Another departure for the show as Daniel and Jack chat about Sam Harris, inexplicably popular professional atheist, Intellectual Dark Webber, thought-experimenter, devil's advocate, mysteriously perennial victim of malicious context-removal, and definitely not a member of the far-right. Seriously... Sam Harris is not a nazi.  The fact that we're talking about him on a podcast in which we normally talk about nazis (and fascists and white supremacists, etc) doesn't mean we're saying he is one.  We're not. Nevertheless, we think he's relevant to our discussion. Something of a cathartic experience for both of us.  We had fun. Content warnings. * Show Notes: Sam Harris website: https://samharris.org/ Sam Harris podcast, "Making Sense." https://samharris.org/podcast/   SPLC: McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating pathways to the alt-right "The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence. "Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.” For posters on TRS, Harris’ work blended easily into that of more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, whose popular blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like,” is reposted on American Renaissance. The site “really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers,” one user wrote. Their “biggest stepping stone” was from Harris’ work to Kersey’s blog: “It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic/political drivers behind the pushing of ‘diversity.’”"   Sam Harris on Recode/Decode: HARRIS: "But it’s a larger problem that worries me that real liberals are vacating the space of rational conversation on certain topics, race and sex and gender and wealth and power and religion and immigration. Huge topics that a lot of people care about. And into that vacuum come right-wing nut cases, opportunists and grifters and narcissists like the president of the United States, and in the extreme, actual Nazis and white supremacists and, you know, populists of that flavor, who we shouldn’t want to empower and we’re empowering them, not just in the States, but I mean it’s even worse in Europe. This is a global problem. This is a point that David Frum has made, which I think is right, whatever you think about David’s politics. If liberals won’t defend specific ideas like secure borders, people will elect fascists to do the job. Enough people care about these things that if you’re going to call everyone a racist who’s concerned about immigration, eventually only a racist who doesn’t care about his reputation anymore will be elected to do that job."   Sam Harris "What Do Jihadis Really Want?" Dabiq 15, ref