Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just to notice that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
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I am just getting over COVID, second time having COVID, and this was not as bad as the last time, but it has kept me off the mic until this moment. I'll try to keep this short, first brief announcement. Podcast subscribers can now share full-length episodes of the podcast by going to SamHarris.org and logging in and clicking the relevant link, and you can even share these links on social media. It sets the way around the paywall whenever you want to share a specific podcast with other people.
As always, subscribing to the podcast at SamHarris.org is the way to support it, and as with AwakenupApp, if you can't afford a subscription, you can only send an email, in this case to support at SamHarris.org, and we'll give you one for free. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Brett Stevens. Brett is currently a columnist for The New York Times, which he came to after a long career at the Wall Street Journal.
Before that, he was the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, and he set a long-standing career in journalism, reporting from all over the world and interviewing scores of world leaders. He's also the author of the book America in Retreat, The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including two honorary doctorates, and a Pulitzer Prize. Anyway, Brett and I speak about the current state of the Republican Party.
Brett was among a few courageous, never-Trump Republicans, and he wound up leaving the Wall Street Journal over differences of opinion there. We discussed the strange change that has occurred in the Republican Party. We talk about attitudes toward Putin, the influence of Tucker Carlson, the war in Ukraine, the failures of elites and experts, the tension between concerns about misinformation and free speech, the 100-by-in-laptop, the 2024 presidential election, how Trump captured the Republican Party, the criminal charges against him, and the future of conservatism in America. And now I bring you, Brett Stevens.
I am here with Brett Stevens. Brett, thanks for joining me. Good to be on your show, sir. So you recently wrote an op-ed in, or your column in the New York Times about your recent trip to Ukraine, which is the proximate cause of this conversation.
I want to get into that, but I think it probably will allow us to talk more broadly about what's happened to us politically in the US, and just what's happened to the Republican Party, and how our conversation about Ukraine and other topics has grown so weird. But before we jump into that, perhaps you can summarize your background as a journalist and a writer. Oh, let's see. Born in New York City, raised in Mexico City, which is a story unto itself, University of Chicago for college, London School of Economics started working at the Wall Street Journal in the late 1990s, worked for them in New York and Brussels before leaving for the Jerusalem Post, where I was the editor-in-chief during the Second Intifada about 2021 years ago, returned to the Wall Street Journal as a foreign affairs columnist and a member of the editorial board, and was very, very happily ensconced there until Donald Trump and pretty much left the journal over, I guess what you call creative differences about our view of the former, hopefully not future president, and came to the New York Times, where I've been for a little over six years as an not-bed columnist.
I write a lot about foreign policy and try to visit the places I write about. And so Ukraine was my most recent foreign travel. How old were you when you left Mexico? Well, I left to boarding school when I was 14, but I didn't really leave the country.
It was still my home until I was practically in college, so 17 or 18. I guess I've heard you talk about that before, but I'm not sure how widely known that backstory is. It's an interesting counterpoint to some ways in which you probably get maligned as a person associated with the center-right side of politics. Yeah, it's funny.
I was chatting with a colleague of mine. I won't say who, but a colleague of mine well-known columnist at the time. So he said, if I had to place you politically, I'd say your center left. I was shocked.
I tend to think of myself as center-center-right, although the last five or six years, I've probably shifted a little bit to the left. It's not so much a shift. It's that the Republican Party has moved so far to the right for me that I feel just deeply alienated from it. Yeah, we'll talk about that because it's needless to say, I understand.
And what did you study in school? I studied, really I studied political philosophy. There was a special name to the program, but that was basically what I was mainly interested in. So I guess let's start with Ukraine as a jumping-off point.
I've been fairly mis-divide, I guess, previous to the recent war on Ukraine. I was mystified by the fact that Putin and similar figures became darlings of, I hesitate to say the right. Because I guess I totally understand how right and left work now as polls politically because so many things are now upside down. But it used to be that the Republican Party was the party that imagined it had won the Cold War.
And you would expect Putin would be among the last people to be celebrated among Republicans. And yet he was, and then his invasion of Ukraine is often talked about among Republicans as something that we provoked. Because it's only sensible for a man like Putin to worry about NATO expansion and even to think that Ukraine isn't necessarily a country and really should be reabsorbed by Mother Russia. Before we talk about your trip itself, what do you make about what has happened to the Republican Party with respect to topics like Putin and America's influence abroad?
I mean, they've almost swapped positions with Democrats when you're talking about the prospect of America projecting any sort of power to maintain a rules-based international order. So it's one of the great weirdnesses of our day. I mean, I wrote my first anti-Putin editorial for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page at the very end of 1999 and would get into arguments with figures on the left, particularly writers for places like the nation on the threat that Putin constituted. I remember writing a column in 2006 titled Russia's Becoming an enemy of the United States.
