#490 — Lies, Bulls**t, and the Rule of Law

Sam Harris speaks with Preet Bharara about the collapse of good faith debate in American politics. They discuss the fragmentation of media, the treatment of Anthony Fauci, the rush to prosecute political opponents, Trump's self-dealing, why indictments strengthened Trump, lying vs bullshit, tribalism and dogmatism, the failures of the Democratic Party, hypocrisy and sanctimony, restoring norms and institutions, the 2028 election, and other topics. This episode was originally recorded for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. How are you?

• 0:27Speaker 02

  I'm good. Great to see you, Preet. It's been a while.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  It's been a while, and I'm just trying to figure out if things are the same, if they've gotten better, if they've gotten worse. I don't want to talk about politics just yet.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Something that's been on my mind, I know is on your mind, and one of the things that you're known for is your commitment to and dedication to and concern about good faith debate and discussion, right? Is that a fair statement?

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  That's why, you know, one of the reasons you have a podcast, that's one of the reasons I have a podcast. So before we talk about how political debate unfolds, because it's a subspecies of overall conversation and debate, there are discussions on college campuses, there are discussions in people's homes, there are discussions at Thanksgiving, cable television, podcasts, you name it. Has the quality of discussion, we love to say, you hear this all the time, and I heard it 20 years ago and 30 years ago also, that the quality of dialogue has gone down?

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Is that true, or do we just reinvent a reason to be concerned and critical and annoyed every few years?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  No, well, I think both things are also true. I mean, those aren't mutually exclusive, but I do think it has gone down for some obvious reasons. I mean, I think the information siloing of, born of social media, has, and the fragmentation of culture as a result of that, that has preceded a pace for the last 20 some odd years. I think people are reading less and what they read is shorter and less carefully argued. And I think much of what people are consuming is, if not AI slop entirely, it's the sloppification born of hot takes and frankly, podcast conversations such as this, although, you know, I think you and I are-

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Hopefully, we're okay.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're not going to be displaying the most egregious sins of the format here, but so many podcasts are just a matter of the host and the guest bloviating without much care to observe anything like academic or journalistic or intellectual norms, right? They're just, I mean, we have so many podcasts that are run by comedians and entertainers and also just unserious people. And so the appetite for contrarianism and conspiracy thinking has been supercharged during COVID and beyond. That's one big cultural change.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  And so there's very little respect for institutions and institutional narratives and gatekeeping and expertise. And so that unwinding has had an effect. It's not to say that there weren't reasons for it, but I think it has been, in the main, disastrous.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I'll just take a moment to defend some comedians I know who are not unserious people.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Before you get mail on-

• 3:21Speaker 02

  You want to name names?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think some of the late night hosts, I don't know that they have podcasts.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I think David Letterman is not an unserious person.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I certainly wasn't thinking of the old guard.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I think Stephen Colbert is not an unserious person. And there are some other comedians, I won't name them.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I'll name one. I mean, he was a friend, but I'm quite worried about his cultural influence. I have named him on many other podcasts, but I think the effect that Joe Rogan's podcast has had has been, I mean, it's been many things, but it has been politically disastrous, I think. I just think, I think it's not just what's happened on his podcast, but the instruction that every other independent broadcaster on earth has taken from his example. I think it's been terrible.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  But sort of the odd thing is, you would think people would have a base level of credulousness about things that they hear. And in both regards, with respect to people that folks think they shouldn't agree with, someone from a different party, they don't believe anything that comes out of the mouths of the people who are on the other side of the fence, which I sort of get that. But you couple that with simultaneously taking as gospel everything said by the folks on their own side of the fence.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  That's true with Joe Rogan. That I don't really understand. That I don't really understand. Do you have a theory about that?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Well, it is a form of tribalism. It's a form of confirmation bias. I mean, there are certain sources that you prejudge as friendly, or through cruel experience, you realize that certain sources are kind of weaponized against you, and you just are not disposed to take them seriously. I mean, if, I'm going to tell you, again, so much of this, you can date to COVID and what it did to our society. I mean, both the fact of the pandemic and the reaction to it, and the overreaction to it, and the counterreaction to it. I mean, all of that was a great shattering of culture that I still think we're working

• 5:18Speaker 02

  out the consequences of and living under the shadow of. But yeah, if CNN colorizes your face to make you look sick and tells the world that you're a racist, or you're eating horse tranquilizer, or horse dewarmer, I mean, Rogan got completely slimed by the mainstream media. So it's natural to think he's going to have a reaction against it. And in miniature, I know what that's like, right? So it's, and you know what it's like when you see a story that you're close to. Many of us have had the experience of seeing the bias and frank idiocy of even the best organs of journalism, like the New York Times,

