X is actually great. Elon fired moderators and replaced them with a crowdsourced fact-checking mechanism (community notes), where a correction (fact-check) only appears if both sides of the political spectrum agree on it. This has resulted in some of Elon's own tweets getting corrected. It's an interesting experiment at the very least.
Because of that website, tens of millions of Americans believed that Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets, and Aurora, CO was being taken over by Venezuelan street gangs. And it is flooded with anti-trans rhetoric. Twitter is probably why tens of millions of Americans believe that the Covid vaccines are more dangerous than Covid. It's an absolute cesspool. And they are obsessed with Hunter Biden's laptop. As if that stupid laptop proved anything of significance!
Sure but there’s a flip side to that. When covid started, mainstream media was blocking discussion of the lab leak hypothesis (including Facebook) claiming it was somehow racist, but later when Trump lost the election, it became OK to discuss it as a probable covid origin theory. X is a bulwark against that kind of media/elite collusion.
Another example is BLM, elites and mainstream media were cowed into parroting the BLM narrative, and only Sam Harris had the guts to challenge it because he had his own platform. X enables regular people to challenge mainstream narratives, people who don’t have the resources of Sam Harris. Anonymity also helps there.
MSM was not blocking the lab leak hypothesis. They reported on what serious people were saying about it on both sides of the issue. But they never claimed the issue was settled because it never was. No one was “cowed” into reporting on BLM. What are you talking about? What exactly is the mainstream narrative of BLM? Are you a Russian bot?
In April 2020...."Democrats showed little inclination to investigate the pandemic’s origins. Like the president’s references to the “China virus,” his suggestion of a lab leak sounded to them like xenophobia and risked fueling anti-Asian sentiment." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html
This was what the Democratic party was worried about in 2020 re: the lab leak question, per a 2023 NYTs article cited above.
This concern came through strong and clear in MSM and in social media at the time.
The point is that the Democratic party was more concerned with fears of "xenophobia" than they were in investigating and validating understandable concerns of citizens about a likely lab leak being the origin of Covid. Even during a pandemic, the Dem's preoccupation with identity politics took priority over a focus on investigating and understanding how this virus was released. The chilling effect of this stance was absolutely echoed in MSM and on social media platforms, with accusations of being racist for even broaching the topic being very common. Dems/Libs took the role of self-congratulatory holier than thou scolders of anyone not in lock step with their point of view on the lab leak question, school closures, masks, vaccines, etc., etc.,
This stuff is what people are sick of and this why the Dems lost.
There was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment at the time. But Democrats left questions of the origins of the virus to professionals in the field, like the CDC. The right on Twitter and Facebook was listening to crackpot conspiracy theorists. The mainstream/legacy media accurately reported the thoughts on the origins of the virus by experienced epidemiologists. To this date, we don't have any certainty about the origins of the virus.
"The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling. The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look for a “hack and dump” operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election. Even after Facebook specifically asked whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Dehmlow of the FBI refused to comment, resulting in the social-media companies’ suppression of the story. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election. " https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/testimony-reveals-fbi-employees-who-warned-social-media-companies-about-hack
"In the case of Twitter, not only did they try to block sharing of it, they suspended The New York Post's actual Twitter account for sharing its own article (about the Hunter Biden laptop). That was a wild overreach, and even Twitter had to acknowledge that." https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerge-in-federal-investigation-into-hunter-biden. (This from an NPR interview, hardly a right wing media outlet.)
Matt, the significance of the Hunter Biden laptop story was the degree to which the MSM and social media via government interference took steps to quash the story for fear that it would negatively affect Biden's chances in the 2020 election leading to a Trump win. It's the effort to sensor the media by the government and the quashing of a real story, keeping it from reaching the voting public prior to the election, that should be of concern to American citizens. This is well documented.
If this level of government censorship happened in a way that affected the outcome of an election of your preferred candidate, as opposed to a candidate you do not like such as Trump, perhaps it would bother you more. I voted for Biden in 2020, but this does concern me. It really should concern any citizen and any real journalist that does not want the government censoring the free press prior to an important election Banana Republic style.
By quashing a story, it helped support the narrative that the election was stolen.
Bottom line, it causes the public to no longer have faith in these institutions. This certainly can and will undermine democracy and democratic institutions which we see happening.
Which does concern me greatly.
This is why the Hunter-Biden laptop story is significant IMHO.
Of interest and quite eye opening is the Munk Debates on Mainstream Media where the Hunter Biden laptop story and other news stories are debated by four well known journalists: https://munkdebates.com/debates/mainstream-media/
Agreed. X is fine. The left is just pissed the right can say what it wants now without getting suspended.
Id rather the spectrum of what's acceptable to discuss be wider and the downside more misinformation, than a much smaller spectrum of acceptability and less misinformation.
Sam is just sour grapes the left doesn't control Twitter anymore, and he just really hates Elon after their personal falling out.
Only someone else that knows fuck all about Sam Harris can make a comment like that. Sam is on the side of truth and is know to have pissed off "the left" just as much as anyone on the other end of the political spectrum. Also, he fell out with Elon because Elon is an infantile dickhead.
I'm a huge Harris fan, and he is a truth seeker....But his falling out with Elon is clouding his judgement about Twitter as is the fact he was personally unfairly driven off Twitter by hateful clowns.
But I can't blame him for falling out with Elon. I'm shocked they were even friends in any capacity just a couple of years ago, Elon being a narcissistic man child.
Community Notes is indeed a better approach to fighting misinformation than moderation.
And as someone who had become a frequent Twitter user a couple of years before Elon took over, I don't think that the site has changed that much. To the extent that it has, it's clearly gotten worse (the lack of identity verification, the boosting of Blue Check content, and war on links were all mistakes that have clearly degraded the experience in some ways, plus the fact that a lot of people I like have decided to post there less often or not at all), but my experience of Twitter really hasn't changed all that much since it became X.
Having said that, it's important to note that Twitter/X has always been a guilty pleasure, because it's always been a dumpster fire in terms of its impact on the country. The core problem with Twitter has nothing to do with too much moderation or too little moderation. It's that a platform that combines 280 character limit posts, it's threading model, and support for anonymity was always going to become a cesspool of tribal anger and divisiveness around any controversial issue.
I enjoy Twitter, but it's similar to how I enjoy UFC. Fights are great to watch, but sometimes you feel a little guilty afterward.
You can curate your feed on X. You can follow mainstream journalists like Caitlin Flanagan, Anne Applebaum, and Ezra Klein, and only get their tweets -- or you can follow Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Bronze Age Pervert.
I enjoy the occasional energetic Alex Jones rant (“Kids, Magellan is way cooler than Justin Bieber!”) or a funny Tate meme, even though they might not be true. And I resent people who insist that every piece of text that crosses my eyes has to be fact-checked and sourced like a publication in The Scientific American.
Yes. I pretty much only ever look at the "Following" feed on Twitter so that's my experience of the platform.
Meanwhile Vladimir, while I agree that that absent a direct incitement to violence, Twitter generally should let the 1st Amendment be its guide and shouldn't be in the business of deciding who should and shouldn't be allowed on the platform, I also think that Alex Jones' Sandy Hook trutherism is some of the vilest stuff ever broadcast. His rants may be amusing (I've never listened so I don't know), but I have a hard time respecting anyone who does listen or follow him. Some times people do things that are beyond the pale and should be shunned, and I can't immediately think of a better example than Jones. I'll be honest that the fact that you listen to him makes me think less of you.
I think I would laugh at his classic rants even if he did worse things than pushing the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory. It’s kind of like Michael Jackson’s music, regardless of whether he was a pedophile or not, the music is still good. Jews listen to Wagner and Tchaikovsky even though they were raging antisemites, etc.
Certainly agree with you that it's fine to listen to Wagner or Michael Jackson, watch Woody Allen or movies, etc. So from that perspective, I guess enjoying Alex Jones videos is arguably fine too. Again, don't think Twitter should ban them. But ...
- If that Magellan rant is an example of the best of Alex Jones, I don't think I'm missing much. I'm someone who still believes Caddyshack is one of the ten greatest movies of all time, so I don't think of myself as a snobby viewer, but man was there no payoff there. There is always some humor in a Magellan reference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcioLRXUCac), but it was really just shouting.
- Also think that Alex Jones is a far more vile human being than Wagner, Michael, Woody, etc. Claiming that the murder of young children was a hoax? Outside of Hamas, it's hard to think of anyone worse.
Yeah, Alex is not a comedian like Seinfeld or Rodney Dangerfield. To me the funny part about his rants is how amped up he gets over silly things like Bieber-Magellan, or companies putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay (hermaphroditic). Most commentators would focus on the environmental impact etc, but he goes ballistic about frogs becoming gay. I don’t know, it’s not for everybody :)
I think the Sandy Hook stuff was horrible, but surely molesting children (Michael Jackson) is worse than falsely accusing someone of being a crisis actor, or claiming that child murders didn't happen.
Yeah, from what I can tell the only red line is the legal one (incitement of violence, etc). They probably have algorithms to detect those messages even in the absence of community notes.
Community Notes often take hours or days to correct false info, by which time it can have been seen by millions of people. One is only notified about a CN if one interacts with a post by liking or sharing it, which makes up a tiny % of the people who read the content.
I completely agree. And because we're living in a media landscape that is generally so confused and confusing, it's so emotionally satisfying to encounter Sam's level of intellectual honesty.
I have been thinking this for a while. Do you all believe there is a snowball's chance in hell that Sam would ever throw his hat in for the Democratic party nominee in 2028?
Sam Harris has written some brilliant stuff over the past several years, particularly after October 7. And much of this current podcast "makes sense." However, the "trans issue" got several paragraphs, yet (after one reading) I don't think he mentioned reproductive freedom once.
I am a physician. I have been taught how to evaluate, diagnose, and treat transgender people. I have been trained and have done (rarely, because it's very uncommon) gender affirming surgery. I have also participated in gender assignment of newborns born with ambiguous genitalia, which is a medical emergency and requires a team of endocrinologists, urologists, psychologists, and social workers who work together to provide the best gender assignment for the baby and his/her family.
Unless you work in this field, or unless you have a transgender person in your family, I doubt that you Sam, or any of you reading this, have any idea how complicated, serious, and difficult this situation is for individuals, families, and doctors.
Which gets back to reproductive freedom, because there is a link. Republican politicians have taken a serious medical and psychological issue and have turned it into a tool of distortion and disinformation to be used (successfully) against Democrats, Liberals, and the "Woke." According to Sam and the rest of us, it worked.
The fact that it worked is as sad, evil, and wrong as anything else Sam points out in the podcast. I guess Kamala did say she would support gender affirming surgery for inmates, or was it immigrants. I wonder how many inmates would request gender affirming surgery? I wonder how many of these inmates were afforded even basic medical and psychological evaluation? The answer is TWO. Two people. At this point I don't have the energy or time to provide a reference, but I'm pretty sure it can't be very many.
Yet the Republicans spent millions of dollars on these attack ads. And, sadly, it worked.
Who should have been responsible for calling them out? Didn't Kamala do enough to call them out over the cruelty over reproductive freedom? Those that voted for the clown were not swayed. Politicians (and their supporters, and the people who vote for them) should get the fuck out of our exam and operating rooms.
Heaven help us if RFK Jr has any say in how we provide health care. Our health care system is as broken as our political system.
Max: You totally missed Sam's point. He wouldn't disagree with anything you have said about the complexity and importance of dealing sensitively with people with either ambiguous genitalia or folks experiencing gender dysphoria. Most of America (including myself) would also fully agree with that point. I think anyone who disagrees with that sentiment can correctly be dismissed as transphobes.
The problem with trans activists, and the problem they have created for the Democratic Party, is that they have gone way past that to label anyone who question any part of what they believe as transphobes:
- In the case of trans women competing in womens' sports at the high school level and above, this is simply insane. Trans activists are wrong about this issue in exactly the same way that climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers are wrong about those issues; they're simply ignoring physical reality because it leads in the opposite direction of the outcome they prefer.
- In the case of how best to care with young people who say they are experiencing gender dysphoria, it's a genuinely difficult issue. On the one hand, I'm sure there are teens who genuinely benefit from puberty blockers and eventually even surgeries. But I think it's very difficult to distinguish between these teens and other teens who these interventions will harm rather than help because the real issues causing their unhappiness are different (whether it's a function of dealing with being gay, reactions to sexual abuse, or just the angst that comes with becoming an adult and sexuality). The explosion in young people claiming to be transgender is a telling indicator that the second category might be much bigger than the first. But the transactivist's community's refusal to address this complexity and instead to double down by attempting to smear folks who raise questions again makes it entirely logical to again question their judgement.
So while it is true that Kamala didn't talk about trans issues on the campaign trail, the fact that she wasn't willing to admit that both she on the campaign trail in 2019 and the Biden administration has been wrong in the way they have handled these issues (essentially ceding all ground to the activists) legitimately made it an issue for people who care about these issues. While I'm interested in this stuff (I think issues of identity are fascinating), I'm not someone who thinks this is one of the top 50 issues that a Presidential vote should be decided on, so it was never going to stop me from voting against Trump.
But Sam's point was that for a lot of people it was important enough to affect their vote. And the fact that someone like you, who is a clearly a thoughtful person, totally misunderstood what Sam was saying, is a great example of how toxic this issues has become for the health of the Democratic Party.
