Sam Harris, “An Insurrection of Lies,” Making Sense Podcast #230 (Transcript)

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Okay, the siege of the Capitol. . . . Like so much that has happened under Trump, what occurred at the Capitol was in every way unsurprising, but it was also in every way astonishing. . . . Trump has turned our democracy and this period in American history into Pizza Gate. This was a Pizza Gate Insurrection. We had people visibly and audibly deranged by misinformation. I mean, just listen to what they say when you stick a microphone in front of their faces. These are people who have been unhinged by the lies that have spilled ceaselessly from the mouth of this president for years. In a way, it was absolutely perfect. It had none of the gravitas of a real coup, but it fully degraded our country. . . . What we saw in D.C. was like a YouTube comment thread come to life. . . .

I’m seeing two truly terrible unforced errors being made at the moment on social media and in the media generally. And they’re causing a lot of further harm. One is occurring on the political right and the other on the political left. Once again, those two poles are a little hard to map, but they’ll have to do for the moment. And we have a problem on both sides of our politics where people have become single-issue thinkers. Even people who are very smart on other topics, it just seems that now most people can't manage to think about two problems at the same time. You know, it’s possible to have cancer and heart disease at the same time, right? That’s a possible state of the human body and they’re both problems and they have to be thought about differently. They’ve got different causes, different remedies. It is possible to acknowledge that Donald Trump is the most dangerously unfit person who has ever occupied the office of the presidency, while also acknowledging that leftist social justice hysteria is terrible and needs to be opposed. You don’t have to be a genius to keep both of these grotesque objects in view. And yet it appears that only a handful of people can manage it.

I just cannot believe what I'm seeing on social media now. Here are the two reactions that I find most troubling. On the right, or right-of-center, many people are minimizing the gravity of what happened at the Capitol by comparing it to the violence that attended the BLM protests last summer, and the insane events in Seattle and Portland. And these people are now focused on the hypocrisy of those in the media and in the Democratic Party who overlooked the violence last summer and who are now calling for law and order.

The real problem is almost certainly worse than this. The real problem is that nearly 50 percent of Republicans support the attack on the Capitol. That is a horrific polling number. That is the abyss politically. But that aside, virtually every one right-of-center is focused on the hypocrisy of the left, both real and imagined. This is a dangerous delusion on many levels. First, in many cases, it’s not true . . . . It’s not true to say that Biden and Kamala Harris didn't condemn the looting and violence last summer. They did. They just didn’t do it enough. Not nearly enough. And I criticized them at the time.

But there’s a much deeper dis-analogy here of what happened in D.C. this week. This was not a protest that got out of hand. This was an insurrection incited by the sitting president of the United States. Regretted terms like “insurrection” and “coup” seem grandiose, given Trump’s total ineptitude. He can’t actually accomplish his aims. But consider the people who attacked the Capitol . . . . They really fought with cops. They weren’t all just let in . . . . One cop is dead from having been beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher and one insurrectionist is dead, having been shot in the neck by a police officer. . . .

There was no telling what that mob would do once it got inside those buildings. They were not looting a shopping mall. They were storming the halls of Congress, at the direct encouragement of the president of the United States, who had convinced them over the course of months that their democracy had literally been stolen from them, that they don’t have a democracy anymore, that they don’t have a country anymore, and that they must fight to get it back. He set them loose on the Capitol that very morning, saying that he would be with them. If you don’t see a difference between that and a BLM protest that devolves into looting and arson, take a moment and try. There is no analogy to be drawn here. . . .

It is a miracle that more people weren't killed at the Capitol. In fact, many more should have been killed. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying I wish that many more people had died. I’m very thankful that so few did. . . . It was only due to a total failure of security that more people didn’t die. The people crashing through those doors who had already overwhelmed the cops, the people who were staring down the upraised guns of the cops who were inside smashing through the glass, those people should have been shot. Because what is the alternative, to just let the lives of our elected officials depend upon the restraint of a mob?