• 6:02Speaker 02

  on full display. As recently as today, I'm reading an article in the New York Times, and I see them predisposed to get many things wrong because they're tending to various left-leaning shibboleths on a topic that I know very closely, right? So all of that stuff is infuriating, frankly. And if you don't have enough of a foothold in the norms of proper, critical thought, it's easy to see how someone who bills himself as really just an entertainer, someone who's just having fun on his podcast with friends mainly, doesn't have a responsibility to keep bending over backwards to give the usual gatekeepers and

• 6:44Speaker 02

  the usual authorities a fresh hearing, right? And so, yeah, there are many people who just think that you shouldn't believe anything in the New York Times, but you should believe what some fairly crazed person thinks about vaccines, in the same breath as he tells you that he was denied a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work. I mean, they're listening to crazy people, but some of these crazy people are running parts of our government now. I mean, again, there's been a great unraveling.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Since you mentioned COVID, do you have a view on how Dr. Fauci has been described, how he's been treated, and how he's been received and thought of? And how do you think of him?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Well, there are a few layers to this onion. So the first thing I would say is that, in defense of all the people who are outraged at how the government handled everything, there are kernels of truth to that outrage. And one kernel is that the immediate branding of any speculation about the origins of this virus being not a wet market, but a lab leak as racist, right? That kind of vilification of people who were just following some obvious chains of thought at the time, that was terrible and terribly counterproductive, right? It had nothing to do with racism, but just step back for a second and ask yourself, how is

• 8:05Speaker 02

  a lab leak more politically invidious, i.e. racist, than a wet market outbreak, right? I mean, if anything, I would say the fact that the Chinese can't figure out how to stop eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs, that is more, quote, racist to observe about their culture than their propensity to have a lab leak out of a level two or level three lab, which happens to more or less everyone, right? So, I mean, the racism charge was always idiotic. It was always going to produce rage in anyone who it was directed at. And so that's true. And Fauci was part of that. And his leaked journals, though I don't think

• 8:48Speaker 02

  they should have been leaked, I think that's awful, are obviously embarrassing. I mean, the contents there, I mean, his level of star fuckery-

• 8:55Speaker 01

  It's consistent with libertarianism, is it not?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  What is consistent?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Rand Paul's libertarianism is consistent with releasing the diary.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's hypocrisy there. So yeah, I don't, I don't support the leaking of private journals in this way. And I think many people would be embarrassed by that process. But what is in fact on display is also as objectively embarrassing as, as almost anything in a public health official. And he was just blown around by his fame in a way that it was, it's just hard to defend. But he's, you know, and as to whether or not he was doing anything to cover, you know, the, the, for the improprieties of himself or his friends in trying to quash any investigation of a lab, lab leak. I mean, I think that remains to be seen, but I do think he's also the focus of a witch

• 9:46Speaker 02

  hunt. And the, the attacks on him and the glee with which many people are expecting an 85 year old man to spend the rest of his days in prison. I mean, like, all of this is just a kind of moral panic and a burning of a witch, which I think is, again, it's a sign of the times we're living in. And I think, so I think the most of it's awful, and yet there are kernels of truth in there that

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  are also understandably getting people tuned up.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  So you, you raised something else that is sort of part of this whole discussion about good faith debate and the lack of it, and where people go directionally with their complaints and what outcomes they want. And, and this one, this one is near and dear to my heart. It's, it's criminal prosecution. And I don't know if it's the case 50 years ago, that people were so quick to say, if you disagreed with somebody, or you thought someone violated a quote unquote norm, and I want to talk about norms in a minute and what they mean. Or someone was on the other side of the fence, or someone committed an ethical violation, or someone told an untruth in some context other than when they're like, it doesn't matter what it is. If they're not in your tribe, lock them up.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  If they're not in your tribe, lock her up. And there's lots of things that are morally blameworthy. I dare say that I've committed a number of them. I'm sure you have, you know, there's not a human who hasn't, but if you're in the other tribe, the call to imprison you, I feel comes much more quickly than it ever did before. And that's even true on the left sometimes, too. What's, what's, what's that? I'm just going to keep asking you questions

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Well, I

• 11:19Speaker 01

  that are impossible to answer.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Let me volley this back to you with a similar question, but I, I'm wondering, I mean, it, there's some significant asymmetries here, right? So it's like, if you were someone who claimed to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, or about the impropriety of, of him having a, you know, a sinecure at, in a Ukrainian oil company for which he was clearly not qualified, and what that might say about corruption from the, in the Biden family and, and the Biden, you know, coming Biden presidency. Okay, well, it's fine to care about all of that, I guess, but then how can you not care about a president who has, has already enriched himself billions of dollars by trading away our, you know, tariff policies and our foreign policy?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Well, he's my guy. Because he's my, he's my guy.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  But it's the scale of the thing that is so

