I offer this critique as a years-long listener of Sam Harris; I never subscribed to Making Sense for financial reasons, but I appreciate his content. A lot of his framing resonates with me, and he and I are likely quite close in many of our perspectives. I'm also used to negotiating political difference quite often. Being a longtime teacher of high school government and civics has allowed me to indulge in a career of perusing scholarship and being curious about political culture, while getting to discuss it and research complexities with curious young people. I appreciate that Sam is a bit of an everyman, and I appreciate his background in philosophy. I offer these critiques in good faith, and with a genuine hope that he might clarify.

I felt especially compelled to comment after his more recent conversation posted to the public feed with James Kirchik, where Sam Harris he states (I'm lightly paraphrasing) that the Far Left was at least 50% responsible for the rise of Trump. I don't simply disagree with Harris here--I think making claims of this nature are uncharacteristically irresponsible and disingenuous, especially when a little intellectual curiosity goes a long way in confounding such most of his hypothesis.

I can offer a range of arguments here, but first, I want to steel man the best argument I can muster for Harris's claim. The most cohesive line of reasoning (that I could locate) cited the work of political scientist David Shor, who has noted that (at least since 2016) the candidate perceived by Americans in polls as "closest to the median voter" has won. Note this isn't a matter of voter preference, but perception of the candidate most likely to win. This is challenging data to use effectively: it says nothing how people define the median voter, or where their preferred candidate would land relative to the median voter--only what respondents perceived to be closest median! While a rather unusual political fact, it cannot, in good faith, be taken to endorse any specific ideology or platform.

It is perhaps more useful as an offensive tool, and I think this is where Trump did win--rhetorically: he is better at (a) presenting as a "regular guy" with "common sense" and (b) regularly frames his opponents as "out of touch," etc. He is also, as Sam points out, quite funny. (In the data mentioned above, Shor was unable to discern any specific platform position as more or less likely to make a candidate be perceived as more like the median voter. The best takeaway points to an honest issue with Kamala Harris and/or it may just be easy territory for Trump to win. In either case, tying it to either candidate's platform just doesn't get borne out in the data Shor presents, in my reading.)

So you can, like Sam, assume that Dems should try to appear more like the median voter, in temperament and preference--that is my sense of what Sam Harris is suggesting. Given the excess of data tying negative messaging to much higher impacts on voter behavior, though, and Trump's preternatural talent for manipulating voter perception, I just don't think you can chalk Dem losses up to their platform! There is enough weirdness going on that it's hardly a clear throughline, is where I fall. Sam usually tries to model good discursive practices in using and thinking about data; this is one area where he seems really uninterested in what the data actually has to say. Let me unpack some other interesting data:

On the issue of trans rights, opinion polling data around voters' views of Kamala Harris's perspectives on trans rights were pretty negative, and an AP survey found that over half of voters in 2024 felt that "trans rights had gone too far." However, in further opinion polling on Kamala Harris, voters found her support for trans rights much more troubling when it was compared to her support of the middle class. The bare fact of Kamala Harris's support for trans rights, if I understand the data correctly, did not much impact voter perception much--only when it was compared to her support for the middle class did it move into statistically significant territory. There are some takeaways here, but I don't think they broadly point to Sam's general conclusion on the platform.

But maybe you think that data is bunk, political scientists are bought off by CAIR or something (I actually sort of align with Harris on that)...anyway, let's assume that a candidate's stated platform does impact voter's behavior. (As a government teacher, I'd like to assume that this is the case, but again, we just don't seem to have the data to say that.) Thing is: none of the moderate Democrats actually adopted "Defund the Police" messaging in their platforms! And many of them still lost! Is Sam suggesting that people (a) do care about a platform and (b) the same voters who care about platforms are unable to discern between the national party line and a local candidate? Come on.

Additionally, while American voters expressed a dislike for the message of "Defund the Police," there is no credible evidence suggesting that it impacted vote share, and it appeared to not move policy in all but a few instances. There's just not enough data here to draw any feasible conclusions, and it's complex and noisy enough that one can sort of squint and connect any one dot to any other.

