Sam Harris on the Susan Rice "Unmasking" controversy - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. Maybe the story has been clarified while we've been talking, but it now seems that Susan Rice came out. At one point she said she knew nothing about the unmasking of Trump associates in this recent surveillance case. And now it seems that it is claimed that she actually asked to have certain names unmasked. And so this is being seized upon, again, just in the last few hours, as an example of a lie, right, which seems very sinister. But as though it equalizes the two sides here. So let's say worst case scenario Susan Rice lied about having some knowledge of this investigation. That doesn't, it says something bad about Susan Rice. It says something, I mean, she has to deal with the consequences of that lie, but it doesn't exonerate all of the lying that Trump has done about everything under the sun, right? So what's so destabilizing here is that the moment, and this is even true of honest errors, the moment that a news organization like yours or the New York Times commits an honest error, that gets pointed to from those who want to treat the mainstream news media as just fake news as see, everything's the same, like, like, like, like, like, they're, you're no better than, than somebody who's just manufacturing fake news on a laptop in his basement. So it's like, it's, and the flip side of that is when Alex Jones gets something right, it seems to, it seems to make him look like a, a, a dignified journalistic enterprise analogous to the New York Times or to ABC News. And neither of those things are true. I mean, there are small lies and then there are huge lies. There are honest mistakes committed by totally reputable organizations that are really trying to get their facts straight. And then there are malicious, there's just militia, malicious propaganda outlets that are not at all trying to get their facts straight and trying to engineer everyone's credulity and ignorance into something that is just purely a matter of, of, you know, tribal sentiment, you know? So we lose our ability to distinguish these different projects when we say, oh, look, you know, fake news, both sides do it. Or here's a lie. Here's Susan Rice's one lie that she told in the last 10 years, maybe and got caught for. And we have a president who lies every time he picks up his, you know, approaches a mic or picks up his Twitter. She had other problems because she had gone on, I believe, on the Sunday morning talk shows after Benghazi with some outdated talking points. Yes. No, Susan, Susan looked like she was itching to get caught. I mean, whether this is a case of she getting caught. Yeah. No, I think your point is very, very important because I think that when you have, if you have one side that lies all the time, it's imperative that the other side don't lie at all. Yeah. Yeah. And caught lying. And say, look, everybody does it. That's why it's a tense time for people in my line of work because we, we wear so much scrutiny and when we get it wrong, we really, you know, we take a lot of heat. But when we get it wrong, I think we're pretty quick to say we got it wrong. Here's the actual, here's the truth. Do you know that Donald Trump Jr. said that Cernovich should get a Pulitzer? No. For exposing Susan Rice? Really? Yeah. Right. Yeah. But that's why this drives me a little crazy because it's not Cernovich. It's the fact that this is, this is belated to the real world. Why'd you lead him down the Cernovich thing? You just gave him right back in. It's, it's, I mean, it's huge. We're in front of the kitten. We're only now discovering the consequences of this. Let's come back in five years and see if, if we're talking about anything that makes any sense.