Thanks for setting me straight Gordon. I listened to the podcast again while running past a dozen Trump Vance signs during my 5 mile run this morning. I don't disagree with Sam, nor do I disagree with you. I agree with you that this should not be one of the top 50 issues upon which an election should be decided. And I agree with Sam when he says the culture wars should be over for Democrats. Republicans have weaponized cultural issues like LGBTQ and even abortion to enhance their quest to fuck the libs. In an attempt to provide a humane place for marginalized people in the the Democratic party, some of us took the bait and doubled down on the right for these people to belong. I am saddened by the fact that they used this to win the election and all the consequences that will follow, or that are happening even today if you look at the appointments.
The only reason the trans activists are being heard is that right-wing media is amping up everything they say and broadcasting it across the country, the more cringy the better, as far as they are concerned.
Activists are a famously obnoxious crowd, and they tend to say some extreme things. But Democratic politicians are not saying extreme things on this issue. And the governing bodies of every sport are designing new rules to deal with people's concerns about fairness and safety.
And WPATH offers excellent, science-based guidelines when it comes to GAC for young people.
I think the cause of the increase in numbers is two-fold: the internet, where people who experience gender dysphoria can find resources that encourage them to live their authentic lives, and because our society (parts of it, anyway) is becoming more welcoming of them. But I'm sure there are kids who get confused about these issues, too. The saying “insistent, persistent, and consistent” is a good starting point. GAC specialists are trained in how to look out for other causes. And as we move forward I'm sure we will be able to gather better data and make better recommendations.
WPATH are responsible, science-based activists. Of course, the transphobic community demonizes them, too.
I disagree Matt. I don't follow much right-wing media, and it certainly wasn't how I became aware of trans activists. I think I first became aware of them when I began hearing about the attacks on J.K. Rowling as transphobic, tried to understand why, and found the allegations utterly ridiculous. And then saw the same ridiculousness from attacks on other folks I find credible.
As for WPATH, I don't really follow their positions closely enough to have definitive opinions, but from what I've read from Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and Lisa Selin Davis, there are legitimate concerns about how they have been operating and whether they are letting ideology get ahead of their commitment to their patients.
Personally, I wish the Harris campaign would have taken two positions on trans issues that would have helped:
- First, making it clear that she doesn't support trans women competing in women's sports at the high school level and above.
- Second, expressing that how to support teen agers who have concerns about their gender identity is extremely delicate and requires being sure to do no harm before intervening medically or going the route of the affirmation model. To be clear, I don't think either approach should be banned. I'm sure there are cases (including it sounds like your nephew) where those approaches are best, but Kamala should have acknowledged that this isn't always the case
I appreciate your disagreement, Gordon. I pay a lot of attention to right-wing media. Are you familiar with Libs of Tik Tok? It's huge on Twitter. It's all about showing the cringiest examples of trans people doing the cringiest things you can imagine in an effort to demonize them and the people who support them. And Dennis Prager talks about it on his national show almost every day. He says we are sick people for supporting their rights. He says we're in favor of lopping off girls breats just because they say they're a boy. He claims that teachers are sexualizing our children by taking them to drag queen story hours. When Bud Light came out with a can honoring Dylan Mulvaney there was such a backlash that Budweiser stock fell about 5-10%. Target had the same thing happen when they had a gay pride display. Transphobia is pretty deep, thanks to right-wing media.
Andrew Sullivan is worse than Sam on this issue. I don't know the other two.
WPATH is terrific. If people follow their advice, there won't be a lot of the problems that people worry about. These are sober, science-based researchers, and they've been doing it for more than 50 years.
My position on rare events like trans women competing in women's sports and being housed in women's prisons is that these issues are best handled at the local level, by people who are very familiar with the facts on the ground. I'm not concerned about the occasional trans girl competing in High School sports. The point of sports in High School is to learn things like how to work together as a team, and how to handle losses with dignity and wins with humility. Above that level, I trust the governing bodies of each sport to make rules that ensure safety and fairness. Prisons are such a fraught issue. Imagine the problems with putting a trans women in a men's prison. Which, again, is why these issues need to be left to local authorities who, hopefully, have everyone's best interests at heart. The bathrooms issue isn't a problem, if people can act like adults. In most cases, most people wouldn't know if a person is trans or not.
There is a way to talk about this issue that won't alienate voters. And the Dems will find a way to do so. I can talk Trump people into agreeing that people should have the freedom to access gender affirming care. They just need to be reassured that the crazy stuff they are saying on right-wing media isn't true, or isn't nearly as crazy as they are trying to make it out to be.
WPATH files is a lot of innuendo, using quotes taken out of context to scare people. Michael Shellenburger has an anti-trans agenda. I recommend reading their guidelines for yourself and determining whether they are a serious, science-based organization making a good faith effort to gather data and make recommendations.
On JK Rowling, I listened to the pod cast series Sam recommended, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling. It was excellent––very fair to both perspectives. I can easily see why trans people are offended by her comments, and why they say she is transphobic. And I understand why some people think JK Rowling is being perfectly sensible. I happen to think she has some trauma with men, because she was abused by a man. I think she is way over sensitive on this issue.
Many women are abused by men. Abused, raped, murdered, groped, molested, lorded over, perved over, stalked, etc. There's not a woman on this planet who's not been rightfully creeped out (if not "traumatized") by some dude. It's a norm. She's not over sensitive, she's accurate about reality and the necessity of protecting women and girls. And I find it so spot-on that women are asked to kowtow to trans women in their sports; meanwhile if trans men entered men's sports, no big deal (they'd likely get creamed if not fucking killed). Women are asked to just scootch aside and deal with it, and if not, they're sensitive/hysterical/transphobic/pick your condescending and damning descriptor. I'm a woman. I'm referred to as a "person with a uterus" in real clinical settings. And I never hear men referred to as "people with testes" or "beings with penises." It just doesn't seem to go both ways with the same fervor. Rowling has the balls to WTF?! the issue and it's warranted. And I say this knowing that many women are just fine referring to themselves as "people with uteruses," and I suppose they're just trying to do the right thing, but. ...I think it's a failure to think outside the craziness of this moment. MEANWHILE trans people suffer many dangers, and if we really tried, I think we the people could be smart enough to cover all our bases with the aim to protect everyone without ostracizing the other.
Her experience, according to her accounting of it, was not normal. He was extremely abusive.
There are so few trans women competing in sports that I think it’s silly to get too alarmed about it. The governing bodies of every sport are ensuring that they maintain fairness and safety in women’s sports. Leah Thomas, for example, would not qualify to compete under the rules today.
High School sports are about learning to work together as a team, and learning how to lose with dignity and win with humility. The stakes are not that high. There may be cases where it would be inappropriate for a trans woman to compete with biological females, but in other cases there is no problem because the trans woman isn’t even in the top half of the women competing, so why not include them? There are cases where no one knows if the person is trans. This is why I think these rare cases are best handled by the people on the ground, not some state or federal bureaucrat making pronouncements from on high. I agree with the last few sentences you wrote. I think we can work this out if people act like adults and stop running around with their hair on fire over every little thing.
Thank you Max for adding depth and humanity to this topic. Even if the trans issue was addressed with the sensitivity you suggest the outrage machine will just find something else to be outraged about. That is a tactic and it has always been. Imagine the uproar when people first suggested that women should be allowed to vote. Even without the amplification of Tiktok and other noxious online forums. This is always a dynamic that must be overcome when we introduce cultural change.
Thank you, Doctor! I have a trans nephew. Gender-affirming care (no surgery) has been unbelievably healing for him. His whole family is fully on board. He is such an amazing person, and since his very conservatives parents agreed to his transition, he is happy and super successful. We're all so proud of him. He will go far in life.
Great podcast/essay. I believe that it certainly didn't help that even impeccably qualified commentators--such as, for example, Anne Applebaum, on Sam's own podcast--refused to even acknowledge problems on the left, for fear of giving ammunition to the right. This idea, that honest self-reflection might hand power to the right, was exactly backwards. People hate being lied to. They hate being gaslit. Especially when it's regarding things that are taking place directly in front of their eyes.
I've found that too. But another point is that I suspect that's new, and a result of having to deal with the vicious MAGA strategy of doing just that. Pouncing on every little sign of weakness and blowing it up into a national crisis. With enormous help from the right-wing media entity of course.
In his recent podcast, Harris attempted to unpack the complexities surrounding Donald Trump's presidential election victory. Instead of addressing the broader issues at play, he veered into a lengthy diatribe about transgender individuals and the so-called "woke" agenda. This focus on transgender issues, while certainly part of the contemporary cultural conversation, felt misplaced and disproportionate, especially when considering the pressing concerns faced by the electorate at large.
The crux of my disappointment lies in the manner in which Harris approached this topic. His anti-trans rhetoric seemed to echo the disinformation campaigns that have targeted the LGBTQ community, further amplifying a narrative that seeks to divide rather than unite. This is particularly troubling given the current climate of misinformation that permeates the political landscape. Harris's commentary detracted from a more substantial discussion about the factors contributing to Trump's rise, such as economic inequality, systemic racism, and the pervasive influence of disinformation.
One cannot ignore the statistical reality: transgender individuals represent a small fraction of the population, and issues related to their rights and integration in society, including athletics, affect an even smaller subset of people. While these issues deserve thoughtful and empathetic discussion, dedicating an entire episode to them, especially amidst a political crisis, feels myopic at best. It suggests a prioritization of culture wars over the pressing needs of the broader population.
For years, Harris's philosophical stance resonated with me. His emphasis on reason, critical thinking, and the pursuit of truth aligned closely with my own values. However, this recent shift towards a narrow focus on identity politics, coupled with a lack of engagement with the larger societal issues at play, has left me disillusioned.
As a long-time supporter, I genuinely hope Harris takes a step back to reflect on the misinformation that is rampant in our society. The narrative around Trump's victory is not rooted in the plight of a small demographic but rather in a complex web of socio-political factors that deserve more nuanced exploration. It is imperative for influential figures like Harris to recognize the power of their words and the impact they have on public discourse, particularly in an era where misinformation can easily take root.
In conclusion, my long-standing support for Sam Harris is faltering as I grapple with his recent commentary. It is my hope that he will return to the thoughtful, reasoned discourse that initially drew me to him, rather than getting swept up in the divisive rhetoric that seems to dominate our current political landscape.
If you consider a simple acknowledgement that there are salient physical disparities between biological males and females “anti-trans rhetoric,” that says a great deal more about you than it does Sam. We have to be able to discuss fundamental realities without worrying if it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings or encroach upon their sense of self. The fact that we can discuss trans women and biological women as separate populations already tells you there’s a meaningful distinction between the two, and it is not hateful to note as much.
We can discuss all that, but maybe after we stop Trump from destroying America and quite possibly the world. The false equivalency here between the existential threat Trump represents, and the discomfort folks have with identity politics — which were hardly a focus of Kamala’s actual campaign, for those paying attention — is the grossest kind of both-sidesism.
Ah, "The Resistance" has entered the conversation.
You chose not to engage with the pushback/counter narrative I provided you with on the claims about Trump being a Fascist/the next Hitler and now it's evolved into "we can't discuss anything else until we prevent Mango Mussolini from destroying America and the world".
It's astonishing that you can be exposed to a clear argument like this on why the Democrats just got absolutely hammered and have the takeaway be "identity politics isn't that important, let's try our 2016 resistance movement again".
Did you see a claim in the piece that identity politics _were_ a focus of Kamala's campaign? Where is the both-sidesism you're railing against?
I think Sam's point is that identity politics is part of what's preventing us from defeating Trump and we need to reevaluate ourselves and our approach in the wake of this devastating loss
I get it. I just don't agree. I think what's preventing us from defeating Trump is 60 years of the GOP behaving as what a friend aptly termed "an asshole magnet." What began with a few crackpots has now become a whole movement.
Worse, the right has its own information ecosystem, carefully constructed over decades. It encouraged adherents to believe lies. That ecosystem has been hyping the so-called "woke agenda," to generate outrage and win votes. It worked. And we did not act in a swift or coordinated fashion to prevent that. Trying to put our woke-horse back in the political barn is not an effective way to address this problem.
Soon they'll be clamping down further on the free flow of information, discouraging critical thinking and further indoctrinating the electorate, and I am already in despair over the consequences.
I agree with a lot of that, right wing media has been horrendous for our country and has eroded truth to a staggering degree. But democrats don’t control right wing media and I think Sam’s points are more about what can we, the left half of America, do to start winning again
Right, but Sam's answer seems to be "stop being woke." I think curtailing speech and behaviors that endorse greater civil liberties, no matter how "annoying" they seem to some, is simply never going to be a viable strategy.
But the bigger problem is, it wouldn't matter.
Because if it's not wokeness, it'll be some other annoying Democratic value, and then Fox + Friends will lie about it, distort it beyond recognition, and generate outrage and anger, and use that to win votes. Wokeness is just the outrage du jour. It was "welfare queens" before that, remember? On and on and on. Are we supposed to endlessly navel-gaze and hand-wring every time they jerk that chain?
It wasn't the identity politics that drove voters away. It was the disingenuously generated hysteria over it. It was the lies.
here's the thing for me: the most Trump ads i saw were playing into the fears around the trans issue. Understand, my daughter's spouse is a trans women - I love her, and I officiated their marriage. I live in a "trans-sanctuary city" (Olympia, WA), and have enormous space for trans people. However, I think it is a travesty that we as a society can't have an honest, nuanced conversation about this, and that the right wing played this card effectively to strike deep fear into the middle of America.
Don’t out other people without their permission, first, and second, the way you’re talking sounds very close to when white people say "I have a black friend".
Conversations can happen without outing LGBTQIA2S+ people online without their permission, there’s no word policing going on. A responsible ally understands this is a safety issue. I’m assuming the commenter didn’t know since they outed their family member, hence the reason I’m informing them so they know and don’t run into it again.
