“There are very few people who are more critical of Trump than I am” — thus spake SAM HARRIS (fallen celebrity)
Sam Harris makes little sense and talks like a televangelical preacher.
He drips acid contempt on half of his fellow citizens and epitomises the hate politics purveyed by the Democratic Party which he votes for in California.
Over a span of 44 minutes in the video below, you can hear for yourself Sam Harris pouring scorn like torrential rain on oh my ”he is such a terrible person” Donald Trump.
Yup. Sam Harris crashed and burned in his Making Sense episode #293 podcast released two days ago titled ‘What I really think of Trump and media bias’.
Suffering end-stage TDS
I could do a whole thesis debunking the political lies which Sam Harris embraces in his video but that will require too many pages. So I’ll just confine myself to teasing out his hatred expressed under the rubric of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
Sam Harris’ hate for anything Trump is typical of the USA’s Left Coast (in Malaysia our equivalent locales would be Bangsar and Jerusubang).
Trivia on the Bangsar DNA: ‘Bungsar’ (old spelling for Bangsar) parliament constituency was the first and only seat won by DAP in the 1964 general election where its winning MP Devan Nair was a PAP leader – later becoming Singapore president – and also Kit Siang’s boss. Fact: DAP was born of PAP.)
In the video above, Sam Harris oozes elitist disdain for “people in Trumpistan”, disdain for Trump’s small donors, for Trump supporters who marched to the Capitol on 6 Jan 2021; as well as disdain for Fox News and OANN viewers, for Breitbart readers, for talk radio listeners; disdain for users of Truth Social [Trump’s new Twitter-like platform] and for pro-Trump chat forums; disdain for “former friends” who ostensibly receive “financial incentives” from their work cheering Trump [methinks Sam Harris has Dave Rubin in mind here although not mentioned by name] and disdain for those Muslims that Sam Harris regards as “living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview”, living under a “despicable” “moral structure” and holding “odious beliefs” that underscore jihadism.
In Malaysia, some find it equally fashionable to hate on Trump.
Why Sam Harris was in the news
A few days ago, he imploded spectacularly on social media. You can find my take on the backstory — ‘Sam Harris is the American Bangsar Bubble-ian’ (click HERE) and ‘More mysterious than corpses of children in the basement‘ (click HERE).
Sam Harris’s reputation blew up because of the following video shared by many including Dave Rubin below.
Trump is asteroid made flesh
Sam Harris’ deranged rant – clipped roughly two-plus minutes – gave the world his infamous quote: “At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared”.
The two-minute capsule reached its crescendo with Sam Harris suggesting “it’s like if there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth”, i.e. likening Donald Trump to a cataclysmic big, orange asteroid slamming into our planet.
According to Sam Harris, critics take his words to mean “if I (Sam) think Trump is as bad as an asteroid that might destroy all life on Earth, how could there be any limit to what I’d be willing to do to stop it”.
To summarise, critics say that Sam Harris is adopting an ‘ends justify the means’ method of politics. Sam Harris, however, denies that he advocates this ‘must-win-at-any-cost‘ strategy against Trump.
Why his remarks caused controversy
The 44-minute podcast Sam Harris dropped most recently in YouTube is his second attempt at clarification after a previous try on Twitter.
He took a stab at injecting clarity after complaining about “being engulfed in a tsunami of hatred”.
Does Sam Harris expect to be exempt from backlash in social media when he stumbles? He forgets the Golden Rule: ‘What goes around comes around’.
Sam Harris has endlessly directed the most deranged levels of hate at Trump and the former president’s supporters.
He views himself as the “smart” one, Republican voters as stupid and Trump fans in 4Chan as “an absolute cesspool”. Of course there will be payback when Sam Harris trips.
The moral philosopher (as Sam is known) moreover contradicts himself when he lamented that the furore was actually over a “non issue”.
Brushing off the blowback as trivial, i.e. without substance, while at the same time acknowledging that his (Sam’s) “statements produced a fair amount of outrage in a very large group of people” shows how he (Sam) rates the intelligence of the many, many persons who reacted negatively to him.
Upset that he was ”getting vilified at scale”, Sam Harris nonetheless still failed to self reflect on his terminal TDS. Instead he chose to double down in his Aug 19 Twitter thread and triple down in his Aug 25 podcast.
”From my point of view, it was totally rational at that point [Oct 2020] not to care about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the truth is I still don’t care given that Trump is looming over the 2024 election,” he reiterated.
Sam Harris is so blinkered by his blind hatred of Trump that he is unable to see where he went wrong when he asserted: ”I can support the right of tech companies to be biased” — which misses the point!
It is not mere ‘bias’ that’s at issue. It’s the tech oligarchs putting their thumb on the scale to tip the 2020 American presidential election — see below report on Facebook’s collusion with the Trump-hating FBI to suppress Hunter laptop newsfeed.
