Sam Harris, the famous atheist who has criticized Robert F. Kennedy for his crusade against vaccines, explained why he thought any blanket condemnation of vaccines could be dangerous.
Speaking on “Impact Theory” with host Tom Bilyeu, Harris prefaced his comments about vaccines by speaking of the efforts to bury the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop just prior to the 2020 election.
“My view is it is a coin toss as to what you do there,” he argued. “Now, if you raise the stakes, more, right, you make Trump even more sinister, you make the election even more tenuous, you make the information even more dubious, then the dials change. And so many of these decisions are not decisions you can make categorically in principle; it really is this pragmatic balancing of just what is true and what are the stakes,” he argued.
“You felt that it was obviously wrong to force people to get the MRNA vaccine for COVID, right?” he asked Bilyeu. “I would grant you, certainly in retrospect, that seems true, but if we change a few of the variables, I think your ethical intuitions and political intuitions would totally change.”
“You make it a much more obviously effective vaccine that really does block transmission, so like a sterilizing vaccine,” he theorized. “You make it a much more dangerous virus. You make it a virus that’s actually preferentially killing kids, rather than old people.”
“So now we’re in an environment where you&#8217;re deciding not to get vaccinated is putting my kids at risk. Do you get to make that choice? You might say, ‘Oh yes, I should be able to make that choice about my body,’ but dial up the deadliness of the pathogen, give us something like airborne Ebola that incubates for a month, you don’t know you have it and you walk around spreading it, and it’s got a 75% mortality rate and it&#8217;s mostly killing kids, no one gets to make that choice anymore. Literally, the cops come in and vaccinate you.”
“I would say that all of us agree to that,” he declared. “You turn up the lethality of the pathogen; you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine; you turn down the risk of the vaccine, give me a truly safe vaccine, where there’s not even one documented case of vaccine injury, right?”
“Then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that kind of environment,” he asserted. “Then it’s just a no-brainer. Then we just don’t tolerate diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high. It’s a full-on emergency. Bodies of kids are being stacked up in parks. There’s so many of them we don’t know what to do with them; we’ve got these mobile morgues and we have a vaccine that actually works?”
“Then we’ve got RFK Jr. saying, ‘Maybe we don’t want to get the vaccine’ on Rogan’s podcast, right? That’s the world I’ve been worried about ever since COVID,” he stated.
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“If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from COVID, at a rate of whatever it was, 1% today, but it was pretty much all kids, we would have had a very different experience,” he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVnc4YZc9hQ&amp;t=5900s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> John Wood in January. “There would have been no f***ing patience for vaccine skepticism.”

End of Faith Discussion Group

‘No One Gets To Make That Choice’: Sam Harris Argues Against Blanket Condemnation Of Vaccines