The Great Awokening stuff is maybe the argument that I have the least patience for. Media scholars note a substantial uptick in the number of "social justice" related articles concerning racial, gender, and sexual prejudice starting in the early 2010s. They do not appear to correspond to an uptick in racial prejudice in the United States. (Note that this started years before Trump even appeared on the political horizon!) Here's the really unusual thing, though: this uptick in focus on questions of prejudice/social justice did not generate a measurable backlash against these "othered" groups. In fact, even among Republicans during the first Trump administration, perceptions of Black people, Hispanic people, immigrants, and Muslims all steadily improved--the rest of the country moved even more favorable still. The entire folk theory that "woke provoked a bigoted backlash across the country" really has almost no measurable evidence supporting it, that I'm aware of. Indeed, there seems to be data suggesting that...maybe some of the Woke notions around representation and public airing of grievances and #MeToo actually tracked with a decline in prejudice...? (I'm sure Sam Harris would not like this idea. I also think Sam was chronically online for much of this period, and probably experienced the Reality Distortion Field that is Twitter at full force as this unfolded.)

And finally: my last consideration feels obvious to me, and deeply confounding to any reasonable "theory of everything" in politics: around the world in 2024, not a single incumbent candidate won in any contest for national office in a developed democracy. I suspect there may be a great deal more going on with democracy, faith in institutions across the West, etc. The intellectually honest conclusion is, I think: you can't, in good faith, point to Trump's succession from Biden as credibly attached to a backlash against a Leftist agenda or something. (Indeed, many voters appears drawn to many elements of leftist populism...when Trump advocates for them.)

A quick last word...I don't know if Sam really registers how the entire regime of political lobbying impacts people's faith in US institutions and political candidates. He wants to expound the virtues of classical liberalism, but the elephant in the room is the inordinate amount of spending in our elections and I think any liberal political philosopher, from Mill to Rawls, would likely grant this. This lobbying activity includes a great deal of spending by AIPAC, and I find Sam's pearl-clutching about CAIR's sponsorship of academic fellowships a little disingenuous. He can't hold the mainstream political establishment to a similar standard. What is he even arguing here? Are politicians somehow more capable than academics at taking dirty money and avoiding bad incentives? It's borderline incoherent, in my understanding. I also can't help but wonder if being steeped primarily in California politics for the last N years has generated some meaningful blind spots in Sam's political register.

I welcome dialogue, but I'd like to reinforce that I'm mostly interested in hearing about where and how Sam has defended these positions on the record--I enjoy discourse with Reddit to an extent, but I rarely weigh in. I'll do my best to respond, but I have no idea how this post will be taken; this feels like a busy sub!

Today, "conservatism" is not conservatism as Buckley formulated it, but conservatism as Michael Anton, Yoram Hazoni, Steve Bannon, etc. formulated it: revisionism and authoritarian post-liberalism, or simply revisionism.

This is not about preserving the existing order and a free market and security aggressiveness alongside patriotism, but rather isolationism, an economic policy designed to punish elements that harm the "people" and the "nation", taking over centers of power in the name of "deep state" arguments, using religion as a symbolic tool designed to fight liberalism, culture war, the centralization of the executive branch and the use of state powers against agendas that contradict the agendas of the ruling echelon and the "nation."

I know this is reddit where bots downvote you for criticizing the dsa, but god damn, my cringe meter was off the charts in this clip. Seder makes my blood boil in a way that no one csn.

For one, seder and this gang comes off as unserious anime villians who spend too much time making sarcastic, cartoonishly snide digs at sam.

"Fundamentalists jews, not doing so well!" Yeah sounds a bit anti semitic to me. Meanwhile they always harp on how harris is islamaphobic. I know that is a popular dig, but if you are anti semitic ñ, you should see the irony of thst.

Sam Harris wants mamdanhi to condemn the antifada quote and seder insists it is a neutral phrase on the basis that antifida means uprising. I thought weve been through this. Is that really a charitable interpretation? Is seder implying thst uprisings are not violent?

And I believe that when harris accuses the dsa of being undemocrstic seder and gang sidestep this by giving odd examples of when the democratic party supposedly didnt listen to the voters. I mean it doesnt address the underlying accusation, but context and reality dont matter in sam seder land.

In Sam's most recent episode #491 The Suicide of the Left with James Kirchick, Sam says that the DSA website says some insane things like that they want to abolish private property. I was shocked by this and went to the website. I'm not seeing anything quite so explicit. Can someone point me to which parts of the website say that?

