Sam Harris is one of the most acclaimed, widely recognised public intellectuals of his generation. Alongside Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett, he was labelled one of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism, a position he secured off the back of his divisive bestseller The End Of Faith (2004). Since then, he has published several acclaimed works exploring rationality, free will, radical honesty, determinism, neuroscience, politics, terrorism, and the philosophy of mind. Sam has also debated many of the most influential thought leaders of the 21st century, from Jordan Peterson to William Lane Craig, and from Deepak Chopra to Reza Aslan. For several years, he was aligned with the ‘intellectual dark web’ - a loosely connected group of iconoclastic public intellectuals united in their opposition to political correctness and identity politics. Today, he hosts Making Sense, a highly popular podcast covering science, politics, and current events.
Why did we invite him on?
We’ve hosted Sam twice before. The first time proved to be a hinge moment in our show and Sam’s public image, as he declared that “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement - [he] would not have cared.” The clip went viral, creating schisms in the discourse. More recently, in 2023, he joined us and Eric Weinstein for an open, no-holds-barred conversation in the aftermath of October 7th.
Much has changed since then. Not just in the Middle East (although there too), but globally. It’s hard to even know where to start. Sam’s view on the world is always fascinating, and we wanted to hear from him; times like these, clarity of thought like his is as refreshing as it is necessary.
What did we learn?
“The fact we’re having this conversation after Jan 6th is crazy.”
With Trump back in the White House, and knowing Sam’s feelings about him, it felt impossible to not start there. We’ve also never had a chance to discuss Sam’s divisive 2022 comments with him since they aired on our show.
”It seems nobody in America took the time to watch the whole clip; most people right-of-centre don’t seem to understand the point I was trying to make. My position really hasn’t changed on the matter. If you cared about Hunter Biden’s laptop because it suggested some level of corruption from Joe, then you should care about the corruption we know to be true of Trump. And I would bet there’s nothing on that laptop that compares to what we know about Trump.”
To Biden, Trump’s flagrant misbehaviour protected him from criticism; he dazzled the public with so much indiscretion, they didn’t know where to start. It was only because Biden was so (relatively) clean that people were able to hone in on a specific story.
But what is it about Trump that Sam is so repulsed by?
What does Sam consider so damning?
The list, it seems, is endless.
”The day before he was sworn in, he launched his ‘meme coin’, which is a pure mechanism for corruption or bribery. He imposes a 50% tariff on India because they won’t nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. He puts a 46% tariff on Vietnam, and how do they alleviate it? They greenlight a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family. He’s using the levers of US power to extract concessions to the advantage of him and his friends. There’s nothing in Biden’s universe that’s even close to that. I’m no fan of Biden’s presidency, but if you care about corruption in government, there’s only one elephant in the room.
But does that really capture why people were so enraged by the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco? Was it the corruption that bothered people, or the cover-up?
In case you’ve forgotten, back in October 2020, the New York Post ran a big story about the contents of a laptop handed into a repair shop in Delaware. It belonged to Hunter Biden, and data on it suggested that he had used his father’s influence in business dealings in Ukraine and China. Shortly after, the Post’s story, 51 former U.S. intelligence officials (ex-CIA, ex-NSA) signed a public letter saying the laptop story “[had] all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
This laid the bedrock for politicians and pundits dismissing the story. Since then, accusations of censorship have dogged the US government. In fact, a House Judiciary Committee interim report claims that some of those 51 intelligence officials were still working for or contracted by the CIA at the time they made the statement. Nothing is certain, but it invites more than raised eyebrows.
Sam doesn’t see it that way.
”I don’t think those guys volunteered to have their reputations destroyed. A laptop that Rudy Giuliani got from a computer store? It certainly looks sketchy. I think it was a good faith mistake. Who decides to take their reputation for discernment and sacrifice it for Hillary Clinton? It’s just not in their interest, it’s not likely to be decisive, and it so obviously looked kooky. This is not the normal way you would discover the ‘smoking laptop’ from hell. [To release it], journalistically, would have been totally irresponsible.”
With that covered, it’s time to shift focus from the past to the present. Last time we spoke to Sam, the prospect of Trump mounting a comeback was upheld only by his most feverish supporters. For him to not just secure the Republican nomination, but win the popular vote and every last swing state, is not just notable - it may well be the most staggering political comeback of the last century.
Trump apologists can offer a thousand reasons for why it happened, but what does one of his fiercest critics think?
”The one thing you can say about Trump is that he’s not a hypocrite. It sounds like praise, but it’s not. He doesn’t pretend to be a good person. But it’s a superpower; left-wing hypocrisy is so galling. The moment you find a Democrat that didn’t floss his teeth when he said he did, it’s a 20 megaton scandal. Trump is the Dan Bilzerian of politics. There’s no pretence of being ethical.”
Many pundits (even former friends) have accused Sam of having ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ - an inability to recognise any positive traits in the leader, and an unflappable willingness to pin every single bad event on him and cast every move he makes in the worst possible light. This, he argues, is a mischaracterisation.
“I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the hostages back. I have no problem saying that. I will readily admit that it’s an amazing achievement, and there was no Democrat who was going to do that. Square that with accusations of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. Many bad aspects of his personality got channelled into strengths. His unprincipledness, his willingness to flip over the chessboard… He got more out of the actors in that conflict than a more principled leader would have.”
Unfortunately, cases like these are the exception and not the rule. To Sam, Trump’s character faults manifest in horror more readily than triumph. More disturbing still is how quickly everyone has adjusted to it.
”My animus towards Trump is not based on some progressive blindness. But we didn’t used to live in a country where masked men steal people off the sidewalk and disappear them to foreign countries. That’s not America, but it’s happening, and it’s totally unacceptable. It’s Orwellian and insane, and it’s insane anyone has acclimated to it.”
The most subversive idea currently being floated by Trump and his team is the prospect of a third term. There’s been no formal declaration, but there’s been more than a little winking and nudging on the subject. Some are doing more than that; former Trump strategist and current staunch advocate Steve Bannon has been on the media circuit telling Americans to “get accommodated” to a Trump presidency that reaches 2033. How? We’ll have to wait and see.
”The founders could not have anticipated this. The Constitution is not a bulwark against events like this. Where we didn’t have laws, we had norms, and everyone before Trump had the decency to do the right thing. He doesn’t care about the spirit of it.”
Whatever you think of Trump, one thing is undeniably true: he didn’t get here alone. The changing cultural tide, helped along by the actions of several key figures, did as much to put Trump back in the office as his own natural, wild political instinct. Sam’s not afraid to name names.
Here, he’s forced to address his former friend: Joe Rogan.
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