Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned.

I’m Preet Bharara.

Sam Harris:

Identity politics is dead, or should be dead. Identity politics is just so flawed both morally and as a political strategy that anyone left defending it in the Democratic Party now, I think, has to be recognized as someone who shouldn’t be listened to.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Sam Harris. He’s a philosopher, neuroscientist, and host of the Making Sense podcast. He’s also the author of five bestselling books and the creator of the meditation app, Waking Up.

Sam Harris joins me this week to discuss political debate in the Trump era, the end of identity politics, and the morality of the Hunter Biden pardon. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in a social post from Bluesky from Randy. I believe this is the first question we’ve taken from Bluesky.

Randy writes, “A lot of noise about Trump replacing Jerome Powell, although he does not have the actual authority to do it. What would be the protocol for getting that done if Trump tries to usurp the system? #AskPreet.”

Of course, Randy, you’re asking about the fed chair about whom there’s been a lot of reporting and there’s an imagined and anticipated skirmish between him and the incoming new president.

But rather than answer that question myself, which is a great one, I had the same question myself not so long ago. So what did we do? We invited Sarah Binder, a political scientist, to the podcast to explore what that would look like. That episode, which you may have missed, aired on November 18th. Check it out on the Stay Tuned feed or wherever you get your podcasts.

This question comes in an email from Paula who asks, “Can you explain what the Vacancies Act is and how Trump could use it to his advantage?”

Paula, you’re clearly a person after my own heart asking technical legal question about a once fairly obscure federal statute.

The statute is the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and it probably will play a more significant role in discussion in an operation with respect to Trump filling his cabinet and lower level appointees than the thing that’s gotten a lot more attention in a lot of social media feeds and on talk shows.

That other thing is the recess appointment, and there’s been some chatter about it and some controversy about it. It remains to be seen whether or not the Senate will go along with the idea of recess appointments for people who otherwise wouldn’t have Senate support. And we’ve seen some people fall by the wayside already, including Matt Gaetz.

But I think more at play is going to be this thing that you mentioned, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and it essentially gives guidance, although it’s not 100% clear and we’re still trying to understand the parameters and perimeters of this particular statute. But in sum, it is supposed to govern who can take the place of a Senate confirmed person in the cabinet or otherwise if that position becomes vacant. Hence, the word vacancies in the name of the statute.

And so essentially, and I’m going to get a little bit technical for a moment, technically, if there’s a head of an agency who leaves by some fashion, that position becomes vacant. One way that you can fill that role and the most natural way you would fill that role, and this is what happened when I was fired from the U.S. attorney’s position, which was a Senate confirmable position, is my deputy, Joon Kim, became the acting US attorney.

The same happened when Attorney General Loretta Lynch left office at the beginning of the Trump term, the Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became the Attorney General. So that’s one way. It’s the most orthodox and traditional way.

Trump probably is not going to want to use that method in a lot of instances because you don’t change around the policy of a department or an agency by taking the prior officials, likely handpicked deputy, to assume the acting position.

So another way you can do it is to designate as the acting official in the agency, someone else who has served in another agency around the country, anywhere in federal government, but who themselves were subjected to Senate confirmation.

For example, in the context of the Justice Department, if there becomes a vacancy because Merrick Garland is gone in the new administration, you don’t have to take the deputy who’s Lisa Monaco at the moment if she remains in office, you could find a Senate confirmed United States attorney or Assistant Attorney General or the Department of Homeland Security and put that person in the place of the acting Attorney General.

And then third, you can also designate as the acting official of an agency some employee of that agency who’s at a high enough level but not at the top who has been an employee of the agency for at least 90 of the past 365 days.

For example, how might that play out with respect to the FBI? People have asked the question, and I addressed it on the CAFE Insider podcast at some length with my co-host, Joyce Vance, what I think of Kash Patel as a nominee and the answer is as you might expect, I don’t think much of it.

I think he’s utterly lacking in qualifications but more importantly, he has articulated repeatedly and publicly and proudly both on television and in writing and in a book, and even in a children’s book that he has written, the insinuation that he is totally on board with Project Vengeance and Retribution.

He literally has in his appendix to his book a list of members of the deep state who presumably are among the targets for retribution when Trump gets back into office, and if Kash Patel becomes the person at the helm of the FBI, he would have more authority and more power than anyone in the country to exact all manner of retribution if he wanted to. So that’s what I think about that.

I think he’s going to have a hard road to becoming the Senate confirmed nominee. I don’t think there’s a legitimate method by which he can be installed on day one outside of a recess appointment given the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

What can happen though is the Trump administration could find someone else in the agency or someone elsewhere in government, as I described, who they determine is loyal to the incoming president and then hires Kash Patel into the department. And then I think per the third provision of the statute I mentioned, after about 90 days Kash Patel or someone else of Trump’s choosing who was brought into the department could be put in the acting director’s spot.

Now, there’s a lot of debate about some of the mechanisms here. We’ll see how it plays out. We’ll see how it operates in real life. We’ll see what legal challenges can be brought but that, in essence, is going to be something to watch for in the coming weeks and months.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Sam Harris.

THE INTERVIEW

What’s the best way to debate a Trump supporter?

Sam Harris joins me this week to discuss the importance of intellectual honesty.

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

Sam Harris:

I’m good, Preet. Great to see you.

Preet Bharara:

So here we are, some weeks after the election. It’s funny I asked you how you were doing before. You said great with a caveat about the country. We’re going to get to all that. Are more people meditating than they used to? How are recent political events affecting how people do things like meditate and use your app?

Sam Harris:

I probably should know that having a meditation app but I couldn’t say.

Preet Bharara:

You need to get your market people on. You have no idea.

Sam Harris:

I think New Year’s is definitely… There’s a secular trend where the New Year’s resolutions change behavior at least for a month. So I’m expecting many more people to be meditating in January if past years are any guide.

