#51 — The Most Powerful Clown

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2016

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris talks about the results of the 2016 presidential election and the prospects of a President Trump.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.9	Well it has come to pass. President Trump, a man who many of us treated as a buffoon,
0:54.4	and only took seriously as a threat at the 11th hour, will be the 45th president of the United States
1:04.0	with a Republican Congress behind him, and with at least one vacancy, probably more on the Supreme
1:11.9	Court to fill. So what went wrong and how bad is this? Well I think there are two parts
1:24.3	to this story. The first is unambiguously depressing, and this is the part that has been seized on by
1:34.2	most liberals, but it's only half the story, and it is this. Trump has ascended to power
1:43.7	despite showing every sign of being dangerously unfit for it, and by exposing in himself,
1:51.6	and in the electorate, the worst that America has to offer, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
2:00.4	a contempt for the most vulnerable among us, intimations of fascism, a positive love of bullying,
2:09.6	total disdain for our democratic institutions, a willingness to make threats of political violence
2:15.5	just for the fun of it, a contempt for science, and a love of conspiracy theories. I mean,
2:22.5	I could run through it all again with crazy things he said and the toxic alliances he's made.
2:30.2	The irony is, if he had been merely half as bad, he would have seemed worse. He would have been
2:38.0	more recognisably dangerous. There were so many awful moments that the media couldn't focus on
2:45.4	them for long enough, or way their significance, and the big things were as big as they get,
	...

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