Another departure for the show as Daniel and Jack chat about Sam Harris, inexplicably popular professional atheist, Intellectual Dark Webber, thought-experimenter, devil's advocate, mysteriously perennial victim of malicious context-removal, and definitely not a member of the far-right. Seriously... Sam Harris is not a nazi. The fact that we're talking about him on a podcast in which we normally talk about nazis (and fascists and white supremacists, etc) doesn't mean we're saying he is one. We're not. Nevertheless, we think he's relevant to our discussion. Something of a cathartic experience for both of us. We had fun. Content warnings. * Show Notes: Sam Harris website: https://samharris.org/ Sam Harris podcast, "Making Sense." https://samharris.org/podcast/ SPLC: McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating pathways to the alt-right "The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence. "Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.” For posters on TRS, Harris’ work blended easily into that of more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, whose popular blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like,” is reposted on American Renaissance. The site “really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers,” one user wrote. Their “biggest stepping stone” was from Harris’ work to Kersey’s blog: “It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic/political drivers behind the pushing of ‘diversity.’”" Sam Harris on Recode/Decode: HARRIS: "But it’s a larger problem that worries me that real liberals are vacating the space of rational conversation on certain topics, race and sex and gender and wealth and power and religion and immigration. Huge topics that a lot of people care about. And into that vacuum come right-wing nut cases, opportunists and grifters and narcissists like the president of the United States, and in the extreme, actual Nazis and white supremacists and, you know, populists of that flavor, who we shouldn’t want to empower and we’re empowering them, not just in the States, but I mean it’s even worse in Europe. This is a global problem. This is a point that David Frum has made, which I think is right, whatever you think about David’s politics. If liberals won’t defend specific ideas like secure borders, people will elect fascists to do the job. Enough people care about these things that if you’re going to call everyone a racist who’s concerned about immigration, eventually only a racist who doesn’t care about his reputation anymore will be elected to do that job." Sam Harris "What Do Jihadis Really Want?" Dabiq 15, referenced heavily in "What do Jihadis Really Want?" Sam Harris: "To Profile or Not to Profile," with Bruce Schneier: SCHNEIER: "Security is a trade-off, and requires some sort of cost-benefit analysis. What is the cost of your security system? What are the benefits? What, exactly, is your correlation? (TSA screeners can’t sort based on religion; they have to sort based on something they can detect. And since there’s no such thing as “looking Muslim”—it’s a belief system, not an ethnic group—they’re going to sort on something like “looking Arab,” whatever that ends up meaning.) Then, you’re going to have to analyze the resulting security system. How does it work, and how does it fail? What’s the false-positive and false-negative rate? (You’ll have to do some theoretical analysis, at the very least refuting current research.) Can your system be gamed? (You’ll need some experimental data with real-world TSA agents in real-world conditions. The last thing we want is a security system that can be defeated with a bottle of blonde hair dye.) You will need it to relate to other security systems. We only have a limited security budget. Is your security system better than other airport security options? How does it affect the other security systems already in place at airports? Would we be better off spending that money on some other aspect of airport security? Or something more general than airports? In my book Beyond Fear, I proposed a five-step process to think through some of these questions. There are other, more rigorous models. But security engineering requires something more than intuition." Sam Harris "The Limits of Discourse" with Noam Chomsky Digest of the Harris/Chomsky debate Ezra Klein "Forbidden Knowledge," (includes links to much of the Klein/Harris material) KLEIN: "He ultimately refused to have me on his podcast on the grounds that a conversation between the two of us would be “unproductive,” pivoting to a demand that I instead publish an op-ed supporting his views (you can read that piece here) or that he publishes all our emails to each other. [Update: Harris has now published our email exchange, and I recommend reading it. I don’t know why he thinks it helps his case, but I think it shows just how resistant to actual dialogue he is on this subject.]" Sam Harris/Ezra Klein emails: HARRIS: "Throughout this exchange, you’ve dodged every substantive point I’ve raised. What’s more, you continue to ignore the context in which you published that defamatory piece. Nisbett et al. say that Murray “was recently denied a platform at Middlebury College. Students shouted him down, and one of his hosts was hurt in a scuffle.” This is an obscenely euphemistic way to describe what actually happened. Hurt in a scuffle? A professor received a neck injury and a concussion. The car in which she and Murray fled was smashed with a stop sign still attached to part of the sidewalk from which it had been wrested. Murray was set upon by a mob—at Middlebury." Addison Independent report on the (Murray / Middlebury) event: "“The protesters then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and trying to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus." The Atlantic report on the event: "One [antifascist] took a large traffic sign, attached to a concrete base, and placed it in front of the car to prevent it from leaving." Middlebury professor on the incident: "Although they made it into the car, the crowd prevented them from easily leaving, with people leaning on the hood and climbing on top. Eventually, after nearly running over a stop sign someone had displaced in front of the car, they managed to break free and head toward the campus location for dinner." Politico, "How the Middlebury Riot Really Went Down": "Behind the vehicle, the security guards pushed protesters aside, clearing a path for the vehicle to slowly inch backwards. The group reformed quickly, allowing the car to move only a couple of feet at a time. Every time a security guard pushed her, said one of the anti-fascists, she steadied herself, planted her feet in front of the car’s path, and waited for her turn to be pushed again. She and her comrades, as she calls them, had trained for moments like these. Their goal wasn’t violence, but the anti-fascists did want to make life hard for Murray. Almost out of the parking lot, Burger sped up to take a left turn onto the street, but he wasn’t yet completely free of the crowd." Sam Harris/Ezra Klein debate: HARRIS: "Let’s take this off race and IQ for a second, because this is something that would’ve been probably just as radioactive and it just happened to break the other way and nobody noticed. I think it was three years ago, or four years ago. I think it was 2014 where there were some, there were reports about Neanderthal DNA. I think it’s David Reich whose op-ed in the New York Times kicked off our latest skirmish, I think it’s based on his work. It was found that most human beings are walking around with around 2.7 percent Neanderthal DNA. At the time, but it was found that the only people who don’t have Neanderthal DNA are black people, people who directly descend with some isolation from Africa, from the rest of the human community. At the time I tweeted, this is now 2014, I tweeted, “Attention all racists, you are right. We are special, or whites are special. We’re part Neanderthal. Blacks are just human.” It just was a trolling of the world’s racists." Matthew Drake, "Are Africans a Different Subspecies? | Tara McCarthy" Superior, The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini 'Being Mr Reasonable' - excellent, caustic overview of Harris by Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs Sam's entry at RationalWiki Mehdi Hassan's epic Twitter thread, listing "bigoted/offensive remarks... [Harris] never apologised for" Essential piece by actual expert on Islam and the Middle East, Professor Juan Cole: 'On How Everything Sam Harris Says About Islam is Wrong', Part 1 and Part 2 Why Is Sam Harris So Bad At Talking About Islam? - article parsing what Harris said in discussion with Maajid Nawaz Good article on Harris and 'New Atheism' by Glenn Greenwald Majority Report and Michael Brooks Show videos about Sam Harris - lots of good stuff here. 'Sam Harris, Uncovered' - Mondoweiss article Article about The Bell Curve, including Harris' support for the book's co-author Charles Murray 'Same Old New Atheism': On Sam Harris - Nation article Salon: 'How "new atheism" slid into the alt-right' Source of Karen Armstrong quote: interview about her book Fields of Blood - Well worth reading in full
Hello, and welcome to episode 22 of I Don't Speak German.
And yep, Jack here, back again, sorry.
And let's do a thought experiment.
Imagine there was an incredibly famous and well-regarded, by some people anyway, and very lucrative writer.
You know, he'd written books, and he's got a podcast, and he's got a reputation as a public intellectual.
But he's absolutely full of shit.
And he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he's actively dangerous to at least, I would say, two, probably more likely three or four separate groups of vulnerable people.
Wouldn't it be... I mean, I'm not saying we should do this.
But wouldn't it be justifiable to drop a nuclear bomb on him and anyone who happened to be near him, just to stop him causing harm?
I'm not saying we should do that.
How dare you accuse me of being a genocidal madman that wants to drop nuclear bombs on people?
That's not what I said.
I just said that we should stop people spreading bad ideas.
And this guy we're going to be talking about is the motherlode of bad ideas.
We're going to be talking about Sam Harris.
And I'm here to talk about Sam Harris with my buddy, Daniel Harper.
Hi, Daniel.
Hello, Jack.
And just to be clear, Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
No.
I want to make that absolutely clear.
On this podcast, we cover Nazis and alt-right and ethno-nationalist, etc., etc.
figures.
Sam Harris is none of those.
I want to make that clear to any of Sam Harris's fanboys who want to pretend that I did not say the thing I just said twice.
Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
We will keep saying it, and yet we will get the claim that we're claiming he's a Nazi anyway.
So anyway.
Yeah, Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
Now I've said it as well.
And also, just to be clear for the overly literal skeptic crowd, the intro that you just gave there is clearly in jest based on the things that Sam Harris has to say about brown people and people of a certain religious subgroup.
I was just playing devil's advocate.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, that's something that we clearly have to do if we're going to really engage with the content of the ideas of serious political analysis is to play a little devil's advocate.
So I understand where you're going with that.
Certainly.
Good.
Good.
I'm glad I'm not being taken out of context.
Because that's the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody, as we know.
Do you know it's actually impossible to disagree with Sam Harris and to quote him in context at the same time?
That's right.
To quote him in context is to acknowledge the truth of what he says.
Exactly.
There's absolutely no way.
Yeah, clearly, clearly.
That's why we have to quote him out of context, because the minute we give you the context, it just becomes clear that he's right.
So we, you know, we have to resort to these underhand tactics.
Exactly.
To silence him.
We should move into the actual show now.
Best-selling author with a podcast downloaded by God knows how many people.
I think it's like the eighth biggest podcast in the world or something.
It's remarkable.
I mean, we're like number like 22, I think.
I think we've kind of gotten up there to that level.
Holy shit, really?
We're nowhere close to that, I promise.
We have something like, I mean, you know, I think Sam Harris is up to like a million unique listens on each episode, and we're somewhere below that.