Preet Bharara:

We’re recording this once again for the folks who are listening on the normal podcast app. We are on video. And Sam, I must say, you look great. So people should check out the video on YouTube.

Sam Harris:

Well, I’m glad I could oblige. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

We’re recording this on Monday, December 2nd, and I was going to ask you about other things first but given the news of the day, I’m just curious if you have a reaction to the Joe Biden pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, either morally, ethically, optically, politically, or any other adverb?

Sam Harris:

Well, psychologically and morally obviously, it’s totally understandable from the point of view of a father and a president who, I guess, plausibly thinks that his son wouldn’t have been prosecuted for these things, or at least to this extent, but for his relation to him.

Conversely, optically and politically, it’s probably pretty terrible. I’ve just started to absorb some of the reaction to it but it’s…

One thing we notice here is that yet again, we notice this for the millionth time, that there really isn’t asymmetry in our politics and there’s a series of double standards where there really is no penalty for fraudulence and deception and even criminality as you go sufficiently right of center and into Trumpistan, whereas left of center, the establishment norms and reasonable expectations of moral order prevail and you can be guilty of hypocrisy, in failing to live up to standards that you espouse and I think Biden can be credibly accused of being hypocrite here.

But right of center, there’s no such thing as hypocrisy because there are no standards anymore. You can be Judge Roy Moore raping a 14-year-old and you can still campaign with a straight face, whereas Al Franken gets defenestrated for some bad comedy. That’s one of those moments that was emblematic of this asymmetry.

Preet Bharara:

I want to come back to how you deal with that asymmetry. But speaking of it, there’s been a lot of reaction on social media and in other places. What I saw, I’m paraphrasing, I won’t get this exactly right, that was interesting to me, was Nate Silver of all people posted something along the lines of any Democrat running in 2028 shouldn’t get a single vote unless they repudiate this pardon.

Laying the gauntlet down on this particular issue when… I don’t follow every single one of his writings and postings and musings, but I’m not sure he has laid down that gauntlet in the other direction in a million possible ways that it could have been laid down. Do you have a reaction to that?

Sam Harris:

Yeah. Well, again, this is a double standard that I don’t think we can really shake because we do want to hold the moral high ground. We want to hold the journalistic high ground and the science-based high ground. We want to be in the reality-based community, to bring back an old phrase, and yet it is hard to do that when you are confronted on a daily basis with political opponents that you can play tennis without the net. It’s a fundamentally different reputational physics that everyone functions under right of center.

Trump is the ultimate example of this really as he pointed out back in 2016, to his own amazement, that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single voter. Something like that is true to an astounding degree. That’s true. It’s barely hyperbole.

And yet the question is, can you, for opportunistic reasons, let your own standards unravel left of center in opposition to any of that? I don’t think we can but it’s a very frustrating game to play.

I understand the outrage over this although obviously, I understand…

The truth is I don’t know the details of the cases against Hunter Biden in any real details. I don’t know how plausible it would be to send anyone else to prison for these things but I would be willing to play a game of poker with whatever his tax fraud was against Trump any day of the week, and I’m sure if we could drill down on Trump’s finances, he’s guilty of more of his long career.

Preet Bharara:

But we have. He’s had judgments against him.

Look, it seems to me you’ll put your finger on the nub of the problem of how to deal with the asymmetry, how to deal with the fact that one side can lie a hundred times, the other side, because politics is politics, can lie once and those things are equated with each other. One side can engage in bad faith 50 times. The other side engages in bad faith once or twice and those things are equated with each other.

Somebody put it this way about the Hunter Biden pardon. In a different universe, you can imagine that the pardon is justified. Maybe the prosecution was unfair and all sorts of arguments can be made.

But if you put your yourself out as the person who is in favor of the rule of law, if you put yourself out as the person who says no one is above the law, and you state directly into the camera with a straight face that you’re not going to pardon your son and you make a big deal out of that fact and by the way, you happily let many, many people, supporters, observers, pundits, myself included, go out there and say, “Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump on rule of law issues in part because he has said, and we take him at his word, he is not going to pardon his son, Hunter Biden.”

If you’ve done that and you’ve set that standard and you set that expectation, then people have a right to be deeply disappointed. Is that fair?

Sam Harris:

Yeah, I think so.

But again, I find the whole thing all too understandable from a father’s eye view. He’s only got one son and one life and he’s got one last opportunity to spare his son, I think, likely a fairly long prison sentence. Correct me if I’m wrong. And so I can see why that was just too tempting to pass up.

I think he’s not thinking about his political reputation anymore because there’s so many knocks against it, which are probably unrecoverable.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, I wonder what he would’ve done had he won re-election or had Kamala Harris become the next president. Maybe he would’ve had a different view.

There’s also the argument that he changed his mind, which is the best moral argument, that maybe he was going to let it go and let his son be subject to the devices of the law, such as they were.

But in recent times, the appointments of people who have trafficked in this idea of retribution and retaliation, including first Matt Gaetz and also Pam Bondi, and then also Kash Patel, his choice for the head of the FBI made him think, “Well, they’re not going to stop at just this stuff. They’re going to talk about all sorts of other things. Why don’t I do what I need to do as a father?” I guess that’s the argument.

Sam Harris:

Yeah, yeah. Again, I don’t expect that to survive much political commentary, which is understandable, but it is not surprising that he did it.

Preet Bharara:

What about this other… So it has been reported that Donald Trump is mused about pardoning Hunter Biden if Joe Biden didn’t, and now imagine the aesthetics of Joe Biden sticking to that principle, not pardoning his son, and then Trump doing it. Is that aesthetically acceptable to Joe Biden? Is that a reason why it’s justified that he did what he did?

Sam Harris:

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.

Preet Bharara:

Do you know what I mean?

Sam Harris:

I know how likely it was that Trump would’ve done that.

That would’ve been the magnanimous and morally interesting thing to do.

Preet Bharara:

And also cutting him to the quick.

Sam Harris:

I’m not sure he would’ve done that. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. He might’ve.