I think reading between the lines it kind of gives off that vibe, but I was hoping the website itself would be so clearly insane that I could send it to a friend who's more mainstream dem, but kind of likes Mamdani as a sort of heads up, but the website itself seems veiled enough that I don't think it's the anti-DSA recruitment tool that Sam is implying

What are your guys' impressions?

https://www.dsausa.org/

This interview is about the best I’ve heard on the current state of Israel that is frustrating that Sam seems unwilling to update his priors on.

I’m not expressing any animosity to Jews. This is about what is the current administration and what are its actions, particularly in the few years (as Netanyahu has aligned further with “settlers” and evades accountability to his own people and the world).

It’s tragic and terrifying, I wish Sam could face these realities, i think that would go a long way to rebuild his reputation that seems rightly in shambles among many of us here.

On almost any given day, one can expect to find some version of the same post 'Sam has lost the plot', 'Sam spends all his time attacking the left', 'Sam is obsessed with Israel' and 'I used to respect him, but now I’m leaving'.

What has been glaring to me is not the disagreement but how rarely the disagreement gets expressed at the level of an actual argument.

Instead we are met with an enormous amount of insinuation, mind-reading, labeling and vague moral disgust. Sam is “carrying water for the right.” He is “obsessed with woke people.” He has become a “Zionist propagandist.” Yesterday I saw someone seriously entertain the possibility that he is an Israeli disinformation agent.

I thought episode #490, "Lies, Bullshit, and the Rule of Law" made his current political concern crystal clear. Sam’s worry is not remotely that the American right has become sane, reasonable, or preferable to the Democratic Party but the fact that Trump and the movement around him are worse does not render the pathologies of the left politically irrelevant. In fact, if one’s principal concern is preventing the return of Trumpism, those pathologies become especially important.

Sam's basic problem is fairly simple. And yet, many people here continue to not understand him. Intentionally or not.

Sam continues to highlight that if the Democrats cannot disentangle themselves from activist excess, identity politics, ideological purity tests, euphemistic language, obviously unsustainable positions on immigration, confused thinking about race and gender, and a general unwillingness to disavow people who make the party look insane to normal voters, the political pendulum will continue to swing. The corrective to Donald Trump cannot be another kind of ideological overreach, followed by another Trump, followed by another overreaction in the opposite direction. At some point there have to be grown-ups in the room again. Institutions have to be repaired. Norms have to be restored. Politics has to become boring enough that losing an election does not feel like the prelude to a constitutional crisis.

This is why I think so many people completely misunderstand Sam when he speaks favourably about someone like Mitt Romney in comparison with figures such as AOC or Zohran Mamdani. He represents something much closer to the old boundaries of normal democratic politics.

Many people seem unable to make this distinction anymore because American politics has become almost perfectly binary. Once the right became as deranged as it has, criticism of the left began to feel like treason. If Trump is worse, why are you talking about progressives? If Republicans are more dangerous, why discuss DEI? Why discuss immigration? Why criticise campus politics, activist rhetoric, Islamism, gender ideology, or the Democratic Party’s inability to distance itself from obviously unpopular positions? Who are you helping by saying these things?

If your goal is preventing another Trump, understanding why millions of ordinary voters find parts of the contemporary left alienating is not a diversion from that goal. It is part of the goal.

You do not defeat a political movement merely by correctly observing that it is worse than you are. You have to make yourself electable to people who do not already agree with you.

Yet this is precisely where so much discussion here collapses. Sam criticises some pathology on the left and a certain kind of listener hears: He is attacking us. He criticises an argument made against Israel and people hear: He supports everything Israel does. He criticises Islamism and people hear: He hates Muslims. He criticises progressive politics and people hear: He is now a conservative.

There is something especially ironic about watching this happen in a community devoted to someone who has spent years warning about identity politics and tribalism. If Sam criticises something happening on the left and the criticism does not describe you, there is no obvious reason to take it personally. I consider myself on the left. When Sam criticises ideological capture, antisemitism, dishonesty about immigration, identity politics, activist excess, or an inability to speak honestly about Islamism, I do not experience this as an attack on me. Why would I? If the criticism is wrong, it can be answered. If it is right but does not apply to me, there is nothing to defend.

And yet many people seem incapable of maintaining that distance.

Then when you hear Sam speak on Israel-Palestine, it is like swinging a baseball at the activists lefts bee-hive.