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  different. And, you know, Nancy Pelosi's stock trades are one thing. What Trump and, and company are doing now is orders of magnitude worse, even if you are going to take the, the least charitable view of the Pelosi case. So my question to you is, if there are not laws against what Trump and family are, are doing now, I mean, cryptocurrency scams, or creating an insider trading mechanism, you know, selling access, early access to his Truth Social posts for a hundred thousand dollars a month, so that you can bet on their implications in the market. I mean, one, aren't there laws against that? And why wouldn't somebody be going to prison once the Democrats are, have enough power to actually investigate things? But that's question number one. I mean, are there laws? And if so, why not?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  But two, my concern is that once the Democrats are in a position to investigate these sorts of things, it's all going to be spun as just more lawfare, more cynicism, more tribalism, and attention to details of scale and to the egregiousness of some of these offenses will go completely out the window, and we will just be moving, swinging back and forth between these misuses of American justice, wherein one is, is actually its proper use. If this kind of financial behavior and self-dealing can't be investigated, I don't know what can be.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Well, so number one, I think it will be. I think the House will be in the hands of the Democrats. The Justice Department is not. And you have my erstwhile friend, Todd Blanch, and former colleague, saying words to the effect of, you know, neither he will say, nor should any attorney general say that they're independent from the White House, which is astonishing. But when you ask a question like that, and a lot of people do on a going forward basis, there's some history here. And Donald Trump has been investigated multiple times, again and again and again, both by state courts, I'm sorry, state jurisdictions, state DAs, by federal prosecutors, a number of them, by a state attorney general, by Congress multiple times. He has been sued, he has lost.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, there, there is a mechanism for doing this. It doesn't always succeed because there are problems of proof, or there are problems of, you know, who's, who's directing the investigation and who's not. And I think the things that you're talking about are ripe for investigation and will be investigated, not by the Justice Department, over the next two and a half years, but at some point they will. Now, the other, the other paradox here is, you know, I, I come from a law enforcement background, and so if someone committed a crime, or there's sufficient predicate to investigate a crime, then you do that. And you walk away if there's not enough evidence, or it's not in the interest of justice. And otherwise, no matter what the hue and cry is, you go forward. The problem is, when, when you investigate and or prosecute, or decline to prosecute

• 14:56Speaker 01

  someone like Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump, or, or anyone else who has a political following, and in some cases, a subset of a political following that is sort of blindly following, I'm not going to say which side I, I mean that to be, sometimes politically, the best thing that can happen to them is to get investigated or to get indicted. You know, I haven't looked at the charts myself, but multiple people have said, and I should go look at it myself, that Donald Trump was deader than dead as a political prospect

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  after he lost that, the election in 2020. And if, and if you look at the, people tell me, if you look at the graphs, his popularity began to rise again when he was indicted by the Manhattan DA. And the other thing that happens is, which I don't know how, you know, this is a sort of a general question for us to discuss, the sort of drowning in information, and, and not just information, but drowning in conspiracy theories, and drowning in lies, and drowning in controversies. Donald Trump, even though the publicity he was getting was largely negative, right? You had the prosecution in Manhattan, you had the prosecution in Georgia, you had the two special counsel prosecutions, he was taking up all the air. Right? So even if somebody else on his side, on the Republican side, had a message, and even

• 16:07Speaker 01

  if the, the information about Donald Trump was bad, it was all about Donald Trump going, going to prove, you know, that old saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity. I don't know if that's true or not. And then you combine that with, and I'm curious what you think about this assessment, you combine that with J.D. Vance's recent pronouncement, that if Watergate happened today, it would be a 12 hour story.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And can you imagine how ridiculous it is that that little thing called Watergate toppled a, popped, toppled a presidency? How do you react to all of that stuff?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Well, I think he's probably right about that, which is, but it's, you know, I would draw the, the opposite lesson, I think, there. I mean, that is a sign of just how deep a hole we are in politically and culturally, right? It's not that it should have been a 12 hour story, it's that it would be now a 12 hour story, given how, how much noise and how little signal there is, you know, you know, on our information landscape, given, given

• 17:03Speaker 01

  But is there always that noise? Or does Donald Trump strategically, tactically, instinctively create that noise? I mean, was there that much noise when Biden was president? I don't, I don't think so.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Well, there was, there have been kind of Trump-like reverberations, you know, that that crossed, you know, the, the four years where he wasn't president. I mean, we, we continue to unravel, and there, there's a left wing version of the kind of the Trumpist noise machine. But, I mean, for Trump specifically, I mean, this is kind of, I think, a kind of unpopular opinion of him, but this is the, the framing I have always had of him, and I, I think I, I still have it. I think a lot of his success and, you know, his ascendancy and his invulnerability to scandal has less to do with him being some kind of political genius, and more to do with the situation in which he has found himself. Right? So I view him as a

