The full transcript

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Bari Weiss. There are no perfect political candidates, but what do you do when both candidates are not just imperfect, but deeply flawed and, according to half of the country, disqualified?

We love this guy.

He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you?

I said, no, no, no, other than day one. You were a very staunch defender of President Biden's capacity to serve another 4 years.

Right after the debate, you insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong.

Given where we are Do you have any regrets about what you told the American people? No, not at all. Not at all. They're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats.

They're eating—

they're eating the pets of the people that live there.

Well, there was a lot that was done, but there's more to do, Anderson. And I'm pointing out things that need to be done that haven't been done but need to be done.

We did great in 2016.

A lot of people don't know we did much better in 2020.

We won. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.

Is there something you can point to in your life, political life, or in your life in the last 4 years that you think is a mistake that you have learned from?

I mean, I've, I've made many mistakes. Um, and they range from, you know, if you've ever parented a child, you know, you make lots of mistakes. to in my role as vice president. I mean, I've probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well-versed on issues. And I think that is very important. It's a mistake not to be well-versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question. We are just one week away from a presidential election that will decide if the next 4 years are helmed by Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump. I know a lot of people who are still undecided. Some of them work here at the Free Press. These undecided voters have just one presidential debate to reference. And as my friends at Open Debates said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed recently, I can confidently state that we haven't yet seen a real presidential debate this year. Debates have devolved into political theater with combative candidates, biased media, agenda-driven moderators, and a fixation on social media soundbites. This structure fails to deliver the substance voters need. So today, I'm here without the pageantry, the makeup, or the muted mics to host not Trump versus Kamala, though the invitation, if you guys are watching, is still very much open, but 2 very smart people who represent each side of the choice that we are going to make a week from today. Sam Harris, unrelated to Kamala Harris, is a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the essential podcast Making Sense. Today, he will explain why he is voting for Harris. Sam has spoken passionately and consistently on this issue since Trump came onto the scene. He calls Trump, quote, the most dangerous cult leader on earth, and highlights Trump's character flaws, Things like how Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, how he mocked a disabled reporter, how he said John McCain wasn't a war hero, how he called veterans suckers and losers. And if I kept going on with examples here, we'd be here all day. For him, the biggest issue is January 6th and what he says was Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Sam writes, quote, the spectacle of a sitting president Refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, culminating in an attack on the Capitol, remains the most shocking violation of political norms to occur in my lifetime. So that's Sam Harris. On the other side, Ben Shapiro, lawyer, co-founder of The Daily Wire, bestselling author of many books, and host, of course, of The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben's going to explain why he's voting for Donald Trump. He argues that we were a better country under Trump and that Trump's policies make us freer, more prosperous, and safer. He says that under the first Trump term, there were no hot wars, no inflation crisis, and far less traffic at the southern border. He makes the case that Trump is not going to be abandoned by the experts, but instead will delegate responsibilities to capable and trustworthy policymakers. He says that Kamala is incompetent and unqualified and that radicalism defines her. I suspect if you're listening to this show, you know these 2 names and have listened to them many times before. And I don't think it's an overexaggeration to say that Ben and Sam are 2 of the smartest, most influential, and most insightful voices on the American political scene today. Today, I ask Ben how he puts aside Trump's character, or at the very least, how he contends with it, his efforts to subvert an American election, and his lack of inhibitions, especially in a future administration where he could have far less guardrails. I ask Sam how he can support Kamala, who hasn't come out against the faction on the left that supports Hamas and Hezbollah. How can he support a candidate that's flip-flopped on her policy position so frequently, and even, as David Axelrod recently put it, goes to word salad city when asked simple questions? And I ask how each candidate stacks up on questions of democracy, the economy, the border, Israel, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine. All that plus much more. Stay with us. Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, welcome to Honestly.

Good to see you.

Thank you. Great to be here. Great to see you both.

Really, really happy to have both of you. I guess I want to start by setting the table with the most basic and fundamental question, which is, giving each of you the opportunity to make your pitch to listeners, which is the question of who you're voting for and why. Sam, let's start with you.

Well, I think it's no secret at this point that I'm not a fan of Donald Trump's. And I'm voting for Harris. The truth is, I would vote for almost anyone over Trump, right? So a lot of this conversation is going to be talking about why I think Trump has disqualified himself for the role of president. And I'm happy to talk about Harris as well. But I mean, that really is the whole story for me. I mean, this is a— I would be voting against Trump with more or less anyone. Because what I want really is normal politics, right? The fact that politics has taken up so much of our bandwidth of late, for really for 8 years, 9 years at this point, is a sign that something's wrong, right? And Trump is at the very center of that. So nothing I say in this conversation is going to come out of a feeling of my own partisanship. I happen to be registered as a Democrat, but I would vote for Mitt Romney at this point. I would campaign for Mitt Romney. I mean, a normal Republican would be absolutely fine with me.

Sure.

So most of what I have to say really has nothing to do with policy even. Trump has announced some policies that I would disagree with, and we can talk about those. But the real issue for me is that Trump is the most divisive political figure to appear in my lifetime. And we should get into the reasons for that. But whatever you think of Trump, even if you think he's great, You really can't deny that he brings out the worst in us, right? He brings out the worst in both his friends and his enemies. And Bret Stephens wrote a piece on this recently. So more than anything, I just want this experience of continuous political emergency to end, right? I want that to be behind us. And from my point of view, Kamala Harris whatever her weaknesses as a candidate, would be just a much-needed return to normal politics. And this is— of course, this assumes that if Trump loses, he's not running again in 4 years. Then I think that it keeps the emergency alive. But for all its flaws, the Democratic Party is a normal political party. And the Republican Party is now a cult of personality. which I consider to be actually dangerous. So, you know, that's really my main concern. I don't think any of this gets better until Trump gets out of politics.

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And to just draw a line under it, let's say the election was between Mitt Romney and Kamala Harris. Would you be voting for Mitt Romney or Kamala Harris?

+4 C-3.1 · Candid answer to Romney-vs-Harris hypothetical · Sam Harris

Well, honestly, at this point, I would probably vote for Romney. But that really should not give any indication of of how fully I favor Harris over Trump. I mean, I'm all in for Harris, right? I've given her money. I mean, I'm gonna be honest about what I think her flaws are as a candidate, but I mean, I just, yeah, there's just, my preference is as large as it could conceivably be. But I think Ben and I and you and I agree about many of the problems in the Democratic Party. And yes, I would view a normal Republican as a corrective to that. But I don't view Trump as a corrective to that. I'm sure we'll get into this. But I think everything that Ben and I worry about on the left gets worse under 4 more years of Trump.

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+3 C-2.1 · Names common ground on Democratic Party's flaws · Sam Harris

Ben, let's go to you. Obviously, you're not voting for Kamala Harris.

You may have noticed, yes. So obviously, I'm coming at this from precisely the opposite point of view. I've given money to President Trump. I've campaigned with President Trump. I brought President Trump to Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson's ohel on October 7th, where he met with hostage families. So I'm very involved in this campaign. So I'm going to use a bit of a different model. I think that Sam is coming from the point of view that Trump is preemptively disqualified from the race, just period, start to finish. We're done. And that ends the calculation. For me, the question is, were you better off in 2019 or are you better off in 2024? And the way that I view this political race is that basically you have this strainer that is American politics. That's the political system that involves the constitutional checks and balances. It involves the back and forth of politics. It involves the rhetoric. And what goes into the strainer is what the candidate brings to the table. And very often that's rhetoric, that's policy, that's staffing. That's all the mess that whatever candidate brings, and they stuff all of that stuff, that entire cholent, into the, into the strainer. And what comes out the other end of the strainer is the thing that I'm adjudicating based upon. And after the strainer in 2019, what I got was a solid economy, the best foreign policy of my lifetime, a president whose rhetoric I very often didn't like, but who had made the country stronger in a variety of ways. And as of 2024, what I see is an administration, and Kamala Harris is the vice president of that administration, who I believe actually probably has a constitutional duty to get rid of the person above her, who— that administration has produced a world that is on fire in a myriad of ways, has produced 40-year highs in inflation, has not in fact calmed the waters. I know Sam was talking about normalcy. The reality is that Donald Trump has not been president for the last 3 and a half years, and not only have we not returned to normalcy, things seem to have gotten significantly worse. In fact, If we were going to sort of describe Donald Trump's role in American politics, I think that one of the differences between Sam and me is that Sam would sort of declare Donald Trump the murderer of American politics, where I would see Donald Trump more as the coroner of American politics, that things were really, really bad before Donald Trump actually entered the American political scene, which is how he became president of the United States in the first place. And Donald Trump simply being defeated would not make any of that go away because frankly, it didn't in 2020. And so the calculation for me is, is very simple. Donald Trump was a better president than Kamala Harris would be, with all Donald Trump's flaws, with all of his excesses. And because we do have a very robust and durable constitutional system almost built to hem in his flaws and excesses, what that means is that I get a lot of good policy that I wouldn't get with Kamala Harris. I do get a stronger American, American presence on the world scene with regard to America's allies. I get a better economy.

Yeah.

And I think it would serve as a corrective to a Democratic Party that seems to have spun out into a world of damaging wokeness, because the Democratic Party is either going to force itself further into this sort of left-wing corner, or they're going to have to moderate and deal with the reality, which is if they lose to Donald Trump twice in 3 election cycles, there's something deeply wrong that cannot simply be corrected by swiveling further to the left.

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Ben, you've moved a lot since 2016. In 2016, you wrote a column titled, I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump. And I want to just read a little bit of that back to you. I will never vote for Donald Trump because I stand with certain principles. I stand with small government and free markets and religious freedom and personal responsibility. Donald Trump, you wrote, stands against all of these things. He stands for Planned Parenthood and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I stand with the Constitution of the United States, you wrote, and its embedded protection of my God-given rights through governmental checks and balances. Trump does not. I stand with conservatism. Donald Trump stands against it. it, I stand with hashtag Never Trump. What changed in these 8 years for you?

+4 C-3.1 · Direct answer to hard question on his Never-Trump reversal · Ben Shapiro

Sure. He was president. I mean, the thing that changed is, as you can read there, there are a number of things that I assumed his presidency would be. And in 2015, 2016, he was, to be fair to me, incredibly unclear about what exactly his policies would be. He was all over the map and then he was president and then I could base my next vote on what he would be like as president because he actually was president. So for example, you mentioned, I say that he was anti-free markets. Obviously he wasn't as president of the United States. That he would be anti-religious liberty. He obviously wasn't as president of the United States. He appointed justices to the Supreme Court who I generally thought were quite good, right? Which is something that I doubted in that column. And so all you could do is sort of base your forecast for the future on past performance. There was no past performance. There was just the stuff that he had said at that point in the campaign. I can now base my future exposition, my future sort of judgment of what Trump's second term will be like on a first term, because he's already been president of the United States. And so one of the big questions that I have for folks who sort of see Donald Trump as this Hitlerian, Mussolini-esque figure is, if that's true, then why didn't we see that in term one? He tried to do many things.

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Mm-hmm.

Those things were generally unsuccessful in terms of, you know, his excesses. And, and so the, the sort of question that I have that people, you know, keep bringing up, they'll, they'll say, well, he'll try to do the same thing in 2028 that he did in 2021. 2020. And the question I have is, what evidence do we have that he would attempt to stick around for, say, a third term? Is that like a real worry that people have? When people say that he's going to overrun the constitutional barriers, he may have attempted to do that, and then he was checked at every point. Whereas I think that actually the system is less built to stop, I would say, these sort of fine-grained excesses of the Democratic Party that is intent on actually changing many of the systems and changing the status of normalcy. So for example, Kamala Harris has vowed to get rid of the filibuster. If you get rid of the filibuster, that means that you can presumably add 2 states. That challenges the Senate balance permanently. She's talked about packing the Supreme Court. She's talked about wealth taxes. She's talked about passing into law certain federal legislation that she could do with 51 votes that Donald Trump has never talked about. In fact, if you look at sort of the spectrum of political opinion right now, Donald Trump positionally is closer to the middle on many of these issues than Kamala Harris is, which is one of the weirdnesses of this election.

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Sam, do you want to respond to that, especially to the question of Ben's point being that, you know, if he was such a strongman, if he had such Hitlerian fascist tendencies, and Kamala Harris has called him a fascist, why didn't he do fascism in his first term?

