too,

01:13:03.200 but, you know, there was, there was not an epidemic of human sacrifice or, you know,

01:13:08.140 any human sacrifice at all, I think. Uh, and yet, you know, we had people believing that

01:13:14.040 in an, in a given year, you know, 10,000 infants or, or more were killed by, you know, uh, satanic

01:13:21.520 cults. It's just, um, really, I missed that one. Yeah. Oh, the, the, uh, well, actually the,

01:13:26.860 the journalist Lawrence Wright tells a great story about how he was, he was just turning his attention

01:13:32.500 to this topic, the New Yorker writer. Uh, and he was at a, um, a seminar run by a member of law

01:13:39.760 enforcement. I think this was probably in Texas. And, uh, the, um, the cop at that point said that

01:13:47.680 50,000 people that year had been murdered by satanic cults, many of them children. And Wright realized

01:13:56.000 at that moment that he was in the presence of something very strange because he knew that

01:14:00.300 there was no year in American history where 50,000 people had been murdered ever, you know,

01:14:05.580 for, for anything, uh, much less by satanic cults. So, um, you know, there, I mean, it's hard to,

01:14:12.940 to diagnose a moral panic when it's happening, especially when it's conflated with real, uh,

01:14:18.220 concerns about social inequality and, and bigotry and, you know, racism and transphobia and

01:14:24.240 homophobia and all, and all the rest and, you know, me too. And I mean, these are all,

01:14:28.660 there's, there's, it's not that there's not, aren't problems that sort of answer to these names,

01:14:35.260 but, um, what the activist class has done with all of these problems has been, um, you know,

01:14:44.780 truly dishonest and, and divisive. And, and we, and I, we have to pull back from the brink here.

01:14:50.300 Yeah. Do you feel like, you know, a lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals, do you feel like

01:14:56.480 that side is starting to come around? I do. I mean, I, I felt this for some time again, because

01:15:02.920 it's so, uh, uh, extreme, um, that I mean, what you encounter in private, uh, you know, with virtually

01:15:11.760 everyone is a very different set of opinions than they're comfortable airing in public. Right. And

01:15:18.660 that's been true for a long time, right. There are many, many people in private, uh, who will say

01:15:26.200 things that are, you know, entirely reasonable, uh, and yet they're the, you know, part of the,

01:15:31.340 the silent majority when, when this conversation spills out into public. Um, and even among kids,

01:15:37.960 right. I mean, I'm, you know, meeting, you know, when I, when I, when I talk to my daughter and,

01:15:42.800 and you kind of take her, her temperature on, on many of these topics and, and, uh, hear what her

01:15:48.780 friends think. Right. It's, it's not quite what, you know, woke activists would hope on these topics.

01:15:54.740 Uh, so yeah, I, I do, I do, um, I'm cautiously optimistic, you know, I'm not, I'm rarely accused

01:16:01.840 of being an optimist, but I'm, uh, I do think that this, it can't last that much longer because it's,

01:16:08.140 it's, you know, the untruths are so obvious here and it's, um, and it, you know, it will give us,

01:16:16.760 each, each extreme is amplifying of the other politically. I mean, we, if we get Trump again,

01:16:22.100 as president, it will be because of the excesses of the far left. Right. I mean, that will be the

01:16:28.360 thing that will drive even reasonable people to overlook the fact that, you know, he's, he's

01:16:34.240 painfully unqualified for the office. They look at him as the, as the 800 pound gorilla who can stop

01:16:39.440 it, who will fight it. Um, and somebody on the show recently was making the point that I can't

01:16:44.180 remember who it was, but it, it was not a Trump hater, but they were saying probably it would get worse

01:16:48.840 under Trump because he so animates this group of people that we're talking about, you know,

01:16:54.480 that maybe wokeism is actually not as bad right now as it otherwise would have been under Joe Biden,

01:17:00.720 even though he's pushing it, he doesn't actively, you know, bring it out in people. He doesn't

01:17:05.560 motivate those who want to march for that cause. So that's also an interesting theory. I'll tell you

01:17:09.940 one quick story. So I was at, um, a big event not long ago, and there was a very well-known, uh, black

01:17:17.860 liberal Hollywood name, uh, household Hollywood name who came up to me and said, Megan, I'm a huge fan.

01:17:26.140 And he said, I, I send all of your videos to all of my liberal friends. And I said, well, why do you,

01:17:34.020 why do you send them? And he said, because all of them are too afraid to follow you.