We're a little below that, yeah.
A little below that.
A million.
A million people listen to that guy every week.
Oh, fuck.
And you can be one of them if you put a link in the show notes to his podcast, so you can go listen if you care to.
That's right, yes.
So yeah, Sam Harris.
Not a Nazi.
No, not a Nazi.
Not a Nazi, but somebody that we felt we had to cover.
Exactly.
And as I said to Daniel before we started recording, I could just probably be here on my own ranting into the mic about Sam Harris and fill up hours of audio.
My history, shall we say, with Sam Harris goes back to the first book, The End of Faith.
Which was published in... When was that published?
Do you happen to know?
2004, I believe?
Yeah.
It was after 9-11 and after the invasion of Iraq.
And it was in... We're going to get... I'm going to get into... I have a quote here I'm going to read about how he came to write that book, which is very instructive.
So, yeah, but... You and I both kind of came out of New Atheism to some degree, right?
Well, to some degree.
I mean...
I was never fully all the way in, if you know what I mean, but 9-11 and the War on Terror era kind of hit for me at a moment when
I was, I was at a moment of political disorientation then, partly because of personal stuff that I don't want to talk about, and partly because of, you know, political stuff to do with my activity that is too complicated and involved and niche and boring to go into, but that's where I was.
And You know, it was a very disorienting time for a lot of people, and it was like that for me as well.
I didn't go quite as off the rails as some people round about that time, but I certainly started to be pulled in a direction that I now look back on with a great, you know, I now look back on that with a great degree of embarrassment.
And I always say, and this might be me narrativizing things a little bit, but I always say that The End of Faith was the book that kind of broke the spell for me.
And in particular, there's a line in The End of Faith where I think it's in the chapter where he's doing his obligatory pop at Chomsky as people Who want to make a name for themselves as intellectuals and commentators in something like the American mainstream kind of have to do at some point, to one degree or another.
And he's going through like, you know, the history of American imperialism, as we would probably put it.
That's not the way he puts it.
And he just writes it off.
He just writes off all that history and all that context with the phrase, no doubt we have much to apologize for.
He loves that phrase.
He loves that fucking phrase.
Does he?
He does.
I don't know.
This is kind of what we're going to be getting into with the episode, because my experience with Sam Harris is very much from that era, and I've lost track of him very, very happily, I have to say, in the present day.
And Daniel, of course, is more up on these things, so Daniel's going to be telling me about what he's been up to lately.
But yeah, that was a real, as I say, I'm probably narrativizing my memories, but that was a real kind of, holy fuck, what am I reading moment, you know?
And yeah, that book generally as well, because that is such a terrible, terrible book.
I don't think I ever read it all the way through.
I read like parts of it, but I don't think I ever like kind of sat down and read it cover to cover.
I was more familiar with Harris kind of in that period from his like TV, you know, he'd be on Bill Maher show or he'd be on.
You know, various, you know, kind of talking heads and reading his blog posts and that sort of thing.
So I feel like I was more familiar with Harris, you know, kind of from the beginning from his kind of more, more informal media appearances than from his books.
I do think I read Literature Christian Nation cover to cover, which he came, I think it was like the year or two after.
Yeah.
It was something.
It's just cash-in.
Right, right, just kind of the second book to – yeah, exactly, a cash-in.
Although we're not going to cover it today, but he really doesn't like it when you accuse him of trying to make money from his books apparently.
God, the thing that I ran into prepping for this is that I did re-listen to a whole – so just a little behind the scenes for the listeners here.
I did a little prep work kind of behind the scenes on this, re-listening to some old episodes of his podcast.
And then we kind of had to cancel and then we had a couple of weeks where Jack and I just weren't available to record together.
I kind of prepped heavy about three or four weeks ago and then, you know, kind of like dropped off and then didn't really have the chance to get quite back up to that level of speed.
So some of my memories on this are slightly hazy.
And I realized while I was putting notes together today for this podcast that I could tell ten different narratives about how terrible Sam Harris is through ten different incidents.
Like the more you look into – like Sam Harris is like fractally awful.
Yeah.
And that he's sort of – and I find it interesting in that he has this – when I first started listening to the Nazi podcast, I was kind of expecting more people to sort of have the opinion that he has, which is that, for instance, I was kind of expecting more people to sort of have the opinion Brown people are terrible because they don't support things like –
You know, gay rights and equality for women and that sort of thing, which is not something you ever, ever see on the alt-right, on the far-right.
You never see white nationalists who are, you know, I'm totally pro-feminist and that's why I don't like brown people.
Sam Harris comes at it from a much more of the kind of, you know, what we might call the liberalist skeptic, you know, kind of position and that, you know, Islam, not Muslims genetically, but Islam is terrible because it Uh, isn't secular, doesn't allow us to, you know, it's anti-gay, it's anti-woman, that sort of thing.
And I think it was kind of a surprise to me because I was kind of used to, from the, um, new atheist stuff that I had kind of come of age in, um, I was used to that sort of argument.
And so it was, it was kind of a, a very, you know, kind of odd thing that you literally never hear that on the alt-right.
It's just not a thing that happens.
Um, and so, um, For me, the reason I kind of got interested in Harris was I had listened to an episode of his podcast that he did with Charles Murray.
This was in 2017.
I didn't listen to it immediately.
It just kind of came up in my YouTube viewing.
Just like 40 minutes of that was kind of clipped and put up on YouTube, and I listened to that, and I was like, well, this is just basic Charles Murray bullshit.
And then some months later, there's this debate he has with Ezra Klein, and I listened to that podcast.
I actually listened to that several times.
I could do probably four hours talking about that.
that whole exchange we're going to get into a little bit of that down the line and there's there are a bunch of show notes on that but um fascinating it's a fascinating debate it's a fascinating like series of events and just describing the story to you i could describe the story i could fill a podcast just telling that story i don't know maybe we'll do it as a bonus you know maybe we'll do it at some point um we're going to get into one particular detail in that We're going to get into two particular details.
We're also going to do a full episode on race and IQ, and all that sort of thing, and focus very specifically on Charles Murray, and on kind of the history of where those ideas come from, and we might do a couple of episodes on that.
So I don't want to get too heavily into that now, because we'll be here all night.
Charles Murray, we should probably specify, is the co-author of The Bell Curve.
Yes, the co-author with Richard Herrnstein of The Bell Curve, which is the 1994 book that sort of codified the race and IQ debate that black people are less intelligent than white people and that that is more than likely at least partly genetic, and it becomes a – it's a big thing.
We will cover that, but once I kind of listened to the Ezra Klein debate, I set Harris up too, so I just added him to my rotation, and I kind of went back through his history and listened to some interesting episodes, like what seemed interesting.
He's interviewed so many, so many terrible people!
He's been on, he's done several things with Jordan Peterson, at least two full podcasts, plus he does live events with Jordan Peterson.
Sorry, go ahead.
We should say, you know, we've talked about how big his audience is.
This isn't just him, this isn't just, you know, him engaging in sort of Socratic debate for the beauty of the cascade of ideas, you know.
This is him giving a platform and a profile to dreadful people.
Most of them already have fairly large platforms, to be fair.
I mean, you know, like he he's like chatted with Ben Shapiro and David Frum and Andrew Sullivan and all these kind of, you know.
Well, at the very least, he's lending, you know, what credibility he has to them as well.
Right.
Well, and he lends a credibility that is of the sort of like I'm the rational centrist, you know, kind of.
Yes.
I'm a good Democrat, etc.
And as a leftist here on this podcast, we have slightly different opinions about what liberal means than I think Sam Harris does, but he certainly kind of portrays himself as, you know, I'm no right-wing nutjob.
I just hang out with right-wing nutjobs.
And interestingly, or not so much, if you – depending on what you expect from your nice, good, rationalist liberals, Sam Harris has never ever, so far as I know, interviewed, for instance, a socialist on his podcast and talked about the Marxist law – sorry, what's the word I'm looking for?
Labor theory of value, labor theory of value.
Sorry, I had a brain fart there for a moment.
He's never talked about the tragedy of the commons or anything.
There's no engagement at all with anything that's left of Elizabeth Warren, for instance.
He just isn't interested in having those debates.
And in fact, again, as we'll get into shortly, he has expressed on many occasions that he has no interest in engaging with people who see the world through a more systemic lens, who see the world through a material history.
He's very interested in ideology, and he's very interested in ideology and ideas as kind of explaining the broad sweep of human history in terms of the problems that we see in our societies today.
And this is the fundamental failing.
This is just the fundamental failing of this project in terms of trying to confront these issues.
And it's a thing that provides a lot of rhetorical cover for actual Nazis because basically he hates the left, quote-unquote, the regressive left, more than he hates the Nazis, even though he does hate the Nazis.
And let's, again, be clear.
Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
The Nazis don't like Sam Harris, and Sam Harris does not like the Nazis.
I'm just going to say it right there.
There is no love lost between these two.
And yet, in some ways, they kind of rely on each other.
Yeah, they're kind of symbiotic.
I think a very good indication of the relationship, actually, is I think it was a tweet that he sent out where he said something like, you know, typical sort of reactionary talking point, particularly today.
And this is very much the direction he's been swinging in lately.
As far as I can tell, he says something like all identity politics is terrible or all identity politics is poison.
And then the second line is, but white identity politics is is the worst.
So that's kind of that's kind of his approach to this in a nutshell.
I think it's a it's a perfect encapsulation because he says white identity politics is the worst.
So he's explicitly saying that, you know, he hates Nazis and white supremacists, et cetera.
They're the worst.
But he prefaces it with all identity politics is terrible, which means, you know, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Any sort of you know anything that we would recognize as any sort of left movement of you know a presto marginalized or vulnerable people he all lumps in together and he you know you talked about the the episode of his podcast we talked to charles murray.
co-author of the bell curve and he characterizes murray very much as a man who is persecuted and marginalized and psyched you know this incredibly he's a best-selling author he's you know he's got an incredible platform he's he's funded he works with the american enterprise institute he's like feeded on right-wing movements he you know charles murray will never ever miss a meal unlike the poor children who got kicked off of welfare roles
in 1994 when the republicans passed the contract with america which was largely inspired by the bell curve it Exactly.
