#391 — The Reckoning
39:48 Share

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. So the reckoning has arrived. Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States, and it seems like he's going to have both houses of Congress. Of course, we know he already has the Supreme Court. And the question is, what to make of all this? Why did he win and why did the Democrats lose? Well, first, we should acknowledge that this is the greatest comeback in American political history.

It's as if Nixon got re-elected to a second term after Watergate. It's better than that, or worse, depending on what you think about Trump. Luckily, I hedged my bet here and I never said anything too critical about the man. I've always been very respectful of him and Elon and the other innovators they have around them. I mean, let's be honest, these guys just want to make America great again. Can't you just give them a chance? All kidding aside, I will let you know when I receive my first audit from the IRS.

But what I think is needed now is an honest assessment of why Trump won. Because it says a lot about our country that he did. It says a lot about how divided we are. It says a lot about the state of the media and the effects of social media. But above all, it says something that the Democratic Party and our elite institutions need to hear. Now, obviously, Trump's win and Harris's loss were determined by many factors. And I think everyone's in danger of believing that their pet issue explains everything that happened on Tuesday.

Now, you could certainly make the case that it was immigration and the southern border, or it was inflation and the cost of groceries. You could even say it was the way Trump responded to that first assassination attempt, which, among other things, prompted Elon Musk to endorse him within minutes, or it was Harris's weakness as a candidate and the way the Democratic Party coronated her, rather than allow some competitive process to happen.

Or you could say that the blame lies with Biden himself and his disastrous decision to run for a second term. That was pure hubris. And of course, this blame extends to all the people who covered for him and lied to themselves or to the public about his competence for over a year. Some of this culpability fell on Harris herself. What did she know about Biden and when did she know it? She never had a good answer for that question.

Or to come to one of my hobby horses, it was her failure to have anything like a sister-soldier moment where she could put some distance between her current self and the Kamala Harris of 2019, who seemed to be in lockstep with the far left of the Democratic Party. The truth, of course, is that all of these things contributed. And if one or two of them had changed, we would have had a different result.

But the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party in the last hundred days before the election weren't in control of most of these variables. They could have messaged differently about all of them. I think it would have been possible to talk about inflation and immigration better than they did. But their real failure, in my view, was to not pivot to the political center in a way that most people found credible.

So to return to my hobby horse, I think there are some lessons that the Democrats really must absorb from what is undeniably a total political defeat. They simply have to recognize that several planks of their platform are thoroughly rotten. Identity politics is over. No one wants it. Latinos and blacks don't even want it, as witnessed by the fact that they moved to Trump in record numbers.

Trump got a majority of Latino men nationwide. And in some counties, he got a majority of Latino men and women. Even after everything he has said about immigrants from Latin America over the years, how they're, quote, poisoning the blood of our people, which is right out of Mein Kampf, a comedian calls Puerto Rico a pile of garbage at a Trump rally.

And the entire Democratic machine and all of liberal media seize upon it like a nuclear bomb has just vaporized an American city and no one cared. Identity politics is dead and we have to bury it. There's one species of identity politics that had an enormous effect on this election and most Democrats don't seem to realize it. Around half a percent of American adults identify as transgender or non-binary.

That's 1 in 200 people. And yet the activism around this identity has deranged our politics for as long as Trump has been in politics. One lesson I would be quick to draw from this election is that Americans aren't really into seeing biological men punch women in the face at the Olympics. And if that sounds like transphobia to you, you're the problem. Political equality, which we should want for everyone,

does not mean that trans women are women. Trans women are people and should have all the political freedom of people. But to say that they are women and that making any distinction between them and biological women for any purpose is a thought crime and an act of bigotry, that is the precept of a new religion. And it's a religion that most Americans want nothing to do with.

I want to be very clear about this. I have no doubt that there are real cases of gender dysphoria. And for those people, we should want to give them all the help they need to feel comfortable in their own bodies and in society. How we think about this, how we understand it scientifically, all of that is still in flux.

But there are four-year-olds who, apropos of nothing, will claim to be in the wrong body. You know, they're born a boy, but they insist that they're really girls. And they never waver from this. And it's pretty obvious in those cases that something is going on neurologically, hormonally, at the core of their being that is not a matter of them having been influenced by the culture.