Well, as Ben said himself, he was checked by people around him, right? And the concern now is that he would have not General Milley and McRaven and McMaster and John Kelly and serious people like that, he'd have MyPillow guy and Mike Flynn and a rogues' gallery of enablers and sycophants and loyalists. That really is the concern, and that's why I think Ben can't draw the lessons he's drawing from the first term and broadcast them onto the second. We know what Trump says he wants to do, and he wants to do crazy things like intern something like 12 million illegal aliens in something like concentration camps and deport them, right? And if you picture what this would do to our society, it's just a moral abomination, right? Just to take this narrow case, I mean, maybe we wanna talk about immigration and the southern border, about which I think Ben and I are gonna largely agree, but I'm pretty sure I don't wanna live in a country where millions of children who are American citizens, who have one or more parent who isn't a citizen, watch their parents get deported. If you just imagine what that would look like. Now, you might think, well, Trump's never gonna do that. You're gonna grade him on a curve, and you're gonna take him seriously, but not literally, et cetera. But you could do the same thing with Kamala Harris. When Kamala Harris says she wants to do a wealth tax, we all know that that's She's not gonna be able to do that. She's certainly not gonna be able to do that if she doesn't have a House and a Senate and a Supreme Court, which she seems to be likely to have none of those things at this point if she wins. But no, you know, so take her seriously, but not literally, right? I mean, there's a double standard here in the way partisans think about— partisans for Trump think about what he says and bracket everything he says as just political theater. But I want to come back to something you said to Ben. Just, I mean, all of his words at this point on this topic could be used against him, right? And this change of heart, I think, is worth examining because I think we lose sight of just how not normal Trump is as a candidate. I mean, I think, Ben, if I had told you 10 years ago that you would one day support a presidential candidate who bragged about owning a teen beauty pageant so that he could barge into the dressing room and ogle naked underage girls, right? I don't think you would believe me, right? Or if I had told you that you would support a candidate who, as president, had been denounced by almost every 4-star general who worked under him as a dangerous moron, Right? I don't think you would believe me. Or a president who had inspired an assault on our Capitol, directly inspired it. I mean, as much as you want to parse what he might have said in that initial speech, there's no question he called everyone to DC and inspired what amounted to be a riot on the Capitol. And he inspired this. I mean, we had people wearing Camp Auschwitz t-shirts and flying a Confederate flag, smearing shit on the walls that Abraham Lincoln built, right? That's what happened on January 6th. And if I told you that you would support this guy and still support him, a guy who has honored these people, right, and who stood by as they were calling for the hanging of his vice president, he just stood by tweeting narcissistic bullshit. And he would later record a song with some of the worst offenders, right? There's 20 of them in prison singing on jailhouse telephones. He recorded his own track on this song and he plays it at his rallies, right? If I told you you would support such a person, you, Ben, right, with your commitment to morality, right, and religious principles and public probity and ethics, I don't think you would believe me.

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Right.

But that's where we are, right? That's, that's how fully Trump has distorted our politics.

So a couple things. So there are a couple of arguments. There's one you made early, and then you sort of morphed it into the second argument about character, which I'll get to in a moment. So there's the first argument, which was, you know, you're taking Trump seriously but not literally. Why can't we do the same with Kamala? So let's do that. Let's take her seriously but not literally when it comes to many of her policy prescriptions. Well, seriously but not literally for Trump on immigration looks like he's not gonna deport 12 million people by caging up entire families. in concentration camps, it looks like term number one, in which he puts back in place, for example, Remain in Mexico, in which he has a proper interpretation of what asylum law looks like, in which we properly allocate resources for Border Patrol. I've been down to the border. They're completely misallocated under the Biden administration, as Border Patrol itself will tell you. And then you look at the status quo that Kamala Harris has presented, which was effectively for 3 and a half years an open border. And so that would be taking them seriously, but not literally. We look at the records, not just what they say, which was sort of my original model. is look at what they do, not just what they say. Then there is the sort of characterological argument that you're making about Donald Trump. And again, I think that the same could be true in reverse. If I had told you, Sam Harris, a few years ago that you'd be supporting a candidate who says that men can be women, for example, or a candidate who has openly campaigned with, say, Mark Ruffalo, who has compared Israel to the Nazi state, or that you would be supporting a candidate whose first action in office, apparently according to the New York Times about 3 days ago, was to examine intelligence reports for gendered language with regard to America's foreign adversaries who are female. You'd be surprised too. I guess all this is to say that we've entered a magically different world, for better or for worse. I think in many ways for worse, and I think you'd probably agree on that, but that world exists. And so now you are faced with a binary choice between candidates, and that binary choice cannot be avoided. I mean, the question, I guess, on a characterological, you know, on a level for Sam, I think, is you obviously believe that Donald Trump is not just a threat to the presidency, he's a threat to the republic, a grave and abiding threat to the very future of the republic, which means what means would be moral to stop him? So, you know, to offer a couple of examples, there have been a couple assassination attempts on President Trump. Let's assume that Trump wins the election. Would assassination, if we are that afraid that he is going to be Hitlerian, then be an appropriate response? Or Less provocatively, would it be an appropriate response for Kamala Harris, who would be the presiding officer in the Senate— she's the Vice President of the United States— to refuse to certify the election if Donald Trump were to win? Because obviously, if he's this grave and abiding a threat, so outside the norm of our politics, so far outside the possibility of a real normal politics that it can't be fixed, would she be right to do that, for example?

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+4 C-3.1 · Direct answer refusing anti-democratic means · Sam Harris

Sam?

That's a question for me on that final point?

Yep.

No, I mean, so, so for, I mean, first of all, you can flip that around. You, if you think Trump's attempt to hold onto power in 2020, if you think all of this business about, you know, you're pressuring Pence not to certify the election was in any way legitimate and is any way not disqualifying for him to run for a second term, well then—

Well, legitimate is not disqualifying. Those are not quite the same thing. I think it was illegitimate and not disqualifying.

+4.5 C-1.2 · Partial concession on Trump's post-2020 conduct · Ben Shapiro

Well, it's gradations of the same problem. But I mean, anyone who supported that on any level, as his running mate, J.D. Vance, claims to, should support Kamala Harris doing the same thing. I know the law has changed in the interim, happily, but you should support that kind of behavior now that Kamala Harris and Biden are in power and overseeing this election. And of course, I would never—

Does he?

No, I would never support such a thing. I mean, so, I mean, you've asked me essentially whether I think Trump is orange Hitler, right? And I never have, and I've never taken those concerns entirely seriously. But I would point out that the leading scholars of fascism at this point, I mean, people like Robert Paxton, use the term in application to Trump. And it's not an empty epithet, right? It's not the same thing as saying that Trump is the next Hitler figure or the next Putin figure, right? I think the difference is that Trump is not ideological. Trump is in the Trump business. Trump just wants wealth and fame, essentially, and he wants power in order just to secure those things. But I think there are very few people who think he wants to create the Thousand-Year Reich. I mean, he wants to build condos and play golf, right? I mean, we're talking about a game show host, right, who got marketed for 12 years on television as a brilliant businessman, and half the country bought it, right? A quarter of the country has rallied to him like he's the Messiah, and another quarter is willing just to look the other way as he desecrates the most basic norms of our democracy. And the most important one which he's desecrated is not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, that is, from my point of view, the only thing you need to know about him to decide your vote in this election is that as a sitting president, he did not commit and would not commit and still hasn't committed, frankly, to a peaceful transfer of power. And we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power, right? And so that is, I mean, just again, to come to default to sane conservative Republican or erstwhile Republican principles, Ronald Reagan singled this feature of our democracy out as the key feature. I mean, it is the thing that made us the shining city on the hill, to use his terms. I mean, the thing that people living in shithole countries, to use Trump's terms, envy in us is this peaceful transfer of power. It is a political miracle. And Trump's campaign, his continued status in the Republican Party as their front-runner, is just a continuous desecration of that principle. And so from my point of view, everything hinges on that. And no, I don't think assassination attempts are the right remedy for that. Voting against him is the right remedy for that. And the reason why things didn't normalize over the last 4 years is not because Joe Biden was so woke, or Kamala Harris is now a woke Manchurian candidate who will govern like a blue-haired activist from Barnard. No, it's that Trump is still in our politics and we don't have a normal conservative party. I mean, this again, to come back to things that you and I agree about, you know, you and I could spend 2 hours here running down the far left and agreeing about just how bizarre the identitarian moral panic has been on the far left. But the problem with Trump and Trumpism is that it seems to justify all of that, right? It adds fuel to all of that. And the reason why the panic is justified, frankly, and again, it extends to Trump's former allies, right? Extends to his former running mate, Mike Pence. I mean, Mike Pence has said that the American people deserve to know that Donald Trump asked me to be loyal to him, to put my loyalty to him over my loyalty to the Constitution. That is political plutonium, and we should— and the Republican Party should recognize it as such. But what we have in the Republican Party is, as I said, a cult of personality and a loyalty test. And you have people like J.D. Vance and even Elon Musk bending the knee in this loyalty test in the most abject way, asserting that they believe the big lie that he really won or might have won the 2020 election. And this is not— it's just not normal and it's not compatible with the norms of our democracy. And the sooner we wake up from this bad dream, the better.

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So again, you know, you talk about the peaceful transition of power, which actually did happen because Donald Trump did leave office. in January of 2021. And Joe Biden has been president mostly for the last 3 and a half years, despite his, his mental ineptitude over the last—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Cut-in during Shapiro's turn · Sam Harris

You cannot call January 6th a peaceful transfer of power.

Well, that's not when the peaceful— that's not when the transfer of power happens. People don't leave office on January 6th.

People leave office on January 20th. If Mike Pence had obeyed him, we would have had a genuine constitutional crisis.

I agree with you, which is I think why Mike Pence did the right thing. And I think that what Donald Trump— the argument that Donald Trump was making between November and January was morally and legally specious. But with that said, there was a peaceful transition of power.

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But right now on the campaign trail, when Donald Trump is asked— and he was on Joe Rogan a few days ago— about the 2020 election, he still claims that he won the election. What do you make of that?

I mean, I obviously disagree with him. I don't think that he won the 2020 election. Also, this is part and parcel— I wish it weren't, I wish it weren't— but it is part and parcel of a reactionary divide that has plagued our politics since before Donald Trump, frankly. I mean, when Donald Trump won the election in 2016, we then spent 3 and a half years of people claiming that Donald Trump was a Russian plant and had been bootstrapped into office by the Russians manipulating Facebook. This sort of election denialism is not, it is ugly, it is bad on both sides. It is, I won't even say that what Democrats—

+3 C-1.2 · Concedes Trump did not win 2020 · Ben Shapiro

+0.5 R-6.1 · Cut-in during Shapiro's turn · Sam Harris

It doesn't exist on both sides.

+5 R-2.4 · Equating Russiagate commentary with Trump's 2020 denial · Ben Shapiro

That's not true. I mean, that's not, if Donald Trump wins this election, I promise you, you will see election denialism on the left. That is incredibly similar to what you've seen from Donald Trump.

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I love that you said that. I wanted to ask you that. And this is a question for you. I'm not going to filibuster, Ben. I just want to ask you, if on Election Day we have a clear result, right? So this is a landslide in the swing states, and someone really wins, right? If I told you that the losing candidate denied the results of the election and simply would not accept a loss, and even appealed to their most fanatical supporters to come into the streets and just obviously provoked violence on the part of the mob. Right. And said— and when asked, you know, what about the Constitution? This candidate said, you know, to hell with the Constitution. We don't have a country anymore. Which candidate am I conceivably talking about?

Well, I mean, I think that, you know, given Trump's rhetoric in 2020, obviously what you're talking about is Donald Trump. I don't think that's how it'd be phrased by Kamala Harris. I think that the way they're being phrased by Kamala Harris is more helpful.

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Kamala Harris, if she loses in a landslide, you think there's a chance that she will not accept the results of the election?

Forget about a landslide.

You call people into the streets.

How about a close election? How about a close election? Forget about a landslide, because a landslide is—

The landslide just makes it perfectly clear. I just want—

I just want—

I'm telling you—

But why the necessity for that sort of clarity in an election that's 50-50? Why not actually pick a plausible scenario? The most plausible scenario is that she loses in a very tight election. And then she says there's been voter suppression. And then she said—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Cut-in during Shapiro's turn · Sam Harris

it's all too plausible, Ben. It's all too plausible because currently the chance that there will be a landslide in the swing states is about 40%, even though we're at 50-50 between the 2 candidates. According to Nate Silver, there's a 40% chance that one of them runs the table in the swing states, right? So it's not—

for sure, that would now be an Electoral College landslide. We're not talking about a popular vote landslide in any case.

Yeah, no, right. So I'm talking about a clear result, right, where no allegations of fraud are plausible.

Okay, so the most obvious sort of rhetoric that would be used along those lines would be Trump's. And then the rhetoric that would be used on the other side if Trump wins would be that Trump has corrupted the system. The system has been so corrupted that people weren't able to vote properly in places like Georgia, which has been the claim that there was Jim Crow 2.0 in Georgia for years. There would be claims that Donald Trump was paid off by the billionaires, that there was foreign interference in the election, that there would be all of these claims and they would float around.

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Right.

Donald Trump has all— this is my original claim. Sam, is that Donald Trump is very obvious in his excesses. Democrats and the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris are much more, I would say, much more subtle in their excesses. But those excesses are no less dangerous for being more subtle. In fact, in some ways, I think they are more dangerous for being more subtle.

↳ P8 raised again here · first raised at U-030

Ben, you can't use a phrase like no less dangerous. Hillary Clinton conceded in 24 hours. That is less dangerous than this continuous provocation that has gone on for years.

Sam, I just disagree with you. I disagree with you. I think that the attempt by members of the media, by Hillary Clinton, who herself said that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected based on Russian interference in the 2016 election, was highly damaging. How long did she say that for?

↳ P13 raised again here · first raised at U-050

How long did she say that for? Does she still say that?

I mean, she will— yes, actually, she will still claim openly that there was manipulation that took place during the— that is true, during that there was manipulation during the 2016 election.

She says what I— the sane thing to say is that there is continuous foreign interference in our elections, right?

But that's always been the case.

That's the double standard, Sam. Now you're proposing a double standard. No, no, but very few people— When Hillary says it, it's totally subtle and fine, and when Trump says it in the most obvious foolish way, then it's totally different.

Sam, go ahead, go ahead.