01:17:38.020 They don't want to be seen as a follower on, you know, if anybody checks your followers,

01:17:43.720 but they make me send them all of your videos. So I do. And we, we all say, yeah, right on.

01:17:49.040 So we're cheering you from the sidelines. I got such a kick out of that. I think that's growing.

01:17:53.460 I do think that there's a growing contingent of people who just need to hear truth spoken

01:17:56.780 and repeatedly, and not just from, you know, diehard conservatives on the hard right, you know,

01:18:03.100 that just normal people need to say what's real. And it's so liberating when you do hear it. And

01:18:08.320 I think the more people like you say, and I say it, the more other people feel comfortable saying

01:18:12.840 it. And weirdly, that leads me to the Dalai Lama. Um, we talked about this yesterday. And the only

01:18:18.220 reason I'm asking you about it, Sam, cause I remember from our last time you, you worked as

01:18:22.640 like an unofficial bodyguard for him at some point in your life. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. For months.

01:18:29.460 Yeah. Like 30 years ago. Yeah. Right. But they were like shoving you to the front. The real bodyguards

01:18:33.640 were like shoving you to the front because they wanted you to take the arrows. Um, so he's rightfully,

01:18:40.520 in my view, come under fire for this bizarre, troubling exchange with this little boy that happened

01:18:47.100 in India where he was on a receiving line of sorts. People were coming up to him and forgive me,

01:18:52.020 we're going to show this video again. I find it really disturbing, but you have, it has to be

01:18:54.920 seen to be believed. Um, and the boy comes up to him just to tell the audience what they're going to

01:18:59.680 see. And, um, they, I'll just read it. So I don't get it wrong. The child, um, asks if he can hug him

01:19:09.260 and the Dalai Lama says first here. And as for a kiss on his, um, I guess, I don't know where the

01:19:16.220 first kiss is. And then he says right here also. Oh, the first one's on his cheek. Then he points to his

01:19:21.040 lips and says now here. And he puckers up and the boy leans in. People are kind of laughing.

01:19:25.940 There's some small applause. And then you see the Dalai Lama staring at the boy. And then he says to

01:19:29.900 the boy, then suck my tongue. And he sticks his tongue out. And the boy kind of goes backwards.

01:19:35.660 There's a bit of laughter. And the boy and the Dalai Lama leave it, lean into one another.

01:19:40.200 The Dalai Lama's tongue is out and they come close and the boy kind of gets out of, out of the way.

01:19:45.560 So this is what we're going to see. I'll show it to you. And then we'll talk about it.

01:19:49.160 Yeah.

01:19:49.380 First, yeah.

01:19:55.700 Then I think finally, she also.

01:19:58.300 It's so exciting.

01:20:13.460 Yeah.

01:20:14.820 It's so amazing.

01:20:25.360 And it's so exciting.

01:20:26.920 what do you make of it? Yeah. Um, well, I, you know, honestly, I'm not quite sure what to make

01:20:35.200 of it. I mean, I agree. It's completely bizarre and, you know, unacceptable on its face. Um,

01:20:42.060 what I, I, I have a hard time seeing it as a, you know, a frank expression of, uh,

01:20:50.260 sexual interest in a child, largely because he's doing this in front of thousands of people,

01:20:56.060 right? The idea that you're going to be, you know, practice your pedophilia, uh, in front of

01:21:01.040 thousands of people, you know, on camera and get away with it seems, you know, patently insane.

01:21:06.500 So, you know, I, I don't know what to make, like had this happened in private, that would be more

01:21:11.840 disturbing on some level because it's like, okay, then, then it's really inappropriate overture

01:21:17.580 toward a child. But, you know, for this, I, I honestly don't know what to say about it. I mean,

01:21:23.400 it's, it's, it's some combination of a, you know, weird Tibetan joke or a, you know, a symptom of

01:21:31.040 brain damage on the part of the Dalai Lama. Like, you know, he's an 87 year old man. You know, I don't

01:21:37.020 know, I don't know what's happening there. I mean, I haven't, I haven't seen him for 30 years. I can tell

01:21:41.880 you 30 years ago, he was an extraordinary and extraordinarily inspiring person. Right. And so,

01:21:49.600 and so I have no idea what's going on there and it's, I completely understand the reaction to it

01:21:55.560 and it's very, it's, you know, it's truly unfortunate that a moment like that can, you know,