And all of the flack I took from that column was from the left. And the switch really came about with the ascendancy of Donald Trump. I think we should be careful because there are still a lot of Republicans, you know, the Mitch McConnell's of the world who are just as anti-Putin as Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and other Democrats. But what I think has happened is in keeping with the fact that the Republican Party, which starting with Eisenhower and maybe even before Arthur Vandenberg and his alliance with Harry Truman, the Republican Party went from being a kind of a conservative internationalist party to reverting to what it had been in the pre-World War II years, an isolationist, or what I call truculent nationalism.
And to the extent that in Vladimir Putin, they see a model of truculent nationalism, a lot of Republicans, certainly of the Tucker Carlson stripe, if that's the right name for it, find a lot to admire. They like the xenophobia, they like the strongman ethic, they have this perception that Putin is anti-Muslim, I think that plays a part of it. There's a kind of cult of machismo. I mean, I don't want to get too deep into the psychosexual aspect of it, but it's clearly, I think, an element there.
And there is a sort of old-fashioned quasi-isolationism, which is let Putin do whatever he wants in Ukraine so that we can do whatever we want in Mexico. It's kind of back to the spheres of influence mentality of the 19th century. You mentioned Tucker, what has his role been here? I guess the thing that I tend not to pay much attention to Tucker, but when his texts were leaked in the Dominion lawsuit and we saw that behind the scenes, he actually reviled Trump, the thing that I took away from that, which I'm still astonished by, is that this is someone who has more or less shilled for Trump for years.
And it cultivated an audience that squarely in Trump's personality cult. Now it's divulged that he considers Trump a demonic figure who hates with every fiber in his being or some such phrasing. And yet his audience doesn't seem to care about the hypocrisy and total lack of integrity as someone whose brand seems to be integrity. I'll tell you the truth that no one wants to tell you because I'm not owned by anybody.
What do you make of the fact that his audience doesn't care that the curtain has been pulled back and he's a liar of a very Trumpian sort? I mean, I knew Tucker slightly when I was the Wall Street Journal and he was at Fox and we were literally under the same roof, under Deuce Corp, and my impression of him was, I remember saying this the first time I met him, I said this to my wife or someone. I've never met anyone as cynical as this guy, that his principal aim is sort of to advance his brand and whether that means coming across as a kind of bow-tied William F. Buckley wannabe or a feverish populist angry every man, he'll do whatever it is to advance the cause of himself irrespective of a point of view.
But the isolationism, the nationalism, that's been there for a fairly long time. I know for a fact that it predates Trump because I once was in an argument about Afghanistan with him. Look, part of being a cynic and I think part of the appeal of cynics is when you're basically saying it's all a lie, it's all bullshit. Let's all be in on the fact that everything is a form of manipulation.
It's weirdly easy to win converts because you're sort of inviting your audience into the pretense of a secret knowledge that everything is for show. There's there's nothing really true. And the only thing that exists is power and your need to advance your power at the expense of the other side, the other the other team. And I think that's really what Tucker is is peddling, which is why he's such a sort of uniquely toxic ideologue for the maga movement.
I mean, that he hates Trump, that's true, that he adores Trump, that's true as well. Knowledge just depends on what serves this particular interest at any time. And Trump, frankly, kind of pedals the same point of view. You know, when I was in college, the Cold War had just ended.
I entered college the same year, the Soviet Union collapsed. And for a variety of reasons, I developed this interest in the mid 20th century literature by anti totalitarian writers, people like Han Arent and Miloj and a bunch of other figures, both from behind the Iron Curtain, Vassalov, Havel and in the free world, who really thought deeply about the totalitarian phenomenon. And what has struck me profoundly in the last five or six years is how the psychological categories, the desire to obey, the desire to be the willingness to be misled, so long as you're made to feel as if you belong, that those methods by which totalitarian or post totalitarian societies were able to rule and to stay in power, that those in effect recall, or, well, the Trump playbook recalls those methods to an eerie degree, and it's really worth rereading those books. Yeah, well, I want to get back to Trump and perhaps we can talk about his current legal troubles and whether the left is getting too confident that he will actually pay for anything that he has done or attempted to do.
But before we pivot back to that, let's talk about Ukraine. Can you just give me the moral and geopolitical case for our support of Ukraine? I think in Ukraine, our moral interests almost wholly coincide with our national interest. We have a moral interest in defending a victimized state against an authoritarian bully who has no regard for any ordinary norms of law or laws of warfare or human rights.
