And the Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

Well, I suppose I should say something about the campus protests.

There's a lot of anger and confusion out there.

Just how much of a problem is this?

Well, there's no question that much of the chaos we see online is performative,

which is to say that it's being staged for the

cameras. That doesn't mean it's entirely insincere, but it is interesting to

consider whether the events themselves would have happened, or would have happened at this

scale and have this character absent an ability to broadcast them on social media.

Of course, its concern relates to far more than what's happening on college

campuses in response to the war in Gaza. The combination of a smartphone and social media

appears to be driving our species crazy. We're all effectively walking around with a television

studio in our pockets. And the question is, what is this doing to us?

So this is just to say that when I see video of crowds of very smug and very hostile kids at our finest universities,

effectively supporting Hamas, I'm a little slow to conclude that this tells me everything I need to know about

the scope of the problem.

As I've said before, the entire aftermath of October 7th has convinced me that I've been

almost totally asleep to the current reality of

anti-Semitism. So I think it is a far bigger problem than I realized. But I still don't

know how informative it is to see a video of some imbecile at Columbia or Harvard shouting for the

Jews to go back to Poland.

What I can say is that the response of these universities has been totally inadequate and

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