Yeah.
You know, if we want to talk about books full of bad ideas directly inspiring crimes, but of course that would be, you know, structural violence taking place in the heart of the imperial capitalist metropolis.
So, you know, it's just not on his radar as anything real.
So he never talks about that, of course.
So, yeah, this is very much where he is now.
He very much characterizes Charles Murray and people like Charles Murray as the silenced, the persecuted, the censored, etc.
And it's by the left.
It's people, you know, denying them a platform.
And, you know, because it's directly comparable, you know, students not wanting Charles Murray to speak at their college.
Pressuring the college and the college deciding, actually, yes, we think you're right.
Or, you know, people protesting him when he arrives to speak at the event.
That's the same thing as him being persecuted and silenced by a totalitarian left that just refuses to engage with any other ideas.
That is very much the way of looking at things that is all over the so-called intellectual dark web.
And it's very much the direction he's been going in, I think, isn't it?
Absolutely.
I actually have a quote from a recent interview he did, and this was kind of the bit that I read that made me decide to go ahead and stick him on the plate sooner rather than later, because it just kind of pissed me off.
But there is this podcast interview he did on Vox on the Recode Decode podcast, and I know that leftists, including myself, have Issues quote-unquote with Fox.
I'm not here to defend everything that they do But I think there's there's there's a lot When when even like wonkish liberals can point out the structural problems with Sam Harris's worldview You know that you're dealing with with someone awful So Russell Brand can point out very eloquently actually the problems with Sam Harris's worldview So, oh, did you watch that a Young Turks video?
recently as well Yeah, I've been watching Young Turks and Majority Report videos about Sam Harris, and I came upon some very good ones, actually, particularly from Michael Brooks, which I will link to.
Yeah, definitely.
I listened to that one, I think, yesterday or the day before.
And I don't normally follow that, but I was kind of like, Looking at Sam Harris stuff on YouTube kind of idly and so yeah, that one is definitely worth linking to.
When, you know, when Russell Brand brings a materialist conception of the world issue and Sam Harris is out to lunch on it, that's kind of amazing.
I have a quote here from Sam Harris, and this is about this sort of like regressive left idea, and it is from this, so I actually haven't listened to this Recode Decode podcast, but there's a full transcript, and I've read the transcript, so I'm gonna read from this.
This is Harris speaking.
But it's a larger problem that worries me, that real liberals are vacating the space of rational conversation on certain topics, race and sex and gender and wealth and power and religion and immigration, huge topics that a lot of people care about.
And into that vacuum come right-wing nutcases, opportunists and grifters and narcissists like the President of the United States, and in the extreme, actual Nazis and white supremacists and, you know, populists of that flavor.
who we shouldn't want to empower, and we're empowering them, not just in the States, but I mean, it's even worse in Europe.
This is a global problem.
This is a point that David Frum has made.
Oh, God.
Jesus Christ.
He's had David Frum on the podcast.
Of course he has.
This is a point that David Frum has made, which I think is right.
Whatever you think about David's politics, if liberals won't defend specific ideas like secure borders, people will elect fascists to do the job.
Enough people care about these things that if you're going to call everyone a racist who's concerned about immigration, eventually only a racist who doesn't care about his reputation anymore will be elected to do that job.
Let me just say that last paragraph I just read could absolutely come out of Chris Cantwell's mouth.
Although on that end of things, it's like, well, you're either going to have to let the Nazis do this job through law and order process, or you're going to get people shooting up synagogues.
Harris isn't going quite that far.
It's like, well, if you're not going to let the fascists come in and clean up the brown people, then This is kind of his shtick though, isn't it?
liberals get up the brown people you're gonna you're gonna get fascists who will do it in a more violent way i guess this is point you know this is this is kind of his shtick though isn't it he makes so many of these points that are you know a hair's breadth away from being identical to the kind of stuff you hear from chris cantwell and people like that and he does it a he does it in his particular slippery way where he will put caveats in so he's got a fallback position so if anybody challenges him on it he can retreat to his
you know the anad the more anodyne and inoffensive fallback position and then accuse you of misrepresenting him which is one of his particular tricks that uh jordan peterson has also adopted you know You know, he does that.
He's much more canny and savvy about it.
But the other thing is that he makes these points, these very, very reactionary points.
You know it what you've just read is like well yes we need we need strong borders and if liberals aren't going to defend borders you know with with that phrase doing an immense amount of work you know so much actual material reality of human suffering and history and everything just completely elided just completely pushed off the edge of the picture there by well of course obviously we need strong borders so if liberals aren't going to defend sensible policies like that then you know you're going to end up with the fascists doing it and the difference is
That, you know, he does it from a position of being anti-fascist or anti-Nazi.
But it's still, and he's not a Nazi, but he's, when he does things like that, he is flirting with the ideology.
And this goes right the way back, because you go back to those first books, Letter to a Christian Nation, there's a line in it that's like, it's something like, the only people talking sense about immigration in Europe seem to be fascists.
It's something like that.
Yeah, I mean, which, and the difference, and the difference that Harris would point out, and again, just to be clear here, is he's not demonizing people, like the actual fascists that we've talked about, you know, the overt race realists, Nazis, etc., would say that brown people are just genetically predisposed to certain kind of culture and predisposed to blowing themselves up in suicide bombing, etc.
Sam Harris disagrees with that.
He thinks it's just bad ideology and bad culture that makes people do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, in many ways, actually, I think the fascist version of it, where it's in the genes, I think that's more coherent.
It's obviously complete bollocks, but it's more coherent than Sam Harris's version, because Sam Harris's version is this slippery, weird sort of... I don't know if he's ever quite gone in with Dawkins on the whole, you know, Religion is a bad meme thing i don't think so but it's the same thing i've heard him say that in that many words but i mean i would i would highly doubt that he would like strongly disagree with it.
It's the same sort of weird idealist in the philosophical sense of idealism you know as reality being primarily made of or powered by ideas it's the same sort of weird insubstantial a historical idealist approach.
To, you know, how culture works, isn't it?
You know, it's not genes, it's the culture.
What does that mean?
It's the culture, it's the ideology.
I've got another segment I want to read from that.
But he always abstracts from history.
His analysis is always completely ahistorical.
So where's the space where you explain where and how the ideology arises?
You know, it's not there.
So the kind of the essential link between the ideology and it's unspoken it's in a kind of black box of non understanding at the center of his analysis but racism is there it's just in.
Innate to the analysis.
It's not he doesn't he doesn't come out and say it and I don't know what he thinks in his heart, but he's anti-racist in his Explicit, you know self-identifications.
I think loads of what he says is effectively just racism But he is his his explicit self-identification is isn't is as an anti-racist but the sheer a historicism of his analysis and It kind of leaves racism as the only possible logic for the position.
Right.
I mean, I would I would, you know, push back slightly on him being anti-racist.
Just I mean, not that I think you're you're describing it that way.
I think here the the tripartite division that I've described a couple of times coming from Kendi's work stands from the beginning between the the racist position, the assimilationist position and the anti-racist position.
I'm talking about his self-identification.
You know, he always says he's not a racist.
Well, right.
He says he's not a racist, but I think he very clearly fits into that assimilationist position.
Well, it's fine if Muslims come here so long as they act white, basically.
I mean, he wouldn't put it in those words, but the secular Muslims are the most important people in the world, and we should let them in, no problem, because we need to save them from their savage family or whatever.
I mean, he almost literally says words like that, you know, in many, many places.
Absolutely, that's where he's alibying himself.
And whenever he's criticised for racism, he always, you know, calls on all his Muslim or ex-Muslim friends to come and defend him.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid Nawaz are the two big ones.
Well, he did that when he got into that Twitter spat with Mehdi Hassan and came out with a Really nasty smear on Mehdi Hassan where he tweeted a video of Mehdi Hassan coming out with, you know, pretty nasty stuff that he has, you know, repeatedly disavowed and apologized for.
And, you know, Mehdi Hassan brilliantly responded with a great big long string of tweets, just a litany of racist statements from Sam Harris.
Which it is not hard to find, but of course that's always out of context.
And we have to believe the lived experience of Muslim people who say Sam Harris isn't a racist, but we mustn't believe the lived experience of Muslim people when they say that their religion is a religion of peace and love.
Funny how that works.
I also want to be clear that there are instances that I found where I think that people have quoted Sam Harris unfairly.
Exactly, exactly.
But like, he thinks everyone quotes him unfairly.
Like, if he listens to this podcast, he will be furious that we are not, like, quoting him exactly and putting exact, you know, things, putting in the audio and all that sort of thing and expressing it.
I've tried to put as many fucking links that you can to everything that I've put in here.
So hopefully, I actually do encourage people, please go and listen to the full thing for yourself.
I am working very hard to not take anything out of context here, so just to be clear about that.
I did want to just read another little segment from this Ricoh Decode interview, which talks about how he came to write The End of Faith, and I think this is interesting.
I actually do.
I mean, this is a really good interview, just in the sense of you get kind of a full picture of kind of who Sam Harris is.
I mean, Harris was a rich kid.
His parents worked in television in Los Angeles.
I think his mom was a producer on The Golden Girls or something.
He's a trust fund kid.
Which can't possibly have any bearing on his view of the world, of course.
Well, he spent like 11 years in Nepal and in India studying meditation after he took some some drugs.
He took, I think, MDMA and had like a psychedelic experience and then spent like 11 years studying like kind of Eastern mysticism, basically.
Look, I'm sorry.
I grew up in the 90s.
Right.
I'm here.
I'm just saying taking MDMA when you're young, that's no excuse.
No, no.
I think the logic I'm landing on here is if Sam Harris had decided to just be kind of the atheist new age philosopher guy, kind of going out and being the rich trust fund kid who pays Really impressive Eastern mystics to teach him to meditate.
I think that's pretty despicable in itself, but it's at least much more harmless than the pattern that he's gone off in.
Anyway, so this is him talking about...
What got you to write the book in the first place?
