Never Trumpers Giving Shitty Advice: Sam Harris Edition

First, a little background.  This was Tim Miller, on his Bulwark podcast, November 21, 2024:  

Miller:   I've stayed on "X" part because of my addiction, that's not as bad as [Elon Musk's] but is... is real and something I'm reflecting on.  But I... I  refused to go into a liberal bubble social media. I was on Threads for one week it was unbearable. I, like, if this podcast conversation we just had... if any sentence of it was put onto Threads you would be overwhelmed with people, like, shaking their finger at you and telling you how wrong you are.

Also this:

PSA: Not going to Bluesky or squib or Meatspace. If you want to do that, cool, you can find my stuff at https://t.co/F6fA5UlPNV / Youtube.

I find Elon mostly terrible but I don't think siloing is healthy for our discourse or useful for my job/understanding of our politics. TL;DR pic.twitter.com/OH4gOH8Ifv

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) November 12, 2024

And here is Tim Miller four years earlier, in October of 2020, on Elon Musk's Nazi shithouse he will not leave because he values open and honest exchanges which -- boo hoo! -- he can't find on a "liberal bubble social media".  

At the time, he had been bitching that he was impatient with Republican fence-straddlers who kept hemming and hawing, pretending they weren't sure who Trump "really" was, because, he said, we know who Trump is. 

True enough.  However, I had the temerity to I point out to him on that it had been the Left which had actually been right about the Right all along. 

Here was his reaction to that open, honest exchange.

So why bring it up?

Because you may have noticed that the virtual MSNBC subdivision which The Bulwark has become really, really doesn't want to hear from Liberals.  At all.  They have one, tame, in-house lefty who can get as dark and depressing as anyone else, but there is a palpable aversion to putting anyone behind a microphone who might bring receipts from the Before Time to the party.

Might use the "T" word -- "trajectory" -- when talking about the Republican party.

Can't have that.  No, no no.  

Instead, Tim Miller brought on the insufferable Sam Harris, who came roaring in with one goal in mind: angrily deploy every straw man in the troop carrier to explain why Kamala Harris was unable to persuade a mob of unpersuadable lumpen MAGA goofs.  Because, I guess, insufferable slag-they-Left-without-ceasing assholes like Sam Harris are much closer to The Bulwark spirit than any liberal, anywhere.

I will translate what I heard into human language.

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of the completely insane Left's complete domination of "the culture"  [Translation:  Speech codes and other dumbfuckery on a handful of elite universities.]

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of all the trans stuff.  

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of  "Latinx".  

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of, OMG, the pronouns!

But she didn't run on any of those things.  Joe Biden didn't say or do any of those things, or govern in any way that reflected any of those things.

Sure, but Harris didn't disavow any of those things hard enough or loud enough!  Harris needed to "Sister Soulja" them tranny weirdos!

Also Kamala Harris lost the election because of the wokety, wokety woke woke!

So should Trump have disavowed any of the thousands of obvious, deranged, hateful lies he has spewed?    Should he have had to explain the many promises he broke, or policies he reversed?

Oh fuck no.  Voters just laugh that shit off.

Sam Harris flatly claimed there is an "epidemic of double mastectomies among 16-year-olds”, which is wildly untrue,. and that we are “watching biological men punch women in the face in MMA contests or anywhere" which is Trump-level lying.  

Honestly, I was waiting for Harris to angrily insist that part of the reason Kamala Harris lost was that she wouldn't sign Grover Norquist's No-Tax-Increase pledge, or her flag pin was crooked, or she refused to agree to put Ayn Rand's picture on the $20 bill.   

Actual Sam Harris quote: 

Harris: The Democratic party is a... is a this very rigged, uh, Rube Goldberg device of death.  Which is just, y'know, rigged to destroy, to... to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever.  And, uh, we have to... we have to tear it down to the studs. I mean it's just like this... is there... Actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics. Otherwise, y'know, this... no one we put forward will be electable.

Tim Miller's mighty pushback to this tantrum was:

Miller: Yeah, um, yeah I don't know... I mean.. I... some of that is maybe a little overstated for me.  Certainly having a candidate who could speak about it, uh, off the cuff and speak about it deftly and I...

Another Sam Harris quote: 

Harris: Black Lives Matter was clearly a a highly corrupt operation, uh, and a grift...

Harris came spring-loaded and ready to spend an hour raging that Kamala lost because of my pet issue, which makes me wonder about the rarified, well-appointed bubble these assholes live in.  Do they know any actual humans?  Except to stop for gas and take a piss and complain about the weak WiFi, have any of these people ever spent more than five minutes in places like where I live?  Around a lot of actual Trump voters?  

Because, take it from me, nothing is more futile than trying to persuade these reprogrammable meatbags of anything they don't wish to hear.   If you spent a week, slowly debunking the nonsense around trans issues, they'd just switch to some other rationalization for doing what they were going to do all along anyway. 

Finally, after the third troop transport full of straw men landed and Harris had gotten so high on his self-righteous dudgeon that he was in danger of being clouted on the head by orbiting space junk, even Tim Miller hadda say, now wait a minute.  

Miller brought up the Nancy Mace example, and suddenly master-debater Harris began equivocating and back-pedaling.  He hadn't heard all the details, y'know.  And he wasn't so sure Tim was explaining every nuance of the situation, y'know.  And he wasn't really up on the topic, y'know.  

Really?  Because based on his obsession with this one fucking subject, I'd have thought this was the only topic he was really up on.  They he began spinning out "answers" like solving this "problem" "architecturally".  Y'know, just build more bathrooms and make them gender-neutral.  Democrats could just go ahead and do that by themselves, right?

Tim pointed out that overarching all of this was the problem of the huge double standard here: Democrats are held to high standards, while Republicans are held to no standards at all.  

Harris responded by taking out his invisible meerschaum philosopher pipe, and mused that, yes, this was a problem  Puzzing.  Very puzzling indeed.  Then he walked himself backwards up the same twisted path he had just come down, negating pretty much everything he had just said and musing that this was indeed a vexing problem.  Perhaps one that could not be solved by politics at all because Republican voters, y'know, are blood oath members of a personality cult, and, as such, basically lost to reason.

And then it was over.

And you know what?

I'm beginning to suspect The Bulwark only values certain kinds of open and honest exchanges.

I Am The Liberal Media