And we also have a vital national interest in showing that we are prepared to defend embattled democracies in the face of this kind of aggression, not just for the sake of Ukrainians, but for the sake of whoever it is that autocrats like Putin, but also Xi and maybe Khomeini and Iran want to attack next. So Xi is looking very carefully at the outcome of Ukraine to determine whether he's going to strike Taiwan. And if Putin is allowed to win or at least to keep his gains and freeze the conflict, we will be in greater danger, not less, which is why doing the right thing by the Ukrainians is also doing the right thing by the American people. What do you make of the claim that we quite irresponsibly provoked Putin?
I mean, it was our own failures of diplomacy, our own provocative dangling of the prospect of Ukraine's membership in NATO. We basically gave Putin no choice but to invade. There was no prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO, none whatever, and Putin perfectly knew it perfectly well. The subject was raised in 2008 and then buried afterwards.
Even now, there's really not much of a prospect of at least near term Ukrainian membership in NATO. So I think I guess that's the Mearsheimer hypothesis. I think that's simply false. And the truth is, I mean, you can go back to the 1990s and say that we provoked Russia when we decided to invite the Baltic states and Poland and some of the old Warsaw Pact members into the NATO alliance.
But the truth is these countries wanted to be in to the NATO alliance because they knew very well, looking at their own history, that if they didn't have the guarantee of Western security, of American security, Russia would reemerge as a great power. And Russia's history as a great power has been one of constant aggression, not just under the Communist, but going back to the Tsarist era, Poland disappeared for a couple of hundred years. So NATO has always been a defensive alliance. I think Putin understands this perfectly well.
And the idea that we're somehow to blame for the fact that Russia has launched one of the most violent and unnecessary wars in history is just perverse. So what was your experience in Ukraine? Well, I don't want to make too much of it because I was there for four days. And, you know, some of my colleagues at the New York Times have been there for months, if not years.
And so there's a limit to how much you can glean on what's really pretty short of visit. But nonetheless, you learn a few things. Number one, no planes fly to Ukraine, no ships sail to Ukraine. It's in that sense, it's one of the most isolated states in the world.
We took a nine-hour train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Number two, Kyiv is thriving. It was stunning to me that a city where so many people have been, so many siblings are at war, is insisting that life should be led as close to normal as possible. I think I said this in a comment, that Ukrainians are living their lives as if there is no war and they're fighting the war as if there is no everyday life.
It's a very striking fact to be awakened multiple times in the middle of the night because Russian drones or cruise missiles are heading your way. And Mark Hamill's voice comes up on a, so they call the air alert app and basically tells you to seek safety and don't be so cocky as to think you're invulnerable. Ukrainians are really determined to win the war. They are not eager to look for a settlement because they know that if they do, Russia will regroup by its time, maybe it might be five years, maybe it might be 15, but will strike again.
So they're really determined to win this thing. And by win you mean reclaim all the territory that was previously lost? That's what Ukrainians, the Ukrainians I met with all insisted to the last person, that they feel they are, every bit is eager to reclaim Crimea, which was seized back in 2014 as they are to reclaim the land that the Russians took since 2022. I think it's ultimately going to be their decision based on how the offensive or their counter-offensive goes to figure out what it is that they can live with.
And I can imagine that if Ukrainians were told, look, we're going to invite you into NATO or we're going to give you other forms of very good security guarantees. But Crimea may be a bridge too far. They might reassess that. But for my encounters with Ukrainians, they were unanimously unanimous in insisting that they want to reclaim their full sovereignty.
Do we feel that we have good mortality and casualty data on both sides of the war? Do we, it's been a while since I've actually heard clear figures? Yeah, no, we don't. The economist had an estimate of Russian fatalities.
This was about a month or two ago, which estimated about 40 to 50,000 Russian fatalities, which means a huge casualty rate because you should casualties, you know, the wounded to come in multiples of the fatality of the fatality rate. But that was based on sort of second tier data because the Russians are not releasing figures and the Ukrainians don't release figures either. I suspect that Ukrainian figures are much lower because Ukrainians haven't like the Russians been throwing convicts like cannon fodder into battle and not really caring whether they return alive or not. What do you make of the prospects of the Ukrainians now in actually winning the war or winning it to the point where the tide has turned in a way that really puts Russia on the back foot?
You know, this war has really mocked concepts of military expertise. You know, when Russia first invaded, I think the CIA was estimating 96 hours or something like that until key fell. Then there was a period of cock shortness where we thought that the Russians would surely fold completely because of their early reversals. We've been surprised in the last few months since the counter-offensive began that the Russians are not capitulating as we thought they would, that there's more morale in Russian lines than had been reported.
So all of that is a long way of saying that I'd be a fool to hazard a guess. You could see a situation in which the first the early weeks of the counter-offensive are slog and then Ukrainians managed to break through. But look, we're back to fighting World War I in which, you know, it's trench warfare, there are tillery battles. It's very hard to get across no man's land.