01:22:01.040 become indelible and, and really be the, really damage the, the legacy of someone who I consider

01:22:07.640 to, to have been just an extraordinarily wise and compassionate person insofar as I am, you know,

01:22:13.900 fit to judge, you know, what he's, what kind of person he's been, been like all these years from

01:22:18.820 the outside. So it's, it's awful. It's awful and strange. So. Right. Because we never know. We never

01:22:25.500 know. We've, we've seen a lot of heroes fall when the truth about them comes out, you know, Jerry

01:22:30.980 Sandusky and the whole thing at Penn state. I, you know, it's a lot of people looked up to him,

01:22:35.980 believed he loved, you know, kids. And then, then we were told a very different story. Think about the

01:22:40.760 Dalai Lama though. I'm, I understand your point. It would, it would in some ways be worse if he did

01:22:45.740 it behind closed doors, because then you'd really have to say, where's this going? And you knew that

01:22:48.880 that exchange in that moment, at least was going nowhere. However, I think the, it's the, I attribute

01:22:56.360 his willingness to do it in the open to his age. I don't think a normal person who doesn't have

01:23:03.000 pedophilic instincts would ever ask for that or do that in any setting. I think perhaps the screen got,

01:23:08.460 got dropped, uh, because he's getting old and forgot how grossly inappropriate people would see

01:23:14.860 that. That's, that's not something any normal aged person does. Not one. I've known tons of them.

01:23:21.300 Um, nobody does that. You don't do that unless you have that instinct. And that's why I really think

01:23:25.440 this is a before and after moment for him. I actually would be vigilant about keeping him

01:23:30.120 away from children from this point forward. I understand once you're the Dalai Lama, you're the

01:23:33.660 Dalai Lama to death. Um, but this guy shouldn't be anywhere near children. You certainly shouldn't

01:23:38.600 be parading him in front of them because I believe that boy was essentially abused right there. I

01:23:44.100 think that experience has the real threat of staying with that child forevermore as an abuse

01:23:48.700 moment. And we all witnessed it. You know, the whole world has seen it now. It troubles me, Sam,

01:23:53.940 and it troubles me when you didn't, but it troubles me when people defend it. As we saw a guy from

01:23:58.000 Rolling Stone do on CNN yesterday, because there really needs to be a hard stop on anything like

01:24:03.000 that from everyone in polite society when it comes to anything that might even open the door a little

01:24:08.340 bit to the exploitation of kids. Yeah, I agree. I mean, again, I don't know really, I don't know

01:24:16.160 how to interpret, uh, what was happening there again. And I don't know if there's anything in

01:24:21.160 Tibetan culture that, that I'm unaware of that would have made some sense of it. I mean, you know,

01:24:26.160 I looked into that. We looked into, they said sticking out your tongue is, is frequent, but

01:24:30.480 not sucking on it. That's the thing. Yeah. I mean, that, so that, but yeah, I, you know,

01:24:35.540 it's just, it's such a total miscalibration of, of, um, the effect it was going to have on the,

01:24:44.860 you know, the, his audience and the rest of the world that I just, I don't know what to attribute it

01:24:49.140 to on, on his side. Again, he's, he's an 87 year old man and, um, uh, yeah, I mean, your

01:24:56.900 interpretation could be correct, but I just, there's, there's no way to know. Yeah. I mean,

01:25:02.000 there's no way either to investigate, right? Like that, that's what I would love to see. Let's do an

01:25:05.800 investigation and see if there's anybody where there's smoke, there's fire. And there's other

01:25:08.940 little boys out there who have a story to tell or now grown boys. Um, that's what should happen,

01:25:13.820 but I don't think there's going to be an appetite for that because he's so revered, you know, he's so

01:25:17.740 revered and has for so many years been held up as this holy leader and this wise man. It's like,

01:25:23.440 well, sometimes our, our heroes fall sometimes behind closed doors. They do absolutely reprehensible

01:25:29.040 things and you have to be open-minded to it when it's staring you in the face. So I hope they do

01:25:34.500 that. And at a minimum, I hope they keep him away from any child in any private setting. Okay. So last

01:25:41.260 but not least, what does this mean for everything we've discussed, uh, for presidential politics and

01:25:47.100 the next presidential vote in your view? Let's say, I know you're not going to vote for Trump. I got

01:25:52.100 that. Um, but could a Sam Harris get behind anybody in the GOP field? Could you get behind a