Sam Harris Argues Against Blanket Condemnation Of Vaccines

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Sam Harris

Vaccines

Author and podcast host <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/sam-harris" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sam Harris</a> said author and Daily Wire host Candace Owens &#8220;should not&#8221; have opinions on subjects like the vaccine, climate change, or the war in Ukraine, adding that people should also not listen to her about such matters.
Harris seemed to deem the mother-of-two unworthy of having her own opinions on issues he often speaks about because she&#8217;s not an &#8220;expert.&#8221; Owens recently <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/candace/ep-100-sam-harris-and-the-intellectual-dark-meltdown" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called out Harris</a> and other self-described intellectuals for discouraging people from doing their own research and only relying on the so-called experts.
&#8220;We&#8217;re swimming in a sea of misinformation, where you&#8217;ve got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who should not have an opinion on these topics,&#8221; Harris said. &#8220;There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety, or climate change, or the war in Ukraine, or anything else we might want to talk about, from Candace Owens.&#8221;
&#8220;She&#8217;s not a relevant expert on any of those topics, and what&#8217;s more is that she doesn&#8217;t seem to care,&#8221; he accused. &#8220;And she&#8217;s living in a culture that has amplified that ‘not caring’ into a business model, an effective business model. And there&#8217;s something very Trumpian about all that.&#8221;
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Sam Harris says <a href="https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RealCandaceO</a> isn&#39;t worthy of having opinions on vaccines or climate change. 
What Sam fails to realize is that Candace arrives at her opinions based on conversations with experts like <a href="https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RWMaloneMD</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ShellenbergerMD</a> 
Why does Sam feel he deserves an opinion? <a href="https://t.co/OhWWnkBsE0">pic.twitter.com/OhWWnkBsE0</a>
&mdash; Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) <a href="https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/1636014784167440387?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Owens shot back at Harris on Wednesday, writing, &#8220;You heard him! Unless you are an &#8216;expert,&#8217; you are not at all entitled to have an opinion about anything. Even the drugs that those who are motivated by profit are telling you to take. Even the manner in which your hard earned money is being spent overseas.&#8221;
&#8220;No opinions, please!&#8221; the BLEXIT founder emphasized.
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You heard him! Unless you are an “expert”you are not at all entitled to have an opinion about anything. Even the drugs that those who are motivated by profit are telling you to take. Even the manner in which your hard earned money is being spent overseas. No opinions, please! <a href="https://t.co/EnQzrNj1OX">https://t.co/EnQzrNj1OX</a>
&mdash; Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1636020134618824705?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Owens last month <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/candace/ep-100-sam-harris-and-the-intellectual-dark-meltdown" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called out Harris</a> for discouraging people from doing their own research and read a number of quotes from conservative author Thomas Sowell she found applicable, such as the following: “People who have acquired academic degrees, without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger [&#8230;].&#8221;
This is not the first time Harris has attacked Owens, previously calling the conservative a &#8220;blowhard and ignoramus.&#8221; 
&#8220;[Sam Harris], you called me a &#8216;blowhard and ignoramus&#8217; because of my COVID stance,&#8221; Owens, an early opponent of lockdown measures, responded to Harris last year. &#8220;Turns out you were sorely wrong but too convinced by your education to see what was plainly obvious. Free speech keeps society safe from arrogant pricks.&#8221;
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As a reminder, <a href="https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SamHarrisOrg</a>, you called me a “blowhard and ignoramus” because of my covid stance.
Turns out you were sorely wrong but too convinced by your education to see what was plainly obvious. 
Free speech keeps society safe from arrogant pricks.<a href="https://t.co/deHAXIYNUC">https://t.co/deHAXIYNUC</a>
&mdash; Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1594720994370936834?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 21, 2022</a></blockquote>
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Harris was a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/malone-interview-owens-reveals-sam-harris-phone-call-as-pair-discuss-godlessness-and-pandemic-panic" target="_blank" rel="noopener">COVID alarmist</a> who <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/podcaster-sam-harris-covid-killed-children-f-ing-patience-vaccine-skeptics" target="_blank" rel="noopener">expressed intolerance</a> for people who do not want to get vaccinated against COVID. He famously complained about low vaccine compliance earlier this year, suggesting there could be harsher mandate measures if COVID were more dangerous to children.
&#8220;The patience &#8212; there would&#8217;ve been no f***ing patience for vaccine skepticism, right,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And everyone would&#8217;ve recognized, this is not my body, my choice. This is you&#8217;re not gonna kill my kids with your ignorance.&#8221;
Owens last year, while <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/malone-interview-owens-reveals-sam-harris-phone-call-as-pair-discuss-godlessness-and-pandemic-panic" target="_blank" rel="noopener">speaking to Dr. Robert Malone</a>, a vaccine scientist who worked on the development of mRNA technology, said Harris called her at the start of the pandemic in sheer panic.
“I do not say this to knock him at all, it was just something that stuck with me for a very long time,” Owens said, recalling the phone call. “He sounded like he was in a bunker, and was just like, ‘You don’t understand, there’s going to be gurneys in the streets,’ and, ‘I know doctors in Italy, this is what’s going to happen in two weeks in the United States.’”
“He was in a mania,” she continued. “I just sort of listened to him, because, in my head, I wanted to be kind, but I was looking at my husband, thinking, this man needs a therapist. &#8230; He was unstable &#8212; and this is a smart person who got himself into this position.”
“I think it’s probably relevant that he’s an atheist,” Owens later asserted, to which Dr. Malone agreed. Religious people, the scientist said, have a stronger sense of community, which grounds them and makes them less likely to fall into a “psychosis” or panic about an issue, including COVID.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/malone-interview-owens-reveals-sam-harris-phone-call-as-pair-discuss-godlessness-and-pandemic-panic" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Owens Reveals Sam Harris Phone Call As Pair Discuss Godlessness And Pandemic Panic </a>

“Candace” Hosted By Candace Owens

Sam Harris Suggests Candace Owens Unworthy Of Having Opinions On Vaccine, Climate. Owens Responds.

Candace Owens

Climate Change

COVID

U.S.