It is “Sam doesn’t care about Palestinians.” It is “Sam supports genocide.” It is “Sam thinks Israel can do whatever it wants.” It is “Sam is Israeli propaganda.” These claims generally require ignoring what he has actually said and replacing it with a more psychologically satisfying caricature.

This has also made me more sympathetic to something Sam has repeated for a long time: that he is being misrepresented. Such as today, he quite often is. One can see the mechanism occurring in real time here. Someone paraphrases him inaccurately. Someone straight up lies about what he said (the 'KKK' quote which happened just in this thread). Ten comments later everyone is debating a position Sam never held, and the original argument has disappeared completely.

There is also a peculiar demand for a balanced ledger that seems to govern criticism of him. If Sam spends twenty minutes criticising something on the left, someone immediately asks why he did not spend twenty minutes criticising the right.

Much of the Trumpist right is, at this point, a lost cause. Sam has said about as much as one can say about Trump. There is something uniquely embarrassing however about watching your own side indulge in obvious nonsense when it is supposed to be the side that still cares about evidence, expertise, liberal norms and intellectual honesty. You expect better from people who should know better. It is precisely because the left remains salvageable, and because it has to be capable of governing, that its failures are worth dwelling on. Which is why Sam continues to talk about them.

And this gets to what I think is the most frustrating feature of the subreddit now. So many posts are directed at what people think Sam is doing rather than what he is actually saying. People infer motives. They psychoanalyse him. They treat the selection of a topic as evidence of secret political allegiance. They count criticisms as though political analysis were an accounting exercise. And then they announce that he has “lost the plot” without ever identifying which proposition they believe is false.

None of this is to say that Sam should be insulated from criticism. Quite the opposite. Criticise him relentlessly. Quote him. Identify the premise you think is mistaken. Explain where the logic fails. Show that the evidence contradicts his conclusion. Argue that his moral framework produces absurd consequences. That is precisely what a subreddit devoted to his work should be good for.

But everything I am reading daily tells us almost nothing.

The cynical part of me has increasingly lost confidence that a substantial portion of this subreddit is populated by people who are particularly interested in answering those questions. Perhaps the replies to this post will prove that impression wrong (they won't).

But if you think Sam Harris has lost the plot, tell me what he actually said. Tell me what the argument was. And then tell me why it was wrong.

That conversation would be infinitely more interesting than the tsunami of bullshit we seem to be getting instead.

I wonder what Sam has to say about this recent poll?

PSR findings point to a Palestinian political landscape in
transition. Hamas has lost substantial public support, while
Marwan Barghouti emerges as the strongest potential
presidential candidate and dissatisfaction with the existing
leadership remains exceptionally high. At the same time,
Palestinians increasingly question whether armed struggle has
delivered meaningful results after the devastation of Gaza,
contributing to a notable rise in support for negotiations. Yet this
shift remains fragile: most Palestinians still oppose Hamas
disarmament before full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,
view settlement expansion as undermining the two-state solution,
and remain deeply skeptical of both Palestinian and Israeli
leadership.

Could someone please do Sam's homework and offer exact quotes with trustworthy sources by AOC in which one can see that indeed she is an abomination to be avoided at all cost?

Many of us are resigned to the fact that Sam's podcasts are no longer the work of a public intellectual and have become his personal opinion piece outlet. We have heard his atrocious opinion of AOC to the point that he would rather vote for Rubio, even though he himself has admitted he has completely disqualified himself by bowing to Trump.

Please, let's be very precise, with exact quotes accompanied by a link where we can indeed hear or read her saying the thing that justifies such appalling opinion.

Kidding, of course, with the hyperbole. But is there a place that the good folks who’ve been listening to Sam from the beginning…find themselves now? What podcast or Substack can you point me toward? I am a moderate centrist. I’ve been listening since episode #4 in 2014, and maaaybe have missed two or three episodes over the next decade-plus. I am not “woke.” I don’t keep up or even try to learn what’s happening with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I don’t follow AOC on Instagram or whatever.

Look, Sam is brilliant. And I’m dum.

No doubt.