Some of the people were armed. One guy was carrying zip-ties of a sort that cops use for handcuffs. What was he planning to do with those, take hostages? There's actually no way of knowing what would have happened had those people gotten their hands on Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. There were people calling for the hanging of Mike Pence. So you’re going to rely on the restraint of people who have just risked their lives to break into the Capitol, who believe that there’s a global conspiracy of child-raping cannibals running the world, people who have never received anything other than a wink and a nod from the president of the United States on those very points.

Granted, much of the footage of this attack on the Capitol is perplexing. You’ve got a cop taking selfies with some of the crowd. You’ve got cops seeming to let people in after others had broken through their ranks. And then you’ve got everyone just wandering around taking selfies and vandalizing the place. Some of the footage . . . makes it look like a busload of people headed to Burning Man just decided to use the restrooms at the Capitol. Some of the people are surprisingly old . . . . but other footage reveals that this was an absolute emergency . . . that disgraced our country and weakened it in the eyes of the world.

Yes, the BLM riots were also a disgrace. And yes, the press contortions around them were also a disgrace. To have CNN anchors say, as a dozen cities were being set on fire: “Well, whoever said protests need to be peaceful?” That was a disgrace. To have a journalist on camera trumpeting “the mostly peaceful protests”—even while cars and buildings burned in the background. That was all a disgrace and just amazing dark comedy. And yes, it was insane, patently insane, to see calls to defund the police as social order was unraveling across our country. But what happened this week was altogether different. Nothing like this has ever happened in our country before. . . . This was a desecration of our government, of our whole system of government, engineered by the president himself. A mob was set upon the Capitol, by the president himself, for the purpose of disrupting the certification of an election that he lost, absolutely lost, but claims to have won.

Just take a moment to view this travesty through the eyes of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or any other dictator on Earth who has a real interest in proving that democracy just doesn’t work right, that there’s nothing to aspire to. They have captive populations who they are messaging to now. They get to tell them that democracy is bullshit . . . that having a free press is just dangerous bullshit . . . because it drives people insane.

What does the United States stand for in the world today? If you don’t think it matters for our country to become the laughingstock of the world, to fail and fail and fail again . . . to fail to deal with COVID—and to fail in a way that still seems impossible to understand, to fail to distribute vaccines we already have in hand when there are more deaths from COVID now than at any point during the pandemic. We’re at the absolute peak and this desecration of the very seat of our democracy is happening before the eyes of the world. To fail to prevent the Russians from accomplishing the greatest hack in the history of cyber-war, and to fail so hard at containing the absolute madness of our president that we can’t even talk about these other failures. We can’t even talk about COVID, or the Pearl-Harbor-level hack of our government, because we have a shirtless fucking Viking stalking the halls of Congress. We’ve got people in “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts hunting down Nancy Pelosi at the behest of the fucking president of the United States.

Trump has been assaulting the foundations of our democracy since before he took office, and if you couldn’t see it earlier, as many of us did, it should have been absolutely clear to you the moment he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power . . . . throughout 2020, he repeatedly refused to offer an assurance that he would cooperate with a peaceful transfer of power. Half a dozen times at least, he shattered the most important democratic norm we have right before our eyes. He should have been impeached for that. I think that moment was the most shocking development in our politics in 100 years. The real “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is not to have seen, every day of this obscene presidency, what a terrifying risk Trump has posed to the safety and integrity of our country. And, of course, the ultimate Trump Derangement Syndrome sent a delusional mob attacking the Capitol, imagining that this was a path to securing Trump another four years as president. . . .

Many people on the left are interpreting the utter failure of law enforcement to protect the Capitol this week as a symptom of white supremacy. . . . And in some cases, it was the only point they made in response to this desecration of American democracy. . . . It’s the wrong point to make, and it’s wrong in almost every way. It would be wrong even if it were right, even if it were obviously true. . . . The cops were put in a totally untenable position . . . . Those cops got completely screwed. And to summarize their failure as a symptom of racism, even as you see black cops among them struggling to protect the place, is so sloppy and disingenuous. This pseudo-insight is now raining down from on high from every liberal voice in the media.