Author and podcast host <a href="https://dailywire.com/news/shapiro-discusses-free-will-noted-atheist-sam-daily-wire/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sam Harris</a> said the &#8220;quiet part&#8221; out loud during a recent appearance on the Triggernometry podcast, comparing former President <a href="https://dailywire.com/news/the-day-the-fbi-raided-donald-trump/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Donald Trump</a> to an asteroid headed for Earth and admitting that he would have excused Hunter Biden for having the &#8220;corpses of children in his basement&#8221; to keep Trump from the White House.
Video of the podcast made its way to Twitter on Wednesday, and it showed an animated Harris explaining just how big a threat he believed Trump was — and just how much he would have excused from Hunter Biden and even President Joe Biden if it meant Trump would not win re-election.
WATCH:
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In which, Sam Harris says that it&#39;s ok to conspire against Trump getting elected, because he was the equivalent of an asteroid headed towards earth. Literally literally. Worth watching just for Francis&#39; reaction at the end. Omg. <a href="https://t.co/hVH7IPAx1t">pic.twitter.com/hVH7IPAx1t</a>
&mdash; Alexandros Marinos (@alexandrosM) <a href="https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1560061984699064320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 18, 2022</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Hunter Biden — at that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared,&#8221; Harris said. &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing — first of all, it&#8217;s Hunter Biden, it&#8217;s not Joe Biden &#8230; even, whatever scope of Joe Biden&#8217;s corruption is, like if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he&#8217;s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden&#8217;s deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right, or China. It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.&#8221;
Harris went on to claim that the allegations regarding Trump University alone were worse than anything that could possibly be found in Hunter Biden&#8217;s laptop — and then pivoted to address the critics whose concern was that the laptop was not investigated in a timely fashion and was essentially dismissed by media.
Noting that critics called the concerted effort to suppress the news about Hunter Biden &#8220;a leftwing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump,&#8221; he added, &#8220;Absolutely it was. Absolutely. But I think it was warranted.&#8221;
Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin interjected then, saying that he needed to address one of the points he felt Harris was trying to make: &#8220;You&#8217;re saying you&#8217;re content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president.&#8221;
Harris pushed back arguing that it wasn&#8217;t really &#8220;leftwing&#8221; because of support from people like the recently-defeated Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY).
&#8220;You&#8217;re content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody from being democratically elected,&#8221; Kisin rephrased.
Harris argued that it was not really a conspiracy either, comparing Trump to an asteroid hurtling toward earth and saying that a group of people discussing how to prevent its impact didn&#8217;t rise to the level of &#8220;conspiracy,&#8221; especially since it was largely being done out in the open.
&#8220;Decades from now I really hope science looks back at this time and studies this kind of mentality toward Trump. I&#8217;m pretty convinced TDS is real at this point, and I&#8217;m fascinated by it,&#8221; Red State Deputy Managing Editor Brandon Morse observed.
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Decades from now I really hope science looks back at this time and studies this kind of mentality toward Trump. I&#39;m pretty convinced TDS is real at this point, and I&#39;m fascinated by it. <a href="https://t.co/ButukZNkkT">https://t.co/ButukZNkkT</a>
&mdash; Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheBrandonMorse/status/1560270118797856772?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 18, 2022</a></blockquote>
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September 29, 2006. Incendiary non believer author Sam Harris, an L.A. resident, has a new book out

Author Admits He’d Ignore Hunter Biden Having ‘Corpses Of Children In His Basement’ To Keep Trump From Winning

Author Sam Harris Would Ignore Hunter Biden Having 'Corpses Of Children In His Basement' To Keep Trump From Winning

