#225 — Republic of Lies

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, it has been two weeks since the election, and those of you who don't spend a lot of time on social media may not be seeing how crazy it is out there. All I can say is we appear to be living through a very dangerous moment, and Trump and his enablers, in their desperation to hold on to power, are making our situation much more dangerous. I want to elaborate on something I tweeted after it became obvious that Biden had won the election. This was around November 6, I think I wrote, there's a needle that we really must thread successfully. Contempt for Trump and his enablers in government is a patriotic necessity. Contempt for 70 million Trump voters is a serious error. Life is complicated. So I want to spell this out a little more, because very few people are threading this needle successfully or even attempting to thread it. And some people have confused what I was saying there with people like AOC seeming to call for vengeance against Trump supporters. She went so far as to encourage people to keep lists of everyone who had supported Trump in any capacity. I think it's quite clear that nothing good is waiting for us down that path. Over 70 million people voted for Trump, and there are many reasons for people to have done this or to have found that they just couldn't vote for Biden. And Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the division in our I mean, he is not Stalin, he is not Hitler. He is a vindictive little con man who got plucked out of a carnival somewhere by Mark Burnett and put on television for over a decade. Trump is the quintessential american fake, and it's been astounding to watch such a bizarre and insubstantial person accomplish one crazy stage dive after the next because there were millions of upraised hands waiting to catch him and to bear his weight. So there are real social problems at the bottom of all this that we have to address, and we won't address any of them by writing off everyone who voted for Trump as racist or otherwise irredeemable. But there are many people in my circle, friends and colleagues and podcast guests, who are making the opposite error. Many of them are almost exclusively focused on the problem of the far left, and this is causing them to significantly discount the harm that Trump has caused and is actively causing to our society. Some of these people are Trump supporters, but many aren't. And they've been taking the trump team's allegations that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud way too seriously. And they're extending a principle of charity to trump and to the rest of his team that is, frankly, delusional. Again, there is a needle to thread here, and many people don't appear to even see it, insofar as I've noticed what others in the so called intellectual dark web have been saying. It's generally not something I want to be associated with. I don't want to single anyone out in particular, but allow me to take this moment to turn in my imaginary membership card to this imaginary organization. I mean, the IDW was always tongue in cheek from my point of view. It was a funny name for a group of people who were willing to discuss difficult topics in public, mostly on podcasts. But it never made sense for us to be grouped together as though we shared a common worldview. I never saw much downside to it, and I didn't much think about it. But in the aftermath of this election, with some members of this fictional group sounding fairly bonkers, I just want to make it clear that I'm not part of any group, right? So if you want to criticize my ideas, that's great. But I only represent myself here, and no one else speaks for me. We have a crisis of legitimacy now on all fronts. People have lost their trust in our institutions, and this is understandable, given all that's happened over the last four years. Trust in media has almost collapsed. But that doesn't mean there still isn't a difference between the New York Times and Breitbart, or between journalists who are doing their best to report facts, even while they harbor their own political biases, and political operatives, or conspiracy theorists who are obviously spreading lies. So as bad as things are in mainstream media, and don't get me wrong, they're quite bad, you simply can't place equal blame on both sides. Politically, at this moment, we have a sitting president who is essentially a QAnon conspiracist. So if you find yourself saying things like, all politicians lie or Biden is just as corrupt as Trump, you have become part of the problem of misinformation in our society. Biden would have to be a supporter of antifa and lying about literally everything to be comparable to Trump. Biden's next tweet would have to say something like, we have evidence that the CIA invented the coronavirus to kill black people. He would have to be that maniacal and the whole democratic party along with him, for there to be an equivalence between Trump and Biden, or between Republicans and Democrats. At this moment, yes, there is influence peddling and bad incentives and opportunism and cowardice and the whole carnival of human error on both sides of our politics. But the republican party has become a personality cult devoted to a fake strongman who really is doing his best to undermine our democracy. So a special focus on Trump and his enablers is totally warranted right now. And again, there is a needle to thread here. There is a difference between Trump and his inner circle and his most abject supporters in Congress. There's a difference between these people who are attempting to hold onto power illegitimately by vomiting lies on everything in sight, and the millions of people who voted for Trump who are, to one or another degree, taken in by these lies. Now, at the time I'm recording this, it seems safe to claim the following. There appears to be no credible evidence of significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. And whatever the Trump campaign is bringing forward is being looked at by the courts. And so far, it's being thrown out by the courts. Ironically, because we have such an uncoordinated election system, it appears to be very difficult to manufacture fraud at scale. And what is being alleged here is massive fraud across many states, several of which have Republicans in key positions of power. And strangely, the Democrats are alleged to have rigged the election for president, but they didn't think to also win the Senate and to get rid of Mitch McConnell, and they lost seats in the House. So this election fraud was really a work of subtle genius. And needless to say, all the Republicans in Congress have celebrated their victories in the House and the Senate, and these votes were cast on the same ballots they're disputing in the presidential race. This is the very essence of incoherence and hypocrisy, just as it was when Trump's campaign began demanding that we stop counting ballots in states where he was ahead, while simultaneously demanding that we keep counting them in states where he was behind. There is now such a degradation of our politics that people don't even feel the need to lie coherently. It's just a continuous carpet bombing of our information landscape with bullshit. So at this moment, it certainly appears that Biden won the 2020 election far more decisively than Trump won in 2016. And Trump claimed massive voter fraud in that election, too, right, the election he won to become president. He even claimed that Ted Cruz was guilty of voter fraud in the Iowa caucus. This is what he does, and it's part of the authoritarian playbook. Trump is a con man who has no respect for anything beyond himself, and he certainly has no concern for the health of our democracy. These are facts about his mind that he confirms for us on a daily basis. Obviously, any credible accusation of voter fraud should be looked at by the courts. But it's very important to point out that no one has been denying this basic principle of election fairness. But this was not like Bush versus Gore in 2000, which came down to 500 votes in a single state. Here we are talking about tens of thousands of votes in several states, a bigger margin than Trump won by in 2016, to which Hillary Clinton quickly conceded. Right, even though she won the popular vote. And President Obama immediately began cooperating with the transition team, while Trump is still refusing to cooperate with Biden's