You're just missing the relevant details here. Almost everyone thinks that there is continuous foreign interference in our elections. Very few people at this point think that it has been decisive and that it was decisive in 2016. I mean, the problem in 2016, it was a much bigger problem, that the internal division was real, and that whatever Russia tried to do on Facebook was amplifying very real divisions that exist in our society, which we should worry about. But I'm not in contact with any Democrats, and I talked to a lot of them at this point, who have burned any fuel over even weeks, much less months or years, worrying that Trump's first term was totally illegitimate because the election was hacked. And I mean, what really happened— I mean, there were things that seemed decisive that one could regret, like Comey opening the email investigation 10 days before the election, and that functioning effectively as a kind of October surprise, right? I mean, nothing came of it, but it seemed decisive in terms of her poll results in those last weeks. But I mean, her loss was overdetermined, and most sane Democrats recognize that.

↳ evidence for the P13 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-069

Right.

What you do not have in the Democratic Party is a cult of personality around anyone and a series of loyalty tests. I mean, again, This is— we're so far from the actual ground truth here. I mean, the ground truth is that we know at this point that there were Republicans in Congress, right, who would've voted to impeach Trump after January 6th, but they didn't because they were afraid for their lives. They were afraid that someone in the MAGA cult would come and kill them. Or members of their families. We know this from Mitt Romney, and we know it from Liz Cheney too. This is not normal, and it's not happening on the Democratic side. This is a descent into— if you don't like the term fascism, something very much like fascism. I mean, I would say that this is fascism punching a gaping hole in our democracy. And it is the effect of Trump's demagoguery.

↳ P15 raised again here · first raised at U-020

So Sam, I—

It's tough politics.

You're saying fascism is punching a gaping hole in our democracy, and this is solely due to Trump. And yet you also say that you would not support Kamala Harris if she, for example, stopped the certification of the election. And so my question remains, if Trump is such a grave threat to democracy, then why aren't you treating it that way? Voting isn't enough. I am treating it that way. I don't treat Kamala Harris as that sort of threat to democracy. I think that Kamala Harris is a threat to many of the institutions.

↳ P14 raised again here · first raised at U-035

↳ P6 raised again here · first raised at U-028

I'm not gonna burn down the village. I'm not gonna burn down the democracy in order to save it, right? So I'm not, in favor of political—

But your argument is that it's ending under Trump.

But your argument is that it's ending under Trump. No, I can well imagine that our institutions are strong enough to weather a second Trump term, right? I don't think we're gonna be— it's not gonna be the Third Reich. And again, I don't think he has those kinds of aspirations because he's such a small figure in the end, right? He is not He's not a man of ideas on any level, right? So as far as I can tell, he believes almost nothing. But the crucial problem for me is that he doesn't seem to recognize that we have an interest in the maintenance of world order, right? I mean, he's a completely transactional figure. He cares about his relationships, right? And I think he probably cares about his relationships to foreign leaders to a degree that could border on treason in certain circumstances. But I mean, it's just insane that we had a president in him who said he trusts Putin more than our own intelligence agencies, right? And then he shared top secret information with Kremlin officials in the White House because he just couldn't keep his mouth shut. I mean, he was literally just gossiping about intelligence secrets related to ISIS And Israeli intelligence went crazy over this, right? I mean, this is— he's not a serious figure.

Well, can I—

Hold on a minute.

Can I respond to that one?

Yes, and then I'll jump in.

'Cause this one's actually kind of fascinating. So I know we shifted sort of topics into foreign policy and maintenance of world order and vision of the world. And this is the part where it seems rather incredible to me to support Kamala Harris as somebody who has a vision of a functional world order. The reality is that when we talk about Donald Trump, I think that in some bizarre ways, Trump and Harris are sort of photo negatives of one another in the sense that Trump appears on the surface very unserious and he says a lot of bloviating and silly things, and then his foreign policy actually is rather serious. And Kamala Harris appears to sometimes, when she's not word salad-ing, say serious things, and then her foreign policy is deeply unserious. So you'll have Donald Trump and he'll say stupid things or bad things where he will say something about ISIS to the Russians.

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interjection during Shapiro's turn · Sam Harris

Or declassify top secret things in real time.

Or you could theoretically have the Biden-Harris administration staffed by people who full-on leak Israeli intelligence plans in the middle of a war to the Iranian government such that it is printed. You may have such an intelligence crisis, in fact, that the Israeli government stops sharing intelligence with the United States specifically because every time they do, it seems to be leaked to the front pages of the New York Times. You could have a foreign policy that is so deeply in hock to America's enemies that in the middle of an existential war in which Israel, for example, is fighting 7 different border wars from 7 different sources, You have the Biden-Harris administration slow-walking aid, threatening a cutoff in aid for supposedly humanitarian reasons, all while Kamala Harris seems signally unable to, for example, have a sister soldier moment with pro-Hamas supporters in her own party, right? And then I'm supposed to feel that Donald Trump is the threat to world order? I mean, the reality is that Ukraine was invaded under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. It was not invaded under Donald Trump. Donald Trump, here's the thing about foreign policy that's really funny. Foreign policy is widely perceived as a game of nuance and complexity, when in reality, foreign policy is not all that complex and not all that nuanced. Very often it amounts to, if you cross this line, I'll punch you in the face or I'll support people who do. And that actually is something that Donald Trump understood quite well, which is why he was able to achieve the best record in the Middle East of any president in my lifetime, while the pseudo-sophistication of the Biden-Harris administration has achieved the most massive conflagration in the Middle East in my lifetime.

↳ P19 raised again here · first raised at U-024

Okay, well then I'll ask you a not nuanced question.

Sure.

Should be simple enough to answer. Who do you think Putin wants to win the election?

I don't know who Putin wants to win the election. I'll be honest with you.

You have no intuitions about this?

↳ P20 raised again here · first raised at U-095

No. And the reason that I have no intuitions about this is because I don't think that Donald Trump knows his own policy on Ukraine. I don't think Putin does either. Donald Trump is wildly unpredictable about Ukraine.

↳ evidence for the P20 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-096

As you know, Putin is behind much of the chaos. You could argue—

↳ P20 raised again here · first raised at U-095

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Ben Shapiro

+2 R-2.1 · Whataboutism · Ben Shapiro

Sam, who does Iran want to win the election?

In the Middle East.

Iran has been actively intervening in the election on the side of Kamala Harris. We know this. The intelligence community has said this. They've actively hacked the Trump campaign.

Okay. I want to get deeper into foreign policy in a second, but I want to stay on the character question for a few more beats. The word that's come up in this conversation a few times, fascism. Or Nazism. It's in the air this election on both sides. There was a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday, and you had the spectacle of MSNBC literally playing clips— I'm not exaggerating— from the Nazi rally that happened at Madison Square Garden in 1939, saying that there was a direct line between the two things.

Well, I'm happy to start or follow Ben, whatever you want.

Yeah, Sam, go ahead.

Well, the first thing to point out is that I think we're now up to 40 of the 44 of Trump's senior-most appointees, mostly cabinet members, Republicans, Republicans who worked for him, who saw what he was like behind the scenes, 40 of 44 don't support him. Again, we're talking about people like Milley, and McMaster, and McRaven. Those are just the Ms. John Kelly. These are generals who had to deal with— Mattis.

What was that? Jim Mattis. I mean, there's a huge number of these people.

Yeah, so we're talking about people who dealt with him in the Situation Room, had to brief him on the fraying world order. And what they encountered in the man was total incompetence and a very disconcerting desire to have loyalty demonstrated to him rather than to the Constitution. On John Kelly's account, He could never make him understand why the generals had to be loyal to the Constitution and not to him personally. And again, this takes us to the question of fascism. And this is why John Kelly has unabashedly now started calling him a fascist. He also called him, I think, the most flawed person he's ever met in his life. I think it was Milley who said he's the worst person he has met. Again, these are not part— to be very clear, these are not partisan attacks. These are serious Republicans who went to work for the man, right? But the reason why fascism is not just an empty epithet is that fascism is a little hard to define, right? It's not a set of ideas, it's a style of politics, right? It's the politics of leader worship and the demonization of enemies within, to use Trump's phrase, right? It's all about Hatred of immigrants and elites and elite institutions. It focuses on the humiliation and victimhood of a native population. And it emerges out of this relentless appeal to the grievances of the mob. And that is how Trump campaigns. He's campaigned in this mode from the very beginning. He is still in that mode. He is every inch a demagogue. And you can just see how people behave around him. You can see how you have to acquiesce to his, again, loyalty tests. All of his lies are, the biggest ones certainly, are a kind of loyalty test. You have to pretend to believe the unbelievable in order to get close to him and function in his orbit. And that's what happens. And it is why scholars of fascism don't hesitate now to call him a fascist or at least a proto-fascist. Right.

So, OK, Kamala Harris would never use a phrase like the enemies within. It's just too coarse. It's boorish. It's frankly too Trumpy. But yesterday on MSNBC, they played footage of the Nazi rally in 1939, the infamous Nazi rally that took place at Madison Square Garden, very clearly suggesting— more than suggesting, kind of saying— that the people gathering there are not just deplorables, as Hillary Clinton said in 2016, but that they're supporters of a Nazi. How is that not exactly the thing that you're criticizing? Only it's issuing forth not from the mouth of the candidate, but from the broader machine that's backing her.

Well, I mean, it's just another— I don't actually— I didn't see the broadcast or the quote that you're referencing. But I mean, the way that lands for me is that that is just a way of whinging and worrying about this very phenomenon we're discussing, just how not normal it is to see this expression of politics in America. I mean, this is just— it is, you know, obviously Hillary Clinton's phrase of, you know, the basket of deplorables was politically disastrous, right, and unwise, and it shouldn't be repeated if you actually want to win elections.

Right.

But the, you know, it should never have been read, given the context of her other remarks about the American people, it shouldn't be read as demonizing half the country in the way that Trump regularly demonizes people in this country. I mean, he's talked about using the military against not just protesters, like in the BLM protests, you know, who he thought should be shot in the leg, You know, ask anyone who knows ballistics what happens when you shoot people in the leg with a rifle, right? You know, he's talking about using force, military force if need be, against his political enemies, right? That's something that you will never hear Kamala Harris or any other normal Democrat or Republican say.

↳ evidence for the P17 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-110

Well, okay, a few points. One, the demonization of a vast swath of the American public has been happening as long as 2008 when Barack Obama was saying off record to donors that there was an entire cadre of bitter clingers who cling to God, guns, religion as a—

It's unwise, but it's not the same kind of demonization. We're not—

how about Tim Walls literally saying over the weekend that the people who are attending this rally at Madison Square Garden, which featured a multiracial cast, many of whom were extraordinarily pro-Israel, giant Israeli banners hanging from the rafters at some points, calling them Nazis? How about Joe Biden speaking at Independence Hall and declaring that everybody who was ultra-MAGA was effectively a traitor to the country and was undermining the Constitution of the United States without making any serious distinction between ultra-MAGA and Republican other than to say there were some good Republicans, those were the ones who agreed with him? You know, this sort of rhetoric has not been on just one side for quite a long time, to say the very least. And when we talk about, you know, the grievance politics, grievance politics has long run the gamut in American politics, unfortunately.

↳ P17 raised again here · first raised at U-109

Yeah.

And going all the way back to, on a class basis, John Edwards and the Two Americas speeches he was making in 2004. So it sort of depends on how you're defining all of this. And none of that is to make light of the sort of rhetoric that's being used in these campaigns. I think one of the most disastrous things actually is the ratcheting up of the political rhetoric on both sides to the point where you have people on both sides saying things like, we're gonna be in a civil war soon, we're gonna be fighting each other, which is of course not true. But it's— but, you know, that sort of rhetoric is not coming from nowhere. And unfortunately, I think that one of the tendencies when people look at Trump is to pretend again that politics sort of sprang into existence when Trump came on the scene in 2015, 2016, rather than seeing him as a reaction to a preexisting politics that existed in America. You know, again, if we wanna get into the sort of origins of where we think the country started to break down, a lot of people on the left will put it on Trump in 2015, 2016. I would say that actually the campaign that broke the country was 2012 when you had a less popular incumbent who had run as a great unifier in 2008 and as a racial unifier in 2008, run in 2012 on a very left-wing agenda in which he essentially tried to cobble together a coalition of the dispossessed in sort of the phraseology of people like Roy Teixeira and single white women in order to win an election. And I think that sort of broke the way that politics was done in the country in a unique way. I think Barack Obama has escaped a lot of culpability for the breakdown in our politics, especially because typically whoever becomes the president is a reaction to whoever was last the president. But, you know, again, putting all of that aside, this kind of one-sided notion that the people being demonized are all enemies of Trump as opposed to Trump supporters is to miss the point, which is that an enormous number of Trump supporters have absolutely been demonized by the media, by the left, by entire industries where if you said for many years that you were voting for Trump in many industries in the United States, you literally could not get a job. This has been a serious problem. in, for example, Hollywood. The kind of notion that it is Trump in his singularity as fascist that is the problem here ignores, I think, the underlying problems. And again, I think also happens to be a misdefinition of fascism. Sam, you described fascism as sort of a manner of speaking, sort of like populism is sort of a mode. I don't think that's actually true. I think that fascism has to be filled with a vision of what American government is and ought to be. And you can make the claim that Trump wants to centralize power in his singular personage, which, you know, may be a thing that he aspires to. That also happens to be a thing that every Democrat president of the last 20 years has aspired to. I mean, Joe Biden has used executive powers in ways that dwarf what Donald Trump attempted to do with executive power.

↳ evidence for the P3 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-024

Right.