Donald Trump

Hunter Biden

Joe Biden

Podcast

Yesterday, hapless bloviator <a href="http://www.evefairbanks.com">Eve Fairbanks</a> wasted 3,000 words in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true">The Washington Post</a> on a risible comparison of open discourse, free speech, intellectual tolerance, civility, and reason to the ignominious defenders of chattel slavery in the antebellum South. Because if you are the <a href="http://www.evefairbanks.com/who-is-eve">unhealthily Civil War-obsessed</a> Eve Fairbanks, nothing apparently says &#8220;civility&#8221; and &#8220;tolerance&#8221; like seceding from the Union in evil defense of human enslavement and firing upon Fort Sumter to instigate a bloody conflict that would ultimately take the toll of 600,000-plus lives.
Really — <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true">read the whole screed</a>.
Fairbanks&#8217; <a href="http://www.evefairbanks.com/who-is-eve">&#8220;about me&#8221; section</a> of her freelance journalist website informs the curious reader: &#8220;I grew up in Virginia a little girl mad about the American Civil War. On weekends I begged my father to take me to all the battlefields: Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Antietam. I was transfixed by the moral question the war addressed and the incredible change its end effected: a change we&#8217;re still trying to make real.&#8221; As someone <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/13394/five-lessons-abraham-lincoln-would-have-todays-josh-hammer">proudly born on Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s birthday</a> and who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42341/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">views Lincoln as the greatest statesman</a> in the history of the American republic, I would succinctly say to Fairbanks: Seek help. This is not healthy. Only through such a narrow, blinders-restricting historical lens could someone possibly deduce that culturally defensive pleas for openness, tolerance, civility, and reason are eerily evocative of antebellum defenders of the &#8220;<a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/peculiar-institution">peculiar institution</a>.&#8221; Fairbanks seems woefully clueless to the reality that many of the greatest thinkers in recorded human history have called for openness, tolerance, civility, and reason for literally thousands of years.
Is Fairbanks so obtuse as to write out of history Aristotle&#8217;s emphasis — later emphasized, in part, by the likes of Maimonides and Aquinas alike — on reason as a quintessential feature of human nature and the necessary stepping stone toward the end goal of true human flourishing? Is Fairbanks so dense as to discard the classically liberal wisdom embodied by early 20th-century Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall: &#8220;I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?&#8221;
At its core, Fairbanks&#8217; juvenile logic is as follows: (A) antebellum slaveholders and slavery defenders stealthily couched their arguments through the lens of tolerance and civility; therefore, (B) contemporary &#8220;Intellectual Dark Web&#8221; types who complain about the intellectually stifling nature of contemporary politically correct leftism run amok, including Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, utilize &#8220;antebellum reasoning&#8221; as a mischievous way to make disreputable opinions seem perfectly reputable. Put another way, as Ben aptly formulated it on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/51218/ep-851-when-everyone-hitler">today&#8217;s podcast</a>: (A) Hitler owned and loved his dog; therefore, (B) all loving dog owners are Hitler. It ought not to take much more intellectual horsepower than merely being a sentient human to intuit the axiomatic asininity therein.
David Duke praised Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) earlier this year — would Fairbanks contend that every Omar supporter is a white nationalist? During the nadir of the Second World War, the United States made a purely tactical decision to ally with Stalin&#8217;s Soviet Union — would Fairbanks submit that every American governmental official, at the time, was a closet communist? Is everyone who enjoys eating at Chick-fil-A necessarily credited with personal support for the conjugal, one-man/one-woman definition of marriage?
The reality is that the discursive and rhetorical notions Fairbanks so sanctimoniously mocks — open discourse, free speech, intellectual tolerance, civility, and reason — are all inherently noble. But noble notions and pursuits, of course, are necessarily subject to intellectual capture, devious bastardization, and sly regurgitation by the forces of evil. Many of history&#8217;s greatest monsters have built support and sought justification for their evil deeds by means of appealing to virtue, reason, and the like. It takes a profound commitment to moral relativism to fail to discern any relevant historical distinctions between, say, Aristotle&#8217;s appeals to reason on the one hand, and Hitler&#8217;s genocide based on something closely approximating racist Aryan &#8220;reason,&#8221; on the other hand. And it takes a similarly robust commitment to moral relativism to fail to discern any relevant historical distinction between John C. Calhoun&#8217;s asserted belief in slavery as a &#8220;positive good,&#8221; on the one hand, and Ben Shapiro&#8217;s insistence on using biologically correct pronouns, on the other hand.
Open discourse and civil respect for opposing viewpoints is a cornerstone of the liberal, post-Enlightenment Western geopolitical order. Indeed, such open discourse and civil respect for harshly opposing viewpoints is what famously animated <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Lincoln-Douglas-debates">both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas</a> in their 1858 debate series. The debates themselves were fine and dandy; indeed, they were wondrous spectacles for a public ensorcelled by the statesmen&#8217;s dueling positions on Dred Scott, slavery in the western U.S. territories, and the question of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/13394/five-lessons-abraham-lincoln-would-have-todays-josh-hammer">judicial supremacy</a>. Instead, where public discourse and sentiment went awry was when violence broke out and the secessionist insurrectionists ultimately fired upon Fort Sumter. Eve Fairbanks, who presumably would have objected to the very spectacle of Lincoln and Douglas debating each other, would do well to learn such a rudimentary lesson.

Illustration Of Lincoln And Douglas Debate, c. 1858.

HAMMER: Washington Post Contributor Compares Pleas For Tolerance And Civility To Antebellum Slavery. She’s Comically Misguided.

Ben Shapiro

Dave Rubin

David Duke

Ilhan Omar

Intellectual Dark Web

Jordan Peterson

Leftism

Political Correctness

Slavery

On Sunday evening, famed atheist Sam Harris fired off a tweet announcing he would delete his Patreon account on Monday to protest Patreon banning several content creators from using their platform. Harris wrote:
<blockquote>
Dear Patreon Supporters &#8212;
As many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform. While the company insists that each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I don&#8217;t share the politics of the banned members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon&#8217;s &#8220;Trust and Safety&#8221; committee.
I will be deleting my Patreon account tomorrow. If you want to continue sponsoring my work, I encourage you to open a subscription at samharris.org/subscribe.
As always, I remain deeply grateful for your support.
Wishing you all a very happy New Year&#8230;.
Sam
</blockquote>
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&#8212; Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) <a href="https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1074504882210562048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Patreon has banned several personalities from the platform, including British YouTuber <a href="https://heavy.com/news/2018/12/carl-benjamin-aka-sargon-of-akkad/">Carl Benjamin</a>, better known as Sargon of Akkad, commentator James Allsup, and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-07/patreon-bans-controversial-far-right-activist-milo-yiannopoulos/10595788">Milo Yiannopoulos</a>. In July 2017, Patreon <a href="https://www.canadalandshow.com/lauren-southern-banned-by-patreon/">banned</a> former Rebel Media personality Lauren Southern.
<a href="https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/far_left_is_raising_money_on_patreon_to_inspire_insurrection.html">The American Thinker</a> quoted <a href="http://farleftwatch.com/far-left-extremists-are-raising-money-on-patreon-to-inspire-insurrection/">Far Left Watch</a>, which reported, &#8220;There are several far-left users who appear to be blatantly violating Patreon&#8217;s <a href="https://www.patreon.com/guidelines">Community Guidelines</a>. These users are raising thousands of dollars each month and are actively using that money to organize and advocate for violent and often illegal criminal activity.&#8221; Far Left Watch listed Revolutionary Left Radio and The Guillotine Podcast.
After the banning of Sargon, Jordan Peterson, a fellow member of the Intellectual Dark Web along with Harris, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/23325113">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>
I have been engaged in a series of intense conversations with many of the people in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web over the last two weeks because of the banning by Patreon of Carl Benjamin, colloquially known as Sargon of Akkad.
I am an admirer of Sargon, and he was a great friend of mine when I was in deep trouble two years ago. I think there is no excuse for deplatforming him (particularly when his fundamental crime was defending himself against neo-Nazis). I have been talking continually with the majority of members of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, and we are determining what steps to take. We thought about moving to alternatively crowd-funding platforms such as SubscribeStar, but it isn&#8217;t obvious that will constitute a long-term solution. Dave Rubin and I (and others) have been discussing the establishment of a Patreon-like enterprise that will not be susceptible to arbitrary censorship, and we are making progress, but these things cannot be rushed without the possibility of excess error.
But I am seriously displeased about the removal of Sargon (and many other people) and will definitely do something about it. Rest assured, if you will (1) that I remain deeply grateful for your support and committed to ensure that the money you pledge will be devoted to the highest cause possible and (2) that none of this is being treated with casual disregard.
</blockquote>