But conversely, there now seem to be countless examples where the possibility of social contagion is obvious, where due to the success of trans activists in changing institutions, these kids are effectively in a cult, being brainwashed by a new orthodoxy. These are radically different cases, and we should not be bullied into considering them to be the same.

I've spoken to many Democrats in recent years and over the course of this election, and a shocking percentage of them imagine that all the controversy about trans rights and gender identity in kids is just right-wing bigotry and a non-issue politically, whereas it is obvious that for millions of Americans, it might as well have been the only issue in this election.

Not because they are transphobic assholes, but because they simply do not accept the new metaphysics and even new biology mandated by trans activists and the institutions that they have successfully bullied and captured. And it's important to say that not all trans people agree with what these activists say and do.

Having the thought police suddenly proscribe the use of the term woman and demanding that we speak instead of birthing person or menstruators or people with ovaries or some other Orwellian construction designed to test everyone's patience and sanity,

the sight of people being deplatformed on social media or fired from universities for merely stating that there are two biological sexes. I actually know a professor who lost her job at Harvard over this, witnessing an epidemic of gender confusion spread through our schools, when people with their own eyes could see that this was a social contagion, being encouraged by the schools themselves.

the ultimate fruition of which, in many cases, is irreversible medical procedures. We've got an epidemic of teenage girls wanting double mastectomies, and some are actually getting them based on ideas being spread on TikTok. And any parent who resists this trend gets demonized and under certain conditions could lose custody of their kids. Well, congratulations, Democrats.

You have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks. I know people who haven't been touched by this issue personally, for whom it was the only issue that decided their vote. In fact, it is the issue that fully radicalized Elon, right? And he's spoken about this at length. Do you think Elon continuously messaging to 200 million people on X and going to Trump's rallies and donating over $100 million to the campaign...

and supporting him on podcasts, and doing everything else in his power to get Trump elected, might have accounted for a few votes? Honestly, I think a doctoral dissertation, and perhaps several, could be written on how trans activism completely destroyed democratic politics, without most Democrats knowing. Of course, people will be doing an autopsy on this election for quite some time,

But there is some polling already that suggests that cultural issues in general, and this issue in particular, were the greatest drivers of swing voters turning to Trump. For the purpose of this poll, a swing voter is defined as those who are undecided in the presidential race or who have changed their voting preference since 2020.

voting Democrat in one election and Republican in the other, or they were independents who had either indicated that they split their votes between Democrats and Republicans, or who hold either a favorable or unfavorable view of both Trump and Harris. So these were the people whose votes were in play. And according to this poll over at blueprint2024.com titled, Why America Chose Trump, Inflation, Immigration, and the Democratic Brand,

When you segment the respondents in this way, for these swing voters, the strongest predictor of a vote for Trump was their response to the following statement. Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class. So transgender issues are flagged as the example of progressive politics in the Democratic Party.

Now, you might want to say that neither Harris nor Biden campaigned as a vocal trans activist, and that's true. But honestly, if you wanted to account for Harris's loss and Trump's win in the briefest possible space, and also indicate the hold that the far left has had over democratic politics and the Biden administration,

I think it would be hard to do better than to juxtapose the following two facts. On his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order ensuring that trans girls could have access to girls' restrooms, locker rooms, and girls' sports. It took him two and a half years to sign an executive order addressing the chaos at the southern border.

Why did he wait so long? Because the far left has always said that a concern about the southern border is racist. What more needs to be said about the degree to which the Democratic Party and the Biden administration lost touch with the will of the American people as for the topic of trans rights and gender dysphoria?

What Harris needed to do, at a minimum, is express her understanding that this issue is complex, that there's a legitimate concern about social contagion, that in certain cases, there's a conflict between giving trans women and girls everything they want and protecting the rights of biological women and girls.

And the jury is still out on many questions here. And policy in Europe has changed radically in recent years for understandable reasons, right? This topic is a total mess ethically and politically. And the orthodoxy among Democrats and in the elite institutions that they have influenced is that the trans activist line is the only ethical line to take.