I was writing it on 9-12.
a little bit of disrespect to Christopher Hitchens, which is just delightful, who was like a friend of Sam Harris's back in the day before Hitchens died.
But she says, what got you to write the book in the first place?
He says, 9-11.
She asks, 9-11.
He says, I was writing it on 9-12.
It was literally my instantaneous reaction.
Okay.
Had not been something you had, not something you had done?
No, I mean I- it was a walk up to this.
Harris again.
My writer jobs were already somewhat in hand because I'd spent a decade writing on my own before I decided I had to go back to school.
But- and then I finished in philosophy, which allowed me to write what I wanted to write.
But no, I was in the research phase of my neuroscience PhD, and I was, as chance would have it, I was doing neuroimaging work on belief, religious and not.
So I was.
The consequences of belief in the world was something that I was already thinking about.
And the difference is between believing and disbelieving a specific proposition.
It's, in this case, believing that paradise exists.
Uh, interviewer.
Got it?
And martyrdom is a way to get there.
Either you believe that or you don't.
And insofar as you really believe it, down to your toes, it's totally rational to be motivated by that.
That's how we confine ourselves in the presence of psychologically healthy, otherwise well-adjusted people who have other opportunities.
The shibboleths of the left here are really non-functional.
The idea that you need to be a victim of some oppression, that you need to have economic hardship, no.
The quarterback of the football team in Marion County can decide, I want to be a jihadist, given the requisite beliefs.
And then he goes on to kind of talk about, for instance – and then I knew a fair amount of Islam at that point.
But so the fact that we were so bewildered and we're still bewildered by – as a week ago or less than a week ago, there was an article in The New York Times talking about how wealthy the Sri Lankan bombers were.
And he talks about, like, why would people want to do this?
Why would wealthy people, people with means, etc., decide they want to become suicide bombers?
And Harris is completely mystified by any explanation except, well, they believe that they're going to get 72 virgins in paradise, and that's the reason.
That's the reason people would do this.
Yeah.
Well, that is a rich kid.
Rich, privileged, white, who is made anxious and paranoid by 9-11, which is a fair enough reaction.
Also, we're going to do a whole episode on 9-11 and its aftereffects at some point, trust me.
Anyway, please, go ahead.
Yeah.
But instead of seeking understanding, he seeks comfort.
Just the spiral of paranoia and anxiety, like so many of these people did, and he finds it in, you know, miraculous confirmation in his neuroscience.
The thing I was already studying, the thing I was already working on, the thesis I already had, it turns out it was just confirmed by 9-11.
That's right!
And not only that, it proves that all those people Who, you know, who say that there's unfairness in the world, that, you know, that, like, rich people and men and white people, purely coincidentally, that that happens to describe him, by the way, that they're privileged in the world.
You know, they're wrong.
Their shibboleths just have no relevance whatsoever.
These things happen because People just get bad ideas in their heads.
That's what happens.
There's these nasty old books, and people read them, and it's got nothing to do with their social position, their material position, their historical position.
Nothing like that.
It's just they read the nasty book, they get the nasty idea in their head, and that's it.
And, you know, there you go.
Isn't that comforting?
It's so wonderful.
I mean, On that on that on that general topic.
Also, you know, we can I can I can feel a lot better about the fact that my country is about to go on an imperialist rampage.
You know, I know he struck an equivocal note about the war on terror, but he's also been one of the he was also one of the main intellectual.
I won't say cheerleaders for the war on terror, but he certainly provided a lot of the Quote-unquote intellectual support, I would say, in the atmosphere of the times.
And that's what the new atheism was.
It was a morbid symptom of that historical moment, I would say.
And I think what Sam Harris is, he's somebody who has parlayed that moment where he opportunistically made himself a public figure off the back of that.
He's parlayed that into a continuing career as basically a reactionary, technocratic, centrist, neoliberal with a particular shtick which is having a go at religion and puffing rationality and stuff like that.
Well, and increasingly being, you know, making a sort of anti-Islam and anti, you know, kind of Middle East view and anti-immigration view is kind of central to what he kind of has to say.
I mean, he's had Douglas Murray.
Douglas Murray's been on this show at least two or three times, and I was relistening to one of those episodes this afternoon, and, you know, like, Murray is a terrible, like, xenophobe awful person.
Not, like, kind of overtly Nazi.
He doesn't seem to sort of lean into that again, that kind of race realist, you know, like, gas all the Jews stuff.
But, I mean, you know, just vehemently, like, anti- Islam because a handful of people that might – of starving, desperate refugees or economic migrants or whatever, a handful of those might end up committing terrible crimes.
And so therefore we have to blanket, keep all those people out of Europe and America.
And Sam Harris sits and just nods along with that.
I mean, there's another moment with Douglas Murray where he's saying, you know, uh, you know, serious countries, you know, real countries, uh, you know, are, you know, are not interested in these like trans rights things and these transgender bathrooms.
And we're going to be sitting here and, and be having this like needless conversation while at the same time, uh, you know, the, the real, the really serious countries are going to come and just like chop all our heads off, you know?
And Sam Harris is literally laughing along in the background while that's happening and I mean, which is just, I mean, that's the sort of thing that's just vile and disgusting and awful like regardless of how you feel.
That's just completely unnecessary, completely disgusting.
It is, yeah.
And Islamophobia was always central to it.
Islamophobia was always completely central to New Atheism.
I think they always sort of, they always, all of them put, you know, screens around it to a great extent, but at the heart of the God Delusion, the Dawkins book, at the heart of the Hitchens book, at the heart of Sam Harris' book, The End of Faith,
Islamophobia, demonization of Muslims, demonization of Islam, and although their attitudes to the actual war on terror varied, Dawkins was against the invasion of Iraq for instance, it was always a A reaction to the war on terror and 9-11 from a sort of anxious, paranoid, reactionary, liberal standpoint.
One of the things that we do, one of the things that I spend a lot of time on on this podcast is analyzing people's ideologies and analyzing social movements through the lens of their propaganda.
I mean, that's argue that that's what I am doing with this project, ultimately.
Um, and so when someone like Sam Harris tries to do the same thing and just takes them at their word...
Because it fits into his, like, kind of ideological view of what their world is like.
Yeah.
I find it, like, kind of almost personally insulting, you know?
It does just kind of show that Harris is, you know, he pretends to be this kind of great public intellectual, but ultimately he is, you know, he's a pipsqueak pretending to erudition on these matters.
Absolutely, yeah.
I opened his book, The Moral Landscape, you know, and he openly contradicts himself just in terms of the basic terms of his argument in the introduction.
And it's visible for all to see in the most basic terms.
This is somebody, you know, playing at being a philosopher, and it's visible on the page.
And it's only a slightly more sophisticated performance than you get from Stefan Molyneux, to be honest with you.
Well, I mean, you know, Molly Molly was a little bit better at like tap dancing around the the kind of the red flags in his in his arguments, you know, Harris just doesn't even know they're there.
And so he just kind of blindly runs into them because he's just this kind of, you know, rhinoceros of, you know, verbiage and just like he just Yeah, he's like the he's like the the kind of the town drunk who just manages to kind of Yeah, yeah.
wave his way through the traffic cones just by, you know, just by refusing to admit they're there.
I don't know.
It's weird.
You know, Molyneux at least, Molyneux actually knows what he's doing, where Sam Harris is, he just seems to be blind to it completely through his own kind of ideological, you know, system.
And it's just kind of, it makes him like kind of fundamentally uninteresting because it's just, he's just stupid on these issues.
Like all of this could come down to a whole thing of like, you can't just, you know, the world is more complex than what people claim to believe.
Yeah.
You know, material conditions matter.
It's just, like, it's one sentence.
You're done.
Your whole career.
Over.
This is it.
The opening, the introduction to The End of Faith is an anecdotal account.
You know, get used to that, Sam Harris readers.
It's an anecdotal account of a suicide bombing.
And, you know, he has the suicide bomber who actually doesn't die.
I can't remember exactly, but I think he stopped before he lets his bombs off and they interview him and he says, oh, I didn't I didn't I didn't care about any politics or anything.
I just wanted to go to paradise.
I just wanted to be a martyr.
Right.
And that's his anecdotal example.
And that's the basis, really, of that anecdote is the basis of the entire thesis of the book.
And certainly with regards to Islam, there's an entire chapter of the interfaith called the problem with Islam, you know, so just to announce things, you know, the sociology on suicide bombing is in.
We know about why people do this.
It's a response to invasion and occupation and tyranny and feelings of helplessness and powerlessness in the face of that kind of, you know, overpowering injustice.
That's what it is.
We understand, to the extent that we can understand anything, we understand the social phenomenon of suicide bombing, you know, and, you know, atheists have done it, you know, Some of the originators of it as a terroristic tactic were atheists, some of them were Marxist-Leninists, some of them were Christians.
The reality of this is complicated and it's because it's history.
It's history.
It's dirty and it's complicated and it's nuanced and it's ambiguous and it's material.
It's based in the grubby reality of material power relationships and this is Sam Harris's entire career in a nutshell.
Present anecdotal evidence You know connecting things you don't like with the things that you want to prove a bad and just abstract away all power relationships so you can just ignore empire and imperialism and colonialism and capitalism and all this that that's it that's the entire Sam Harris project right there in the introduction to the end of faith and
I'm struck constantly by this, like, not only does he say Islam is the problem, but Islam is the problem based on this, like, kind of cartoonish image of the afterlife being, you know, as if other religions don't promise an afterlife, and as if, just to be clear here, I'm an atheist, and there are things that are worth sacrificing my life for.
I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm talking about neo-Nazis under my real name on the internet.
I mean, I'm not trying to put too fine a point on that, but is there nothing Sam Harris would die for?
Is there nothing that he believes in enough to...
To be worth sacrificing his life?
Is the belief in this cartoonish afterlife the only thing that could possibly justify giving your life for a cause?
I have no idea how Sam Harris would answer that question.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it does
Strike me as just like fundamentally just like this rich kid who's never really had to suffer for anything And you know it is in his belief structure and just to just again I do want to get into this this little bit here because he an episode I think is episode 43 of his podcast he does an episode called what do jihadists really want and this is Interpreting propaganda this is the thing Sam Harris is really really good at by the way because he takes them completely at their word and
And he reads from Dabiq, which is the English language ISIS magazine, from Dabiq 15.