• 17:57Speaker 02

  The analogy that has worked for me is that he's kind of an evil version of the Chauncey Gardner character from the Jersey Kozinski book and the being there and the film by that name. If people remember, Peter Sellers played this character who is just kind of alone in the house and he's all he is is the gardener and he gets a thrust into a situation where he can be, everything he says can be mistaken for political wisdom, but he's really an imbecile, right? And he's never ceases to be an imbecile, but he's in a context in which everything he does begins to look profound and has a profound effect on the people around him. There's something like that going on with Trump,

• 18:38Speaker 02

  right? So ask yourself now, is it, is Trump being a genius when he contradicts himself 15 times over the course of 30 minutes on topics of enormous importance like what's going on in our current war with Iran, right? He'll, he'll claim that the Iranians are just peace-loving people just like ourselves who want the best for their country. And then he'll turn around and say they're scum. He'll say he's going to annihilate them, but then he'll say that the war's already been won and the Straits of Hormuz are wide open. And he lurches back and forth. It is just a word salad, right? Now, that is not, I

• 19:15Speaker 02

  would say, calculated to confound the audience. And no, it's just, he has found himself in the presence of a, of an electorate where tens of millions of people simply do not care about what is real, right? They don't, it's not like, so an ordinary con man has to lie so as to be believed, right? He has to, he has to be aware of the logical expectations of his audience. And the con is to shade the truth or to lie outright in such a way. The puzzle piece has to fit, right? Or seem to fit so that everyone doesn't call bullshit

• 19:56Speaker 02

  on, on the whole enterprise. Where, what the situation Trump is in is, he's got enough people, you know, something like 30% of Americans, maybe 40% of Americans, who simply don't care if the puzzle piece fits, right? There's just, they're not tracking the truth. They're signaling to themselves in this, some kind of, you know, extended loyalty test that they will eat everything that comes out of his mouth, you know, lie, insult, you know, hallucination. And, and they'll give him money. I mean, he'll, then, then he'll print another, you know, fake gold coin. And it doesn't matter what that gold coin says. I mean, he could mint a coinage that says, you're all a bunch of dumb cucks. Come and

• 20:40Speaker 02

  get it. And he would sell millions of dollars of those coins, right? So that's the situation he's in. And given that he's got tens of millions of people who are, who will never be dislodged from that cult, he looks like of some kind of political genius.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Would you describe it as a demagogue?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  And so, demagogues never have a majority, I don't think.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  It's unlikely that they have majorities because there are thinking, intelligent, rational people in any given population, particularly one that's a democracy, that may be under threat of becoming something less than or different from a democracy. And, you know, most people, as politicians, whether it's Republican like John McCain, or it's a Democrat like Barack Obama, you know, try to strike themes of unity and stitching together coalitions and big tents. And there's always talk about tents. Is the tent big enough? Is the tent too big? And Donald Trump seems to have figured out, again, instinctively, because I don't think he gives deep thought to anything. He doesn't have a manifesto at home. He has instinct in his head that you don't need to have 51% of the people.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  You don't need to have 60% of the people. And if you, if, if your particular appeal is to that subset of any population who is, who is more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, and is, and is more likely to not be attached to democracy. I mean, Anne Applebaum has this, this, this statistic that I think about all the time. And I was looking back at one of her books over the weekend, that I think there are social scientists who believe that even in, in Western liberal democracies, there is like a latent subset of, I don't know, they claim, 20, 25, 30%. We're like, yeah, look, if, if we have to have some autocracy, but we get the outcomes we want, then we're okay. And he, and he figured that out. I

• 22:26Speaker 01

  mean, look, even now, with his very low poll rating, he's basically alienated all the people who have some skepticism about him, even if they voted for him. And the only people that are left are the ones who don't. And if that's of a sufficient number to win the Electoral College, then, then that's all, that's all you need. Does that mean the system is messed up? And then I guess my question is, on the pie chart of blameworthiness about our being in this predicament, how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump? And how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump supporters?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Well, I would, I would point to the other part of the pie, which I think is, I would say at least half of it, which is the miscalculation and frank idiocy and confusion of the left, right? I blame the left in large measure for the fact that there's a President Trump in the first place.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Let's go through that.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Literally, the President of the United States, Commander in Chief, who also calls himself the chief federal law enforcement officer of the country, is saying that certain people are guilty and should go to prison and, in the case of some, should get the death penalty. In the old days, if a sitting President of the United States openly called for the death penalty of a duly elected member of the Senate from the largest state in the country, from the other party, that would be close to presidency ending that day.