I feel like it’s… Again-

Sam Harris:

It’s possible. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… people don’t give Trump credit enough for doing disruptive, contrarian things, but-

Sam Harris:

He probably would’ve done it along with pardoning himself for everything that he’s done and… Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe. Or all the January 6th people too.

Sam Harris:

Yeah.

I think he would do it in the spirit of an autocrat showing that he can be made magnificent with his use of compassionate power.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like the thumbs up/thumbs down in the gladiator arena.

Sam Harris:

Yeah, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

But in fact, he would do it alongside the subtext of, “You are a terrible father for not pardoning your son-

Sam Harris:

Right. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

… and I’m the better patriarch.” Right?

Sam Harris:

I think you’ve found a brilliant Shakespearean plot point here. Yeah.

He could have done that and he would’ve said, “I did the thing you didn’t have the guts to do, Sleepy Joe.” Yeah. Something like that.

Preet Bharara:

Either way, he wins, right?

Biden pardons his son, it’s going to give a lot of talking heads and Trump himself a public rationale for doing what he was otherwise going to do anyway, pardon a lot of bad people. And if he didn’t do it, if Biden hadn’t done it, then he would’ve done it and it’s…

I find that in a lot of circumstances here, and nobody’s going to love this, but Trump has commandeered a position of being in the win-win situation, of head side win, tails you lose, and it goes back to your first point.

Tell me what you think about this. It’s not very fully formed but it occurs to me that if you have managed to succeed and our system is supposed to be built so that this does not succeed, but if you’ve managed to succeed on a bed of lies and corruption and gaslighting and despite bad conduct, sexual misconduct, lying in court, all sorts of other bad, if you managed to succeed and put together a winning coalition with all of those attributes and all of those devices, then what is the other side’s choice?

I guess you could be virtuous and go high when they go low, which tends not to work, and some people would say is naïve, or you try to go low also but you don’t do it well and you’re never going to be as good at going low as the other guy. So that’s also, I find, I hate to say it, a checkmate situation.

Sam Harris:

Yeah. And it erodes your morals in the process. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Could you debunk that theory? Because I don’t like it very much.

Sam Harris:

There’s some versions of attacking Trump that I think could have worked. I think this is just hypothetical but at least I imagine, though there appears to be no bottom. I think there might’ve been a few ledges within the abyss that we could have found that might have harmed his reputation even among his cult.

Preet Bharara:

What are those?

Sam Harris:

Well, I hold out some hope. Again, this could seem completely fatuous, but I still think that had the Apprentice tapes that are rumored to exist, I believe, on to a moral certainty I know they exist because I believe I know two people who had face-to-face conversations with Mark Burnett in private where he said they existed with Trump using the N-word in just Mark Fuhrman-style earnestness. This is just what I call these people.

If that audio had leaked or that video had leaked and it was like the Fuhrman tapes, I think it certainly back the first time around 2016, 2017, America would say, “Okay, this is a place we can’t go with a president. This is the end of someone’s political career to be heard talking like this behind closed doors.”

Now, I could be wrong about that, we’ll probably never know, but I think that would’ve mattered had those tapes come out.

I also think if there had been a sufficiently clear forensic analysis on his finances at the right time where it could have been established that he really was a fake businessman, not a real businessman, if it was proven to the satisfaction of people who didn’t have to be, have to do too much homework to understand it, that he really was just a game show host who Mark Burnett had sold to the country as a business genius for 12 years, and there was no there-there, and just a string of bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits and a very large inheritance from his father that he had practically squandered.

Ironically, now, he is a real billionaire based on having successfully grifted his cult and produced a meme stock on top of a fake business.

But had it been very clear that he was a business fraud, I think that could have mattered at the right time but again, maybe not.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting that you’re picking two things that are unrelated to his governance. I wonder if there are things…

I have a couple of thoughts.

He’s in a honeymoon period right now. It was not a landslide. Some people are saying it’s a landslide, posting it was a landslide, or at least that he has a significant mandate because a lot of votes weren’t counted and it looked like it was a much larger win than it was, but still a decisive win and the transfer of power will happen peacefully because the particular side who lost believes in the peaceful transfer of power.

But he’s not governing yet. He’s trolling with his nominations, he’s making incendiary statements. He’s keeping us busy on the weekends.

My suspicion is that once he’s actually responsible for everything and he’s in the White House and he’s governing that things might be a little bit different, that trolling is not enough.

The question I have is if you think about the best way to prosecute the case against Donald Trump and Trumpism, what are the ways in which he has been politically damaged, not among his base because that seems never to be possible, but what are the ways he’s been politically damaged by things in the minds of independents or people who could have gone either way in the last or the next election?

And the one example that comes to mind in my head was the family separations at the border. And if you agree with that, what does that tell you? Is there some lesson in that? Is the process for the downtrodden and sometimes feckless Democrats to wait for something bad to happen?

Look, on the other side… And I’ll stop my filibuster in a moment.

On the other side, my understanding is you can trace Biden’s decline in popularity from the withdrawal in Afghanistan, which was not something that was imposed upon him. It was not something that Republicans plotted. It was a failure of the Biden administration after which everyone pounced, including people on the democratic side. Is that the strategy? Politically, would Trump wait for him to screw up? And what do you think about the family separation point?

Sam Harris:

Well, I think there are things he could do that would condemn him in the minds of certainly most independents. The question for me is what would actually break his connection to his core supporters? Right?

Preet Bharara:

Well, I don’t think anything-

Sam Harris:

What would turn MAGA against him?

Preet Bharara:

Let me narrow your question.

What reasonably foreseeable thing could do that other than some crazy, outlandish factual development? Can you think of anything?

Sam Harris:

Well, I guess he-

Preet Bharara:

Fifth Avenue scenario?

Sam Harris:

He’s certainly going to own the economy. So if the economy doesn’t do well, I think there’ll be no one to blame.