I've included a link to Dabiq 15.
So he reads big chunks of this and then just comments on it.
See, they say right here that they're not doing this for material reasons that have to do with invasion.
They're doing this because Allah wills it.
And clearly we must take that 100% seriously.
This propaganda piece, this clear propaganda, we must take it as honestly.
But he tells the story.
So one of the things in this magazine, and I've got it, it's called How I Came to Islam, and it is on page 36 of this magazine.
And I do recommend that people read it because it's a woman who comes from Finland.
Who finds the religious institutions in Finland and the time and place that she grew up to be lacking.
She doesn't really like sort of secular society.
She finds, you know, she doesn't find them meaningful and she goes and searches for other ways of kind of living her life and she ends up She ends up finding Islam as part of a school assignment, actually.
They do a little assignment on Islam, and she's like, actually this speaks to me more than the culture in which I grew up.
She ends up moving to the Middle East, and her son, her young son, actually dies in some either bombing or terror attack, I'm not sure.
I can't remember the details, and I don't want to go hunt for it here.
But her son dies, and she talks about how it's actually a great blessing that her son was fated to die, that he died in this terrible way, that nonetheless would ensure that his soul was kind of brought to Allah, as opposed to living in the kind of corrupt degenerate society that she came from.
And it's a terrifying, it's a terrible story.
It's a story of tragedy and etc, etc.
I'm not, and it's a complicated story, right?
What Sam Harris gets out of this is she believes that her son was better off dead.
than alive because she believes in the afterlife.
Now, again, it's not only Muslims believe in the afterlife.
Christians, you could believe – how many Christian families who send their children off to die in a needless war for oil have very similar things to say that it's very nice that my son died.
It's terrible that he died, but also like he died fighting for what he believed in.
He died fighting for freedom, or he died, you know, fighting against... I mean, you know, it is not difficult to find videos of soldiers saying truly terrible things about all the brown people that they're going and killing.
Plenty of soldiers commit war crimes, etc, etc.
This is not unique to this ideology.
And also, this structure, if you read the bits of this that he doesn't read on the podcast, it's very clear that this woman, you know, basically just kind of fell in with a generalized reactionary movement.
That she didn't like the sort of secularism, she didn't like a degeneracy, she didn't like, you know, she wanted something that was more controlled and conservative and right-wing, and that she wanted that kind of life.
And found it in this place because she didn't find it anywhere else.
You know, this is a general pattern with reactionary movements, which, if you view this from a slightly larger point of view, then, like, there's an afterlife involved, and that must be the key to it.
You suddenly understand a lot about, like, how reactionary movements attract people.
You know, it's not like it was right in front of Sam Harris and he misses it because he's so focused on the afterlife Yeah, I hate going through it to that much detail.
I do recommend people read this I do one of these days.
I'm gonna go through the whole of the beak I think it's fascinating like the way it's it's structured but again, he had it right in front of him and And he misses the forest for the trees.
He misses the forest for a bump on a log.
He's not even seeing the trees!
Yeah, he misses the forest for a twig.
No, that's perfect.
He just misses out on the huge explanatory power of a complex historical and materialist analysis because all he's interested in is finding a link between a line in a holy book An idea in a head and a blob on a neural imaging scanner.
That's the trajectory he wants to follow and everything that falls outside of it is just irrelevant.
It's just like he says to Ezra Klein, American history is irrelevant.
When he's talking about race and IQ!
Race in America!
He says American history is irrelevant.
We've had that conversation, he says.
And the other thing about what you've just read that strikes me is the utter hypocrisy of the man.
You know, anybody criticizes him, he just wails, oh you're misrepresenting me, you're mischaracterizing me, you're taking me out of context.
And yet, you know, I believe in the principle of charity when you read people's works.
I think when you read something that somebody has said or something that somebody has written, you should try to make it make sense, because that's what they're probably going for.
And if you can't make it make sense, then you know that what they're saying is probably incoherent.
So you should read things with an effort.
You know, what charity did he show to that woman's words when he crudely misinterpreted them as, you know, I think my child is better off dead?
And yet more hypocrisy, right?
He believes what Muslims say when they say the things that he wants to hear.
And yet I remember during the war on terror era when people like him were talking about it's all about, you know, they're doing this because they hate our values and they hate our freedom and they want 72 virgins.
You know, Al-Qaeda was very clear about what they wanted.
They wanted the US out.
You know, they wanted Israel and Palestine sorted.
They wanted the US to stop helping Israel oppress the Palestinians.
I'm not expressing, you know, sympathy with Al-Qaeda, by the way.
But, you know, and they wanted the US military bases out of the holy sites in Saudi Arabia.
They said this, but it was just all ignored by people like Harris.
I agree, definitely.
Sam Harris also has a habit of getting into email debates with people that he is in no way competent to get into email debates with.
And coming away with the mistaken impression that he won.
Yes, there are three examples of this.
The most fun is definitely the Noam Chomsky one.
I don't have like a quote from that one just because I really do want people to just read the whole thing.
But Sam Harris approaches Noam Chomsky.
I've got a link in the show notes.
Sam Harris approaches Noam Chomsky and wants to have a debate about like The morality of war and sort of the, the, the, you know, the value like collateral damage and, and, you know, that sort of thing.
And, uh, as a way of sort of like challenging Chomsky's assumptions about how the war on terror and the war in Iraq is actually a good thing, et cetera, et cetera.
And to challenge Chomsky's kind of notions of American imperialist violence being actually really, really bad because Harris kind of.
He sees it all as a matter of intentionality.
Noam Chomsky, you don't seem to take intentionality into account.
Somebody says in the End of Faith, he says that Chomsky has a moral blindness because he doesn't take our good intentions into account.
He just takes our good intentions for granted.
No doubt we have much to apologize for, but we always mean well.
That's just a given that we always mean well.
In episode two of his podcast, literally episode two, Call it why I won't criticize Israel.
He makes his exact point that like, well, the Israeli sure they have much to apologize for in terms of their like murder of children.
But if we can imagine the nuclear weapons on the other hand, the Arabs, those dirty Arabs, he doesn't say dirty Arabs, but you get the impression would absolutely just nuke Israel off the face of the map.
And so.
viewing it through this moral lens of intentionality we have to we have to view things you know we have to say that while we can criticize israel in in the harshest terms um there is no moral equivalency between them and it's like what the fuck are you even talking about there's real atrocity happening on the ground yeah and this is you know this is taking idealism to the point of absurdity Again, philosophical idealism.
You know, yeah, okay, as a thought experiment, let's reverse it so that Iran or whatever has all the nukes.
What would they do if they suddenly magically acquired nukes tomorrow?
What's the point in that as a thought experiment?
That's not going to happen.
Countries don't suddenly acquire a massive nuclear arsenal, right?
In order to have nukes, we would, in Iran, right, you know, a sophisticated nuclear weapons capability in Iran.
The entire history of the world would have to be completely different.
So the entire history of Israel and its, you know, everything would have to be different.
So the entire material history which has caused there to be enormous tension between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors wouldn't have happened, would it?
Something else would have happened instead.
So what he's positing there Tacitly, and maybe even without realising he's doing it, although actually I think he realises he's doing it a lot of the time and he's just lying.
He's saying, you know, even if you changed all the material circumstances and all the historical circumstances, the Arabs would still, if they had the capacity, they would still want to murder the Jews.
And I'm not going to say why.
And don't ask me why, and don't try to guess why, because if you do I'll call you out for calling me a racist.
Well, what's that?
What is that?
I know what that is.
He's saying that there's something inherent in Arabs or Muslims that makes them want to kill us.
Sorry, I was hoping you'd just say racism, but, you know, that's fine.
I mean, and it is, it's very much that there's something, you know, right there that, you know, and ultimately this is where, you know, I spend a lot of time trying to differentiate between sort of the cultural assimilationist and the sort of biological determinist positions just because I think in a lot of ways it's useful.
In terms of kind of combating these ideologies and these movements sort of understand what they're actually saying, but but in practice, you know, it's it's it's putting up a border wall and not letting certain kinds of people through and whether you let in, you know, a handful who meet some, you know, like stringent criteria, join your society.
It's disgusting and awful.
they look more like you and then you feel they're safer to your comfort level than the rest of them versus keeping them all out, it's kind of a – it's nice for that handful, but it's still ultimately a deeply xenophobic reactionary agenda, and it's disgusting and awful.
Oh, you know, whether it fits the sort of textbook definition of fascism or racism is just a – it's useful in terms of us understanding it, but ultimately in practice it kind of fills the same need.
Yeah, ultimately, you know, trying to make sense of it in those terms would be playing exactly the same kind of idealist, just game of abstract categories that's all Sam Harris ever does.
I think it's a good thing.
I think you can really see his method in his sort of tap dancing around whether or not the... because he's come out in favor of profiling, hasn't he?
You know, because certain people... Oh, I've got one right here.
I've got one right here.
Don't worry.
So I'm just going to recommend you read that Noam Chomsky debate, and it's literally Chomsky swats Harris away like an annoying mosquito.
And at one point, Harris is like, well, I don't know how you come across in this conversation, but I would like permission to publish these emails so that people understand how he calls the thing the limits of discourse, you know, an attempted conversation with Noam Chomsky.
And Chomsky basically responds like, if you want to publish these, go right ahead, whatever, dude.
That's going to come back in a minute.
I love the idea of Chomsky going, whatever, dude.
He didn't say whatever, dude.
I would love for him... Noam Chomsky, if you're listening to this, just give us audio of you saying whatever, dude, and it's gonna be great.
Even better, I'd like to hear Slavoj Žižek say whatever, dude.
I think that would also be hilarious.
If any well-known leftist figures want to send us audio of them saying whatever, dude, we will gladly accept and publish.
Yes, definitely!
Let's just have that be the closing.
Just like a dozen lefty academic times.
I am – this is such a silly podcast.
I'm completely serious, by the way.
No, no, no, absolutely, absolutely.