You're commenting here - on a blog that's addressing why the Democrats just suffered a historic defeat due, in some part at least, to identity politics - to try and tell someone they can't talk about a person in their actual, "not on the internet" life - a person whose wedding they officiated no less.
Definitely no word (or thought) policing going on here.
Incidentally, Sam has spoken at some length about why "I have a black friend" is actually a totally coherent point to make. If you actually have a black (or any other race/identity than your own) friend, spouse etc, you actually are demonstrating something meaningful about yourself.
Real racists/bigots/transphobes etc don't actually "have a black/gay/trans/Jewish friends".
Well said Multatuli. I expected better from Sam than to fall into this singular line of thought like so many in an ever growing movement of “anti woke”. Basically everyone at The Free Press for example. Trouble is, they are not wrong about the issues of the left - it’s just not the whole story, or even the most meaningful part. I would encourage people to drive through the endless, once thriving, now broken towns across the Midwest, rust belt, and southern states.
Racine, WI - Louisville, KY - Columbus, OH - Harrisburg, PA. Even bigger towns like St Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland. These towns have been gutted. They are angry, sad, addicted, and have lost hope while the coastal politicians like Schumer and Pelosi (on the Dem side anyway) have stood idle while they themselves made millions supporting a corporate machine that has given nothing to the American people - including tax revenue! This is not free market either - I support free market - the game is totally rigged and the money has bought the politicians for decades.
This is why Trump won. Even if the woke issues were non-existent, sooner or later Trump or a figure like him would’ve won. Bernie has been right about this and they ignored him on the left. This is the result.
“Anti-trans” tells you all you need to know about the author of this comment - they’re either deliberately misrepresenting Sam’s take or they read at a preteen comprehension level.
When you start your day, you probably make a to-do list. If not literally, then at least mentally. You put emphasis on some tasks more than others. For example, paying your electricity bill has to be more important than buying milk. Because if there is no electricity, the milk is going to go bad anyways.
In a similar fashion, you have to emphasize issues based on how important they are to the public. If the public is more concerned about their grocery bill, your concern for the world peace, LGBTQ issues, NATO, fill in your blank, means nothing to them.
Majority of people will have no problem with trans people getting what they want. What they have a problem with is putting more emphasis on issues that concern half a percent of the population rather than on issues that concern half of the country.
It is high time that Democrats learn this lesson and course correct.
There was no "anti trans rhetoric", wtf are you on about. Sounds like you completely failed to process this essay. Sam is right, a lot of people voted on the trans issue that have no connection to trans people. I've just engaged with some of them to find out why...because I'm intellectually curious, unlike you.
"transgender individuals represent a small fraction of the population". Right, and transitioners have been arround for decades. No one cared at all, until it became a political movement using "in your face" aggression tactics, and tried to censure everyone not 100% onboard. Full-grown men with beards using women's changerooms at the beach (yes, I've seen them), calling out TERF's, and on and on. These activists are not your friends, and are what have caused so much unwelcome polarization. Most people seriously don't care what you do, as long as you are respectful. I know at least two trans-women who have completely distanced themselves due to embarrassment.
I suggest Democrats follow Sam’s advice and if I were positioning myself for a 2028 Presidential run I’d go on Making Sense in April or May of next year and make some sense on these issues. That would be a good start. A post-woke Democrat sounds interesting.
What is also truly astonishing is that the two titanic forces barreling toward us at warp speed — AI and climate catastrophes — seem to have played almost no significant role in the election. All else pales in comparison in comparison.
Why would they have played a significant role in the election when what's evidently taking up a sizeable chunk of people's bandwidth and resources is whether they can manage the cost of living? It's a Maslow's Hierarchy dynamic and it doesn't matter that you think people should have been deciding on the basis of something else.
Your comment noted that "[these two issues] seem to have played almost no significant role in the election."
I read that as "these two issues weren't front of mind for voters when they made their choice" not "the candidates didn't speak about these topics enough".
I agree that leaders should talk about important things when they articulate their approach, policies and what they stand for. That said, their primary responsibility is to win and ensure they put themselves in a position to take action on the things they consider important.
Agreed. But it’s a shame that so many people, especially those dealing with the ever growing wealth inequality who need it the most, don’t have the ability or resources to vote in their own best self interests by being able to see past and through all the propaganda. I know I’m describing a dream world, but damn, as a species we actually have developed an ability to understand our own behavior, motivations, logical thinking fallacies and biases. It just that 95% of us have either no desire or no ability to do so. Sure wish it were the other way around.
AI risks is overblown at the moment, mainly because its abilities are way overblown by industry hype peddlers. LLMs are no more than fancy autocomplete engines, and their interpolation over human-produced content does not meaningfully approximate any level of intelligence, so concern about a superintelligence is premature. The only things I’d worry about there is the much easier generation of misinformation, and the general rot its careless adoption is causing to the economy.
I value your thoughts, Sam. I deactivated my Twitter/X account today after hearing you say the below quote* on the podcast.
Small thing: maybe @MakingSenseHQ could move from Twitter/X to Bluesky?
*"And perhaps a note to journalists, scientists, writers, and other 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 must conserve, then we have to instantiate it elsewhere—not on a platform that is owned, run, and entirely dominated by a meme junkie who lost all his principles years ago."
I've never understood the complaint about "identity politics". There are various constituencies, and they have different values and interests, and both parties are interested in appealing to as many of them as they possibly can. As if the right doesn't have their identities that they are trying to appeal to, like white Christian, rural, working class conservatives.
It seems like Sam is way too easily swayed by right-wing media propaganda into believing that some of these issues are far bigger than they are. The left didn't campaign on the trans issue. The right did, as he pointed out. They made a mountain out of a mole hill, and it sadly worked. They successfully demonized the left's compassion for trans and nonbinary people. That is NOT the left's fault. We are not wrong to support these people. They are some of the most vulnerable people in society. We Democrats believe in individual liberty, and we should boldly proclaim that belief on behalf of trans and nonbinary people. Individual liberty is a core American value we ought to be proud to run on. We should shame anyone who wants to outlaw gender-affirming care.
And, Sam, I'm sorry, but not acknowledging the FACT that the boxer in question was born female is wrong and a bit cowardly. I saw and read the footnote. I doubt most people will. Stop giving that hatred and bigotry against those women wings! They are suffering terribly from all the abuse heaped on them. I hope they win their lawsuits.
Sometimes I wonder, Sam, if you're driving around in your car and absorbing arguments from talk radio for several hours a day. Teenage girls are not having the breasts lopped off in any kind of serious numbers. It's so rare. But you give people the impression that this is happening at alarming levels. It's just not.
"And, Sam, I'm sorry, but not acknowledging the FACT that the boxer in question was born female is wrong and a bit cowardly".
The boxer had ambiguous genitalia at birth and was WRONGLY thought to be female. He was not born female. I feel like I shouldn't have to point this out, but females don't have testicles. His testicles were internal and thus were not noted. At the time of puberty, the boxer did not begin menses, because he had no uterus, no fallopian tubes and no eggs.
What he does have are testicles, which pumped out the testosterone that enabled him to go through puberty. What had been thought to be a clitoris was in fact a penis, which grew during puberty to be a micro penis.
So we had a man fighting women in the Olympics, and unsurprising to anyone with eyes and common sense, he won the gold medal.
Look, I can see that many here are doubling and tripling down on this issue. It's the by now familiar talking points:
1. It isn't happening.
2. If it is happening, it's rare and doesn't matter.
How do you know so much about her genitalia? Where are you getting your information?
And did you read Sam's footnote?
"I understand, of course, that the controversy over Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting’s participation in the 2024 Summer Olympics wasn’t a clear example of the problem of trans women in women’s sports—because neither, to my knowledge, is actually trans-gender."
And who is saying that GAC isn't happening? Yes, surgeries for teens are very rare. And most people who access GAC are happy they did. You are very confused, and very emotional about this issue.
We should be investing in quality research on that subject, and we should let everyone know the facts about the risks and benefits before signing on for any particular treatment. WPATH is doing their best, but they are way underfunded.
Sam is exaggerating that. He signed a lot of executive orders the first day.
Here's what they said about LGBTQ matters
Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation
All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. The Biden-Harris Administration will prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. To begin this work, President-elect Biden will sign an Executive Order that builds on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) and ensures that the federal government interprets Title VII of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This Order will also direct agencies to take all lawful steps to make sure that federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ persons.
If it puts Trump in power, yes, I do see a problem with that. Do everything you can, even piss a lot of people off, to put the right people back in power, and then use that power to protect disadvantaged, and those discriminated against.
It’s ugly and unsatisfying but it’s the game we are currently stuck with and fumbling the messaging needed to win the votes does nobody any good in reality.
So you're willing to take away, or ignore, the Constitutional rights of some Americans if it gets your favored candidate elected? Your commitment to upholding the Constitution seems shaky and transactional. Isn't that what we're all afraid of with Trump? Only abiding by the parts of the Constitution we like is the path to chaos. Holding that attitude is the beginning of the end of our Republic.
Thank you for writing this so much more eloquently and calmly than I could have. Seems Sam Harris is so enamored with the "trans issue" that he is actually perpetuating falsehoods himself.
How is it the Dems fault that the electorate is so reactive/gullible to Boogeyman problems that really don't affect them personally?
It's dang near impossible to reason with the under educated and over religious, especially when they're blasted with misinformation constantly. Which Sam has done here himself.
"How is it the Dems fault that the electorate is so reactive/gullible to Boogeyman problems that really don't affect them personally?"
This is baffling to me, too. Did the folks who find identity politics "annoying" (Sam's word) -- but who otherwise aren't personally affected by the choices of others -- think about whether they'll be personally hurt by cuts to education, health care, reproductive rights and social security? What about climate change? How the heck do you justify THAT pivot?
I saw the ads featuring trans people. And I knew the ads would be effective at triggering rural and religious reactionaries. They blanketed people's TV screens with these ads. I'm sad to say that I think they were the deciding factor. But I don't blame Dems for standing up for trans rights. I blame the MAGA crowd for demonizing trans people and their supporters. And I know Sam believes in standing up for trans rights, too. But I think he is falling for a lot of right-wing propaganda on the issue. I don't think there is a massive social contagion happening. I think more people these days are feeling safe about living their true lives, like Harper from the Will and Harper movie. They are feeling more hopeful that they will be accepted for who they are. I see that as a positive step for liberal, democratic pluralism. We should be applauding our society for that, and contrasting our freedom with the repression in religiously conservative societies.
It the dems fault, not because they are wrong but because they aren’t TACTICALLY successful in reaching that small minority of swing voters and the broader group of centrist voters which then makes their messaging ineffective in WINNING ELECTIONS. It doesn’t matter how right you are if you lose the vote and as anti-idealist as that sounds, reality doesn’t care; you either alter your messaging to be more broadly appealing, even if you are sucking up to people whose opinions you despise, because REALITY requires it if you want to take back control and change things for vulnerable groups. It’s an ugly reality but losing with one’s idealism intact does no one any good. I hate the friggen game but reality will assert itself every time.
Dems are the ones that made trans issues, along with other social related issues, a top and urgent priority during the peak "woke" era of 2020-2022.
People aren't as dumb as you think, they see over such a period an administration and democratic party and elite culture that supported in general an identitarian worldview. Whether it was trans issues, racial issues (recall race based vaccine program and small business load programs, support for DEI initiative in and outside of government, etc. And again not just supported it, but was a main talking points for 2+ years for many people on the left.
At the same time we had the worse inflation in 40+ years.
What do you think the general swing voters perception is going to be?
Its going to be they care more about "woke" social issues than about help their day to economic day lives.
As far as I can tell from your engagements on Sam's work, you seldom pass up an opportunity to entirely miss the point, Matt.
"Sometimes I wonder, Sam, if you're driving around in your car and absorbing arguments from talk radio for several hours a day. Teenage girls are not having the breasts lopped off in any kind of serious numbers. It's so rare. But you give people the impression that this is happening at alarming levels. It's just not."
You then go on to cite a particular case of a trans person in your life and the happy outcome as if that, in itself, is more than one data point. As personally meaningful and great as it is, it's just one example.
To clarify, what is a "serious number" of teenage girls "having their breasts lopped off" such that it would be "alarming" in your view?
A few excerpts from Sam's piece that, if you actually read and pay attention to them, will make it clear that the predictable reactions to it from you and others here who are also _clearly_ missing the point (intentionally?):
- "What I think we need now is an honest assessment of why Trump won—because it says a lot about our country that he did."
- "**Obviously, Trump's win and Harris loss were determined by many factors, and I think everyone is in danger of believing that their pet issue explains everything that happened on Tuesday.**" [Pay special attention to this one].
- "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 [...] 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. [...] Or, to come to one of my hobby horses, it was her failure to have anything like a “Sister Souljah” 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 must recognize that several planks of their platform are thoroughly rotten.**
**Note:** He’s making it clear that all of those factors played a role (potentially a large one) but that they weren’t controllable by the Democrats whereas there were some clear areas where Harris and the Democrats could have made a meaningful impact with specific choices.
- **There's one species of identity politics that had an enormous effect on this election, and most Democrats don't seem to realize it.** [Again, pay special attention to this claim].
If you read all of the above carefully - and charitably/fairly - it's VERY clear what his argument is. You require blinders and/or motivated reasoning to think otherwise.
A final note: Adding a footnote to clarify and elaborate on the point you're making isn't cowardice. It's literally on the same page.
Yeah, I read the article. I also listened to it. It seems to me that he is blaming the Dems for standing up for trans rights. I'm blaming MAGA for demonizing our compassion for these people. And he should've made it clear that the boxer is NOT trans. What he said in the body is factually different from what is in the footnote. I think you are motivated to defend Sam. Your comment didn't really clarify anything for me. Feel free to try again if you still think I'm missing something.