And again, this is one of the places where I have a very large-scale problem with sort of the, let's take Trump's rhetoric seriously when he says a dumb thing to John Kelly, and he admittedly says many dumb things, But when Joe Biden attempts to, for example, defy the Supreme Court to alleviate student loan debt, or when he attempts to use OSHA to cram down a vaccine mandate on 80 million Americans, or when Joe Biden, you know, or when Kamala Harris puts out campaign proposals that she's going to literally just pay people who are Black business owners or Latino business owners 20 grand a pop and then relieve the loan debt, which is totally unconstitutional, when she says those sorts of things and attempts to pursue them, then that is supposed to be taken as sort of rote, normal, how American politics works. The thing about Trump that's not normal is how he talks. The thing that is normal about Donald Trump is actually what his administration looked like, which is why I keep coming back to, what was your life like in 2019? Was it better in 2019 or 2024?

But put aside John Kelly, put aside The Atlantic piece for a second. Look at the list of names of people who I know that you respect. Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Will Hurt. John Bolton. We could go down. It's a list of like 100 people. Do they all have Trump derangement syndrome? I mean, what are they seeing that is leading them to sound such an alarm? And what do you make of the argument that Trump has now burned through all of the A-listers, the B-listers, and arguably the C-listers, and he's left with like Mike Lindell and Kash Patel that are not going to be able to restrain him in the same way? I think that's a pretty compelling argument.

↳ P18 raised again here · first raised at U-106

It's less compelling to me considering that there are a bunch of holdovers who certainly would go back into the administration. So for example, Mike Pompeo is very likely to go back into the administration as Secretary of State. You're going to see Howard Lutnick doing much of the staffing up of this administration as opposed to Trump himself. I mean, one of the things that Sam mentioned earlier, which is I think probably the best description of President Trump in many ways, is that this is a guy who likes to build condos and golf. I think that's true, which means that he delegates an enormous amount of power to people who are sort of professionals in the area, which is how you ended up with 3 fairly traditional originalist judges on the Supreme Court as opposed to the person he said he might appoint in 2015, 2016, His sister. So again, one of the hard parts about gauging Trump is what is he just saying and what is he doing? And that's why I keep going back to sort of the Strayner reference, which is I already saw what he did. As far as the people who he's fired, who he's been alienated from, who refused to bow the knee, the wonderful thing about American politics is that there's a nearly endless supply of professional politicos who are willing to fill the gap in order to actually perform political functions. I don't think there's any danger of DC running out of politicos who are willing to staff up top levels of the State Department who aren't, you know, MyPillow guy.

↳ evidence for the P15 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-117

Okay. I know a lot of people that are sitting out this election or writing someone in. And the reason for that is because they're absolutely disgusted. They're disgusted with Trump for all of the reasons that Sam has been articulating in this conversation, some of which I think Ben would agree with. But they're also disgusted with what they see as the lies and the hypocrisy coming from not just the Harris campaign, but more broadly, the left. They see a party that claimed to care about democracy, but then undermined democracy by anointing a candidate instead of holding an open primary. They see a side that claims to care about the rule of law, but then weaponized the rule of law against their chief political opponent with feckless political lawsuits. Let's exempt the Georgia case for a minute. And then with Kamala Harris in particular, They see a candidate that they view as having lied about Biden's fitness for office, who even attacked the integrity of the US attorney for writing that the president was too old and too senile to prosecute, and who still is doubling down on that lie, saying in a recent interview on CNN that she has no regrets about defending Biden's mental capabilities. Sam, I don't know anyone who hates lies and liars more than you. You've said in the past, All lying is destructive of the social fabric, even so-called white lies. And that's one of your main reasons for opposing Trump, that he's such a liar. And it's obvious in the ways that he lies. But what do you make of that argument that I hear, and not always so articulately put, but that I often am hearing from people who are saying, I cannot bring myself to vote for her because to vote for her would be to validate this set of things that I so profoundly oppose?

All right, well, let's try to put this in some sense of proportion, right? Trump is, I think, without question, the biggest liar, perhaps in human history, but certainly the biggest liar anyone can name. I mean, I don't know anyone, any historical figure, who is trailing tens of thousands of documented lies. other than Trump. I mean, he's simply— there's simply something wrong with his mind. And he lies pointlessly. He lies in ways that don't serve his purpose. He lies compulsively. And he lies, obviously, to produce certain political effects. But it is pathological. And it's pathological to have a political culture that doesn't care about this degree of dishonesty in a presidential candidate. I mean, the real Trump Derangement Syndrome is to think that his flaws in his character, perhaps his dishonesty above all, don't matter. That's the derangement. So if we were going to decide this election on the basis of honesty and personal integrity, This is simply nothing to talk about, right? Now, if you want me to run through the evidence of lying on Harris's side, I'm happy to do it. I mean, I think some of what you're calling lying is not so clear-cut, right? I mean, I think there are multiple ways of describing what's happening with Joe Biden, which don't—

Mm-hmm.

cash out to clear lying on the part of the people who, until the 11th hour, insisted that he was a viable candidate, right? I mean, there was— for instance, just neurologically speaking, I'm not a clinician, but I can well imagine that this apparent contradiction that Kamala is faced with and hasn't figured out how to answer is not such a contradiction. I mean, the contradiction is this. If someone asks her point blank, Well, If President Biden isn't fit to run, and we've decided he isn't after that debate, because look, you're running for president, why is he fit to govern? Who's governing? Who's in the Oval Office right now? If it's a man who can't campaign, how can he run? Sorry, if it's a man who can't campaign, how can he run the country?

Yeah.

Now, that's very easy to say, and it kind of lands well, but neurologically speaking, I don't think it's necessarily true. I can well— and I have this on the authority of people who— I've never met Biden, but I know people who know him. I know people who spoke to him even toward the end of his campaign. And there's a difference between being able to perform in public at a debate and being able to be compos mentis, given enough time in a long conversation about decisions that have to be made. And I can well imagine that while he's obviously not fit to campaign, and much less debate, that if you get him in the Oval Office and you ask him about what should we do about Iran? He's of sound mind, and he was never a great speaker. And what you meet in him is somebody who can still govern, right? Now, is it ideal that someone that old be in that position of power? I don't think so. But look, Trump would be 82 at the end of his term, right? We've got another old guy seeking power. So I think I'd be the first to say that that we should age test the presidency at a certain point, because, or at least give cognitive tests to people who are of a certain age. But again, I think there's probably some daylight between how Biden shows up even now in the Oval Office and how he shows up on our television sets as a totally moribund, figure and as someone who can't campaign for the presidency.

+4.5 C-1.2 · Partial concession · Sam Harris

So you don't think, Sam, the people around Biden covered up his mental condition knowingly?

↳ P21 raised again here · first raised at U-122

Well, yes, but what they're covering up— again, I don't have any inside knowledge here, but I have a sense that this seems quite plausible to me, right? What they're covering up is the fact that he's getting worse and worse as a candidate, right? He was never a great candidate. He was never a great speaker. He's not someone who can speak extemporaneously like Ben Shapiro, right? I mean, it's like, it's just not— that's not how he was ever wired. Whether his stutter was the problem or not, he's just not a great speaker. And Kamala Harris is not a great speaker. But I think what they were covering up is, okay, yeah, he's lost a step or 2 or 3, but we have no alternative now. We're locked in. The process is over, right? He's the candidate. So we gotta make the best of it, and we gotta figure out how to get him in front of the camera at the right hour of the day so that he doesn't look like he's gonna fall asleep. And that, I could imagine, was a one long emergency, or it certainly became one at the end of his campaign. And the debate, what the debate did is made the entire country realize, all right, this is totally unsustainable. But it's not the same thing as knowing that this is a Weekend at Bernie's presidency and there's no one in the Oval Office and the country's being governed by functionaries whose names we don't know, right? That is not plausible to me. But yes, I think it would be good to have a younger president. There's no question.

↳ evidence for the P21 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-127

But for the people who say, just to push— just to follow up on one aspect of that question, who say, I would have loved an alternative to Donald Trump. I would love to have voted in an open primary for someone that I preferred rather than have been— sort of have Kamala Harris foisted upon me. Do you think that's a legitimate gripe? You think it's legitimate, but just who cares in relationship to Trump?

It's a completely legitimate preference. It would have been my preference. I think we would have a stronger candidate. I think Kamala herself would be a stronger candidate now if she'd gone through that process. I mean, one of the things she's suffering is just the fact that she had to hit the ground running at 1,000 miles an hour, and we're witnessing all the kinks in her campaign get worked out when a campaign should be closing the deal, right? So I mean, that's just, she would have been stronger had she prevailed and became the candidate through that process. But I think that's— It was not fascism that delivered that circumventing of a primary. It was the Democratic Party, did what it did, right? It's not— they didn't disenfranchise half the nation. I mean, that was not what was happening. But was it an ideal process? No.

+1.5 C-1.2 · Partial concession · Sam Harris

I think the distinction maybe between the two of you when it comes to the question of Trump and his relationship to truth is that, Sam, you see Trump as being a liar, and Ben, you on balance see Trump as a bullshitter. And there's a kind of a difference between the two.

Hmm.

Yes, and I think that Sam is being very generous with his interpretation of events surrounding Joe Biden's health, where I fully believe that we were lied to for solidly 2 years about Joe Biden's mental status by people close to him. I mean, there were articles that were widely then derided in places like The Atlantic talking about how there were foreign leaders who were bewildered as to Joe Biden's condition 2 years in advance of him dropping out of the race, and we were told, weeks, literally weeks before he dropped out of the race, that any clip that showed that he was non compos mentis was a cheap fake. That was said at the White House, and that was trafficked by pretty much everybody in the media for solidly 2 weeks leading up to the debate. And then there was the debate, and it appeared that he was staring into the maw of death live on camera, and suddenly everybody switched their opinion in real time. And it is my, you know, grand supposition that no one actually switched their opinion in real time if they were close to him. The idea that he is somehow behind closed doors turning handsprings and competent mentally to actively take on the challenges of world politics, I see zero evidence that that is the case considering he can't go on the campaign trail for a day without mentioning that Gabby Giffords is dead when she's alive or suggesting that a strike that happens by Israel against Yemen is actually a strike by dock workers. These are not the strains of a day-to-day campaign, post his campaign, when he's just on the tarmac answering basic questions, he loses track of who he's talking about, where he is, what the hell is going on around him. And meanwhile, Kamala Harris is still out there holding fast to the line that actually he is not only well, he is doing absolutely fine, which of course does beg the question that you quite properly asked, Sam, which is, if so, then why are you the candidate precisely? The lack of honesty with regard to Biden's health, I think, was one of the reasons why so many people were both enamored of the fact that Kamala replaced him, and also on the right, bewildered and angered by the sort of narrative switch that took place in real time. I mean, you saw this narrative switch take place in real time. When we talk about honesty in politics, there are really sort of 3 characters that matter in a presidential race. And I know that, you know, this may be controversial territory for some people who are on the left side of the aisle. There's the candidate of the Republicans, the candidate of the Democrats, and then the media that seem to be largely legacy media, a sort of apparatus of the Democratic Party, where the narrative switched from Joe Biden is totally competent mentally to Joe Biden needs to go immediately to let's forget about who's president of the United States and never mention it again, to people like Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris went solidly almost 2 months without doing a serious interview at the beginning of this campaign. And it's that sort of dishonesty that leads people like me who I agree with Barry's characterization, think of Trump as a bullshitter, to say which are the bigger lies? Trump jabbering about his golf game or the fact that we've been lied to about the health of the President of the United States, or the fact that we've been lied to—

↳ P21 raised again here · first raised at U-122

Actually, it's interesting that you raise golf because honestly, if you're a golfer, only a serious golfer can understand how aberrant it is for him to lie about golf. I mean, golf is this one sport that to a degree that, again, it seems completely bizarre, is all about honor and integrity. I mean, if you're Tiger Woods at the Masters and you've won the event and you fail to sign your scorecard when you walk into the clubhouse after the event, you lose the event, right? I mean, that's golf, right? And Trump is someone who has pretended to— who has claimed to have won tournaments he didn't even enter, right? I mean, that's just x-ray vision for any golfer who understands just how insane that is. That's like an x-ray vision into his character, right? I mean, it's just— it is a—

↳ P23 raised again here · first raised at U-123

Sam, I mean, you're just— you're taking very, very seriously a man thinking about golf.

No, no, I'm just saying that even the things that you think are totally superficial give you a tremendous amount of unflattering information about the man. I mean, he's just—

You know, there's actually something deeper to say about the golf thing, so funnily enough. So I was talking with a friend from abroad and we were discussing the bizarre debate between Trump and Biden in which they started discussing their various golf games, which was the most amusing thing I've ever seen in a presidential race.

Mortifying.

It was incredible.

I thought it was hilarious. And not only did I think it was hilarious, I thought it actually I said something far deeper and more interesting about the state of American politics, which may be why, you know, I think that there may be a difference in the level of sanguinity between Sam and me when it comes to the health of the republic. So the way that I saw that, there's 2 ways to see that. There's glass half empty, which is you have 2 old men jabbering about their golf game. And then there is the sort of glass half full perspective, which is we are such a powerful and durable country that we can put 2 80-year-olds on a stage jabbering about their golf game to one another.

Right.

And whichever one jabbers worse, we will make the president of the United States. And you know what? We will still be the most powerful country on the face of the earth and everyone will love it because that's the reality. The institutions of the United States are incredibly durable. I mean, this is something that whenever we hear about, you know, the threat of Trump, and I hear from the right too, you'll hear from the right the sort of statement, this is the last election. And I've ripped on it when the right says this. I don't like this. I don't like when Trump says it. I don't like when any politician suggests this is the last election.

I mean, Elon Musk is saying that every single day right now.