We are such – we are silly, silly men.
No one should take it seriously.
Anyway, so he had a debate before the Chomsky debate, and I believe 2011 he has a debate with a security expert named Bruce Schneier.
Now, again, we could have our political disagreements with Bruce Schneier here.
He's someone who was trying to work within the system to sort of build.
I mean, he's like a computer security guy.
He's done.
He's kind of a meta security expert.
He's he's a very good at sort of designing systems.
He's kind of his expertise in designing systems to make make organizations and processes more secure.
And Harris wants to have a debate with him about racial profiling.
And so let's not pretend that Bruce Schneier is raging at the tooth, you know, leftist here.
Firebrand intellectual.
Left-wing intellectual.
He's no, he's no, like, virulently, you know, sort of like, you know, he's no softie.
Let's put it that way.
Um, but Harris is, uh, and again, I recommend you read it because it's hilarious.
It's just hilarious to read the whole thing.
Um, but Harris comes down with, uh, you know, like, well, we should, you know, if we know with some 99% likelihood that the next, uh, you know, suicide bombing is gonna be a, uh, brown, is gonna be a Muslim, you know, who believes certain things, and, you know, that that's gonna be the next, uh, person who's gonna try to, uh, bomb an aircraft, shouldn't we just, uh, focus our energies there?
And Schneider says over and over again to various degrees of explanatory power, no, this is completely ridiculous, and I'm gonna read one of his, like, just... What happens when you confront an actual expert with Sam Harris's, like, mumbo-jumbo?
This is Schneider speaking.
Security is a trade-off, and requires some kind of cost-benefit analysis.
What is the cost of your security system?
What are the benefits?
What exactly is your correlation?
TSA scanners can't sort based on religion, they have to sort based on something they can detect.
And since there's no such thing as looking Muslim, it's a belief system, not an ethic group, they're gonna sort on something like looking Arab, whatever that ends up meaning.
Then you're gonna have to analyze the resulting security system.
How does it work and how does it fail?
What's the false positive and false negative rate?
You'll have to do some theoretical analysis at the very least for feuding current research.
Can your system be gamed?
You'll need some experimental data with real-world TSA agents in real-world conditions.
The last thing we want is a security system that can be defeated with a bottle of blonde hair dye.
You will need it to relate to other security systems.
We only have a limited security budget.
Is your security system better than other airport security options?
How does it affect the other security systems already in place at airports?
Would we be better off spending that money on some other aspect of airport security?
Or something more general than airports?
And he ends with, but security engineering requires something more than intuition.
And that's just, Harris just refuses to see this point over and over and over again, that you can't confront experts who actually look at the nuts and bolts of these systems and give them like, but we know it's going to be a brown person.
And so it's like, even if we admit that the next one's good, even if we say 100% that our next 10 terror attacks are going to be The Muslim men from some certain, it still makes no sense to use that as your heuristic because ultimately, suddenly the system has huge numbers of more failure points that can be gained.
And Harris refuses over and over again to admit to that fact and to understand what Schneier is actually saying to him.
And it's like, but no, it's, they're brown people and they're bad and they're gonna come and kill us.
And at least that one ends with a sort of like a more of a, you know, a mutual respect at least.
I mean, Schneier does not, you know, quite go off on Harris the way he should have.
But, I mean, again, I love that one just because it's so, like, clearly, I'm an expert on this and you're not, and you're pretending to have any kind of knowledge on this subject.
And, you know, you see this over and over again with Harris.
He gets in under his head.
You see this with Charles Murray.
He doesn't understand the sciences, so he just ends up accepting whatever bullshit Charles Murray gives him, right?
Nodding and going, hmm, interesting, like Dave Rubin.
Oh, interesting, yeah, like Dave Rubin.
Or when Douglas Murray is talking about the threats to Western civilization by brown people and how trans people are achy.
Like, oh, yeah, I don't know, sure, whatever.
And that's because ultimately Sam Harris is a scam artist, in my opinion – What he's doing is he's selling a brand.
He's selling the Sam Harris brand, which is the Project Reason.
Reason and rationality and detached, you know, intellectual, cool, thoughtful, you know, knowing better about everything, just also happening to be a rich white guy, you know, and we should view all these things with a great sort of
Detachment and, you know, and I'm not racist or anything, but also it just happens to be that, you know, Antifa are a bunch of thugs and Black Lives Matter are stupid and all this stuff about trans bathrooms is rubbish and we shouldn't be thinking about it and we need to racially profile brown people and stop immigration.
These just happen to be things that we should do.
I'm not racist, I'm just rational.
And that's why he has all these fucking fans and all these millions of downloads and listeners And ultimately I think you know kind of talk I mean I love these debates where he just gets squashed you know by I mean he gets squashed as I say by Russell Brand and Ezra Klein it's not hard to squash the guy but ultimately it doesn't matter because all he has to do is show up and do his thing and he's feeding the fans and that's ultimately all he's doing I think.
Exactly, and he has this, I mean, we are going to get letters from this one, let me put it this way, this is going to get lots of angry tweets, despite the fact that Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
He's not a Nazi.
Because the ultimate thing is going to be like, we're not understanding the point that Sam Harris is making, when I think I understand completely the point that Sam Harris is making.
And I, you know, I wouldn't say, I'm not putting words in your mouth, I wouldn't say he's a grifter or that he's like, I mean, he is selling a brand, but he buys his bullshit.
I think he literally buys that he is actually this super intelligent, super rational human being who is just able to, who just can't, Convince the irrational dullards around him that ultimately he's correct.
Yeah, but all the great scam artists do believe their own bullshit.
I mean, that's just part of the car.
And so much of what he pedals is just I mean so much of it is just incredibly.
Simplistic crude basic reactionary garbage repackage like that hold the whole the whole thing about whether we should profile airports and stuff it all basically do you know you boil it right down to its essence it's.
A paranoid white person in a line at the airport feeling uncomfortable because there's a guy two spaces ahead with a head of them wearing a turban.
Right.
That's all it is.
It's just, oh, look at him.
Oh, that makes me anxious.
That's all it fucking is.
And he just couches it in pseudo-intellectual language.
And he does this, he does this over and over again.
You know, so he comes out with pseudo-intellectual sounding verbiage that's basically just, PC has gone mad these days, hasn't it?
And Islam isn't a race.
You know, it's just basic reactionary shit packaged as intellectualism.
That's, that's his, that's his, that's his con.
Well, and the, you know, just, just the, the failure to see this sort of like, regarding something like airport profiling, you know, It is worth it to marginalize and oppress an entire racial group.
Every brown-looking man should be subjected to cavity searches to make sure that I don't have to wait an extra 20 minutes in line at the airport.
That's ultimately what racial profiling always was.
Why do I have to be searched?
I'm clearly not the bad people.
You should only go after the bad people with this stuff.
It's just so transparently stupid.
And that bit of that debate you just quoted is a perfect example of his childish nonsense crunching up against somebody who actually knows something about the messy technical nature of reality on the ground.
It's almost embarrassing.
It's like Dunning-Kruger Syndrome, you know, to a T. He's completely in over his head and he doesn't even realize it.
And just for completion, getting into the third instance in which Sam Harris decided to publish some emails that he thought made himself sound like an awesome public intellectual and actually made him sound like a doofus, even in the minds of his own fans, we need to get in and talk a little bit about the Ezra Klein, Race at IQ, Charles Murray stuff.
We might do a whole episode talking about this exchange.
I'm not going to get into the details on it.
I put a link in the show notes that includes all the links that you need to kind of get caught up on the whole thing.
It's absolutely fascinating, but like probably a little bit too inside baseball to spend an hour and a half on it.
But I want to read just this little bit from the Sam Harris Ezra Klein emails.
Now this is Sam Harris.
Throughout this exchange, you've dodged every substantive point that I've raised.
What's more, you continue to ignore the context in which you published that defamatory piece.
Nisbet et al.
say that Murray was recently denied a platform at Middlebury College, students shattered him down, and one of his hosts was hurt in a scuffle.
This is an obscenely euphemistic way to describe what actually happened.
Heard in a scuffle, a professor received a neck injury and a concussion.
The car in which she and Murray fled was smashed with a stop sign still attached to a part of the sidewalk from which it had been arrested.
Murray was set upon by a mob at Middlebury!
So, some of those details are accurate.
One of the reporters at Middlebury was injured.
I have a blog post that you can read to kind of talk about this incident in which Charles Murray was denied a platform at Middlebury.
There's a lot of conflation that's happening in terms of Harris' account on this, in that he ...fails to differentiate between the students at Middlebury who engaged in mostly peaceful protests to, you know, turn their backs, to, you know, shatter them down, who, you know, pulled a fire alarm, for instance.
And then there was a small group of, you know, older anti-fascists who surrounded the car and did, and behaved in a more aggressive manner.
Um, Harris feels no need to differentiate between these two groups, um, because it doesn't suit his agenda, uh, but even more than that, he claims that the car was smashed with a stop sign still attached to a part of the sidewalk.
So, and I have all the, there are four independent articles that I read about this, because that seems like a really, if somebody was beating the car with, with, like, He says that someone wrested the stop sign out of the concrete and smashed it on the car, which sounds like something the Hulk would do, not something that, like, an anti-fascist would do.
Well, it might have been an anti for a super soldier, of course.
Yeah, of course, of course.
The Addison Independent.
This is from the day after the event or shortly after the event.
This is a quote.
And again, all these links are in the show notes.
The protesters then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on it, trying to prevent it from leaving campus, he said.
At one point, a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car.
Thrown in front of the car.
Public safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.
From the Atlantic, one anti-traffic sign attached to a concrete base and policed it in front of the car.
A Middlebury professor on the incident.
Again, I've got all these links right here.
Although they made it into the car, the crowd prevented them from easily leaving, with people leaning on the hood and climbing on top.
Eventually, after nearly running over a stop sign someone had displaced in front of the car, they managed to break free and head towards the campus location for dinner.
And then, probably the most accurate, the far-left politico.
Oh, the Middlebury riot really went down.
Behind the vehicle, the security guards pushed protesters aside, clearing a path for the vehicle backwards.