The only thing I’m motivated to do is to attempt to get as close as I can to what’s actually true.
As you illustrate with the statement “ It seems to me that he is blaming the Dems for standing up for trans rights.”, you’re both mistaken AND missing the entire point of the piece.
I’m satisfied that the points I’ve made constitute a clear statement of what his - and my - view is so I’ll pass on the mulligan.
It is overwhelmingly likely that these surgeries happened with the consent of their parents or guardians. And it is overwhelmingly likely that these people are glad they had the surgery. (See the study below.) Would you outlaw such surgeries?
Jazz had his puberty blocked, then was put on cross sex hormones, and then was castrated and had a neo-vagina created.
Jazz is incontinent, is sterile, and had never and will never have an orgasm.
Tell me, how do you obtain informed consent from a child to sign the ability to orgasm away? The child has no conception of what an orgasm is, or how it affects intimacy with a partner. How can a child possibly know what it is to be sterile? To give up the ability to breast feed or carry a child?
Parents have no right to give these thing up on behalf of their child when it isn't a life or death intervention. It's COSMETIC! Remember: these are cosmetic procedures.
This is the biggest medical scandal we have ever had in this country. The scope and scale of it are devastating.
If you think what I am saying is garbage and wrongheaded, please look into yourself.
If you are someone who thinks castrating kids chemically and/or surgically is fine, and even advocates for it, don't you think you had better be more rigorous than you have ever been in your life about anything? Look into the studies, the debunking of the studies, and the debunking of the debunking of the studies. Read everything.
Wasn’t too long ago that the claim was, “this isn’t happening at all.” The goalposts moved, yet again, and people noticed. Once again, observers calling this out are tarred and feathered as irredeemably evil bigots. The word “compassion” becomes both bulwark and cudgel.
We can also discuss the permanently inorgasmic children that so called “puberty blockers” are producing. Marcia Bowers, head of USPATH, thinks it’s a real problem. But if we discuss it here, we’ll be called bigots.
It is not a fact that the boxer in question is female. In fact, the medical report showing she is a male with a DSD was leaked. She was banned for being male from another boxing league, and it’s far from clear what exactly the truth is.
In fact, it’s looking more and more likely she is a male with a DSD. Let’s stick to the facts.
Again that’s just not true. There have been at least three rounds of testing conducted. Russia ordered two. She did not appeal the results when she was barred by the IBA. Russians did not leak the results. The leak was from the French and occurred just a few weeks ago. This was another set of tests unrelated to IBA. We know from this leak that she was informed she is a male, with testicles and testosterone. We know she suffered distress at the diagnosis. We know she was advised to seek gender affirmation treatment. You might be in a bubble if you’ve not seen all this.
So what the left didn't campaign on it. They just crammed it down everyone's throats the last 10 years, but perhaps not the last 6 months.
And sorry, Kamala Harris, simply was a DEI candidate. She won zero primaries. She did pathetically in 2020, and was only picked by Biden bc she was a woman, and a woman of color.
That is identity politics in its purest and most stupid form.
And it's just poison. Skin color and phenotype shouldn't be the most important part of your identity
.....and if you think otherwise, then white people should be allowed to think the same thing. Can't have it both ways.
Right wing media crammed the issue down everyone’s throats. They fomented a phony moral panic, and millions of Americans fell for it. Trump’s campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars, making it the biggest issue of the campaign.
Trump won primaries. Trump won 2 Presidential elections.
Kamala crashed and burned very quickly in 2020, and was openly handpicked for her gender and race. I'm not making an assumptions either, that is what Biden said....wants a female VP, which morphed to female of color VP. It was going to be Klobuchar, then word came down it had to be a POC...hence Kamala got on the Biden ticket.
Then when he dropped out he hand picked her. No one chose this woman through democratic means.
I find it interesting that you point out that everyone will have their pet reasons for Harris losing, and then you spend the rest of the podcast (post) elucidate your pet reason: broadly, wokeness, such as transgender rights.
I broadly agree with concerns about wokeness and it's impact, your acknowledgement of the complexity of the issue but also the extremism that's come to define it.
But I disagee about it's central role. You, anecdotally, talk about "literally eeveryone you know" who supported Trump did so for this reason. I can tell you, anecdotally, that literally no one I know who voted for Trump, or who I heard describe their reasons for voting for Trump ( Musk aside) said this was even a reason. And how to explain Trump winning in Michigan and Wisconsin, while those states elected Democratic senators, or other such cases?
The anti-woke, the anti-abortionists, and other single issue voters surely helped put Trump over the top. But, I think you underestimate the economic side. Not inflation or taxes, but that working and middle class people are frustrated about their decline in living standards since at least 2008, and angry as they watch their children's prospects decline. They feel like an elite few are benefitting from globalization and free trade, and they want to strike out at those people, whether they are Democrats or traditional Republicans.
I don't think they even care whether Trump can fix it. That's why they can't be swayed by the 'truth' about the cost of tariffs or mass deportations. They just want to poke a stick in the eye of those few enjoying the success of the current system, and throw a brick through their window, break it down. They just want Trump to do that.
You ignore what Harari tells you about our economic future. Why not seriously address its impacts, by listening and seriously discussing it with him, or talking to Senator Chris Murphy, or economist Martin Wolf, or, for the history, Naomi Oreskes, or Thomas Piketty (yes, I read the whole thing)?
Just to be clear, I do think they are hoping Trump can fix it. But, mostly I think they are angry and disillusioned with Democrats and traditional Republicans, and so are immune to logical arguments (from people they no longer trust) for why Trump's ideas won't work. They no longer trust our economic and political systems.
I find this interview a good summary of how the economic and cultural end up meshed together in this anger...
Thank you Sam, this is a precise accounting of the present moment. You and I are the same age and I grew up not far from you in Orange County. I have been a registered Independent my entire adult life. Woke ideology, anti-Western sentiment, and hostility towards white people has caused me to vote against the democratic party across the board. The left’s weaponization of the term racist, to threaten and bully and bend people into submission and to their will, has created an atmosphere of fear whereby any reasonable discussion is impossible. The imposition of two sets of rules, whereby we are to celebrate a black woman express how wonderful it was to “see someone who looks like me” when Kamala spoke at the Democratic National Convention. And yet, if a white man were to say this about Trump it could cause him to lose his livelihood. Everyone I know notices this, and all of them vote. The past 4 years have felt less like a push for equality and more like an attempt at payback. And then after the election, to see the reaction from the women on The View and all the other left wing meltdowns. They clearly do not get it. I sometimes wonder if we live in different but intersecting planes of reality.
thank you - I hear your anger and disgust at how this all went down. For my money, the biggest single thing - if it's possible to tease out one thing - is the flood of lies, the mis and disinformation that choked our airwaves and the internet. There is no possible way to have an honest, thoughtful election when people have to wade through piles and piles of excrement to get at anything at all resembling the truth. This is the Steve Bannon play book.
I was waiting for Sam's podcast post election. It was worth the wait. I also read the comments. It's amazing how selective our perception can be and the context and subject be confused with issues used to illustrate a point. We're in for a wild ride. As for me I will give as little attention as possible to the upcoming administration. It's being filled with lunatics, grifters, religious zealots, the profoundly ignorant and stupid, psychopaths, malevolent ,greedy, incompetent, sadistic, masochistic , power hungry individuals and groups. I expect lies, distortions, half-truths to be promulgated daily by the administration, amplified on Twitter (X). These people will have difficulty working together and that will be interesting, if not entertaining
It’s hard to happily ignore when you live in a blue state dependent on the Fed Gov. Ts planning on moving a lot of the work done here to South Carolina & it will shatter the fragile NM economy. I won’t be surprised to see a systemic defunding of all blue states/counties.
Pretty good stuff. It is so great that Sam Harris is motivated to take the time share his thoughts (and so eloquently).
One small criticism in The Reckoning is that Sam has over-generalized about the people ("they") who voted for Trump over Harris in the recent election:
"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."
It is possible to acknowledge that Trump is deficient, even dangerous, in numerous categories yet still pick him over Kamala Harris. The converse is, of course, also possible. Pick your poison.
Democrats don't get to choose the electorate. They get to choose how to approach the electorate to get their votes in order to win elections. Complaining about the electorate is OK in op-eds, but blaming the electorate in an election won't work, in fact it provides the opposite of the desired effect.
The real issue is the stupidity of the American voter. As Michelle Obama wondered, why are the polls so close ? This election should have been an anyone but Trump vote given his track record as president and before and since. You don't need to do much research to realise the man lies every time he opens his mouth and he should be behind bars. He has not one redeeming feature and Kamala Harris, good, bad, or indifferent would have won in a sensible country.
You’re correct on all counts of course, but those of us who can see through Trump, and who are actually immune to his horrible populist rhetoric must accept that about 50% of us simply aren’t and will always be vulnerable to this type of manipulation and fear tactic.
I think it’s a lost cause to try to change human nature, which has this vulnerability distributed in about half the population everywhere you go. It’s inborn and probably, in my opinion, had some survival benefit back a quarter million years ago.
I’m a physician and I have observed for 35 years that people seem to come out of the womb tending drift one way or the other in terms of rational thought versus fear and anger/based responses. That’s not going to change.
We must learn to work within that reality. that half of us are frightened, angry, gullible.voters and always will be.
So many of my friends screamed that it’s just a lack of education. It’s not. It’s human nature and a distribution of traits that our species is stuck with
That 50% figure of yours may be true for the US but not necessarily elsewhere. Polls in Europe and Australia showed Harris would have won by a ratio of at least 3:1. Here in Australia we have compulsory voting which doesn't guarantee good govt but it means extremists like Trump could never win office. The US is more religious and the faithful voted for Trump in droves. Gullible in the extreme. When Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters deplorable, she was being polite.
Yes, the 50% was just an approximate number thrown out to make a point. And yes, the milieu of life in the United States, a much older and in some ways degenerated culture than young Australia will have different outcomes in things such as elections.
The point I’m trying to make is about a distribution of hundreds of different traits within the human species.
In reality, the gullibility quotient, the fear quotient, the Tendency towards cognitive biases and failure to self-correct with new data, and all the other personality and thinking attributes we humans possess are all expressed in the population on Bell curves (or some sort of statistical distribution curve) and my point is that some people are definitely born more prone to this sort of thing than others. I see myself as at one far end of the rational spectrum, for which I am grateful, but I believe I was simply born that way, questioning things critically since I was a toddler. I take no credit, I had no choice.
My brother on the other hand was born to be more conservative and I believe, despite having been a straight a student all through his life, falls pray to, cognitive fallacies and biases more easily.
For this reason, I don’t think simple education is enough, and because I believe it’s part of human nature, I think we have to deal with this species-wide vulnerability head on.
And I’m definitely not sure how!
But strategic and tactical thinking about building a better world - one without fascism and autocrats - must take this aspect of human nature into account if we ever want to be successful.
X is actually great. Elon fired moderators and replaced them with a crowdsourced fact-checking mechanism (community notes), where a correction (fact-check) only appears if both sides of the political spectrum agree on it. This has resulted in some of Elon's own tweets getting corrected. It's an interesting experiment at the very least.
Because of that website, tens of millions of Americans believed that Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets, and Aurora, CO was being taken over by Venezuelan street gangs. And it is flooded with anti-trans rhetoric. Twitter is probably why tens of millions of Americans believe that the Covid vaccines are more dangerous than Covid. It's an absolute cesspool. And they are obsessed with Hunter Biden's laptop. As if that stupid laptop proved anything of significance!
Sure but there’s a flip side to that. When covid started, mainstream media was blocking discussion of the lab leak hypothesis (including Facebook) claiming it was somehow racist, but later when Trump lost the election, it became OK to discuss it as a probable covid origin theory. X is a bulwark against that kind of media/elite collusion.
Another example is BLM, elites and mainstream media were cowed into parroting the BLM narrative, and only Sam Harris had the guts to challenge it because he had his own platform. X enables regular people to challenge mainstream narratives, people who don’t have the resources of Sam Harris. Anonymity also helps there.
MSM was not blocking the lab leak hypothesis. They reported on what serious people were saying about it on both sides of the issue. But they never claimed the issue was settled because it never was. No one was “cowed” into reporting on BLM. What are you talking about? What exactly is the mainstream narrative of BLM? Are you a Russian bot?
In April 2020...."Democrats showed little inclination to investigate the pandemic’s origins. Like the president’s references to the “China virus,” his suggestion of a lab leak sounded to them like xenophobia and risked fueling anti-Asian sentiment." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html
This was what the Democratic party was worried about in 2020 re: the lab leak question, per a 2023 NYTs article cited above.
This concern came through strong and clear in MSM and in social media at the time.
The point is that the Democratic party was more concerned with fears of "xenophobia" than they were in investigating and validating understandable concerns of citizens about a likely lab leak being the origin of Covid. Even during a pandemic, the Dem's preoccupation with identity politics took priority over a focus on investigating and understanding how this virus was released. The chilling effect of this stance was absolutely echoed in MSM and on social media platforms, with accusations of being racist for even broaching the topic being very common. Dems/Libs took the role of self-congratulatory holier than thou scolders of anyone not in lock step with their point of view on the lab leak question, school closures, masks, vaccines, etc., etc.,
This stuff is what people are sick of and this why the Dems lost.
There was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment at the time. But Democrats left questions of the origins of the virus to professionals in the field, like the CDC. The right on Twitter and Facebook was listening to crackpot conspiracy theorists. The mainstream/legacy media accurately reported the thoughts on the origins of the virus by experienced epidemiologists. To this date, we don't have any certainty about the origins of the virus.