And I don't like when Elon says that. I think that that's wrong. That this is the end of the republic if Kamala Harris wins the election. I think that if Kamala Harris wins, then people on my side of the aisle will need to go back to the drawing board and figure out new strategies on how to thwart whatever her agenda is. But because, you know, my view of American politics is that it will continue and the institutions are durable, that means that my choice really becomes about who do I think is going to best function inside those durable guardrails that are most likely going to hold back most of the excesses, if not all of the excesses of the candidates, and who is going to be more professional at manipulating those guardrails. And I think that Trump's amateurism and lack of professionalism when it comes to manipulating those guardrails in some ways is a point in his favor, as opposed to the professionalism of the Democratic Party on this sort of stuff.

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Well, speaking of jabbering on, I find Kamala to be a fascinating candidate because it feels sometimes like she's being scripted by Armando Iannucci. I just want to read 2 things that she has said recently. She was at a town hall with Anderson Cooper, and he asked, how can we differentiate your policy beliefs from Biden's? Not exactly a difficult question. This is what she said. Well, there's a lot that was done, but there's more to do, Anderson. And I am pointing out things that need to be done but haven't been done but need to be done. I could do a dozen of these right now. And, you know, when you have you know, a Democratic grandee like David Axelrod, not exactly a simp for Donald Trump, getting on television and accusing his candidate of going to word salad city, you kind of can come to understand why some people are choosing the comprehensible bullshit of Trump over the incomprehensible Kamala Harris. At least that's, you know, when I'm listening to her, I'm like, what is this person actually standing for? What is she actually saying?

Mm-hmm.

What is the positive vision here beyond I'm not Donald Trump? And maybe I'm not Donald Trump is enough for a lot of people. But I'm left— I'm watching her obsessively looking for that positive vision, and I'm not seeing it. And Sam, even in the beginning of this conversation, I asked you, why are you voting for Harris? And the answer amounted to because she's not Donald Trump, which I get. But like, help me see what is the positive vision there beyond the fact that she's not—

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Right.

Him.

Yeah, well, as I said, not him is really enough. And it should be enough. Because, again, for me, it all falls out of the big lie and not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, that is so destructive of the health of our democracy that I just think that's— there's nothing else needs to be said, right? And I wonder, if not that, what Trump could do that would disqualify him in Ben's eyes, right? I mean, perhaps Ben could tell us, but for me, that's more than enough.

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If he used SEAL Team 6 to kill his political opponents, I think that that would probably disqualify him in my eyes.

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Well, here's something that might be disqualifying that has not yet come up in this conversation. January 6th happened 4 days after Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State to say, I just want to find 11,780 votes. Let me repeat that. I just want to find 11,780 votes. To me, that's arguably worse than January 6th. How does that get a pass?

Okay, so it's not that that gets a pass. I mean, obviously there's an ongoing court case regarding it. There's always a matter of interpretation when it comes to President Trump. There's the interpretation where he's asking the Georgia Secretary of State to falsify 12,000 votes in order to overturn the electoral results in Georgia. And then there's the interpretation, which I find frankly more plausible, which is that Donald Trump actively believes in his mind that there are a bunch of votes that are hidden in Georgia, and he believes that those votes can be found if the—

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+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Sam Harris

He just wanted 11,000 of them. All he needed was 11,000.

Well, yes, because that would achieve the victory. He doesn't care about, about finding the other 40,000.

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Have you listened to that audio recently?

I have. I have listened to that audio, actually.

I mean, it is so unseemly.

+3 C-1.2 · Partial concession · Ben Shapiro

I mean, to have a president— I'll agree on unseemly, Sam. I have a question for you, really.

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But it's a little bit like the difference between lying and bullshit. Is it unseemly, as I think Ben would agree, or is it—

yeah, go on. Right. So, I mean, but this is one of the questions actually that I have for Sam. So let's assume that everything that you're saying is true, right? Let's assume that Donald Trump is, you know, a fascist and a threat to the republic and all this sort of stuff. So 48% of the American population is going to vote for him. Half the American population that votes in this election is going to vote for Donald Trump. What does that make them? You said earlier that you don't think that it's a good idea politically to label half of the American public that. But does it mean that anyone who supports Donald Trump in order to say stop Kamala Harris or because they like what he did as president as opposed to Kamala Harris, does it make them fascists? Does it make them sort of the, the true threats to the republic? How would you characterize those people?

Well, obviously there are different cohorts, right? I mean, there certainly are some fascists or aspiring fascists and actual Nazis in our society, and they are all in Trumpistan, right? So there are those people, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about those people, but—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Ben Shapiro

Quick correction, Nick Fuentes has apparently endorsed Kamala Harris. I'll just put that out there because Trump is too philosemitic for him.

But yeah. We can double-click on that and it's not gonna go well for your side of the argument. But we're both worried about antisemitism and we know it exists on the left and the right. But the really scary anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism that would give us Timothy McVeigh-style terrorism and violence in America, is on the right.

Right.

We might be more annoyed by what's on the left, but if I told you that someone went into a synagogue this week and just murdered 20 people at random, and that person was not a jihadist, if you had to guess whether it was someone on the far right or some blue-haired person who'd gone to the Ivy League and was antisemitic in that vein, you would be, you like me would win money all day betting it was coming from the far right because that's where the genuinely scary antisemitism is. And so some of that is wrapped up in this populist phenomenon of Trumpism. But no, there are many people who are just low-information voters. There are many people for whom wokeness and far-left identity politics has become a single issue, the single issue around which they're gonna react, which I understand. I mean, I've found it as galling as you have. It just hasn't subsumed everything for me. I've kept it in some proportion with other things that worry me. But it's not a, To recognize how pathological Trump is, to recognize the message we are being given by the Republicans who have been close to him, who ad nauseam will tell you he's unfit to serve, his behavior, his manifestly dysregulated behavior where he seems to have nothing but contempt for our allies, and nothing but praise for our enemies, right? And I mean, the fact that he, while professing to be strong, is so obviously weak in that he's so easily manipulated by flattery, right? All you have to do is flatter him and he's your guy. I mean, I know you think, and there are many single-issue voters of this sort, many Jews who are worried about Israel think that, well, Trump is better for Israel, so I'm a single-issue voter.

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Right.

There's nothing he can say or do, bullshit or otherwise, that is going to get me to vote for Harris because I'm just worried about the survival of Israel. Well, Trump, I'll grant you, there have been hopeful signs of his support for Israel, certainly during his tenure as president, but Trump is in the Trump business. Again, I think if the mullahs in Tehran offered him a golf course deal somewhere, our policy could change. I mean, he's that venal. He's that uncoupled from any sane concern about international order, and he's that unprincipled. And so I just think it's— there's a corruption that runs, you know, all the way through the man that does not make him a reliable ally to anyone.

OK, so there are a few things to respond to there. So on the antisemitism issue, I mean, I think it's sort of fascinating how you grouped, you know, the possibility of terror attack on a site. Obviously, if there were a terror attack on a site today, a Jewish site today, it would probably come from one of, historically, if you're looking at the last few years, one of 3 categories, right? Jihadist, and that means jihadist sympathizer, which today is more likely to be a Democrat, unfortunately. Or it could be a Black Hebrew Israelite, which we've seen a couple of those actually. Or it could be a white supremacist, right? Which—

Well, there was a shooting in Chicago over the weekend by a guy screaming Allahu Akbar. Correct.

Correct, that's right.

And don't get me started on jihadism because that'll take 2 hours.

Well, an area where we certainly agree is—

I don't think there's any daylight there.

Exactly, but this is one of the— when you say genuinely scary antisemitism, it turns out that there are multiple forms of genuinely scary antisemitism. One is the sort of individual antisemite who goes and murders Jews, and then there is a second type of genuinely scary antisemitism, and that is a system-wide infusion of antisemitic worldviews into an entire party. And you are seeing that happen inside the Democratic Party right now. And that is very frightening to me as a Jew and as an American. When the intersectional ideology, which suggests that victimization is equivalent to failure, that you failed in life, therefore you are a victim of something. And again, you can see that in a lot of grievance politics, but you see it in intersectional terms on the intersectional left. And the idea therefore that if you are Jewish, that means that you're successful, that means you're an exploiter. And that is now, that matrix is then applied to international politics in the way that, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been applying it to the Israel-Palestinian situation. And that becomes a deeply held belief inside the Democratic Party. This is why, for example, by polling data, what you see is that Republicans support Israel 66 to 8. And what you see is that Democrats barely plurality maybe support Israel. And among young Democrats, a plurality actually don't support Israel. They support the Palestinians. That to me is a more systemically scary thing than what's been happening on the right. And again, you're talking to somebody who is a victim of an enormous amount of antisemitism, including from people like white supremacists in 2015, 2016. So it's not like I don't have any experience with this sort of stuff. They continue to hate me just as thoroughly as they ever hated me. And in fact, it's one of the reasons that many of them have gone anti-Trump is because I support President Trump. As I mentioned before, I've campaigned with President Trump. I've taken him to the Ohel. You know, like because of that, they are very angry with President Trump. The sort of speculation you have to get to, to the idea that Donald Trump is gonna be more anti-Israel than the Biden-Harris administration after being the most pro-Israel president in American history, just in political terms, he was the most pro-Israel president in American history, that is a far stretch. And as to the idea that President Trump is easy to manipulate on foreign policy, again, when it comes to his rhetoric, I don't disagree that very often he will say kind things about anyone who will say a kind thing to him. What I look to is what was the actual political outcome of his presidency. The actual political outcome of his presidency— under Barack Obama, there was an invasion of Ukraine, and under Joe Biden, there was an invasion of Ukraine, and under Donald Trump, there was no invasion of Ukraine. And that is because Donald Trump is wildly unpredictable. And it turns out that wild unpredictability in foreign policy, again, is not actually a particularly terrible thing to have. Some of that, by the way, is actual strategy by President Trump, believe it or not. President Trump has openly spoken about the fact that he will bluster and he will threaten and you don't know quite what he's going to do. So you can attribute that if you want to, you know, sort of his natural instability. But the reality is that he actually sometimes applies that sort of unstable formula for foreign policy in a way that does scare off America's enemies.

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+3 C-1.2 · Partial concession · Ben Shapiro

I think putting character aside, because I don't think that the two of you are going to see eye to eye on that question, I don't— I think that probably the strongest argument for Trump is his foreign policy legacy, not just because wars weren't breaking out, but good things happened, like the Abraham Accords, like incentivizing European allies to take more responsibility for their defense. And I think the choice sometimes feels like you have, you know, perhaps stability, but weakness from her and craziness from him. So it feels sometimes like a choice between crazy and weak. Sam, I would love for you to contend with Ben's argument here that Trump's foreign policy, as blustery and frankly crazy as he was, and many of the things he said when he was president absolutely alarmed me, but looking back, did, in retrospect, did it lead to a more stable world when you look at the foreign policy picture?

Well, again, I had, as I said, I have reasons to think that looking back is not as instructive as we'd like it to be, because there were so many guardrails in place, which Trump smashed into and has vowed to remove for his second term. Right. I mean, all these people who are warning us— again, the 40 of the 44 most senior, most appointees— all of these people were the guardrails. And they all came away saying, yeah, he crashed into me and eventually fired me because I wouldn't let him do that insane and illegal thing he wanted to do. I mean, we're talking about generals who had to convince him that we couldn't use our nuclear weapons. I mean, this is not a normal situation. This is a— Trump is somebody who thinks that you can stop wars if all you need to do to stop a war is to bring in some wheeler-dealer from from Queens and negotiate it like it's a condo renovation, right? I mean, he's just— this is all bullshit. Yeah, bullshit is the right word for much of what comes out of his mouth. And yes, I'll grant you that he can seem crazy and unpredictable, because he is somewhat crazy and perhaps unpredictable, but he's not all that unpredictable. I mean, he's predictably bent around by flattery. I mean, you can be as odious a person as the leader of North Korea that's kept his entire society in what is effectively a prison camp, and all you have to do is flatter the man and he will claim to be in love with you, right? And as far as an ally with Israel, I mean, it's just like, if memory serves, Trump's first utterance, public utterance after October 7th, was not some completely sane and compassionate expression of solidarity with Israel. It was some petty criticism of Netanyahu because he had felt slighted by Netanyahu. I mean, it's just, it's like, I mean, he's the guy who when the Twin Towers came down after 9/11, he jumped on the radio and said, you know, many people say I have the tallest building in New York now, right? I mean, that's the man, right? That's the man who we've already elected president.

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But from a policy perspective, do you think a Harris administration would be better on Israel than a Trump administration?

I do, because it would be staffed by sane people. And what we have— again, do you want Mr. Pillow guy in the conversation with Mike Flynn and who, Candace Owens? Who's gonna be in there? Jack Posobiec? I mean, like—

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No, I mean, on his Israel policy, Mike Pompeo and David Friedman are the most likely people to be in the administration. And on Kamala Harris's side, it's most likely to be Philip Gordon.

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No, but he's surrounded by grifters and maniacs.

Sam, I know precisely the people talking to him, right? So I'm not speculating about that. I mean, one of the arguments— so there are a couple of things that I think are worth noting here. One is that you say that past performance is no indicator of future performance about him, and you also say that about her. So I grant you that there's consistency there. I tend to think that the best indicator of what a second term might look like is what a first term—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Sam Harris

I can tell you why it's not a good indicator for him. It's not the same dynamic doesn't hold I mean, she's again, she's got all the real positions she wants to have.

