Sam Harris: Trump, Religion, Wokeness

Listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's laptop. At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared ... Whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is... it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.

I think Trump is, essentially, we got Alex Jones as president of the United States. I don't think they're very different people. It's the same phenomenon.

The core of the cult, which it's all nested with QAnon and conspiracy thinking and the big lie and Trump can do no wrong... As a Venn diagram, it overlaps 80% with the Alex Jones phenomenon. I see them as the same problem.

When I look at Twitter, I see a company that has a terms of service, which people like Alex Jones and Trump clearly violated ... You shouldn't knowingly be able to turn your mob on a private citizen and ruin their lives through doxing, which is what Jones and Trump were doing.

I do think, at this point in history, you should be able to have a social media platform and exclude any specific group you want and just say 'That's the way we do it, and if you don't like it, boycott us.'

Every time Trump singles out a specific citizen and says 'Look at this jackass who's trying to...', whatever the claim would be, that is a human sacrifice. We know that person's life is just never the same again, because he's turned tens of millions of morons on that person, vicious morons.

Hilary Clinton, for all of her flaws, was not worse than Trump ... We could have known Joe Biden was going to just be comatose in office—not worse than Trump.

It's a matter of having someone who's totally unfit to have power be given more power than any person in a generation. And [Trump is] unfit in every possible way. It's not that he's just got a few screws loose; every screw's loose—every screw that you would want totally cranked down is loose or non-existent in him.

A smaller problem is just for some billionaire to buy the New York Times and give it to Alex Jones to run. That would be a catastrophic loss and mistake, but that's a smaller problem than getting Trump re-elected.

You don't always need to have an opinion about everything. You certainly don't always need to have a strong opinion about everything. And even if you do have a strong opinion, you don't always have to be the person expressing that opinion, because, very likely, someone else will.

If we get four more years of Trump or a Trump-like phenomenon that's just as provocative to the left, then that calculation changes. But if we've got a normal presidency in 2024, Democrat or Republican, I think the woke thing has just become so unpragmatic. I don't see how people don't begin aging out of it in some short order.

You can count on two hands the number of unarmed black men who get killed every year by cops, and you can count more white people who get killed every year by cops under identical circumstances.

I consider myself a liberal and have always voted as a Democrat. Until we dealt with this woke apocalypse, I would have certainly called myself a Democrat without much self-consciousness.

The Trump phenomenon is now and has been for many years, and really since the beginning... it's a personality cult.

My criticism of Trump is totally nonpartisan. There's literally nothing I say about Trump that I could say about any other Republican, right, and I think Liz Cheney is a total hero.

Politically speaking, I consider Trump an existential threat to our democracy.

Pick a random American better than Trump in the Oval Office, the likelihood that you're going to get someone who's worse than Trump... it's on the order of one in a million ... You're not going to get worse than Trump if you pick a random.

It's in identification with thought that the past and the future exert their weight on the present ... It's because we're processing everything we experience in the present through this scrim of discursive thought that we never actually make satisfying contact with the present, or we rarely do.

The difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 minutes, much less 10 hours or 10 days, is enormous. Just think of how life-deranging those periods are where you're just helplessly motivated by anger. 10 minutes is enough to completely fuck up your life.

Your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in you ... Table stakes for any ethical conversation is more than just your capacity to be offended.

Twitter was the real teaching tool for me ... I got on the platform, as everyone did, not really aware that I was enrolling myself into a psychological experiment to which no one had consented, and the outcome is yet unforeseen.

[Twitter is] disastrous for intellectual honesty and compassion and theory of mind, taking the extra moment to understand where the other person is coming from. So, there's no principle of charity. It's really a disastrous machine for manufacturing discord.

If you're identified with thought habitually, you are at the mercy of whatever you happen to think about.

Meditation, really... In the end, it's actually not even a practice you're doing. In the end, it's something you're ceasing to do. It's no-distraction; you're ceasing to be distracted.

Once you know how to meditate, you do notice that the half-life of negative emotions is really, really brief. And it's actually impossible to stay angry or embarrassed or whatever it is, pick your negative emotion, for longer than, you know, some tens of seconds.