So the Ukrainians have a huge task ahead of them and it wouldn't surprise me if they make very little progress. So your point about the failure of expertise here has more global significance because it really seems to be the heart of the Trumpian isolationist, conspiracist core over there, which is, which again has turned everything upside down or many things upside down. But it has this kernel of truth to it, which is that, you know, on many, many fronts are experts, are elites, have embarrassed themselves in their claims to certainty. I mean, if you look at the public health messaging during COVID and the backlash against it, and the part of that was there's a fundamental misunderstanding about how science works and the failure to recognize that COVID was a moving target.
And of course, we're going to keep having to revise our opinion of what's actually happening, you know, do vaccines prevent transmission. We hope so. It looks like they don't really do a very good job of that. But all that gets scored as just the utter embarrassment of the so-called experts and what replaces a trust in institutions and experts is a sense that basically everyone's opinion is the equivalent of any other person.
And we should all just do our own research about COVID, about mRNA, about Ukraine, about anything. And you can't trust these deep state rent seekers. And so the punchline that many have drawn, certainly right of center, is that what we need is a proper reboot, which is by definition isolationist. Where do we ever get into our head that we need to be the world's cop?
How is it that Ukraine, which most Americans can't find on a map, is considered to be a vital national interest? We apparently have billions to spare for Ukrainian munitions, but we can't figure out how to get the homeless metinolatics off the streets of our most important cities. How do you respond to that eruption of populist discontent with international norms, with institutions, with experts, et cetera? Well, you're raising two somewhat distinct points.
One of the, I think, real problems we have in the country is not only that experts failed, but experts refused to acknowledge or too many experts refused to acknowledge that they failed. And so the distrust that I think is pervasive in the United States, I mean, you look at one institution after another and levels of trust have just plummeted, that distrust is well founded, or at least it's not completely crazy. Not only did experts often insist on solutions that turned out to be inadequate, but they did so with consummate arrogance. And I think that has, they have not helped, they have not helped their case.
And by the way, I mean, this is not just in terms of public health, although that's what you were talking about. It's in one, one institution and one area after another where the expert point of view fell short. Now, the second point, which is the idea of like we just need a reboot in foreign policy. When people say, well, most Americans couldn't find Ukraine on a map, that to me suggests that Americans ought to spend more time looking at maps because Ukraine is not some obscure little country, six degrees to the left of nowhere.
It's at the very heart of Europe. And the idea that we have spent all of this money on Ukraine that could have been better spent on treating fentanyl or shoring up the border is just a failure of mathematics. I mean, the amount of money we've spent on Ukraine as a percentage of our total budget of our total resources, it's a fraction of a single, single percentage. I mean, 50 billion sounds like a lot of money.
And then you say, well, what's the budget of the United States? It's what five or six trillion. So you're not talking about devoting an outside share of resources. But the truth is that countries have to be able to do many things at once.
And so what we're devoting to Ukraine is important because we want to maintain a world in which dictators aren't rampaging everywhere and getting stronger and more confident. We want to avoid a situation like the 1930s where the dictators combine and we have to face a genuine global crisis. We want a situation where it's Ukrainian fighting for their freedom, not American fighting for Ukrainians. And then when it comes to other issues, whether it's the Fentanyl crisis or the immigration crisis, those are separate issues that you have to consider sort of separately and rationally.
I don't think that if we pulled up stakes at Ukraine tomorrow, we would be an inch closer to addressing the tragedies going on in places like Portland or San Francisco or the migration crisis from Ukraine. From the call and all the way to Manhattan. So let's link to for a moment on the point you made about the failure of experts and institutions. Because I fully agree and some of this, rather a lot of it had to do with the way a woke, identitarian nonsense was disciating many of these institutions.
So you know, your own included. No comment. Yeah. So I'm hopeful that the pendulum has begun to swing back to something more sane there.
I don't know if you have a sense of where the culture is moving. But I'm just wondering what you think institutions and experts should have done and or should do now. I mean, do we need something like a truth and reconciliation commission around expert opinion or on what score our apologies warranted and what form would you imagine them taking? And do you have any examples of places that seem really egregious that do cry out for some kind of reckoning?
Well, I mean, the first thought is the closure of schools across America during the COVID, the early phases of the COVID pandemic, which wrecked terrible damage on young children that is going to be geared together. And I'm going to take years to repair. And I think the problem is that we during the COVID crisis, we conflated the interests of public health with the public interest. That's to say, the public health is a part of the public interest, but it's not the sole part of the public interest, right?
I mean, take another example. We could save tens of thousands of lives every day or every year if we had a national speed limit of 30 miles an hour. Okay. Well, we cut just overnight.