Preet Bharara:

There’ll be Mexico, there’ll be China, there’ll be-

Sam Harris:

Right. But his response-

Preet Bharara:

… the house is minority.

Sam Harris:

His response to all of that.

Obviously, if he successfully shunts blame to everyone else but him for his fans, well, then they will never break their support of him.

The pernicious factor here is that because for this whole time, really for virtually a decade, he’s had a sufficient number of cultists in his base. The Republican establishment that has at various points acknowledged how demented he is as a political figure has not been able to step away from him because they’re afraid of his base.

You have to erode his base in order to uncouple the political fortunes of otherwise normal Republicans from Trump and Trumpism. That’s the thing that is…

You can’t just say what’s going to affect independence because the really awful thing that has happened here is that we’ve had otherwise normal Republicans, again, for nearly a decade, cover for him and apologize for him and only criticize him in private but in public stand shoulder to shoulder with him. That’s what so deranged our politics right of center.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I totally agree with you.

I guess what I’m suggesting is if you go back six months and you think Trump couldn’t have gotten re-elected with just his base, he needed independence, he needed people who were undecided, and had there been a better strategy of separating Trump from those folks, the independent folks, he wouldn’t have been re-elected and some of the spell would’ve been broken. Yeah, going forward, if you want a strong robust Republican Party, you got to do something about the base.

But you said it already in this interview, the Fifth Avenue metaphor reigns supreme. I can’t think of one thing, no matter what happens, whether COVID happens, a recession happens, a war happens, he seems to have schooled the cult into believing someone else is to blame and he’s not to blame.

I can’t think of one thing that could happen that would cause his base to flee.

Sam Harris:

Well, he’s had a lot of help, it must be argued or admitted, left of center in all of the crazy identity politics and moral panic and moral confusion that has been there to react against in Trumpistan.

The fact that we had a candidate in Kamala Harris who could not give straight answers for how her views have changed since 2019 and 2020 because she was playing or thought she had to play four dimensional intersectional math and chess with this coalition of weirdos, frankly, and she just couldn’t speak plainly about things that really have easy answers or should have easy answers. She should have been able to say how her thinking about the border has evolved and say something to account for this mystery that the border was left in this state of chaos for as long as it was.

Joe Biden on his first day in office, his first executive order on his first day, had something to do with trans kids in sports and it took him two and a half years to issue an executive order about the border.

That was a problem. That was a fire that had to be put out. And if only rhetorically in the last a hundred days of the campaign and the Democratic machine and Kamala Harris at the head of it really couldn’t figure out how to speak plainly about these things, I think that that doomed her campaign.

Preet Bharara:

There’s an interesting debate going on in democratic circles and there’s a circular firing squad and all of that, a registered Democrat, and I voted for the last ticket on the Democratic side, obviously, and all the way back. But I’m not in the party. I’m not a party elder. I’m not part of the DNC.

It just seems to me as a general moral matter, and this is the vein in which I’m asking you the question, when you lose, whether it’s a sports game or a political fight, aren’t you supposed to figure out what you did wrong and see where your mistakes were and see where-

Sam Harris:

Oh, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… the other side was strong?

In any athletic endeavor, you watch the footage of the game and whether it’s basketball, football, or baseball, you study the footage. Sometimes, it’s the case to extend the analogy that there was a bad call and the refs got it wrong and maybe it was even a decisive moment at the plate in a baseball game or at the goal line in a football game. But you can’t orient your whole strategy for the next game around the efficient, can you?

Sam Harris:

No, no. I think that this really requires a fairly heroin postmortem for Democrats. I think there are many lessons to learn. I think they’re easily summarized.

I would summarize it and the first thing I would point out is that identity politics is dead, or should be dead.

Identity politics is just so flawed both morally and as a political strategy that anyone left defending it in the Democratic Party now, I think, has to be recognized as someone who shouldn’t be listened to.

This is just-

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean? It’s like anything else. I don’t know what identity politics means.

Sam Harris:

Well, there’s a fairly-

Preet Bharara:

People who are MAGA, the MAGA folks have a certain identity and they have a certain vision of what it means and-

Sam Harris:

Not quite.

Yes. There are white supremacist morons somewhere there in the crunchy center of MAGA. There’s no question but I think there’s a lot of [inaudible 00:30:45]-

Preet Bharara:

MAGA has a crunchy center?

Sam Harris:

Yeah. Majority of Hispanic men are now MAGA apparently.

Here’s what’s wrong with identity politics just as a moral foundation. I think the flawed politics follow from this.

You just imagine a case. Actually, there’s a case in the news that you’ll be well aware of now that resembles this.

But take the generic case of people on a New York subway car and some violent lunatic gets on there and starts threatening everyone, and everyone’s clearly terrified. And then some brave individual stands up and confronts him and an altercation ensues. The violent threatening man winds up dying. He gets choked, unconscious, or has a heart attack, or he gets hit and he falls down and hits his head and he dies.

It’s pretty clear that the person who killed him effectively had not set out that morning to kill anyone and he was simply defending himself and lots of other people on the car who will tell you how terrified they were.

Here’s what’s wrong with identity politics.

Anyone taken in by identity politics, and this is most of the Democratic Party, certainly, historically, doesn’t know how they feel about the situation just described until I tell you the skin colors of the people involved.

Was the guy who got hit and died Black or white? Was the guy who hit him Black or white? Were the people being threatened Black, white, or Jewish, or Asian, or… Give me these details and then I’ll be able to do the moral math.

Now, that is an obscenity. To have that kind of software running on your brain is morally obscene and I would argue now it is politically suicidal.

Even people of color don’t want this identity politics. The Latinos don’t want Latinx.

All of this pandering to these imagined victim groups has backfired, atrociously, and people can see that it doesn’t scale. You can’t-

Preet Bharara:

I have views on this as well.

You don’t disagree that there are groups and individuals within those groups who actually in fact face discrimination and mistreatment, right?

Sam Harris:

No, I don’t disagree with that.

But there’s much less of that than is alleged by Democrats most of the time, and that’s a problem.