I am genuinely concerned that we have tens of millions of people in Trumpistan who are now, for all intents and purposes, totally unreachable. But between them and the rest of us, we have millions of conservatives who are not lunatics. They are absolutely outraged over the selective application of outrage. . . . The analogy between what happened last week and the BLM riots is idiotic. But it is easy to see how the media and Democratic politicians have totally discredited themselves in their eyes. . . .

Finally, I just want to touch upon the fact that Trump was finally banned from Twitter. . . . There are people who seem way more agitated over the fact that Trump was kicked off Twitter than they were over the attack on the Capitol. This is a very interesting topic and I think there are many issues to debate. But it seems to me that in the case of Trump, it’s not even a close call. Trump has been violating any sane terms of service policy on Twitter for years. He’s threatened nuclear war on Twitter. More importantly, he has ruined people’s lives intentionally on Twitter, as president of the United States, with tens of millions of rabid followers, many of whom he knows to be quite deranged. He’s attacked private citizens repeatedly knowing that they would be doxxed and inundated with death threats.

That should get you kicked off Twitter. He should have been kicked off years ago. In recent months, he’s relentlessly spread misinformation about the election and he has destabilized our society in the process. And then he incited an attack on the Capitol. Twitter isn’t obligated to give him a platform to do those things. This is not a free speech issue. This isn’t a “Why can’t we just debate all ideas issue?”, this is a “Why should we let the most dangerous cult leader on Earth use our platform to sow division in society?” issue. Why should we give him the tools to produce mob violence? Honestly, I would expect to get kicked off Twitter for causing one one-millionth of the harm Trump has caused on the platform.

Many people have pointed out an apparent irony that the president of the United States has been kicked off Twitter, but Ayatollah Khamenei and the Chinese Communist Party still have their profiles up. And they’re spreading odious misinformation. Well, they should be kicked off . . . . The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need Twitter as a platform to spread its propaganda. That seems like a pretty easy call. But there are many other things to say here. And I share people’s concern about the power of big tech and especially the the harm that these social media platforms have done to our society. This needs to be the focus of government regulation. I think Facebook should probably be broken up as a monopoly.

I think there’s a lot that has to be done here. But people have been getting kicked off Twitter for far less every single day. You’ve been on Twitter, and it is somewhat ironic to see all of these erstwhile libertarians not be able to find their libertarian principles and recognize that private companies should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do. . . . There is an interesting discussion to have about the power of these platforms. Maybe social media needs to look more like telecom. Should the phone company be able to kick all the Nazis off its platform because it doesn’t like what they talk about? These are interesting questions. . . . But with less than two weeks left in his doomed presidency, letting an increasingly destabilized Trump just tweet whatever the hell he wants to millions of proper lunatics . . . was an untenable situation. It might have been a hard call for Jack and the other people at Twitter, but as far as I can tell, it was the right one. . . .

I am worried that we will see some Timothy McVeigh style terrorism coming from the right at some point. And, of course, part of the responsibility for this will fall on Trump and his enablers, even if it happens months from now . . . . The lies that he has told will long outlive him. Our society has been poisoned, verifiably poisoned by lies. Trump harbors an enormous responsibility for this. But the antidote to the lies of Trump and his enablers can’t be the lies of the left. . . .

Biden should work very hard to diminish the power of the presidency and I think the Oval Office has to be made psychopath proof. Of course, it would be great if we could figure out how not to elect a psychopath to the presidency. But once having done that, we need a system that will check the misuse of that office. We need laws where we only had norms, norms that Trump was more than happy to violate. . . . Trump has been a stress test of our democracy that we nearly failed. We should do our best to learn from it. I’ve just been a barrel of laughs, these last two podcasts. Can we start 2021 again? . . . I'm starting the New Year all over again. Happy New Year, everybody.

—Sam Harris, “An Insurrection of Lies,” Making Sense Podcast #230 (January 11, 2021)

*Please note that this is a partial transcript created with freely available software. It surely contains errors and is no substitute for the real thing (i.e., listening to the actual episode).