But the truth is, every shibboleth that came out of the far left in recent years contains within it the same recipe for the destruction of democratic politics. Each is like an evil hologram. Take the term Latinx. Who was that for? Only 3% of Latinos are in favor of this silly rebranding of their ethnicity. Again, Trump did better among Latinos than any Republican in memory.

Do you think it was because there wasn't enough identity politics rammed down their throats from the left? Do you think they just need to see some more white people admonished for the sin of cultural appropriation? You think another lecture about sensitive Halloween costumes might do the trick? Much of democratic politics has become a bad SNL sketch. Democrats simply have to understand that this is one of the reasons that we're getting four more years of Donald Trump.

Four more years of this man holding more power and responsibility than any person on Earth. If it sounds like I'm blaming far-left activists for this, along with everyone who bent the knee to them, I am. Sure, inflation didn't help. But the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party couldn't change the price of groceries.

They could control whether the vice president gave a rational accounting of why she no longer supports taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in detention. You know how many ads the Trump campaign ran on that issue? In some markets, it was a third of their ad spend. She's for they/them. He's for you. Someone find me the video where Harris made any sense at all on this topic.

And the same can be said for all the other cultural issues that have been poisoned by the far left. Literally everyone I know who voted for Trump, and this includes some extraordinarily influential people like Elon, literally everyone was focused on cultural issues. It wasn't inflation for them. It was trans activism and the insanity at the southern border and DEI policies.

and homelessness and crime in our cities, and the unwillingness of Democratic DAs and mayors to do anything about it. The fact that when you go into a CVS and you need to call a locksmith to liberate some razor blades and Tylenol, that is an absolute disgrace. It is a clear degradation of the quality of life in American cities. And these things mattered on Tuesday when people went to the polls.

And most of our largest cities are run by Democratic mayors, at least two-thirds of the top 100. And I think it's a higher percentage of the top 20. What are the Democrats doing about homelessness? The Democratic Party largely owns this problem. And for years, Democrats have been acting like the answer to it is for everyone just to become more tolerant. They won't police the streets, but they'll police the language. These people are not homeless. They're unhoused. Okay, great.

Anyone who lives in a city, who has to shepherd their kids past some raving lunatic standing outside the supermarket, or who knows that there are whole sections of town that he shouldn't even set foot in because they look like the third act of a zombie movie, many of these people are done with your politics. And so are millions who don't live in big cities, but visit them, or just see the images on social media. No one wants to live like this.

This is the sort of issue that was easily and justifiably weaponized against Democrats in this election. Or take the Hamas supporters on our college campuses. You don't have to be Jewish to see how shameful this is. This is an assault not just on Jews and Israel, but on Western civilization. Or let's just call it what it is, real civilization.

If the Democratic Party can't figure out that civilization needs to be defended from barbarism, what do you expect is going to happen in a presidential election? Yes, Biden and Harris were not terrible on this issue, but they talked out of both sides of their mouths. They bent over backwards to not offend the people who were totally confused in the Democratic Party about what happened on October 7th.

and about the problem of Islamism and jihadism worldwide, who think in terms of Islamophobia rather than really protecting human rights. Here's one clue on the path back to sanity on this issue, which you may have missed. The hijab is not a symbol of female empowerment. Most of the women throughout the world who wear the veil are forced to by men who will beat the shit out of them if they don't.

It might be time to figure this out if you actually care or want to credibly pretend to care about the rights of women on planet Earth. There's simply no question that democratic moral confusion on many of these issues cost Harris millions of votes. So that's the reckoning that has to happen now among Democrats, and I hope it does. But the concern now is that four more years of Trump and Trumpism will prevent it.

Trump is such a provocation to the left and to liberal institutions that Democrats could find themselves doubling down on all their delusions. Needless to say, this will be exactly what Trump and the MAGA cult want because it will be politically suicidal. If you are a Democrat who voted for Harris, please absorb this. You lost more people of color than you ever have in a presidential election while running against Archie Bunker,

Worse, Trump is actually supported by real racists and white supremacists. And that still wasn't enough of a problem. Who do you think your identity politics is for? You're really going to keep celebrating pornographers of racial grievance like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi? Should we just give another Pulitzer Prize to the 1619 Project and congratulate ourselves?