Define fake racists because you’ve run out of real racists is a real problem and a group like the Southern Poverty Law Center… I would say this is still referred to without any caveat by real journalists left of center as a great source of information about the problem of racism in America.

But the Southern Poverty Law Center at some point in the last decade or so became a woke madhouse. It used to do necessary work. It used to prosecute real members of the Ku Klux Klan and bankrupt real racists and anti-Semites and white supremacists, and that was great.

But now it just finds racists where they don’t exist. I know liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims who have been attacked as anti-Muslim bigots because they just couldn’t figure out how to calibrate their Islamophobia detectors over there at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The pendulum has swung out into craziness, genuine craziness, and I think is in the process of swinging back among Democrats but we have to let it swing back.

My real concern here is that the lesson drawn from this loss in 2024 really, which was a categorical loss, will be that at least for some people in the Democratic Party, that we weren’t progressive enough. We weren’t morally panicked enough. We need to double down on identity in some even more irritating way and I think that’s a big disaster.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not in that camp.

Look, I want to ask you about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I want to ask you, A, do you feel like they practice identity politics or not?

And, B, if one of the goals of doing a postmortem is to figure out how the other side won and how you lost, isn’t one thing you do to look back on the successful leaders of your party previously with the understanding the time marches on and generations change and issues evolve and the zeitgeist changes.

Bill Clinton was president a long time ago, but that dude won, twice convincingly. Barack Obama won twice convincingly and Barack Obama deported a lot of people. Are we supposed to move past those winners or not?

Sam Harris:

Well, I do think we need a new generation of winners who have their heads screwed on straight. Those guys are… Yeah, they’re far more pragmatic than many of the other people we might think of. But there’s a crop of younger politicians now who seem to understand everything we’re talking about here.

Somebody like Ritchie Torres, from what I can tell, is just kryptonite to the far left here because he’s got all the intersectional brownie points as a gay, I think Black Latino combination, correct me if I’m wrong, but he wants no part of identity politics as far as I can tell. And he’s quite eloquent on this topic.

Again, I just come back to my generic example on the subway car. If you think something morally important comes into the picture and can’t be evaluated until you know the skin color of the people involved in such a situation, something’s wrong with you. You have become indoctrinated into a kind of politics that has damaged your moral toolkit, and we have to reclaim a sane moral toolkit in order to practice a sane politics left of center.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Sam Harris after this.

Going back to the other, do you think, and I don’t have a full recollection, did Barack Obama avoid identity politics? And if so, was that a reason for his outsized success?

Sam Harris:

I think he largely did. I think he was largely dinged by the left for not having been enough of a voice for the Black community really. I think he wanted to sidestep that issue.

I think in her defense, Kamala Harris in her campaign, was not running as the first Black woman/Indian possible president. Some of her surrogates described her that way but it seemed to me that they were fairly leery, and I think wisely so, of making much of the fact that she connected all of these intersectional identities. That was not how she was selling herself, and that was not the basis of the inspiration that she was really trying to leverage.

Again, there was a little bit of that which was inevitable but I thought she stayed away from that and that was good.

Preet Bharara:

Well, but… I think actually that’s a great point. And one could argue that a lot of the actual elected leaders on the Democratic side are not crazy, are pragmatic, are practical, don’t talk in the polemical ways that you’re describing but there are activists on the liberal side who do and people often don’t separate the two.

Sam Harris:

Yeah. And also-

Preet Bharara:

Is that fair?

Sam Harris:

… the people who… The more mainstream voices are-

Preet Bharara:

And there’s no repudiation of those voices.

Sam Harris:

Yeah. And they’re afraid of those voices, the mainstream candidates and even journalists are afraid of those voices.

This is to some degree what social media has done to our politics and to media generally. Social media became the editorial conscience of mainstream newspapers and news organizations. Everyone feels like they need to react to what is happening, what the mob is doing on Twitter or on X now, and I would say they don’t, but that’s not been obvious for many years now. This probably what amounts to 8% of the left has-

Preet Bharara:

What percent?

Sam Harris:

8%.

The studies that I’ve seen on just how many activists are there, left and right. You’re talking… The tales of the distribution of political craziness really indicates something like 8% in the fringe that it’s just very loud. You just have a valuable 8% that suck up all the-

Preet Bharara:

Very, very few, if any, publicly accountable elected officials in the Democratic Party advocated for defunding the police.

Sam Harris:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

Except should they have repudiated the defund the police people more, would that have mattered?

Sam Harris:

Oh, yeah. And also…

But defund the police was of a piece with many other obvious failures of basic political sanity and governance. The fact that you had the George Floyd riots just reflexively described as mostly peaceful protests by news anchors and politicians and all of the violence and mayhem was downplayed at the local level and even at the national level. There’s so many examples of…

So much of this is local, right? You have all of this DA… Alvin Bragg over in your neck of the woods.

You have all these liberal DAs who won’t prosecute crimes that really do erode the quality of life for everyone in major American cities that are disproportionately run by Democrats. You can’t walk into a CVS or a Rite Aid or a Duane Reade now without jailbreaking your razor blades and deodorant because everything’s under lock and key because there’s so much theft that goes unprosecuted.

That kind of thing is galling to everyone. And the fact that we think that that’s-

Preet Bharara:

Well, some of those DAs are being recalled in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.

Sam Harris:

But it’s taken too long.

But some of the wind in the sails of Trumpism has been all of that too and just the absence of basic sanity left of center when talking about all of that.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that the best way to critique and be a plausible critic of Trump 2.0 is to pick your spots?

Look, we’re going to cover a lot of different things in the podcast over the next four years. Moral issues, social issues, cultural issues, political issues, but there are things that are happen that are important. If Trump withdraws from NATO, we’re going to talk about that. If Trump does in fact use the military on domestic soil to do things that violate the Posse Comitatus Act or the Constitution, we’re going to talk about that.