The group reformed quickly, allowing the car to move at a time.
Every time a security guard pushed her, said one of the anti-fascists, she stated herself, planted her feet in front of the car's path, pushed again.
She and her comrades, as she called them, had trained for moments like these.
Their goal was that the anti-fascists did want to make life hard for Murray.
Almost out of the parking lot, Berger sped up to take a left turn into the street.
It wasn't yet completely free.
So, I'm sorry to read that much about the detail of a stop sign.
But I think it speaks to Harris's sort of perspective on this.
He reads an account of someone using a stop sign to block the path of a vehicle.
And in his mind, it's raving, violent anti-fascists smashing a stop sign on a car and injuring people.
I use this as kind of the object lesson in terms of the the way that the in the rhetoric in the way that like pushing for particular kinds of readings of these kind of like again violent interactions between anti-fascists and you know regular respectable people gets read in sort of the mainstream liberal culture because I don't believe that like Harris believes that he's distorting the event here.
I think this is you know what he believes happened.
I mean he wasn't there at the time And yet no news report that I could find references anything of the sort the way that Harris describes it happening.
And so it again just speaks to this sort of idea that Harris is so terrified of the leftist response of people who are willing to stand up and speak loudly against
Literally, the rise of liberal fascism and racism and structural inequality, etc, etc, that he has gotten that there is, that the anti-fascists are the real, like, violent ones, and they're doing things, and yet he seems not to notice actual white supremacist violence, or he doesn't seem to think it's very important.
This kind of thing you see this with this actual dark web crowd this idea that the real danger is coming from the left it's the incivility from the left protesting and fighting against even violently even you know with milkshakes or whatever against The actual, you know, power structures.
And so there's just a complete lack of a willingness to engage with an analysis of those power structures.
That there is no difference between using violence against an ethnic minority and using violence as a way of defeating a more powerful structure.
And this incident just seems like such a Such an encapsulation of it for me.
It just seems so, like it's just so transparent in Harris's mind.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's the whole purpose of his rampant idealism and his rampant anti-empiricism, you know, because he claims to be an empiricist, but his entire analysis just depends upon ignoring huge swaths of empirical reality, you know, historical fact.
And the purpose of doing that is to make, as you say, structural violence and structural power relations Just make them vanish out of the analysis and reduce it down to this abstract game of categories where you can turn it into a battle of ideas you know and.
Yeah, he may not be a Nazi, but he's definitely a reactionary.
And, you know, he's practicing an identity politics of his own for all his constant whinging about identity politics.
His identity politics is of the wealthy white male, you know, technocratic neoliberal and about, you know, shoring up that kind of power and by making it just disappear in these thought experiments and these
Idealist games that he plays it's it's what it's all about and part of that now the you know the iteration that took when he first started making his career as a reactionary huckster in the war on terror you know that was one way of doing it and he's carried that through into today and he's turning it into this.
This agenda of attacking the left, you know, and this is why he will sit down and have conversations with Ben Shapiro, and we'll sit down and have conversations with David Frum and Andrew Sullivan.
And while he is not like chatted with Stefan Molyneux, he had kind of said at a certain point, Oh, I would be happy to sit down with Molyneux, because I think he's a reasonable voice, but he'll sit down with Jared Taylor, who he doesn't think Jared Taylor is a reasonable voice, because Jared Taylor is, if you listened to a previous episode, Jared Taylor is the lead guy at American Renaissance, and he thinks American Renaissance is too explicitly racialized, but Stéphane Molyneux
It's just kind of exploring good science and being kind of a reasonable person and even though we may disagree on our politics you know, we should be able to have like a Reasonable discussion over this and this comes up over and over and over again in terms of Sam Harris's, you know Sort of sort of political analysis is why can't we just have reasonable conversations and yet Sam Harris?
Rejects having reasonable conversations with people who are anywhere meaningfully on the left Very very rarely does he bring up anyone with like an actual feminist issues or an actual view of racial issues unless they are like this guy coleman hughes he's like a 22 year old like college sophomore who gets published in coillette and is like the their expert on race issues because he's a black man willing to say like the real problem is the black community etc it's like you know he won't have conversations with
say you know not tahisi coates or ibrahim kendy uh both of whom um esra klein recommended to sam harris and said you should have You should have conversations with people like this if you really want to explore these issues.
He will bring in people who basically already agree with him.
He'll bring on Charles Murray, but won't bring on any of Charles Murray's critics.
And it's just it's such an open.
And there is a particular incident we will probably cover when we do the race episode, but he did bring somebody on who challenged all of his assumptions about Charles Murray like a week after the Charles Murray interview.
And it did not go well for Sam Harris, but we'll cover that another time because I don't want to get into the details right now.
Yeah, and it's why he, you know, it's why he supported Trump's both-sides-ing or many-sides-ing of what happened at Charlottesville.
And he said things like, you know, oh, you know, the crowd of Antifa or whatever attacked peaceful protesters who just happened to be Nazis.
I think that's pretty much a direct quote from him, you know.
And it's why he constantly puffs stuff from right-wing figures.
He is basically reactionary.
He might not be a Nazi, but he is basically reactionary and he shares that project of demonizing and belittling and discrediting the left with today's fascists.
And you were talking about how he refuses to have reasonable debates with people.
One person I remember him debating in textual form quite a few years ago now is Karen Armstrong.
The very fine scholar of religion you know very serious actual historian of religion and he had a debate with her and he was he was disgustingly rude and condescending to this woman who knows far more about these things than he does.
And, you know, regarding Sam Harris and what he means today, I want to read something.
I'm going to read something now.
It's from an interview that Karen Armstrong did about her book.
I think it's her most recent book, Fields of Blood, where she writes about the history of religious violence.
I haven't actually read the book, you know, and I'm sure that Karen Armstrong and I would have our differences, etc.
But she writes the book about how it's just not It's just not reasonable.
It's too much of an oversimplification.
This canard about, you know, religion being responsible for so much violence and, you know, violence is about power and it's about economics and it's about politics and stuff like that.
And and there's one part of the interview.
Where the interviewer asks her.
I'll read the interview now.
This is the interviewer speaking.
When you hear, for example, Sam Harris and Bill Maher recently arguing that there's something inherently violent about Islam.
Sam Harris said something like Islam is the mother load of bad ideas.
When you hear something like that, how do you respond?
And this is Karen Armstrong's response.
It fills me with despair because this is the sort of talk that led to concentration camps in Europe.
This is the kind of thing people were saying about Jews in the 1930s and 40s in Europe.
This is how I got into this.
Not because I'm going to apologize for religion, or because I'm filled with love and sympathy and kindness for all beings, including Muslims.
No, I'm filled with a sense of dread.
We pride ourselves so much on our fairness and our toleration, and yet we've been guilty of great wrongs.
Germany was one of the most cultivated countries in Europe, it was one of the leading players in the Enlightenment, and yet we discovered that a concentration camp can exist within the same vicinity as a university.
There has always been this hard edge in modernity.
John Locke, Apostle of Toleration, said the liberal state could under no circumstances tolerate the presence of either Catholics or Muslims.
Locke also said that a master had absolute and despotical power over a slave, which included the right to kill him at any time.
That was the attitude that we British and French colonists took to the colonies, that these people didn't have the same rights as us.
I hear that same disdain in Sam Harris, and it fills me with a sense of dread and despair.
I totally agree.
That's pretty much perfect.
And in a world in which we have actual concentration, not filled with Muslims, although there are some Muslims, I'm sure, in these camps, but we do have camps filled with brown people in southern New York.
Yeah.
And, you know, how much have we seen Sam Harris Murphy, just to see if he had mentioned it, he talked about, you know, that kind of that kind of terrible thing, you know, it's much, much worse when Charles Murray gets, you know, hit with the deaths, or, you know, or Tommy Robinson, or sorry, that's clearly a much more important than children being tortured.
Far more so, yeah, because our intentions are always good by definition.
Right, right, exactly.
Just to sort of again kind of read a couple of things here and wrap up, I did want to read a little segment from that Ezra Klein debate, from the actual debate.
Speaks to the fact that Sam Harris has no understanding of what the far right actually believes and what they actually say in the way that their minds work in the way that ideology and propaganda works because.
I'll just read this and this is Sam Harris speaking.
I'll just say it bears emphasizing that, you know, we've said repeatedly, we've done it kind of jokingly, but you know he's not a Nazi.
He's not a Nazi.
Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
We're going to keep saying it.
You know, believe it or not, you know, and this pertains to lots of debates that are having now that we shouldn't have to have, but it doesn't begin at its worst point, you know.
It begins quietly and slowly and gradually and a lot of the groundwork for it and a lot of the support for it and a lot of the atmosphere in which it grows is provided by people who aren't signed up members of the party, okay?
Right.
I think this is what you know is what Karen Armstrong's getting at.
And I think this is something that we really do need to emphasize.
Sorry, I'll let you go on.
No, no, exactly.
It's it's it's not that Sam Harris is believing these things.
It's not that he's but he's he's providing cover.
And ultimately, you know, there is a You gotta pick a side in this, right?
Like, if you don't want to be involved, you don't have to be involved.
But ultimately, it really is like there are people who are coming to do ethnic cleansing, and then there are people who are fighting against that.
And you get to choose.
There's one side or the other.
Which side do you want to be on in that battle?
And Harris has kind of picked his side on that.
Like, he thinks he's kind of standing in the reasonable center, but let's just... He has no clue.
And this is where I want to kind of... In the debate, he says, you know, Let's take this off recent IQ for a second because this is something that would have been probably just as radioactive and it happened to break the other way and nobody noticed.
I think it was three years ago or four years ago.
I think it was 2014 where there were some there were reports about Neanderthal DNA.
I think it's David Reich whose op-ed in the New York Times kicked off our latest skirmish.
I think it's based on his work.
It was found that most human beings were walking around with around 2.7% Neanderthal DNA.
...at the time, but it was found that the only people who don't have Neanderthal DNA are black people, people who directly descend with some isolation from Africa, from the rest of the human community.
At the time that I tweeted, this is now 2014, I tweeted, attention all racists, you're right.