You really think racism is the problem in America? And what we saw this week was just a victory for white male identity politics? That's how you're going to explain Trump's popularity at this point? Trump gained support from every racial group except white people, right, where he lost one percentage point when compared to 2020. You're going to chalk that up to racism?

We're about five days out from the election when I'm recording this, and I'm still hearing prominent Democrats say things like, America was never going to elect a black woman for president in the year 2024. That's not the issue. And if you keep this up, you're going to get President Candace fucking Owens someday. Wouldn't that be a perfect rejoinder to this stupidity?

I hope it's obvious from everything I've said and written for years, and from the first half of this podcast, that I understand the frustration and even revulsion that people feel for the far left, and for the progressive orthodoxy that has infected our institutions, for the censoriousness and thought policing, and the gaslighting, and the lying. I understand the degree to which our institutions have been bent by this,

And anyone who's followed my work from the beginning knows that I've been outraged by this encroaching moral blindness for at least 20 years, long before wokeness or Black Lives Matter or trans activism or defund the police.

In the years after September 11th, 2001, when I began to focus on the problem of Islamism and Jihadism, I was complaining about just this. I could see that anyone who described these problems too honestly would get tarred as a racist, as though that made any sense.

I saw how someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated like an untouchable by left-wing think tanks and liberal writers. How even Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times, whose whole shtick was to show his concern about the rights of women in the developing world, even he felt obliged to condemn Ayaan as an Islamophobe

This is a woman who is quite literally being hunted by Muslim theocrats in one of the most cosmopolitan societies we have, modern Holland. For years, I witnessed journalists obfuscate about the threat of Islamic extremism. Someone was found just stabbing people in a European city or mowing them down with his car, shouting Allahu Akbar, and it would be reported that the motive for the crime was still mysterious.

and the perpetrator would be described at most as an immigrant. Sometimes every detail like this was suppressed, and you'd have no idea what happened. Just random mass murder. Needless to say, this kind of politically correct dishonesty has since spread to many other topics, as the left-wing hatred of Western civilization and capitalism and white people has distorted everything left of center.

I understand how infuriating this is, especially on an issue that touches your life directly. I know what it's like to read an article in the New York Times and to spot obvious lies. But the alternative to the failure of journalism simply isn't the fire hose of lies and half-truths and conspiracy theories that you find on X.

And it's not the calculated and ever-present distortion you find in right-wing news channels that never had any journalistic standards to violate in the first place.

There is simply no alternative to healthy institutions that maintain their credibility even when they make mistakes by reliably correcting their errors. And when they fall short of this standard, they can be pressured to do better because they have intellectual and moral scruples. It's an imperfect process, but it's the best we've got. Elon Musk never corrects his errors.

Tucker Carlson never corrects his errors. Donald Trump never makes errors because he never stops lying. He's playing tennis without the net and his fans love it. Putting your faith in deranged personalities isn't a viable alternative to having truly liberal institutions that you can trust and that can be obliged to earn your trust back when they fail.

I understand how satisfying it is to find a new bully to beat up the other bullies who've been making you miserable. Okay, but the problem is this new bully is worse.

This new bully has no principles. This new bully has no journalistic or academic or scientific conscience to appeal to. Whatever might be wrong with a person like Anthony Fauci or Francis Collins or any of the other doctors who have been demonized right of center for their approach to setting COVID policy, at least they are real doctors and scientists who have some professional scruples and reputations to protect.

among people who actually know something about medical science. RFK Jr. has none of that. He's just a cowboy taking shots at the establishment. The Joe Rogan podcast is not a substitute for the Wall Street Journal or the Kennedy School at Harvard.

It is simply not progress to have a comedian like Dave Smith, who's apparently done his own research, interviewed about the history of the Middle East or the war in Ukraine like he's the next Henry Kissinger. All of this free access to information is making us dumber. Of course, I blame Trump and social media for how divisive our politics have become.

Trump is what you get when 51% of a society just declares bankruptcy on core moral values and political principles and journalistic ethics and necessary institutions. There is no real defense of Trump and Trumpism.