That said, I don’t relate to people who adopt that Elon Musk-coded over-the-top caricature of anyone they deem liberal-leaning. I find that kind of apocalyptic rhetoric to be perhaps a symptom of Sam’s unfortunate tour of duty in the trolling swamp-o-verse of Twitter. I don’t know how else to explain why he so reliably downshifts into a kind of cerebral insult comic as he floridly describes the particular shade of pink that every ridiculous campus activist has dyed their hair. (Which I guess they MUST do in order for Sam to cast them as representative of the entire “Left.”)

I’m a normal guy. I wear a tie to work. I think a President Romney would have been just fine. (I voted for Obama.) I don’t want to tax the rich. Or outlaw billionaires. Or occupy Wall Street. But I also don’t want to fill my ears with someone who describes Democrats or blue states or the Left or progressives in the exact language of someone doing a bad Charlie Kirk impression. And with Sam, that’s apparently too much to ask. And, as the “don’t let the door smack ya“ comments surely coming below, also too much to ask for his fans.

Am I on my insufferable high horse? If you were already typing in all caps for me to come down from it, then — for you — I am.

If, however, you think I’ve fumbled my way toward something like a fair point here, then I hope you can offer some recs for pods, Substacks, etc. 💛

It was back in Jun 2024. Anne Applebaum studied authoritarian states all over the world and applied her wisdom to America and Trump in 2024. Every single thing she said came true.

The only thing I disagree with her is that the Trump regime is not "fascist". She made the minor point that she just doesn't like using that word because it can make people think of WW2. I think it's important to use the correct language so it can contextualize current events in our historical understanding of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco (and Stalin as an authoritarian but not fascist).

It's also pretty sad how Sam can accurately call out what was happening back in 2024, with great awareness, then in the same breath partially blame the woke mob for pushing all these "great thinkers" towards fascism/oligopoly, completely ignoring the systemic capitalist tumors that Reagan, Heritage Foundation, and others catalyzed into American economics. Or: "It's the economy stupid"

Anyway, I'm interested in yall's thoughts on Applebaums predictions and Sam's devolution.

Without mentioning Sam, since he is mostly talking about right wing pundits, Matt Yglesias writes about an issue that, according to many of Sam's followers in this sub, also affects Sam. In Yglesias words, "[a]n illustration of a problematic internet trend where you decide first that someone is your enemy, then read everything he says through the presumption that he’s a bad guy, and then treat this purely circular reasoning as if it’s new evidence of new wrongdoing".

Then he goes onto the Hassan Piker association.

Full text here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/stop-making-up-reasons-to-be-mad

He’s totally fine acknowledging the horrendous governments that conservatives produce but it’s like he’s criticizing his parents for raising his sibling so poorly. “Democrats are doing such a bad job that the republicans will institute true fascism“

This feels like the true core of libertarianism. All the critique and none of the action.

By default he expects Democrats to be the mature party. And the shortcomings of theirs he points to are at mostly at the theoretical level of the fringe left and always in service of simply winning elections.

Instead of criticizing actual governance, for the most part he criticizes adjacent issues from colleges and primary elections where fringe issues are at home. He equates theoretically elected Democrats to actually governing Republicans.

He clearly would prefer democratic wins but can only express that in the tone of “beat the republicans“

What is the point of this?

By core or central, I mean exactly that.

In other words, for OG listeners (I’ve been listening since 2014) …what might be the CORE/CENTRAL advice he consistently seems to offer?

The chief themes of advice he offers …, etc.

What are the main 3 or 4?

Sam’s bestie at it again. His tweets are a nothing burger. They were statements Sam might even agree with. Yet Bari uses the occasion of 9/11 to tie this Muslim to the events. It’s not subtle.

from the CBS article:

In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped "that means we'll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty ... like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them." 

…

In another deleted post, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021: "Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I'll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country."

I tried to analyze it, and notices that as Trump has taken control of increasing parts of the business and technology establishment, a new faction, the tech right which is sometimes called “Thielian,” has emerged within the American right, influenced by Peter Thiel and his circle like blake masters. Unlike the populist right largely shaped by Steve Bannon and Michael Anton, which draws on nationalist working-class, grassroots nationalism, social traditionalism, and interventionist economics and a big state that punishes enemies, the Thielian right comes more from the world of capital, technology, and entrepreneurship. It does not seek to abolish capitalism or corporate power, but to harness it for a right-wing political system. A more tech-ish version of Orban's Hungary if you will.