If we enforced a 30 mile an hour speed limit, tens of thousands of lives would be saved. So we would be doing something for the sake of public health, but we would be doing it at a cost that I don't think anyone listening to this podcast for a moment would accept. Why? Because we recognize that the public interest involves a series of trade-offs between competing goods.
One of them is public health, but another one is the interest of children getting to school and getting to school in front of an actual teacher, not in front of a screen and socializing and seeing a person's mouth move and smile and frown and whatever. And the apology that's owed by public health officials is to say, we big-footed other areas. Because we thought that the only thing that mattered in a pandemic was saving people from COVID. Now, that's not to say it doesn't matter.
Of course it matters, right? But it would have indicated it would have shown some humility and some sense that they should have kept to their own lanes by saying we advise about a public health issue, but we understand and recognize that there were other competing interests. And that goes, by the way, for all kinds of things in which you can think of people who have expertise in a given subject, presuming because they have expertise in a given subject that they're experts in every related subject. I mean, I'll give you another example.
And this will probably get me into trouble, right? Say you are a climatologist and you know that the earth is warming and that this is going to have major downstream effects for humanity. Okay. That does not necessarily make you an expert in economics.
It doesn't make you an expert in politics. It doesn't make you an expert in a number of related fields, all of which need to be brought into a large conversation about the long-term effects of climate change. You can say those effects are real, that they're serious, it's coming. We have to deal with it.
But it might mean that the right answer isn't completely upending the current energy economy for the sake of technologies that aren't yet. Mature, right? And so I just want to be clear. I'm not saying the views of climatologists aren't important.
They are important. What I am saying is that if you're looking at a problem that is as large and as vexing as climate change, right? It can't simply be the climate experts who are telling us, telling the rest of the public what to do. There has to be some weighing of competing interests.
And you can think of many other fields where people who are experts in one subject have tried to impose themselves on areas where their expertise is much more limited. Yeah, well, I think the concept of trade-offs is an important one because there are so many situations where we imagine there is just one right solution without acknowledging that whatever the best, you know, satisfying solution is, it will represent a trade-off. And if you focus on the other half of that trade-off, it can seem scarcely tolerable. You're often picking between the least bad among many bad avenues.
But I'm still struck by... It seems to me there were an R of a number of variables in play that make public messaging about anything public health, foreign policy, any major public concern somewhat fraught. And one is there's a kind of paternalistic slash pragmatic impulse that you can see arising where officials, experts, recognize that they are messaging into a kind of circus of misinformation and half-truths and lies and grifting conspiracy theorizing. And this was especially bad when Trump was president.
And so you have a president who's saying things like, you know, we have 15 cases and we're not going to have any more and then it's going to turn into a cold right after that. So figuring out how to talk to people in a way that leads to the best public health outcomes to speak narrowly of COVID now is not a goal that is necessarily achieved by being as rigorously and comprehensively honest, just throughout the process. You could see public health officials, essentially talking to children, right? And just saying, listen, we know you're all a bunch of conspiracy-addled maniacs.
We're going to try to dumb this down to a point where you're just, you know, most people most of the time are not going to screw this up. So, yeah, get the vaccine. You're being a good citizen by getting the vaccine. It will reduce transmission.
It's safe. Now, we know that if you double click on any one of those claims, it's a far more nuanced conversation and there's a risk benefit calculation to be talked about with any vaccine. But it's much more of a political than it is a scientific challenge to communicate about a pandemic. And it was made especially difficult given how shattered our politics has become by the information siloing allowed by social media.
I find much that happened during COVID as you do, and even as galling as many MAGA people found it. But there is this problem of just knowing that every scientifically scrupulous nuance is going to be weaponized as you see. They don't know anything. How do you talk to Trumpistan?
That's a great question. And the answer is who knows. But I think we would have been better served if public health officials from the get go had said had continuously emphasized what they don't know the limits of their certainty. There was an element there, which was we better make this real simple and clear because people are too stupid to digest complex information and information that has large gaps in it.
So maybe, and I don't know if this would have worked, but maybe if you had had our leading public health officials saying from the beginning, we think this vaccine is safe and on balance. We think it's a good idea for you to take it. Is it going to provide perfect immunity? Early studies suggest that it will really protect you, but we could be wrong and we know that viruses tend to mutate so we don't know what it's going to do the next round.
Are there risks associated with it? They're risks associated with every medicine on balance? We're going to take it and we think you should you should too. Just something less than that kind of sensorious we know best you must do as we say approach that was that was the approach of the public health officials and certainly the Biden administration in its early days.
Then that might have been more persuasive than what the kind of you must do this mentality because people don't like necessarily being told to inject themselves with relatively novel medicines. In fact, up until 10 years ago, we began this conversation by talking about inversions, but up until 10 or 20 years ago, it was typically the left that insisted on very, very extensive testing of all new drugs because we didn't want another thalidomide. We didn't want another medicine that seemed to promise a cure that had knock on effects five or 10 unforeseen consequences that could be devastating, even if only to a relatively small fraction of the people who took the medication. So it was the left that talked a lot about the precautionary principle.