"The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling. The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look for a “hack and dump” operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election. Even after Facebook specifically asked whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Dehmlow of the FBI refused to comment, resulting in the social-media companies’ suppression of the story. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election. " https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/testimony-reveals-fbi-employees-who-warned-social-media-companies-about-hack
"In the case of Twitter, not only did they try to block sharing of it, they suspended The New York Post's actual Twitter account for sharing its own article (about the Hunter Biden laptop). That was a wild overreach, and even Twitter had to acknowledge that." https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerge-in-federal-investigation-into-hunter-biden. (This from an NPR interview, hardly a right wing media outlet.)
Matt, the significance of the Hunter Biden laptop story was the degree to which the MSM and social media via government interference took steps to quash the story for fear that it would negatively affect Biden's chances in the 2020 election leading to a Trump win. It's the effort to sensor the media by the government and the quashing of a real story, keeping it from reaching the voting public prior to the election, that should be of concern to American citizens. This is well documented.
If this level of government censorship happened in a way that affected the outcome of an election of your preferred candidate, as opposed to a candidate you do not like such as Trump, perhaps it would bother you more. I voted for Biden in 2020, but this does concern me. It really should concern any citizen and any real journalist that does not want the government censoring the free press prior to an important election Banana Republic style.
By quashing a story, it helped support the narrative that the election was stolen.
Bottom line, it causes the public to no longer have faith in these institutions. This certainly can and will undermine democracy and democratic institutions which we see happening.
Which does concern me greatly.
This is why the Hunter-Biden laptop story is significant IMHO.
Of interest and quite eye opening is the Munk Debates on Mainstream Media where the Hunter Biden laptop story and other news stories are debated by four well known journalists: https://munkdebates.com/debates/mainstream-media/
Agreed. X is fine. The left is just pissed the right can say what it wants now without getting suspended.
Id rather the spectrum of what's acceptable to discuss be wider and the downside more misinformation, than a much smaller spectrum of acceptability and less misinformation.
Sam is just sour grapes the left doesn't control Twitter anymore, and he just really hates Elon after their personal falling out.
Only someone else that knows fuck all about Sam Harris can make a comment like that. Sam is on the side of truth and is know to have pissed off "the left" just as much as anyone on the other end of the political spectrum. Also, he fell out with Elon because Elon is an infantile dickhead.
I'm a huge Harris fan, and he is a truth seeker....But his falling out with Elon is clouding his judgement about Twitter as is the fact he was personally unfairly driven off Twitter by hateful clowns.
But I can't blame him for falling out with Elon. I'm shocked they were even friends in any capacity just a couple of years ago, Elon being a narcissistic man child.
Community Notes is indeed a better approach to fighting misinformation than moderation.
And as someone who had become a frequent Twitter user a couple of years before Elon took over, I don't think that the site has changed that much. To the extent that it has, it's clearly gotten worse (the lack of identity verification, the boosting of Blue Check content, and war on links were all mistakes that have clearly degraded the experience in some ways, plus the fact that a lot of people I like have decided to post there less often or not at all), but my experience of Twitter really hasn't changed all that much since it became X.
Having said that, it's important to note that Twitter/X has always been a guilty pleasure, because it's always been a dumpster fire in terms of its impact on the country. The core problem with Twitter has nothing to do with too much moderation or too little moderation. It's that a platform that combines 280 character limit posts, it's threading model, and support for anonymity was always going to become a cesspool of tribal anger and divisiveness around any controversial issue.
I enjoy Twitter, but it's similar to how I enjoy UFC. Fights are great to watch, but sometimes you feel a little guilty afterward.
You can curate your feed on X. You can follow mainstream journalists like Caitlin Flanagan, Anne Applebaum, and Ezra Klein, and only get their tweets -- or you can follow Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Bronze Age Pervert.
I enjoy the occasional energetic Alex Jones rant (“Kids, Magellan is way cooler than Justin Bieber!”) or a funny Tate meme, even though they might not be true. And I resent people who insist that every piece of text that crosses my eyes has to be fact-checked and sourced like a publication in The Scientific American.
Yes. I pretty much only ever look at the "Following" feed on Twitter so that's my experience of the platform.
Meanwhile Vladimir, while I agree that that absent a direct incitement to violence, Twitter generally should let the 1st Amendment be its guide and shouldn't be in the business of deciding who should and shouldn't be allowed on the platform, I also think that Alex Jones' Sandy Hook trutherism is some of the vilest stuff ever broadcast. His rants may be amusing (I've never listened so I don't know), but I have a hard time respecting anyone who does listen or follow him. Some times people do things that are beyond the pale and should be shunned, and I can't immediately think of a better example than Jones. I'll be honest that the fact that you listen to him makes me think less of you.
I think I would laugh at his classic rants even if he did worse things than pushing the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory. It’s kind of like Michael Jackson’s music, regardless of whether he was a pedophile or not, the music is still good. Jews listen to Wagner and Tchaikovsky even though they were raging antisemites, etc.
Here's one classic AJ rant in case you want to check it out: https://x.com/iamyesyouareno/status/1662223252385853440
Certainly agree with you that it's fine to listen to Wagner or Michael Jackson, watch Woody Allen or movies, etc. So from that perspective, I guess enjoying Alex Jones videos is arguably fine too. Again, don't think Twitter should ban them. But ...
- If that Magellan rant is an example of the best of Alex Jones, I don't think I'm missing much. I'm someone who still believes Caddyshack is one of the ten greatest movies of all time, so I don't think of myself as a snobby viewer, but man was there no payoff there. There is always some humor in a Magellan reference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcioLRXUCac), but it was really just shouting.
- Also think that Alex Jones is a far more vile human being than Wagner, Michael, Woody, etc. Claiming that the murder of young children was a hoax? Outside of Hamas, it's hard to think of anyone worse.
Yeah, Alex is not a comedian like Seinfeld or Rodney Dangerfield. To me the funny part about his rants is how amped up he gets over silly things like Bieber-Magellan, or companies putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay (hermaphroditic). Most commentators would focus on the environmental impact etc, but he goes ballistic about frogs becoming gay. I don’t know, it’s not for everybody :)
I think the Sandy Hook stuff was horrible, but surely molesting children (Michael Jackson) is worse than falsely accusing someone of being a crisis actor, or claiming that child murders didn't happen.
If you enjoy that stuff, there is some darkness in your heart. I hope you heal one day.
Wasn’t community notes there prior to Elon?
Yeah but it wasn’t as widespread and it was only supplemental to the human moderators. Now it’s the main moderation mechanism.
In other words, is there no moderation outside of this? Anyone can post anything? I don’t use the service often enough to know.
Yeah, from what I can tell the only red line is the legal one (incitement of violence, etc). They probably have algorithms to detect those messages even in the absence of community notes.
Community Notes often take hours or days to correct false info, by which time it can have been seen by millions of people. One is only notified about a CN if one interacts with a post by liking or sharing it, which makes up a tiny % of the people who read the content.
Wrong
Just see today that his own Chatbot fact checker found that Elon himself was a top spreader of misinformation.
Sam debates like no one else. He’s eloquent & logical. Oh, how I wish we had a President Harris, only this time Sam.
I completely agree. And because we're living in a media landscape that is generally so confused and confusing, it's so emotionally satisfying to encounter Sam's level of intellectual honesty.
I have been thinking this for a while. Do you all believe there is a snowball's chance in hell that Sam would ever throw his hat in for the Democratic party nominee in 2028?
Sam Harris has written some brilliant stuff over the past several years, particularly after October 7. And much of this current podcast "makes sense." However, the "trans issue" got several paragraphs, yet (after one reading) I don't think he mentioned reproductive freedom once.
I am a physician. I have been taught how to evaluate, diagnose, and treat transgender people. I have been trained and have done (rarely, because it's very uncommon) gender affirming surgery. I have also participated in gender assignment of newborns born with ambiguous genitalia, which is a medical emergency and requires a team of endocrinologists, urologists, psychologists, and social workers who work together to provide the best gender assignment for the baby and his/her family.
Unless you work in this field, or unless you have a transgender person in your family, I doubt that you Sam, or any of you reading this, have any idea how complicated, serious, and difficult this situation is for individuals, families, and doctors.
Which gets back to reproductive freedom, because there is a link. Republican politicians have taken a serious medical and psychological issue and have turned it into a tool of distortion and disinformation to be used (successfully) against Democrats, Liberals, and the "Woke." According to Sam and the rest of us, it worked.
The fact that it worked is as sad, evil, and wrong as anything else Sam points out in the podcast. I guess Kamala did say she would support gender affirming surgery for inmates, or was it immigrants. I wonder how many inmates would request gender affirming surgery? I wonder how many of these inmates were afforded even basic medical and psychological evaluation? The answer is TWO. Two people. At this point I don't have the energy or time to provide a reference, but I'm pretty sure it can't be very many.
Yet the Republicans spent millions of dollars on these attack ads. And, sadly, it worked.
Who should have been responsible for calling them out? Didn't Kamala do enough to call them out over the cruelty over reproductive freedom? Those that voted for the clown were not swayed. Politicians (and their supporters, and the people who vote for them) should get the fuck out of our exam and operating rooms.
Heaven help us if RFK Jr has any say in how we provide health care. Our health care system is as broken as our political system.
Max: You totally missed Sam's point. He wouldn't disagree with anything you have said about the complexity and importance of dealing sensitively with people with either ambiguous genitalia or folks experiencing gender dysphoria. Most of America (including myself) would also fully agree with that point. I think anyone who disagrees with that sentiment can correctly be dismissed as transphobes.
The problem with trans activists, and the problem they have created for the Democratic Party, is that they have gone way past that to label anyone who question any part of what they believe as transphobes:
- In the case of trans women competing in womens' sports at the high school level and above, this is simply insane. Trans activists are wrong about this issue in exactly the same way that climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers are wrong about those issues; they're simply ignoring physical reality because it leads in the opposite direction of the outcome they prefer.
- In the case of how best to care with young people who say they are experiencing gender dysphoria, it's a genuinely difficult issue. On the one hand, I'm sure there are teens who genuinely benefit from puberty blockers and eventually even surgeries. But I think it's very difficult to distinguish between these teens and other teens who these interventions will harm rather than help because the real issues causing their unhappiness are different (whether it's a function of dealing with being gay, reactions to sexual abuse, or just the angst that comes with becoming an adult and sexuality). The explosion in young people claiming to be transgender is a telling indicator that the second category might be much bigger than the first. But the transactivist's community's refusal to address this complexity and instead to double down by attempting to smear folks who raise questions again makes it entirely logical to again question their judgement.
So while it is true that Kamala didn't talk about trans issues on the campaign trail, the fact that she wasn't willing to admit that both she on the campaign trail in 2019 and the Biden administration has been wrong in the way they have handled these issues (essentially ceding all ground to the activists) legitimately made it an issue for people who care about these issues. While I'm interested in this stuff (I think issues of identity are fascinating), I'm not someone who thinks this is one of the top 50 issues that a Presidential vote should be decided on, so it was never going to stop me from voting against Trump.
But Sam's point was that for a lot of people it was important enough to affect their vote. And the fact that someone like you, who is a clearly a thoughtful person, totally misunderstood what Sam was saying, is a great example of how toxic this issues has become for the health of the Democratic Party.
Thanks for setting me straight Gordon. I listened to the podcast again while running past a dozen Trump Vance signs during my 5 mile run this morning. I don't disagree with Sam, nor do I disagree with you. I agree with you that this should not be one of the top 50 issues upon which an election should be decided. And I agree with Sam when he says the culture wars should be over for Democrats. Republicans have weaponized cultural issues like LGBTQ and even abortion to enhance their quest to fuck the libs. In an attempt to provide a humane place for marginalized people in the the Democratic party, some of us took the bait and doubled down on the right for these people to belong. I am saddened by the fact that they used this to win the election and all the consequences that will follow, or that are happening even today if you look at the appointments.
The only reason the trans activists are being heard is that right-wing media is amping up everything they say and broadcasting it across the country, the more cringy the better, as far as they are concerned.
Activists are a famously obnoxious crowd, and they tend to say some extreme things. But Democratic politicians are not saying extreme things on this issue. And the governing bodies of every sport are designing new rules to deal with people's concerns about fairness and safety.
And WPATH offers excellent, science-based guidelines when it comes to GAC for young people.
I think the cause of the increase in numbers is two-fold: the internet, where people who experience gender dysphoria can find resources that encourage them to live their authentic lives, and because our society (parts of it, anyway) is becoming more welcoming of them. But I'm sure there are kids who get confused about these issues, too. The saying “insistent, persistent, and consistent” is a good starting point. GAC specialists are trained in how to look out for other causes. And as we move forward I'm sure we will be able to gather better data and make better recommendations.
WPATH are responsible, science-based activists. Of course, the transphobic community demonizes them, too.
I disagree Matt. I don't follow much right-wing media, and it certainly wasn't how I became aware of trans activists. I think I first became aware of them when I began hearing about the attacks on J.K. Rowling as transphobic, tried to understand why, and found the allegations utterly ridiculous. And then saw the same ridiculousness from attacks on other folks I find credible.
As for WPATH, I don't really follow their positions closely enough to have definitive opinions, but from what I've read from Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and Lisa Selin Davis, there are legitimate concerns about how they have been operating and whether they are letting ideology get ahead of their commitment to their patients.
Personally, I wish the Harris campaign would have taken two positions on trans issues that would have helped:
- First, making it clear that she doesn't support trans women competing in women's sports at the high school level and above.