01:25:58.060 Glenn Youngkin, a Nikki Haley was just announced yesterday. Tim Scott is forming a, an exploratory

01:26:04.620 committee, which is sort of the step before actually declaring. And now we know that the first,

01:26:08.640 uh, Republican presidential debate is going to happen. Fox news in, uh, August in Milwaukee,

01:26:13.040 which is going to host the, uh, GOP 2024 convention. So things are starting to happen

01:26:18.600 and, uh, it looks like the Dems are going to go with Biden. We don't know for sure, but he seemed

01:26:23.040 to tell the Easter bunny and Al Roker the other day. He's, he's going to run. He just hasn't announced

01:26:26.960 it yet. So what does it look like for you? Well, again, my, my criticism of Trump is,

01:26:33.260 is truly nonpartisan. I mean, it's not, um, and insofar as it would extend to a, a disinclination

01:26:40.900 to vote for any other Republican, it's really only to the degree that they have pandered to Trumpism,

01:26:47.120 right? So if you're going to, if you're going to hold up a candidate who has also gone all in on the

01:26:51.580 big lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that, you know, that January 6th was a,

01:26:56.820 was a nothing burger and, you know, nothing was ever at stake. And, um, I mean, that's,

01:27:03.820 that's, you know, that's the larger crater that Trump has left in the GOP and in, in our politics,

01:27:11.120 but a normal Republican candidate is, is somebody who, you know, I would, you know, I'm not quite

01:27:17.700 sure who would, could conceivably rise to the, to the top of the field there and actually get the

01:27:23.280 nomination, but, um, it, that's the sort of person who I really have, you know, nothing negative to,

01:27:29.900 to say about him. It's just, um, I don't know what the kind of candidates you mentioned, I don't know

01:27:36.420 what each of them have said specifically on the topic of, of the big lie and, you know,

01:27:42.240 election denialism and how they reacted to Trump's not supporting a peaceful transfer of power.

01:27:46.780 I think those three have been careful to stay away from it. Those three are not,

01:27:50.540 you know, Carrie lakes, if you will. Um, so yeah, I think, I don't know. I feel like you

01:27:56.340 could get behind them. Could you get behind a Kamala Harris? No. Why? No. Well, one, I just don't

01:28:05.520 think she is electable. Right. But I mean, the degree to which she has pandered to the far left

01:28:12.060 and will continue to pander to the far left, um, I just think is, is, you know, unconscionable,

01:28:19.640 right? So it's, it's not, um, it, you know, I, I don't imagine that she necessarily agrees with all

01:28:26.020 of the, the, um, the dogmas she has paid lip service to over there. So, you know, there's a

01:28:31.960 kind of a cynicism and an opportunism that I, I believe I detect there, but insofar as she does

01:28:37.600 believe those things, insofar as she does think that, uh, you know, we have an epidemic of racist

01:28:44.380 cops performing lynchings on our city streets and, and, uh, um, you know, that's, um, again,

01:28:53.760 it's completely dysfunctional to be lying about real problems. Right. So, um, uh, and, and then

01:29:01.980 manufacturing fake problems. So, um, yeah, no, I couldn't, I couldn't support her, but I don't

01:29:07.500 think any, I don't think that's likely to happen, but, you know, I don't think she's likely to be

01:29:12.200 the candidate. Unless something happens to him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that would be, I don't,

01:29:16.140 honestly, I have no inside knowledge or even any intuitions about what the Democrats are going to do

01:29:22.960 if Biden, uh, for some reason, wasn't going to be the candidate. I mean, I don't know who would,

01:29:28.400 I don't know if it's Gavin Newsom. I don't know who would, could rise to the,

01:29:31.320 to the top of the field, but I can't imagine that it would be Kamala Harris.

01:29:36.260 Going to be tough, tough lady to move off to the side, given what they say they stand for.

01:29:41.680 All right. Well, after we, when we get closer to the election, we'll come back and we'll talk

01:29:46.400 politics again. We'll see whether the gorilla made it happen or whether somebody else is in the GOP

01:29:51.840 slot. Uh, things are about to get pretty fun as we go into debate season. Sam, thanks for being here.

01:29:56.880 Thanks for speaking so openly and honestly about it. Thank you, Megan.

01:30:01.320 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 12, 2023

Activists Capturing Institutions, Censorship and Twitter Toxicity, and Woke Untruths, with Sam Harris ｜ Ep. 527

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