But as I think about a list of principles for myself who is privileged to have this platform and you were privileged to have also an enormously influential and large platform, I don’t know if you think about these things in terms of how are you going to conduct yourself in the future differently or not, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not going to jump at every shiny object and in a version of persisting in the idea advocated by Michelle Obama but slightly different context, when they go low, we go high. I don’t know that you need to be as nice and weak kneed as Democrats I think have been before when they follow that aphorism.

But I do think that when you’re critiquing or when I think about critiquing Donald Trump, I want to be extra, extra careful and fastidious about my facts and about the logic of my arguments and not give any grist to the other side when I make an argument that there’s some hole in it or that I’ve misrepresented some way.

That’s not quite when they go low, we go high but unless you’re willing to fight in the precincts of we will lie and cheat and obfuscate and engage in ad hominem and lies, which I’m not prepared to do and I think a lot of people are not prepared to do, although some are, you have no choice but to be unfailingly rigorous if you can. Is that naïve or is that the right way to go?

Sam Harris:

No. Well, whether it’s always pragmatic it is just the way I want to live. It’s the way I want to be in the world.

I think trying to be morally impeccable and intellectually honest is always a good thing, again, even if there are points where you can observe its pragmatic failure. I think there will be those points.

But no, I’ve defended Trump against unfair calumnies.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about that.

Sam Harris:

I think you win points but ultimately, you win points even with your enemies if you can demonstrate that you are honest even to your own disadvantage or the disadvantage of your side in any given argument.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I was talking with the team before you came on about this exact point and in my book about prosecutions, different contexts and a different focus, but something I believe very deeply in the practice of law and the practice of trial law is the most credible people with the jury and with the judge are those who concede when it’s right and appropriate to concede a point.

That’s not conceding the whole case. That’s not conceding the whole argument.

I give this example of Ben Brafman, who’s a very noted criminal defense lawyer, and had a very odious client who he had to represent and nobody liked the guy. He’s called Martin Shkreli, and I don’t want to be sued by him but these are other people’s words, most hated man in America.

He got up at one point. I think it was an argument to the judge, not the jury, but I can’t remember exactly and he just said, “My client’s a pain in the ass,” or some version of that, “He gets on my nerves too but that doesn’t mean that this was a crime, or that doesn’t mean this is the right thing to do.”

I feel like on the left we don’t do that. Nobody wants to concede any quarter to a person that they find so odious. And as you point out, I point out that that’s not effective. It’s also not right. And generally speaking, the right thing is also the effective thing.

What are the things we should concede overall? I’m going to get into some specifics that I think are interesting that you had pointed out, and I’ll tell you what I think we should concede about Trump. What sort of general overarching things, if any, should people who are opposed to Trump concede about him?

Sam Harris:

Well, to come back to your first point, just preserving our sanity here as podcasters or political commentators, I’m also not going to leap at every bright shiny object.

For me, the litmus tests will be what has actually happened and what is still merely hypothetical.

For instance, I don’t think I spent more than 10 seconds on a podcast commenting on the possible appointment of Matt Gaetz, and I’m happy I didn’t spend much time on it because I could have spent an hour on just how odious a possibility this is, but now it appears like it’s totally evaporated. Maybe he’ll find some other perch and we’ll have something to comment on.

But just keep your powder dry until something actually happens, or the threat of something happening is so monstrous that you really have to comment on it. That’ll, I think, save a fair amount of angst both in yourself and in your audience.

Again, with Trump, there’s so much attack surface on the man and on his political movement that you never have to lie or exaggerate in order to find something worth commenting on or criticizing, or even deriding. He’s a monstrosity and yet he’s not guilty of everything that has been alleged against him.

Perhaps the specific you have in mind, which I’ve commented upon several times both on podcasts and in print and it’s a surprisingly durable piece of misinformation on the left.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a good people on both sides.

Sam Harris:

The very fine people on both sides attack on him, which is he’s-

Preet Bharara:

It’s an article of faith among people who oppose Donald Trump that he said this odious thing that is quoted back as you have said it. So could you briefly just recite what the claim is and what you believe the truth to be?

Sam Harris:

As most people will recall, there was this Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that had these white supremacists with tiki torches at night chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and there was violence and one young woman was run over and killed by, I think, a white supremacist driving the car. It was a genuinely awful eruption of violence and being a bigotry at this rally.

And there was a fair amount of violence between the protesters and the counter protesters who had assembled there and it went on for a couple of days at least. And in the aftermath, there was a press conference. There was a bit of word salad coming from Trump, as is often the case, but he was fairly clear in what he was saying, if you listen to his comments, his full comments or read the full transcript.

He was not as bad as he’s capable of being. No one in the room could be fairly said to have been confused about what he was saying if they listened to everything.

But what got exported from those remarks was a clip. This happens to everyone’s disadvantage on social media because it’s just how the game of smearing people is played.

This clip made it seem that he said that there were very fine people on both sides and by people on both sides out of context, he certainly seemed to mean that he thought the white supremacists with the tiki torches and the kinds of people who drive over other people with cars were also very fine people.

This calumny against him was spread to the ends of the earth by Democrats. So much so that I still encounter just impeccable journalists or otherwise impeccable journalists who believe this to be true and when I debunk it for them-

Preet Bharara:

What he actually said was that, it’s a fair quote what you said, but if I recall correctly from the time and from your writing, he didn’t condemn supremacists. He just said that there were some people what? Who were not white supremacists?

Sam Harris:

He said explicitly, “I’m not talking about the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis. They should be condemned totally.” He literally said those words. That’s basically verbatim.

But there were other people, he clearly thought there were other people… Now, whether there were other people or there were other people at every point that he could have been talking about in the rally could be debated.

But he clearly thought the logic of his remarks suggests that he clearly thought there were other people there protesting the removal of statues who were not white supremacists. Just ordinary people that did not want that history change.

Preet Bharara:

There was third category of person. Right?

Sam Harris:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

There was a third category of person who was sympathetic to the protest but were not white supremacists.