- Second, expressing that how to support teen agers who have concerns about their gender identity is extremely delicate and requires being sure to do no harm before intervening medically or going the route of the affirmation model. To be clear, I don't think either approach should be banned. I'm sure there are cases (including it sounds like your nephew) where those approaches are best, but Kamala should have acknowledged that this isn't always the case
I appreciate your disagreement, Gordon. I pay a lot of attention to right-wing media. Are you familiar with Libs of Tik Tok? It's huge on Twitter. It's all about showing the cringiest examples of trans people doing the cringiest things you can imagine in an effort to demonize them and the people who support them. And Dennis Prager talks about it on his national show almost every day. He says we are sick people for supporting their rights. He says we're in favor of lopping off girls breats just because they say they're a boy. He claims that teachers are sexualizing our children by taking them to drag queen story hours. When Bud Light came out with a can honoring Dylan Mulvaney there was such a backlash that Budweiser stock fell about 5-10%. Target had the same thing happen when they had a gay pride display. Transphobia is pretty deep, thanks to right-wing media.
Andrew Sullivan is worse than Sam on this issue. I don't know the other two.
WPATH is terrific. If people follow their advice, there won't be a lot of the problems that people worry about. These are sober, science-based researchers, and they've been doing it for more than 50 years.
https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_English.pdf
My position on rare events like trans women competing in women's sports and being housed in women's prisons is that these issues are best handled at the local level, by people who are very familiar with the facts on the ground. I'm not concerned about the occasional trans girl competing in High School sports. The point of sports in High School is to learn things like how to work together as a team, and how to handle losses with dignity and wins with humility. Above that level, I trust the governing bodies of each sport to make rules that ensure safety and fairness. Prisons are such a fraught issue. Imagine the problems with putting a trans women in a men's prison. Which, again, is why these issues need to be left to local authorities who, hopefully, have everyone's best interests at heart. The bathrooms issue isn't a problem, if people can act like adults. In most cases, most people wouldn't know if a person is trans or not.
There is a way to talk about this issue that won't alienate voters. And the Dems will find a way to do so. I can talk Trump people into agreeing that people should have the freedom to access gender affirming care. They just need to be reassured that the crazy stuff they are saying on right-wing media isn't true, or isn't nearly as crazy as they are trying to make it out to be.
"WPATH is terrific":
- https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/03/05/leaked-discussions-reveal-uncertainty-about-transgender-care
- https://can-sg.org/2024/03/08/wpath-files/
- https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56a45d683b0be33df885def6/t/65ea1c1ea42ff5250c88a2f5/1709841455308/WPATH+Report+and+Files%28N%29.pdf
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/09/disturbing-leaks-from-us-gender-group-wpath-ring-alarm-bells-in-nhs
WPATH files is a lot of innuendo, using quotes taken out of context to scare people. Michael Shellenburger has an anti-trans agenda. I recommend reading their guidelines for yourself and determining whether they are a serious, science-based organization making a good faith effort to gather data and make recommendations.
https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/wpath-nothingburger-waste-of-time
On JK Rowling, I listened to the pod cast series Sam recommended, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling. It was excellent––very fair to both perspectives. I can easily see why trans people are offended by her comments, and why they say she is transphobic. And I understand why some people think JK Rowling is being perfectly sensible. I happen to think she has some trauma with men, because she was abused by a man. I think she is way over sensitive on this issue.
Many women are abused by men. Abused, raped, murdered, groped, molested, lorded over, perved over, stalked, etc. There's not a woman on this planet who's not been rightfully creeped out (if not "traumatized") by some dude. It's a norm. She's not over sensitive, she's accurate about reality and the necessity of protecting women and girls. And I find it so spot-on that women are asked to kowtow to trans women in their sports; meanwhile if trans men entered men's sports, no big deal (they'd likely get creamed if not fucking killed). Women are asked to just scootch aside and deal with it, and if not, they're sensitive/hysterical/transphobic/pick your condescending and damning descriptor. I'm a woman. I'm referred to as a "person with a uterus" in real clinical settings. And I never hear men referred to as "people with testes" or "beings with penises." It just doesn't seem to go both ways with the same fervor. Rowling has the balls to WTF?! the issue and it's warranted. And I say this knowing that many women are just fine referring to themselves as "people with uteruses," and I suppose they're just trying to do the right thing, but. ...I think it's a failure to think outside the craziness of this moment. MEANWHILE trans people suffer many dangers, and if we really tried, I think we the people could be smart enough to cover all our bases with the aim to protect everyone without ostracizing the other.
Her experience, according to her accounting of it, was not normal. He was extremely abusive.
There are so few trans women competing in sports that I think it’s silly to get too alarmed about it. The governing bodies of every sport are ensuring that they maintain fairness and safety in women’s sports. Leah Thomas, for example, would not qualify to compete under the rules today.
High School sports are about learning to work together as a team, and learning how to lose with dignity and win with humility. The stakes are not that high. There may be cases where it would be inappropriate for a trans woman to compete with biological females, but in other cases there is no problem because the trans woman isn’t even in the top half of the women competing, so why not include them? There are cases where no one knows if the person is trans. This is why I think these rare cases are best handled by the people on the ground, not some state or federal bureaucrat making pronouncements from on high. I agree with the last few sentences you wrote. I think we can work this out if people act like adults and stop running around with their hair on fire over every little thing.
Thank you Max for adding depth and humanity to this topic. Even if the trans issue was addressed with the sensitivity you suggest the outrage machine will just find something else to be outraged about. That is a tactic and it has always been. Imagine the uproar when people first suggested that women should be allowed to vote. Even without the amplification of Tiktok and other noxious online forums. This is always a dynamic that must be overcome when we introduce cultural change.
Yes. 100%. Nailed it, Gordon.
Thank you, Doctor! I have a trans nephew. Gender-affirming care (no surgery) has been unbelievably healing for him. His whole family is fully on board. He is such an amazing person, and since his very conservatives parents agreed to his transition, he is happy and super successful. We're all so proud of him. He will go far in life.
I'm glad that things are working out for your nephew Matt.
Thank you for this.
Great podcast/essay. I believe that it certainly didn't help that even impeccably qualified commentators--such as, for example, Anne Applebaum, on Sam's own podcast--refused to even acknowledge problems on the left, for fear of giving ammunition to the right. This idea, that honest self-reflection might hand power to the right, was exactly backwards. People hate being lied to. They hate being gaslit. Especially when it's regarding things that are taking place directly in front of their eyes.
I've found that too. But another point is that I suspect that's new, and a result of having to deal with the vicious MAGA strategy of doing just that. Pouncing on every little sign of weakness and blowing it up into a national crisis. With enormous help from the right-wing media entity of course.
Spot on.
And irony on the Right has another post birth abortion.
In his recent podcast, Harris attempted to unpack the complexities surrounding Donald Trump's presidential election victory. Instead of addressing the broader issues at play, he veered into a lengthy diatribe about transgender individuals and the so-called "woke" agenda. This focus on transgender issues, while certainly part of the contemporary cultural conversation, felt misplaced and disproportionate, especially when considering the pressing concerns faced by the electorate at large.
The crux of my disappointment lies in the manner in which Harris approached this topic. His anti-trans rhetoric seemed to echo the disinformation campaigns that have targeted the LGBTQ community, further amplifying a narrative that seeks to divide rather than unite. This is particularly troubling given the current climate of misinformation that permeates the political landscape. Harris's commentary detracted from a more substantial discussion about the factors contributing to Trump's rise, such as economic inequality, systemic racism, and the pervasive influence of disinformation.
One cannot ignore the statistical reality: transgender individuals represent a small fraction of the population, and issues related to their rights and integration in society, including athletics, affect an even smaller subset of people. While these issues deserve thoughtful and empathetic discussion, dedicating an entire episode to them, especially amidst a political crisis, feels myopic at best. It suggests a prioritization of culture wars over the pressing needs of the broader population.
For years, Harris's philosophical stance resonated with me. His emphasis on reason, critical thinking, and the pursuit of truth aligned closely with my own values. However, this recent shift towards a narrow focus on identity politics, coupled with a lack of engagement with the larger societal issues at play, has left me disillusioned.
As a long-time supporter, I genuinely hope Harris takes a step back to reflect on the misinformation that is rampant in our society. The narrative around Trump's victory is not rooted in the plight of a small demographic but rather in a complex web of socio-political factors that deserve more nuanced exploration. It is imperative for influential figures like Harris to recognize the power of their words and the impact they have on public discourse, particularly in an era where misinformation can easily take root.
In conclusion, my long-standing support for Sam Harris is faltering as I grapple with his recent commentary. It is my hope that he will return to the thoughtful, reasoned discourse that initially drew me to him, rather than getting swept up in the divisive rhetoric that seems to dominate our current political landscape.
If you consider a simple acknowledgement that there are salient physical disparities between biological males and females “anti-trans rhetoric,” that says a great deal more about you than it does Sam. We have to be able to discuss fundamental realities without worrying if it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings or encroach upon their sense of self. The fact that we can discuss trans women and biological women as separate populations already tells you there’s a meaningful distinction between the two, and it is not hateful to note as much.
We can discuss all that, but maybe after we stop Trump from destroying America and quite possibly the world. The false equivalency here between the existential threat Trump represents, and the discomfort folks have with identity politics — which were hardly a focus of Kamala’s actual campaign, for those paying attention — is the grossest kind of both-sidesism.
Ah, "The Resistance" has entered the conversation.
You chose not to engage with the pushback/counter narrative I provided you with on the claims about Trump being a Fascist/the next Hitler and now it's evolved into "we can't discuss anything else until we prevent Mango Mussolini from destroying America and the world".
It's astonishing that you can be exposed to a clear argument like this on why the Democrats just got absolutely hammered and have the takeaway be "identity politics isn't that important, let's try our 2016 resistance movement again".
Did you see a claim in the piece that identity politics _were_ a focus of Kamala's campaign? Where is the both-sidesism you're railing against?
I think Sam's point is that identity politics is part of what's preventing us from defeating Trump and we need to reevaluate ourselves and our approach in the wake of this devastating loss
I get it. I just don't agree. I think what's preventing us from defeating Trump is 60 years of the GOP behaving as what a friend aptly termed "an asshole magnet." What began with a few crackpots has now become a whole movement.
Worse, the right has its own information ecosystem, carefully constructed over decades. It encouraged adherents to believe lies. That ecosystem has been hyping the so-called "woke agenda," to generate outrage and win votes. It worked. And we did not act in a swift or coordinated fashion to prevent that. Trying to put our woke-horse back in the political barn is not an effective way to address this problem.
Soon they'll be clamping down further on the free flow of information, discouraging critical thinking and further indoctrinating the electorate, and I am already in despair over the consequences.
I agree with a lot of that, right wing media has been horrendous for our country and has eroded truth to a staggering degree. But democrats don’t control right wing media and I think Sam’s points are more about what can we, the left half of America, do to start winning again
Right, but Sam's answer seems to be "stop being woke." I think curtailing speech and behaviors that endorse greater civil liberties, no matter how "annoying" they seem to some, is simply never going to be a viable strategy.
But the bigger problem is, it wouldn't matter.
Because if it's not wokeness, it'll be some other annoying Democratic value, and then Fox + Friends will lie about it, distort it beyond recognition, and generate outrage and anger, and use that to win votes. Wokeness is just the outrage du jour. It was "welfare queens" before that, remember? On and on and on. Are we supposed to endlessly navel-gaze and hand-wring every time they jerk that chain?
It wasn't the identity politics that drove voters away. It was the disingenuously generated hysteria over it. It was the lies.
HERE is the solution:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/12/disinformation-threat-democracy/
This sounds like chat GPT to me.
Agreed...
It is.
lol... I was thinking the same thing.
here's the thing for me: the most Trump ads i saw were playing into the fears around the trans issue. Understand, my daughter's spouse is a trans women - I love her, and I officiated their marriage. I live in a "trans-sanctuary city" (Olympia, WA), and have enormous space for trans people. However, I think it is a travesty that we as a society can't have an honest, nuanced conversation about this, and that the right wing played this card effectively to strike deep fear into the middle of America.
Boys is girls bathrooms and Supreme Court nominees who can’t speak to there is a difference isn’t a small issue.
Do 𝙮𝙤𝙪 have segregated bathrooms in 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 living space?
Oddly enough, I don't have strange men coming in and using side by side toilets in my house.
I don’t have unmarried members of the household sharing showers.
The question wasn’t posed to you. Why are you answering for user no causes?
With regards to the extraneous info you provided, I can tell you the marital status of those who use your facilities is irrelevant to my query.
Don’t out other people without their permission, first, and second, the way you’re talking sounds very close to when white people say "I have a black friend".
How can anyone have the conversation without the constant admonishment and word policing.
Conversations can happen without outing LGBTQIA2S+ people online without their permission, there’s no word policing going on. A responsible ally understands this is a safety issue. I’m assuming the commenter didn’t know since they outed their family member, hence the reason I’m informing them so they know and don’t run into it again.
You're commenting here - on a blog that's addressing why the Democrats just suffered a historic defeat due, in some part at least, to identity politics - to try and tell someone they can't talk about a person in their actual, "not on the internet" life - a person whose wedding they officiated no less.
Definitely no word (or thought) policing going on here.
Incidentally, Sam has spoken at some length about why "I have a black friend" is actually a totally coherent point to make. If you actually have a black (or any other race/identity than your own) friend, spouse etc, you actually are demonstrating something meaningful about yourself.
Real racists/bigots/transphobes etc don't actually "have a black/gay/trans/Jewish friends".
Give Sam's discussion with Chelsea Handler a listen from 18:45 https://samharris.org/episode/SEC856276DD
I agree. And both sides need to take some ownership of the situation.
