The Day Sam Harris Stopped Being a Skeptic

For many years I had listened to Making Sense, the podcast of Sam Harris. I admired Sam's ability to analyze many complex issues, including religion and cognitive science. I don't listen to him nearly as much any more. He has fallen off the tracks regarding COVID and censorship. I am also concerned that he has a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome - I describe TDS as a disgust of Trump that is so intense that one is willing to start with the premise that Trump cannot ever again be president, then to reverse-engineer government and media institutions that get in the way, disabling them if necessary, doing whatever is necessary to guarantee that Trump never again holds power.

Recently, I found myself wondering when it was that I first noticed that Harris fell off the rails on these topics. I think it was on his January 2, 2019 with Renée DiResta, who is described in the podcast notes as "Director of Research at New Knowledge and Head of Policy at the nonprofit organization Data for Democracy." I remember listening to this podcast several years ago, thinking that Sam was simply eating out of DiResta's hand, taking everything she said without exercising any meaningful skepticism or pushback. While I listened to that podcast, it seemed like a truly bizarre moment compared to other episodes of an otherwise excellent well-informed, highly-engaging podcast.

At minute 18 of the podcast, Sam seemed hypnotized into head-nodding as DiResta described "Russian Interference in the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016." When Harris asked whether we know this to be true, DiResta responded there is "no basis for doubt," that it is "crystal clear," "it happened" and an "incontrovertible truth." A claim like this should result in dozens of questions, including who, what, when, where, how and why.

But that was the day Sam-the-Skeptic died. At Minute 20, Sam assured DiResta that this Russian interference only went in one direction. It "was not a pro-Clinton campaign." DiResta explained to Harris that the Russian "Internet Research Agency" was growing "tribes" on social media, based on divisive issues having nothing to do with Trump, then somehow switching those tribes and disillusionment into pro-Trump propaganda. DiResta explained that this social media propaganda was organized around ideas of "pride" of Americans "to exploit feelings of alienation" on topics as diverse as Immigration, southern culture, LGBT, Bernie Sanders, religious rights, BLM and pro-police. And then the Russians started "weaving in their support for candidate Trump." Somehow those evil-doers converted people who allegedly found these to be topics of interest to channel their frustrations into votes for Trump. And somehow these social media posts (a mere "81 Facebook pages") swayed the outcome of a national American election where multi-millions of dollars were being spent by the candidates themselves. DiResta spun this spectacularly unconvincing story based on black-box "trust me" causation. She was allowed to sell this wild story without backing it up with any meaningful corroborating statistics or any psychological analysis of how this tactic could possibly work, yet Harris sat on his hands for the entire podcast drinking the Kool-Aid.

Now we know a lot more about Renée DiResta. According to Michael Shellenberger's recent article: "Why Renee DiResta Leads The Censorship Industry: How a former CIA fellow came to lead US government efforts to stamp out disfavored speech on the Internet."

DiResta’s rise to the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community struck me back in December of last year as improbably meteoric. DiResta had repeatedly described her involvement in fighting disinformation as having started in 2013 when she became a new mom and grew concerned about spreading anti-vaccine information online. “In 2013,” she explained to Kara Swisher, “I had my first kid… You know, you have to do that preschool thing here, you’ve got to get them on a list a year early. I didn’t want to be in a preschool with a bunch of anti-vaxxers, candidly.” Two years later she was helping to fight ISIS online and by 2018 she was testifying before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

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NYT Forced to Acknowledge U.S. Spy Efforts due to Third Party Release of Leaked Documents

In Daniel Ellsberg's day, the NYT was seen as a place friendly to whistle-blowers and those who have documents exposing secret government activities. No longer. Further, the NYT refuses to post a link to the leaked documents, only linking to its own hand-wringing articles. Nowadays, secret documents are leaked elsewhere and the NYT needs to play catch-up, coupling its reluctant acknowledgement with a warning about the damage that could be caused by leaks about secret U.S. activity:

The leak has the potential to do real damage to Ukraine’s war effort by exposing which Russian agencies the United States knows the most about, giving Moscow a potential opportunity to cut off the sources of information. Current and former officials say it is too soon to know the extent of the damage, but if Russia is able to determine how the United States collects its information and cuts off that flow, it may have an effect on the battlefield in Ukraine.

The leak has already complicated relations with allied countries and raised doubts about America’s ability to keep its secrets. After reviewing the documents, a senior Western intelligence official said the release of the material was painful and suggested that it could curb intelligence sharing. For various agencies to provide material to each other, the official said, requires trust and assurances that certain sensitive information will be kept secret.

On the other hand, if you are part of the U.S. security state, the NYT is more than happy to post your propaganda, as it did in the case of the Nord Stream Pipeline. Unbelievably, knowing that it's "explanation" of the pipeline destruction is bullshit, the NYT suggests it's not a good idea to dig further into who destroyed the pipeline:

It's a good day to celebrate the immense good fortune of NYT reporters who get to draw big salaries while not having to do the difficult work of actually practicing journalism.

Proposed new Mission Statement for the New York Times: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.

Joe Biden promised to disable the pipeline prior to its destruction:

Biden's neocon crony, Victoria Nuland, helped to lead the post-destruction cheerleading, as Aaron Maté reminds us, but, again, Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.

No wonder the corporate media and their U.S. government partners hate Twitter 2.0...

