"Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement—I would not have cared." — Sam Harris
Sam Harris would rather vote for someone who has actually committed worse harm than the imagined harm he worries Trump might commit. And he calls that "rational."
I wrote two years ago about how I quit Sam Harris after being a fan for years. His recent quotes about Biden/Trump was not surprising as it further confirms my decision to stop listening to his podcast. I seem to remember hearing Harris make that same "corpses of children" analogy on another podcast a year or two ago, which I thought was insane at the time, but for whatever reason that clip did not go viral then. But it was the final straw for me, when I realized Sam Harris was not worth listening to about anything anymore.
I used to think Trump broke Sam Harris, causing the self-proclaimed rationalist to become irrational about certain political issues, but now I see that Trump merely exposed how irrational and broken Sam Harris' thinking already was about not just politics but everything else. The truth is Trump is not a unique existential threat to the world, country, or even democracy (as Harris believes he is), but Trump is a threat to the neoliberal world order that Harris wants to maintain.
On the Big Tech/news media/government coordination to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election, Harris said: "That's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was—absolutely. But I think it was warranted." His "logic" being, we must defeat Trump to save our sacred Democracy. So if the dumb people want to vote for Trump (aka democracy) then we must do anything we can to prevent them from freely voting for their preferred candidate based on all available information. We must hijack democracy to save democracy. And that is the logical thing to do...if your "logic" is based on the faulty premise that Trump is some dangerously evil existential threat.
This is coming from the man who wrote an entire book called Lying in which he claimed it was always wrong to lie—except, I suppose, when it comes to ensuring his preferred political candidate is elected to office. Harris later back-tracked, claiming the conspiracy wasn't explicitly "left-wing" because Liz Cheany was on board with burying the Hunter Biden story to defeat Trump too. This is a typical case of Harris presenting strawmen to bolster his points and "defeat" his opponents. When the right-wing hates Liz Cheany more than a lefty like Sam Harris, he might want to reconsider whether she is actually on the right-wing. Harris presented a similar strawman in is evidence against God, claiming that he can't see heaven with a telescope in the sky, so...case-closed. Harris makes himself look smarter and intellectually superior by dismantling the weakest and most childish representations of the views on the other side.
On the left, you often find things named for the opposite of what they actually do. The "anti-fascists" riot in the streets with support from corporations and the state. The "anti-racists" examine everything through the prism of race. The "Democrats" are against populism, aka democracy. The "progressives" do nothing but regress society. And "rationalists" like Sam Harris are utterly irrational.
I feel a bit embarrassed now to ever have been a fan of Sam Harris, but his Trump derangement helped illuminate how equally deranged his views were on religion, morality, economics, and free will. Plus Harris led me to other thinkers in the now defunct "Intellectual Dark Web" such as Dave Rubin, who led me to Michael Malice, who led me to Curtis Yarvin.
I would love to hear Sam Harris debate Yarvin or another member of the "New Right," but Harris would never agree to do that. He carefully curates his conversations, only choosing anti-Trump "conservatives" who reaffirm his deranged beliefs. Sam Harris may not believe in God, but he does believe in Satan, personified by his distorted view of Donald J. Trump. Believing Trump is the devil is more absurd than believing in a bearded man in the sky.