All his defenders act like his critics just don't like the man's style. He's just too crass or bombastic. Or they think we're worried about hypothetical things that might never happen. We're worried he might become a fascist in the future. And needless to say, these concerns are telltale signs of Trump derangement syndrome. But none of that is true. The problem with Trump isn't his style. And it's not merely what might happen in the future. The problem is what has already happened.

is the damage that Trump has already caused to our democracy. And it's the fact that he has turned the Republican Party into a personality cult that celebrates all this damage as a sign of progress. For instance, while many of us really wanted Kamala Harris to win on Tuesday, we are also breathing a sigh of relief that she didn't win by a very narrow margin. Why are we relieved about this?

Because Trump and Elon and several other high-profile freaks spread so many lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud that they effectively rigged our society to explode. On the day of the vote, Trump and Elon were both spreading lies about a terrible fraud being perpetrated in Pennsylvania. Now that Trump won, where's the concern about fraud? It just evaporated.

I guess Elon looked into it and our voting machines are fine now, right? Pay attention to what happened here. These guys imposed a serious risk of injury on our whole society for purely selfish reasons. And the fact that we're now relieved to have avoided a civil war is itself an injury to our democracy and to our social order. Is this too ethereal a point to understand?

If someone rigs your house to explode, and the bomb just happens to not go off for reasons that they didn't actually control, it seems to me that they don't get to say, well, no harm, no foul. Let's just move on. Let's agree to disagree about what happened here. No, you put our whole democracy at risk with your lies.

You knowingly raised the temperature and the pressure on your side of the electorate, again, with lies, and ran the risk of producing serious violence if things had gone the other way.

Honestly, there was a moment on Tuesday night when the tide had fully turned against Harris, when the needle over at the New York Times website was giving Trump an 89% probability of winning, but the blue wall states had not been decided. It was still possible at that point for Harris to win. One in ten chance events happen all the time.

But I remember thinking that I hope she doesn't win now. Because at that point, given the optics, given that Republicans really thought they had it in the bag, and that even Democrats seemed to think that, and thought that publicly, in plain view of everyone, on television and social media, if Harris's luck had turned at that point, and she had won, we could have had a civil war.

Given the degree to which conspiracy thinking had been weaponized by Trump and his enablers, again, even on election day itself, these lies had been spread consciously, deliberately. Elon did this personally to hundreds of millions of people on the social media platform that he owns. Given all of that, honestly, I think it simply wasn't safe for Harris to win a free and fair election at that point.

That is a totally crazy thought to have had on election night in America in the year 2024. Where do we send the bill for the damage that has been done to our country? Half of our society just elected a man to the presidency who they know would not have accepted the results of the election had he lost. Vice President Harris conceded the next day, as everyone knew she would.

There is probably no one who supported Trump who thinks that he would have done what they fully expected Harris to do, which is to protect the most important norm of our democracy, the very thing that makes it possible, the peaceful transfer of power.

And the astonishing thing is that Trump supporters are totally okay with this asymmetry. They expected Harris to concede and would have demanded that she do it. And yet they know Trump wouldn't have conceded if he lost, understanding all the risk this would have posed to our social fabric. And they are fine with that. That is already the ruination of our politics.

That is what the path to fascism looks like. We are already on it. There is nothing hypothetical about this. Bad things have already happened. And this is true whatever happens over the next four years. It's like in the film The Exorcist. If your kid has stigmata and is vomiting green goo in all directions and is moving furniture with her mind,

you should admit that you have a problem. It shouldn't require Satan himself to make an appearance. What is so frustrating about Trump supporters is that they refuse to acknowledge any of this. They simply refuse to acknowledge how pathological our situation is and how pathological Trump himself has made it. Whatever story you have in your head about all the good Trump might do in a second term, he's a disruptor.

He's got all the tech bros in there with him. He's just crazy enough to scare our enemies. Or he's just a bullshitter and he won't do half of what he claims he'll do, so don't worry about it. Whatever story you're telling yourself, here is what is true now. We are returning a man to the Oval Office who, as a sitting president, would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

and who tried to steal the 2020 election, all the while claiming it was being stolen from him. And he has lied about this ever since, knowing that these lies stand as a continuous provocation to violence. And there are court cases pending, seeking to hold him accountable for all of this, cases which, now that he'll be in control of the Justice Department, will be dismissed.