In fact, back 20 years ago, all of the anti-vax woo-wooism seemed to me to be coming from California lefties and people who believed in herbal solutions instead of antibiotics. And then that again kind of flipped completely in the last five or 10 years, maybe not completely because there's RFK Jr., but it flips substantially. Yeah, well, he's kind of the fulcrum or one fulcrum of the flipping because he obviously has garnered a lot of support from Trump's cult in a way. I mean, just direct funding and the same people who are open-minded about Trump are very open-minded about RFK Jr.
It seems what's going on. I have a weirdest experience, which is, I mean, I just sort of took RFK Jr. from the get-go to be ridiculous and a complete crank. And then a friend of mine, very intelligent person of centrist democratic views, or at least that's how I had known her confessed to me that she was thinking, this was before the anti-Semitic stuff.
So maybe something has changed, but confessed to me that she was seriously thinking about voting for him in the primary. So I don't think his appeal should be underestimated. I mean, I was sort of stunned. I was like, the guy's a crank.
I mean, give me a break. But what she found she was responding to, I think, were two things. She didn't like the way RFK Jr. was sort of being maligned and censored and derided.
She liked what she thought was sort of his forthright belief and free speech and open debate, which I think he's very cleverly playing up. And she'd always been slightly on the more homeopathic side of the medicine. In a kind of an everyday world, not like she wasn't vaccinating her kids or anything of a sort, but just believed that we're an over-medicated society. And so there is a, she represents, I mean, this is an anecdote of one, so I don't want to make too much of it.
But I remember thinking after she told me this, I said, geez, if someone has sane and bright and, you know, if I say normal, is responding to RFK's message that way, that maybe the base of his support is much wider than I suspect. People who wind up supporting RFK Jr. and similarly fringe and crankish voices in my view are often led there by the heuristic that it's, yeah, whenever you're in the business of trying to demonize someone to the point of silencing them, whenever you're de-platforming someone, whenever you're saying you're not going to platform someone, even just using this term platforming, you seem like you have something to hide, right? You're afraid of conversation, right?
And we have this basic assumption that sunlight is the best disinfectant, right? So if he's wrong about anything material, that will be exposed if you just talk to him, right? So why not talk to him? Why not just put him on the Joe Rogan podcast for four hours and let him roll?
You know, and all these people complaining about that, they seem scared of something and they claim it's misinformation, but it's much easier to see them as shills for the establishment who are ruled by bad incentives and captured by the ad dollars of the pharmaceutical industry and they're trying to prop up this old world that has been fully discredited by recent stress tests. If you're scared of R. K. Jr., you know, you're, you are untrustworthy.
I want to hear him now. And that extends all the way to somebody like Alex Jones, right? He's just like, well, why wouldn't you talk to Alex Jones? He might be right that the certain frogs are becoming gay and maybe that has implications for what's happening to humans.
But this idea that we don't have a misinformation problem, we merely have a stifling and free expression problem, is profoundly naive when you look at this apparatus we built, this kind of hallucination machine that is just algorithmically boosting nonsense and divisive lies and people obviously can't navigate it on their own. I mean, people are people believe the impossible in the wake of all this and, you know, it really is showing the... Look, people are going to believe and have believed at any given time, including long before Twitter and Facebook could turbocharge misinformation or disinformation. People have believed all kinds of crap.
That's just in the nature of a free society. I mean, you can go back any point in history and find people fully subscribed to preposterous conspiracy theories, whether it was, you know, who killed JFK? I grew up with that, you know, answer Lee Harvey Oswald. Although I'm sure some of this podcast is going to...
R.K., his nephew begs to differ. Well, I mean, the John Birch Society, I mean, just go back in history and you will find a tremendous amount of misinformation circulating and often commonly believed. And that is in the nature of a free society that a lot of falsehood flourishes, proliferates, sinks into people's consciousness. There's a limit and I think a very sharp limit on A, how much of that can be stripped out.
You know, I might say that by the way, certain religious dogmas strike me as a bunch of ridiculous misinformation, but I'll get myself into trouble if I move further down that path. You'll get an argument here. I know that, but it's sort of to one side of my point here. But what I worry about is that when you try to suppress it and you try to use powerful tools like the Twitter sensors or the Facebook sensors or government sending messages to social media companies to shut down certain veins of opinion, the censorship is to actually turbocharge the misinformation, not to dispel it, right?
Because it adds to... it adds a veneer of kind of a persecution or even martyrdom to those who are perhaps misinforming people, right? Because I think not only am I just being persecuted for... I'm trying to speak my mind and I'm being persecuted for it and other people respond to this.
