“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement - I would not have cared.”

Believe it or not, that’s actually the least controversial thing Sam Harris said in a recently released clip from his appearance on the “Triggernometry” podcast. He followed that up by asserting that “Whatever [the] scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is, if we can just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in…it doesn’t even stack up against Trump University.”

If this isn’t Trump Derangement Syndrome, I don’t know what is. Such a claim would be suspect under any circumstances, but Harris makes this argument as the Biden administration funnels tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons and other aid to Ukraine for its war against Russia. That this is a “firefly to the sun,” as he puts it, next to Trump’s fake college scam, is utterly ludicrous.

But Harris was just getting started. These deranged musings were merely the setup to his main point, which was that the censoring of The New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop days before the 2020 election was justified. Harris granted that Twitter’s suppression of the story under the false pretense that it was Russian disinformation was in essence a “conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump,” but nonetheless insisted it was “warranted.”

Wow, you can actually watch Sam Harris self-destruct his career in 2 min 20 seconds.

"Taking down the New York Post's [laptop article]? That's a Left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. But I think it was warranted."pic.twitter.com/0bIoWJDdNa

— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) August 18, 2022

The host then pressed him for clarification, after which Harris slightly walked back his “conspiracy” concession with one of his classic “thought experiments.” He posed the question, “If there was an asteroid hurdling toward Earth, and we got in a room with all of our friends and talked about what we could do to deflect its course, is it a conspiracy?”

To answer his question: yes - if half of the world’s population wants the asteroid to hit the Earth.

Harris’ analogy perfectly illustrates the fundamental contradiction at the heart of resistance liberalism. They see Trump as a singular threat to democracy, yet when pressed, they will fully endorse subversive, conspiratorial, and anti-democratic means of opposing him. They must maintain their view of Trump as something like an asteroid on a collision course with Earth in order to justify these tactics, because to accept Trump for what he actually is - a democratically elected leader - would lay to bare their true feelings about democracy itself: they hate it.

This was plainly obvious from the minute Trump declared his 2016 candidacy, and is even more obvious now. From Hillary’s “deplorables” line to their relentless indignation over the January 6th riot, liberals have not only attacked Trump himself as an odious figure, but they’ve cast all of his supporters in that same mold in order to delegitimize their participation in the democratic process. In a real democracy, everyone gets a say, no matter how repulsive they may be. But liberals don’t want real democracy. Instead, they want a democracy curated to their particular tastes and sensibilities, and which excludes those who don’t conform to them. This, of course, is no democracy at all.

Sam Harris and his ilk would be better suited to just admit all of this out in the open. It’s perfectly legitimate to oppose democracy - the Greeks themselves had many negative things to say about it, chief among them is the power it grants to a mostly ignorant and unenlightened population. If Harris’ cohort thinks the American public is too stupid to take seriously their responsibilities as democratic actors, they should just say so, and propose an alternative form of government that relegates the rubes to the irrelevance they feel befits them. But to claim, as liberals do, that their opposition to Trump is motivated primarily by some civic obligation to protect democracy, is patently ridiculous.

We should be grateful to Sam Harris for so clearly articulating his upside-down ethos in all of its self-negating absurdity. Never has any prominent liberal expressed such bald-faced contempt for the very democratic norms and ideals they claim to cherish so deeply. It was a rare candid moment from an elite clique typically much more careful to couch their arguments in ways that conceal their honest opinions about democracy. It’s good that one of them finally let it rip.

Photo: Triggernometry