Sam Harris:

Right. And who were protesting at some other point. They weren’t there at night with the tiki torches. They were there during the day resisting civil war monuments coming down, etc.

But he was absolutely explicit in saying, “I am not talking about the neo-Nazis. They should be condemned totally. Now, if that isn’t good enough to stand as condemning the neo-Nazis, then we have no future as a species collaborating through making small mouth noises. We have to be able to talk and use words-”

Preet Bharara:

Again, this is the one side versus the other side thing and I completely take your point, and I think there’s huge value in acknowledging for another reason I’ll mention in a moment, that some things need to be conceded factually.

But boy, that alleged misstatement or mischaracterization on the part of the left of Donald Trump pales in comparison to a thousand of those that are done all the time by Trump and his supporters. That doesn’t make it right.

Sam Harris:

It’s the asymmetry again. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

But the reason why…

Look, some people maybe don’t care at all or care very, very little about persuading anybody outside their tribe. I know a lot of my listeners are not going to be happy with some of the things you said here. And we have a lot of people to the left of you on this show and they’ve gotten a lot of opportunity to talk for seven years. And so it’s good to have different points of view and to try to assess in a clear-eyed way the good, the bad, and the ugly of both sides.

Sam Harris:

Although I would just add here as a footnote, I consider myself a person of the left. If I had to select the menu of all these left-sided moral convictions-

Preet Bharara:

You pick left. You’re left-handed.

Sam Harris:

… I would do quite well. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

The point I’m making is in a long-winded way, is if you want any hope of being listened to by people who are at least facially on Trump’s side, it helps to be as accurate as possible.

The reason I say that is I still am on those circles on Twitter, we’ll talk about why you think everyone should be off Twitter, but I like to hear what is on the minds of the people who support Trump and when they hear someone, whether it’s Barack Obama or anyone else, give an hour-long speech and 30 seconds of it relates to the quote that you just said from Charlottesville, they stop listening.

Now, some people are going to respond to me and say, “Preet, you’re an idiot, and you’re naïve and you’re stupid, and they’re not going to listen anyway.”

But I find it striking how much people who support a guy who’s incapable of telling the truth on a daily basis take umbrage, as you’ve used a very fancy essay word, that calumny against Donald Trump, and I just wonder if it’s not worth for people who want to have their views and viewpoints that are contrary to Trump accepted, or at least be plausibly acceptable, or at least take a walk through the mind of someone of a contrary view to get those things meticulously right. What do you think?

Sam Harris:

Well, again, I think it should be how we want to function and live in the world anyway.

It’s certainly how I want to live. I don’t want to be lying about my opponents no matter how despicable they are. I want to be honest because in the end, honesty is the only thing that stands a chance of being truth tracking. It’s the only thing… If you’re being honest, it’s a totally different algorithm than the alternatives because there’s nothing to keep track of. You can just keep telling it like you see it and if your mind changes, then you can be honest about that. It’s truly flexible and responsive to better data and better arguments, and it’s the only mode of being that is.

So if it turns out you thought he said the thing but then you find a fuller clip that puts it in context and you realize, “Oh, he didn’t say that thing,” you have to concede that because that’s just… Everything else is intrinsically divisive because it’s dishonest and you’re just playing for a team and teams change. All of a sudden, you’re surrounded by liars who used to be your friends.

Preet Bharara:

I understand the incredible frustration and irritation on the part of folks who hear this argument and complaints about Trump adversaries and opponents not being meticulous on occasion because it’s very rich.

I’m reminded. My favorite example from early in President Trump’s first term was his White House counsel wrote a letter, I think, to a house committee and in the letter was complaining about somebody not saying something fully accurate. Maybe it was Adam Schiff, maybe it was someone else, and that’s all fine and well and good.

But in support of their allegation of untruth and factual misstatement, they cited, I think, the Washington Post Fact Checker. The irony…

On this occasion, the Fact Checker said, “You have one Pinocchio,” or whatever the metric was, which was interesting because up to that point, that same Fact Checker had given Donald Trump hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of worse-

Sam Harris:

Well, I think it was 30,000 lies documented-

Preet Bharara:

… worse assessments.

Sam Harris:

… by the Washington Post.

Preet Bharara:

It’s incredibly frustrating and rich for them, for literally the counsel to the President of the United States, to rest on the credibility of a Fact Checker that otherwise has found his own boss, president of the United States, thousands of times more lie worthy than the person they’re complaining about. So I get people’s frustration.

Sam Harris:

But the remedy for that can’t be to lower our standards or to have none. It’s just-

Preet Bharara:

When they go low, you’re saying it, Sam, we go high.

Sam Harris:

Yeah. Well, it’s not… But not in a sanctimonious way, just in a sanity and norm-preserving way.

We have to make the institutions and shore them up the way we would want them to be maintained in the absence of Trump. At a certain point, Trump is going to disappear and we’re going to be dealing with a more normal character on the Republican side, whether that’s-

Preet Bharara:

JD Vance.

Sam Harris:

… JD Vance or… Yeah.

I don’t know JD and I only know what you can know about him through having read articles about him and seen him perform as a political actor relatively recently. But he strikes me as a much more normal politician.

Trump, it is true that he is a totally unique and quite grotesque political object. He’s functioning by a kind of physics that, as someone pointed out, I forget who this was, what he has brought to our politics is essentially the physics of celebrity as opposed to normal politics.

The things that would be truly destructive, actually just fatal to anyone else’s political career, for him, somehow work and it’s inscrutable that this is so and when you look at the details, it seems often impossible that it would be so and yet he’s turned his side of the information landscape into yet another season of a reality TV show. People appreciate it and accept it on those terms.

Yes, it’s maddening but we can’t turn our side the information and political landscape into an equally grotesque theater of both absurdity, lack of integrity.

Preet Bharara:

We were talking about conceding things earlier and there’s a concession that I’ve made from the beginning about him, which is some fundamental portion of his diagnosis of what’s wrong with the country is true to me.