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Matt Taibbi’s Patience with MSNBC Runs Out

Excerpt from Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Eat Me, MSNBC: Reviewing the last six years at the network that claims now to be concerned with integrity and accuracy":

[Corporate news outlets] could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

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About Two “So-Called” Journalists and the Corrupt Congresswoman who Attacked Them

Russell Brand, as animated as ever, showcases the corrupt history of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as he simultaneously advocates for free speech. Brand didn't appreciate that Wasserman-Schultz called Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger "so-called reporters." Got him a bit riled up. I had the same reaction when I watched the hearings live . . .

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Nashville Shooting is a Tale of Two Media Ecosystems

Whatever the story of the day, it will immediately hit the "go" button, causing the two corporate media tribes to roll up their sleeves to reverse-engineer what happened, turbo-charging certain convenient facts and suppressing other inconvenient facts. That is what has happened in the case of 28-year old Audrey Hale, who murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school. In a perverse way, it inspires a feeling of awe to behold the contortionist work product of the two well-oiled media machines. Oh, to be a fly in the wall in the back offices of those two teams!

As a citizen who is not naive, you might be thinking "But what actually happened? Just tell us the facts, please." Instead of becoming well-informed, however, you will be presented with an intensely processed/sterilized/lede-burying/contorted story that will give you, at best, about half of what happened. When we see this results of this process, story after story, week after week, it should challenge all of us to stop trusting any one "news" account. It should remind us that they are preaching to us, not teaching us about the real world. It should deeply insult us that they are coddling, as though we are children. They are convinced that we can't deal with the raw data, the who/what/when/where/why and how of the real world. Even worse, they are motivated by hubris; they think that they are so uniquely intelligent and courageous that only they can deal with harsh reality and that they are protecting us, commandeering the American Project to mold it into their own image and likeness. That has always been the mindset of censors. They self-appoint themselves because they convince themselves that they much smarter than the rest of us. They do this even though censorship is antithetical to free speech and even though, thoughout history, censorship has never worked.  That is the central lesson of Robert Corn-Revere's 2022 book: The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, well summarized at Reason.

The only solution is for each of us to start piecing together what happened bit by bit, from a wide variety of sources from a wide variety of perspectives. That is our plight, yet most people don't have the time to cull through this mess. We have jobs and families and for months, we have put off fixing that leaky faucet in the bathroom. Most of us thus give up in one of two ways.  A) We pick our favorite corporate news shop, assuming it to be credible, perhaps out of habit or perhaps because it is comforting to read that version of of news, thus feeding the confirmation bias.  Or B) We give up on spending time to independently figuring out what is true, thus giving up on being informed citizens, meaning that we will be blindly throwing darts on Election Day, if we vote at all. By giving up entirely, we either avoid "political discussions" or we mutter something like: "It's all a bunch of bullshit." The fact that so many Americans keep picking one of these two paths is reason to believe that the 39 long-dead signatories to the 1787 Constitutional Convention constantly spin in their graves.

Most of us feel this dysfunction with corporate media, as shown by surveys:

Where to turn? One of my favorite writers is Nellie Bowles, who publishes TGIF at The Free Press. Week after week, she does a great job of crystallizing the hypocrisy that runs through the veins of America's news corporations. She does this, writing with aplomb and more than a touch of humor. In today's TGIF, she does what she does best:

An inconvenient killer: The killer, Audrey Hale, was a biological female who identified as a man. My takeaway from this is murderous lunatics come in all shapes and sizes. And it seems likely that this person had some special animosity toward the religious school where they’d been a student.

But the mainstream media became obsessed with obscuring the situation and denying that the killer was trans.

Here’s the Reuters headline: “Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.” Hmm. Or: “CBS News is still working to confirm Hale’s gender identity.” From the NYT: “The suspect appeared to identify as a man in recent months.” Appeared to identify!According to the New Rules, followed strictly by the Times in all other cases, you’re actually not allowed to say someone “appears to identify as a woman.” The person simply is a woman. At worst, if you’re feeling heretical, you say they are a trans woman. Hale had his pronouns in hisbio, for godsake (he/him). But the NYT throws all that out, distancing the shooter from anything trans-related.

Eli Erlick, one of America’s most prominent trans activists, argued that sometimes shooters only take on a trans identity for convenience: “The Colorado shooter only temporarily took on the identity to avoid hate crime charges.” Weird to see Eli admitting that some people might take advantage of gender self-ID for their own nefarious purposes. Now, let’s talk about a 45-year-old male convict who suddenly identifies as a woman. . . wait, where are you going, Eli?

Others blamed Nashville for bringing the slaughter on themselves. Here’s New York Times contributor Benjamin Ryan on the situation: “Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, where @benshapiro & @mattwalshblog have led an ideological war against trans people.” Many deranged people online echoed this notion that Nashville had it coming. A few hours after the Nashville shooting, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs’ press secretary, Josselyn Berry, posted an image of a woman wielding two guns and wrote: “Us when we see transphobes.” She’s since resigned, though I’m sure she will pop up with a much better-paying job soon.

Anyway, the most important thing to happen in an inconvenient situation is to suppress it quickly. And that’s what has happened. Soon after the shooting, it had fallen from the top story slot. And within a day or two, it was all about gun control efforts and how Republicans were getting in the way.

Bad timing for your Day of Vengeance: It was very awkward that this week is the planned Trans Day of Vengeance. Days before the Nashville school shooting, leftist media personality Cenk Uygur had encouragedtrans people to get tons of guns: “If anyone should get guns, it should be trans Americans.”

How do we break out of these silos?  Jonathan Haidt urges us to reach out to those with whom we disagree in order to to have a more robust understanding of what is going on around us.

More . . .

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