So will a Kamala Harris term look like her first Kamala Harris term? And then just final point, you keep using the word normal. And I think there are a lot of Americans who hear normal and what they actually hear is situation normal all fucked up. Meaning we've done normal politics a lot and it turns out that things were kind of fucked up. And Trump, things were not normal and things in terms of actual day-to-day life economically, foreign policy-wise, we're less fucked up. And so would we all prefer a choice between normal and not fucked up and normal and not fucked up? That'd be great. That not fucked up would be a great status quo. But the reality is that there are a couple different operative levels of normal. And one of the things that I think people want normalcy from is their lives. If people had felt satisfied that Joe Biden had restored normalcy when he came into office, he came into office with a popularity rating in the high 50%. And within a year, he had sunk those popularity ratings down into the low 40s because it turns out he was not normal. It turns out that he could say all the things that he wanted, that he could mutter whatever he wanted into a microphone, and Americans did not feel sanguine. They did not feel stable. They did not feel that him blowing out the spending, for example, or pulling out of Afghanistan, leaving billions of dollars behind while lying to the American people for months that everything was gonna be totally hunky-dory over there, they didn't like that either. And so this kind of, the reference to the word normal over and over and over to only refer to the behavior of the candidate as opposed to the life lived by Americans is the reason that despite all the excesses, some of which you and I agree on, Donald Trump right now is running dead even with Kamala Harris and maybe ahead.

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Ben, just for the listener, I want you to explain who Phil Gordon is and who David Friedman. So you said Mike Pompeo and David Friedman or Phil Gordon. Explain who that is and the distinction. Sure.

So Mike Pompeo and David Friedman are incredibly pro-Israel. David Friedman was the ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump. It was, it was David Friedman and Mike Pompeo who worked with President Trump to, for example, broker the Abraham Accords along with Jared Kushner. They also helped move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a pledge that had been made by both parties and then failed by both parties until Donald Trump became president of the United States, who acknowledged the territorial sovereignty of the Golan Heights by the state of Israel. Phil Gordon is a foreign policy advisor to the Kamala Harris campaign. In the past, he has written about his desire to effectively normalize relations with Iran. The Kamala Harris, Joe Biden campaign obviously worked very heavily also with figures like Robert Malley, who actually probably was compromised, as it turns out, by Iranian intelligence. You know, one of the things—

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He's being investigated.

He is being investigated. I think it's very likely he was compromised by Iranian intelligence. You know, when you look at the team, I think one of the things that's sort of fascinating about the duality between Trump and Biden-Harris is something that, Sam, you'd once suggested that one of the things about Trump is that he obviously, in your opinion, has no principles, that he's completely variable, that he does wild things, he says wild things, and that he doesn't have sort of a plotting, go-along ideological sort of thrust. And I agree with some of that. I also think that if the ideological thrust of a campaign or candidate is wrong, that can be significantly more dangerous than the variability of the alternative candidate.

Hmm.

And so I know exactly what I'm gonna get from a Kamala Harris presidency with regard to the Middle East. because I know exactly what I got from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and I see no difference. She can't even name a difference. So I have very significant doubts as to why I would expect a radical change in policy from Obama or Biden, except possibly to the left. If you listen to people like Bernie Sanders, who is now out publicly attesting that he believes he'll have a receptive ear in the White House to a full arms embargo on the state of Israel.

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Sam, I think—

I just gotta respond to some of that because, yep, I, you know, I am like Ben, and I think like you, Bari, not satisfied with the noises that have come out of Democrats' mouths since October 7th, right?

+3 C-2.1 · Common ground · Sam Harris

So I don't know if I'm— Yeah, I was simply going to pay you a compliment and say that of all of the people, sort of, I think you have been since October 7th the most powerful moral voice, let's say broadly on the center-left on this question, which is why I think people are going to be really curious to understand why you think, again, putting— it's impossible to put character to the side, but just on a policy level, why you have faith that the Democratic Party is going to be stronger against jihadism, stronger against Iran, and more muscular in its support of Israel.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, on this issue, on the defense of Israel and a recognition that that ultimately regime change in Iran is an imperative. It's a moral imperative. It's a geostrategic imperative. I mean, I consider myself right of John Bolton at this moment. So it's like, it's not— that's where I am. And I should point out that John Bolton doesn't support Trump either. And he's very hawkish on this issue. Listen. Harris has an impossible task, and if she loses next week, we'll recognize that it was in fact impossible. But she has to hold this, or seem to hold this coalition together, and the coalition includes a lot of liberal and confused young people who think that, you know, who've believed everything they saw on TikTok about the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the evil IDF. I mean, she needs those people to vote, otherwise we will have a Trump presidency. So on some level, the fact that she is as tongue-tied as she is on this topic is easily explained. The fact that she must always turn the corner when expressing her full commitment to support of Israel and her recognition that Israel has a right to defend itself, Seemingly, she always has to complete that sentence with, but of course, we need a ceasefire, and there's been far too much death and destruction in Gaza, right? It's been unconscionable, right? She has to give that whole thought and never just the first part, right? Whereas the whole thought is completely incoherent. I mean, it is just in fact true that if you acknowledge that Israel is fighting an existential war against a death cult, you know, that is using its own civilians as human shields. And you acknowledge that the IDF is doing a better job of that than we have ever managed, right, in terms of the ratio of the killing of noncombatants to combatants. You know, something like 1 to 1 in Gaza, and it's been, you know, 1 to 9 in some of our conflicts with jihadists, right? So if you acknowledge that they're doing a better job than we have, you can't then complete the sentence with but of course, we need a ceasefire and there's been far too much death and destruction in Gaza and it's unconscionable, right? No, they're fighting a defensive existential war and they're doing a better job of it than we ever have and we should support them, right? That's the policy I want from my party and that's the policy, whether we're gonna get it rhetorically or not, that's the policy I think we will get from a Harris administration. I mean, if you look at what Biden has done, I mean, Biden in the beginning, immediately after October 7th, was great. I think Ben would acknowledge that his going immediately to Israel was great. And Israel has gotten a ton of support. I mean, in this latest, I mean, there have been hiccups and there's certainly been rhetorical errors, but we have given more aid to Israel in the last year than we've ever given Israel. And in this latest mission where they fought flew sorties over Iran, my understanding is that there were American planes in the air ready to respond if any Israeli planes went down, right? So we are supporting them. What we aren't doing and what Kamala Harris can't afford to do for purely idiotic political reasons now is spell this out clearly in moral terms that would satisfy us the 3 of us, because there are so many morons on the far left who have yet to vote.

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+3 C-1.2 · Partial concession · Sam Harris

So I actually wonder about that, you know, because when you look at the politicians who are successful in the swing states from the Democratic Party, that's actually not super true. So for example, Josh Shapiro, obviously governor of Pennsylvania, Jewish, very pro-Israel, was widely perceived as a possible Kamala Harris pick, which would've made for another odd Harris-Shapiro ticket. But she didn't pick him specifically, I think, because she was afraid of this particular base. That guy has a 60% approval rating in the state of Pennsylvania, and she'd likely be walking away with that state if she had picked him as opposed to the bizarro world candidate Tim Walz. The same thing is true of John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who's been staunchly pro-Israel, shocking everybody on the right with his pro-Israel sentiments throughout this entire war. If you look at Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, who's running for a Senate seat against Mike Rogers, They had a debate. In that debate, they both talked about Israel, and they sounded nearly identical, actually, on the issue of Israel.

But there's also this strange phenomenon of a significant number— we've written about this in the Free Press— of Muslim voters going for Trump because they see him as the anti-war candidate. I don't know how closely you guys have been paying attention to that.

Well, in a respectful way, that's not flattering from my point of view with respect to support for Israel or their expectations of his support for Israel.

Let me just— I wonder, I wonder if— I do wonder if Harris— if it's not indicative of something ideological for Kamala Harris, the fact that she has not had a sort of sister soldier moment with regard to these campus protesters who've been making asses of themselves in the streets.

She should have. I mean, she should have. I mean, I view her not picking Shapiro differently. And here I believe I have some behind-the-scenes knowledge of what actually went down there. And it's— I don't think it was because, you know, the fact that he's Jewish was perceived as a liability. I think it was much more a sense, you know, one-on-one when she was vetting them, that he wasn't a natural number 2. You know, I mean, he was—

Yeah.

He ran the risk of upstaging her. He wanted a real portfolio, whereas Walls didn't come in with that kind of ambition, and she was more comfortable with him for understandable reasons. I think it was a mistake. I think she, you know, I'd be happier if she had picked Shapiro at this point. And I would have been at the time. But it's— listen, I think she— as has often been said, the Democratic Party is a weird coalitional party, and it bends around the political rhetoric in ways that you really don't have to worry about among Republicans, because it's just not the same strange object politically. And yes, so I think— Is Harris having to pander to people who you and I don't agree with? Yes, yes. But, you know, she is married to an observant Jew, right?

Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, the idea—

Oh, now we're gonna get into Jewish observance.

Observant by my standards, maybe not by your standards.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, not by any standard that I've ever heard that Doug Emhoff is observant. If by observant Jew you mean that he occasionally identifies as Jewish to benefit the political campaign, I agree. Okay, but that's not—

Okay, let's, let's, let's go from Israel to Ukraine for a minute, because I think the 3 of us are part of a vanishingly small minority in this country that see the wars in Israel and Ukraine as being at least somewhat connected. But that's not how the 2 parties see things. The Democrats have their chosen war, which is Ukraine. The Republicans have their chosen war, which is Israel, seemingly at the expense of Ukraine. Trump has said some really remarkable things about Ukraine. He's called Zelensky the greatest salesman on earth. Every time he comes to our country, he walks away with $60 billion. He's expressed a lot of doubt that Ukraine can win. He's praised Russia's military, saying they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That's what they do. And then J.D. Vance, Trump's running mate, has said pretty, to my mind, alarming things. I got to be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another. Let's start with you, Ben.

Sure.

You are hardly an isolationist. I've always thought of you as someone that has a pretty muscular view on foreign policy. Does any of this alarm you? Does this sort of what I hear as frankly appeasement rhetoric toward Putin and Russia coming out of the current iteration of the Republican Party give you cause for concern?

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So, I mean, there has been this very weird gap between J.D. Vance and President Trump on this particular issue. And J.D. has actually acknowledged that gap in the past, that he, for example, has suggested that there be total defunding of the Ukrainian war effort, which is something Trump has never actually said, right? Trump has been pretty cagey about what he wants to do on Ukraine, but when I have asked him about Ukraine, he has actually suggested that he would continue to fund Ukraine sufficient to essentially solidify the borders that are currently there, which seems to be, I think, the most realistic policy considering what's going on there right now, since it doesn't look like that a Ukrainian liberation of Crimea or the Donbas region is in the offing anytime in the near future. And so then the question sort of becomes, how do you best get to an off-ramp that solidifies the lines and then deters future war? Trump seems to be more along those lines. A lot of the lines that you say, one of the weird things about when Trump talks about these sorts of things is that you can sort of read them both complimentarily, and then you can also read them as though he's being derisive.

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Right.

When Donald Trump says, for example, that Zelensky's a wonderful salesman, he walks away with $60 billion every time he leaves. Donald Trump tends to kind of like salesmen who walk away with $60 billion every time they leave. So is that a compliment or is that an insult? When Donald Trump is talking about the Russian military and their capacity to absorb losses, right, that's actually obviously true. And I think that one of the big calculations that's going on in Ukraine is the Russian willingness to simply endure enormous amounts of material loss. And that's, that's not unique to Trump. That's something that historians like Victor Davis Hanson have pointed out as well.

Right.

In terms of his actual policy, I think what Trump's actual policy looks like, he's actually never— he's been— if you think that he is an isolationist who's going to withdraw all aid from Ukraine, he's been shockingly unwilling to say that. Shall we say that? Which is a thing. He's rarely shockingly unwilling to say anything, but he has never said in any sort of context that he would full-on withdraw American support from Ukraine. He's called on Europe to pay up more. which is the same sort of stuff that he said about NATO. J.D. Vance has said something different, right? J.D. has taken a different viewpoint. But again, the vice presidential candidate tends to cede to the presidential candidate. One thing that Trump really doesn't like is the stigma of losing things. And so if he were to walk away from Ukraine and then Vladimir Putin were to stroll into Kyiv, I really don't think that President Trump would be very much in favor of that.

↳ evidence for the P29 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-210

Sam, do you want to weigh in on Ukraine at all?

Well, I just think we have an internet, a interest in maintaining the international rules-based order, right? So it's just— and Trump has never seemed to understand that, right? The fact, as I said before, that he routinely disparages our allies, you know, the leaders of the most stable and influential democracies, and routinely praises our enemies, right? And I think even cited in in his debate with Harris that, you know, the endorsement of Viktor Orbán was, you know, the real feather in his cap, right? I mean, it's like he loves dictators or quasi-dictators, and he seems to revile the people who he really should view as allies and colleagues, or any American president should, certainly if we're going to have a multilateral approach toward maintaining world order, right? I mean, I think, you just had a debate, Barry, on your podcast with Brett Stephens and Matt Taibbi and Jamie Kirchick and Lee Fang, I believe, about whether America should maintain its role as the world's policeman, right? Police the world. Clearly it should, but I mean, that is a multilateral job, right? We shouldn't have to do that alone, right? And we can't be strong enough alone, right? So we need our alliances. And Trump has been the worst president in living memory in terms of actually understanding that and encouraging, successfully encouraging multilateral approaches to those kinds of challenges. And glad-handing the world's dictators, especially those who are behind the very conflicts that we're most worried about. I mean, Putin is behind both of these wars, one of which the Republicans like and the other—

It's all one war. It's one war. I mean, in my view.