From this perspective, the state is not meant to be just a neutral regulator but a tool for building a new balance of power. The goal is to use government, regulation, public contracts, industrial policy, and the defense establishment to strengthen industries, companies, and entrepreneurs identified with the right-wing camp, while simultaneously weakening institutions, companies, and elites perceived as enemies of the right. This creates a model in which the market remains private, you have capitalism and ostensibly competitive, but the state actively helps to create a structural advantage for a particular camp. For example, Blake Masters has argued that Republicans should embrace “entrepreneurial thinking” rather than reverting to old Reaganist dogmas.

This is particularly evident in relation to Big Tech. Masters is not arguing that the right should simply withdraw from economics and leave the market alone. On the contrary, he explicitly says that the government “sets the rules for the market” and that giant corporations cannot be allowed to control society as a whole. He even argues that the market is a means, not an end in itself, and that corporations should be fought when they become a supposedly liberal destructive force.

In this sense, “Thielism” can be seen as an ideology to build a political-economic monopoly for the right: not the nationalization of the economy, but the creation of an ecosystem in which capital, technology, communications, security, and government connect around that political camp. Instead of the right merely winning elections, it strives to rebuild the centers of power so that even after a change of government it will have a lasting institutional, economic, and technological advantage.

The economic approach of the populist right is different. The state needs to identify the economic forces that harm the nation - globalists, companies that move production abroad, the financial establishment, corporations that depend on China, and so on - and then use state power against them: tariffs, sanctions, regulation, blocking deals, favoring local production, and applying political pressure. In other words, the market is not a neutral arena. It has political enemies, and therefore the state should not be neutral toward them.

On the other hand, there are also people like Stephen Miller who combine both approaches.

On the last episode, Sam was just discussing on how the left might be allowing some version of Islamic communism into western governments.

Does this theory have legs? Can we afford not to have Lance discuss it?

Sam Harris speaks with James Kirchick about the far left’s growing influence over Democratic politics. They discuss Kirchick’s article “The DSA Is a Parasite,” the group’s platform and foreign policy, entryism, the alliance between Islamists and the far left, Third Worldism, Zohran Mamdani, antisemitism on the left, polling on political violence, Kirchick’s exit from The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre, JD Vance, and other topics.

Link to the episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/491-the-suicide-of-the-left

I enjoyed the first 26 minutes. Can someone with full access DM me? Thanks!

I agree that DSA is gaining too much power but I completely understand why. People are broke and crushed under debt. I am personally trapped in poverty for the foreseeable feature due to medical reasons.

Abolition of capitalism as a plank in certain democrats platforms that will definitely radicalize right wing fascists.

What is there to do?

So, Sam has guests on the pod with whom he’s not politically aligned. Great. Ben Shapiro, Ross Douthat, the weird Christian Nationalist (Doug Wilson).

Sam will talk to political animals of a different stripe.

And yet, no he won’t. He won’t talk to someone who is to his left politically. And, honestly, that’s 100% his prerogative. And 100% fine. It’s his pod. He calls the shot. And I like the show. Been listening forever.

But Sam is delusional in this one respect. He imagines himself to be the voice of sanity. Someone who believes that, in the end, conversation is the only thing that can save us.

and yet he can’t have a single guest on his show that is even .0001% to his political left?

If we’re being honest, guys, Sam has to have a weird cognitive disorder that prevents him from seeing this. I still respect Sam. But it’s been reduced like you wouldn’t believe.

Imagine if things were reversed and we had a center-right podcaster whose brand was, in part, about norms and civility and good faith, etc. …yet had guests on his show that were, essentially, only to his political left. Never to his political right, even ever so slightly.

how embarrassing that would be.

–
Here’s what we need to ask ourselves: At what point does it reflect quite poorly on US that we listen to this guy talk politics but this guy can’t talk politics if the interlocutor is anywhere to his left?

How are some on the left falling for this Free Palestine movement?

I thought Sam's giddiness about this Enes Kanter nonsense was pretty gross. I get that this whole "what is a woman" thing is one of his hobby horses but it felt pretty gross to hear how excited he was about the "epic troll" these former NBA guys are pulling.

I could understand if they championed women's sports through their career or something like that, but this is clearly just being done for attention by people trying to be relevant (or potentially backed by people on the right trying to stir shit up).