Well said Multatuli. I expected better from Sam than to fall into this singular line of thought like so many in an ever growing movement of “anti woke”. Basically everyone at The Free Press for example. Trouble is, they are not wrong about the issues of the left - it’s just not the whole story, or even the most meaningful part. I would encourage people to drive through the endless, once thriving, now broken towns across the Midwest, rust belt, and southern states.
Racine, WI - Louisville, KY - Columbus, OH - Harrisburg, PA. Even bigger towns like St Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland. These towns have been gutted. They are angry, sad, addicted, and have lost hope while the coastal politicians like Schumer and Pelosi (on the Dem side anyway) have stood idle while they themselves made millions supporting a corporate machine that has given nothing to the American people - including tax revenue! This is not free market either - I support free market - the game is totally rigged and the money has bought the politicians for decades.
This is why Trump won. Even if the woke issues were non-existent, sooner or later Trump or a figure like him would’ve won. Bernie has been right about this and they ignored him on the left. This is the result.
Absolutely Tim. Bernie has been right about this. It's time that the Democrats stop dismissing him in the name of wanting to tend toward the center.
“Anti-trans” tells you all you need to know about the author of this comment - they’re either deliberately misrepresenting Sam’s take or they read at a preteen comprehension level.
When you start your day, you probably make a to-do list. If not literally, then at least mentally. You put emphasis on some tasks more than others. For example, paying your electricity bill has to be more important than buying milk. Because if there is no electricity, the milk is going to go bad anyways.
In a similar fashion, you have to emphasize issues based on how important they are to the public. If the public is more concerned about their grocery bill, your concern for the world peace, LGBTQ issues, NATO, fill in your blank, means nothing to them.
Majority of people will have no problem with trans people getting what they want. What they have a problem with is putting more emphasis on issues that concern half a percent of the population rather than on issues that concern half of the country.
It is high time that Democrats learn this lesson and course correct.
There was no "anti trans rhetoric", wtf are you on about. Sounds like you completely failed to process this essay. Sam is right, a lot of people voted on the trans issue that have no connection to trans people. I've just engaged with some of them to find out why...because I'm intellectually curious, unlike you.
"transgender individuals represent a small fraction of the population". Right, and transitioners have been arround for decades. No one cared at all, until it became a political movement using "in your face" aggression tactics, and tried to censure everyone not 100% onboard. Full-grown men with beards using women's changerooms at the beach (yes, I've seen them), calling out TERF's, and on and on. These activists are not your friends, and are what have caused so much unwelcome polarization. Most people seriously don't care what you do, as long as you are respectful. I know at least two trans-women who have completely distanced themselves due to embarrassment.
I suggest Democrats follow Sam’s advice and if I were positioning myself for a 2028 Presidential run I’d go on Making Sense in April or May of next year and make some sense on these issues. That would be a good start. A post-woke Democrat sounds interesting.
What is also truly astonishing is that the two titanic forces barreling toward us at warp speed — AI and climate catastrophes — seem to have played almost no significant role in the election. All else pales in comparison in comparison.
Why would they have played a significant role in the election when what's evidently taking up a sizeable chunk of people's bandwidth and resources is whether they can manage the cost of living? It's a Maslow's Hierarchy dynamic and it doesn't matter that you think people should have been deciding on the basis of something else.
I think that leaders should lead, and if they aren’t at least talking about the climate and AI then they aren’t leading.
Your comment noted that "[these two issues] seem to have played almost no significant role in the election."
I read that as "these two issues weren't front of mind for voters when they made their choice" not "the candidates didn't speak about these topics enough".
I agree that leaders should talk about important things when they articulate their approach, policies and what they stand for. That said, their primary responsibility is to win and ensure they put themselves in a position to take action on the things they consider important.
Agreed. But it’s a shame that so many people, especially those dealing with the ever growing wealth inequality who need it the most, don’t have the ability or resources to vote in their own best self interests by being able to see past and through all the propaganda. I know I’m describing a dream world, but damn, as a species we actually have developed an ability to understand our own behavior, motivations, logical thinking fallacies and biases. It just that 95% of us have either no desire or no ability to do so. Sure wish it were the other way around.
AI risks is overblown at the moment, mainly because its abilities are way overblown by industry hype peddlers. LLMs are no more than fancy autocomplete engines, and their interpolation over human-produced content does not meaningfully approximate any level of intelligence, so concern about a superintelligence is premature. The only things I’d worry about there is the much easier generation of misinformation, and the general rot its careless adoption is causing to the economy.
Agree on climate though.
THIS!!
I value your thoughts, Sam. I deactivated my Twitter/X account today after hearing you say the below quote* on the podcast.
Small thing: maybe @MakingSenseHQ could move from Twitter/X to Bluesky?
*"And perhaps a note to journalists, scientists, writers, and other 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 must conserve, then we have to instantiate it elsewhere—not on a platform that is owned, run, and entirely dominated by a meme junkie who lost all his principles years ago."
I also deactivated my account for the same reason
Sam is just being a sour grapes baby about Twitter. Right wingers just don't get suspended now.....that's it. It's really not that different.
That, and after his personal falling out with Elon he wants to disparage his social media company as much as possible.
The evidence is not at all in your favor.
I agree, but I found bluesky to be toxic in the opposite manner.
That's valid. Unfortunately, most social media platforms seem to have at least some degree of toxicity.
I've never understood the complaint about "identity politics". There are various constituencies, and they have different values and interests, and both parties are interested in appealing to as many of them as they possibly can. As if the right doesn't have their identities that they are trying to appeal to, like white Christian, rural, working class conservatives.
It seems like Sam is way too easily swayed by right-wing media propaganda into believing that some of these issues are far bigger than they are. The left didn't campaign on the trans issue. The right did, as he pointed out. They made a mountain out of a mole hill, and it sadly worked. They successfully demonized the left's compassion for trans and nonbinary people. That is NOT the left's fault. We are not wrong to support these people. They are some of the most vulnerable people in society. We Democrats believe in individual liberty, and we should boldly proclaim that belief on behalf of trans and nonbinary people. Individual liberty is a core American value we ought to be proud to run on. We should shame anyone who wants to outlaw gender-affirming care.
And, Sam, I'm sorry, but not acknowledging the FACT that the boxer in question was born female is wrong and a bit cowardly. I saw and read the footnote. I doubt most people will. Stop giving that hatred and bigotry against those women wings! They are suffering terribly from all the abuse heaped on them. I hope they win their lawsuits.
Sometimes I wonder, Sam, if you're driving around in your car and absorbing arguments from talk radio for several hours a day. Teenage girls are not having the breasts lopped off in any kind of serious numbers. It's so rare. But you give people the impression that this is happening at alarming levels. It's just not.
"And, Sam, I'm sorry, but not acknowledging the FACT that the boxer in question was born female is wrong and a bit cowardly".
The boxer had ambiguous genitalia at birth and was WRONGLY thought to be female. He was not born female. I feel like I shouldn't have to point this out, but females don't have testicles. His testicles were internal and thus were not noted. At the time of puberty, the boxer did not begin menses, because he had no uterus, no fallopian tubes and no eggs.
What he does have are testicles, which pumped out the testosterone that enabled him to go through puberty. What had been thought to be a clitoris was in fact a penis, which grew during puberty to be a micro penis.
So we had a man fighting women in the Olympics, and unsurprising to anyone with eyes and common sense, he won the gold medal.
Look, I can see that many here are doubling and tripling down on this issue. It's the by now familiar talking points:
1. It isn't happening.
2. If it is happening, it's rare and doesn't matter.
3. Ok it happens and it's good.
How do you know so much about her genitalia? Where are you getting your information?
And did you read Sam's footnote?
"I understand, of course, that the controversy over Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting’s participation in the 2024 Summer Olympics wasn’t a clear example of the problem of trans women in women’s sports—because neither, to my knowledge, is actually trans-gender."
And who is saying that GAC isn't happening? Yes, surgeries for teens are very rare. And most people who access GAC are happy they did. You are very confused, and very emotional about this issue.
Are harmful puberty blockers rare? What are the stats on those?
We should be investing in quality research on that subject, and we should let everyone know the facts about the risks and benefits before signing on for any particular treatment. WPATH is doing their best, but they are way underfunded.
A lot there, but just take the trans issue.
This is clearly a child of the left.
Again, what was the first executive order Biden did?
Which governors were insistent on following the left on sports, bathroom, and parental notification for trans gender folks?
Why was there a video of Kamala talking about this in the first place?
It’s because they made it an issue.
Sam is exaggerating that. He signed a lot of executive orders the first day.
Here's what they said about LGBTQ matters
Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation
All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. The Biden-Harris Administration will prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. To begin this work, President-elect Biden will sign an Executive Order that builds on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) and ensures that the federal government interprets Title VII of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This Order will also direct agencies to take all lawful steps to make sure that federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ persons.
Do you see any problem with that?
Yes. Conflating sex and gender.
This executive order ends women being a protected sex class, since anyone can opt into it.
It eliminates the ability of women to have their own sex based sports, spaces, and prisons. I see a giant problem with that.
No, it does not. That's a wild exaggeration of what the order says and does.
If it puts Trump in power, yes, I do see a problem with that. Do everything you can, even piss a lot of people off, to put the right people back in power, and then use that power to protect disadvantaged, and those discriminated against.
It’s ugly and unsatisfying but it’s the game we are currently stuck with and fumbling the messaging needed to win the votes does nobody any good in reality.
So you're willing to take away, or ignore, the Constitutional rights of some Americans if it gets your favored candidate elected? Your commitment to upholding the Constitution seems shaky and transactional. Isn't that what we're all afraid of with Trump? Only abiding by the parts of the Constitution we like is the path to chaos. Holding that attitude is the beginning of the end of our Republic.
Thank you for writing this so much more eloquently and calmly than I could have. Seems Sam Harris is so enamored with the "trans issue" that he is actually perpetuating falsehoods himself.
How is it the Dems fault that the electorate is so reactive/gullible to Boogeyman problems that really don't affect them personally?
It's dang near impossible to reason with the under educated and over religious, especially when they're blasted with misinformation constantly. Which Sam has done here himself.
"How is it the Dems fault that the electorate is so reactive/gullible to Boogeyman problems that really don't affect them personally?"
This is baffling to me, too. Did the folks who find identity politics "annoying" (Sam's word) -- but who otherwise aren't personally affected by the choices of others -- think about whether they'll be personally hurt by cuts to education, health care, reproductive rights and social security? What about climate change? How the heck do you justify THAT pivot?
I saw the ads featuring trans people. And I knew the ads would be effective at triggering rural and religious reactionaries. They blanketed people's TV screens with these ads. I'm sad to say that I think they were the deciding factor. But I don't blame Dems for standing up for trans rights. I blame the MAGA crowd for demonizing trans people and their supporters. And I know Sam believes in standing up for trans rights, too. But I think he is falling for a lot of right-wing propaganda on the issue. I don't think there is a massive social contagion happening. I think more people these days are feeling safe about living their true lives, like Harper from the Will and Harper movie. They are feeling more hopeful that they will be accepted for who they are. I see that as a positive step for liberal, democratic pluralism. We should be applauding our society for that, and contrasting our freedom with the repression in religiously conservative societies.
It the dems fault, not because they are wrong but because they aren’t TACTICALLY successful in reaching that small minority of swing voters and the broader group of centrist voters which then makes their messaging ineffective in WINNING ELECTIONS. It doesn’t matter how right you are if you lose the vote and as anti-idealist as that sounds, reality doesn’t care; you either alter your messaging to be more broadly appealing, even if you are sucking up to people whose opinions you despise, because REALITY requires it if you want to take back control and change things for vulnerable groups. It’s an ugly reality but losing with one’s idealism intact does no one any good. I hate the friggen game but reality will assert itself every time.
Sad but true.
I think you are missing the point.
Dems are the ones that made trans issues, along with other social related issues, a top and urgent priority during the peak "woke" era of 2020-2022.
People aren't as dumb as you think, they see over such a period an administration and democratic party and elite culture that supported in general an identitarian worldview. Whether it was trans issues, racial issues (recall race based vaccine program and small business load programs, support for DEI initiative in and outside of government, etc. And again not just supported it, but was a main talking points for 2+ years for many people on the left.
At the same time we had the worse inflation in 40+ years.
What do you think the general swing voters perception is going to be?
Its going to be they care more about "woke" social issues than about help their day to economic day lives.
As far as I can tell from your engagements on Sam's work, you seldom pass up an opportunity to entirely miss the point, Matt.
"Sometimes I wonder, Sam, if you're driving around in your car and absorbing arguments from talk radio for several hours a day. Teenage girls are not having the breasts lopped off in any kind of serious numbers. It's so rare. But you give people the impression that this is happening at alarming levels. It's just not."
You then go on to cite a particular case of a trans person in your life and the happy outcome as if that, in itself, is more than one data point. As personally meaningful and great as it is, it's just one example.
To clarify, what is a "serious number" of teenage girls "having their breasts lopped off" such that it would be "alarming" in your view?
A few excerpts from Sam's piece that, if you actually read and pay attention to them, will make it clear that the predictable reactions to it from you and others here who are also _clearly_ missing the point (intentionally?):
- "What I think we need now is an honest assessment of why Trump won—because it says a lot about our country that he did."
- "**Obviously, Trump's win and Harris loss were determined by many factors, and I think everyone is in danger of believing that their pet issue explains everything that happened on Tuesday.**" [Pay special attention to this one].
- "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 [...] 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. [...] Or, to come to one of my hobby horses, it was her failure to have anything like a “Sister Souljah” 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 must recognize that several planks of their platform are thoroughly rotten.**
**Note:** He’s making it clear that all of those factors played a role (potentially a large one) but that they weren’t controllable by the Democrats whereas there were some clear areas where Harris and the Democrats could have made a meaningful impact with specific choices.