We're putting Trump back in power when we know that he can't honestly discharge his oath of office because he has no respect for the Constitution. And half of our society is not only willing to run this risk, they're positively jubilant about it. At a minimum, you should acknowledge that these events have seriously injured our politics. Again, whatever happens over the next four years,

And I have something that I really must say to Joe Rogan and the other podcasters who interviewed Trump. You can't have it both ways. You don't get to say that this was the podcast election.

and that these long-form conversations are incredibly important for people to hear so that they can make up their mind about who to vote for. And then take no journalistic responsibility whatsoever to get your facts straight or to expose obvious lies when you're talking to the most prolific liar on earth. You don't get to spout endless conspiracy theories about how our election system is dangerously broken and vulnerable to fraud. And then when your candidate wins...

Say, "Oh, well, Trump's victory was just too big for them to rig the election." No. How about realizing that there was nothing significantly wrong with our election system in the first place, and that all these concerns about fraud were lies coming from your candidate and his surrogates, and they were telling these lies in preparation for not accepting the results of the election had he lost.

and you let your platform be used for that purpose by people who are willing to shatter our politics and even risk provoking a civil war out of personal self-interest. Every podcaster who interviewed Trump managed to make it seem like all the bad things that have ever been said about him were the result of some left-wing elite media conspiracy.

To interview Trump or his surrogates responsibly would have required that you put them on the spot for any number of odious things he has said and done, and for things he said he intends to do in his second term, all of which are well documented, and many of which should be totally disqualifying in a presidential candidate. It's not enough to just turn on the microphones and have a conversation.

And it doesn't matter that it's three hours long. If all you're going to do is launder the man's lies by ignoring them in the interests of maintaining good vibes, there is a complacency and an amorality to the way you approach this that was actively harmful. And all you people with Twitterphile's derangement syndrome,

Just how fair and balanced are things over there at X now? Is it the bastion of free speech you were hoping for? You think having a platform run by a manic billionaire who doesn't trust any of his own moderators to vet information, so he fires them, but trusts random conspiracists and lunatics, so he personally amplifies their lies to 200 million followers? You think this is progress?

Do you think you'd feel the same way if a left-wing billionaire was boosting activist garbage to his 200 million followers every hour on the hour? And perhaps a note to journalists and scientists and writers and people with actual reputations to protect and lives to live, none of this gets any better until you all decide to leave X. You know it's a cesspool. You know it's harming our society. Most of you know it's harming your lives personally.

By merely being there and making it seem like everyone has to be there because everyone is there, you are helping to build the tool that is making fact-based conversation impossible. Our society is being riven by lies, and social media, and X in particular, is largely responsible for this. Of course, I get that some breaking news happens there first, and some news might only happen there.

But if that's a feature of social media that we simply must conserve, well then we have to instantiate it elsewhere, not on a platform owned and run and entirely dominated by a meme junkie who lost all of his principles years ago. Once again, everything I've been talking about and complaining about has already happened.

But looking forward, of course there are reasons to be worried about a second Trump term. Is RFK Jr. really going to be setting medical policy for the country? That should make your head explode. Is Trump going to weaken our international alliances? Will he pull us out of NATO? If we have fewer biological men in women's sports, are we also going to have fewer democracies? Is that a fair trade? Is Trump going to call the MyPillow guy and the Pizzagate dummies for advice on how to run the world?

Or will he suddenly pivot and surround himself with competent ethical advisors? Well, we'll have to wait and see. Needless to say, I will respond to whatever happens on this podcast. But I'm not going to spend the next four years obsessing about Donald Trump. As I've said before, I consider him one of the greatest opportunity costs for humanity to appear in my lifetime. The fact that we've had to think about this man continuously for a decade is just an incredible piece of bad luck.

So I'm going to do my best to pick my moments here. I'm sure there will be many over the next four years, but I am just not willing to give more of my time to politics than is absolutely necessary. And I will be sure to tell you when I receive that first IRS audit. Thanks for listening.