Famed Atheist Deletes Patreon Account Over Banning Of Anti-Leftists

Milo Yiannopoulos

Two weeks ago, philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris had Ezra Klein, who is Vox&#8217;s editor in chief, on his podcast, Waking Up. The topic: Klein&#8217;s website had labeled Harris a participant in &#8220;pseudoscientific racialist speculation&#8221; because Harris had had the temerity to host social scientist Charles Murray on his program. Murray, you&#8217;ll recall, is the co-author of The Bell Curve, a book that discusses IQ differentials among population groups, among other topics. And Murray himself has been cast out of the good graces of the Left for having the temerity to discuss inconvenient data; last year, a crowd of Antifa hoodlums broke up Murray&#8217;s lecture at Middlebury College and injured a fellow professor.
Harris, like Murray, was cast out of the good graces of the intersectional Left just a few years ago, in 2014, when he pointed out that Islam is more of a threat to the peace of humanity than Christianity is. Harris stated, &#8220;Islam at this moment is the motherlode of bad ideas.&#8221; Ben Affleck responded by calling Harris&#8217;s statement &#8220;gross&#8221; and &#8220;racist.&#8221; Harris, by contrast, explained, &#8220;We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every critique of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people, and that&#8217;s just intellectually ridiculous.&#8221;
Harris isn&#8217;t the only leftist to have found himself intellectually homeless &#8212; but with a growing population of followers. Bret Weinstein, an Occupy Wall Street&#8211;supporting, &#8220;deeply progressive&#8221; professor at Evergreen State College, has become a popular man on the intellectual right despite his politics. Why? Because Weinstein refused to bow to identity politics by taking a day off of class in order to comply with the so-called Day of Absence at Evergreen &#8212; a day on which white students and faculty were supposed to leave campus. This led to Weinstein&#8217;s exit from the university.
Those who have been cast out of the good graces of the liberal intelligentsia include others, such as Jordan Peterson, who until quite recently was appreciated as a scholar in psychology and the author of a difficult and complex tome, Maps of Meaning. But he came to prominence in Canada in 2016 because he refused to abide by politically correct strictures regarding the use of transgender pronouns. He stated in the National Post, &#8220;I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words &#8216;zhe&#8217; and &#8216;zher.&#8217;&#8221;
All of these people have built serious audiences, at least in part because of their refusal to comply with the diktats of the Left. What do they have in common? First off, their refusal. They are case studies in what I&#8217;ve been terming the Bartleby Effect.
<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/sam-harris-jordan-peterson-intellectual-renegades-audiences-growing/">To read the rest, click here</a>.