I suspect that Alex Jones is profile and I mean, he's one of the most detestable individuals in American life today, but I suspect that his profile was if anything kind of elevated by the attention that was given to the people's identity. And I'm not sure what he has to say. I've zero sympathy for the guy. I think he's revolting and evil, particularly for what he said about the murders in Sandy Hook.
But we do a lot, those of us who are in the business of trying to offer good information or at least sound and well-based analysis don't do ourselves or our cause any favors when we're trying to shut other voices down because we declare that they're beyond the pale and anything they have to say is not just wrong, but evil. So in the ecology of a free society, I think the ecological metaphor is a good one. Like if you want a healthy ecology, you're going to have to accept that there are going to be mosquitoes and ticks and termites and all kinds of creepy, crawly things that in and of themselves are not very attractive, but perform a kind of function in the overall well-being of a given truth ecosystem. And part of this is maybe getting a little into the weeds, but in the ecology of truth, you actually have to understand and be acquainted with what is false, right?
Like you cannot understand truth in the absence of its opposite. So efforts to get rid of what's called misinformation or what might be misinformation aren't in fact serving the ultimate cause of truth, if that's what you want to call it, because it has to be present in order for us to understand what is sure than not. Right. Yeah.
The only caveat I would add here is that when you're talking about social media in particular, it's not really a question of platforming or not necessarily. It's just the question of what the algorithm does to boost misinformation and outrage preferentially, right? So it's the signal boost that is the unique feature here and that which is genuinely new. And if you...
That's a fair point. That's a perfectly logical fair point. Yeah. And you can, and you have to, you know, to do nothing is still an editorial decision, right?
Like you have to tune the algorithm one way or the other. And if you're going to flatten everything, well, then flatten it, if you're going to try to boost better information, well, that's its own choice. But if you consciously created an algorithm that you can now see is boosting device of lies faster than anything else and you're maintaining it because your business model depends on you doing so. Well, then you've built an outrage machine and that's the status quo that I think...
I mean, I guess there are two points that need to be considered. And I fully accept what you said. Number one is, are you sure when you are trying to root out misinformation that you are, in fact, rooting out misinformation? And the example of that that comes to mind is Facebook's ban on any mention of the Wuhan Virology Institute as a potential source for the pandemic where they had effectively banned it until, you know, until it turned out it was actually a perfectly well-grounded hypothesis.
So question number one is, do you trust the gatekeepers when it comes to deciding what is good information versus what's bad information? I think that's a very important consideration. The second thing is, did Trump become more potent or less potent after he was banned by Twitter, judging by how he's doing at the polls after a three-year ban? More potent.
Now, I don't know if there's a causation there, but the extent to which his efforts to deplatform him have backfired is another issue that I think that's worth considering. I don't have a great answer, but my general guess is that when you try to deplatform prominent people, you're giving them a patina of victimization, which benefits them in ways that those who have deplatformed them never intended. Here's a case study we could analyze, which actually you could do a bit of a post-mortem on my still not completely formed opinion of the Hunter Biden laptop because it really has all of these issues in miniature. Tell me what if anything is wrong with this?
Many people are confused about what I thought or what I think and what I thought at the time because of some misleading clips that spread on social media. But so at the time, and I still, my position really hasn't changed here, I thought it was a genuinely difficult call, journalistically, whether to pay attention to the laptop 10 days before the election, given what had happened in 2016 when Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email case and we knew that her candidacy might have failed for other reasons, we knew that that was the coup de gras with respect to what immediately hour by hour, what happened to the polls. And for obvious reasons, anyone who was worried about Trump getting a second term, him being a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer power, the idea that we had to be beholden to Rudy Giuliani's timetable and take the bait 10 days before the election and start putting front page articles about the Hunter Biden laptop on the cover of your newspaper, that just seemed idiotic. And so I thought, journalistically, it would have been both prudent and defensible to say, listen, whatever's true in this laptop is going to be true two weeks from now.
We're going to slow roll our consideration of this, knowing that this was dropped on us as an October surprise, set to detonate with just enough time to get it to derail the campaign, but not enough time to fully vet all this information and figure out what's Russian disinformation and if anything, and what isn't, there's every reason to worry that this could be Russian disinformation. And so we're just not, we're just going to wait until after the election to really do a deep dive on this. So journalistically, that seemed a plausible response to me and a defensible one, although admittedly, still somewhat depressing one, my bias being toward actually digging in and figuring out what's true. And then the additional steps that like that social media took, like Twitter actually blocking the New York Post's account once they released an article on the topic, that seemed much more heavy handed and harder to defend.