Real issue behind Hunter’s laptop
In his Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris talked about how he had “become the object of a Twitter mobbing” last week.
Twitter mobs enforcing cancel culture is something that the Dems (Sam Harris’ preferred party) usually encourage but this time the shoe is on the other foot with Sam Harris targeted.
But no mea culpa is forthcoming from Sam Harris. Instead he trotted out the predictable lame excuses — he was misunderstood, konon (no he wasn’t), he was misrepresented, konon (no he wasn’t), he was misinterpreted in the worst possible way, konon (no he wasn’t), he was taken out of context, konon (no he wasn’t) …
His Twitter thread made Sam Harris’ bad situation even worse in what’s usually called the folly of ‘digging your hole deeper’.
Now in his most recent podcast, Sam Harris denies that he is walking back any earlier positions but only seeking to “clarify”. With this, he is digging his already very deep hole all the way to Shanghai.
What discerning individuals find most off-putting about Sam Harris is his invidious putar belit.
He declared “if pressed, I would probably side with those ignoring the (Hunter laptop) story because that’s what I in fact did”.
He continued, saying “there is this underlying question: Why do I know that Biden couldn’t be nearly as corrupt as Trump without examining the contents of his son’s laptop? Because both of these guys have been living in public for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. We know a tremendous amount about both of them going back over 40 years.”
Here’s my Malaysian perspective on the matter.
Joe Biden is a career politician harking back to 1972 when he was firstly junior senator for Delaware. That’s at least 50 years spent in politics.
Trump had no political experience before he rode down the golden escalator of his glitzy tower in 2015.
And Sam Harris is telling us that Biden with his half-a-century involvement in politics “couldn’t be nearly as corrupt as Trump” the political novice? I’m speechless! It is well nigh impossible to get through to a TDS acute sufferer.
BELOW: Trump loves America; you can’t say the same for Dems
Err, Nietzsche … monsters gazing into abyss?
Sam Harris is a crusader against organized religion and made his name as a high profile atheist mocking religious folks.
Karma’s a bitch ‘cos golly, here is Sam Harris himself speaking like an evangelical preacher when he insists that he does not really hate Trump at all, and that he’s by no means a political hyper partisan.
Sam Harris said in his Making Sense podcast: “I realise that when I say this sort of thing [“Orange Man bad” x1,001], it sounds like an expression of personal hatred and of my own personal political partisanship but it is neither of those things. I don’t hate Trump; I hate the fact of him. I hate the space he occupies in our world. I hate what he has done to our politics”.
Urm, how is Sam Harris’ hating the very fact of [Trump] not the same as hating Trump? And how is Sam Harris hating “the space [Trump] occupies” different from hating Trump?
Sam Harris is a master of weasel words, ain’t he?
More Christian charity phrases from Sam Harris: ”It’s not about hating the man; I hate the phenomenon.”
Sam Harris provides us the Alice in Wonderland phenomenon of ‘Words mean what I say they mean’.
Sam Harris is behaving like the Christian preachers he so likes to bash. You know how the Christians are always declaring they love their enemies, and that they only hate the sin and not the sinner.
The protestation “I don’t hate Trump (I just hate Trumpism)” by Sam Harris sounds a lot like what an evangelical preacher might say. And he wonders why the crowd is calling him out as a “hypocrite”.
BELOW: Books authored by Sam Harris
Man of straw, feet of clay
Slithery Sam, pusing sini pusing sana.
It comforts Sam Harris to think the only reason he is being dissed by a huge chunk of the English-speaking commentariat is due to the “cult of personality” around Trump. But one need not idolise Trump to realise that Sam Harris is a sneaky bastard full of artful dodges.
To ‘strawman’ means to misframe your opponent’s argument in its weakest form; to ‘steel man’ means to present your opponent’s argument in its strongest form.
Without doubt, Sam Harris deliberately straw mans his critics. He assigns weak sauce to the critics (i.e. he puts words in his detractors’ mouth) which they did not themselves cook.
e.g. The critics had pointed out that Sam Harris literally said it is “warranted” for Twitter to lock out the New York Post from its account so that the newspaper could not publicise its Hunter laptop expose.
Caught flat footed, Sam Harris’ first resort was to shift the blame to everybody else. He blamed the ‘editor’ who compressed his interview into the two-minute viral clip.
He also claimed ”many things got condensed and entangled in my remarks about the Hunter Biden laptop story” and thus the short snippet was “garbled”. (No it wasn’t. The two minutes perfectly distilled Sam Harris’ trainwreck of thought.)
Then Sam Harris blamed his interviewer Konstantin Kisin for interrupting him.
Sam Harris faulted Kisin – “but then I get cut off by the host” – for the supposed garble following that ear-popping bit where he (Sam) proclaimed: “That’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump — absolutely it was, absolutely. But I think it was warranted”.
Stickily stuck now, Sam Harris began to quibble about the word “warranted” and then grudgingly conceded that he “truly misspoke” on “this single word“.
