Peak ‘rational atheist’ Sam Harris has expressed gratitude towards Jack, the CEO of Twitter, for suspending the account of incumbent US President Donald Trump. He said that the suspension “should have happened years ago” and that “we’ve paid a terrible price for the delay.”
Sam Harris was not always so unhinged. Once upon a time, he did appreciate the dangers of social media censorship. In December 2018, the peak ‘rational atheist’ deleted his account of Patreon, a platform for subscription service, after the platform suspended the accounts of numerous conservatives alleging that they were associated with ‘hate groups’.
He said then, “As many of you know Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from this platform. While the company insists each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I don’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’s ‘Trust and Safety’ committee.”
Since then, however, the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), however, appears to have gotten to him. He has made some extraordinarily bizarre comments of late. Sam Harris had said in an October 2020 episode of his podcast, “Osama bin Laden, as a person, is far more understandable to me and far less reprehensible, personally, psychologically, than Trump.”
Sam Harris has said in the past, “I find Trump more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden… With Osama bin Laden, it’s just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense, right? He’s making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He’s committed to a cause greater than himself.”
He had added, “I don’t doubt he had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about. He’s a real person, right? And in some ways, he is kind of a moral hero in a very bad game. And so therefore, he’s kind of prototypically evil when viewed from my game. He’s a person of actual substance- he’s just committed to the wrong ends, whereas Trump is the negation of all those things.”