- **There's one species of identity politics that had an enormous effect on this election, and most Democrats don't seem to realize it.** [Again, pay special attention to this claim].
If you read all of the above carefully - and charitably/fairly - it's VERY clear what his argument is. You require blinders and/or motivated reasoning to think otherwise.
A final note: Adding a footnote to clarify and elaborate on the point you're making isn't cowardice. It's literally on the same page.
Bravo
Yeah, I read the article. I also listened to it. It seems to me that he is blaming the Dems for standing up for trans rights. I'm blaming MAGA for demonizing our compassion for these people. And he should've made it clear that the boxer is NOT trans. What he said in the body is factually different from what is in the footnote. I think you are motivated to defend Sam. Your comment didn't really clarify anything for me. Feel free to try again if you still think I'm missing something.
The only thing I’m motivated to do is to attempt to get as close as I can to what’s actually true.
As you illustrate with the statement “ It seems to me that he is blaming the Dems for standing up for trans rights.”, you’re both mistaken AND missing the entire point of the piece.
I’m satisfied that the points I’ve made constitute a clear statement of what his - and my - view is so I’ll pass on the mulligan.
I believe the number is around 350 over the last five years in the US.
So can we get you on record as saying that 350 teenage girls “lopping off” their breasts isn’t a serious issue?
It is overwhelmingly likely that these surgeries happened with the consent of their parents or guardians. And it is overwhelmingly likely that these people are glad they had the surgery. (See the study below.) Would you outlaw such surgeries?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/10/21/gender-affirming-care-satisfaction-regret/
Let's take Jazz Jennings as an example.
Jazz had his puberty blocked, then was put on cross sex hormones, and then was castrated and had a neo-vagina created.
Jazz is incontinent, is sterile, and had never and will never have an orgasm.
Tell me, how do you obtain informed consent from a child to sign the ability to orgasm away? The child has no conception of what an orgasm is, or how it affects intimacy with a partner. How can a child possibly know what it is to be sterile? To give up the ability to breast feed or carry a child?
Parents have no right to give these thing up on behalf of their child when it isn't a life or death intervention. It's COSMETIC! Remember: these are cosmetic procedures.
This is the biggest medical scandal we have ever had in this country. The scope and scale of it are devastating.
If you think what I am saying is garbage and wrongheaded, please look into yourself.
If you are someone who thinks castrating kids chemically and/or surgically is fine, and even advocates for it, don't you think you had better be more rigorous than you have ever been in your life about anything? Look into the studies, the debunking of the studies, and the debunking of the debunking of the studies. Read everything.
Point me to where I indicated a desire to outlaw anything. Again you illustrate you're engaging with a fiction.
“Teenage girls are not having the breasts lopped off in any kind of serious numbers”.
This sentence is crazy. It’s just nuts. Serious numbers?
Wasn’t too long ago that the claim was, “this isn’t happening at all.” The goalposts moved, yet again, and people noticed. Once again, observers calling this out are tarred and feathered as irredeemably evil bigots. The word “compassion” becomes both bulwark and cudgel.
I think we're talking about 350 over the last five years in the United States. If my memory is serving me well.
And it’s okay to support this because it’s only 350? Still crazy.
We can also discuss the permanently inorgasmic children that so called “puberty blockers” are producing. Marcia Bowers, head of USPATH, thinks it’s a real problem. But if we discuss it here, we’ll be called bigots.
It is not a fact that the boxer in question is female. In fact, the medical report showing she is a male with a DSD was leaked. She was banned for being male from another boxing league, and it’s far from clear what exactly the truth is.
In fact, it’s looking more and more likely she is a male with a DSD. Let’s stick to the facts.
Where are you getting your facts from? The org that leaked that document has no credibility and was run by shady Russians.
Again that’s just not true. There have been at least three rounds of testing conducted. Russia ordered two. She did not appeal the results when she was barred by the IBA. Russians did not leak the results. The leak was from the French and occurred just a few weeks ago. This was another set of tests unrelated to IBA. We know from this leak that she was informed she is a male, with testicles and testosterone. We know she suffered distress at the diagnosis. We know she was advised to seek gender affirmation treatment. You might be in a bubble if you’ve not seen all this.
She’s even suing the French reporters who leaked the diagnosis.
You might be in a bubble.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/11/06/algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-taking-legal-action-over-gender-reports_6731869_4.html
OMG, that story does not back up your claims, you moron!
Yes it does. Please go find the leaked report. It says exactly what I said.
And everything you said “it’s all just slander from Russia” is nonsense.
You have been lied to and I’m sorry but don’t call me a moron. Neither of us know the truth of her sex, but it is not established fact as you claimed.
Again, where are you getting your information?
It’s being reported on all over the place. Guardián, Le Monde, etc. if you dig, you’ll find the actual report in French with the diagnosis.
So you can’t give me a link to what you’ve been reading?
So what the left didn't campaign on it. They just crammed it down everyone's throats the last 10 years, but perhaps not the last 6 months.
And sorry, Kamala Harris, simply was a DEI candidate. She won zero primaries. She did pathetically in 2020, and was only picked by Biden bc she was a woman, and a woman of color.
That is identity politics in its purest and most stupid form.
And it's just poison. Skin color and phenotype shouldn't be the most important part of your identity
.....and if you think otherwise, then white people should be allowed to think the same thing. Can't have it both ways.
Right wing media crammed the issue down everyone’s throats. They fomented a phony moral panic, and millions of Americans fell for it. Trump’s campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars, making it the biggest issue of the campaign.
She was a prosecutor, then a DA, then the AG of California, then a US Senator, then the VP. But you don’t think she’s qualified to be president?
But the guy who started a phony university, went bankrupt 4 times and pretended to be a businessman on a reality TV show is qualified?
Trump won primaries. Trump won 2 Presidential elections.
Kamala crashed and burned very quickly in 2020, and was openly handpicked for her gender and race. I'm not making an assumptions either, that is what Biden said....wants a female VP, which morphed to female of color VP. It was going to be Klobuchar, then word came down it had to be a POC...hence Kamala got on the Biden ticket.
Then when he dropped out he hand picked her. No one chose this woman through democratic means.
I find it interesting that you point out that everyone will have their pet reasons for Harris losing, and then you spend the rest of the podcast (post) elucidate your pet reason: broadly, wokeness, such as transgender rights.
I broadly agree with concerns about wokeness and it's impact, your acknowledgement of the complexity of the issue but also the extremism that's come to define it.
But I disagee about it's central role. You, anecdotally, talk about "literally eeveryone you know" who supported Trump did so for this reason. I can tell you, anecdotally, that literally no one I know who voted for Trump, or who I heard describe their reasons for voting for Trump ( Musk aside) said this was even a reason. And how to explain Trump winning in Michigan and Wisconsin, while those states elected Democratic senators, or other such cases?
The anti-woke, the anti-abortionists, and other single issue voters surely helped put Trump over the top. But, I think you underestimate the economic side. Not inflation or taxes, but that working and middle class people are frustrated about their decline in living standards since at least 2008, and angry as they watch their children's prospects decline. They feel like an elite few are benefitting from globalization and free trade, and they want to strike out at those people, whether they are Democrats or traditional Republicans.
I don't think they even care whether Trump can fix it. That's why they can't be swayed by the 'truth' about the cost of tariffs or mass deportations. They just want to poke a stick in the eye of those few enjoying the success of the current system, and throw a brick through their window, break it down. They just want Trump to do that.
You ignore what Harari tells you about our economic future. Why not seriously address its impacts, by listening and seriously discussing it with him, or talking to Senator Chris Murphy, or economist Martin Wolf, or, for the history, Naomi Oreskes, or Thomas Piketty (yes, I read the whole thing)?
Yes
"I don't think they even care whether Trump can fix it". Wow. You think so? If that's true, then a lot of things fall in place for me.
Thanks, Anne.
Just to be clear, I do think they are hoping Trump can fix it. But, mostly I think they are angry and disillusioned with Democrats and traditional Republicans, and so are immune to logical arguments (from people they no longer trust) for why Trump's ideas won't work. They no longer trust our economic and political systems.
I find this interview a good summary of how the economic and cultural end up meshed together in this anger...
https://youtu.be/Um017R5Kr3A?si=wcOEnCqgvOPzn2Qm
Yes, I'm hearing the same. Thanks for the link, I like the Amanpour news and podcasts.
Thank you Sam, this is a precise accounting of the present moment. You and I are the same age and I grew up not far from you in Orange County. I have been a registered Independent my entire adult life. Woke ideology, anti-Western sentiment, and hostility towards white people has caused me to vote against the democratic party across the board. The left’s weaponization of the term racist, to threaten and bully and bend people into submission and to their will, has created an atmosphere of fear whereby any reasonable discussion is impossible. The imposition of two sets of rules, whereby we are to celebrate a black woman express how wonderful it was to “see someone who looks like me” when Kamala spoke at the Democratic National Convention. And yet, if a white man were to say this about Trump it could cause him to lose his livelihood. Everyone I know notices this, and all of them vote. The past 4 years have felt less like a push for equality and more like an attempt at payback. And then after the election, to see the reaction from the women on The View and all the other left wing meltdowns. They clearly do not get it. I sometimes wonder if we live in different but intersecting planes of reality.
thank you - I hear your anger and disgust at how this all went down. For my money, the biggest single thing - if it's possible to tease out one thing - is the flood of lies, the mis and disinformation that choked our airwaves and the internet. There is no possible way to have an honest, thoughtful election when people have to wade through piles and piles of excrement to get at anything at all resembling the truth. This is the Steve Bannon play book.
I was waiting for Sam's podcast post election. It was worth the wait. I also read the comments. It's amazing how selective our perception can be and the context and subject be confused with issues used to illustrate a point. We're in for a wild ride. As for me I will give as little attention as possible to the upcoming administration. It's being filled with lunatics, grifters, religious zealots, the profoundly ignorant and stupid, psychopaths, malevolent ,greedy, incompetent, sadistic, masochistic , power hungry individuals and groups. I expect lies, distortions, half-truths to be promulgated daily by the administration, amplified on Twitter (X). These people will have difficulty working together and that will be interesting, if not entertaining
It’s hard to happily ignore when you live in a blue state dependent on the Fed Gov. Ts planning on moving a lot of the work done here to South Carolina & it will shatter the fragile NM economy. I won’t be surprised to see a systemic defunding of all blue states/counties.
This!! This is what we need. I just want logic all the way down
Pretty good stuff. It is so great that Sam Harris is motivated to take the time share his thoughts (and so eloquently).
One small criticism in The Reckoning is that Sam has over-generalized about the people ("they") who voted for Trump over Harris in the recent election:
"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."
It is possible to acknowledge that Trump is deficient, even dangerous, in numerous categories yet still pick him over Kamala Harris. The converse is, of course, also possible. Pick your poison.
Democrats don't get to choose the electorate. They get to choose how to approach the electorate to get their votes in order to win elections. Complaining about the electorate is OK in op-eds, but blaming the electorate in an election won't work, in fact it provides the opposite of the desired effect.
Beautiful, Sam.
The real issue is the stupidity of the American voter. As Michelle Obama wondered, why are the polls so close ? This election should have been an anyone but Trump vote given his track record as president and before and since. You don't need to do much research to realise the man lies every time he opens his mouth and he should be behind bars. He has not one redeeming feature and Kamala Harris, good, bad, or indifferent would have won in a sensible country.
You’re correct on all counts of course, but those of us who can see through Trump, and who are actually immune to his horrible populist rhetoric must accept that about 50% of us simply aren’t and will always be vulnerable to this type of manipulation and fear tactic.
I think it’s a lost cause to try to change human nature, which has this vulnerability distributed in about half the population everywhere you go. It’s inborn and probably, in my opinion, had some survival benefit back a quarter million years ago.
I’m a physician and I have observed for 35 years that people seem to come out of the womb tending drift one way or the other in terms of rational thought versus fear and anger/based responses. That’s not going to change.
We must learn to work within that reality. that half of us are frightened, angry, gullible.voters and always will be.
So many of my friends screamed that it’s just a lack of education. It’s not. It’s human nature and a distribution of traits that our species is stuck with
The newest studies in evolutionary psychology would confirm that.
That 50% figure of yours may be true for the US but not necessarily elsewhere. Polls in Europe and Australia showed Harris would have won by a ratio of at least 3:1. Here in Australia we have compulsory voting which doesn't guarantee good govt but it means extremists like Trump could never win office. The US is more religious and the faithful voted for Trump in droves. Gullible in the extreme. When Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters deplorable, she was being polite.
Yes, the 50% was just an approximate number thrown out to make a point. And yes, the milieu of life in the United States, a much older and in some ways degenerated culture than young Australia will have different outcomes in things such as elections.
The point I’m trying to make is about a distribution of hundreds of different traits within the human species.
In reality, the gullibility quotient, the fear quotient, the Tendency towards cognitive biases and failure to self-correct with new data, and all the other personality and thinking attributes we humans possess are all expressed in the population on Bell curves (or some sort of statistical distribution curve) and my point is that some people are definitely born more prone to this sort of thing than others. I see myself as at one far end of the rational spectrum, for which I am grateful, but I believe I was simply born that way, questioning things critically since I was a toddler. I take no credit, I had no choice.
My brother on the other hand was born to be more conservative and I believe, despite having been a straight a student all through his life, falls pray to, cognitive fallacies and biases more easily.
For this reason, I don’t think simple education is enough, and because I believe it’s part of human nature, I think we have to deal with this species-wide vulnerability head on.
And I’m definitely not sure how!
But strategic and tactical thinking about building a better world - one without fascism and autocrats - must take this aspect of human nature into account if we ever want to be successful.