We are special.
Our whites are special.
We're part Neanderthal.
Blacks are just human.
It was just a trolling of the world's racists.
And let's just...
I heard that and I tweeted at it at the time that I heard it.
It's so hilarious because if you follow these people at all, they use the exact opposite argument.
I have a link to a video from Matthew Drake.
Uh, who does this show called Illustrated Philosophy, where he takes, uh, right-wing audio clips and then illustrates them on camera.
I mean, he's a talented illustrator.
He's a fuckin' Nazi.
But, anyway, I had to link to it on Bitchute because it has been taken off of YouTube because, um, he's a horrifying racist and it's hard to... I mean, you can be a racist, you just have to be slightly more coded, and he's pretty awful.
We'll co- We'll get to him eventually.
He's a buddy of Cantwell's, kinda, sorta, um...
But anyway, there's a link, and you can listen to Tara McCarthy make the exact argument that it's because European-descended people have the most Neanderthal DNA that makes them ethically superior.
The point is, like, the point was never the science.
It's never the science that makes these things real.
It's always just the justification for the pre-existing belief.
So you can watch that thing there.
There's also, there's a recent book that was published called Superior, The Return of Race Science by Angela Zing.
Yeah, I'm about a third of the way through this book.
It's pretty good.
It's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit of an overview.
I think if you're listening to this podcast, you might find it to be, I mean, I don't know, like for me, it's a little bit, I would like a little bit more detail on some of this stuff.
It's a little bit, but I think it's a very useful book and there's a segment I'm going to read from this and I didn't cut and paste it into the show notes just because the Kindle doesn't want to let me do that, but we'll see.
So I'm going to read this little section here.
Indeed, when the Neanderthal connection was revealed by geneticists, ancestry testing companies were quick to sell services offering paying members of the public the opportunity to find out how much Neanderthal ancestry they have, presumably in the expectation that this might mean something to them.
The finding also had a peculiar effect on scientific research.
Fairly soon after it was found that it was modern-day Europeans who have the closer association to Neanderthals, not, as it turned out, Aboriginal Australians, the image of the Neanderthal underwent a dramatic makeover.
When their remains were first discovered in 1856, the German naturalists are technically naming them homo stupidus.
But now these same Neanderthals, once the dictionary definition of simple-minded, loudish, uncivilized thugs, became oddly rehabilitated.
It's almost like a sort of naive, wiggish idea that you can, you know, you can debate fascists out of their positions by just saying, oh, look, here's some nice science.
It proves you're wrong.
And they'll go, oh, that's that's a that's a shame.
It turns out I've been wrong all this time.
Oh, well, never mind, old chap.
No harm, no foul.
You know, it's almost as if that's rather silly or something, isn't it?
Yeah, it's almost as if this is about And then not about like the actual white nationalist these actual races will use any kind of definition of genetic difference as a way of justifying their their beliefs about their own superiority and it doesn't you know suddenly it turns out it turns out Europeans have the.
Um, have a higher percentage of Neanderthals than other people, so therefore the Neanderthals must have been good.
Yeah.
And you see this not just in this kind of far-right ideological spectrum, although you do see it there, but you see it in terms of the way that museums, the way that respectable scientists suddenly start to reinterpret.
Oh, it turns out we're the ones most closely genetically related?
Maybe they did have art, maybe they did have culture, you know, and then suddenly, no, they're more like us!
You know, can't you see?
Again, it's almost like, you know, science like every other branch of human discourse and knowledge and understanding is, you know, socially and materially and historically embedded in a network of existing power structures, you know, and that those might actually influence the way people think and write and talk about things.
And naive idealist just so stories about, you know, beliefs bad, facts good.
Scientific facts can't be racist.
Actual quote from Sam Harris.
You know, it's almost as if that's all rather silly.
In that bit of the Klein debate that you quoted, he goes on to sort of whinge about how, oh, if it had gone the other way, the left would have made that, you know, an untouchable subject and we wouldn't be able to talk about it, doesn't he?
Which gives far more...
Which gives far more comfort to the far right, that sort of thing repeated endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
That gives far more comfort to the far right than he did damage to them by tweeting, you know, his sarky little tweet.
Right, and it's not like people are, again, we'll do a whole thing on race and IQ, but it's not like this is a subject that is forgotten about in academia.
People talk about genetics and talk about This is in terms of genetic propensity.
I mean, this is this is a highly, you know, a highly active field of research.
You know, lots of money gets spent on these things.
What you're not allowed to do is to do it in a sort of, you know, overtly racialized, stupid, pseudoscientific way.
And not expect to be criticized for doing it stupidly.
Yeah, you know, science, you know, as an institution or a set of institutions has its flaws, but you can't do it in a way that's at variance with the current mainstream scientific understanding of these things, which is that, you know, race as a category is, you know, certainly in the old fashioned sense, it's next to meaningless.
I mean, and then of course, like, so I want to end, this is a piece actually from the SPLC, and this is entitled McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan, investigating pathways to the alt-right.
And I want to end on this mostly as a sort of a summarizing again kind of why I thought this episode was necessary, and we're wrapping up here.
I mean, we may go on a few more minutes, but I feel like We could do 10 of these.
We might just do fun audio bits where we make fun of Sam Harris for 30 minutes.
We might just do those as bonus episodes because I have only scratched the surface of this utter stupidity.
But I want to read, which sums up why I think it's important.
The Skeptics Movement, whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them, has also helped to channel people into the alt-right by way of human biodiversity.
Sam Harris has been one of the movement's most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence.
This is a thread on the then-existing therightstuff.biz forum.
There was a thread in which people talked about how they got into the alt-right, and this is sort of a Someone just going through and kind of summarizing the contents of that thread.
So, anyway. anyway.
Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of the scientific consensus, that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based.
Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics and environment, demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-20th century, Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray's work as politically correct moral panic.
For posters on TRS, Harris' work blended easily into that of the more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, who we discussed last time when we discussed American Renaissance, and there's going to be some news coming up about him, I think, in the near future.
Anyway, whose popular blog, Stuff Black People Don't Like, is reposted on American Renaissance.
The site really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers, one user wrote.
Their biggest stepping stone was from Harris's work to Kersey's blog.
It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic and political drivers behind the pushing of diversity.
Just for me, just so I'm done quoting the piece here.
People find Sam Harris and people like Sam Harris, they are interested in the exploration of this quote-unquote scientific data about racial differences, but they find Harris's ultimate conclusions lacking because they are just lacking any kind of real foundation behind them.
They move on to the harder stuff that gives what seems like a more reasonable perspective by basing things and like, no, we should actually be racist because this thing is real and we should take this into account.
And that's why people like Harris who provide cover for these beliefs who are not who are talking publicly about these things to huge audiences without any kind of real understanding or even willing to accept pushback from critics.
There you go.
Can't put it any better than that.
leads people down this path into overtly fasciistic ideologies.
So again, Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
Nazis don't particularly like Sam Harris, but they often find him really useful.
There you go.
Can't put it any better than that.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think we're done.
I think that's, I think, again, so much more we could do with, I think we've been going on nearly two hours now, so time to wrap up, I think.
Yeah, I think we can wrap up now.
I am sorry listeners that the audio has been a bit spotty We have tried to we've had to actually record certain bits Several times because we broke up too much, but I think it's still okay.
I think it's still listenable and We may have to find a different way to record because we've had some audio issues.
We're using Skype and I know the last couple were a little bit spotty as well.
Ultimately, Jack and I have a lot of experience doing this and with no disrespect to the other guests, we just haven't recorded as often together.
We're working on the technical problems and we do apologize for them.
Indeed.
Do you know what we're doing next time?
Well, I'm not sure exactly.
I might have a guest come on pretty shortly, and I'm kind of working on scheduling that.
But the next time I think you and I are together, there's been some news that's happened, and I think it's going to be fun to finally get around to Andrew Anglin, actually.
So, Andrew Anglin and the Daily Stormer.
Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin.
Right-o.
He lost a lawsuit.
He lost a lawsuit, and yeah.
4.1 million dollars if anybody can find his ass.
So yeah, I think it's time to wrap up on the Anglin story a little bit there.
So yeah, I think it's time to do that next.
So yeah, that's the plan.
And we might have another guest episode in between now and then.
So yeah, that's the plan.
Okay, great.
Okay, well that was episode 22.
We talked about Sam Harris.
He's not a Nazi.
But yeah, but.
As opposed to Andrew Anglin who absolutely is a fucking Nazi.
Yeah, that's it, actually, isn't it?
You know, in exactly the same way that Harris has spent his career repackaging, you know, crude racist bullshit in intellectual language.
There you go.
You can sum him up by just slightly changing the I'm not a racist, but thing into, you know, he's not a Nazi, but.
Right.
Well, in England, it's done the exact opposite.
He takes like sort of the sort of pseudo intellectual arguments and then And then the black people are just genetically inferior and, you know, we should crush them, the infants, etc.
You know, so anyway, we'll get into that next.
Yeah.
So you can find me on Twitter if you want to do that at at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore.
And you can find Daniel on Twitter at Daniel Harper.
Do get in touch with us if you want to give us any information or tips or advice or ask us any questions or anything like that.
We want to hear from you.
And we have Patreons.
If you'd like to give us some money, that would be very much appreciated.
It genuinely does help us to do this.
I just want to say, this is going to sound very corny, but I'm incredibly grateful to the people who are listening.
We have a much larger listenership than we ever thought we would get with this show.
And it's just incredibly gratifying to go to the website and look at the stats and say, bloody hell, how many people have downloaded this and are listening to this?
And we're getting some very nice feedback and signal boosts on Twitter as well.
So to everybody that's done that, just thank you so much, guys.
That's brilliant!
Absolutely, I 100% agree with that and I've got I am still behind on my emails.
I do apologize.
I'm I'm I'm working my way through that I had some Last week and I meant to kind of spend some time on that But then I was also on vacation and I spent less time thinking about Nazi shit than usual.
So my apologies for that That's fair.
I think you do need your occasional breaks from from thinking about Nazi shit, you know, I think just for your own psychological health You know Yeah, that's it then.