Shapiro At ‘National Review’: The Bartleby Effect

In December, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro appeared on stage in San Francisco with noted atheist Sam Harris and the brilliant mathematician Eric Weinstein to discuss various issues, foremost among them Harris&#8217; insistence that free will does not exist and Shapiro&#8217;s rebuttal to that position.
The two-hour event was later broadcast on Harris&#8217; podcast, which you can hear below. Here are some excerpts from the discussion centering on Shapiro and Harris&#8217; battle over free will:
<blockquote>
Harris: Can&#8217;t we just chart a course toward greater fulfillment, greater peaceful collaboration based an intelligent analysis of what it is to be social beings?
Shapiro: I don&#8217;t think you can unless you&#8217;re willing to acknowledge that reason, the capacity to choose, the capacity to act in the world, that these things exist and that has to be done based on an assumption because you&#8217;re opposed to some of these things; you don&#8217;t think free will exists.
Harris: Yeah, but I also don&#8217;t think you need free will to live a moral life.
Shapiro: I&#8217;ve never really understood that position so we&#8217;ll have to get into it. To me, if you&#8217;re going to have a conversation with someone and convince them, you have to agree on the value of reason. The value of reason is not something that evolutionary biology suggests. What does reason have to do with evolutionary biology per se? It&#8217;s a mode of action that is more likely to preserve your species. It doesn&#8217;t create objective truth. The notion of an objective truth that exists apart from you and it exists whether or not you are living, this not something that can necessarily be gathered from science alone. You have to make certain assumptions about the universe and the way that your mind reflects what is present in the universe, as Kant would argue.
Harris: It&#8217;s true that an evolutionary perspective on ourselves suggests that we have not evolved to know reality perfectly. If you believe that we are apes that have been selected for &#8212; and all of our cognitive architecture is built by virtue of its adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms, yes, it&#8217;s hard to believe that we are perfectly designed to do mathematics or anything else that is­­ ­&#8212;
Shapiro: But you do feel that we can still gather objective truth.
Harris: But even that picture suggests a wider context of minds more powerful than our own that could have evolved or our own future minds.
Shapiro: Why would you appeal to minds that have not yet evolved or future minds as opposed to a Creator who just put us here with certain capacities?
Harris: Because that, I would argue, we don&#8217;t have any evidence for. What we do have evidence for is that we&#8217;re here, we understand a lot about the mechanism that is operating now that got us here that is causing us to be the way we are; we can see our relationship to other life forms; we know that you look at chimps that share 99% of our DNA and they obviously share a lot of the evolved precursors of our own social and cognitive architecture; but they have no idea of what we&#8217;re up to, right. So they&#8217;re cognitively closed to most of what we&#8217;re doing and most of what we care about and by analogy we know that we could be cognitively closed to what we might be capable of in a thousand years now. That our sense of what engagement with the cosmos &#8212;
Shapiro: But I guess the argument is that if you&#8217;re arguing that we&#8217;re cognitively closed to certain things, then why are you arguing which specific things we&#8217;re cognitively closed to?
Harris: I&#8217;m just saying that once you admit it&#8217;s possible to not know what you&#8217;re missing, factually, ethically, spiritually, in any domain of inquiry, it&#8217;s possible to come up against a horizon line where the known meets the unknown.
Shapiro: You&#8217;re sounding religious here. (laughter)
</blockquote>
Later in the discussion, Shapiro focused on the gap between the atheist&#8217;s insistence that knowing facts without the guidance of a transcendent morality could lead to a moral system. Harris recalled speaking with Rick Warren, whom he said argued that without God people would just be raping and killing each other. Harris claimed Warren said that without a belief in Hell, Warren himself would act in such a way.
Shapiro said he didn&#8217;t agree with everything Warren said, but he did believe that a scientific materialist worldview could not construct a moral system because &#8220;is&#8221; has nothing to do with &#8220;ought.&#8221; He continued:
<blockquote>
Science is about &#8220;is&#8221; and has no capacity to say anything about &#8220;ought&#8221; other than constructions that are based in a notion of free will that you yourself reject.
</blockquote>
Harris responded, &#8220;If that were true, how would you explain the moral character of my life? I mean I&#8217;m not raping and killing people. I live a life that you would recognize to be ethically well-structured.&#8221;
Shapiro answered, &#8220;As I just said moments ago, I don&#8217;t think you have to be a religious person to lead a moral life. I do think that there has to be a religious underpinning to a moral system because I don&#8217;t think you can, you&#8217;re using terminology that is based on certain assumptions about human nature that I&#8217;m not sure that you are recognizing that you reject.&#8221;
Harris argued that taking free will off the table does not &#8220;rob us of morality,&#8221; adding that &#8220;we still have a preference between an excruciating plunge into civil war and needless misery and building a viable global civilization where the maximum number of people thrive.&#8221; That led to this exchange:
<blockquote>
Shapiro: You&#8217;re using a lot of active verbs for a person who is a product of environment and genetics.
Harris: No, but it&#8217;s all happening. We can build robots that act. I&#8217;m moving my hands now but I honestly don&#8217;t know how.
Shapiro: But is the robot moving the hands? The point that I&#8217;m making is when you say &#8220;we can discern, &#8220; &#8220;we can build,&#8221; &#8220;we can create,&#8221; &#8220;we can decide,&#8221; who is &#8212;
Harris: Exactly like you speaking now, you don&#8217;t know how you follow the rules of English grammar.
Shapiro: I&#8217;m not arguing that you can&#8217;t make a convincing case that I don&#8217;t have free will; I&#8217;m arguing that you can&#8217;t make a convincing case you can build a civilization on lack of free will.
Harris: Take this case, the moral relevance of this, and Eric, I&#8217;d be interested to know if you agree with this; It seems to me that once you admit you either won the lottery or you didn&#8217;t on some level, that conveys a kind of ethical commitment or an ethical obligation that you wouldn&#8217;t otherwise have.
Shapiro: Why?
Harris: You can&#8217;t be the kind of person who then says, &#8220;Basically you&#8217;re on your own, you either make it based on your effort or not.&#8221; This goes to questions of should we have universal health care. It&#8217;s not just an economic answer.
Shapiro: You&#8217;re going directly from &#8220;is&#8221; to &#8220;ought&#8221; with no stop on the train at all. For literally decades, there were very wealthy and very sophisticated countries that took the premises that you are building upon and built some of the most repressive regimes in history.
Harris: But they had other things going on; they had bad ideas of economics; they had personality cults &#8212;
Shapiro: I agree with all of that, but the point that I&#8217;m making is that you are making definitive statements about value judgments with reference to a naturally selected interaction of biology and environment. I just don&#8217;t know how you are getting from one to the other. Do robots have morality, is what I&#8217;m asking you.
Harris: They certainly would if we built them to have conscious states that allow for suffering and well-being. That&#8217;s coming, and we&#8217;re going to have to ask that question.
Shapiro: So we can be God, but God can&#8217;t make us those kinds of robots, is that the argument?
</blockquote>
Harris attacked the idea that principles propounded centuries or millennia ago should be adhered to, arguing that humanity should &#8220;Outgrow their religious provincialism.&#8221;
Shapiro responded, &#8220;I have a couple of quick responses to that: the best tools available are all predicated on assumptions that can only be made about human action and that you fundamentally reject. Again, things like reason, things like free will. Why are we having a conversation here tonight? Why did anyone show up here tonight?&#8221;
Harris answered, &#8220;Reason does not require free will. Reason requires having a mind that can follow an argument and can care about whether or not you&#8217;re following it.&#8221; This exchange followed:
<blockquote>
Shapiro: But me responding to your argument is not a matter of choice at that point.
Harris: Reason is never a matter of choice; if I convince you &#8212;
Shapiro: Then why is reason superior to amygdala response?
Harris: It&#8217;s scalable; if I give you sufficiently good reasons for anything you will helplessly believe what I believe; it won&#8217;t be a matter of choice; you never choose.
Shapiro: But why are you giving me those reasons? Again, you&#8217;re giving me a lot of active verbs for a guy who has no capacity to choose himself. You&#8217;re using my language and then you&#8217;re building a house using the bricks that I&#8217;m giving you.
</blockquote>
Harris did not address the question, simply repeating his claim that a person would &#8220;helplessly believe, etc.&#8221;
Shapiro stated, &#8220;You cannot have reason without making an assumption about the function of the human mind that is not evidenced by evolutionary biology or science.&#8221;
Harris turned to Weinstein, asking, &#8220;Eric, help me here.&#8221;
Shapiro pressed, &#8220;What I&#8217;m asking is why you think the firing of certain neurons is more morally appropriate than the firing of other neurons?&#8221;
Harris, &#8220;Sorry, I would be happy to get to that but let me just stick with reason for a second.&#8221; Then he stumbled on about adding oranges, prompting Shapiro to step in and state bluntly:
<blockquote>
Here&#8217;s the problem, I think, and the disconnect we&#8217;re having. I&#8217;m not arguing that you don&#8217;t agree reason exists; I&#8217;m arguing that your whole mode of creating a societal morality is based on this reason. And you&#8217;re making a moral argument that reason is superior to any other method of eliciting a response. The way that you are talking about reason is that reason is basically a key and you stick it in the lock of my thinking and suddenly the door opens. I&#8217;m asking you: there are many ways to open that door, including using a battering ram, which has been the preferred method of most governments over history. You need to make an argument to me why it is more moral, how you are getting to the &#8220;ought&#8221; of reason without any appeal to a morality that exists beyond you, especially when you get to complex moral questions that are not two plus two equals four and are complex moral questions like what the tax rate should be.
</blockquote>
Listen to the full discussion below:
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LISTEN: Shapiro Discusses Free Will With Noted Atheist Sam Harris