”… I believe everything I say here except one word,” added Sam Harris, continuing, “I said that ignoring the laptop story and even suppressing the New York Post’s Twitter account when they ran it was – quote – ’totally warranted’. What I clearly meant to say was ‘totally justifiable’. It’s a difference between ‘justified’ [warranted] and ‘justifiable’.”
Oh, so now it’s simply semantics and using “the wrong term”.
Slithery Sam makes as if his critics are claiming (they did not) how he believes it is warranted for the Democratic Party to commit election fraud in order to keep Trump from getting reelected. Do you see the sleight of hand which Sam Harris just pulled?
To recap, the critics highlighted Sam Harris’ moral approval of the effort to suppress info about the Hunter laptop in the run-up to the presidential election. They never said Sam Harris endorsed the stuffing of ballot boxes. It is Sam Harris who falsely gave the impression his critics had implied he endorses election fraud.
He uses this deflection in order to dilute their real critique.
The following is yet another example of Sam Harris slyly strawmanning the argument put forward by his critics: They had rightly pointed out that Sam Harris believes it is warranted for Twitter to suspend the New York Post which broke the laptop story.
Again Sam Harris deviously diverts, making as if his critics had claimed (they did not) it is wrong for the New York Times to ignore the laptop story.
Slithery Sam is eliding two different newspapers – New York Post vs New York Times – to cloud the terrain. Orang kata ‘NY Post’ dia cakap ‘NY Times’. What a Dapsterish (sneaky) thing to do!
Here’s a fuller excerpt: Sam Harris said: “… neither of those actions [ 1. Twitter suspending the Post to suppress laptop story, 2. NYT electing to bury the story altogether] entail breaking the law; they don’t even entail lying. This is just pure editorial judgement especially if you think the story stands a chance of being Russian disinformation. This is not breaking the First Amendment [guaranteeing freedom of speech]. It’s not destroying democracy in order to save it. It isn’t any of the things that hysterical defenders of Trump are now alleging. And I should say it’s simply amazing to hear people who are carrying water for the biggest liar, probably in history, shrieking about the primacy of truth and journalistic integrity in a right-wing echo chamber that has ignored real facts and real stories for decades. You’re telling me that you think Fox News and Breitbart and AM [morning] talk radio and the One America News Network don’t ignore stories they find politically inconvenient? This is where you get your news and you’re pretending to care about media bias?”
Again to be explicit — critics who are not necessarily “hysterical defenders of Trump” had their eye on Big Tech suppression of the New York Post. Sam Harris is throwing in the New York Times’ media bias only as a red herring.
The main issue is blanket suppression amounting to election interference. Extreme pro-liberal bias by the American media is secondary.
What a sorry excuse this Sam Harris is if humankind really wants for our rational faculty to be exalted.
Helen Ang 
There are thousands of Sam Harris examples in these United States the Land of the Brave and the Free, ranging from self-created born again christians to the Ku Klux Klan.. We must not take such American examples out of context and treat them as our own. Our beloved Malaysia grew out of a Counter-Insurgency War 1948-1992. Many precious lives were sacrificed and lost to protect our Sovereignty and National Interest besides those innocents who were victims of the Communists. Hence, legal measures were raised which were entirely different from the Freedom which exists in these United States. In the case of Sam Harris who is doing his utmost for a living, we may extrapolate the many NGOs in Malaysia which are foreign-funded and inspired as Sam Harris like.. Sam Harris could go full blast as a hater of another political group as part of the traditional American lobbyist profession. But he would definitely not last a second in ye olde KL without being probed by the PDRM for his utterances verging on encouraging to physical violence by the people in the streets. Malaysia is still a fledgling democratic society within which there are many different groups of peoples with different racial and religious characteristics which only the Federal Government can rule with Law and Order to keep the Peace, Harmony and Prosperity. Anything which is too much out of the ordinary will spell trouble. Lee Kuan Yew used to propound the need of an authoritarian government for a successful emerging nation in his hey-day. or justifying his iron-fisted rule. This was supported by our Dr Mahathir Mohamad. But the outstanding Indian scholar Professor Amartya Sen and a prominent Indian journalist TJS George shot Lee Kuan Yew’s rationale down in flames in the early 1990s. What is good for these United States may not be good for our beloved Malaysia now on her way to be one of 4 important small countries of the World being the United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, Malaysia but not tiny Singapore. HASTA la VISTA baby ! Courtesy Boris Johnson designate ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
A good example of the degree of Freedom in Malaysia as compared with these United States is the closure of the Comedy Club in which one participant mocked an age-old religious practice. Within our Malaysian context, what she did was hurtful to a majority but on the other side of the coin, it was only a joke as regarded by the minority. Hence,our beloved Malaysia has rules and the Law which make us all walk the straight and the narrow in our speech and actions always.in our disparate society. HASTA la VISTA baby ! Courtesy Boris Johnson designate ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.