But Putin, if you look at Putin and Xi Jinping and the mullahs in Iran, you know, that is the axis of instability. that we need to worry about now. And they're trading weapons. You can add North Korea to that. We've got North Korean soldiers showing up in Russia now, right?

Yeah.

And Trump imagines that none of this would have happened had he been in power, which I think there's no reason to believe that.

Well, I mean, it didn't.

+4.5 C-1.2 · Partial concession: wars did not break out under Trump · Sam Harris

Well, yes, it didn't. But that's, I mean, there are many, many variables we could talk about. He even imagines that Hamas wouldn't have attacked Israel on October 7th.

I agree with him.

But you think a death cult that is in fact suicidal is calibrating its behavior based on who the American president is?

No, I think the death cult that is suicidal and is funded by Iran and told what to do in large part by Iran would've had a different condition on the ground if Donald Trump had been president, because Donald Trump would've brokered Saudi Arabia's, the Abraham Accords by February of 2021.

This is all—

Whereas Joe Biden decided to absolutely alienate the Saudis from day one of his administration. thereby leading to a breakdown negotiations between the Saudis and the Israelis while he attempted to open the economy of Iran negotiating a nuclear deal. Yeah, I do think the geopolitical conditions make a very big difference in the discussion of what Hamas was doing on October 7th. I do, by the way, one quick comment and then you can go to whatever you want to go to.

Yeah.

I think that when we talk about, you know, saving democracy or the international rules-based order, I think one distinction between sort of how Trump addresses foreign policy and frankly, how I think a lot on the right now address foreign policy, is there's a lot less talk about, say, democracy or the international rules-based order, and there's a lot more talk about what America's interests in the world are. And I don't necessarily think that that's a bad thing. I think that the Biden-Harris administration likes to say democracy a lot while slow-walking aid to Ukraine, for example, or slow-walking aid to Israel, or condemning Israel for supposed human rights excesses in the Gaza Strip. And they like to talk a lot about the international rules-based order, which in my opinion absolutely does not exist. If there were an international rules-based order independent of American power and the threat of American power and the power of American allies, then it would simply self-govern, which of course it does not. There is no international rules-based order. The international law is a sham.

↳ P30 raised again here · first raised at U-216

There's no question.

Yes, that's right. And so Donald Trump throwing American muscle around—

But Ben, there's a lot of people on your side of the aisle who almost seem to celebrate or revel in the end of what was once called the Pax Americana. And I'm thinking of J.D. Vance, I'm thinking of Tucker Carlson, I'm thinking of that entire wing of the party that in my view is, let's put Trump aside for a second, is very, very ascendant. How much does that worry you?

+4 C-3.1 · Direct answer: the isolationist wing worries me · Ben Shapiro

I mean, that obviously worries me because I disagree with that. And one of these sort of internecine battles that's being fought on the right is over these questions of foreign policy. There's a weird horseshoe that's taken place in American foreign policy thinking where the sort of far right that you're talking about has sort of met the far left in its disdain for the use of American power and for the maintenance of American power abroad. I think that's ignorant. I think that's counterproductive. Obviously, I think that things as simple as freedom of the seas, which guarantee the actual affordability and working of the global economy, are due to the power and projective power of the United States Navy and her allies. And you're seeing that come to a complete crashing halt in places like the Red Sea specifically because of lack of deterrent power. which is why everybody's now having to ship around the Horn of Africa. So, you know, I—

But we've been talking about Kamala Harris, you know, the sort of missed opportunity for a sister soldier moment, maybe with someone like Rashida Tlaib. Do you think that Trump could have had an opportunity for something like that with someone like Tucker?

Well, I would point out that she was censured, right? So, I mean, the far left of the Democratic Party has been shoved to the side by the normal Democrats in a way that the far right of the Republican Party hasn't been. I mean, we have— and this is— sorry to interrupt you, Ben, but I just want to respond to what you just said. Again, you're grading Trump on a curve here. Tucker Carlson was sitting right next to him at the Republican National Convention. Tucker Carlson, who just had this— I mean, say what you want about amateur historians, but his Holocaust revisionism on his own podcast is something that we all noticed.

↳ P31 raised again here · first raised at U-232

Right.

It's bizarre. And I mean, whether he's a real anti-Semite or just anti-Semitic adjacent, I don't know. But you've got a lot of characters in there who are in good standing with Trump and certainly with Trumpism who are explicitly encouraging— I mean, you're even adding J.D. Vance to this list. They're explicitly encouraging an American retreat from the world stage. And That is a form of American weakness, right? And I view, I think like you do, weakness to be provocative here. We need to be as strong as we've ever been, perhaps stronger than we've ever been, but we also need to project that strength in a way, again, in a multilateral way that fills this vacuum of power that we're noticing, because it will be filled. It will be filled by China, It'll be filled by Russia. It'll just be filled by chaos.

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↳ P31 raised again here · first raised at U-232

Right. No, so I agree with your analysis, obviously, of the world situation. I think that the sort of calculation you have to do when you look at both parties, and again, I agree with much of your assessment of Tucker Carlson, of whom I've been extraordinarily critical, especially on that particular interview that you're speaking of, or when he went to Russia to talk about bread prices or whatever it was. That sort of stuff is, as you may know, not my bag. I'm not fond of it. The calculation that you have to make when you are making a vote between these 2 candidates on this issue, for putting all the other issues to the side, is which one is more likely to project American power? Which one is more likely to actually project strength? Which one is more likely to project weakness in the world? And here again, I will return to what Donald Trump did during his first term. And I think that so much of this conversation revolves around that one single question that I think people are gonna have to answer for themselves. Do you see his first term as predictive of his second? Or do you, like Sam, think that all of the guardrails removed, that he is going to be something completely different that we've never seen before? And we're sort of in the speculative position that we were all in 2015, 2016 with regard to a presumptive Trump presidency.

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Well, I think that is definitely the question most Americans are thinking about. And number one issue in this election and in so many others is the economy and inflation. And people look back, people look now at the price of eggs and the price of—

Barry, before you pivot to the economy, I just want to Sure. Close the loop on what Ben just said there.

Sure.

If what you say is true, how do you explain the fact that all of these 4-star generals who worked in the capacity of being his advisor on these very issues of how to maintain world order, all of them have come out against him and in support of Harris, with no professional advantage for doing this? I mean, you know these guys are being inundated with death threats, their families getting doxxed. This is a nightmare, right? And yet they're doing it. And also, it's against the grain of what military figures do in general, because they want to stay out of politics. How do you explain their behavior if, in fact, Trump is more likely to credibly project American power in a sane and ethical way in the teeth of all the threats that we face?

↳ P18 raised again here · first raised at U-106

Donald Trump is a very difficult person interpersonally with his staff, I think would be an easy way to put that.

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You think that explains the kinds of sacrifices that, that these figures are now making?

I mean, I think that it explains—

They just didn't like their old boss and they're just saying it now, they feel they need to say it?

No, I mean, I think that his treatment of them in some cases was extremely bad. I think that there are significant ideological differences with some of his past picks. I mean, that was true, for example, when he fired Rex Tillerson, who was his former Secretary of State. And there, you know, Trump is, as we've mentioned and people may have noticed, volatile and unpredictable. The policy that emerged from his administration is a policy that in fact was quite good. So the question again is going to be whether you think that he is now going to swivel completely into something completely new and completely different. My bet is that Trump will look very much like Trump 1, and that Kamala will look very much like Biden 2. And if that's the bet, that's a clear bet for me.

↳ evidence for the P18 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-121

Okay. For me to go to the economy now?

Sure.

Okay. One question on the economy, a few on immigration, and then we'll close. I know Ben has a trip to make. And thank you guys so much. Um, Ben, you're a free trade guy. Trump has said that the most beautiful word in the English language is the T-word, which is tariff. He's proposing a 20% tariff on all goods from other countries. Defend that.

How can you possibly defend that? Again, I'm going to chalk this one up to bullshitting, specifically because I think he chalks it up to bullshitting, meaning that one of the things that he recently came out with in the last couple of days, which again seems to be a fresh proposal, is that we trade a tariff regime for the complete revocation of the income tax, which frankly looks a lot sexier to me than just tariffs on their own. If I have to trade higher prices for no income tax, That looks— that's at least an interesting proposal. One of the things that Trump tends to do when it comes to trade agreements is talk about how he's going to completely rip up trade agreements and he's going to tariff everything up to the sun, and he tends to use it as a weapon of leverage more than he does actually just tariff things randomly. So for example, he said that he was going to completely tear up NAFTA and do a completely new trade deal, and it turns out that the completely new trade deal looked very much like NAFTA with some of the changes around the edges. Donald Trump had suggested that he was going to heavily tariff Canadian goods that were coming in, and then he actually used it as leverage in negotiations with Justin Trudeau over other issues. So Donald Trump will stake out positions with tariffs that are sort of zero-sum positions economically, and then use those zero-sum positions as a way of cudgeling other countries into doing things that he wants them to do. So do I take seriously the idea that without any congressional legislation at all, he's going to be able to levy a 20% tariff on everything coming into the country? No, I don't. And I think that President Trump, as Sam has mentioned, he likes the wheeler-dealer image. If he is a wheeler-dealer, he tends to use tariffs more as a piece of leverage to get things that he wants in sort of the same way that he used to say about NATO, well, maybe NATO's not all that important. You guys should increase your contributions to NATO. And the predictable result was the contributions were increased to NATO and America did not actually stop supporting NATO.

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Sam, do you wanna weigh in on the economy? And I don't know if this is a top issue for you, but go on.

Yeah, I mean, obviously neither of us are economists, But I mean, the jury is not out on these questions. I mean, again, this is an example of Ben, and as everyone is forced to do, he's grading Trump on a curve. And in this case, you just discount what he says he will do and imagine you know what he will really do.

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Well, because he did it. Again, based on past performance.

Based on what he's done in the past.

Same question.

He's told you that tariffs are his silver bullet and that above all, You know, this is the sweetest word in the English language, I think, above love.

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Yes.

And he intends to impose them, right? And so all you can go on is the stated policies of the Harris and Trump administrations by which to judge what's likely to happen. And the Wall Street Journal did that 2 weeks ago, and they went out, they surveyed, you know, I don't know how many economists, and 60% thought all of the variables like employment and inflation and interest rates, all gets worse, GDP, all gets worse under Trump. And 12% thought that they would get worse under Harris, right? So you got 60% to 12%, according to a Wall Street Journal poll of economists, right? So that's all I have to go on. I mean, generally speaking, if you look at what tariffs tend to do, They tend to be regressive in all kinds of ways that you wouldn't want them to be. So—

Well, you and I don't disagree on tariff policy. I mean, I actually am quite anti-tariff unless you're talking about a tariff for purposes of protecting a security-laden industry, for example.

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+3 C-2.1 · Common ground: both oppose broad tariffs · Ben Shapiro

But Ben, you're basically saying that what Trump does, and he does this time and time again, is he sort of— if you think of tug of war, he takes the last man position in the tug of war. Not because he believes that position, but because it's his way of sort of shifting the Overton window on a particular subject.

Yes. I mean, I'll give you an example. So when we held the fundraiser for President Trump, we had a conversation and one of the things that Trump said to me, and this allows me to do my Trump impersonation, which of course everybody enjoys. Once you're in the Trump impersonation, you can't get out is the only danger. But I was speaking with President Trump and he was talking about Ukraine and Putin and he said, you wanna know why Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine? I don't know if this story's true or not. This is how he tells it. Why Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine. The reason he never invaded Ukraine is 'cause I said, Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm gonna bomb the shit out of you. And Vladimir Putin said, no, you won't, Mr. President. And I said, well, I might. Right, okay, so that is the way that Donald Trump tends to negotiate. That's how he thinks of it himself, okay? So whether that happened or not, it's a window into how he thinks of negotiation, which is you take the hardest position and then the risk that you're actually going to do the thing is what creates the leverage. And so that's what I'm saying about tariffs.

Okay.

And that's a nice transition to immigration because earlier in this conversation, Sam, you know, had taken Trump and, you know, the Trump campaign literally at their word that they're going to deport millions and millions of people. Do you believe that Trump's actually going to do that if he wins?

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No, I think that he's going to focus on deporting criminal illegal aliens. I think that he is going to work on closing the border as it currently stands. I think that he's going to reinstall Remain in Mexico. I think that he's going to reimplement the asylum interpretation policies that were pertaining at the border at the time that he was in office. And I think that when Trump himself is questioned on this, it depends who's doing the questioning. So very often you'll hear him say to friendlies, sure, it's gonna be the biggest deportation in American history. We're gonna round everybody up. We're gonna throw 'em all out. They can't stay. And then when you drill down, then it'll turn out that he— and J.D. Vance does this too— he'll start talking about, well, we really have to focus on the criminal illegal aliens first. We have to focus on on the people who we don't want in, in our country. Because in reality, the, the amount of, of resources that would take in order to deport that number of illegal immigrants, uh, the, the sort of fracture in American life that it would create would be politically unpalatable. I mean, Sam himself has said that Trump is sort of a pragmatist when it comes to this sort of stuff. He just, he thinks the ends of his pragmatism are his own personal glorification. Even if you take him by that sort of standard, I don't think that Donald Trump wants the sort of headlines that would certainly happen if the sort of, you know, full-scale everybody who's illegally immigrated to the United States over the course of the last 30 years, which you're probably talking 20 million people at this point, are getting rounded up and summarily shipped south of the border. So, you know, I think that the immigration policy of President Trump looks very much like the immigration policy of President Trump in term one. And again, this will be, I think the— we've said it, I've said it many times, if you believe that Trump one looks like Trump two, Trump 2 will be better than Harris 1. If you believe that it'll be out of the box, something completely new, something that you've never seen before, or whatever he says on a given day, then I understand the trepidation. I also think that that is failing to interpret the gap between— I've played this game before. Hey, Bari started this entire conversation by reading a column that I wrote in 2016 about Donald Trump, in which I claimed that he was not going to be pro-free trade, that he was not going to appoint pro-life justices, in which I claimed that he was going to perhaps increase taxes, all these sorts of things. And I thought at the time, all of that is perfectly plausible because that's sort of what he'd said on the campaign trail. And then we actually got him as president. And what we got as president was a set of policies. And I liked that set of policies. And I think that he liked that set of policies because they were largely successful. And so I think he'll imitate most of those policies.