&#8220;I will be deleting my Patreon account on September 1st,&#8221; announced Sam Harris during his July 25th-published Waking Up podcast.
Patreon is an online fundraising mechanism through which Harris has, at least as of July 25th, more financial supporters than directly through his own website.
Harris noted a wave of left-wing agitation campaigns directed at shutting down all views dissenting from their neo-Marxist dogma, fearing that he will be financially damaged by such campaigns in the future.
Dependence on third-party platforms such as Patreon and YouTube are too risky for financial viability, said Harris, adding that he seeks full independence and control over revenue streams from his patrons.
Harris pointed to Patreon&#8217;s <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/18893/patreon-kills-lauren-southerns-account-robert-kraychik">recent termination</a> of Lauren Southern&#8217;s account. At the time, Southern said Patreon&#8217;s decision eliminated most of her income.
Patreon&#8217;s CEO <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmcK6GvgVPs">subsequently denied</a> that his company&#8217;s decision to terminate Southern&#8217;s account was motivated by political consideration.
Partial transcript below.

<blockquote>
If you&#8217;re supporting [my] podcast through Patreon, you should&#8217;ve received an email from me announcing that I&#8217;ll be leaving the platform on September 1st&#8230; I don&#8217;t leave Patreon lightly. In fact, there are more people supporting me on Patreon than through my own website, but there are now many reasons why it&#8217;s become important that I consolidate support for the show on my site, however you might be interested to know the proximate cause of this decision. 
I noticed the other day that Patreon cancelled the account of a conservative journalist &#8211; Lauren Southern &#8211; without warning, and without, as they stated, any possibility of appeal. Now, I&#8217;m not taking a position with respect to Southern &#8211; I&#8217;m actually not really familiar with her work &#8211; but this happened the same day that Richard Dawkins was deplatformed at UC Berkeley; and this is an action that should go down in the annals of [politically correct] insanity. This was right after his book, &#8220;The Selfish Gene,&#8221; was voted the most inspiring science book of all time in a public poll that was commissioned by the Royal Society, so the left continues to eat itself.
These events are part of a wave of deplatformings and demonitizations on YouTube and elsewhere, and it&#8217;s being driven almost entirely by leftist confusion about free speech. I consider myself well left-of-center on almost every topic, but this is just the Wild West out here in terms of people organizing campaigns of protest against totally legitimate and blameless scholars and journalists and scientists, and I realized that I just can&#8217;t afford to have this podcast be even slightly vulnerable to the whims of third-party.
&#8230;
I think the future of digital content lies in audience support, not in ads, and Patreon has really stepped into that space by itself. So please don&#8217;t get the wrong idea here, but in the current environment, I&#8217;ve decided I need full control over my platform. This could be a costly move, I recognize.
</blockquote>

Harris concluded his explanation by inviting his supporters to support him directly through his website and outside of Patreon as an intermediary.
Listen to Harris&#8217; explanation for his forthcoming departure from Patreon below.

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Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.

Sam Harris: I’m Leaving Patreon

Free Speech

&#8220;Redistribution is the end game,&#8221; said Sam Harris in an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4utkb6vSyQ">April interview</a> with Joe Rogan, speaking of what he described as economic inevitabilities resulting from the ascendance of artificial intelligence (AI) and mass automation.

Harris pondered a future in which many human needs and wants are fulfilled by AI and mass automation.

The inevitable ubiquity of AI and mass automation, said Harris, will drive rates of unemployment far higher than contemporary levels. Dealing with such a future, he added, requires a political paradigm shift away from free market principles (emphasis added):

<blockquote>
&#8220;There precipice we&#8217;re getting to is, virtually everyone is gonna be [made redundant by artificial intelligence and automation]. And that&#8217;s a good thing. Why can&#8217;t they figure out that they just wanna learn new languages and spend more time with their kids and play frisbee and have fun. We need a new ethic and politics that decouples a person&#8217;s claim on existence from doing profitable work that someone will pay you for, because a lot of that work is going away.
&#8230;

This is the greatest opportunity in human history. We&#8217;re talking about canceling the need for dangerous, boring, repetitive work. And freeing up humanity to do interesting, creative, fun things.&#8221;
</blockquote>
The spread of AI and mass automation in a free market environment, continued Harris, would almost certainly exacerbate &#8220;wealth inequality.&#8221; He pushed a Marxist narrative of free markets inevitably yielding extreme polarization of wealth between groups, with class warfare resulting in revolution:

<blockquote>
&#8220;At a certain point, the wealth inequality will be obviously unsustainable. You can&#8217;t have multiple trillionaires walking around living in compounds with razor wire, and just moving everywhere by private jet, and then massive levels of unemployment in a society like ours. At a certain point, when the richest people realize, &#8216;Enough is enough. We have to spread this wealth because otherwise people are just gonna show up at our compounds with their AR-15s or their pitchforks.&#8217; The society will not sustain it. There has to be some level of wealth inequality that is unsustainable; that people will not tolerate &#8230; Redistribution is the end game.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Harris did not comment on levels of government control &#8211; either in the social or economic spheres of society &#8211; that citizens or subjects &#8220;will not tolerate.&#8221; In other words, growing restrictions on human freedom resulting from increasing governmental centralization of power and control were not commented on.

Self-reliance in the vein of Calvinism, said Harris, is a value that must be overcome to transition to a future era of plenty:

<blockquote>
&#8220;If we have a culture of people who think, &#8216;I don&#8217;t want any handouts. And I certainly don&#8217;t want my neighbor to get any handouts. And I don&#8217;t want to pay any taxes so that he can be a lazy bum,&#8217; if we have this hangover from Calvinism, it makes it impossible to talk creatively and reasonably about what has changed.&#8221;
</blockquote>



Harris and Rogan discussed &#8220;universal basic income,&#8221; a contemporary rebranding a socialist and communist state-driven redistributionist &#8220;&#8221;social welfare.&#8221;

Harris and Rogan touched on futuristic speculations made by political economist Jeremy Rifkin in his 1995 book, &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/End-Work-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/B000ILZ5L0">The End of Work</a>,&#8221; which predicts rapid increases in leisure time resulting from a fusion of AI and mass automation fulfilling many human needs.

On &#8220;climate change,&#8221; Harris pushed the narrative of anthropogenic global warming. &#8220;We need a carbon tax, clearly,&#8221; he said, describing &#8220;clean tech jobs&#8221; as a growing and profitable industry.

Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.

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