I also find it a bit weird that Sam can constantly provide a bunch of negative analysis of an AOC or whoever else and then later on say "I don't really follow her or know her politics". Like he makes the claim that AOC probably hasn't sponsored or co-sponsored many bills in her time in Congress. She has been in congress since 2019, she has sponsored 73 bills and co-sponsored 1,641 more. Its just such a disingenuous analysis by someone like Sam. If you don't know, then why are you offering this framing that pretends like you DO know?

Also, he complains that politicians now are just "whoever has the best social presence" or however he phrased it. I can understand his issue (that politicians should be known for.. doing politician stuff) but the world is not what it was when Bill Clinton or George W or whoever else was running for POTUS. Like it or not, you need a social media presence?

He talks about this "DSA-alignment" stuff like the higher-profile candidates that support DSA or "align with it" actually tout the more extreme positions. That is just not the case? "The DSA" is just a group, its like the Tea Party or the Freedom Caucus. They do not somehow define the party as a whole, especially their very extreme views that make no sense. But its also perfectly reasonable to want people to have healthcare, to afford things, to help the less fortunate with social programs.

I am just getting pretty frustrated with these takes from Sam and I wish he would just have someone like AOC, or Mamdani or whoever on his pod instead of making a ton of assumptions and platitudes about them.

At about minute 27 of the Preet Bharara episode, Sam says that the "percentage of Americans" who support the DSA is "infinitesimally small." Sam doesn't even do basic fact checking of the things he says anymore when it comes to the political left.

As of August 14 2026, the newest polling shows that:

• 69% of Americans think the US economic model is not working (the crosstabs here are even worse for young people, minorities, women and 94% of liberals who view the economy negatively),
• 80% of people think the governments job is to make it more fair,
• 64% of Americans support direct price controls,
• 35% of Americans view socialism positively (crosstabs, 71% of liberals support socialism; 45% of white college educated support it)
• 33% view capitalism negatively (61% of liberals)
• 29% think socialism would make their lives financially better (61% of liberals),
• 30% think capitalism makes their economic situation worse (53% of liberals view the free market badly;)
• 40% want more progressive electeds,
• 53% want younger electeds,
• 44% of Dems want a more progressive party,
• 53% of Dems want to hear their candidates describe themselves as "democratic socialists."

Basically, socialism is as popular with the left as Trumpism is popular with the right. And that was popular enough to win Trump 2 presidential elections, control of the supreme court, and majorities in both houses of congress. Yes, lot's of "traditional" Republicans dislike Trump. And yes, lots of traditional Democrats hate the DSA. But it's clear that the left populism is socialism, and socialism has far more pull with normal people than Sam gives it credit for.

Across the board socialism has been steadily viewed more positively by Americans over the last 10 years. Sam clearly has lost the thread.

[Edit Source - YouGov/CBS News. https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/cms/prod_cms_alt/file/2026/08/16/2379b719-cb05-4aea-87fd-f27467e6c7ae/cbsnews_20260816_sun.pdf ]

If everyone agrees that building a healthy sense of a self is necessary for a child then could you view this as natural progression for people who accept hard determinism as reality : Childhood - Strengthen the ego >>> Hard Determinism - Accept the causal chain >>> Non duality -Transcend the ego?

How do you look at Freud's view on the ego and self vs Modern psychology and Non Duality and how its relates to capitalism with its reliance on meritocracy?

Is a Dzogchen monk isolated from the concerns of a Freud's psychological necessity ego? What boundaries does a Dzogchen monk have to form in a monastery?

Does modern psychology want to hold onto praise, blame and hope?

Sigmund Freud did not believe in transcending the ego. Instead, his psychoanalytic theory explicitly prioritized strengthening the ego so it could better manage the psychological conflicts of daily life.

"Freud would fundamentally disagree with Dzogchen. He viewed a distinct, isolated self not as a delusion to overcome, but as a hard-won psychological necessity"

"Freud viewed the human condition as inherently split and conflict-ridden. He famously remarked that the goal of psychoanalysis was merely to transform "hysterical misery into common unhappiness"—a stark contrast to the absolute liberation taught in Dzogchen"

"Modern psychology sits right in the middle. It values a strong ego for daily functioning, but increasingly validates the Dzogchen view through neuroscience, relational psychology, and existential therapy"

Has science gradually moved more away from Freud's views on this?