There is a swamp, system is often and largely rigged, and there are a lot of people who’ve been forgotten. Now, I think his prescriptions for all of those things are BS. He’s not competent to handle them. He lies about the extent of many of them. He offers mirages to people and he’s got a million other problems that we’ve talked about. But those fundamental things are there.

This new DOGE that everyone’s talking about. It is not wrong that there is bloat and waste in our government.

I was in the government and I was in one of the most elite places ever and there’s bloat even in the most elite places in government.

Do we gain something on the other side by conceding all these things? And do you worry that people just jump immediately on the anti-Trump bandwagon no matter what policy is put forward, or you have healthy skepticism, or what’s the right way to deal with something like that that you wonder might be abused?

Sam Harris:

Well, one change, again, this is to shine some light once again on the distinction between the already real and the hypothetical.

One change in my approach here is to just focus on what has already happened. So when I complain about Trump and Trumpism-

Preet Bharara:

It’s easier to dissect.

Sam Harris:

Well, also just it is… In my view, certain things are just indisputably real.

And so we now have elected to a second term a former president, now future president, who as sitting president wouldn’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power and clearly trying to steal an election, the 2020 election, all the while claiming it was being stolen from him.

Now, that is already a step on the road to fascism in my view. Fascism is an inflammatory term to use in this context, but I think it is warranted. I’m not saying we are in a fascist society or that we’ll be in one in the next four years under Trump.

But if you want to look at how democracies erode and can ultimately fail, electing a guy who will not commit to a peaceful transfer of power and who clearly tried to steal an election and floated a lie about it being stolen from him for four years, all the while knowing that the maintenance of this lie was a continuous provocation to political violence and didn’t care about any of that, and we didn’t have a peaceful transfer of power because he summoned a mob to the Capitol and set them loose, all of that is already a moral and political injury to our country.

We are as divided as we are because we have had a right wing in this country that has been fed just an incessant stream of lies, big and small, for years now and believed most of them.

Again, I would focus on the fact that that’s already the case and that doesn’t prevent you from noticing any good thing Trump might do in the future.

The truth is I’m agnostic as to whether or not he and Vivek and Elon and all the crypto bros, whether they can actually cut lots of government waste and force us to all recognize that it’s now a good thing that the Pentagon no longer buys toilet seats for $1500 or whatever it is.

Preet Bharara:

I think it’s more than that.

Sam Harris:

Yeah. It would be…

Again, I’m agnostic about their capacity to either through genuine competence or just sheer inadvertence do something good, but I just think we have to be honest about the harms that have already been suffered by our democracy and they’re legion at this point.

I think for me, the most sobering moment in this election was the moment when it was pretty clear that Harris was going to lose, the New York Times needle was showing an 89% chance that Trump was going to win, and people started already… All the talking heads on television already started talking as though it was a fait accompli and it looks like Trump’s going to win.

The optics had completely changed politically for her on television and online and yet it was still possible that she was going to win. The blue wall states had not been declared yet and according to the New York Times, she had an 11% chance of winning at that point and 11% events happen all the time. Right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’ve experienced many of them.

Sam Harris:

Yeah, yeah.

Unfortunately.

But what was so alarming for me at that moment was the recognition that had she won at that point, it would’ve been genuinely dangerous for our society. Half of our society, and it’s the half that owns most of the guns, had been so stoked by lies for years. They had been so deceived about the vulnerability of our election system and about the liability of fraud and even on the very day you had Elon and Trump saying that there’s fraud in Pennsylvania right now, the whole election is a sham, all of those claims have since evaporated.

But at that moment, it simply was not safe, in my view, for her to win a free and fair election. That is an insane thing to have been thinking in 2024 in America and that’s where we are.

We are that combustible and we’re that combustible for a reason. We’re that combustible because Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party have consciously rigged our society to explode, and they were clearly not going to accept the results of the election had Trump lost, and that’s already an unconscionable injury that they have perpetrated on our politics.

That’s where we are. That’s the ground already lost. There’s nothing hypothetical about any of that.

Preet Bharara:

Sam Harris, thanks for being with us.

Sam Harris:

Yeah, great to see you.

Preet Bharara:

Great having you. Great conversation with you as always.

Sam Harris:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Sam Harris continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, Harris shares the best decision he’s made in a decade.

Sam Harris:

I wasn’t aware of the price I was paying for segmenting my life in five to 20-minute or one hour increments between moments of algorithmic delirium.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

To end the show this week, I want to give a shout-out to the Oxford English Dictionary and in particular, it’s Word of the Year. As you may know, I’m a lover of language and words and grammar. I could talk and debate about specific word usages and grammar rules all day long, and sometimes I do, and so it’s no surprise that I always love to find out various dictionaries words of the year.

In this year’s Oxford English word is extremely relevant, as I’m sure you’ll agree, their word, brain rot.

Now, we’ll put aside for a moment the brain rot appears to be two words rather than one, but I don’t mean to nitpick.

Oxford released its decision earlier this week defining brain rot as “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material now, particularly online content considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also, something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

Remarkably, this was news to me.

The first recorded use of brain rot was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden.

I guess we now know why the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. It’s brain rot.

Anyway, as Oxford notes, the term has taken on new significance as an expression in the digital age. Here’s what Thoreau wrote in Walden. “While England endeavors to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally.”

Well, I know this feeling, as I’m sure many of you do too. It’s that cloudiness that follows an endless Twitter doom scroll. Or maybe you’ve encountered it after watching hours of aimless TikToks or Reels. It’s all too real, and it’s clearly something that millions of people can relate to.

Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said this in his announcement of the words win. “Brain rot speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embrace the term, endorsing it as our choice this year.”

And so as we head into the holiday season and prepare for what’s to come after the New Year, I invite all of you to aim for a little less brain rot so that our brain soil, if I may, can be rich and ready for whatever the future has in store.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Sam Harris.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet.

You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.