↳ evidence for the P9 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-035

+6 C-4.2 · Owned an error: 2016 predictions about Trump were wrong · Ben Shapiro

Sam, I think maybe the weakest I think maybe the biggest vulnerability for Harris is the fact that she was meant to— forgetting the actual formality of the title— that she was charged with overseeing the border, and that since January of 2021, when Biden came to office, some 8 million migrants have come over the southern border compared to under Trump, there were something like 2.4 million encounters at the southern border. How do you— if you were advising her, And I know that we're in the homestretch of this campaign. How do you think that she should contend with that record?

Well, I think she can— not on that issue, on all these issues we've touched, I think she should be able to explain her change of position without any embarrassment. I mean, she could easily say, listen, I've been vice president for nearly 4 years. I've learned a lot. I mean, I might have made some of the mistakes that Joe Biden made when he made them, because with the— given the same information. But, you know, with hindsight, I can recognize that we made many mistakes. We made many mistakes. It was a mistake not to do our best to secure the southern border immediately. It was our— the way we pulled out of Afghanistan was an embarrassment, right? I mean, that was just, you know, the— We made all kinds of mistakes, right? And I recognize those mistakes, and I would commit to with the benefit of hindsight, to not make any of those mistakes again. I mean, I don't see anything politically suicidal about just owning the past in that way and then clearly stating what you intend to do in the future. I think it's pretty clear that everyone, apart from a few crazy activists, recognizes that the southern border, if for only political reasons, is a disaster, right? that the status quo is untenable and needs to be rectified. So as far as her commitment to do that, I have absolutely no doubt about it. And so it is on other topics. I mean, again, I come back to this bizarre act of divination that Ben is forced to do here with respect to Trump. You can't take what he says seriously. The fact that he wants to— he's telling us the first thing he's gonna do is deport 12 million people or 20 million people or however many people it is. You can't take that seriously. He's not gonna do any of that. Well, okay, but if Kamala Harris was making claims of that sort, you wouldn't be so fast to say, oh, she's not gonna do any of that, right?

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+3 C-1.2 · Partial concession: Biden-Harris border and Afghanistan mistakes · Sam Harris

Well, 'cause she did all of it. You're accusing me of divination, but the point I'm making is that I don't have to divine his intent from past action You are objectively— you're dividing all—

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+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption during Shapiro's turn · Sam Harris

you're not acknowledging the reverse with Kamala Harris.

You're saying everything she did before doesn't matter. What she's saying now is what matters.

No, no, it's— first of all, she did very little before because she was not— she was not the decider. But second of all, she said she was. You're not acknowledging the role that the guardrails played in the first Trump presidency. And these guardrails are talking to us. I mean, literally, these guardrails have names. They're names like John Kelly, right? They're talking to us and they're saying, don't vote for this man, right? I know what it's like to work with him. I know what he intended to do. I know what he asked me for the 14th time to do, and I said— and I had to say no yet again, right? And the fact that you're not inclined to take any of that information on board, I view as a— as a political problem, and it extends to everything like, I mean, honestly, if you just reverse the roles, if Kamala Harris had had dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, I don't think I'd ever hear the end of it from you, right? Now, but it's just a footnote with Trump.

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Well, would she have dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and then also have moved the Jerusalem embassy and Legitimized the Golan Heights, done the Abraham Accords.

I'm a fan of the Abraham Accords and many of the things that Kushner did and that Trump had him do. Yeah, I mean, I think that's— there's no embarrassment on my side in acknowledging that. I mean, the scope of Trump's indiscretions is just so enormous and the liability is so obvious and the testimony about that so nonpartisan that I find it very easy to admit the things he did right and that the Democrats have done wrong. It just doesn't sway the balance.

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+4.5 C-1.2 · Partial concession: Trump did things right on Israel policy · Sam Harris

Guys, I know a lot of people that are not voting this year, or they're writing in Mitt Romney or writing in Nikki Haley or writing in their mom or their dad or their aunt or their uncle. I'm curious if you guys see that as an immoral position. Do you think that there's a moral obligation to vote in this election?

Well, it depends where you live. I mean, in California—

Let's say— I'm from Pittsburgh. Let's say you're in Pennsylvania. Do you think there's a moral obligation?

I mean, I never find that formulation especially compelling, because, I mean, if you don't know much of anything, you're kind of adding noise to the system, right? It's like, if you're going to vote at random, I don't think there's an obligation to do that. If you're, you know, especially a low-information voter and you're just voting because someone told you how you should vote, I mean, it's like, I don't really— the health of our democracy does not hinge merely on everyone voting, right? I think we have a moral obligation to be informed and to add our voices to this conversation, you know, if only by voting. especially when it matters. And I think, yes, in this election, I do think it matters more than most.

Ben?

I agree with a lot of what Sam says there. I mean, I think that, you know, the election matters. Obviously, we're on opposite sides of this one. Do I think that you have a moral obligation to vote? I'm not sure that you have a moral obligation to vote just as a general proposition. I think that there are many good reasons not to vote, including you just think that both candidates don't meet your standard for what can be, or you have a utopian standard of what you want, you believe that you're going to achieve that goal by withholding your vote or something like that. Obviously, I think that if you are going to vote, Sam and I are going to have polar opposite views about this as far as what your moral obligation to vote for is. But as far as whether you have a moral obligation to vote, just sort of generally speaking, I don't think that people generally have a moral obligation to vote.

I guess I wonder if you each want to make an appeal To listeners who are undecided, and there are a lot of those people who listen to the show, and they're not undecided from a position of ignorance. They are genuinely torn about who will be the better candidate. And they are people who feel either abandoned or disgusted by both parties and feel politically homeless.

Sure. So, I mean, my appeal is, is just this. This is an important election. Obviously, there are major political differences between the two parties. The enervation of the current Democratic Party, I think, is very important if you care about things like the health of the economy or the future of foreign policy. If you're looking at how your life will get better versus getting worse, I think that Donald Trump will do a better job of making your life better, including all the guardrails, including all the systems of government, acknowledging that the business of politics is messy. The final product of a Trump administration is going to be something that you are going to have a better time living with than you have under Joe Biden and— or under Kamala Harris. And as proof of that, I present the period 2016 to 2019 and then the period 2021 to 2024 by way of contrast. The argument is very simple. Are you better off than you were 5 years ago at this point? And then the question becomes Sam's question, which is, if you have not made a dispositive decision that it is impossible for you to vote for Donald Trump, if that decision has not been made where you have overcome the obstacle of imagining to yourself that, that he's going to destroy democracy or that your vote for him will help destroy democracy, then the question is just one of who will implement policies you like better. And once that's the question, the clear answer is, is Donald Trump. And I would assume that the, the counterargument is just that you can under no circumstances vote for Donald Trump because there's a barrier to entry that cannot be overcome. I will notice that there has never been, nor will there be, an affirmative case for Kamala Harris because she is not going to be a good president. She can't even make the affirmative case for herself. She can't explain how she will differentiate herself from Joe Biden, and she continues to be an empty vessel for whatever the Democratic Party wants her to be at any given moment.

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Sam?

Well, it's— from my point of view, it's very simple. I think I've made the case over these 2 hours on every one of these topics. I mean, you take the economy, all we can go on is the fact that most economists now think that her stated policies will be much better than his stated policies. If you can't judge on the basis of stated policies and you have to pretend to be clairvoyant, well then, then, you know, then it's hard to have the conversation. I just think character matters above all here. I mean, what is untenable in my point of view is to give the most malignantly selfish and self-interested person and dishonest person the world has ever seen, right? And again, I don't think that— that sounds hyperbolic. It's not, right? It's no more hyperbolic than saying he's over 6 feet tall and over 200 pounds, right? Again, the man is trailing tens of thousands of documented lies, right? It's insane that we're even having this conversation. I think it's irresponsible and dangerous to give someone of this character more power and responsibility than anyone else on earth, right?

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Yeah.

Last time around, the wheels did not entirely come off because he was surrounded by comparatively normal political appointees who had serious reputations to protect and some sense of probity and above all, a commitment to protecting the Constitution. And he slammed up against them for 4 years and They will all tell you now what that was like and why they think you should vote for Harris, right? And again, this is not a partisan story at all, from my point of view, or theirs. And I think that should really decide the matter.

↳ P7 raised again here · first raised at U-032

The word normal has come up a lot in this conversation, like what is normal politically? And I think if I can sort of like look at us from 10,000 feet, or maybe look at us from pre-2016, I kind of see the way that politics has maybe deformed everybody involved. In other words, Sam, one of the strongest critiques against you that's made a lot, and it came up a little bit in this conversation, is the idea that you have TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, basically a hatred of Trump so profound that it impairs your otherwise profound judgment, profoundly good judgment. And Ben, I think people would look at you and say, you're Mr. Character is Destiny. You're a social conservative. You care about character more than almost anything else. You think it's our destiny. here you are making excuses for Trump. Is there a way for us to escape— maybe this is too stonery or philosophical a question, but is there a way for us to escape the way that politics is maybe forcing us to compromise our principles? Or perhaps you guys don't see it that way, but that's one thing that I'm left this conversation— leaving this conversation thinking about.

Well, I would respond to the TDS claim, and I think I might have already said this somewhere, but I just think— I mean, I think TDS is a cute meme and it serves to shut down conversation, but the real Trump Derangement Syndrome from my point of view is to imagine that Trump's character flaws don't matter, right? I mean, to not care about a politician who lies with this kind of velocity and perversity about everything under the sun. to not care that you have someone who, as a sitting president, wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right? And who maintains the lie that he won the 2020 election when there's absolutely no evidence that he did and abundant evidence that he didn't. And to not recognize that even just the maintenance of that lie and the requirement that his collaborators, like his current vice president, maintain that lie, that itself is is provocative of violence, right? I mean, that is— it's not— I mean, it would be worse if he solicited violence directly. But just claiming again and again and again that our democracy has been stolen and that the current president for these 4 years is totally illegitimate, that's dangerous, right? That's already a shattering of some basic norms of our democracy that we should want to unshatter.

↳ P39 raised again here · first raised at U-286

Yeah.

And so I think the real derangement is to have lost sight of how pathological all this is. And so again, my appeal to normal is just that, right? This is a highly non-normal situation that we should want to get out of. And I view Harris's candidacy and her possible presidency as above all, a pivot back to normal. And I do, again, I get to come back to a place where we started, because I think Ben and I and you, Barry, agree about a lot of the pathology on the far left. And we worry that our institutions have lost sight of the fact that they really should be recognizing their dependency on Western values, and they should be willing to protect those values, institutions like Harvard The New York Times. I think all of that gets better under a Harris administration, and all of it gets worse— it's already— the pendulum is already swinging back in all those institutions. Everyone's at the end of their patience with wokeness. But I think if we get 4 more years of Trump, it's gonna be all woke all the time on the left, and it will seem to be justified given the way he talks and given the kinds of alliances he's formed. Again, you got Tucker Carlson sitting right next to him in a box seat with no daylight between them. Right. And there's a rogues gallery behind Tucker. And so, yeah, the far left will continue to react to that and our institutions will continue to lose their moral compass.

+3 C-2.1 · Common ground on far-left pathology · Sam Harris

Ben, as far as the sort of character is destiny argument, the argument that I would make is that It's not the character of the president that's the destiny of the country. If that were true, then we've had a lot of big problems before. We've had many presidents, unfortunately, who have lagged in the character department, ranging from JFK to Bill Clinton. But if the question is the character of the American people and that being its destiny, it seems to me that the character of the American people can only be built up at the local level with community values that are free of politics, and that can only happen When the stranglehold that happens, definition of values by the top-down institutions in our country, by people like Kamala Harris or by the federal government or by the media, when that stops and there's a return to a sense of community in the daily lived life that people actually want to engage in, that is where character is built. And that's where the character of the country is built. It's not built by Kamala Harris being a massively wonderful character. Obviously we don't have to get into her history politically, But let's just say that the sort of sterling character references on Kamala Harris, I think, are somewhat overdrawn, to put it mildly. I think that when we look at the character of our politicians, if we believe the character of our politicians is the destiny of the country, then we are certain to have a bad fate. If we believe the character of the American people is the future of the country, the question becomes, how do we delegate the most power back to the American people to live lives of virtue? And to my mind, there's only one party that is even attempting to pretend to talk about doing that. And that is the Republican Party at this point, with all of its flaws and with all of its myriad excesses.

↳ P39 raised again here · first raised at U-286

↳ evidence for the P23 verdict on Ben Shapiro · ruling prints at U-134

Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, my fantasy Harris-Shapiro ticket. Thank you so much for coming on, Honestly.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Bari. Great to see you both.

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