And I think it did actually have the sort of the Streisand effect that you just referenced a moment ago that it really brought more attention to it. But it was also just less defensible in my view. And now you're fast forward to the present moment. I still, you know, all this time, given that Trump has, my feeling was at the time and it is now, I don't care what's in that laptop because I know in advance that even if it reveals some degree of corruption on the part of the election.
It's going to pale in comparison to the corruption. I know is true of Trump and his family. And the truth is that corruption isn't even as troublesome as many of the other things that I despise in Trump and the prospect of him getting a second term. So I can just say that I actually, as long as Trump is a candidate, I don't really care what's on that laptop.
As Odysse says, it might be, and I do worry that there's a lot there that could in a perfect world discredit Biden's candidacy. But it's, I just don't care as long as Trump is running. And so I'm just wondering how you view that response. I guess I disagree.
The standard I would apply, first of all, I don't think it's the business of those of us in the journalistic profession, certainly on the new side, not the opinion side, to try to tip the scales by withholding stories that we would otherwise consider legitimate. And by legitimate, what I mean is that's imagined that it wasn't the Hunter Biden laptop. It was the Donald Trump junior laptop. There's no question.
It would have gotten a very different response and say the Donald Trump junior laptop contained all kinds of alarming information about his business deals with foreign actors, hints of corruption. All the stuff that turned out to be on the Hunter Biden laptop, the treatment should be the same. Once, once editors came to determination that this was, they had a good reason, good reason to believe that what was on this laptop was true or at least reportable, even if there were some lingering doubts, they should have reported it. You think they should have just followed the timing of Giuliani, knowing that he had held this thing until it was too positive?
Again, I just don't think that it serves the media well when we are self-consciously trying to tip the scales of an election. We are trying to... Look, your determination is a voter, right? Let's say it had come out before the election, and there was some evidence that Hunter was corrupt and maybe even that his father knew more than he's claimed.
You would still vote for Biden because he would say they might both be crooks or have bad things against them, but Biden is what the British call... By the way, this is not what I'm saying he is, but you might say that Biden is what the Brits call it an ordinary decent criminal, and Trump is a unique threat to democracy, and I would sooner take the Hunter Biden run of the mill, you know, an epitism slash favoritism slash whatever it is to the screaming risk that Trump represents for democracy. That's a decision that Sam Harris makes this a voter, right? But from the point of view of editors, I think many editors were derelict in their duty.
And the test I've always applied to, I've said this to Republicans a million times, I've said, you know, if it had been a republic, let's say it had been Barack Obama or Joe Biden, who had been accused of sexual assault the way, incredibly accused, the way Jean Carroll credibly accused Donald Trump, right? How would you take it, right? Would you dismiss it? No, you wouldn't.
You would take it seriously. So I just think that it's important for the media's credibility. This goes back to the early part of our conversation to stick to its lane. We are not trying to tip the scales in an election.
We are trying to be fair-minded, thoughtful, but essentially transparent, tellers of the news, right? That's our role. Our role is not to say, you know, yes, yes, yes, but Trump is such a unique threat to democracy that this is one story. We're just not going to air because we don't like the timing.
If we would have done it, if the shoe had been on the other foot, then we have to apply an equivalent standard. If we don't do that, and I think too often much of the mainstream media hasn't done it, it creates a perception of a biased media and leads to people having more confidence in what Alex Jones is of the world have to say than what the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal have to say. So it's the same in a sense. We're talking about the same thing.
By trying to have a larger role that's simply the role of being disseminators of solid and credible information, we harm trust in what we do. We harm trust in the concept of expertise, and we drive people to the margins of the information economy. Yeah, I get that that risk seems to be borne out, certainly in certain cases. I worry that for me that the timing was all there, or certainly most of the consideration.
And given the example of Anthony Wieners laptop and how that was evaporated as a story right after it had this decisive effect on the election, it just seems it's ridiculous to play into Giuliani's gamesmanship at that point. I think Trump would still have lost the election. We'll never know. I think Trump would have, Trump was on his way to a massive loss.
And you might say, could it have tipped a few thousand votes in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania? I tend to doubt it. People were made their determination about its presidency, irrespective of allegations of hunter-genemics. But you have some prominent Republicans walking around saying this was how the election was stolen from Trump.
It wasn't stolen in all the way as Trump claimed it was stolen because we did not give the Hunter Biden laptop story the appropriate hearing in a timely way. I don't know what Vivek Ramaswami is saying and perhaps others are saying it. Yeah, sure bullshit. Perhaps we can linger on this point for a moment, despite my claim that I wouldn't want to do anything to increase Trump's chances to get reelected.
What lessons should we draw from the Hunter Biden laptop at this point? Have you looked at it long enough to know what you think about possible implications for Biden? So if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcasts, along with others subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.
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